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11 Women's Stories for International Women's Day

Posted on March 08, 2023

Panamanian author Cheri Lewis, whose "Open Hands" was featured on our blog.

International Women's Day is a March 8th holiday with purported roots in both ancient Rome and Soviet Socialism, according to Russian Life magazine.

In its modern form, International Women's Day is understood differently by different people. For some, it's a time to give women flowers and "pleasant surprises of the breakfast-in-bed variety"(ibid.) For others, it celebrates women's art, activism, and contributions to public life. If you're interested in the latter form of the holiday, here's some writing by and about women from Words Without Borders:

  1. Grass, a dictated memoir from a former "Comfort Woman"
  2. Ney Boulevard: A complicated friendship between a man and a woman, both Persian refugees in Paris, but with little else in common
  3. Milgrom: Can a new generation of women escape women's traditional fates?
  4. The Egyptian Tomb: A mother and daughter, conflict and connection, in Mexico
  5. Mrs Saniya's Holiday: A working mother in Egypt
  6. Thunder grandmas: Ideas for teaching a memoir about the clash of modern life and traditional beliefs in Kazakhstan
  7. Cat-girl in a Scandinavian Dystopia: Teaching a graphic novel about a girl created to serve "other people's dreams"
  8. Amina Saïd's Border-Defining Poetry: Teaching lyrical poems from Tunisia
  9. "An Uncoincidence, a Noncoincidence:" From the eminent Russian poet Larissa Miller
  10. Is there such a thing as too many babies? Find out in the Panamanian short story "Open Hands"
  11. A poem from "Angry Young Woman" Sveta Grigorjeva

To find many other texts, search "women authors" or see the blog post "7 Complex Female Characters in International Literature"

This article is a re-post, with some new additions -- Eds.