Rad American Women A–Z, which was just released from City Lights/Sister Spit, doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list of important American women. But to imagine the 25 women selected by author Kate Schatz and illustrator Miriam Klein Stahl as a representative sample is to imagine a world in which radicalism is somehow the norm, a world in which living as a woman in America might itself be a radical act. From Angela Davis to Zora Neale Hurston, from Dolores Huerta to Kate Bornstein to Maya Lin to Patti Smith to to Temple Grandin to Wilma Mankiller, the book profiles women who came from very different backgrounds and worked in very different fields, but who were all undeniably radical: in their politics, their aesthetics, their style, in the ways in which their work continues to shape and challenge our own lives. Very few, if any, of them are familiar from the Famous American Women books of my childhood. In one of the most moving sections of the book, Schatz and Klein Stahl devote the letter X to The Women Whose Names We Don’t Know, gesturing not only toward public figures who could eventually show up in middle-school social-studies curricula–“the women we haven’t learned about yet”–but toward the ordinary women “whose stories we will never read.”
I got to talk to Schatz and Klein Stahl over email about their collaboration, their own daughters, and about the politics of basically every concept in the title: radicalism, America, nationalism, women, feminism, and the alphabet! Continue reading
