Victoria Scott The Storyteller’s Daughter Boldwood Books, January 2025.
Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.
In this story that weaves together a narrative from the past with one from the present day, Victoria Scott combines World War 11 historical events, the role of women in work and family environments and their stories. This is a quiet page turner rather than a gripping read. However, quietly though the pages might be turned, turned they must be. The Story Teller’s Daughter begins slowly, but as the stories of Nita and her great niece, Beth, evolve it is impossible to leave them. Partly it is the evocative writing about the house and surrounds that have impacted the two women’s lives that is so engaging. The women whose stories combine their gathering strength, their preparedness to question their lifestyle and readiness to make change are also appealing. Nita resists expectations to marry and uses her voluntary work as a journalist on a local paper to change her life. Beth in an age where while her being employed is expected, as is a commitment to the domestic duties that remain to be done, lead to her making changes too. Some are forced upon her, others she chooses. Both women’s stories show them questioning themselves and the choices they have made that might need to be adapted to new ideas and events. See the complete review at Books: Reviews.
International Women’s Day
“The future of our world is only as bright as the future of our girls.”- Michelle Obama
“We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.” – Malala Yousafzai
‘Above all, be the heroine of your life. Not the victim.’ –Nora Ephron
‘Well-behaved women rarely make history.’- Eleanor Roosevelt
“I stand on the sacrifices of a million women before me thinking what can I do to make this mountain taller so the women after me can see farther – legacy” – Rupi Kaur
“Women are always saying, ‘We can do anything that men can do.’ But men should be saying, ‘We can do anything that women can do.” – Gloria Steinem
‘I write only for Fame’, Jane Austen, 1796.
And the rewriting of history by her nephew:
‘No accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any production of her per […] In public she turned away from any allusion to the character of an authoress’ Henry Austen, 1817
I would advise no woman to give up anything she has managed to win. I would advise every woman to work as she can, and gain what she can, and keep it. No woman should be made to surrender her goods or herself. A wise woman will enrich herself as if she were the equal of a man, and a good law would protect her rights, not rob her like an envious husband.’ He smiles at me, very charming, and he shakes his head. ‘You would suggest a sisterhood of queens, a sisterhood of women,’ he says. ‘You would suggest that a woman can rise from the place where God has put her – below her husband in every way. You would overthrow the God-given order.’ ‘I don’t believe that God wants me ill-educated and poor,’ I say staunchly. ‘I don’t believe that God wants any woman in poverty and stupidity. I believe that God wants me in his image, thinking with the brain that He has given me, earning my fortune with the skills He has given me, and loving with the heart that He has given me.’Fictionalised discussion between Margaret Tudor and the Papal Ambassador, Three Sisters Three Queens (2016) Philippa Gregory.
Rowena Cade, creator of Minack Theatre, Cornwall.
Rowena Cade is remembered by Tom Angrove, her ‘builders mate’, as :
‘carrying single handed twelve 15 foot (4.5 metres) wooden beams from the shoreline right to the theatre. Customs men, looking for salvage from a Spanish freighter, met her on the beach.
Challenged about whether she had seen the timber Rowena admitted that she had taken up some wood that morning. She suggested that the officers should come and see it. But, thinking that such a frail looking woman couldn’t have lifted what they were looking for, they went on their way’
Mary’s letter spoke of some of the pictures and cathedrals she had seen…I hardly know what swelled in my throat as I read her letter – such a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work. Such a strong wish for wings …
Happy International Women’s Day!
For inspiration this March, head to our online resources and explore women artists and sitters from our Collection, including our Lens Talk page, kindly supported by the CHANEL Culture Fund. On our social media, we will focus on self-portraiture with our #PortraitOfTheDay series and a short film series with our incoming Curatorial and Collections Director, Dr. Flavia Frigeri.
You can also be inspired in person by visiting the Gallery, which has many events, exhibitions and displays to discover throughout the month.
“Women artists. There is no such thing – or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist’.”
– Dorothea Tanning
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
Philippa Mowbray & Malvina Stone The renovation of a modest 1960s house on a stunning cliff block in Mosman Park is both dramatic and architecturally significant. A seamless composition of muted tones, austere lines, and stunning outlooks, it is a family home that is both warm and sophisticated.
