By the Wayside, Stories, out now from Unsolicited Press
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By the Wayside - Eighteen stories about women who prevail.

Some declare that the future is female. My response? It damn well better be! Because if it isn’t, then women will remain relegated to a place where they are unheard, unseen, subjugated, abused.

When I was growing up, my mother not only had a job, she had a career, professor of French Literature at Cornell University. My father was a professor, too, in English. My mother had the chance to serve as acting Chairman of the French Department for a while. When the position was filled, she asked for an increase in salary, and to be made a full professor. She was told that neither would happen, and that in fact, she would never earn as much money there as her husband did. This was 1967.

I wouldn’t say she was a feminist, and I certainly wasn’t one when I was younger. My life followed much more traditional lines than for many women of my generation, in that I gave up a paying job to stay home, not because my husband thought I should, but because I wanted to put my energy into writing. When I had children, they fit into that world easily enough. There was nothing I was giving up “outside” to take care of them. I was once disparagingly called a housewife, a term which I’ve always found meaningless.

Over the last decade or so, my fiction has become clearly feminist. The eighteen stories in my new collection, 
By the Wayside, are all about women struggling with sudden responsibility, men, reproductive issues, finding a way to express, being accepted as peers. Do they say anything new? Probably not, but I believe they're strong, clear, and inspiring.

I hope you'll agree.

 
 
 

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