Mary Novaria

“Do you think a woman will ever be president?” I asked my mother.   “I don’t know,” she said. “Honestly, I think a black man will be elected president before a woman will be.” Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock.com It was 1972. I was a 13-year-old girl fascinated by Watergate and the Equal Rights Amendment, and I would later go to journalism school on the coattails of Woodward and Bernstein. My mother believed she and my dad were about the only liberals in our very Republican suburb on the North Shore of Chicago. She used to joke that the poll workers had to shake the dust off the Democratic roster when they came in to vote in a primary. She and my dad grew up in hardworking, blue-collar households. Their generation was the first on both sides of the family to attend college and, in my dad’s case, even high school. My mother, Ruthie, was a registered nurse who stayed home with her children—at first. One day she was our carpooling, suburban mother who mimeographe...

Girls in the rain in Torbeck, Haiti Haiti is one of those places that steals your heart and then breaks it over and over again. The country is still trying to claw its way back from the devastating earthquake that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in 2010. Now, nearly seven years later, with tens of thousands of Haitians still living in tents, along comes Hurricane Matthew, the latest in a long string of disasters—both natural and man-made—to befall our hemisphere’s poorest nation. The latest death toll hovers around 900. The collapse of a major bridge has choked off traffic and prevented much-needed supplies from reaching the hinterlands, and there is fear of another cholera epidemic. I’ve been to the south of Haiti twice and have a number of friends who have been many times more than that (under the auspices of the Haitian Episcopal Learning Programs), building schools and hospitals, conducting medical clinics and forging lasting friendships and partnerships w...