AAUW-Astoria Oregon

11/03/2026

In Chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck writes about small farmers watching their crops rot while people go hungry thirty miles away, the specific cruelty of a system that produces abundance and distributes catastrophe. He calls what those farmers carry “a great anger” that is “in the souls of the people.” The phrase is incendiary. It is not a metaphor. It is Steinbeck doing what Steinbeck could do better than almost anyone in American literature: naming the thing the system preferred to leave unnamed.
Since 1996, San Jose State University’s Center for Steinbeck Studies has given an annual award using that phrase as its title, to artists and activists whose work operates in the same spirit. To people who look at what the country prefers not to see, and describe it with enough precision and craft that the rest of us cannot look away. The list of past recipients, Bruce Springsteen, Arthur Miller, Studs Terkel, Joan Baez, Dolores Huerta, Khaled Hosseini, Ruby Bridges, is not a list of comfortable establishment figures. It is a list of people who chose the harder, more specific work of standing with those the system has written off.

Today, that award goes to Barbara Kingsolver.

She grew up in rural Kentucky, which is not the path most people imagine when they imagine how a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist begins. She went to DePauw University in Indiana on a music scholarship, classical piano, and then switched to biology, which tells you something about her. She has always been interested in how systems work: ecological ones, economic ones, human ones. She earned a master’s degree in biology from the University of Arizona and became a science writer before becoming a novelist, which means that when she describes what is happening to a community or an ecosystem, she is not doing so impressionistically. She is doing so with the specific understanding of someone who was trained to trace causes and effects.

She published her first novel, The Bean Trees, in 1988. It was about a young woman from rural Kentucky who drives west and inadvertently becomes the guardian of a Cherokee child, a story about poverty and displacement and the specific ways that women and communities survive what the official systems cannot or will not address. It was named to bestseller lists and won awards and announced the presence of a writer who was going to be impossible to ignore.

The Poisonwood Bible came in 1998 and made her internationally famous, a novel about an American Baptist missionary family in the Belgian Congo in 1959, told from the perspectives of the women the mission was dragging along behind it. It was a Pulitzer finalist. It became an Oprah Book Club selection. It remains one of the more significant American novels of the last thirty years.

But Demon Copperhead, published in 2022, is the work that connects most directly to what the Steinbeck Award was designed to honor.

She took the structure of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, a Victorian novel about a boy born into poverty, ground through institutions that are supposed to help him and mostly don’t, navigating a world designed to benefit the people who already have, and she set it in contemporary Appalachian Virginia. Her Copperfield is a boy born to a teenage single mother in a single-wide trailer. The institutions grinding him down are not Victorian workhouses but the foster care system, high school, and the opioid pharmaceutical industry that flooded his community with prescription painkillers and then left it to manage the aftermath alone.

Kingsolver has been living in southern Appalachia since 2004, on a farm where she raises Icelandic sheep and an extensive vegetable garden with her husband. She wrote the novel about the place where she lives, the people she knows, the crisis she has watched happen in real time. Demon Copperhead is not a journalist’s account of the opioid epidemic. It is an act of witnessing from the inside, the specific work that Steinbeck did with migrant workers in California, transposed eighty years forward and two thousand miles east.

The Pulitzer Prize committee awarded it the 2023 prize for fiction. The British judges awarded it the Women’s Prize for Fiction, making Kingsolver the first author in the prize’s history to win it twice. A New York Times readers’ poll named it the best book of the 21st century. The comparisons to Steinbeck were not invented for today’s ceremony, they had been circulating for two years before anyone at San Jose State wrote the invitation.

She also, twenty-six years ago, founded the Bellwether Prize, an award she created out of her own resources to support fiction that promotes social change and has never received the literary establishment’s full blessing. She built a parallel system for honoring the work the main system underpays. She has, in other words, been operating in Steinbeck’s territory for her entire career: using the tools of literary fiction to make visible the people and communities that economic and political systems prefer to render invisible.

What connects Kingsolver to Steinbeck is not genre or geography or even subject matter, exactly. It is commitment, the specific decision that fiction is not just an art form but a form of civic life, that the novel has an obligation to the world it describes, that telling the truth about a community with enough care and craft is itself a form of action.

