Alas...

So, I got caught up in other things such as gazing at the window and admiring the autumn trees hereabouts as seen through mists & sprinkles. Driving through those sprinkles & fog, settling ever thicker, down to Grandview, MO, where Harry Truman's grandfathers established their farms back in the 1840s, I believe. I was to talk to a gaggle of ladies, old friends of one another, about my books. Mimi waited in the car. One of the ladies remembered visiting w/ Harry's mother, Mattie, and his sister, Mary Jane. I experienced one of those quiet thrills you get when you brush up against history.

Hurrying home by way of the store for a bottle of white wine, by way of the graveyard so Mimi & I could walk 'round the damp stones & Mimi could sniff at the grass, to get dinner on the table for the best sort of company: an old friend of my own. so all in all, I neglected to write a lick yesterday about it's being the 195th anniversary of the birth of women's rights activist & devoted mom & friend to Susan B., her forger of thunderbolts, in fact Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in Johnstown, New York. And oh didn't Judge Cady wish that his pretty daughter, the 8th of his 11 children, had only been a boy... " I thought that the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous," LIzzie would write later on. "So I decided to study Greek and learn to manage a horse." and that was only the beginning.

Failure Was Impossible

"Failure is impossible." So wrote Susan B. Anthony, but there had to have been days when it seemed pretty goddamned impossible: Woman Suffrage

It was in 1848 that Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls, NY, launched the Women's Rights Convention, this radical confab being the first of its kind. Not until the spring of 1851 later does Lizzie Stanton [short & round & curly-girly radical whose tough mind crackled with ideas and revolutionary opinions on nearly] meet tall, spare Susan B., known as "Aunt Susan" to the legions of suffragists. Fifty years the team would write, agitate, organize, petition the U.S. Congress, and otherwise plug away at trying to wrench the Vote out of the government's tight fist. "I forged the thunderbolts," said Mrs. Stanton of her writings, and Susan fired them, riding "the [railroad] cars" thousands of miles to speak, to state the cause, lay out the argument to audiences around the country. Countless women [and men] paraded in the streets. A few, including the valiant Alice Paul, endured arrest and cruel treatment behind bars for daring to stand silently with their banners outside the White House fence.

Of course neither Lizzie nor Susan B. lived to see the day, August 18, 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was finally ratified, thanks to a narrow vote in the Tennessee state house. Almost 72 years after the Seneca Falls convention and 90 years ago today.

i"Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving." Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Eulah Day

So, as I write, the last few days of Women's History Month are ticking away.  By the time some of you read this, 'twill be April, Nat'l Poetry [Sexual Abuse/Board Game/ Violence/ Grilled Cheese] Month or, perhaps, beyond, but that, for now, is in my unimaginable future when this day, March 25, 2010, will be, for you future readers, your past (and mine). For me and my family, today is the anniversary of the birth of Eulah Brown in Cameron, Missouri, in 1893.  She'd grow up to be a hard-headed (She went off to business school in 1912, worked as her hometown's very first female "typewriter" in the office of Mutual Tornado Insurance Company. Eulah gave up the job when her fiancé, Harley Wolfe, returned home at last from the Great War in the summer of 1919 and married her.) , dark-haired young woman with a lovely features that became wondrously crone-like in her latter years.  Troubling, in a way, me being something of a cronette and one of Eulah's grandchildren.  

More importantly, world-and-women-wise, today is the 75th (yikes! time is a runaway train, no foolin')  anniversary of the birth of journalist and social activist Gloria Marie Steinem.  What young feminista/Baby Boomer did not delight in the quote attributed to Gloria:  "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." My very own eyes saw those words on many a T shirt under which no customary underwear constrained the wearer's bosom, set free. whew! Or "The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off."  Yup: anger is a terrible master, but it is an amazingly effective servant.  And bless you, Ms. Steinem, for having said: "Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."  Think Lizzy Cady Stanton, revolutionary in crinolines, totally rad.

Loftier, more seriously, Gloria noted that, "like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before." 

And best of all, to my mind: 

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities," said Gloria S., Birthday Woman, "Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."  

With all her being, Ms. Eulah would agree.  Happy Birthday.  Go Girls, this month and all year round. March on.