What I Want Them to Remember

Their nightstand and bookshelves tell you all you’d need to know. Anne of Green Gables, Ramona, Laura Ingalls Wilder. We have Girls Think of Everything, Rosie Revere Engineer, Not One Damsel in Distress. Harriet Tubman. Helen Keller. Sojourner Truth. Marie Curie. These are their heroes. We go through our Bible with care and find all […]

Meet the Princess of the Press: Ida B. Wells

Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Before Billie Holiday sang the lyrics above at Cafe Society, the first integrated nightclub in New York, another icon of history, sat nightly, frantically documenting every lynching […]

Dorothy Day: Saint with Thorns

  “Don’t worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.” ~Dorothy Day I heard about Dorothy Day years ago, when I was a young radical. She was an advocate for women’s rights before American women had the vote. She was arrested and went on a hunger strike. She advocated for the […]

When Hospitality is Radical

She pauses, the doorbell’s eerie reverberations beat a note of panic through her veins. She wipes her hands on the linen apron wrapped around her and hurries to tell them to hide themselves in the basement or attic.   She breathes deeply, realizes this is the moment she and her husband have talked about, and […]

The Famous Woman You’ve Never Heard Of

“A great deal of living must go to a very little writing.” – Frances Ridley Havergal You probably don’t recognise her name. But if she had been born today, you would.  She was the equivalent of a famous Christian singer-songwriter. You would have gone to one of her gigs, sung her songs, heard her testimony. […]

Minnie Vautrin: Staring Down Death

“The city is strangely silent—after all the bombing and shelling. Three dangers are past—that of looting [Chinese] soldiers, bombing from aeroplanes and shelling from big guns, but the fourth is still before us—our fate at the hands of a victorious army. People are very anxious tonight and do not know what to expect . . […]

Ordinary Woman, Extraordinary Life

Surely no one expected anything to come of the fourth daughter born in 1745 to the poor school master of a charity school in the tiny village of Fishponds, outside Bristol England. Girls, particularly those of the working class in the highly stratified society of eighteenth century England didn’t have great expectations. Most of them […]

Motherhood on the Head of a Pin

 Jill Lepore wrote a book about a woman we know hardly anything about. A thick book, a love letter, a weighty tome about a woman of whom the slimmest of evidence exists—letters, a single hand-stitched notebook, ghostly things that others said of her. She was a poor woman from Boston right before and after the […]

A Legacy of Love

She loved. Not with an everyday lovey-dovey sort of love, but with agape. A love that keeps no record of wrong. A love that hopes. A love that never fails. I’m still trying to figure out that sort of love. My own love is imperfect. People aren’t always trustworthy. Those I love don’t always follow […]

Girls Can Do All the Things

  Juliette Gordon Low founded the girl scouts because she had been hanging out with the Boy Scouts founder and thought, well, why the heck weren’t girls encouraged to go hike in the woods, build a fire, swim? She liked all of that stuff. When people think about women who have made a major impact […]

Daughter of the Sun

  At a time when only around 1% of American girls studied past high school these three women were medical students at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.(1) The young woman on the left was born on March 31, 1865 in Poonah, India, to a high-caste Brahmin Hindu family of the Maharashtra people. Her birth […]

Women Have a History

“History is no longer just a chronicle of kings and statesmen, of people who wielded power, but of ordinary women and men engaged in manifold tasks. Women’s history is an assertion that women have a history.” ~Aparna Basu, Professor of History at the University of Delhi, India And what a history it is! From warriors, like Boudica, Zenobia, Lyudmila […]

Blue Skies

  Winter in Denver is much better than winter in Cincinnati. You can argue with me all you want, but guess what? Three hundred days of sunshine a year means you’ll feel that golden warmth shining on your face more often than not. Even in those dark cold days between the Super bowl and March […]

Living in the Boring Chapter

It seems to me that most people live semi-ordinary lives with straightforward paths. You graduate from elementary school to middle school to high school to college and then you start working. My life has often consisted  of jumping headfirst into a random major change, freaking out because it was harder than I expected, finally acclimating […]