Showing results for "a odyssey" in Women

He was an ambitious but drifting writer from a prominent Scottish family. She was a tough Nevada silver miner’s wife, with children, when they met. Who could have predicted that Fanny Van de Grift and Robert Louis Stevenson would go on to create one of history’s great literary marriages? From their first encounter in France in 1876, Fanny and Louis’s partnership transcended societal expectations to become a literary union that was progressive, eccentric, and tempestuous, but always animated by a profound mutual respect

Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were either runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many of them left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages-traumatic "middle passages"—only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and sexual exploitation. Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next-that is at once a search for one's roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

As a child, Roxana Spicer would sometimes wake to the sound of the Red Army choir. She would tip-toe downstairs to find her mother, cigarette in one hand and Black Russian in the other, singing along. Roxana would keep her company, and wonder. Everyone in their village knew Agnes Spicer was Russian, that she had been a captive of the Nazis. And that was all they knew, because Agnes kept her secrets close: how she managed to escape Germany, what the tattoo on her arm meant, even her real name. Discovering the truth about her beloved, charismatic, volatile mother became Roxana's obsession.

Nine years of living with dying and raising three teens while working dawn to dusk. Slowly, I eased through it. Slowly, I developed a realization of my priorities, who I was, and where I belong. A world where handshakes are meaningless, love is a memory tear sliding down my cheek and death has become too-close of a companion. How could I keep going? Bird feathers, dolphins, a moon that brought me up short-these were the symbols that showed me the way. And gradually I attained a family, my family filled with love.

Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama's governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she became increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her.

"Liminal" means threshold, and we find thresholds all day long if we have the eyes to see. Thresholds are not just a transitionary place, they are opportunities for discovery, awareness, and choice. We are at a fascinating place now in the history of the human experience, at the threshold of the next paradigm place. By all measures, our world is changing, and this requires us all to be prepared by building capacity to contribute to its ease.

This story chronicles the journey of an 18-year-old young woman who entered an order of teaching nuns in 1952, believing herself to have a religious vocation. After three years of novitiate training, she pronounced vows and was assigned to teach in the elementary grades of parochial schools in New Jersey, Baltimore, Fall River, and New York. During the last two years of her life as a nun, she matriculated in a program of religious studies at Fordham University. There, she enjoyed exposure to many European theologians who proffered enlightened views on religion.

When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was "given, as a slave" to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green's library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai'i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility.

Who hasn’t dreamed of chucking it all to live a traveling life? Yet two months after Kate and her husband Dave leave home to live on the road, she awakes in the grips of a seizure. The diagnosis of a brain tumor comes at a terrible time: It is their first-year wedding anniversary, and they have no home.

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905-1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a "sex and race discriminating world." Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.

With wit and candor, Lynn Petronella, former world class runner and 1980 Olympic contender traces the roots of her history and her interest in running and gives us a true picture of the behind the scenes look at what it was really like to be a part of the historical quest for the first woman's Olympic Gold medal in the first ever woman's Olympic Marathon in Los Angeles in 1984.

A continuation of the serendipitous saga commenced in Raving Violet, Valerie Gilbert’s first non-fiction collection of short stories, Memories, Dreams & Deflections: My Odyssey Through Emotional Indigestion, picks up the sojourn of this sassy, single mystic, mired in her mind and cloistered above the streets of New York City. This volume explores Valerie’s intrepid and irreverent search for healing inside and out (both medical and mystical), the quest for peace (and quiet) and, as always, true love.

Fifty percent of adult women have some form of sexual dysfunction at some point of their lives, preventing them from enjoying vibrant, soulsatisfying sex. Such was the case with Laura Zam, who suffered the blame, shame, and embarrassment of feeling bedroom broken. For her, delving between the sheets meant physical pain, zero desire, and emotional scars from being molested in her early years. However, in her late 40s, after meeting and marrying the love of her life, Zam was determined to finally fix her sensual self.