Describe the women who have most influenced your life and the formation of your character.

My mother, who had six living children, was certainly a profound influence on me. She herself had been illiterate until she was in her 20s. She grew up in that old Czarist Russia, and she learnt to read very rapidly, indeed, in a revolutionary circle. She came to this country and met my father. She had two children on the farm. I was the second child. I was born just before they left Omaha and moved to a farm in Nebraska. We were tenant farmers; we didn't own the land. It was an era before washing machines, although the washboard had been developed. There was no electricity, either. We used oil lamps. To get water, you had to go out in winter or summertime to where the pump was, quite a distance away

She and other women of that generation had to work – especially farm women. With the children born close together, you can imagine the amount of diapers and other washing. We moved to the city when I was about five, so I don't remember too much about farm life. There were six children altogether in Omaha. By then, my mother had learnt something about birth control, because I know that when I was in high school, she was someone that women would occasionally come to for a little hope. Birth control was, of course, illegal. You didn't know anything about it unless you got the information from somebody else.

My mother also went to night school for about a year-and-a-half and loved the chance to learn to read and write English, although her primary languages remained Russian and Yiddish. There were magazines and journals that came into the house, and books that she had. She did not have much time.

She was very eager to know what we were learning. When I went to high school, I crossed the tracks to an Omaha college-preparatory high school. We had a classic education. We had to take two years of Latin and we started out with Greek history, not American history. I had memorized, in Socialist Sunday School, a remarkable speech that Spartacus made as the leader of a slave revolt. As my mother was interested in what I was learning, she asked me "Why was slavery good for humanity?" And I thought she'd lost it; and I said, "It wasn't good." She asked me again, "No, why was it good? I'm not talking about the slave. It wasn't good for the slave. Why was it good for humanity?" So, I was stopped. She then told me that throughout most of recent history, the last thousand-or-so years, most writing, most art, had come from people who had leisure.

Anyway, she worked very hard. She was somewhat active in a Socialist group, but did not have a lot of time. Without ever articulating it, I unconsciously contrasted my mother's life with the life of my teachers. I didn't know anything about their personal lives, but I felt that she could have been a wonderful teacher, a wonderful leader of some kind, but for the circumstances of her life.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?

Since the first convening of women in any numbers, in 1848 at Seneca Falls, "women's rights" expresses it better to us than "feminism" does, even though it does have to do with the rights of women. I prefer women's rights, or the right to the full development of one's capacities. But the word "feminism" is the word in common usage now. And it may have been, though I don't think so, an attempt to encompass females of all ages, including children. So, in that sense, it's a better word. "Women's rights" speaks on the surface, as if it's only about grown up women.

What would you most like to tell your daughter, son, the next generation about your hopes for women of the future? How would you advise a young woman to go about finding her own voice?

I gave two speeches, collected in essay form in my book, Silences, and was asked to speak about women writers; that is, the names of women whom I had read and thought were important to be read. Instead, I spoke, and all of it was impromptu, although I did have notes. The speeches were entitled "Silences in Literature" (1962) and "One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century" (1972). I ended the second speech with: "Soil or blossom, the hope and intention is that before the end of our second writing century, we will begin to have writers who are women in numbers equal to our innate capacity – at least twelve for every one writer-woman of recognized achievement now."

As a result of all the things that were happening around this resurgence, this movement having to do with the situation of women, it had never surfaced in the way that it suddenly had. I also said, "It is the women's movement, part of the other movements of our time, that has brought this into being, kindling a renewed – in most instances, the first – interest in the writings and writers of our sex." There had been consciousness-raising. Women got together – academic women – and asked themselves how come they weren't getting tenure, or how come they were not moving from being lecturers to associate professors to professors? Could it be that there was a certain attitude about women, in industry, in the places where most women worked? When the slogan came up, "Equal pay for equal work," we scoffed. We said that has nothing to do with us, because we are not doing the same kind of career work where there are also men. We are doing primarily women's work; and we want comparable pay for comparable work. I also wrote, "Read and listen to living women writers; our new as well as our established, often neglected ones. Not to have an audience is a kind of death."

How do you define success for yourself? Is one form of success countering the silences you wrote about?