Mariia Gabriel A sanctuary and escape to nature were what this owner hoped to evoke in her Karrinyup haven. Set on a long narrow site overlooking lush parklands, the modern stone, timber and iron home makes a strong statement yet is understated in its elegance. Read More
Read the complete article at Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog.
International Women’s Day in Cambridge 2018 – encouraging women to register to vote.
A wonderful memory of time spent in Cambridge.
Tom Nichols Staff writer
The Pentagon’s DEI Panic
What are the nation’s warfighters so afraid of?
I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a classic ’80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan:
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away
The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. It will not fade away: The plane and its mission will always have an important place in military history. But people working in the United States Department of Defense might have a harder time finding a reference to it on any military website, because of an archival sweep of newly forbidden materials at the Pentagon.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a massive review of DOD computer archives in an attempt to “align” the department with President Donald Trump’s directive to eliminate anything on government systems that could be related to DEI. At the Defense Department, this seems to mean scrubbing away any posts or images on military servers that might highlight the contributions of minorities, including gay service members. So far, according to the Associated Press, some 26,000 images have been flagged for deletion, including a photo of the Enola Gay, because … well, gay.
International Women’s Day and Democratic Party Responsibilities?
Below are two articles that raise questions about how the Democrats should proceed for the next four years.
I have included the second because, in my opinion, Sarah Jones heartfelt commentary on International Women’s Day was undermined by her references to Democrats and her suggestion that they have been asked to be civil to the Republican Party. I have not seen this advice to Democrats from the leadership and would like to have had the claim confirmed by quotes. I appreciated most of Sarah Jones’ article, particularly the references to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY)* and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D, TX).
However, the claim does encourage me to publish an alternative view about the way in which Democrats should have approached the recent Trump speech in Congress. The criticisms in this article also have their flaws. For example, the claim that Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who delivered the official Democratic response was almost unnoticed because of the coverage given to other aspects of the Democratic Party members’ response is questionable. It was given solid coverage and Slotkin’s ability was demonstrated beyond doubt.
Grieving on International Women’s Day
The Daily with Sarah Jones <politicususa@substack.com>
March 8 2025
The Daily is 100% independent and committed to delivering opinion and analysis that protects democracy and freedom.
I look at people with whom I interact a little different now. I wonder, do you, too, hate women so much that you’d vote for a felon who incited an insurrection against our country?
International Women’s Day is an op-ed by Sarah Reese Jones.
International Women’s Day is a global holiday meant to celebrate women’s accomplishments and commemorate their fight for equality. It used to be called International Working Women’s Day, in fact.
And there is so much to honor and of which to be proud, but if I’m being honest with you all, the biggest emotion I have this Women’s Day is grief.I’m still grappling with the fact that two incredibly competent and hard-working women have been beaten in a presidential election by a now known adjudicated sex assaulter and felon.
I look at people with whom I interact a little differently now. I wonder, do you, too, hate women so much that you’d vote for a felon who incited an insurrection against our country?
The way I allowed myself to imagine and to hope both times to see a woman finally in the Oval Office, to see someone a bit like half of the population holding that office of power and esteem (at least, formerly) – this is the worst part.
Both times when I voted, I included photos of my grandmother and great-grandmother, both of whom fought hard in their own lives to be treated with dignity and some measure of mattering.
Then I think of my mother: A woman I admire as much as I love — fiercely forever — and I see her broken heart. This is not what I wanted for her.
I see my women friends and how shattered they are. Some couldn’t speak for weeks after the election. Some are still in post-election shell-shocked agony. I see my friends with young daughters grappling with how to protect their children. I see my female mentors and women who protested in the 1960s gutted to find themselves here, with less rights.
This kind of hate aimed at your entire class changes you. It changes the way you see the world. It’s undeniable.
And while it’s certainly not insurmountable and it’s not the last story, it’s the story of today. Women have lost rights over their own bodies. And so I grieve. I cannot stop grieving.
Women are being hated on internationally by hugely popular alt-right male influencers, some of whom have been accused of heinous crimes against girls and women, and for whom our president reportedly encouraged the lifting of their travel ban so they could come to the U.S.
He has a cabinet full of the worst kinds of men, men who hate women so viscerally they have been accused of violent crimes against women. These men are seemingly chosen because of this trait, not in spite of it. After all, the big boss is a “rapist” who bragged about sexually assaulting women.
