WOMEN'S READING GROUP 25TH ANNIVERSARY

Poet Mary-Ella Holst wrote this poem on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Women's Reading Group.

THE WOMEN'S READING GROUP

We began after Twig but before Nina, around the table, upstairs on 80th and Lex., the only walk-up parsonage the church has ever had.

We read the books we had been denied:
Woolf, Chopin, Hurston, more Woolf,
never enough of Virginia.

Entered lives of women we had not known:
Margaret Fuller, primarily Fuller, but also
Gilman, Cather, Britten, a litany of names become stories.
Women whose lives we will never be over in our lifetimes.

We had husbands, partners, lovers, some now deceased, divorced,
or now-husbands, partners, and lovers not yet known.
Children, now with children.
And we had a list of ten books a year.
Ten books a year for twenty-five years.

Classics, now recognized. New books, now classics.
Women forgotten, now remembered—Gaskell comes to mind.
And Virginia, always Virginia, steeping into our sensibility.
And Ladies of the Club, our mirror in history, as Fuller is our model.
Stanton and Anthony working to shape the American being
of who we are, might be, the power of our lives.

Not only meaning but power. Blessed be, this is always the theme:
Power, change, movement, meaning in the everyday lifting of the cup,
the opening of the book,
the beginning of the conversation.

Always the beginning, each evening, each book.
Each new woman walking through the door,
her story waiting to be told,
sentence by sentence, freed by the books
and the gift of the conversation.