International Women's Day

There are many many women in my life who deserve recognition, but I have two women I have written about before to write about again...my mother and my grandmother.

The picture of my paternal grandmother and me hangs on the wall of the study. I have always loved it. She died not long after this picture was taken, but she left a legacy of memories and stories. I know I have written about this before, but it is an important part of the family history that she and three of her sisters all graduated from the University of California (the other one went to Stanford) back in the day when a college education for women was not always encouraged. I'll get to that when I get to my mother. I was the fourth generation in the family to go to Cal Berkeley. I think it is impressive for the fact that it is written in beautiful script on real sheepskin and signed, in fading ink by the entire faculty...all seven of them. And of course, the fact that it is dated 1899. I have an album of equally fading pictures of the campus, with its two buildings, North Hall and South Hall, and the Berkeley hills, devoid of eucalyptus trees which were planted later in the background.

My mother had a very different story. She grew up on a prune ranch in Oregon the youngest of a sister and four brothers. The crop was always in danger of failing and ,although I think they had enough money to live on, the future was never secure. Her sister, ten years older than she was,  was a nurse and died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic in 1918. Her brothers all went to university, but she, being a girl, went to secretarial school. I was always impressed by the fact that she knew shorthand, and often took notes in it.  She always regretted that she didn't go to college, something I must have realized, for I felt it was important for me to earn the degree she never got. Even though I married John at the end of my freshman year at Cal, I continued on to graduate when I was 6 months pregnant with Dana.

When my brother and I were both married and she and my dad had sold the family home and moved to downtown Los Angeles, my mother enrolled at UCLA. We were living in Scotland when she graduated, and she missed her graduation ceremony because she and my dad were visiting us in Edinburgh. When she picked up her diploma after she got back, she notice the words cum laude at the bottom.

I am also thinking of the women of Afghanistan living under the Taliban, denied an education and forced to live under draconian restrictions which they are fighting as best they can. They are being denied their rights as women and as human beings and the world, with so many things to worry about, seems to have moved on.