It’s also near-impossible to imagine the grief of Black women, who worked so hard to uphold former presidential candidate and V.P. Kamala Harris — these women were there from the first moment of her presidential run, they led the way when everyone else was lost. They have been the mainstay of the Democratic Party, and instead of being honored for this, a mostly white male chattering and consultancy class spoke over them, down to them, and around them.
Even now, we hear white male Democrats telling their elected members they need to be civil, they need to show respect for the people who have stolen the right to live from women. What kind of message is this? Who is creating these messages? And more importantly, how out of touch does a person have to be to think that’s the message women – who ARE the Democratic Party – need to hear or even should hear right now.
No, sirs. That’s not it.
Be civil to the party that is trying to cut Medicaid that will hurt children, children being still largely under the purview of women? Single mothers undercut yet again. Rape victims forced to give birth to their rapist’s baby and then unable to feed their child.
Be civil, they say. What they mean is be quiet.
So instead, I turn to women like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), who aren’t trying to get along with civility politics as Republicans break and violate essential tenets of the social contract.
I’ve been covering politics for 15 years, and I’ve been an institutionalist. I’ve been an incrementalist. I’ve been covering women’s rights this entire time, long before that brief flicker during which it was cool. After all of that, I find myself on this International Women’s Day completely radicalized by the cruel dismissal of the most basic rights of women and girls. The way this is being discussed in the media as if it’s a mere policy disagreement, when in fact it is a basic human right.
If there is any takeaway from today for me, it’s that I vow with everything in my being to never stop speaking up for women and girls. We have gone backwards, but I won’t let that stop me. This International Women’s Day is the day for white women to pledge to do the work that Black women have been doing consistently, throughout history, without the rewards. We need to be there for our sisters and take up the workload. That is our mission now: Solidarity with our sisters.
We need to turn inward to one another and to our allies, because the majority of the political class doesn’t get it.
A majority of Americans seem to hate women so much that dealing with their contempt is a part of our lives. Misogyny and internalized sexism are a part of our daily existence. We encounter it everywhere, in every space, we are objects and not human beings. And too often, the darker the skin, the worse the treatment.
This is unacceptable. It’s inhumane. And it certainly has no place in the Democratic Party. It is also most definitely not “civil.” So when they talk about civility politics, we know they are not talking about being civil to us.
Rather, they are talking about appearing civil to powerful white men and the institutions they run. They cannot be complicit in the face of violence against our bodies while expecting us to show up to empower them. We will not support those who lecture us about civility while our right to live is stripped away from us. Stop asking us for money while “crossing the aisle” to enable the violent men who comprise this administration. Enough.
*I reviewed Take Up Space The Unprecedented AOC some time ago and cannot find the reference for the blog. I have repeated it on the Book Reveiw page for this week. See Books: Reviews.
Fighting Trump Requires Focus. Democrats Didn’t Show It.
The president’s policies could rekindle the resistance, but House members put the focus on themselves.
Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) implores Democratic lawmakers to stand during President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on March 4, 2025. | Pete Kiehart for POLITICO
By Rachael Bade
03/05/2025 03:20 AM EST
Rachael Bade is POLITICO’s Capitol bureau chief and senior Washington columnist. She is a former co-author of POLITICO Playbook and co-author of “Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump.” Her reported column, Corridors, illuminates how power pulses through Washington, from Capitol Hill to the White House and beyond.
Congratulations, attention-hungry House Democrats: You stole the spotlight from Donald Trump on Tuesday night.
Your reward? Undercutting your own message in the fight against Trump, making your party look small and desperate, and making Trump look like the commanding figure he desperately wants to be.
I’ve covered a few of these spectacles over the years, but the scenes from this joint session were unlike anything I have seen before: Dozens of lawmakers heckled and booed the president. Others held up signs, many more walked out in protest. One, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), was escorted out of the chamber after interrupting Trump, refusing to sit down and shaking his cane in outrage.
There’s a reason House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned his members yesterday morning to offer a “solemn” response to Trump’s address. It’s the same reason former speakers Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi also advised their members to keep their cool in previous years under different presidents.
