Q:  Why did you write Adventurous Women: Eight True Stories About Women Who Made a Difference?

A:  Because I love true stories, especially about women.  I love doing the research and writing about incredible historic women who have so much to offer us. In Adventurous Women, I wrote about Louise Boyd, an Arctic explorer; Mary Gibson Henry, a botanist and plant hunter; Juana Briones, an entrepreneur and family head; Alice Hamilton, a scientist and industrial toxicologist; Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and humanitarian; Katharine Wormeley, a Civil War superintendent on a hospital transport ship; Biddy Mason, a former slave, midwife, landowner and church founder; and Peggy Hull,  a journalist and war correspondent.

Q:   What do these historic women have to offer us?

A:   Inspiration. Empowerment. Life lessons. Excitement.

Q:   What was the biggest challenges in writing Adventurous Women?

A:  There were two. The first was defining adventure in a way that encompassed a wide range of experiences that included the adventures of an Arctic explorer to a former slave who won her freedom and built a prosperous life as a midwife. For me, adventures are about being bold, about defying set ways of thinking and behaving, about taking risks, going beyond the boundaries, the limitations, about overcoming obstacles, about daring to be different.

The second was dealing with vast differences in the amount of primary source material: Alice Hamilton wrote reports, letters, speeches, articles, textbooks, and her autobiography. Juana Briones never learned to read or write. There were also differences in the duration of their adventure: Katharine Wormeley’s adventure lasted three months. Mary Gibson Henry’s lasted almost forty years.   To deal with this challenge, I wrote each chapter as an essay, a flexible form that I love to read and write.  In Adventurous Women, some chapters feature extensive first-person and eyewitness accounts, one chapter has two parts—an essay and letter excerpts, and in another chapter, I write about my experience in “meeting” one woman.

Q:  Of the eight women, do you have a favorite?

A:  No, each one is my favorite, although for different reasons.  However, some people who read the manuscript do have favorites. To date, they are Biddy Mason, Mary Gibson Henry and Katharine Wormeley.

Q:  What do you hope readers take away from reading Adventurous Women?

Why did you write Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II?

I found my first book about a women war correspondent--Margaret Bourke-White-- on an outdoor book stand in New York City in 1997. Next I found, Lee Miller’s War: Photographer and Correspondent with the Allies in Europe in 1944-45 on a sale-book table at the Getty Museum in California. Then there was Martha Gellhorn’s The Face of War and Dickey Chapelle’s What’s A Woman Doing Here? (A Reporter’s Report on Herself). Reading women war correspondents’ words and seeing the women photographers’ pictures was an extraordinary experience that affected me deeply and compelled me to write their true story.

What was your favorite part of writing this book?

I loved the hours I spent in various libraries reading the women war correspondents’ articles and seeing their photographs that were published in newspapers and magazines during World War II.

Why is the title: Where the Action Was?

 Men war correspondents were permitted to go to where the action was—the frontlines and combat. Women war correspondents weren’t, but some did, including Margaret Bourke-White who was the only foreign correspondent to cover the Nazi attack on Moscow and Martha Gellhorn who covered Allied troops in Italy and stowed aboard a hospital ship to cover the invasion of Normandy and Dickey Chapelle who reported from the front lines on Iwo Jima and Margaret Higgins who entered the concentration camp at Dachau before American troops arrived to liberate it.

 What kind of pictures did you include in this book?

There are more than 70 black and white pictures either of women war correspondents or taken by them, including Margaret Bourke-White’s spectacular photograph of the Kremlin in Moscow lit up by Russian antiaircraft tracer bullets and German magnesium flares used to provide light for their nighttime bombing raid, Dickey Chapelle’s powerful picture of a critically wounded marine, and Toni Frissell’s poignant picture of an American soldier in Italy on Easter Sunday, 1945.  Actual newspaper dispatches by women correspondents are included. Each chapter opens with a front page headline from newspapers throughout the U.S. that heralds a major event in World War II. 

What would you want readers to take away with them after reading this book?

Just as I am, I hope that readers will be in awe of the women correspondents’ courage, determination, and resourcefulness. I hope that readers will understand why correspondents risked their lives to report from where the action was—and is today.

What inspired you to write the book?

I love the true stories of girls’ and women’s lives. My idea of a great time is a trip in search of women’s history. I go to many places, including historical sites, museums, cemeteries, and libraries. Wherever I can, I take pictures and buy books—new and used. In 1995, I drove across the U.S. By the time I got to Los Angeles, my car was full of books, including the diary of a young girl Caroline Richards (see chapter 6) that I found in a used bookstore on the way to Yosemite National Park. I shipped the books home, so I could fill up my car with more books on the return trip.

I selected girls whose voices and experience I could weave together to tell the compelling true story of growing up female in America. I included girls and women from different geographic regions who represent various racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic perspectives.  Each girl’s account adds various elements to the narrative, including historical facts, fascinating details, dramatic incidents, lively anecdotes, and poignant memories.

Finding primary source text and visual material that reflects the diversity of girls’ perspectives and experiences across the span of American history.

That girls always were and always will be an integral and dynamic part of the American story. I hope that my passion for the true stories of girls’ and women’s lives is contagious.

In the course of the research you did for Girls, did you discover anything that surprised you?

The most fascinating things was the fact that girls throughout history were such active participants in American politics, in economics, in every facet of life. Every single event in American history could be told through the voices of American girls. They thought about things. They had opinions. The evidence is right there, in history. That evidence is incredibly exciting.

The profound sense of strength and power of these girls. They were multidimensional beings beyond the stereotypes that they were only concerned with boys or knitting.

Do you think the 21^st century is the best time to be growing up female?

