Women Brave in the Face of Danger: Photographs of and Writings by Latin and North American Women

by Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall (b. 1936, New York City, USA) is an American-born writer, photographer, activist and academic. Born in New York City, she lived for many years in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and spent time in North Vietnam during the last months of the U.S. war in that country. She has written extensively on her experiences abroad and back in the United States, and has taught at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and other colleges. WOMEN BRAVE IN THE FACE OF DNAGER includes photographs of and writings by Latin and North American women. Margaret Randall’s photographs are warm, infused with feeling. She sees the varicose veins, the signs of poverty, class, and age, but her people are not objects viewed in a glass cage. Bravery in the face of danger can be witnessed in childbirth, in watching a child grow up in fighting for what one believes, in all the minutiae and crises of daily life. The evidence is here in the photographs by Randall and in the writings by ordinary women and by well-known poets and writers, including Gabriela Mistral, June Jordan, Marge Piercy, Debbie Wald, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde; all speaking out about their lives, our lives. This book is a testimony to the family of women and to the triumph of the human spirit.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1985

About the author

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. She has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the turbulent 1960s she co-founded and co-edited EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities.

Margaret was privileged to live among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, share important years of the Cuban revolution (1969-1980), the first four years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visit North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the U.S. American war in that country (1974). Her four children—Gregory, Sarah, Ximena and Ana—have given her ten grandchildren: Lia, Martin, Daniel, Richi, Sebastian, Juan, Luis Rodrigo, Mariana, Eli, and Tolo. She has lived with her life companion, the painter and teacher Barbara Byers, for almost a quarter century.