Gladys taber and jill7/26/2023 ![]() Somehow, by some divine light, we have got to see ourselves as people, one and all.” We have got to stop lining up as Fascists, Communists, Laborites, Gentiles, Jews, Negroes and Whites. Every mother and every father has the future life of the world in control. Good will toward men, that is the answer. It will be the sum of the little people’s feeling. And this cannot be accomplished by any great legislation. “What is the answer for us? The creative instincts, the love force must be nourished with every beat of our hearts until they overbalance the destructive instincts. The aggressive instincts have run the world into destruction, culminating in the desperate promise of the atomic bomb that man shall perish from the earth, and the earth from the cosmos. Race prejudice snakes along every hidden byway. Labor and Management are embroiled in half the world. Civil conflict exists everywhere, people are still starving. We are insecure, when we have won the war. ![]() “Many simple folk like me are thinking long thoughts this Christmas as we wrap the packages. Gladys Taber, from The Book of Stillmeadow, 1948: Browning clearly defines herself as a strong feminist, a welcome stance in these reactionary times when many young women of my acquaintance don’t realize how old time feminists have forged the rights that make their lives more full of possibilities. Not only did Gladys write of gardening and domesticity, but she often waxed more political about war (against) and enviromentalism (for). While reading her memoir last night, I began to reminisce about my joy in discovering the Stillmeadow and Stillcove memoirs of Gladys Taber. I admire her transparency and exposure and am amazed by it and by the fact that I connect with her experiences even though I would have thought that as editor of “House and Garden” her life in a more privileged sphere would have made her foreign to my more humble existence. I’m reading Dominique Browning’s “Around the House and In the Garden”, a memoir which precedes her wonderful “Paths of Desire.” Both are about her home, her garden, and recovery from divorce. The misery of deeply cold weather: I find myself longing for actual spring, for tulips, for roses, irises, peonies, poppies.
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