Shifting Thoughts And Ideas

I just learned about a new collection of essays by Susan Sontag, titled On Women. Here is a short blurb from the publisher: “A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism.”

Sontag died in 2004; this is a collection of writings from the 1970’s. The Atlantic has a review of it by Katie Roiphe. In Roiphe’s description of the collection, it mirrors things I have been thinking about: how past feminist ideas can inform today’s. What is, or what should be, the dialogue between the past and the present in both intellectual thought and felt experience?

This has been on my mind because I am writing two projects that involve looking forward, while simultaneously backward, in terms of feminism and women’s rights. One project is a memoir; the other a documentary about women artists from the past and present. I can look over the span of decades I’ve lived and see the changes. I have felt and drawn the changes.

When I look at a cartoon drawn by a woman in 1920’s, I wonder if the artist was dealing with similar concerns as we are now, or, possibly, how things have shifted. Sontag writes about women and age; Helen Hokinson — a cartoonist for The New Yorker in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s — drew about it.