Ladies for Life blog and blogroll

I've just set up a Ladies for Life blog. Right now I'd like to concentrate on compiling a blogroll that lets pro-life ladies of all ages find like-minded ladies easily. So if you are a well-mannered woman or girl who believes in protecting human life from conception to natural death, please pop over and let me know in the comments if you'd like your blog or website listed. And please pass the word. Thanks.

Surface versus heart

Looks can be deceiving, as Robert J. Avrech rediscovered at a restaurant in Israel (see second half of the post). The comments so far are pretty interesting, too.

Now, ladies, I'm all for dressing modestly (by all means, let us support and promote ladylike dress and manners, especially amongst godly women), but he possibly has a point, don't you think?

OK, so in my life I've misjudged people based on how they dress, so I know he has a point. And for those of you who think that by linking to Mr. Avrech's post I'm campaigning for ritual, I'm not. But, I've learned the hard way that it's as easy to misjudge somebody because he engages in ritual as it is to misjudge him because of how he dresses. Ritual can shove aside honest faith, to be sure - but it doesn't have to, and often doesn't, as far as I've seen.

In the full disclosure department, and while we're kind of on the subject, I spent about half of my childhood believing I was half-Jew, on my mother's side. It turned out that I was the victim of a disinformation campaign run by my then teen aged cousin Harvey. Harvey, it seems, got sick and tired of certain anti-Semitic relatives, and thought he'd hoist them by their own petard, by convincing very young (read: gullible, excitable, ignorant) visiting out-of-state cousins that they were part Jew, and sending them out to babble this extremely cool information far and wide. (Hey, we were all related to Anne Frank! We were descendants of oppressed people! We were survivors! We had reasons for our big noses!) To make it more fun, Harvey insisted that we were Polish Jew. Polack jokes were all the rage then, you see, and so it was doubly cool to be the butt of jokes but keep our heads held high. (Did I mention we fancied we were survivors?)

The grown-ups all feigned surprise at our claims (which irritated us, as I recall - it seemed so dishonest of them), and then denied the Jewish heritage, but Harvey convinced some of us kids that the grown-ups were afraid of being thought Jewish. Us, though, we were too brave and smart to fall for, or go along with, cowardly lies denying our heritage...

(What? None of your cousins or brothers fed you stories that you swallowed, hook, line and sinker when you were a kid? Never? Ah, c'mon...)

Harvey's hope, as I understand it, was that the anti-Semitic friends of the anti-Semitic relatives would hear that they had been lunching with closet Jews, and kick the supposedly tainted people out of their too-cozy little cliques, thereby making the anti-Semitic relatives get what they'd dished out. I never heard if the campaign worked. And I've never quite decided whether to be proud of Harvey's efforts, or mortified, or a combination thereof. Usually, I feel like it's a combination thereof, with a heavy leaning toward mortified whenever I stop to think how he kept me duped and defending him for years and years.

Anyway, for years I thought I was part Jewish, and I've never quite gotten over my fascination with the more charming of the Jewish traditions. I don't subscribe to them, or practice them, but I still like learning about them.

Years after Harvey shamelessly misled us in the name of a good cause, my mother took me to Tennessee to meet the woman for whom I'd been named.

Actually, I was given my mother's name, and she had been named for this woman, but at the time I was adamantly against having been named for my mother (no other woman or girl where I grew up was named for her mother - It Simply Was Not Done - and besides which it was embarrassing to be named for a woman who had a knack, or so I thought, for causing me embarrassment with my friends), so my parents were riding out my rebellion by claiming that I'd really been named for this woman, despite what they'd told me when I was younger.

Anyway, I met this woman, and she was a remarkable sight to see. She was poised and polished, well dressed, every inch the picture of a southern lady, and she had a voice to die for, liquid, mellow, clear, with a gorgeous accent. We went out to eat, my mother, my aunt, this remarkable creature for whom I'd been named (I was honored beyond words to be her namesake now that I'd seen her), and me. When the waitress came, I quite naturally said please and thank you and looked the waitress in the eye and otherwise treated her like a human being. What else are you supposed to do, confronted with another human being, I ask you?

"We do not talk to people like that," the gorgeous creature for whom I'd been named said, dispensing instruction, dripping scorn.

Long story short, the woman for whom my mother was named, and then for whom I was named, was not prepared to regard waitresses as anything other than subhuman, nor were blacks fully human in her book, and therefore our black waitress was doubly beneath notice. My mother and my aunt were loath to ruffle the revered elder Kathryn's feathers, all the more so because she was the guest of honor at this little dinner, and so they sat there cooing at me not to disagree with her, at least in public.

I wished I could become invisible, and afterwards I briefly tried to switch to my middle name.

I'm over it now.

But it took some getting over, I tell you.

A few years after The Dinner of The Incompatible Kathryns, I considered marrying a black man - not because he was black, but because he was himself - and in the back of my mind, while I was mulling the pros and cons of the match, I treasured the idea of inviting Kathryn Mine Elder to such a wedding.

