Book of Awesome Women Writers. Becca Anderson
Elmer Higgins saw that her writing was excellent, making science accessible to the general public. At his direction, she submitted an essay about the ocean to the Atlantic Monthly, which not only published Rachel’s piece but asked her to freelance for them on a continuing basis, resulting in a book deal from a New York publishing house.
By now, Rachel was the sole support of her mother, brother, and two nieces. She raised the girls, supported her mother, and worked a demanding full-time job, leaving her research and writing to weekends and late nights. But she prevailed nonetheless. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind, debuted in 1941 to a war-preoccupied public. It was a completely original book, enacting a narrative of the seacoast with the flora and fauna as characters, the first indication of Rachel’s unique perspective on nature.
Rachel’s second book, The Sea Around Us, was a nonfiction presentation of the relationship of the ocean to Earth and its inhabitants. This time, the public was ready; she received the National Book Award and made the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years. The Edge of the Sea was also very well received, both critically and publicly. Rachel Carson’s message of kinship with all life combined with a solid foundation of scientific knowledge found an audience in postwar America. However, shy and solitary, Rachel avoided the literary spotlight by accepting a grant that allowed her to return to her beloved seacoast, where she could often be found up to her ankles in mud or sand, doing research.
As her popularity rose and income from book royalties flooded in, Rachel was able to quit her job and build a coastal cottage for herself and her mother. She also returned the grant money that had been given her, asking it to be redistributed to needy scientists. In 1957, a letter from one of Rachel’s readers changed everything. The letter came from Olga Owens Huckins, who was reporting the death of birds after airplanes sprayed dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), a chemical then in heavy use. Carson was keenly interested in discovering the effects of DDT on the natural habitat. Her findings were shocking; if birds and animals weren’t killed outright by DDT, its effects were even more insidious—birds laid eggs with thin eggshells that broke before the hatchlings were fully developed. DDT was also suspected of being carcinogenic to humans.
Rachel vowed to write a book about the devastating impact of DDT upon nature “or there would be no peace for me,” she proclaimed. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with cancer. Despite chemotherapy, surgery, and constant pain, Rachel worked slowly and unstintingly on her new book. In 1962, Silent Spring was published. It was like a cannon shot. Chemical companies fought back, denied, and ran for cover against the public outcry. Vicious charges against Rachel were aimed at what many of the captains of the chemical industry viewed as her Achilles’ heel: her womanhood. “Not a real scientist,” they claimed. She was also called unstable, foolish, and sentimental for her love of nature. With calm logic and cold reason, Rachel Carson responded in exacting scientific terms, explaining the connections between DDT, the water supply, and the food chain.
Ultimately, President John F. Kennedy assigned his Science Advisory Committee the task of examining the pesticide, and Rachel Carson was proven to be absolutely correct. She died two years later, and although her reputation continued to be maligned by the chemical industry, her books had launched a movement that continues to this day.
Perhaps if Dr. Rachel Carson had been Dr. Richard Carson, the controversy would have been minor…. The American technocrat could not stand the pain of having his achievements deflated by the pen of this slight woman.
Joseph B.C. White, author
BETTY FRIEDAN mother of modern feminism
In 1956, young housewife Betty Friedan submitted her article about the frustrations women experience in their traditional roles as housewives and mothers. She received rejections from McCalls, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and every other publication she approached. The editors, all men in that day and age, were disapproving, going so far as to say any woman would have to be “sick” to not be completely satisfied in her rightful role!
But Betty knew that she and the millions of women like her were not sick, just stifled. Betty had put aside her dream of being a psychologist for fear of becoming a spinster, instead choosing to marry and work for a small newspaper. She was fired from her job when she got pregnant for the second time and began, like most middle-class women of her day and age, to devote herself full-time to the work of running a home and family, what she called “the dream life, supposedly, of American women at that time.”
But, after a decade of such devotion, she still wasn’t happy and theorized that she wasn’t alone. A graduate of Smith College, she decided to poll her fellow alumnae. Most of her classmates who had given up promising careers to devote themselves to their families felt incomplete; many were deeply depressed. They felt guilty for not being completely content sacrificing their individual dreams for their families, each woman certain that her dissatisfaction was a personal failing. Betty called this “the problem that has no name,” and she gave it one, “the feminine mystique.”
Over the next five years, her rejected article evolved into a book as she interviewed hundreds of women around the country. The Feminine Mystique explored the issue of women’s lives in depth, criticizing American advertisers’ exclusively domestic portrayal of women and issuing a call to action for women to say no to the housewife role and adopt “a new life plan” in which they could have both families and careers. With its publication in 1963, The Feminine Mystique hit America like a thunderbolt; publisher W.W. Norton had printed only two thousand copies, never anticipating the sale of three million hardcover copies alone.
Unintentionally, Betty had started a revolution. She was flooded with letters from women saying her book had given them the courage to change their lives and advocate for equal access to employment opportunities and other equality issues. Ultimately, the response to Betty’s challenge created the momentum that led to the formalization of the second wave of the US women’s movement in 1966 with the formation of NOW, the National Organization for Women.
Betty was NOW’s first president and took her role as a leader in the women’s movement seriously, traveling to give lectures and take part in campaigns for change, engendering many of the freedoms women now enjoy. She pushed for equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and access to birth control and legalized abortion. In 1970, she quit NOW to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, and in 1975, was named Humanist of the Year. Of her, author Barbara Seaman wrote, “Betty Friedan is to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King was to blacks.”
In 1981, responding to critics who claimed feminism ignored the importance of relationships and families to most women, she penned The Second Stage, in which she called on men and women to work together to make the home and the workplace havens for both genders. Betty made another revolution with her 2006 book, The Fountain of Age, raising consciousness about society’s stereotypes about aging decades after she had, as futurist Alvin Toffler so aptly put it, “pulled the trigger of history” with The Feminine Mystique. And she didn’t stop there, but went on to advocate for better balance between work and family life with her book Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family, as well as finding time to pen a memoir, Life So Far. Betty passed away at home in 2006 due to a heart attack on her eighty-fifth birthday, but her life continues to inspire women the world over.
It’s been a lot of fun making the revolution.
Betty Friedan
TONI MORRISON the truest eye
Toni Morrison comes from small-town, working-class Ohio, a state that fell “between” on the Civil War issue of slavery, a state with many stops along the underground railroad, and a state where many crosses burned “neither plantation nor ghetto.” She has made this her canvas for her rich, original stories that dare tell uncomfortable truths. And for her daring, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in 1931 as Chloe Anthony Wofford, Toni and her parents worked hard as sharecroppers in their adopted Northern home of Lorain, Ohio. She was keenly interested in language as a child and loved hearing ghost stories, songs, and thundering sermons at church. After high school, she attended Howard University and graduated at the age of twenty-two, following that with a master’s program at Cornell. Her thesis paper examined the theme of suicide in