Book Talk with Zelda Gamson – Don’t Play Like a Girl: A Midcentury Woman Leaps Into Life
On Saturday, August 3rd, at 3:30pm, at the West Tisbury Library, Zelda Gamson will give a talk about her newly released memoir, Don’t Play Like a Girl: A Midcentury Woman Leaps Into Life. During this talk, Zelda will be in conversation with Nan Doty. Books will be available for purchase and signing. This event is free and open to the public.
About the book:
“Meet Zelda Gamson: 87 years old, widow to a famous sociologist, still cutting her own bangs, and looking back on a life whose shape is only beginning to emerge. She, too, was a tenured professor; she’s been a mother, a dancer, an activist, a householder, and an early expert in “gig work” and “code-switching” before either term was coined. In ‘Don’t Play Like a Girl: A Midcentury Woman Leaps Into Life,’ Gamson tells the story of how she forged her own path even when her choices were limited and her way unclear. From getting pepper-sprayed at a Vietnam War protest to being drugged without her consent during the birth of her first child to finding her bliss alone on an island, Gamson shares a funny, harrowing, lively tale with an intimate perspective on universal questions. How can we give to others while still holding onto our essential selves? What should young women now understand about how quickly their right to self-determination can vanish? How do we live with joy amidst turmoil? Wise and warm, “Don’t Play Like a Girl” offers a relevant, instructive vision for a contemporary world that demands unprecedented improvisation. People of her generation and her fellow academics, activists, and fun-lovers will return to their youth with Zelda Gamson. Young women and young men will love and learn with an elder who still feels like they do.”
Author Zelda Gamson lived year-round in Chilmark year-round for almost 30 years. She is the founding chair of the Chilmark Housing Committee, working closely with Molly Flender. She is a sociologist with degrees from University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Harvard. Zelda taught at Michigan, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and was visiting scholar at Stanford and UC Berkeley. She is a retired professor from University of Massachusetts Boston with specialties in higher education and organizational behavior. Her work has been published in sociology and higher education journals, as well as general-reader articles about Eastern Europe, reviews of books on Jewish subjects, poetry, activism and aging on MV. Her husband of 65 years, Bill Gamson, died in 2021. She is now living in Brookline and missing her many Vineyard friends.
Nan Doty is a lifelong educator. She was raised in Philadelphia and visited her grandmother on the Vineyard every summer before she moved to MV year round. Nan is a Chilmark friend of Zee Gamson, having first met Zee in 1985 after reading Zee’s book, Liberating Education. This discussion about higher education enthusiastically continues between them to this day, along with many common connections and interests, including Philadelphia, family, feminism, health, and Qigong.