Last week I gave my new speech on Frontier Feminists, and at the end of it, a woman came forward to speak with me. She had a grave expression on her face. Others in the audience seemed to know her, because everybody left the room really quickly. The woman...

One of the cool facts about writing historical fiction is how little things have changed since the 1740s I write about. Certainly people haven’t changed. But sometimes, things do change, which makes it uncomfortable for me at times. In my sequel to A FALSE DAWN, my main character, Louise...

Last week I met a woman who said she was closely related to Marie Chouteau, which surprised me because Chouteau has been dead since 1813. Marie Chouteau was an amazing women. Born in 1753, she lived most of her life as a farmer and businesswoman in St. Louis, when...

Did you know that women of the Iroquois nation profoundly affected the thinking and writing of white women who fought for the right to vote in the 1800s? It’s true. In the Iroquois culture, women owned property, including houses and stored food. They elected (and if necessary, replaced) local...

My new lecture on Frontier Feminists has been going well. I’ve given two presentations, with four more scheduled in south Jersey and suburban Philadelphia over the next six weeks. One thing that makes me glad, and also surprises me, is that so far, no one in my audiences knows...

The novelist E.L. Doctorow once spoke of the difference between history and historical fiction. As I remember it, he said, “History is what happened. Historical fiction is HOW IT FELT.” That’s one big reason that women’s history is so appealing to me. Most of the history I learned in...

Some women did not like it when I began preparing my speech about Colonial women. They said to me, “What makes you an expert on women?” I was so surprised at their hostility that I didn’t have a ready answer. Today, three years after that conversation, I’m ready with...

This past week, I made my first attempt at presenting my new speech, FRONTIER FEMINISTS, to a real audience at the Jewish Community Center in Cherry Hill. I an enormously relieved to say that the speech went well: I was concerned that an hour-long presentation would be too boring...

We tend to think that in Colonial America, all the rules and traditions that defined rights and protections for women must have been very, very primitive. That’s often true, usually true in fact. But not ALWAYS true. Women of the Iroquois Confederacy, who lived in upstate New York, are...

My speeches will start in September, with six engagements scheduled for October and November at local libraries. FRONTIER FEMINISTS will be coming to you shortly! I’m really excited and a little nervous, too. But the stories I’ve found to tell you are so fascinating – history itself is so...