Rachel Vincent, Liz Bernstein, Leymah Gbowee and Julienne Lusenge meet with sexual violence survivors in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2014. Photo: Peter Müller When I was 10, I was an avid reader and particularly loved reading biographies. I vividly recall reading short, child-versions of biographies about Florence Nightingale — the nurse who pioneered the use of hygiene in field care and saved countless lives on the front lines during the Crimean War — and biographies of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, two African Americans who had bravely made their way from the South to the North to escape slavery. Harriet Tubman traveled mostly at night, and used moss — which grows on the side of the tree that gets the least amount of light, the north side — to guide her to freedom. To this day, while walking in the woods, I find myself checking on which side of the tree the moss is growing.
It is perhaps not surprising then that as I grew older, I sought out books written by and about women. In my turbulent teens and 20s, it was the lives and experiences of women I had never met — writers like Harper Lee, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Nawal El-Saadawi, Gloria Naylor, Julia Alvarez and Arundhati Roy — who helped me to feel less alone in this world. Their collective wisdom pointed me towards a new kind of North, an interior freedom; they showed me that there are many ways in this world to be a woman, and that fear was normal, but so was boldly refusing to accept things as they are.
In 1983, when I was 18, my mother gave me a copy of Carol Gilligan’s book, In A Different Voice. This book posited the theory, ground breaking at the time, that women and men have different approaches to morality. Gilligan’s work has since been knocked off its pedestal, but the core idea that women and men have different “voices” and ways of being in this world has always stuck with me, and in ways big and small, has shaped my life.
