Sallie Bingham
Sallie Bingham is a writer, teacher, feminist activist, and philanthropist.
Sallie’s first novel was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1961; she has since published six additional novels and the well-known family memoir, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989). Her forthcoming book, The Silver Swan: Searching for Doris Duke, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May 2020.
She is founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which published The American Voice, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University.
The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters
“The heart and soul of my book lies in the vibrant silences I heard between the lines, silences that translated themselves into words as I wrote. The Blue Box does not share the soft glow that softens the details of so many family histories; its light approaches a glare. For, when I chose to write about upper-white women in Virginia, I knew I was making a choice in many ways alien for me; I have always been more interested in the lives of the people, largely women, who according to our culture do not count.”
— Sallie Bingham
Sallie's Latest
Liberation
It's hard now to believe the extraordinary sense of liberation I as well as many other women felt during the early 1970s...
Dogs of Santa Fe
We love dogs, we spoil dogs, sometimes we give dogs the love we can no longer afford to give human beings, after so many losses and disappointments....
Changing My Mind
Seldom has a book caused me to change my mind... but D.H. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia changed me....
Labor Day in These United States
When will we avid consumers quit going to Walmarts? Are lower prices really a defensible excuse?...
Ode to Cerrillos
How blessed I am to leave near a little spot in the desert that deserves, and is given, its very own ode....
Dry vs. Wet: Switzerland vs. Italy
Generalizations about countries are always questionable... yet as I reflect on my recent tour, the contrast between them seems to boil down to these qualities....
Reading Toni Morrison in China
Morrison’s raw courage in confronting and describing the effects of incest, racism, and the tragedy of women forced into its confines will be with me always....
Sleeping with Strangers
Women should not wear veils. A religion that insists on that is as culpable as a man who insists on it....
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
Abuse is screwed into the frame of the patriarchy. Top males so often exert their power over people they perceive to be weaker. Once, it was slaves....
The Silver Swan
The Next Step
How to live on nothing is a question the publishers have not condescended to consider....
Celebrities
These days if a writer is smitten with the idea of writing a new book—a new analysis—of any supposedly well-known person, the obstacles to her research will be enormous....
Death of Ten Thousand Pricks
Scheduled to be published in August, 2018, The Silver Swan is now delayed till sometime in 2019....
I Want It to Be Said
By now we all know that the discrimination that afflicts one group afflicts all of us....
Doris Duke: Love, Sex, Power and Money
Does it matter that she never found her match in terms of money, status and achievement?...
I Didn’t Sing for a Year
I remember being amazed when my young granddaughters and their friends listened, apparently unperturbed, to hip hop verses that demonize or degrade women....
Music Hath Charms
I grew up with almost no music at all. Music, after all, is not words and only words counted in that world....
Doris Duke and the Sea
Both Doris and Alleda developed physical strength, courage and confidence battling the waves on the beaches at Newport....
Doris Duke
Doris Duke Goes to Press
My relief in learning that “The Silver Swan” will be published next June prompts me to rejoice like old-time newspaper editors when the daily edition was put to bed....
Doris Duke and Me: Dancing
Doris Duke practiced with Martha Graham’s company in New York and proudly wore their black satin jacket with her name and the company’s name on the back....
Tony’s Stairs
In Mabel's case, as in the case of so many women, it’s the myths rather than the facts that are remembered....
Ring of Fire
Remarkable women are surrounded by a ring of fire... made up of glowing embers of gossip, innuendo, and misunderstanding....
Scandal, Rumor and Innuendo: Doris Duke and Popular Imagination
Almost the only question people asked me about her is, “Did Doris Duke marry her butler?” No, she did not. But does that question really matter, in a long, complex and accomplished life?...
My Apprenticeships
Apprenticeships of any kind—even that sort involved in learning to sew on a button—depend on a bitter and prolonged deprivation of pleasure, a narrow and deep focus that will never allow for what we call a balanced life....
I Didn’t Sing for a Year
I remember being amazed when my young granddaughters and their friends listened, apparently unperturbed, to hip hop verses that demonize or degrade women....
Something Has Gone Wrong
Something has gone wrong with this country, and I don’t know how or exactly when....
Doris Duke and the Sea
Both Doris and Alleda developed physical strength, courage and confidence battling the waves on the beaches at Newport....
Doris Duke: Getting Dirty
Getting dirty as a child allowed Doris Duke to develop into the daring woman she became. I wonder how many eight year old girls today would be allowed to wander on the beach in a dirty shift, with mud up to their knees?...
Writing
Changing My Mind
Seldom has a book caused me to change my mind... but D.H. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia changed me....
Reading Toni Morrison in China
Morrison’s raw courage in confronting and describing the effects of incest, racism, and the tragedy of women forced into its confines will be with me always....
Children in Church
They made no noise, having been warned beforehand, and perhaps silenced by the the powerful male voices of the priests and the bellowing of the organ. But they moved. Oh, how they moved......
