Thinking about love in all the wrong places this last few weeks. When I returned to my cruise, my son asked me if I'd found a man. Being a widow, I have to admit, I looked, but it's too recent for me. The idea of finding a man started me thinking about younger men. After all, I'm only 60, soon to be 61, but looking at the men on my cruise, they were all (besides married) pot-bellied, bald (so was my late husband especially after chemo) hunched over and already shuffling around the deck like they were 20 or 30 years older. So I decided I want a younger man. Not too much younger, maybe 45-50 (yes, and with an income). After all this is the day of the cougar woman looking at men and not being intimidated by her age or theirs. Which got me to thinking about the actress Ruth Gordon who married Garson Kanin 15 years younger than she was in 1942. That was 67 years ago long before cougars were more visually on the prowl. What a love story that must have been. To have thumbed her nose at convention during a time when women were not allowed to even have careers outside the home without suffering censure.
Today, Mary Tyler Moore is also thumbing her nose at convention with a husband many years younger than she is. If she can do it, if Ruth Gordon can do it, then so can I. Which did bring me back to writing. Though somewhat haphazardly. I started thinking about women in writing. For years, women had to write under a man's name because women were not readily accepted in what was once considered a male dominated career. Yet some of the best literature was written by women; the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, George Elliot, Mary Shelley, Pearl S. Buck, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou (I added her here because I consider her a bridge from the past to the future), Willa Cather and Dorothy Parker. These women changed the face of literature and did so with grace and intelligence.
March was National Women's History month and I'll admit, I completely forgot. So I'm celebrating now. To all those women who changed the face of history from Josephine Baker to Beyonce, from Toni Morrison to Nora Roberts, from Harper Lee to Benazir Bhutto. I salute you.
To all women everywhere - YOU ROCK!!!
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2 comments:
Miriam, you and I are in the same boat (or should I say cruise ship) (lol), although in my case, a man would be the last thing my kids would ask me about. I enjoyed your tribute to women of the world. We've come a long way, baby (is that phrase showing my age)??? (lol again)
Thank you, Niambi.
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