By making a scene, members become the story — but also become an easy target. And more importantly, they take the focus away from where their party wants it — in this case, on Trump proudly owning his most controversial policies.
The president, after all, gave Democrats plenty of material to work with. He boasted about gutting the federal workforce and upending U.S. foreign alliances and agreements. He acknowledged that his tariffs, levied against some of America’s closest allies, would cause pain for farmers, a big chunk of his loyal base. (“It may be a little bit of an adjustment period,” he said. “Bear with me.”)
He admitted his vaunted Department of Government Efficiency “is headed by Elon Musk,” inadvertently undercutting his administration’s arguments in several pending lawsuits challenging DOGE’s authority to slash government programs. And while he blamed predecessor Joe Biden for the “economic catastrophe and inflation nightmare” he said he inherited, Trump barely offered any solutions to bring down prices himself — something voters of both parties say he’s not addressing enough.
Democrats, alas, couldn’t let that be the focus.
Green, known for his repeated attempts to impeach Trump, started the night off by interrupting Trump and shouting, “You have no mandate!” As Trump talked about tax cuts, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) scribbled notes to Trump on a whiteboard, telling him “start by paying your taxes.”
When Trump talked about cutting waste, fraud and abuse, Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.) shouted, “What about the $400 million Tesla contract?” Others held up signs reading “FALSE” as he ran through the litany of cuts DOGE had made to allegedly wasteful government programs.
At one point, Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida and several other Democrats took off their jackets and walked out, their backs imprinted with messages like “RESIST” and “NO MORE KINGS.” Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) fundraised off a photo taken of her holding a sign that read “This Is NOT Normal” as Trump walked by her.
“Hi that’s me,” she wrote on X, retweeting the image and linking to a donation page. “We will not be silent. Join me in the fight.”
Once upon a time, this sort of behavior wouldn’t have even been imagined, let alone tolerated. Sixteen years ago, the scandal du jour centered around Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouting, “You lie!” at then-President Barack Obama. More recently, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) were widely mocked after heckling Biden — and according to much of the coverage, playing right into his hands.
Last night, it wasn’t one or two members — it was too many to count.
The White House was positively giddy over the split-screen Democrats served them on a silver platter. In the moments after the speech ended, top Trump operatives were gleefully pointing out how Democrats sat stone-faced, or worse, as the president:
- Awarded an honorary Secret Service badge to a young boy with brain cancer — who dreams of becoming a police officer — his surprise and glee plastered all over his face;
- Renamed a wildlife refuge after a young girl murdered by undocumented immigrants, with her tearful mom sitting in the audience;
- Informed a young man in the gallery he’d been accepted into West Point so he could follow in the footsteps of his late father, a fallen police officer who had dedicated his life to service;
- And announced to the nation that a terrorist who allegedly helped mastermind the murder of 13 U.S. troops during the Afghanistan withdrawal was being extradited to the U.S. to face justice.
As one White House ally told my colleague Dasha Burns mid-speech, Trump’s speech was “good” but Democrats are “making it look even better by behaving like petulant children.” Speaker Mike Johnson added on X: “The way the Democrats behaved was unserious and embarrassing. That contrast between our forward looking vision and their temper tantrums was on display for all of America to see.”
What was more surprising to me was that Trump, never one to resist throwing a punch, mostly refrained from rolling in the mud with the protesting Democrats — a testament, perhaps, to the influence of his strategy-minded chief of staff, Susie Wiles. (OK: He couldn’t resist a “Pocahontas” dig after spotting Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren clapping in support of Ukraine.)
One final observation: The biggest loser of all might well have been Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who was tapped to deliver the official Democratic response — and did so competently, on message and without incident — only to be overshadowed by the antics of her old House colleagues.
Green, the Democrat who kicked it all off last night, said it was all “worth it to let people know that there are some people who are going to stand up,” as he told reporters after getting escorted from the chamber.
But if Democrats think standing up and walking out is their best path back to power, rather than adopting a more strategic approach to their Trump resistance, it could be a long four years — and possibly beyond.
Labor Win on March 8,2025
The Australian Labor Party had a resounding win in the Western Australian election. Although the final result is not yet known, the photos above show the huge Labor majority. For my American friends, red is a positive in Australia as it is Labor; blue is the conservatives’ colour.
Special Correspondent on her way to Western Australia
Robin's Room 