Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument is familiar, these days, and unheeded; we are still nursing, helping, filling in as we have been trained to do, sometimes paid, often not, and I reflect with discouragement that if we have not been formed genetically to perform these roles, centuries of training have stored these expectations in our bones.
Blog Posts on Writing and Authors
Scandal, Rumor and Innuendo: Doris Duke and Popular Imagination
Almost the only question people asked me about her is, “Did Doris Duke marry her butler?” No, she did not. But does that question really matter, in a long, complex and accomplished life?
Doris Duke and Me: Dancing
Doris Duke practiced with Martha Graham’s company in New York and proudly wore their black satin jacket with her name and the company’s name on the back.
Glamour-Puss
I sometimes think that love never touched her, although she knew many lovers. Always she seemed to be asking as she did of one of them, “Are you doing what you’re doing to please ME?”
Breeding
The variety is endless, but the end result is the same: enormous fledglings crowding the adult bird out of the messy nest.
My Apprenticeships
Apprenticeships of any kind—even that sort involved in learning to sew on a button—depend on a bitter and prolonged deprivation of pleasure, a narrow and deep focus that will never allow for what we call a balanced life.
Doris Duke In Love
Was Doris Duke in love with, or—more cogently—did she love any of these men, or the six or seven others who took up portions of her life? Hard to say.
Doris Duke: Getting Dirty
Getting dirty as a child allowed Doris Duke to develop into the daring woman she became. I wonder how many eight year old girls today would be allowed to wander on the beach in a dirty shift, with mud up to their knees?
Doris Duke, Pop Music, and Me
Doris, high-diving, surfing in Hawaii, battling the waves on a stormy day off Newport as she had ever since childhood, might have resisted pop music’s anthem of female submission.
Kafka and The Littlest Rebel
Pantaloons and golden curls do not limit her temerity. It fascinates me to see that this long-forgotten children’s book seems in a strange way more modern than The Trial.