I've been thinking a lot lately about the things I wish I had known way back when, during that last summer before my senior year when I was just starting to panic about what I was going to do with my life. I truly had no idea what to pursue in college other than a prevailing interest in history and books. (Neither of which were part of my first college degree except for dull textbooks on subjects I had no desire to read.) One subject I wish I knew a lot more about was women's history, particularly the courageous women who traveled to faraway places and discovered fascinating things in often the most desperate of circumstances. It is Mary Anning though, who never left her hometown, that really intrigues me. Even though she found some of the most significant fossils in history, she struggled to support herself and her family and saw her discoveries often claimed by others. What Mary would have taught me is that anyone - ANYONE - can do great things and also, that you have to stick up for yourself at all times. I strongly recommend Shelly Emling's biography of Mary, THE FOSSIL HUNTER (see my review). I'm also looking forward to Tracey Chevalier's novel about her life, REMARKABLE CREATURES.

The question this go-round was really rather basic - What historical figure or nonfiction book (s) do you wish you knew about or read the last summer before your senior year in high school? Folks were all over the map with their answers - I hope you find them as interesting as I did! (And please note we have a lot of guest appearances this month - the group is changing and will be back in August with a larger more frequently rotating line-up.)

Neesha Meminger: "I was so desperate for actual, live, real women mentors and role models when I was sixteen and seventeen, but they seemed non-existent then - particularly women of colour. I found a lot more when I hit my twenties, so I will list those - hoping that young women out there who are actively seeking voices challenging the current status quo will find solace in these voices as I did, when I finally did find them. I wish I had known about more women of colour who'd spoken up and fought back against oppressive forces in their lives, in spite of their own fears and the odds stacked against them. Now I know they are everywhere - they just don't get the air time. Women like Mukhtaran Mai, Aung San Suu Kyi, Phoolan Devi, and women like Amrita Pritam who bucked convention, for example, have been around for decades but most people have no idea who they are.

The non-fiction books I would send back to my sixteen-year-old self would be along the lines of Audre Lorde's "biomythography", SISTER OUTSIDER, any of bell hooks' non-fiction - ART ON MY MIND, KILLING RAGE, REEL TO REAL, James Baldwin's THE FIRE NEXT TIME, just to name a few. But I also would have loved to see films that represented and reflected something closer to my experiences - films like Marlon Riggs' documentaries - TONGUES UNTIED and COLOR ADJUSTMENT, to name just two; though not non-fiction, Gurinder Chadha's BHAJI ON THE BEACH and BEND IT LIKE BEKHAM had a profound impact on me when I first saw them. They reflected an experience I could relate to and looked at some of the hard issues within the South Asian community with honesty and humour. Pratibha Parmar's KHUSH and A PLACE OF RAGE were two documentaries that gave me a glimpse into the South Asian LGBTQ community and opened an entirely new world for me; and Dionne Brand and Ginny Stikeman's SISTERS IN THE STRUGGLE is a film I will always cherish.

I would inundate my sixteen-year-old self with these films and books and stories of real, live women of colour - women who were unafraid to speak up and speak out, women who not only survived, but thrived...women who, in many cases, continue to speak, create, dance, live, and love, in spite of the odds."

Tanita Davis: "It would have helped me tremendously to know about the life of Jeanette Pickering Rankin. Jeanette Rankin was a.) the first woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and b.) the ONLY PERSON TO VOTE AGAINST the U.S. entering WWII. She received death threats. She lobbied for infant and maternal health issues in Congress as well, and was responsible for some of the first social welfare programs for women, infants and children.

And her home state of Montana JUST HATED HER. Oh, she was reviled and slandered and had things thrown at her in public. In the face of a weeping nation, howling for blood after Pearl Harbor, she remained calm and steadfast and insisted that retaliation was not necessary. Obviously, this was beyond unpopular. No matter what we think of her particular opinion - the point is that Rankin was a LIFELONG pacifist. And it wasn't as if she suddenly jumped on this pacifist bandwagon; Rankin voted against entering WWI, too. She stuck to who she was, and didn't let emotion or circumstance change her tune.

