Women in Charge: Stories

These seven stories of women, their loves and families and work, come from a moment when women’s progress has bent back: when opportunity of being in charge has been extended, then in part withdrawn. This is the time of transition between a president whose era ended with financial collapse, and the bruised promise of the next president—neither era giving an opening for women, who will seize what they can from men who come near. Yet bursts of joy and power and co-creation are still possible, and for men, too: sons, lovers, friends.

The women are:
• American and Etruscan mothers of first-born sons;
• A suffering care-giver in medieval Chartres, living in the spirit of the Virgin in whose name a cathedral is built;
• The leader of a politically divided erotic commune, in a New York City brownstone;
• A young sculptor who wants to turn violence against her into productive rage;
• An extortionist on a grand scale with a talent for phone sex;
• A greedy-for-experience ghost in a sci-fi future in Colchester, England;
• Sally Mary’s quiet war to control her days as she’s dying in a rehab home.

With such a range of characters, these stories are very different one from another, in topic and point of view. "Yet all are character driven, full of outer and inner speech, and concerned to root events in history