Women’s Work as Artists and Writers

  This month’s newsletter, after a long hiatus, focuses on essays by Kathleen Meadows, “Pictures in the Sky,” and “Summer of 1972,” by Susan Light.   Kathleen brings us to the three-acre farm in the lower San Joaquin Valley in California to the alfalfa fields and its pungent aroma and the changing colors of the sky. We see her move from those fields to the suburbs to UC Berkeley and to a life of teaching and motherhood.  Throughout her childhood, her teen years, and her years as a mother, a single mother, and a teacher, the writing spirit and as she describes, “the raw poetry of sight and sound, the music of words, that wouldn’t let go.” She returns to those words and to those visions over and over again. Susan Light, in her essay, “Summer of 1972”, describes the hurdles and challenges she faced when hoping to pursue her interest in science and medicine.  A summer program in Conn. becomes her way out of a narrow environment to one that will show her “It is OK to be a girl and like scie

   As a young child living on a  3 -acre  farm  in the lower San Joaquin Valley,  I would spend  long  days lying in  alfalfa fields , the pungent aroma filling  my senses as I gazed  up  at the sky. At daw n it would be pin k and gold, sometimes cyan-blue   at midday, deepen ing  to  vi olet  at nightfall.  I would pretend I was an  astronomer  studying the skies, try  t o imagine stories as I scanned   my celestial  hideaway .  I remember wanting to  describe my feelings   so everyone  would kno w what  it was  like to wa tch stars move, or  clouds  morph  into   unsheared   sheep,   or even  the sensation  of mud squishing between my  toes as I hopped back to our smal l clapboard house with the wrap- around porch.   My  imagination  only became more intense  as I grew older. I could scarcely wait for the  dented  yellow school bus to drop me off so I could r ace home to make a secret fort  out of eucalyp tus branches, or watch the  Angus  bull  mating  one of  our favorite  Guernsey

      Growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Pittsburgh in the 1960’s doesn’t set a girl up for a scientific career. The family tree was laden with immigrant businessmen and housewives. The only woman physician I had ever met was a radiologist at the Children’s Hospital when I had whacked my foot against the bathtub in our narrow bathroom in a futile attempt to exercise. Devoted to watching “Dr. Kildare” and “Ben Casey”(adoring the former and just tolerating the latter), I don’t recall any women in medicine who weren’t nurses.   The science classrooms at my high school were double the size of the regular classrooms to accommodate the labs. There were doors at both sides of the podium where Mr. Herman, the freshman biology teacher, stood passing out completed test papers as we shuffled out of the door of the first floor classroom closest to the main entrance. As one of the younger teachers with a lawn mower haircut and a wide gap between his two front teeth, he had won the affect