I can’t say whether it’s the best time. There are still so many issues, for example, violence against girls and women and pay parity. But I think there’s enormous hope and possibility in the fact that, for the first time in history, women and men of goodwill can reach across generations to talk and act on the negative impact of gender stereotypes. I think the mandate for all of us is to keep communicating and making these connections.

Q & A with Girls, Inc. for their website in March 2006
Q & A Part One — Q & A Part Two

I wrote it because I believe that death, a hard, sad, unavoidable fact of life, is easier to accept when we are able to talk about it and get answers to our questions. When we hear other people's stories. When we learn about the variety of attitudes and rituals that have existed concerning death and burials. Nobody is immune to death. People die. I will and so will you. But if we are prepared, we can deal with death, however and whenever it happens. 

Before I actually start writing any book, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to present the factual material: how to make it irresistible, informative, and empowering. With this particular book, I added the challenge of how to minimize queasy feelings--my own and those of potential readers. As I proceeded with my research for this book, I realized that the factual material was irresistible, informative, empowering, and minimally queasy to me when I incorporated it with my own experience and the experiences of other people. So that is how I wrote this book, and, for example, why the chapter about what happens to dead bodies begins with Ann Sparanese's account of her trip to the morgue. 

Absolutely! All too often adults act as if they can protect kids from dealing with death. But they can't. Death is everywhere--in real life and in the popular culture--and kids know it. The what, why, and how of death and burial worries some kids and overwhelm others. But, in my experience, most kids are curious and full of questions. They want the truth and they want it presented in a matter-of-fact, respectful way, not a gross-out-the-reader, ghoulish way. 

 What was it like to write Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial? 

Writing the book was a roller coaster ride--up and down, funny and sad, fascinating and I-don't-think-I-really-want-to-know-about-that. At times, it was intensely personal, especially when my mother was diagnosed with cancer and died four months later as the book was going into production. At one point, as I was checking and double-checking the text, photographs, and captions, I said to my son Stephen, "This is the wrong book to be working on now." When Stephen replied, "Actually, it's the right book," I was startled. But as we tended to my mother's dying, death, and burial, I realized Stephen was right. Because of researching and writing Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial, I was full of useful information and I had gained a measure of calmness about death and the burial process that I shared with my family. Together we dealt with my mother's dying, planned her funeral, dug her grave, provided our own urn for her cremated remains, and had a funeral procession with a Dixieland band and a fire truck. 

The whole experience reaffirmed for me the truth of the words that I had written in the preface to Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial: Understanding death doesn't necessarily take away our anxieties or fears about our own death or our sadness about other people's death. But it does help us find ways to continue on with our lives. 

You have written 14 nonfiction books, 10 on women’s history in 10 years. Why?

Because I am passionate about women’s history! For most of my life, historical women were invisible or confined to traditional roles. Then I discovered the truth about women’s indispensable contributions to American history. I uncovered true stories about real women overcoming odds and obstacles to do what they needed to do and wanted to do in life. I realized that historical knowledge empowers all of us to know who we are and what we can do in the world. I figured out that knowing women’s history protects girls and women from being duped into thinking that they are inferior, or unfit, or incapable.  That is why I am passionate about women’s history! 

You have written about toilets, bathrooms, sinks and sewers; corpses, coffins and crypts; strikes. What do these have to do with all the books you have written about women’s history?

Everything if you think about who typically cleans the bathroom, who is responsible for many of the emotional and practical tasks of dealing with death, and who needs to fight for better working conditions.

Regardless of the topic, I approach each book in generally the same way. I search for relevant material in archives, attics, libraries, used bookstores, and museums. I immerse myself in words and visual images, listen to available audio tapes, view videos, and visit historical sites and cemeteries until the material takes over my mind. 

 People's voices are an integral part of all of my books. In selecting voices, I look for quotations that make something happen--spark insights, evoke feelings, amplify ideas, inspire action, illumnate personalities, illustrate facts, and/or provide role models. A good example of the role model function of quotes are the words of Dolores Huerta in Strike!, "One thing I've learned as an organizer and activist is that having tremendous fears and anxieties is normal. It doesn't mean you should not do whatever is causing the anxiety; you should do it" (Strike!, 70).

 A quote from Mother Jones illuminates her personality: "I am not afraid of the pen, the sword or the scaffold. I will tell the truth wherever I please." (Mother Jones, 15). 

Edna "Shorty" Hopkins, a welder during World War II, illustrates a fact: "We were doing the same kind of welding that the men were. But they didn't call ours certified. We only got $1.20. I asked, 'Am I doing certified welding?' 'No, Shorty, you're not.' But I was, and I knew it, but there was nothing I could do' (Rosie the Riveter, 88-9). 

As for words that inspire action, Joe Hill's last words to Bill Haywood provide a powerful example: "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize" (Strike!, 46). 

  In addition to the text, the visual images and captions are an important element in my books, which is why I do my own photo research and write the captions. In some cases, I do my own photography. I look for vivid, interesting, and unusual images. In Mother Jones and the March of the Mill Children, I photographed and reproduced images of actual newspaper accounts of the march. I also photographed and reproduced images of newspaper accounts and company newsletter articles in Rosie the Riveter. 

For my book, A Woman Unafraid, I drove to Maine where Frances Perkins was buried to take a photograph of her gravestone that has these words on it:  "U.S. Secretary of Labor."  Many of my  photographs are in  my  new book, Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial.  Read the captions and you will see how far I traveled to take pictures for that book.  Some of the photographs are sad. Some are funny.  All of them, I trust, are interesting.

 Before my books go into production, fact checkers and expert readers review the manuscript. After I respond to all the questions, comments, and suggestions, the book goes into production, and, although authors do not have much if any say about the design of their books, I have been thrilled that my books have been beautifully designed. The art director who designed two of my books told me that she was "deeply moved by the text" to create books "that would attract readers."

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