Trayvon Martin could not have been me. Not now. Not 35 years ago, when, like President Obama, I was Trayvon Martin’s’ age. The reason is plain: I am a white woman, raised in a wealthy suburb, an English professor. The infinite ways in which my life—and the life of my own teenage son—are different and […]
Author: Susan Celia Greenfield
Susan Celia Greenfield, Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, is the author of Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance and of many scholarly articles on early women novelists. In addition to the Ms. Blog, her op-eds and reviews have appeared in CNN Opinion, The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and PBS Need to Know. She also publishes short fiction.
Of Jane Austen, the Bennet Sisters… and VAWA?
“I let him film us having sex, Lizzie. I let him do that. … He never made me do anything, so just tell me that I didn’t get what I had coming Lizzie, just try to tell me that!” A sobbing and self-abusive young woman named Lydia Bennet is speaking to her older sister Lizzie […]