On Women's Bones in Hard Times

What's a woman to do in times like these? Write.

It is April. At this moment in time, I am in the last semester of my M.A. program. The looming deadlines of multiple final projects inch toward me like thick smoke in my throat. I have a thesis to finish, too. In the summer, I will uproot my life to continue my education. It is a privilege none of my ancestors, particularly the women, have enjoyed. For every woman about which I write, I think of a woman who came before me. I remember their names. I think of having a daughter and the women about which I would tell her: my grandmothers, my best friends, my first love, Mary Shelley, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Sappho, Angela Y. Davis, Anne Carson, Edith Hamilton. All the women whose lives and writings have shaped my own.

My thesis is, more or less, about women and women’s writings. It is about Ceres and Proserpine, and Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died when Mary was only an infant. This mother-loss impacted every aspect of Mary’s life as she grew up, raised by her father and her mother’s metaphorical ghost. In the mythological tale of Ceres and Proserpine, the god of the underworld kidnaps Proserpine and, upon tricking her into consuming the food of the underworld, puts an end to her girlhood. No longer can Proserpine wander the fields with her beloved mother; now, for six months out of the year, Proserpine must live with Pluto in his domain. The loss that Ceres and Proserpine feel echoes that which Mary felt throughout her entire life. In novels by Mary such as Frankenstein (1818) and Mathilda (1959), this parent-child dynamic is continuously explored and yet it never seems to satiate her grief at the loss of the first woman in her life. It is, then, the loss of a woman that shaped Mary’s writings and, in turn, shapes how I read Wollstonecraft’s writings. Women are always in dialogue with one another no matter the life or generations that separate us.

This is to say that women are always on my mind. I research extensively on women’s writing. I write about the way in which sex and gender—their sociocultural structures, particularly—influence writing either negatively or positively. As I make my way home from the university campus, I play an audiobook. It is Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) by Joan Didion. The epigraph includes the poem “The Second Coming” (1919) by W. B. Yeats. The following lines most struck me:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” (7-8). Who is the best and the worst, then?

Ahead of me as I walk is a protest. I pause my audiobook. Black and white signs on pale wooden stakes soar above heads. The signs read things like “hands off our students” and “free Mahmoud Khalil.” The protesters are small in number, but they’re growing. As they shout, more join. I recognize some of them: students I’ve tutored, acquaintances I’ve made. Across the street watching the protestors is a line of policemen on motorcycles. Two more patrol vehicles are parked down the block. Our university is an urban, open campus and student protests are an element of our history. But in my five years on this campus, I’ve never quite seen police presence like this for a student protest. What, I wonder, are the policemen thinking as they watch us? What do the student protesters see reflected in the nondescript visors resting on the policemen’s faces?

Yeats wrote the poem during the aftermath of the 1918 pandemic and the First World War. Though it is not defined as such, it echoes the sentiments of many later protest poems such as Adrienne Rich’s “What Kind of Times are These?” (1995) and Zeina Hashem Beck’s “Savage Sonnet” (2024). The latter of which speaks of the genocide of the Palestinian people enacted by Israel and supported by the US. It is a stark reminder of the suffering that is ongoing. It is too, in a way, an archive. Writing is record after all. And poetry is action; it is not stagnant, not silent. As a composition teacher, I emphasize the power of writing to my students. During my lecture last week, I played my students a video in which Toni Morrison spoke on censorship and the privilege of writing. For a small fraction of my students, writing is a chore despite any way I try to connect it to their own interests; these few students use AI to “write” their assignments. It is heartbreaking. I think of all the women, past and present, and men too, who do not have access to education. Who cannot write because writing is a privilege they do not have. These students do not recognize their privilege or the precarious moment in which they live. They do not know they are part of a tradition, one in which writing—language—has been handed down from generation to generation until it finally reached them. And the gift, the power, that writing is goes unrecognized.

When I get home, I continue reading an advanced copy of PENELOPE’S BONES by Emily Hauser. It is “a new history of Homer’s world through the women written out of it” (Chicago UP, June 2025). Though I won’t spoil anything, I will say that it is an exemplary study of historical and fictional women’s influence upon ancient communities and present-day studies. It is a reminder that women are, whether seen or not, always part of the narratives. Women like Emily Hauser are doing the important work of bringing long-forgotten women back into the light. Through the archaeological work she discusses within her forthcoming book, we as readers can imagine the real lives of ancient women. Much of the archaeological records discussed are composed by the records of women’s bones and what those bones tell us about their lived experiences. For just a moment, thanks to history and science, these women are alive again to us. I wonder if these women, at least the ones who were privileged enough to know how to do so, wrote. What would the discovery of their written materials do to our current understandings of ancient civilizations and cultures? How might we otherwise remember these women if they could be remembered by their own records?

Other women have done similar work though in vastly different ways. Helene P. Foley’s Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (2002) and Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Wives, Whores, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (1995) come to mind. So do the exceptional number of personal narratives, poetry collections, archival materials, and online blogs that are currently documenting the many voices of women across the globe; voices that will influence future generations of women and their writings. This is all to say: write. Make an archive of yourself. Do not let history forget you—or the women about which you care, either. In hard times such as these, it i imperative to write. Women’s bones are tough, but they are mortal. Writing has the potential to survive; to tell us what women’s lived experiences were like—the joy, the laughter, the hardship, the survival. Tell us about it all.

“No woman has ever written enough.” — Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999), bell hooks.

Sincerely,
Kaitlin Smith