Popular articles by Rona / Sort by date

I was heading home from a Christmas party, sated on champagne and smoked salmon, when the car radio broke the news: 14 young women killed at l'Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal by a gunman shouting, "You're all a bunch of feminists!" While I was deciding which earrings to wear with my new silk suit, they had been separated from their male classmates and mowed down just because they were bright, ambitious women intent on careers in engineering. [more]

My mother died nearly 13 years ago, but for a fleeting second recently I could have sworn I saw her striding by---a gray-haired woman in a chiffon scarf, a billowing black raincoat and her signature touch, a broad-brimmed hat worn at just the right angle. It was my own reflection, proof that after a lifetime of doing things my way (which once included going bare-headed in heat waves and blizzards), I'm not all that different from my mother. [more]

This story, written when I was 15, was published in Ladies' Home Journal in October, 1965, where it kept company with "What Americans Expect from Robert Kennedy." A mortifying sidebar identified me as a "prodigy" who "sang in seven languages at a year and a half and, at three, composed what her mother...calls 'shapely little narratives.' The story was later cited in the annual Best Short Stories anthology edited by Martha Foley. [more]

My friends and I used to seethe when grizzled tradesmen called us "dear" and our husbands "Mr. So-and-so." We vowed our kids' generation would banish sexism once and for all. Too bad we didn't take a stand against ageism. Now that we're old enough to pay for attentive service, we're getting "dears," "sweeties" and "young ladies" from people young enough to be our children. This kind of faux endearment has a name: elderspeak. And the time to stop it is now. [more]

Robbie and I were five years old when he named his doll Rona after me. We were going to get married someday. Relationships like ours are belittlingly called "puppy love," yet there's nothing trivial or cute about the tenderness of children's first longings for each other or the anguish of their first heartbreaks. [more]

Why every young woman needs a wise female friend to cheer her on---someone who never worried about her report card or grounded her for missing curfew. [more]

I always thought I wanted a daughter, but the time was never right for a second baby. I had one excuse after another---until at last I realized that one child was enough for me. It was time to make absolutely certain that my birthing years were over. [more]

I was 14 years old and in the ninth grade at Oyster River High School in Durham, N.H., when I wrote this short story, a prizewinner in the Scholastic Magazines annual writing contest for young people. My first published work, it was later featured in the long-vanished Read magazine and has since appeared in countless anthologies for high school students. After more than 40 years, I still get inquiries about "The Fan Club." [more]