Women's Writing Worldwide

words: 258 Ida Pruitt, an American woman who lived in Peking, wrote the oral autobiography Ning Lao T’ai-T’ai based on the stories she told her. Ida wanted to learn more about Chinese customs and met Ning. They talked for some time and Ida learned a lot from her. The name “Ning Lao T’ai-T’ai’” means “Revered Old lady Ning” and Ida used it in her writing of her story called “A Daughter of Han”. Ning Lao T’ai-T’ai was very poor and lived with her husband. Anything they obtained was through begging. Her husband was a man of low standards and often acted on his own. When he is first mentioned, he jokes about selling his child. At first, she just brushes this thing off after asking her husband about it, but nothing ends so easily. After a cold day, she did not have enough clothes to keep herself covered and so her husband told her to stay home and he would take the child with him and beg. After a long day, he returned without her. He was on opium and sold their child away. Even though she...

Words: 272 Nien Chang was born in Peking and educated in London but spent most of her life back in China. She lived through numerous changes in the Chinese government, even being imprisoned during the reign of Mao Zedong for around 7 years. In this book, we see an excerpt from “Life and Death in Shanghai”.             The excerpt talks extensively about her experience of being imprisoned by the Communist Chinese government by Mao Zedong. She was imprisoned for being thought to be a conspirator with powers outside the government. Because of this, she was interrogated and tortured for years. Throughout her time there she goes over the indignities she suffers as well as the slow breaking of her will. Most times her main form of protest was simply being quiet and refusing to respond to anyone. On page 117 she is being insulted and berated by the guards only to remain silent as she writes, “A year or two ago, I would have shouted back at...

words: 546 Emilie Carles came from a poorer family and grew up doing hard work during World War 1. At the end of the war her life lightened up and she spent her time studying in the mountains to become a school teacher. Despite how difficult this was, she wanted to help her students think at another level. Eventually, she met Jean Carles who later became her fiancée. This was not an easy part of her life as seen in the excerpt from “A Life of Her Own”. The life Emilie Carles in this excerpt shows a woman who always seemed to have to fight to have her life to herself. In each stage in her life that is shown in this excerpt, she is always facing constant pushbacks in her ability to choose in her life. In the earlier section of the excerpt, she first deals with the predicament of trying to marry Jean Carles. When Emilie brought Jean to her family, the exchange went really well. It was only when he left that things went downhill. Emilie’s own happiness or value she saw in Jean was comple...

 Words: 274 The excerpt from a “Testament of Youth”, was written by Vera Brittain, a woman from a decent middle-class family in England who went to Somerville College. Her time at the university was short since World War 1 was going on. She left the university to become a volunteer nurse in the war for a few years. Through the tragedies of the war and the losses of her fiancée and her brother came her letters which were compiled together to create “Testament of Youth”, covering 25 years of her life.             Upon receiving the news that Captain E. H. Brittain M.C. was killed, Vera’s life was shaken. She described her loss and how she would break down and cry out for him. She was hurt badly by this loss, but she continued to press into what had happened. She finds the Colonel, who recognized her because her eyes are just like Edward’s, her brother. Throughout the excerpt, we get to how the memory of her brother lingers in a...

In an excerpt from “The Italics Are Mine” by Nina Berberova, she writes about her life and who she was around the age of 60. Nina came from a decent background in Czarist Russia but went through many hardships during the Second World War and eventually taught at Princeton University when she immigrated to America. Many times when her environment was dull, she was not; she was rather sharp when it came to matters of the mind. Nina lived a life with a sense of urgency in nearly all circumstances in her desire to find a profession or occupation. On page 68 Nina says, “I was ten when I got the idea that it was necessary for me to choose a profession quickly” (68). Not that it was uncommon for a child to want to be a fireman or a police officer, but not to the intensity that Nina had. Throughout the excerpt, she tries to learn numerous things and puts herself in situations out of her comfort zone to test herself to truly see if a job is right for her. From gymnastics to a focus on folklore,...

 Word Count: 372 The “Daughters of Beauvoir”, produced by Penny Foster, talks about various women’s experiences and how their lives were impacted by the numerous works and writings of Simone de Beauvoir. Rather than an initial deep dive into the person and life of Simone de Beauvoir in the beginning of the documentary, the film instead looks into the lives of women who saw Simone as a sort of “mother”, or as someone who gave them not just somebody to look to. Something remarkable about each person interviewed was that most times, Simone did not just give them a new way of life but finally put into words the feelings and experiences most women had into form. All of a sudden, the various things they felt and thought were cemented as something not just prevalent in them themselves as personal issues but now had a name and could be more easily identified. Marge Piercy, a writer herself, described her experience being an Existentialist, how certain things in her life, like her marriage,...

Word Count: 315 Simone De Beauvoir is quite an interesting woman with an even more interesting sense of stability. Despite Simone’s upbringing, she developed into a completely different person from where she started, even in her earlier years. A large amount of her development came from her companion Jean-Paul-Satre.  Simone’s upbringing was very strict and controlling, which started her desire for freedom. She first began to think about this freedom through consuming another work named Mon Journal. Even in her life, books, stories, and literature were the branch for women like herself to have the lens which they viewed the world to be challenged and expanded. On page 54, Simone illustrates her new found freedom, which would seem like something many would overlook or take for granted. She says, “And now, at long last, I too had a room to myself” (54). Through her words we see that small things like personal privacy were great privileges to her. She was elated about her furniture ...

Words: 297 In the first account in "The Norton book of Women's Lives" by Rose Phyllis, she displays a story from Maya Angelou, an actress, and singer who later became a writer. This excerpt gives a brief insight into the character of Maya and how she perceives the world, God, and other people. Despite this being written later in Maya’s life, this passage feels authentic, to the point it sounds like it was written by her in the moment as she experienced it, rather than an account of certain events in the past. The ways Maya conveys her emotions and thoughts are illustrated in a fashion that turns her autobiography into somewhat of a shared experience. After Maya’s grandmother was approached by a group of rude women who came to instigate and cause trouble for her, she did not treat them with the same level of offense she was given. Maya tried to rationalize it but was only able to come up with more questions. On page 45, Maya writes, “She stood another whole song through an...

Word Count: 366      Upon reading the introduction of "The Norton book of Women's Lives" by Rose Phyllis, much was revealed about the author as well as the impact of the women’s writing to her as how these stories impact others as well.      The writer of this book reveals herself at the very beginning of the chapter to be very introspective about her identity and sought out autobiographies and examined them throughout her life. Despite what she had read earlier in her life she was not content with the role model of ones such as Eleanor Roosevelt. In her words, she preferred “something different” (p. 12). She instead preferred women who “lived life to the full” (12).      Through the autobiographies mentioned in the introduction, she illustrates an image of how women expressed themselves through writing and how their stories had an impact on many who read their works. The way the writer goes through the autobiographies mimics an experien...