Author Archive | Martha Shelley

After Max and I moved to the little town of Etna, we developed routines. On Saturdays we drove the 30 miles over the hill to Yreka, to shop at the supermarket, take out books from the local Siskiyou County Library, and eat at a Mexican restaurant. During the week we read, wrote, hiked, and sometimes […]

Soon after Max and I returned home to the Bay Area from our trek across the United States, she proposed that we move out to the country for a year. She wanted to continue her research into women’s history and write up the information she had gathered on our trip, without the distractions of big-city […]

Cassandra Langer gives high praise to my new book, Released From the Wheel. It’s in the current edition of The Gay & Lesbian Review. I’ve copied it below. My only quibble is where she says I’m no longer an activist. I’m not organizing new groups or demonstrations these days, but still participate as much as […]

On the road trip Max and I were taking across the United States in the red VW Beetle, we finally arrived in Washington DC. We didn’t know DC and were pretty sure there’d be no place to camp, but I remembered my mother’s Uncle Ben Bojankosky, who had moved to Silver Spring MD after his […]

After Denver, Max and I headed toward South Dakota in the red Volkswagen Beetle, reaching the Badlands late one afternoon. When we stopped to take a walk, the ground was clay and slippery, which I found delightful. I could almost skate on it, I thought, or make pots, though pottery wasn’t a local tradition—the Natives […]

Max and I continued to see each other during the spring of 1977, after my trip to Detroit and the dissolution of the Women’s Press Collective (WPC). To recap from a previous post, I met Max a couple of months before going to Detroit, when I had gone to her house to talk with some […]

A friend who worked successfully to rescue endangered Afghan women—details are still secret—asked me to write a poem for them: To a Land You Do Not Know Welcome! to a land you do not know. Told like Abraham/Ibrahim to get out, go forth, lekh lekha, you left your home, your family all that was familiar, […]

On August 18 I wrote about how the CIA covertly funded the mujaheddin in Afghanistan in order to provoke an invasion by the Soviets. Once the Soviets did invade, we continued funding them throughout the next ten years (1979-1989). Total cost to the taxpayers was around $2.4 billion. Our so-called representatives never asked for our […]

I keep reading pronouncements by politicians and newspaper pundits, as well as comments by readers who state that the U.S. entered Afghanistan with good intentions (in addition, of course, to capturing Osama bin Laden). America wanted to install democracy, to build a nation, and to protect the rights of women. We failed because the Afghans […]

I was deeply disturbed by what I had learned from women who worked with and for the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center as part of the Feminist Economic Network (FEN). Shortly after interviewing them—this was in the early spring of 1977—I took the train to Detroit, where FEN was based, to make inquiries there. The […]