Legacy of Harm
Doris Duke must at least have wondered if her generosity, in all its forms, could ever compensate for the destructive effects of nicotine addiction. ...
The Double Cottonwood
I find myself involved in three groups to my great pleasure and satisfaction, this after many decades avoiding groups as a waste of time....
18 Favorites of 2018
I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2018, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes....
Women
Liberation
It's hard now to believe the extraordinary sense of liberation I as well as many other women felt during the early 1970s...
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
Abuse is screwed into the frame of the patriarchy. Top males so often exert their power over people they perceive to be weaker. Once, it was slaves....
How Do We Go on Living?
When I saw the Century Plant blooming in my dooryard garden yesterday morning, I remembered the letter Sido wrote to her son-in-law, Colette's husband, turning down his invitation to come for a visit....
Writing History
There are so many hidden stories that we as writers and readers need to write and to read—and to demand that they be written by women....
Judy Chicago: The Master in Action
Elemental, terrifying, and beautifully rendered—often in tender pastels—these images of women in the throes of labor and birth speak to the power we, as a gender, are often afraid to claim....
The Double Cottonwood
I find myself involved in three groups to my great pleasure and satisfaction, this after many decades avoiding groups as a waste of time....
The End Is the Beginning
Women's History Month ends today—one month out of the twelve to represent more than half of the world's people—with the hope and the promise that we are just beginning....
Nearly Lost
The first issue, of course, is to level the playing field so that women have the same opportunities for education and performance as men....
18 Favorites of 2018
I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2018, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes....
New Mexico
Dogs of Santa Fe
We love dogs, we spoil dogs, sometimes we give dogs the love we can no longer afford to give human beings, after so many losses and disappointments....
Changing My Mind
Seldom has a book caused me to change my mind... but D.H. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia changed me....
Ode to Cerrillos
How blessed I am to leave near a little spot in the desert that deserves, and is given, its very own ode....
Spanish Market and the Triumph of Craft
These staring female saints, these progressing pilgrims, are as far as can be imagined from the images in European churches—or even in the "white" churches of the northeast....
Flamenco: The I I Do Not Wish to Lose
The whole tragic history of Spain seemed contained in this music and these movements....
The Double Cottonwood
I find myself involved in three groups to my great pleasure and satisfaction, this after many decades avoiding groups as a waste of time....
Faith
Are we entering a time of converging faiths, offering hope to some, or only another giant step in the widespread agnosticism that seems at times a sure forerunner of despair?...
Einstein with the Hopis
Mileva... may have contributed to her husband's discoveries; in letters he alludes to them as "ours" although the question is unanswerable for lack of evidence....
Letting Go of Apache Mesa Ranch
Continuing to own an unproductive piece of land at the end of a terrible road broke through several layers of my dreams—or where they delusions?...
Kentucky
Sometimes It Takes a While
Several decades ago, I became aware of the work and life of Enid Yandell, a Kentucky-born, Paris educated sculptor whose statues I used to see at various ceremonial points in Louisville. This early twentieth-century woman artist, although acclaimed in her time, seemed to be forgotten. Yandell was one of a group of talented women artists ...
18 Favorites of 2018
I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2018, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes....
Teaching Girls
A small school in a southern city where girls were usually curbed physically or mentally, the Louisville Collegiate School for Girls and its teachers did not deal in... limits. My years there started me on my way as a writer....
My Mother’s Cookbook
I did make some progress... although probably my greatest accomplishment was mayonnaise made in a blender....
Spring Planting
The Horsetooth Corn will grow vigorously to remind us all that fertility, growth and abundance is still possible....
A Few of My Favorite Things
I am particularly blessed in these special places that seem to have come into my life by chance or luck but are in fact the material manifestations of prayer....
17 Favorites of 2017
As this year comes to a close (some might say thankfully), I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2017, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes....
My Family
And It Does Go On
I am devoutly grateful for the lives of Will's two older brothers who have mourned him with me and yet managed to go on....
The Secret Bunker
A big resort in the mountains of West Virginia, called The Greenbrier, figured often in my great-grandmother Sallie's tales of her girlhood in Richmond....
18 Favorites of 2018
I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2018, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes....
The Mustard Seed
As a child, I planted seeds every spring and knew how likely it was that, when I forgot to water them, they would never spring from the dry earth....
My Mother’s Cookbook
I did make some progress... although probably my greatest accomplishment was mayonnaise made in a blender....
Apples
Like the medieval desert mendicants, holy men who lived their lives in remote caves and were sometimes fed by ravens, Will had long ago lost any interest in possessions, or any taste for food....
17 Favorites of 2017
As this year comes to a close (some might say thankfully), I've once again chosen my most popular posts of 2017, based on visits, comments, Tweets and Facebook likes....
Acting Christmas
Something in our basic human nature calls for ritual celebration with other people, even if the other people are strangers....