In high school, I was so easily swayed by -- basically everything. I needed to know that someone like Rankin existed, and that she'd survived. That would have given me the courage to be ...myself.

Jenny Davidson: "A non-fiction book I wish I could have read the summer I turned sixteen is Lynne Cox's SWIMMING TO ANTARCTICA. I could not have read it because it did not yet exist, though Cox had begun her career as an extraordinary long-distance swimmer in the 1970s, and would later chronicle it in this magical and inspirational series of essays (her feats included a swim across the Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia, at a time when the Cold War made it near-impossible that she would be able to obtain permission from the relevant authorities to land on the Russian side, as well as the amazing swim of the title). I had many notions of heroic feats that were drawn from sources as varied as King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, the Greek and Norse myths, musicians and explorers and artists, but not from the world of sports or physical accomplishments, and I think this book would have given me a glimpse of what I would later find in endurance sports when I took them up in my mid-30s."

Tanya Lee Stone: "I wish I had a better knowledge of who Elizabeth Cady Stanton was at that time of my life. I think if I had known what she did to kick off the movement for women to have the right to vote, and known what obstacles stood in her way, and how long it took the movement to actually succeed, and how much flack women took in the process, I would have jumped into the whole voting process with more gratitude and thoughtfulness. I don't mean to imply that I took my right to vote for granted, because I was certainly stoked the first time I cast my vote, but I think if I had known about Stanton and her cohorts I would have savored the opportunity more and really understood the role we all play in our democracy."

Loree Griffin Burns: "I grew up outside of Boston, and when I look back, the nonfiction books I wish I’d had then were books that would have helped me Wake Up. I was so completely focused on my life’s agenda—going to college, finding a career, establishing a life out on my own, having a home, maybe getting married and possibly (gulp!) having a family of my own—that I forgot to pay any attention to the world around me. You know, the woods, the trees, the sky, the moon. Making my way down this path I’d charted was paramount, though, and I dedicated myself wholeheartedly to jumping through hoops, studying, extra-curricularizing, and generally doing the things I though needed doing in order to have the life I wanted. There was no time for looking around, no time for wondering, no time for feeling awe. And when there was time to read, escapist fiction was what I looked for. (Think Stephen King.)

I wonder, though, what my seventeen-year-old self would have thought of a book like Bill Bryson’s A WALK IN THE WOODS, had it shown up on her nightstand. Hiking? Huh? Is there time for that? Could Bryson’s irreverence have been enough to turn my head to the woods? To stir a tickle of wonder? Could Barbara Kingsolver’s HIGH TIDE IN TUCSON, force me to look more closely at the people and creatures in my landscape? Is it possible that a copy of Edwin Way Teale’s THE STRANGE LIFE OF FAMILIAR INSECTS, might have, for a moment or two, woken me to the idea that there was an entirely different and completely fascinating world in miniature happening alongside my own … in the tiny front lawn? I think so.

So, those are some of the nonfiction books I’d send back to myself. I’m not sure if they contain any great life lessons, but I think if I'd read them, I'd have lifted my eyes sooner, noticed the natural world that was then only a backdrop, unseen and unconsidered. I needed a smack on the noggin’ and someone to say, “Hey, Loree, look around you. Look! See?!” Bryson and Kingsolver and Teale eventually gave me that smack, but I wish that they’d found me—or I’d found them—sooner."

Beth Kephart: "Perhaps because my mother was a true Philadelphian, I never could leave the city. I have hovered around its edges. I have lived there as a student. I have locked myself up in research carrels, going backwards in Philadelphia time.

Over the course of all of this, I've encountered a man whom I wish I had known in my high school years. His name was George Childs, and he was a true Everyman—editor of the great (and literary!) newspaper, Public Ledger; best friend to Anthony Drexel; co-creator of one of the very first and most delightful suburban towns (Wayne, PA); and (most of all) the greatest philanthropist the city had or has ever known. Childs made substantial contributions to Bryn Mawr College, for he believed in the academic rights of women. He built burial grounds for the poor. He threw parties whose guests included Dickens, Wilde, Whitman, and Arnold, and beyond them, the newsboys and typesetters whom he employed at the Ledger. Democrats and Republicans alike wanted urged Childs to run for presidential office; he never did. Young people would show up at his office asking for advice—he spent the time, he listened to dreams, he helped finance them. He wanted nothing for himself. He felt uncomfortable in the limelight. The good he did he did because it made the world more right. Childs, to me, sets a prime example of what gifted people might and should do with their gifts. It’s never too soon to be taught that souls like his exist."

