She must have read my book!

Rebecca Edwards, who began a stint as a Dutchess County, New York legislator this year, must have read A Shocking & Unnatural Incident. Why else would she know that the early women’s rights movement wasn’t just about suffrage? Just kidding. Edwards writes a detailed account of...

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Best dressed congresswoman offered 1st equal pay bill

Ever hear of Winifred Stanley? The first person to introduce equal pay legislation in Congress? Me neither, but a recent Washington Post article changed that. Rep. Winifred C. Stanley was a Buffalo, NY, Republican, who gained a congressional seat on a $6 campaign budget. Despite a successful...

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Casual shopping helped spur right to vote

Here’s a shocker: Shopping, that decidedly female pastime of perusing consumer goods with or without the intent to purchase, was actually a catalyst for the women’s rights movement. Erika Diane Rappaport writes in Shopping for Pleasure that “for many middle-class housewives in Victorian...

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#Girl Power: 2 NY students advocate women’s rights

Lily Zhang and Sheryl Chen, both 17 and seniors at Staten Island Tech High School, have collaborated to create Girls Advocating Leadership & Strength, Inc. GALS is a non-profit organization focusing on supporting female leadership positions in business and politics. It’s comforting to...

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Seneca Falls deserves some respect

A newsy article about Seneca Falls, NY, the setting for my first historical novel, turned up in the Washington Post recently. Debra Bruno starts out by declaring that “If Concord, Mass., is the home of the “shot heard round the world” in the American Revolution, and Gettysburg was...

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This was a vote against women

Journalist and lawyer Jill Filipovic declares in a Washington Post opinion piece that Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president is “a clear statement of what so many of my countrymen (and the people who put Trump in power are mostly men) value: white male supremacy above all,...

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Worse than Dead: the Next Best Thing

Author Nancy Gadzuk enrolled me in The Next Big Thing meme. First, I had to look up the word “meme.” The short definition: it has something to do with repetition. And that’s what we’re doing. Answering questions sent by our writer friends about our works in progress and posting answers on...

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Not Two of the Boys

Expressions of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s feminist passion are a joy to read in Not One of the Boys by Brenda Feigen, another cutting edge, mid-20th century feminist. Both women attended Harvard Law School and though a dozen years separated them in age, the attitude toward female...

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Sojourner Truth didn’t say that

I’m disappointed. The famous words “And ain’t I a Woman?” did not come from the mouth of Sojourner Truth. According to historian Nell Irvin Painter, author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, Frances Dana Gage, a white feminist, revised Truth’s impromptu address to a women’s rights...

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