Feminist writer to speak

Essayist and poet Katha Pollit will speak on women in leadership as part of a lecture series, Women and Public Policy in the Next Century at 7:30 p.m. March 10, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. The public is invited to attend the talk free of charge.

Pollit received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her book of poems Antarctic Traveller won the National Book Critics Award in 1983.

Pollit’s writing appears regularly in The Nation, The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her commentary, pithy, poignant and precise, often examines issues such as marriage or sexual violence from the perspective of women.

In Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (Knopf, 1994), a diverse collection of 19 Pollit essays, the author writes: “In the popular stereotype, a feminist is a woman who wants power over men or to do without men or to be like a man. In the view of ‘difference feminists’ it is to reclaim and celebrate the supposedly feminine virtues of caring, connection, altruism and cooperation. And in the view of innumerable popularizers, feminism is a kind of assertiveness training by which women can overcome external barriers to professional success. For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question ‘Are women human?’ with a yes.”

As part of the series, journalist and author Peggy Orenstein will lecture at 7:30 p.m. March 26, in the Muskie Archives.