Sara Ryan: "A book I wish I'd read the summer before college: America Day by Day, by Simone de Beauvoir. It's her travel journal from when she spent four months in the U.S. in 1947. When I read it, it transformed de Beauvoir from a Distant Intellectual into a person.

Here she's writing about her first time in New York: "I'm walking in streets not yet traveled by me, streets where my life has not yet been carved, streets without any scent of the past. No one here is concerned with my presence; I'm still a ghost, and I slip through the city without disturbing anything."

The immediacy and intimacy of the writing made me feel connected both to the lived experiences she was describing and to the larger sociological observations about the U.S. that she derived from the experiences.

I think if I'd read it before college, I might have thought more, sooner, about the actual people behind the Assigned Texts that confronted me; people who might, when not composing magisterial prose, have been looking for a really good meal, or jazz club, or friend."

Pamela S. Turner: "I would've loved to have known about solo women adventurers like Mary Kingsley (Africa), Gertrude Bell (Arabia), or Alexandra David-Neel (Tibet). Don Brown has since done wonderful picture books about some of these women. At age 17 I was dying to see the world and to know how these women defied the roles they'd been assigned would've been quite heartening. And...this may sound self-serving since I've authored three "Scientists in the Field" books, but I would've gotten a great deal out of the "Scientists in the Field" series. I was interested in a science career but I had absolutely no idea about what scientists actually did! Nobody in my family had ever gone to college so I lacked mentors and models. I think nonfiction books, at their best, can help open a teenager to extraordinary possibilities."

[Ed - I am deeply impressed by the SCIENTISTS IN THE FIELD series; see my review of Loree Griffin Burns' latest contribution, HIVE DETECTIVES, in my July column at Bookslut - CM]

Sarah Rettger: "Between the fact that I was - and totally still am - an unrepentant history nerd, and the fact that I basically grew up with an internal feminism sensor (I read Ms. magazine all through middle school, and I'm still not sure how I got through adolescence without alienating a large portion of the population), it's hard to think of notable women I wasn't at least aware of when I was 17. But there's one who stands out.

I may have known *of* Dorothy Height during the summer before my senior year (I remember very clearly that I first learned about her from Cokie Roberts' We Are Our Mothers' Daughters), but I didn't know much about her. Her memoir, OPEN WIDE THE FREEDOM GATES, was published while I was in college, but if it had been around earlier, it would have been a welcome break from all the AP English summer reading I was plowing through. (Seriously? You expect a bunch of 17-year-olds to get Faulkner by themselves, with no guidance? Lysistrata was one thing, but - sorry, that's a rant for another time.)

Height was awesome - a social worker in New York during the Great Depression, active in the Civil Rights movement, part of the YWCA and the National Council of Negro Women, managed to meet and work with all kinds of people. And she never married, but still seemed to have a substantial "family," something that means a lot to me now, but *really* would have been useful to my never-been-kissed high school self."

Tarie Sabido: "Honestly? I wish I had read ANY nonfiction book about strong women. I read nonfiction about men like Malcolm X and Mikhail Gorbachev. At school, we learned about scientists like Louis Pasteur and Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, and Filipino heroes Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio. We didn't really discuss any women in class. Not even Marie Curie. And I went to a girls' high school! Because we never really discussed women in class, it didn't occur to me that there were many important women in history. So I didn't seek out books about them. What a HUGE disservice to me and my classmates. It's a good thing my college professors introduced me to strong women in history!"

[Ed - Tarie I thought you might like this photo of early women astronomers - women I'm sure we all wish we had learned about! CM]

[Post pics of Audre Lord, Jeanette Rankin, Lynne Cox actually swimming in Antarctica, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, pic from George Childs Recreation Area (created by land donated by his widow in 1912), Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Bell and some of the women at Harvard College Observatory circa 1900)