Stories make meaning, anthropologists are apt to say.
By organizing events and experiences, stories connect teller and listener in ways that confirm but also subvert ideas about human agency, for example, or about the values and constraints of place. Students were asked to read but also to write accounts of women and science. Richards had a lab of her own in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Christmas practiced medicine in Harlem and wrote health care policy in Jimmy Carter's White House. Each woman found a great many things to do beyond the doors of her workplace.