These are some of the women writers who spoke to my heart, the fabric of the scholar-net needed for the work I do:

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up. Adrienne Rich

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society, and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included. Adrienne Rich

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion. Doris Lessing

[Writing about a woman whose long-suffering, war-veteran husband's "pitiful complaint" kept her from an honored place in the Veteran's Parade] She whose every desire was for warm participation was never allowed to be present. Doris Lessing

We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained. Nikki Giovanni

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all. Emily Dickinson

List of my writings here and CV here