I don't think of that as success. When I’m writing and I'm not able to say it well, I have to struggle to say it the best possible way that I can say it. I don't think in terms of success or failure in the usual way that those words are used. I think, "That isn't right. It needs work." Or, I think, "This is the best I can do." And occasionally I feel – and I feel this sometimes when I'm asked to read something of mine aloud, and I see the effect on faces and postures of the people in front of me – that I said it so that it means something.

What made you decide to pursue a non-traditional occupation?

Like other human beings, little children love learning to talk. They love language. They love rhymes. It is innate in human beings. Those who were born without the capacity to use their voices, nevertheless, developed a sign language, as could those who could not hear sounds. To express oneself, to communicate, is a human need and capacity. I was lucky enough to fall in love with what was in books, thanks to a public library. In my novel Yonnondio, where the mother is trying to get her kids to the library, she, herself, has had very little education. And she says to her children, "That's what books is – inside people's heads you'd never get to know – getting to places you'd never get to really see,"

I also grew up in a neighborhood where I heard different ways of speaking. It was a time when our country was one-third immigrant or children of immigrants. I'm speaking partly about accents and different languages. I grew up in a neighborhood that was partly black, and if you read my story Oh, Yes, which is set in a black church, well, that was part of the experience of my childhood. Around the corner at the Calvary Baptist Church, I heard such eloquence, such use of language, that I would actually have a physical response. I would sit there shaking a little bit.

I heard stories. I was lucky enough to have been born in 1912 in Omaha. There were actually several people I knew, grandparents in a family on our block, who'd been slaves as children. And they loved to talk. Older people love to talk to a child who will listen to them. And when I was a child, my dad was the State Secretary of the Socialist Party in Nebraska, and I heard Eugene V. Debs speak. He was one of the great American orators. He came to Omaha after he'd been released from jail for having opposed World War I. To this day, I remember the way he expressed himself. I’ve talked about the influence of hearing Debs and the way that he said, "You are not heads to them that can think; you are not hearts to them, hearts that feel, hearts that care. You are only hands." And he held up his hands, "Cowhands, farmhands." That was part of the tradition of oral speech, and I’d marvel at the passionate use of what speech, language can be.

What challenges have you dealt with at work or at home due to your gender? What benefits?

In Silences I wrote, "What possible difference, you may ask, does it make to literature whether or not a woman writer remains childless – free choice or not – especially in view of the marvels these childless women have created. Might there not have been other marvels as well, or other dimensions to these marvels? Might there not have been present profound aspects and understandings of human life as yet largely absent in literature?"

That was not all I said at the Modern Language Association conference in 1971, nor was it phrased as a question, but as based on conviction. I spoke not only of the loss of women in literature, but to other fields of knowledge and action as well. The everyday means by which women and their potentiality are distorted, discouraged, limited, extinguished. How our creative expression has had to remain inchoate, fragmentary, unformulated, and alas, unvalidated.

Then I go on to say, "I was entering into an almost taboo area, the last refuge of sexism. What has been is the least-understood, least and last explored, tormentingly complex core of women's oppression, motherhood. No context has been established." I don't know if that sounds angry, but I have to qualify that statement in this way: it is through one's children that one learns something about one's society.

I should say something about the situation of mothering – and for that matter, fathering – in our society, now. There is worry about safety for one's children. It's a far more dangerous society now. Not too much of this has surfaced in literature, I'm afraid; although Jayne Anne Phillips addresses this topic in one of her novels. But about motherhood, if you're speaking about it in relation to getting writing done, and that was in the first and the second talk, there is interruption. This is even more of a concern now. I'm not speaking about mothers who are writing and who are in privileged circumstances. I'm speaking about the situation for those mothers who are struggling to write.

What woman (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with and why?

I don't know how much I'd get over a dinner. However, Katherine Mansfield was very important to me when I was very young and still in high school. She remains an important writer to me, but it was because of how beautifully she wrote and also because of her journals

In some of Katherine Mansfield's journal entries and letters, you find a very conscious feminism. She and Virginia Woolf had difficulty having a friendship, but they tried to establish one around mutuality. Katherine Mansfield came from an entirely different world than the world I grew up in, but she was an influence on me.

Katherine Anne Porter was an influence on me also, not only because of how perfectly she wrote, but also because of her content. She went down to Mexico at its revolutionary time. She was affected at the time and wrote, among other things, Flowering Judas. I love reading letters, too, which most people don't. If one reads letters and journals, there's a different feeling about a writer than if one reads the fiction alone.