This week’s post is part of a community project celebrating International Women’s Day, initiated by
, , and others on the Creatively Conscious Substack. It’s a virtual daisy chain, a creative act of friendship, solidarity, reciprocity and connection.So much is swirling lately: on the world stage, in our country, in my community and family, and within my own heart. Some days, it all gets to be too much. Their invitation is an opening to pause and reflect, renew my creative spirit, and connect with a virtual circle of writers, readers and alchemists.
I’ve just finished Lauren Groff’s luminous new book, The Vaster Wilds. An astonishing feat of imagination and craft that continues to linger, full of brilliant passages like this gem:
“The spring unleashing its winter-coiled power, the joy of living.”
It’s inspiring me for this month’s Talking Back to Walden, which is about shelter. Subscribe to receive it directly in your inbox.
If you could sit in circle with 5 other women, who would they be and why?
My circle includes an architect, a scientist, a tree-planter, a systems scientist, and a writer. But they are each far more than those single descriptors. Join our circle. Meet these five remarkable women.
Eileen Gray (1878 – 1976)
“A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation.”
A debutante born to an aristocratic Irish family, Gray was one of the first women to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She indulged her love of Japanese lacquerware by moving to Paris to apprentice with a master. Her iconic screens marry centuries-old technique with modern geometry and are still coveted a century later. She owned a shop in Paris briefly in the early ‘20s to sell her furniture but was lured away by a fascination with architecture. In her late 40s. With no formal training.1
This woman was such a badass that she designed and built a villa in the south of France right next to Le Corbusier’s villa. Jealous of her talent, he defaced her wall with an aggressive cubist mural. She was rediscovered at the age of 92 by the critic Joseph Rykwert (I quote him in this post), who praised her “inventiveness” and “visionary intuition.” British designer Zeev Aram proposed reproducing her furniture, and they worked together for the next six years until her death at age 98.2
In our circle, I hope she spills the tea about what a nightmare neighbor Corb was.
Eunice Newton Foote (1819 – 1888)
“What would she have accomplished if she had been born today?” ~ renowed climate scientist,
In 2020, the New York Times carved a bit of space from its grim pandemic news to publish belated obituaries of remarkable people they’d overlooked. That’s where I learned that, in 1856, Ms. Foote published a scientific paper detailing her ingenious experiments with glass jars that revealed the effects of greenhouse gases. A full three years before John Tyndall published his famous paper that is credited with this foundation of climate science.3
Despite two strikes against her—being a woman and an amateur—she was a force for the intellectual, civil and social rights of women. A prominent feminist, she’s the fifth signatory on the declaration from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention advocating equal rights for women. When I’m frustrated or demoralized by today’s rampant misogyny, I think of all she faced and yet accomplished.
In our circle, we’ll all dream up brilliant answers to Katharine Hayhoe’s question.
Wangari Maathai (1940 – 2011)
“Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking.”
I love that she is primarily known for planting trees, but this Kenyan woman broke ground in many other ways as well. After earning two degrees from American universities in the 1960s, she received her PhD from the University of Nairobi, where she taught veterinary anatomy, becoming chair of the department and an associate professor—both firsts for a woman in her region.4
The tree-planting began in the mid 1970s to empower women, build community, heal the environment, and improve quality of life. The Green Belt Movement she started has planted more than 20 million trees and expanded far beyond Kenya. In the late 1990s, she advocated the cancellation of debts for poor countries by the year 2000. In 2004, she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
In our circle, I hope she’ll guide us to plant some saplings of our own.
Donella Meadows (1941 – 2001)
“The Earth says: rejoice! You have been born into a world of self-maintaining abundance and incredible beauty. Feel it, taste it, be amazed by it.”
I learned about this remarkable systems scientist in my early years of sustainable design. Her article, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” dazzled me with its erudition, elegant clarity and humor. That essay convinced me that if only people understood how the world actually works, we could design our environment in dynamic balance with earth’s living systems, rather than as a rapacious domination machine.5
Dana was a beloved Dartmouth professor and MacArthur Fellow who left a brilliant body of work in the short time she was with us. She founded the Sustainability Institute (now the Donella Meadows Institute), combining research in global systems with practical demonstrations of sustainable living, including the development of an ecovillage and organic farm in Vermont, where she lived.6
In our circle I’ll ask her which of the “Miniature Earth” animation videos she prefers. (Subscribers can vote your choice below.)
Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960)
“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions."
Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of my touchstone books. Well-plotted with vivid characters, its language is poetic and lush without being fussy or distracting. I’m in awe of how Hurston weaves mythic stories into earthy dialect and moving drama so seamlessly.
A glance through Hurston’s biography reveals an ambitious, talented, dramatic woman with a fiery intellect who successfully pursued a variety of creative and academic passions, yet later worked as a maid, a librarian and a substitute teacher before dying penniless and relegated to an unmarked grave.7
She studied at Howard University and later at Barnard with anthropologist Franz Boas. In addition to publishing award-winning short stories, novels, plays, and a memoir, she did field work to collect African American folklore in Florida and the Caribbean. She was a member of the Harlem Renaissance until breaking with Langston Hughes over authorship of the play they were collaborating on. She won fellowships from the Rosenwald and Guggenheim Foundations for her anthropological work.8
In our circle, I fully expect she will flourish a long colorful scarf and charm us with exuberant stories. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
By reading and writing about these five women, I’m right there, sitting in a circle with them. We laugh, we cry, maybe we gossip a little. They remind me to keep persevering and to be generous with sharing my gifts. To dare to see the world through my own unique eyes, to risk speaking up, to correct wrongs.
These women lived. They risked everything to make discoveries, publish scientific papers, to design and craft beautiful things, plant trees, promote democracy, uplift other women, build community, collect and write stories. They farmed, taught, danced, fought, celebrated, reinvented, and mourned. Along the way, they struggled with self-esteem, misogyny, racism, naysayers, imposed limitations, illness, poverty, jealousy, disappointment, loss, obscurity, fame, and expectations, both high and low.
Rising from our circle, I pass through the heavy doors they opened, follow the paths they bushwhacked, and, illuminated by the lights they lit, behold the beauty they created. Their invitation is open to us all.
This is the store, Aram, that still sells her iconic furniture.
Foote’s obituary from April 2020
The website, the Donella Meadows Project Academy for Systems Change, is packed with goodness, including this delightful page documenting the clever illustrator Dave Macauley’s cartoons visualizing systems.
Tribute to her on the Cobb Hill ecovillage website
In 1973, a young writer, Alice Walker, made a pilgrimage, placed a headstone and in 1975 published an essay in Ms., setting off a revival of Hurston’s work.
Vote for your favorite “Miniature Earth”
As promised, here are two versions of “Miniature Earth,” inspired by Dana Meadows’ May 29, 1990 “State of the Village Report”. Subscribers — which do you like best?
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Gathering a community of women, present or past, has an impactful result. To be reminded of possibilites, our individual potential is a powerful reflection. These women you shared, practiced with risk, their own truth.
Oh, Julie, how I loved reading this post. I feel happier and alive just having spent time with you and these awesome bright lights. Their Eyes Were Watching God is such a brilliant, brilliant piece of writing--one of my faves. Thanks for writing and sharing this!