The Crones’ Tales gathers five women from different eras of the feminist movement in a cottage to drink wine, trade stories, debate ideas, and retell a classic fairy tale through the lens of their own generation. What inspired the idea of gathering women from different feminist eras into one story?

The short answer is that it evolved. A few years ago, I had an idea for an anthology of fairy tales written by different female authors. I talked to the women in my local writer’s centre. There was a lot of interest but no action so I decided to move on to other things. Still, the idea of fairy tales told by different voices stayed with me and then last year I set myself a challenge – I would publish a short story every two weeks on my website. During this challenge, I wrote the story What’s In A Name and realised that that story had a distinctive voice. That made me wonder if I could return to my original idea but instead of different writer’s voices, I would write with different story teller’s voices. That meant that I needed to figure out what these women had in common and what would bring them together.  I considered story telling frameworks like the travellers (Canterbury Tales), the strandees (The Decameron), the desperate (The Thousand Nights and One) and then I remembered a movie called My Dinner With Andre. The plot sounds terribly dull – two men eat dinner and talking – and yet it’s one of my favourite movies. With this idea of a dinner conversation in mind, I remembered reading about Mary Wollstonecraft attending dinners thrown by her publisher, Joseph Johnson at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard Lane in London. It was the Age of Enlightenment, an age when men were focused on their rights and freedoms. Johnson invited these radical thinkers to sit around his dining table, eating, drinking, talking. Mary wasn’t the only woman to attend these dinners, but it was her Vindication of the Rights of Women that made her stand out. She didn’t want to only be a woman who wrote, she wanted to be a woman who could support herself with her writing. While she never achieved her goal, her voice came to represent that of the movement that would much later, become known as feminism. It was this slow progression in the fight for women’s rights, the progress and the regression, that led me to ask the question – how have women’s ideas of ‘their rights’ changed over time.

How did you approach representing different waves of feminism through the five women, and what tensions between generations were most interesting to explore?

That’s a great question. Beatrice is modelled on Mary W — only mellowed a bit with age — because she pre-dated any formal movement. Women before and during the Enlightenment, were like lone voices struggling to create their own lives. She witnessed the women of the French Revolution being murdered for demanding the same rights as men. She never achieved the financial independence she longed for and she died, like so many women of her age, in childbirth. While her daughter, Mary went on to become famous as a writer, Mary W and her treatise and her life were debased by her husband William Godwin. Her treatise lay dormant for years until it was revived by the Seneca Falls Convention which produced the Declaration of Rights and Sentiment written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  Magret is not based on Stanton alone – but perhaps her prickliness is — because she was part of a movement. That movement for women’s rights was an off shoot of the abolitionist movement which not only pushed to free the slaves but also pushed for black men to receive the right to vote. In 1870, black men won that right, but women wouldn’t get the same right in America until 1901. That’s a 30-year gap. In those 30 years, WW1 wiped out so many young men that women had to fill the gap. Then WW2 again asked women to take the place of men. Each time they stepped up, they gained confidence in their ability to keep the home fires burning. So why did they abdicate their newfound freedom in the post-war years? The simple answer seemed to be that women were told they were no longer needed and that coincided with the media building an image of a fairy tale life in the suburbs. Initially I planned a Rosie the Riveter character, but I didn’t think that adequately portrayed why so many women retreated to home and hearth. Women, especially those who knew what men endured during the war, were much more complex than that. So what, I wondered would convince that woman to take up the role of the traditional housewife? The solution was to choose a woman who knew exactly what she was giving up. Someone who understood that it was an act of sacrifice. For younger women today, I think the 50s of America looked like a peaceful, domestic age when women vacuumed their immaculate houses in heels and pearls while their husbands went to work in the cities. Ginger isn’t that woman. If anything, she and her husband strive jointly to create their own safe haven. I think, that’s why she has a vested interest in upholding that image. As for Verna, the 70s feminist, she is the one who’s internally most conflicted. Her generation demanded the same sexual freedom as men while also railing against being treated as sex objects. They entered the work force demanding the same jobs as men but settled for less pay, thus reducing worker’s wages. They changed divorce laws and found themselves raising children on their own. They toppled the male dominated house of cards but failed to provide a firm foundation for the next generation of men and women. That internal conflict, that desire to have it all, Verna pushes onto her millennial daughter. It’s Chloe who is told she needs a career to feel fulfilled but also feels the need to be the wife and mother that the boomers traded for success in the boardroom. Verna’s fairy tale speaks for both her and Chloe. And finally, there is Florence, the Gen Z woman. While the storm rages outside and she sits in her cosy cottage, she wants a world without conflict – one that gives everyone an equal chance. The question is, will she hide in her cosy cottage or will she step outside and face the storm?

What do you hope readers take away from the conversations between these women?

The current backlash against women’s rights, places the rights of all people in jeopardy. And that is frightening and demoralising. What I want readers to take away is that we have weathered such storms before and in the process become stronger. We’ve encountered schisms in our movement and learned from them. And finally, in terms of my writing, I want readers to take away that the current night may have come to an end but there are more evenings to come.

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