We are proud to be the official booksellers and co-sponsors of this event.

Join us at the Library for a very special visit from local author Kathleen Courtenay Stone! She will be discussing her book, They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men, just in time for Women’s History Month. Local independent bookstore Brookline Booksmith will be selling copies at the event starting at 6:30 PM, and Kathleen will be available to sign copies after the event.

They Called Us Girls is a collection of biographical portraits of seven women who had careers in male-dominated professions in the mid-20th century — an era when women were expected to stay home — but these women had careers in medicine, law, science and other fields. Kathleen interviewed them when they were in their 80s and 90s to find out the source of their expectation-defying ambition. Several were from the Boston area, and you may know of them. Mildred Dresselhaus, a physicist, was the first woman to be a full, tenured professor at MIT. Frieda Garcia, executive director of a Boston social service agency, transcended cultural boundaries in the city’s nonprofit sector. Judge Rya Zobel, a refugee from war-ravaged Germany, was the first woman appointed to the federal court in Massachusetts. The program will include a presentation and an open discussion of the women and their careers, relevant historical events, their motivation for defying the constrained expectations of the day, and what lessons we can draw to help young women and girls today find fulfilling careers.

Kathleen studied art history at Oberlin College, and holds a JD from Boston University School of Law and an MFA from Bennington College. As a lawyer, she was a law clerk to a federal district court judge, a litigation partner in a law firm, senior counsel in a financial institution, and a solo practitioner. She taught seminars on American law in six foreign countries as a Fulbright Senior Specialist and through the Center for International Legal Studies. After many years practicing law and writing countless legal briefs, she turned to other sorts of writing. Her reviews of recent books and art exhibitions have been published in Ploughshares and Arts Fuse. Her work has also appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Pangyrus, The Timberline Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She also co-hosts Booklab, a literary salon, and is on the board of directors of Biographers International. For more information, please visit her official website!