409Z Summer 2026 Memory and Self: Women's Milestones

409Z  Memory and Self: Women's Milestones

We’ll read women’s non-fiction memoirs (life-writing). Often popular movies subtitled “a girl’s story” use men’s milestones with an actress at the center, for example, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. By reading Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood (U.S.); Jill Kerr Conway’s Road from Coorain (Australia); Bobbie Ann Mason’s The Girl Sleuth (U.S.); Arundati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to me (India); with a fifth very short memoir, Annie Ernaux’s A Happening (France), together with Carol Gilligan’s In A Different Voice, we’ll take a voyage of discovery in the realities of younger women’s lives and choices. 

Ellen Moody has been teaching since 1972, in senior colleges until 2011, and now for 12 years at two OLLIs. She is a published scholar with specialties in the 18th through the 20th century, with a love for women's and life-writing. Her publications include studies and editions of women's texts.