The Grapes of Wrath named a great anger in the souls of the people.

Demon Copperhead named another one.

11/03/2026

11/02/2026

A Mighty Girl's Pick of the Day honors those who struggled, generation after generation, for true universal suffrage: "Lillian's Right to Vote: A Celebration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965" by Jonah Winter. As one-hundred-year-old Lillian climbs the steep hill to her polling place on election day, the journey carries far more weight than the distance between her front door and the courthouse. With every step, the long arc of her family's struggle for the ballot rises up around her: her great-grandfather Edmund, born into slavery, casting his first vote after the Fifteenth Amendment; her grandmother turned away by white men with guns; her parents driven from the registrar's office by an angry mob while a young Lillian clung to her mother's hand; and, decades later, Lillian herself walking from Selma to Montgomery alongside marchers who refused to be turned back.

Inspired by the real Lillian Allen, who at one hundred years old cast her ballot for Barack Obama in 2008, this lyrical, deeply moving picture book traces nearly a century and a half of African American voting history through a single woman's determined climb up a hill. Author Jonah Winter pairs spare, almost hymn-like prose with Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner Shane W. Evans's striking mixed-media art, in which a vividly dressed Lillian moves forward across each spread while the translucent ghosts of her ancestors and the civil rights movement unfold behind her.

Published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the book closes with an author's note placing Lillian's story in the broader history of the struggle for ballot access -- including a reminder that the work of protecting voting rights is far from finished. This powerful book is more relevant than ever, given the repeated efforts over the past two years to undermine this critical civil rights law, including a Supreme Court decision earlier this year that weakened the very protections Lillian’s family fought generations to secure. Highly recommended for ages 5 and up.

Lillian's Right to Vote" is available for https://www.amightygirl.com/lillian-s-right-to-vote

For a child's eye view of the civil rights movement -- told by the daughter of activist Andrew Young and culminating in the Selma to Montgomery march and the passage of the Voting Rights Act -- we recommend "Child of the Civil Rights Movement" for ages 5 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/child-civil-rights-movement

For the memoir of Lynda Blackmon Lowery, who at fourteen became the youngest marcher in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march and had been jailed eleven times before her fifteenth birthday, we recommend "Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/turning-15

For the story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, a white teenager who joined the Freedom Riders, the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-ins, and the Selma march that helped bring about the Voting Rights Act, we recommend "She Stood for Freedom" in editions for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-stood-for-freedom-picture-book) and ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-stood-for-freedom-middle-grade)

For more books about courageous girls and women of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, visit our blog post on "50 Inspiring Books on Girls & Women of the Civil Rights Movement" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11177

11/02/2026

** Ladies: This is the kind of man who doesn’t want women to have the right to vote. Pete Hegseth gave him a platform at the Pentagon. You know what to do on Tuesday. **

Repealing women's right to vote is "a good idea," Doug Wilson -- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's pastor -- declared with a laugh during a NPR interview. Pressed on why he wants to end a right American women have held for more than a century, he added: "I don't want women voting as individuals."

In ordinary times, a far-right pastor talking this way could be written off as a fringe extremist and easily dismissed. These are not ordinary times.

Wilson founded the church network Hegseth belongs to, and the Secretary of Defense has drawn him steadily closer -- thanking him from a Pentagon stage "for your leadership, for your mentorship," and inviting him to preach inside the Pentagon itself, a workday sermon in the building's auditorium broadcast live over the department's internal television network, as part of a monthly Christian worship service Hegseth launched there.

More recently, one of the pastors from Wilson's own Christ Church was hired as a Pentagon speechwriter, ABC News reported. In October, Hegseth went further still: he created a new Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs that reports directly to him -- further institutionalizing his infusion of evangelical Christianity into the Pentagon, including a push to add more Christian-influenced coursework in the military’s schools.

Wilson's proximity to power, NPR observed during the July interview, has never been more pronounced -- and he does not disagree. His theocratic-political vision, he told the network, is "closer to getting a hearing" now than at any point in the forty years he has been preaching it.

