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In the 1980s and 1990s, when I read women’s history on my own, I realized that there were important and prominent women in every decade, but they disappeared when the history books were written. Women were like sand castles; men were like rocks. The waters of time washed over both and wiped out the women. The Clintons — mother and daughter — are helping to remedy that. By telling the stories of 103 Gutsy women, they want to raise the sand from the beaches and fuse the particles into solid quartz. more »

Rose Madeline Mula writes: I wore frilly, voluminous petticoats that propped up impossibly full dresses. Yes, these may have been ridiculous — but I think far preferable to today’s skirts and dresses that are stretched so tightly across tummies and tushies that they produce a series of unsightly horizontal wrinkles that have somehow become an accepted fashion statement instead of an abomination to be banished by a steam iron. And it’s amazing how women manage to sit while their torsos are bound in those impossibly tight, short frocks. (“Frocks.” Now that’s a word that really dates me.) more »

The authors analyzed data from the Los Angeles County Health Survey with a focus on two specific health behaviors — eating at fast-food restaurants more than once a week and eating five or more servings of fruit and vegetables daily. For the purposes of the survey, an apple is used as a reference point for a serving of fruit, and a handful of broccoli or a cup of cut carrots are used as references for a serving of vegetables. The researchers analyzed 4,244 responses from both immigrants and native-born Americans regarding fast-food consumption. They analyzed 9,166 responses to the fruit-and-vegetable-intake question.   more »

Julia Sneden reviews: We find that it an interesting process, looking back at books we read in our twenties and thirties. The books themselves haven't changed, but thanks to the varied experiences that another twenty or thirty years have added to our lives, we read them from a different perspective. Herewith, the first review of an old, beloved book (actually, three books). "Her mother too had been marked in youth, body and soul, by the bearing and nourishing of children; and she had thought perchance no more than Kristin herself, when she sat with that sweet young life at her breast, that so long as they two lived, each single day would lead the child farther and farther from her arms."   more »