Frances Broene Rogers '18 is the author of Footfalls: Echoes of the Life of My Time 1895-1985, an autobiography published in 1992, when she was 97 years old. She wrote the accompanying reminiscence this summer as she approached her 103rd birthday this November.

Footfalls recounts a life of the 20th century and the century's own history as well. ("I am a child of the century, my thinking life almost coincident with it," the author notes.) It is an inspiring book without deploying the jargon or preachiness of such tomes. It is a "woman's book," but not in the condescending, audience-limiting sense that term usually conjures. Think of its pleasures as those of a true novel.

Some of the ordeals Rogers faced over the first half of our century corresponded to the extent to which she accepted or rejected the conventional roles for women. She was born in 1895 in a strict Dutch Calvinist family and community in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Resisting pressures to attend a religious college, she arrived at U-M in 1914, as World War I was breaking out in Europe.

In her junior year, Rogers joined the Michigan Daily. In her senior year, she and three or four other female students succeeded, over the opposition of several male students, in assuming key editorial duties because the war had sharply depleted the ranks of male students. She had felt painfully awkward around young men, but by the end of college, "I had lost my shyness," Rogers wrote. "Going to work on the Daily was the smartest thing I ever did."

When Rogers returned to U-M as a graduate student in 1930 and applied for an instructorship, she recalls how Oscar Campbell, head of the English department, discouraged her: "There will never be a woman on the staff of the department while I am in charge."

During the Depression years, she said in an interview, she went wherever she thought she might be able to find work, "and survived one way or another, buoyed up by a sense of freedom and infinite possibility." There were "low moments," too, she added, as the years passed with no permanent employment in sight.

One day in the early '30s, when she was waitressing on campus and taking graduate courses, Rogers asked Dean of Women Alice Lloyd if the U-M Health Service might put her up for a week because she was too tired to function. After questioning Rogers about her life, Dr. Raphael of the medical faculty wrote a note that Rogers peeked at. It read: "Diagnosis: intolerable economic situation." Rogers spent the next week with "nothing to do but eat and sleep."

There is a heroism in ordinary life that people the world over are called upon to display every day. Few who are lucky enough to take the necessities of life for granted appreciate this quotidian drama. Reading Footfalls could change that.

Footfalls by Frances B. Rogers is available from the Sunstone Press, P.O. Box 2321, Santa Fe, NM 87504, Visa and Mastercard accepted, $12.95.