Status Updates From Working It Out: 23 Women Wr...

"Joann Green ... the only child of Dr. Louis A. Soloff, who was born in Paris while his mother was en route from Russia to meet her husband in America, and of Mathilde Robin Soloff, whose sister Clara played the role of Nell in the Camden, New Jersey, production of He Ain't Done Right by Nell.
Joann Green attended Friends' Select School in Philadelphia, Wellesley College, and Radcliffe College."(342)

"Art—good art—occurs when there is some agreement that good art, in fact, exists. When women artists seriously decide to assure responsibility for making history—for making whatever they agree good art is, instead of waiting to be recognized for their achievements—then and only then will they assure themselves of inclusion in recorded art history." (300, Miriam Schapiro) hmm

"The thing I remember above all from those days are the beauty of a stylized, colored-chalk fish one of the children made, the way that same little boy sometimes stepped on my feet in his eagerness to tell me something—we wore the same size shoes" (273, Nanette Vonnegut Mengel) what? you were a 20-something teaching kindergarten. how are your feet the size of a kindergartener's???

"One of the madly comic inventions of Rube Goldberg's Professor Lucifer Butts ... On a night when he was dimmed by gin, Goldberg's hero conceived a perfect way to get his car into his garage though the door of that building was closed and he was not able to get out of the car." (270-271, Nanette Vonnegut Mengel) did not realize until now that Rube Goldberg was a writer, not a...I don't know...sculptor?

"That summer ... I wrote the essay. I was beginning, very cautiously, to make the logical links between American imperialism past and present. The piece hedges; I was not trained at Harvard for nothing." (223, Marilyn Young)

"trying trying o so hard not to judge myself
for creating, with a company,
for sharing, with an audience,
in the middle of everything, a few moments of blithering joy." (127, Joann Green)

"The mirror must be so large that the not-so-small baby crawls in front of it no matter where the not-so-small baby crawls. It is important that the baby does what it does. This is not artifact, and anyway, it is impossible to direct children." (122, Joann Green)

(the last two quotes are from alice atkinson lyndon)

"But if I have taught these girls anything, or if my work says anything, it has to be (as a friend put it) that 'massive is not masculine.' I want them to know that the ability to use tools and to solve problems physically does not maim a woman or necessarily inhibit her relationships with others, women or men." (34)

"Most of my students at Wellesley College are definitely afraid of the physical aspects of trying to make sculpture, and if I have read them right, they are somewhat afraid of looking at contemporary sculpture as well. At first, I attributed this to class distinctions—more or less affluent middle-class girls resisting the manual-training aspects of making sculpture—but it may very simply be lack of experience." 33-34

"By describing our conflicts about work and our resistances to it, by relating not only prejudices against ourselves, we may illuminate the generic aspects of any individual woman's ambivalence and confusion." (xxx) *may* illuminate? don't promise what you don't think you can deliver, I guess. but really seems like damning with faint praise.