In the opening pages of her influential autobiography, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, beat poet Diane Di Prima remembers how she came to forge her young identity, her understanding not just of gender, but of her gender, through her grandmother’s warm influence embroiled in the tempestuous 1930s:  My earliest sense of what it means to be a woman was learned from my grandmother, Antoinette Mallozi, and her knee [...] my grandmother taught me that the things of woman go on: that they are the very basis and ground of human life. Babies are born and raised, the food is cooked. The world is cleaned and mended and kept in order. Kept sane. That one could live with dignity and joy even in poverty. That even tragedy and shock and loss require this basis of loving attendance. And that men were peripheral to all this. They were dear, they brought excitement, they sought to bring change....