As a network of women, we sat on our stories, not wanting the backlash and potential career obstacles that telling our stories might bring. We speak in one voice, which should be viewed as fiction, since specifics, such as employer names, have been omitted.

The December 2023 Centenary of the proposal by Alice Paul for an Equal Rights Amendment in December 1923 was barely noticed, since in a century the ERA still has not passed. Though this was a U.S. centenary, the problem is global, so we also include authors outside the U.S.

We decided to publish our story collection under the pseudonym of Nicole Bourbaka, modeled on Nicolas Bourbaki, the pseudonym that a group of mathematician pranksters used to create a fictitious persona, represented by his body of published work. Nicole is also a fictitious persona – a hybrid of multiple human women – she’s represented by her stories.