Germantown High School * Philadelphia, PA. * Class of 1957

Life After GHS

Miriam Brody

Life got better and better. Well, I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t mind having my own color hair back and getting rid of some of the wrinkles, but in every other sense I’m grateful to be on the other side of all the figuring things out that went on in those early years. I went to Penn, lived in France, lived in Boston, picked up a graduate degree, got married, spent some time in England, lived in New Haven and moved to Ithaca New York in the early seventies. My life’s partner, father of my children, and all-around best buddy is Isaac Kramnick who teaches at Cornell University. We’ve led a proverbial academic life and have beat an academic trail around the East Coast. I taught at Ithaca College for many years (in a writing program), picked up my PhD at Cornell, and raised three children. Life was madly full and chaotic, but the kids were worth it (less so reading all those freshman essays). We’ve got grandchildren now, the “dessert” of life. Yes, this stage of life feels different. It’s suddenly quieter, I have so much more time. I’ve always been writing and have been lucky enough to have published, mostly women’s history. I’m the editor of the Penguin edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and have written a book about gender and language (“Manly Writing”). I’ve written a biography for young adults on Victoria Woodhull (19th century feminist) and am writing about Emma Goldman just now. I’ll probably write till I drop. I live in this remote midland of upstate New York on a street at the edge of a world-famous campus with a world-class library. Not a bad mix, actually. Perfect, no. I wish it were two and a half hours closer to Philadelphia and New York. But then it wouldn’t be Ithaca.