Protest and possibility in the writing of Tillie Olsen Book

Exhaustively researched and knowledgeably sifted, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World is an incisively engaging work that exhilarates the mind while also extending beyound the mere bland categorization of 'biography' and 'women's studies,' for it stretches quite easily into other academic dimensions: sociology, psychology, history and economics; it is a work that is more than what it is promoted to be. Pierpont's succinct yet smooth academic prose is honed and streamlined; excess language and descriptive clutter is cast aside, and only the germane pith, the be-all and end-all, is critically dissected. Writing is a soul-searching craft-that more often than not-offers an intellectual and spiritual cartharsis. It is a powerful talent (one of many) by which many positive changes can be enacted, for when asked why they do what they do, writers, broadly speaking, would never hesitate to say, "The pen is mightier than the sword." The twelve writers, authors in Passionate Minds would have used the above-in varying degrees-as a life philosophy. From Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand to Olive Schreiner and Marina Tsvetaeva, the lives profiled were not of simple women who 'slothfully' mused over global issues and then did nothing about them. The concerns, though mostly relegated to a specific gender, nonetheless, addressed all of humanity. Economic equality and intellectual stimulation, rather than artistic expression, would be at the top of the pyramid in this case. The broader essence of the book is how a person or persons broaches a subject that is of pressing concern to him or herself. What tools could and can be used to rectify specific areas that have long ago been ignored or deemed too weighty in intensity to even approach? In Ayn Rand's case, could it be done through collectivism or individualism? For Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy especially, collectivism would tower, the two probably being the modernized propellant of the literati activist, now being emulated. But the one thing that linked all these women was the printed word, printed utterances that came in the form of essays, novels, plays, journalism, poetry. These were the weapons of transformation (see Mae West, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin), racial exploration (see Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell) and onward. What is remarkable about these lives is that they either rose from abject poverty and anguish or dived headlong into it in order to write, to do something that had a greater and profound good that was not yet visible to the masses: "I write for thee/I suffer privately/ And glory comes when I am gone..." These writers had battle scars from sacrifice. And the improvement is so little.