His ultimate aim is that the U.S. become a Christian theocracy. Critics have drawn uncomfortable parallels between Wilson's vision and theocratic governance more commonly associated with religious extremism abroad. The commonalities run deep, especially as Wilson's brand of Christian nationalism leads heavily toward Christian fascism, embracing many aspects of theocratic authoritarianism.

In the country Wilson envisions, non-Christians could not hold public office and LGBTQ+ Americans would have no legal recognition -- and women's suffrage would be repealed. His followers describe women's suffrage as a "rebellion against God." His publishing house produces books arguing that "voting is an act of rulership" and "since rulership is not given to women, women should not vote."

These are his long-term objectives. What he says he is working toward now is more immediate: an absolute nationwide ban on abortion and an end to same-sex marriage. "Those are the fish that I would want to fry now," he declared.

As for the vote, what Wilson wants is a country where a married woman does not cast a ballot of her own. Under the "household voting" system he describes, each household would get a single vote, cast by its head -- who, in his theology of male "headship," is the husband. He frames it as a family voting together, as one. But the design leaves no room for a family that disagrees: the vote belongs to the head, and he casts it. A wife who saw things differently would not have a vote of her own, only his, cast for them both.

None of this is new for Wilson, who once called women "the kind of people that people come out of." When CNN aired a segment featuring Wilson's co-pastors arguing against women's right to vote, Hegseth reposted it with the caption: "All of Christ for All of Life."

There is an irony in the timing. American women vote at higher rates than men, and have in every presidential election since 1980 -- the gap widest of all among the youngest voters. It is exactly this that Wilson hopes to bring to an end. This is the man the Secretary of Defense calls his mentor, welcomes to the Pentagon, and holds up as a model -- the head of a movement that would take the individual vote from married women, among them many of the more than 200,000 now serving in the United States military.

Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both her legs in combat in Iraq, warned that the real danger is views like these taking hold so close to power. They are, she said, "designed to justify discrimination and mistreatment of women, including those who sacrifice in uniform to defend Americans."

The Founders had a word for government that serves one religion above all others. They called it tyranny. And they wrote the First Amendment to prevent it.

--> To listen to NPR's interview with Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, visit https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5822558/pastor-doug-wilson-interview-pete-hegseth

--> To learn more about Doug Wilson, the Sons of Patriarchy podcast explores how biblical patriarchy, Christian nationalism, and theologies of authority and submission have fueled abuse in churches, schools, and families -- with a particular focus on the movement centered around Wilson at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sons-of-patriarchy/id1772141068

For powerful books for tweens and teens about girls living in real-life oppressive societies throughout history -- including religious autocracies -- visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426

For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364

For books for young readers that honor the service of women in the military, visit our blog post "The Price of Peace: A Mighty Girl Recognizes Veterans" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12356

For a children's book that gives groundbreaking women in the military, past and present, the respect they deserve, we highly recommend "Heroism Begins With Her: Inspiring Stories of Bold, Brave, and Gutsy Women in the U.S. Military" for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/heroism-begins-with-her

For several excellent books for teen and adult readers about heroic women who served in the U.S. military, we recommend "Women Heroes of World War II"(https://www.amightygirl.com/women-heroes-of-world-war-ii), "Women Heroes of the US Army" (https://www.amightygirl.com/women-heroes-us-army), and "Courageous Women of the Vietnam War" (https://www.amightygirl.com/courageous-women-vietnam)

11/01/2026

Her first name never made it onto the exam sheet. Her score still landed at the very top of the pile.

In 1907, the Department of Agriculture had a laboratory to fill. Harvey Wiley, who ran the Bureau of Chemistry and was the nation’s leading food safety advocate, wanted a chemist named Mary Engle Pennington to lead it.

There was a catch. The job required a civil service exam, and Wiley registered her as “M. E. Pennington,” a name that gave no hint of her gender.

She earned the highest score of anyone who sat for the test in that session. The Civil Service recommended her for the position.

Then her gender came to light. Some members of the Civil Service tried to rescind the offer. Wiley stepped in and made sure she took the job.

She became the USDA’s only female lab chief and the highest paid woman in the federal government at the time.

