GRIT AND GHOSTS https://ift.tt/W4ejiNJ
In future years, the Covid-19 project will emerge as a genre of its own in whatever field it happens to fall. In Foster’s case, driven to online teaching by the pandemic, she walked away, deciding instead “to find those trails of crumbs that would lead me to women who, living under different conditions from my own, each trying to exert her will on a world that has ideas of its own, had done it.” On the face, the eight women on whom Foster settles have little in common except an undeniable scrappiness. One, Gertrude Stein, who famously said of her native Oakland that “there is no there there,” trained as a doctor but also walked away because a male professor refused to give a woman passing grades. Another, Marguerite Lindsley, was the first female park ranger in federal service, growing up and working in Yellowstone National Park after earning degrees in the sciences—and then being sidelined for, yes, being a woman. A couple of her heroes are her own ancestors, young women who navigate...
