Mary Felstiner, a history professor at San Francisco State, has had rheumatoid arthritis since her early 30s. Today, at 62, the stiffness in the joints of her hands is so severe that Felstiner can barely sign a check or type an e-mail message longer than, "Sure, let's meet at 5."
Still, Felstiner, a nationally recognized expert on women and genocide, is a prolific writer. She is at work on her second book, contributes frequently to scholarly journals, and generates a steady output of memos, letters of recommendation and reports.
Felstiner accomplishes most of this without lifting a pen or touching a keyboard. For the past two years, she has used Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a speech-recognition program that converts the spoken word to text.
Writing this way is frustratingly slow, she says. Each correction involves as many as 10 verbal commands that Felstiner utters into a headset microphone attached to her computer. But it's vastly preferable to anything else she's tried.
"For me, this is wonderful," Felstiner said. "It's enabled me to be independent, and that's the name of the game." -courtesy of SFSU Magazine
• To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (1995)
• Out of Joint: A Private and Public Study of Arthritis (2005)