But the story of how she got there starts much earlier, in a library.

At twelve, Mary checked a medical chemistry textbook out of the Philadelphia Mercantile Library for some light summer reading. She came back fascinated by the chemical elements.

She asked her school’s headmistress to add chemistry to the curriculum. The request was angrily rejected, because the headmistress did not think science was appropriate for young women.

Undiscouraged, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania at eighteen. When she finished her coursework, some of the university’s trustees, who opposed giving women degrees, handed her a certificate of proficiency instead of a diploma.

Her professors were so impressed that they admitted her to the doctoral program without a degree. One of them, Edgar Fahs Smith, ran the chemistry laboratory and supported education for women.

In 1895, she completed a dissertation on derivatives of two metals, columbium and tantalum. She became one of only 12 women to earn a chemistry PhD in the United States before 1900.

A PhD did not open many doors for a woman. Chemists like her could become assistants in laboratories supervised by men, teach home economics, or pursue nutritional science at the United States Department of Agriculture.

Pennington wanted to keep doing laboratory research, so she created a new career path instead.

She taught physiological chemistry and ran the laboratory at the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia. She also cofounded a subscription lab that ran bacteriological and chemical tests for local doctors at $50 a year.

The lab soon had more than 400 subscribers. One of them was the City of Philadelphia, which hired her to investigate its often contaminated milk supply. That was the start of a food safety career that would last decades.

At the USDA, her assignment was poultry and eggs. The supply system had stretched thousands of miles in just a few decades, and shoppers now expected chicken and eggs all year long, when once they had eggs in spring, chickens in fall, and turkeys in winter.

For four years, she and her staff traveled by train to the Mississippi and Missouri valleys, the country’s main chicken- and egg-producing districts. They recorded every detail, from butchering to cleaning.

What they found was troubling. Many chickens and eggs were already unfit when they went into storage, because sanitation was lacking. Then the damaged goods spent days or even weeks in poorly refrigerated railcars and city warehouses, before sitting several more days in stores.

Pennington tested new handling methods herself. She slaughtered and packed thousands of chickens, developed sanitary techniques like fast freezing, and designed an all-metal cooling rack that she patented on March 19, 1912.

Then came World War I. In October 1917, she told the St. Louis Railway Club that the nation was at war, needed food, and had to save it.

She joined a team of 27 men who called themselves the “imperishables.” Their job was to test the storage and cooling systems of the nation’s 40,000 refrigerated railcars.

They placed electric thermometers at several levels inside the cars and took constant readings as trains crossed the country. Pennington herself made 500 of these trips in just two years, sleeping in cabooses parked on railroad sidings.

The results were bleak. Fewer than 10% of the so-called “refrigerated” cars were actually cold enough, and many were insulated with nothing but paper or air.

So she wrote guidelines for how a well-designed refrigerated car should be built. The government had temporarily taken control of the railroads during the war, and entire fleets were built to her specifications.

Here is what most people miss: the problem she was solving was not only mechanical. It was trust. Poor handling had led to bacterial contamination, public suspicion of refrigerated goods, and millions of dollars in wasted food.

A cold chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and her work reached each one: the packing room, the railcar, the warehouse, and eventually the home refrigerator. Each one had to hold for the whole system to work.

After more than a decade in federal service, she left government for the private sector. Her reasons are not entirely clear, but she wanted to work with companies to promote better food safety practices.

She believed those practices were good for business because they saved money and avoided negative publicity. She also saw them as a moral duty, ensuring a healthy food supply for ordinary people.

That second career as an industry consultant ran from 1919 to 1952, covering refrigerated food transport, cold storage, and home refrigeration.

Recognition followed. In 1940, she became only the second woman to win the American Chemical Society’s Garvan Medal. In 1947, the American Association of Refrigerating Engineers made her a fellow, years after she became its first female member in 1920.

She did not like public attention. Throughout her career, she ignored gender barriers as she met them and kept working.

Today, it feels ordinary that milk, eggs, and chicken can travel hundreds of miles and arrive safe to eat. That ordinary feeling is built on a cold chain whose earliest standards and equipment she helped develop.