I think Harvey, at least, would have approved of the gesture.

Anyway, looks can be deceiving.

As if you didn't know that already... :)

The most important aspect of beauty

Over at A Maiden's Wreath, Mamselle Duroc writes, in The Making of Beauty, Part 2:

In Part 1 I talked about Style, Poise, and Confidence, saying that they were all extremely important to real beauty, regardless of your height, weight, or shape.

But I concluded by mentioning a fourth item, saying that it was far more important than all the others, and always achievable, even when nothing else is.

Imagine yourself ill and dying, wasting away. What physical beauty you had has long since faded in your sickness. You're thin as anything, you're pale and haggard, you look more like a skeleton than a living human being. Style is unattainable, and even a little pointless. You're not able to put on a nice pair of earrings every day, and you don't need cute shoes because you're bedridden. Poise? It's hard to be poised when you're too weak to move. Good posture and gracefulness aren't feasible. As for Confidence, you're far to shattered to face the world with your head held high. You can't even lift it.

Yet there is one quality that a woman can always have, no matter what her circumstances. Our blog's patroness, Zelie Martin, had it as she lay dying of cancer, and her famous daughter St. Therese of Lisieux had it as she lay dying of tuberculosis.

It was Love...

Read the whole post.

I stumbled across The Maiden's Wreath while, of all things, looking for something about G.K. Chesterton. I wound up at The American Chesterton Society, which has a blog, which had a post titled Young Catholic Ladies "Get" GKC, which led me to this post, in which Mamselle Duroc notes that one of the great things about Chesterton was his reverence for women.

The "About the Blog" entry reads:

A Maiden's Wreath is a blog for young Catholic ladies who incline towards the old-fashioned and traditional. The purpose is to provide inspiration and encouragement to grow in virtue and holiness.

Sounds good.

It's a group blog, quite well done from what I've seen from browsing around today. And they also accept submissions. Please pass the word to any young ladies you know who might be interested.

When a woman runs for office...

... I wish she'd just run for office and not pretend it's a big deal she's female, or that anybody owes her a vote because she's a woman. I see I have company in this view of things.

This reminds me of a story that made the rounds when the Star Trek series with the woman captain was just getting off the ground. The story was that the production team wanted to make a big deal of the fact that the captain was a woman, but the actress playing the captain said she assumed that by that far into the future it would be commonplace for a woman to be a captain and therefore nobody would think twice about it. And therefore it wouldn't make sense to make a big deal about it in the storylines.

I don't know if that story is true, but it's one of those 'if it's not true, it oughtta be' stories. And it's a good point. Unless we're talking about a job where it would be freakish or insane or otherwise a really bad idea to have a woman doing it, could we please stop acting like it's freakish for a woman to be under consideration for the job?

Since most people have long since outgrown getting excited by women running for office (face it, women have been getting elected for generations in America), aren't the folks making a big deal over a woman running for office embarrassing themselves?

They embarrass me. And, for the record, they don't represent me. I believe all candidates, male or female, should be judged on character, experience, track record, and proposals. Silly me.

Modern smelling salts

Just down the road, a woman is missing and presumed drowned. The radio news reports have warned people that the chances of stumbling across a corpse are pretty high just now, and also assure us that people with property along the river downriver have been notified personally. It's an awful situation, but so far nobody I've heard of has taken to running around screaming that they shouldn't be expected to deal with something like this, or that they'll never recover from the experience.

You are scratching your head over that last statement? I don't blame you. Normal people absorb news like this and deal with it at least after a fashion, normally. They search, they grieve, they make sure the lady's horses and dogs don't starve or die of thirst. They don't expect, or claim, that they'll never get over it.

Don't misunderstand me. I don't mean to give short shrift to the heartache, the grief, or the horror involved, especially for whoever winds up dealing with the remains (assuming the lady is, in fact, drowned). My heart goes out to her family, her neighbors, the search and rescue people, her friends. She was an acquaintance of ours, a bookstore customer, somebody I didn't socialize with but did chat with when our paths crossed. I am, myself, somewhat shocked and sick over the whole situation.

It probably doesn't help any that a week and a half ago we buried one of my favorite people on Earth, and that a couple days after that I found out that a very nice young man in our community is terminally ill. To make it worse, he and his very nice young wife are the very picture of devotion. But I guess that's part of my point. If you live in a community, as opposed to off in your own little world, you run into this sort of heartache all the time. Frequency doesn't make it easy. It doesn't make it seem normal. It is, truly, heartache. Tragic. Difficult. Painful. But it is, for all that, surprisingly common. And it doesn't ruin you for life. It might - perhaps should - stagger you for a bit (would you rather be heartless?), but it doesn't ruin you for life, especially if you have the decency to pitch in to help those staggered more by the calamity than yourself. (It helps to know you've done something, for one thing. And you can draw on the strength of others if you only work beside them. Etc.)

