You're Doing What? Older Women's Tales

YOU'RE DOING WHAT? Older Women's Tales of Achievement and Adventure, Compiled and Edited by Marjorie Penn Lasky.

"You're Doing What? is an inspirational and insightful call to action to its readers. These stories are certain to encourage women - and men - of all ages to view aging as an opportunity to act on long deferred or never before-imagined dreams." - Congresswoman Barbara Lee

In my mid-70s, I asked myself what was I, Marjorie Lasky, doing scrambling off-trail in Sedona, Arizona, traversing slick steep slopes, climbing to intimidating heights, and choosing between the narrow ledge and the prickly pear. Yet each day when the scrambling ended and I was (essentially) intact, I was amazed at what I had accomplished. Eventually I called it "My Trip of Unintended Consequences" because it inspired new challenges. One endeavor birthed this project - my collecting stories by older women, describing their achievements and adventures.

The book, YOU’RE DOING WHAT? Older Women’s Tales of Achievement and Adventure is a compilation of 62 of these memorable first-person tales and photos. In the book, you’ll read about and view photos of daring older women of different races, classes, sexual orientations, and disabilities facing challenges and choices as they age. All are embracing new adventures and changing what it means to be an “older woman.” Celebrate them! And let them inspire you despite those voices that still might challenge, “You’re Doing What!”

PARTICIPANTS:

Compiler, Marjorie Lasky

A professor in the Contra Costa Community College District from 1973-2008, Marjorie Lasky taught Women’s, United States, and Latin American History. As an older woman, she finished a PhD dissertation, “Off Camera: A History of the Screen Actors Guild” and a degree in Labor History at UC Davis, served as chief negotiator and president of her faculty union, founded Grandmother’s Against War (Bay Area), and, upon retiring, took up the saxophone.

There will be readings by four contributors:

Effie Dilworth

Effie Hall Dilworth graduated from UC Berkeley in English literature. She worked for the university for 30 years with the campus’ natural history collections as a computer programer and the administrator of a database system. In June 2013, the Chinese Historical Society of American published a booklet her cousin, Connie Young Yu, and she wrote about the family soy sauce enterprise, “Wing Nien Brand, A Story of Longevity.”

Lydia Gans

Lydia Gans was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1931. Her parents were fortunate to find a sponsor who made it possible to get visas and emigrate to America. They arrived in New York in January 1938. Lydia grew up in Manhattan, went to Hunter High School, graduated at 17 at took the train to Berkeley.

Rose Glickman

Rose Glickman’s first book, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914, was published in 1984. She has translated a historical biography, Agnessa: From Paradise to Purgatory, A Voice from Stalin’s Russia, published in 2012.

Helen Isaacson

Helen Isaacson was born and brought up in Brooklyn, New York. She met her husband when they were both reporters for the student newspaper at Brooklyn College. They have lived in Washington D.C., London, England, Oberlin, Ohio, Ann Arbor, Michigan and Berkeley where they moved after both retired from teaching at the University of Michigan.

Linda Slavin Kirby

Linda Slavin Kirby continues to hike (although she’s not climbing any more mountains), took her daughters on a three-week African safari to celebrate their “significant” birthdays, and recently returned to the world of tap dancing, which she had previously left.

Kathy Labriola

Kathy Labriola is a nurse, counselor, and hypnotherapist in private practice in Berkeley, providing affordable mental health services to alternative communities. She has been a card-carrying bisexual and polyamorist for more than 40 years. She has written and published Love in Abundance: A Counselor’s Advice on Open Relationships and The Jealousy Workbook.

Sherry Lou Macgregor

American Indian and Scottish, Sherry Lou Macgregor is an elder in the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe. Each summer she is a “puller” in the tribe’s canoe on the Tribal Canoe Journeys. Her experiences and observations on these Canoe Journeys have inspired her to document the history of Pacific Northwest Coast Indian Canoe Culture. She is currently writing a book on this subject. In 2012 she published Beyond Hearth and Home: Women in the Public Sphere in Neo-Assyrian Society.

E. Kay Trimberger

E. Kay Trimberger, a sociologist, is professor emerita at Sonoma State University. She is writing a book tentatively titled Creole Son: An Adoptive Mother’s Story of Nurture and Nature. She blogs occasionally on the Huffington Post and Psychology Today.