By Agnes Krup “What would you like to listen to?” I asked my daughter after we had threaded our rental car into the heavy traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway. “ABBA,” she said without hesitation. “And I won’t listen to any of your other music the whole trip, Mama.” What a difference a year makes. Last year [...]

Stoic no more: When Veterans Administration nurse Drea Horton was in nursing school, she told Stars and Stripes this week, "they teach us not to cry, to be the stoic helper."  So Horton, 45, found another way to talk about the wounded warriors who fill her life: her newly published book of poems. Horton said [...]

September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, and with it a spate of news media attention to the disease that sees 20,000 new diagnoses per year, 62 percent of them in women over 45. As advocates prepare a September 5 march in Colorado and elsewhere to raise awareness, many are also mulling over whether a new, [...]

A boomer woman at his side: Like everyone else, WVFC has just learned that John McCain has responded to Barack Obama’s historic Presidential nomination by deciding to make a little history himself. Surprising nearly everyone, McCain chose as his vice-presidential nominee one of the "dark horses" we highlighted two weeks ago: Palin, 44, is the [...]

Forget women with guns: just give us power tools. Most of the photos in the brochures for "Nontraditional Employment for Women" programs show young women just out of high school. But at Women Build, a training program run by Habitat for Humanity, it’s midlife women who decide to take matters (and hammers) into their own [...]

By Dr. Patricia Yarberry Allen I had endured more than enough of Chris Mathews and his crew so I chose to watch the PBS coverage of Wednesday night at the Democratic Convention. It was a relief to have some measured reporting and interviews without overt partisan remarks and rumor flogging.  I certainly did not miss [...]

Trying not to think about what it means for her: This week, the newswires buzzed about revelations in a new memoir by Carol Thatcher, daughter of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, that the former Iron Lady has had her memory dimmed by dementia. (Though the video above, from an interview only two years ago, [...]

For the three-dimensional joy of it: As we’ve celebrated all week, this year’s Olympics featured many midlife women, and some who are inspired by them. In the Washington Post, Jill U. Adams writes of being  drawn back to the balance beam, inspired by today’s winners as she once was by Olga Korbut: The girl I [...]

Here is an incredibly moving comment from the convention floor last night from Anne Price Mills, a delegate from Washington State. She is already getting threats and hate mail, which is very sad. She is speaking her heart and her mind. -Elaine L.

All this week, Women’s Voices for Change editor Elaine Lafferty will be sending reports from the Democratic Convention in Denver. Next week, she’ll be doing the same from the Republican Convention in St. Paul. I rarely agree with Maureen Dowd, but this time she’s got it right. She says the vibe here is weird and [...]