I was just finishing graduate school when the feminist movement began—around 1970. It spoke so powerfully to my personal experience that I wrote part of my dissertation on how the movement was transforming women’s language: allowing them to discover their own voice for the first time in Western history.

As a brand new Asst. Professor of English, I devised courses on “Women Writers” and on “Women as Characters in Fiction” (where the class discovered that most women characters in classic novels died at the end because the author couldn’t imagine an interesting future for them).

Then gradually over the following decades, gender became less important to me. Largely this was because of feminism’s successes: the equal dignity for women that feminism secured from society. The very institution of marriage was marvelously transformed: my husband happily scrubbed the kitchen floor and changed diapers. The workplace set up daycare centers; it became common and expected that young moms would keep their jobs, their careers.

I’m not trying to say that all of feminism’s battles have been won—only that in my own life, I no longer felt the need to enlist in them.

But I read with special interest the poems by women in the current issue of Image (#58). I think I singled them out because Margaret Rabb’s “Woman’s Constancy” first caught my eye, starting as it does by blatantly putting a woman’s spin on Donne’s famous phrase.

“No man the island that a woman is,” Rabb begins, then travels through a splendidly crafted sonnet that draws on imagery of water to evoke a Panamanian woman’s life. In fact, of Rabb’s four poems in this issue, three are immersed in water imagery and three explicitly take “woman” as their subject. All four are sonnets, and all display the sonnet’s special play with language that makes the poems in a sense about language: words and water flow in and out of each other in Rabb’s verse. (“Heal all breakers that shatter on shores, / Shore up the broken heels of scattered words” from “Break of Day.”)

Kelly Cherry’s two poems in the issue are also sonnets. “Woman” isn’t particularly their subject, though her “On Value” is autobiographical and so in a woman’s voice. The poem is about her discovery in graduate school that analytical philosophy was not for her. It’s a delightful poem that pulls off the feat of crafting a care-free tone about something potentially ponderous:

I had long hair. We value what we love, I thought (minutes before love became free). My bangs fell to my eyes.

Slipping the poem’s main statement that “we value what we love” between comments on her hair is a bold gesture. Would a male writer do it?

Maybe. But the comfort with being a professional while also paying attention to one’s hair style seems to me a particularly women’s combo.

Sharon Cumberland’s two poems aren’t sonnets, but they are definitely formed. “Prayer” has the feel of blank verse, though it isn’t. “Kyrie Pantokrator” has a powerfully repeated stanza form with a refrain varied for each stanza, and the poem’s subject is woman’s absence from the outside world. Growing up, the poem’s speaker found that the only role allowed to women was the martyrdom celebrated in church history.

The other woman poet in this issue, Melissa Range, isn’t writing here about women’s issues at all. In fact, she writes beyond gender; in “The Amanuensis” the speaker identifies with Jeremiah. This poem and her other here, “Scriptorium,” are about what it might be like to write God’s words, to be the vehicle for God’s communication to humankind. They are poems of dense, rich language—words that seem to come concretely to life on the tongue.

So I’m not about to generalize that all the women poets in Image are writing about women—though it’s interesting (coincidental?) that Claire Holley’s essay in this issue is about being a professional musician and a mom. Her enticing title says it all: “The Wisdom of Goodnight Moon: On Making a Record, as the Mother of a Two-year-old.”

As the mother-in-law of a full-time economist who is also the splendid mom of my two school-aged granddaughters, I can’t help but be aware of how women’s creative expression is encouraged in this early twenty-first century. Everything has changed for the better since the early 1970s. At that start of the women’s movement, we felt we had to prove our independence and our worth by crafting our own forms of discourse.

I doubt that women poets in that decade wrote sonnets; everything inherited from (male) Western tradition was suspect. Now the feminist movement has matured enough that the choice is each woman’s to make: write in traditional forms or craft your own; write about women’s issues or don’t. I think God, in her wisdom, must be pleased with this development.