After Marla’s dragoning, Alex’s parents raised the two girls as sisters, but questions about Marla’s disappearance lingered at the edges of Alex’s consciousness.īarnhill writes from Alex’s point of view as an adult, looking back on a remarkable period in history that coincided with her formative years. She was also one of the most influential people in Alex’s life after all, Marla gave birth to Alex’s cousin and best friend, Beatrice. Perhaps this is how we learn silence-an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.”Īlex’s Aunt Marla was one of the disappeared women.
I was four years old when I first learned to be silent about dragons. The mass dragoning meets a similar fate, but despite her best efforts, Alex Green can’t forget: “I was four years old when I first saw a dragon. The women didn’t vanish they became dragons.Īs Kelly Barnhill writes in When Women Were Dragons, “people are awfully good at forgetting unpleasant things.” Just look at our own world, in which willful silence around the injustices of the past affects how history is taught (or isn’t taught) in American schools. Later reports-at least, those that were publicly acknowledged-omitted a key detail about this mass disappearance. They were brides on their wedding days and switchboard operators harassed by their male managers. In 1955, hundreds of thousands of women disappeared.
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