You’re Doing What? Older Women’s Tales of Achievement & Adventure– Signing with Marjorie Lasky PhD

YOU’RE DOING WHAT?  OLDER WOMEN’S TALES OF ACHIEVEMENT &  ADVENTURE

edited by MARJORIE  PENN LASKY, PhD

Chaucer’s is pleased to welcome Marjorie Penn Lasky, PhD., editor of You’re Doing What? Older Women’s Tales of Achievement & Adventure, complete with sixty-two first person narrative stories and photos.

In this book are women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations who face various challenges and choices as they age. This collection of first-person accounts will   encourage you, regardless of age or gender, to think about how you want to live as you grow older. We live in a time of longer lives.

You can read about daring older women — like the mermaid sex goddess, monofin intact, gliding in the Caribbean, or the early 60’s first-time bride finding her future husband on Craigslist. A Chicana counter’s her mother’s denial of her Mexican heritage. A bisexual polyamorist rejects a life like her mother’s. And a retired history professor, diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in her 20s, documents her struggle with the disease.

“How refreshing it is to sample a collection of essays by women of a certain age who ignored biases and barriers that discriminate against women, gave themselves permission to climb steep mountains, tore of the rulebook of tradition, and launched their own search for adventure, discovery and meaning. Their stories are as unique as each of these women.”  — Eleanor Coppola, filmmaker, writer, artist.

Professor Emerita from the Contra Costa Community College District, Lasky taught Women’s, United States, and Latin American History. As an older woman, she finished a  PhD dissertation and a degree in Labor History, served as chief negotiator and president of her faculty union, founded Grandmother’s Against War (Bay Area) and, upon retiring, took up the saxophone.