Excerpt

Introduction

The Strength of Women

The character who first leaps to my mind when "mysterious women" are mentioned is Sarah Woodruff, the woman in The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. Picture Meryl Streep in the movie version, windswept in a dark cloak walking on The Cobb at Lime Regis, looking haunted, and haunting. And it turns out, she is a mystery not only to the characters in the novel, primarily Charles who falls under her spell, but also to Fowles himself. So much so that he had to provide three different versions of the story and leave the reader to choose among them to decide what happens. Who really is Sarah Woodruff?

Despite the post-modern construction, there is still something essentially romantic about the novel. It plays on our notions of womanhood and Victorian romance, the intriguing attraction of the mysterious woman, even when the novel defies our expectations.

Let's make this clear from the outset: the mysterious women in this volume are a different kettle of fish entirely.

What would the opposite of Sarah Woodruff be? Maybe her polar opposite can be found in someone who was real and who embodies a kind of womanhood that many women are more familiar with in real life, and yet who in her own way remains mysterious.

The woman who comes to my mind is someone like Maria Elena Moyano, the Afro-Peruvian activist, community organizer, and local politician. Mother of two, relentless advocate for the poor neighborhoods of Lima where she grew up and lived her whole life, bright and charismatic by all accounts, and in the end the victim of assassination by the terrorist group the Shining Path. When the assassins came for her, she was with her two young sons and some friends who gathered around to try to protect her. But she firmly put them aside and stepped out to meet the murderers saying, "This is for me." Whereupon she was shot and killed.

For me the mystery about her has always been, where did that kind of courage come from? There was no wild Rambo-style shoot-out. She walked calmly forward to meet death. She had known for a long time that the Shining Path was after her. Had she planned for that moment of confrontation? Was it the act of a mother doing what she could to protect her children and her friends? I'll never know. What I do know with certainty is that I do not have that kind of courage, nor can I imagine where I would get it from should the need arise.

There is no Maria Elena Moyano in this volume, and it's not all about the heroic, but there are women in these stories who share the mysterious kind of courage that allows them to meet threats to their very existence in selfless ways. Life is hard on these women, hard on them in real ways like life is often hard on real women. The mysteries in this volume are about what makes each woman choose her own path of quiet heroism, or a path of quiet desperation, or in a couple of cases, of quietly exuberant defiance. I find myself at a loss to know where they get the courage, the strength, and in some cases simply the chutzpa to do what they do.

And yet they are not only heroic. They are eminently human and fallible. Some of them will make you chuckle and others will break your heart, and some might even scare you. They are all powerful in their own ways, often in situations that seem designed to rob them of all power.

Which brings me to another point. A pet peeve almost. Even if Moyano had not been assassinated, she was already a peculiarly female kind of hero. Her life was dedicated to providing for people who had little or nothing during an excruciating civil war. Hers was the story of how women organize to get people fed, raise children, educate and inspire them, in even the worst of circumstances. For me, it is the true history of humankind. Not how many people fought and died in battles and wars, but how did families persist? How did we help each other survive, heal, and eventually thrive against all odds? And that history is largely a story of women.

Women like the ones you will find in these stories.

Why do they make the choices they do? Sometimes we learn the answers and sometimes we don't. Either way, with one notable exception, I'd be delighted to meet every one of them and shake their hands. I'd be honored.

As for that one odd woman out, let's just say I sympathize with her in some ways, I get where she's coming from, but if offered the chance to meet her, I'd have to politely declare that I have a pressing engagement elsewhere.

—Gwyneth Gibby

Lincoln City, Oregon

April 3, 2020