But here's the deal (I am coming to the "modern smelling salts" business, really...). In college, I remember, my friends and I read in the newspaper about someone finding the body of a woman who had been dead a few days, and we sat around claiming to each other that we'd never recover from finding a body that had been dead a few days. Never.

In hindsight, I can see we did that sort of thing rather a lot. We were never going to get over this or that or the other thing. I don't know where the grown-ups were: whether they didn't catch us at this sort of nonsense, or didn't care, or thought it was cute, or considered it harmless. Harmless, my foot. If you practice thinking of yourself as fragile, and breakable, and unable to recover from circumstances, how can you expect to become strong, and steady, and resilient - or reliable, for that matter?

We also used to sit around and feel superior to those delicate damsels of older days who reportedly swooned at the least provocation, expecting someone to fish out the smelling salts and revive them.

We should not have laughed at them, I think. I think, really, that we were more like them than we knew. And in some ways we were their inferiors. The oh-so-refined ladies did, after all, recover from their swoons. We were practicing, on the other hand, to never get over whatever had prompted us to have a case of the vapors. To never forget. To never heal completely.

The oh-so-refined ladies of yesteryear, moreover, weren't asking for more than personal attention. We had an unfortunate tendency to think the world ought to be changed to protect our fragile selves. Not that we considered ourselves fragile. I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar was a big song about then, and we could be caught, now and then, belting out I am strong, I am invincible, etc.

Who were we trying to kid, I wonder? If we had been strong, if we had been confident (never mind 'invincible'), would we have championed abortion? Affirmative action? Punishment for clubs that only admitted men? Would speech codes have even come up as a subject? Hate crime legislation was over the horizon yet; but it's the same sort of thing, isn't it?

I look around, and a lot of what's going on in society, in popular culture, and at the government level seems to me nothing more or less than people (generally people who have practiced modern variations on swooning until it is second nature to them) getting the vapors (right on cue, very often, it seems to me), and somebody rushing to provide them with (mostly harmful) variations on those old smelling salts, whether it be legislation, lawsuits, or optional medical procedures, or what have you. We have 'progressed', you see, from individual swoons, to group ones, whenever possible. Or at least some folks have.

The gentility is lacking, but I still think it's the same thing. Oh, this is too much for little ol' me! the lady exclaims, collapsing in a heap. And somebody rushes to the rescue, playing along, instead of (which might be more sensible, and perhaps better for everyone in the long run) saying, "Oh, for crying out loud, stop being hysterical."

The 20 weeks campaign

In the UK:

On 6 May Nadine Dorries MP launched the official parliamentary campaign to reduce the upper limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. The matter will come to the vote when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is debated in the Commons later this month...

Visit the 20 weeks campaign website for more information. For those of you in the UK, there's a petition to sign, if you'd like.

hat tip: Anglican Mainstream

Another encore I could do without

I am beginning to wonder if every single bad idea that was promoted to my generation when we were college students is going to resurface this decade.

Take, for instance, the "equal pay" idea. I know why I fell for this when I was an adolescent and early twenty-something (miseducation matched with inexperience, boosted by the insane, fact-free, unrooted idealism of the '60s and '70s; flavored with a Marxism I didn't realize was there, not to mention just plain ignorance about how the economy functions in general and how businesses survive in particular, not to mention just plain naivete about human nature, etc.). I can see why this sort of thing can be attractive to a well-meaning but misguided kid. But how can any actual adult with real-world experience think this is something the government ought to pursue? It's crazy.

Like the Equal Rights Amendment, which I hear has also been dusted off, I find the 'equal pay/ comparable worth' idea patronizing. I'm one of those women who currently earns less than most men with a comparable education because once I got old enough to take a more mature look at my options, I opted out of the career culture. Plain and simple. I chose a life that gave me more time with my husband, more time for myself, more freedom, more autonomy, more control. Within certain boundaries, money is far easier to give up than time. Loss of income you can offset to a large degree with frugality. Lost time? Lost independence? What can you do to make up for days when you find yourself forced to wave hello-and-goodbye at loved ones as your paths cross, with no time to sit down and chat because the clock is ticking and you've promised to be elsewhere in exchange for a paycheck?

If I decide to go get a job working for someone else, I'll weigh the possibilities based on several factors. And, if you can imagine this, I can probably manage to find out if one job pays less than another, and can actually factor that into my choice of which jobs to go after, which training to pursue. No, really, I can. I'm female but I think I can do that. I am woman, hear me roar watch me make a rational choice.

The Network of enlightened Women (aka NeW)

This is interesting, and encouraging. Conservative women on college campuses are organizing NeW Chapters, which sound much more civilized than NOW Chapters. Much. The movement (there are enough chapters already for me to feel justified in calling it a movement, albeit a small one yet), started as a book club at at the University of Virginia in 2004. Book discussions are still part of the program.

hat tip: Is Feminism Finished?, by Jennifer Roback Morse, Townhall.com, April 2, 2007 (via Lightweight Feminists Never More Apparent, by Julie Ponzi, No Left Turns, April 2, 2007).