The things we trust without a second thought were once somebody’s stubborn, careful work.

11/01/2026

She made her first stage appearance at two months old.

Her mother Annie Adams carried her on during a production at the Salt Lake Theatre — the theatre that operated under the special patronage of Brigham Young, where Annie had built her career as the leading woman of the company. The family were the descendants of Mormon pioneers who had followed Brigham Young west across the plains. The theatre was as much a part of that world as the church. When Annie needed an infant on stage, she brought her own.

The child’s father did not approve. James Henry Kiskadden — a businessman in mining and banking, not a theatrical man — had no use for this path for his daughter. He died when Maude was still young. By then she had already chosen, or perhaps simply inherited, her direction. She took her mother’s maiden name as her stage name. Not Kiskadden. Adams. The name that came from the women’s side, the side that had built something on a stage in the middle of the Utah Territory.

At sixteen she moved to New York with her mother.

What followed was the careful construction of a career. Broadway debut. Supporting roles. Then, in 1889, a decision that defined everything that came after: she was offered a five-year contract by a major producer, and she turned it down in favor of a lesser offer from the more powerful Charles Frohman. She bet on the right relationship instead of the bigger deal. Frohman made her a star.

In 1895, Frohman arranged for the Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie to watch Adams perform. Barrie had been resisting all requests to adapt his popular novel The Little Minister into a play. He felt there was no actress who could play Lady Babbie. He watched Maude Adams and changed his mind. He adapted the novel. It opened in 1897 and ran for three hundred performances. Adams, who had twenty-two curtain calls on opening night, later said it was her favorite role of her career.

And then Barrie kept writing for her.

Quality Street (1901). What Every Woman Knows (1908). The Legend of Leonora (1914). A Kiss for Cinderella (1916). He wrote them with her in mind. She built her career inside the world he created for her, and between them they built a collaboration that neither could have achieved separately. These productions made Maude Adams the most popular actress in America.

Then there was Peter Pan.

The announcement of her casting had barely been made when she required emergency surgery — an appendectomy. It was uncertain whether her health would allow her to open. She opened. Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up — J.M. Barrie’s play about the boy who never grew up, the Neverland, the children who flew — opened in Washington, D.C. in October 1905 to modest response, then moved to Broadway, where it ran and ran. Adams performed Peter Pan more than 1,500 times. She earned twenty thousand dollars a month doing it.

She had co-designed the costume.

The collar she put on that costume — a flat, rounded collar sitting neatly at the neck — became an immediate fashion sensation. From 1905 onwards, it was known as the Peter Pan collar. It is still known that today. Every wedding dress with that neckline, every school uniform with that collar, every women’s fashion magazine that has printed the design across the last century — all of it traces back to a costume Maude Adams assembled for a role she played while recovering from surgery.

She was also named as inventor on three light bulb patents. The stage lighting she developed for her productions was technically innovative enough to constitute genuine invention.

In May 1915, the RMS Lusitania sank off the coast of Ireland. Among the dead was Charles Frohman, who had made her a star and guided her career for twenty-five years. She lost her producer and her closest professional collaborator in a single afternoon.

She kept performing. Then, in 1918, the influenza epidemic found her while she was playing A Kiss for Cinderella. She fell dangerously ill. She retired from the stage.

She did not return for thirteen years.

At some point during those retirement years, she wrote an essay. She called it “The One I Knew Least.” It was about herself. The woman who had played every kind of human being on stage for decades — who had been Lady Babbie and Peter Pan and Joan of Arc and Portia and countless others — wrote about her difficulty discovering her own personality because she had been inhabiting other people’s since childhood.

The most celebrated actress of her era said the character she understood least was her own.

She returned briefly to the stage in the early 1930s, playing Portia and Maria in Shakespeare. In 1937, at sixty-five, she became a professor of dramatic art at Stephens College in Missouri. She taught for over a decade. She retired to a house in upstate New York, where she had lived since 1905 with Louise Boynton — her life partner, an editor and publisher, who died in 1951. They are buried together.

Maude Adams died on July 17, 1953. She was eighty years old.

She was two months old when she first stood on a stage.

She invented a collar people still wear.

She never quite found herself.