Pregnant women are often regaled with comments about the similarity of the stuff in their bellies cushioning their progeny to the ocean. Oceans and amniotic fluid do not have exactly the same salinity as is oft quoted as fact. Amniotic fluid has about 2% salinity. Oceans are 3.0 to 3.5% dissolved salts. All life does seem to […]
Names and Naming
Names are powerful. Most of us know that some cultures view personal names as so powerful that they are shared only with the closest immediate family members. But many things have names. A linguistics course taken long, long ago taught me about markedness, about marked and unmarked terms. In these oppositional pairs one term is […]
Mothers and Others, the Mosaic of Women in Our Lives
Mothers Mothers are probably the most influential people in the world. I am not sure that it was always this way for every culture in the world. In Sparta, mothers gave their sons over to the state to begin training as warriors at age seven. In upper class, historic, European families mothers did not nurse […]
Her History
I have a thing about old letters, images, tawny browns, and filtered light. They remind me of times gone by and the first stirrings of a history written for women, about women, by women. Women’s domains no matter how they are parsed were, and largely still are, focused on the home, and relationships among family and […]
Googling Gaia
Women and Communication Women have been the indexers and organizers of human life for, literally, ages. Google is attempting to mimic the natural process of organizing and accessing information about what we do, what we want, based on a more natural model that takes social relationships and context into account. Real attempts at tapping the […]
Family and Friendship in Legacy
When I announced to people that The Women’s Legacy Project was launching in the near future I wrote: I think I have found the connecting thread within and between my interests, writings, academic & educational areas of dalliance: women, information and legacy. At first glance my interests may appear to be all over the place, […]