ABSTRACT
Women and self-silencing have been much on my mind since reading Terry Tempest Williams’ moving memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. Williams’ mother died when she was 54, leaving to her daughter all of her journals. When she herself turned 54, she sat down with the journals planning to read them. But as she opened them, one after the other, what she found was blank page after blank page. Several shelves of journals and not a single word in any of them.
