Tag Archive | women’s rights

The Joys of Being a B-Book Author

May28

120px-Rippl_Young_Girl_Dressed_in_YellowWhat is a B-Book Author? If you write e-Books, you know. It one of the two million e-Book authors that are stuck in the bottom tier, with more arriving daily. Make no mistake, there are many e-Books  deserving of the bottom tier; faulty grammar and syntax, scammers, and  pamphlets that  claim to be books but are not, but what about e-Books that are well written but cannot move because they are being crushed into oblivion? It’s a real dilemma, but such is life.

Of course, I and many others  would love to be in the A-Class, but I am not and probably never will be. But here’s the thing. I am retired, have three sources of income, and I live on the prairie where there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. It’s not like I have anything more pressing to do than write B-Books, so in a sense, I guess it’s a hobby.  Here’s the other thing. In the course of creating B-Books, I learned to write, really write. I use punctuation correctly, write with clear concise wording, and keep my paragraphs tight.

I guess, it’s all about perspective, and I would rather be a B-Book Author than never have written anything in my life.  It’s sort of like leaving footprints behind, and that’s not such a bad thing.

grid

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0185HGFR6

 

Yikes! There’s a Woman in the Closet

Apr20

In the year 1857, women didn’t have careers, but were expected to marry, partake in the mandatory semi-annual baby birthing, and bake bread. If they had not achieved those milestones by a certain age, they were considered spinsters. The life of a spinster was the life of an outcast.

Thus was the life of Emily Dickinson who was most likely suffering from a social disorder, and begin dressing only in white, and talking to visitors through closed doors so she didn’t have to speak to them face to face. During the last fifteen years of her life few neighbors saw outside of the house, and when they did she was dressed entirely in white. Consequently, she became ‘the woman in white’; the recluse of Amherst, Massachusetts.

After speaking of ‘a great darkness coming’, she fainted while baking bread.  After a two year’s illness, she died but not before extracting a promise from her sister, Lavinia, also a spinster, to burn her papers, and was laid to rest in the family plot.

That would have been the end of the story of the strange lady in white except Lavinia after burning her sister’s personal correspondence found a locked trunk in Emily’s closet, and the 1800 poems of Emily Dickinson were pulled from the closet. Lavinia spent the duration of her life getting Emily’s poems published, and they have been in continual publication since that time. In 1899, Lavinia died at age sixty-six.

Black-white_photograph_of_Emily_DickinsonIt’s a strange story, one sister writing in the closet, and the other sister sheltering her strange ways. It does raise the question of what would Lavinia have done had she known about the closet horde when she made the promise? Thankfully, she didn’t find the trunk for two years, and realized its value; a story to be told.

It seems to me, this tale presents a great moral to women everywhere; ‘Get out of that closet, and go where you heart takes you.’

photos: U.S. Creative Commons (Wikimedia Commons)

grave

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Go Vote; It’s Your Right

Apr19

trump
FACT: Women’s suffrage in the United States, the right of women to vote, was established over several decades, first in various states and localities, and then nationally in 1920.

FACT: The GOP began as the women’s party, championing suffrage 40 years before it became law. Republicans also saw the first woman elected to Congress, the first female speaker of a state house, and the first female Supreme Court justice.

FACT: Donald Trump employs more women than men at the upper echelons of his real estate empire, and in many cases pays them more according to the Republican Presidential Candidate’s attorney.

trump-1266569_960_720

(you could do worse, much worse)

A Look Backward – Abortion

Apr16

Imagine this: The year is 1960, and a young girl is dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. She is 15, and lives in a family of ten reared by dysfunctional parents below poverty level. Uneducated and lacking job skills, she clearly understands her only chance for a better life is through education. To tell her parents of her impending shame means another beating or being driven from the family home. The father of the baby is not an option, but says he will arrange and pay for an abortion.

Laura_Muntz_Lyall_-_Portrait_of_a_Young_Woman In that time before abortion was legal, there was no birth control available, and there were no social services available for young women in such a predicament. If she was born into a family of means, she would be quietly whisked out of town to a home for wayward girls, her baby would be born and adopted without her having ever seen its face, and she would have returned home with a bogus story about spending a year with a relative; however, this is a child from the other side of the tracks. What this girl receives is a handful of money, an address, usually an abandoned building, and a time she is to show up. If this young woman has one-thousand dollars in her hand, she will be seeing a doctor who will treat her badly and remind her she is a tramp, but if she has anything less than that, it could conceivably be a woman with a knitting needle. It will not be a medical setting, and far from sterile. Without anesthesia, the process will be painful, and without proper precautions against hemorrhage or infection, she will find herself on the sidewalk twenty minutes later wounded, bleeding, and looking for somewhere to lay down. She has no idea who performed the procedure, and has been instructed if she has complications go to the hospital. Further imagine, this is a poor woman of color. She has but a 25% chance of survival.

In the years before abortion was legalized and performed in clinics and hospitals, an estimated one million illegal abortions were performed each year in the United States. The procedures were botched and performed in dire germ-ridden surroundings, and women usually ended up at the emergency ward of the nearest hospital. Many died of hemorrhage and/or abdominal infections. The lucky ones who survived were left sterile, chronically ill, and traumatized.  

Who is to say what is morally right or wrong, other than God and the woman’s own conscience, but do we ever want to return to a time when young women are being scraped off a sidewalk, and carted to local hospitals to die of sepsis resulting from botched illegal abortions?

Big Girls Speak For Themselves!!

Apr13

womanThere was a time women wore hoop skirts, were considered so delicate they had to be routinely revived with smelling salts when their corsets ceased breathing activity, and were believed to be too hysterical to vote. Off they were sent to the parlor to discuss ‘lady things’ while the big boys remained at the dining room table with whiskey and cigars to rationally discuss the political landscape.

Poor dainty little creatures, and weren’t those just the days?  Thank you, God, those days are gone. The spineless things tore those hoops from their skirts and used them for hula hoops, tied the corsets around their husband’s heads, kicked the smelling salts to the curb, and ran into the streets. Having sprung themselves from the parlor, they begin to walk alone and talk out loud, manage careers and homes, and vote. Actually, they did everything the big boys did, sometimes better, and they begin to speak for themselves, if anyone was listening or not.

Wouldn’t you just know it? History is trying to repeat itself. Trapped behind the 2016 Presidential Campaign, women are once again being delegated to the backroom while the  politicians, all of them, discuss women’s reproductive organs, birth control, abortion, women’s health care options, and all things female as if they were talking about someone from another planet.

Guess what guys?? We are standing right here, and you need only ask if you want to know what we want. Don’t look in the backroom for us because we’re not there, and please cease and desist using our fallopian tubes for a Presidential platform. We can speak for ourselves, and can manage our own birth control issues and choices.