Okay, I’ll give this a shot. Women in society. Well, clearly during WWII, women were even less advantaged than we are today. Of course, the truth of the matter is that we still bump up against the “glass ceiling” in corporate America, and research demonstrates that we don’t earn as much as men even when we’re doing the same job. But in the 40’s, women didn’t have to worry about glass ceilings so much, because they weren’t a part of corporate America except as secretaries and “girl Fridays” anyway. They only did men’s jobs during the war, and even then it wasn’t very well accepted, and as soon as the men came home, the women were expected to get back into their kitchens. Certainly Piercy gets the message across that women, no matter how capable, and no matter what they accomplish, are still subservient to men, both in society and in their personal relationships for the most part. While their men were away, these women (Ruthie, Louise) proved themselves able to support themselves and pursue their own goals, but ultimately, Murray comes home and Ruthie adapts herself - and her life - to his needs, and Louise ends up falling back into her relationship with Oscar. She feels more independent - more her own person - than she was when they were first together, but the fact remains that she still feels the need for him to be her anchor, feels the need to “belong” to a man - especially to Oscar, so she’s not quite the independent woman that she’d like to believe herself to be. Society, I think, is still afraid of what women might do if they were fully empowered. In that respect, there’s a part of me that wants to yell, “Go, Hilary!” But there’s another part of me that doesn’t like the calculation with which she “forgave” Bill his dalliances. I think that was all about her own ambitions, and believing that she could only attain them if she remained married to him. So that leaves Obama, and that raises the issue of bigotry rather nicely, here, doesn’t it? I hear that some Ohio voters were quite candid with reporters about not voting for Obama because he is black. I mean, how sad is that? At any rate, human beings sometimes seem to have some sort of bigotry gene, in my opinion. I was pretty appalled, actually, to learn that when the concentration camps were liberated, WE - the Americans - simply turned them into DP, or “Displaced Persons” camps and in some instances, even left the same people running them. And, I will never, ever understand - not in a million years - how anyone could ever justify genocide. I’ll never understand how non-Jews in Europe could side with the ****s. What an abomination. I can’t imagine sane people doing such things to other human beings, and it frightens me that so many INSANE people could actually get together and create armies and take over whole countries. It frightens me because there are still places in the world today where essentially the same thing is happening. It makes me very discouraged about our progress as a human race.
Okay. I can’t get to the rest right now, but I will. You know I always have plenty to say.
Z
And, I suppose to be quite truthful, I am constantly discouraged by the horrors of real life - don't want to read about fabricated ones, or see movies about them, despite their possibly cathartic value from a psychological point of view.