Over-the-hill Revolutionaries

I am no fan of "Madmen." Glamorizing the sexist attitudes of the fifties and sixties seems to me the last thing the world needs at this moment. I admit that I have seen only one episode, the first, and about twenty-three minutes of the second, but that was enough to turn me off from the series for good.

My favorite "good times" of the second half of the twentieth century involve the antidote to the culture of Madmen – the international effort that is still spreading known in those days as The Women's Movement.

Betty Friedan and Friends

If you are fifty-five or over and worked for a living during the 1960's, 70's, and 80's, in the US, Canada, or Western Europe, you participated in this revolution that profoundly and forever changed the entire world.

If you are younger than fifty-five and came of age or were born into a world where working women’s rights were protected, stick around find out a bit about how we got to where we are today.

Bella Abzug

There were, in those early days a few widespread influences: books like "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan and "The Female Eunuch," by Germaine Greer; "MS. Magazine"; the marvelous New York Congresswoman, Bella Abzug. The National Organization for Women emerged eventually. We did have a well-publicized march for equality – down Fifth Avenue. My father, the World War Two combat Marine, pushed my daughter in her stroller in that demonstration, while I carried a sign that said, "THREE GENERATIONS FOR EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN." But none of these publications, societies, or events can be credited with the Movement’s widespread success.

Rosie the Riveter

Of course, the demand for equal rights did not come out of nowhere. A wonderful example was set by the Civil Rights Movement. The employment of women in war-time manufacturing during the "Rosie the Riveter" era had changed women’s self-image. The demographics of the country – a growing economy and a lower birth rate pointing to a need for more entrants into the workforce also had an impact. All of that history and more. Yes. But.

Whatever the historical factors, I doubt the revolution would have gotten off the ground it were it not for thousands and thousands of ordinary women on the line who fought the battles on the job, who showed up every day and got the work done, and thought up imaginative ways to thwart the status quo when it stood in the way of progress.

I know a lot of stories from the pink collar wars. Here's one of my favorites. It is a perfect example of what made the Movement move:

In the state of Nevada in the 1970's, there was a thriving printing business. Big firms stamped out mail order catalogs, magazines, Sunday supplements for newspapers, all kinds of color work on shiny paper. The jobs were divided into heavy printing and light printing. Those who did heavy printing were all men and made near twice the hourly rate of those doing light printing, who were all women. The women wanted into the higher paying positions, but a state law stood in their way. Nevada’s books said that if the job required employees to lift more than twenty pounds, the work had to be done by men. Women protested, testifying that females in everyday life regularly lifted more than twenty pounds. Any mother of a toddler or housewife who did laundry and grocery shopping for a family of four could have told you that. Nevada women took their case right up to the State Supreme Court. But the justices held their ground and upheld Nevada's right to "protect" women in the printing industry from getting a sixty percent increase in their wages.

Not ready to be frustrated once and for all, the ladies looked for another way.

Printing was the second biggest industry in the state. The first biggest was gambling. And that's where our “light” printers found their answer. The big-time casinos employed hundreds of women who waited tables at the headliner dinner theaters. They preferred ladies with long legs and pretty faces. The statuesque, scantily clad members of the "weaker sex" hefted huge trays piled with dishes, glasses, cutlery.

Casino Waitress

The printing women did a little study. One Saturday evening, when the restaurants were packed, they got the waitresses to weigh their trays. About a third of them were over twenty pounds.

Nevada had two choices. Either force the casino owners to put men in the place of the waitresses in stiletto heels, or change the law and let women do jobs that required them to lift more than twenty pounds. The casino owners, with their enormous political clout, weighed in, as it were, on the side of the women printers. The law changed and so did the take home pay of hundreds of women workers.

It happened that way over and over, a little triumph here and rule changed there. Progress.

Things are not perfect yet. But they have gotten better. And will continue to do so. Because of the revolutionaries in pantyhose who made it work those decades ago.

Annamaria Alfieri

Left-overs

Why do left-overs sometimes taste better than the original? My mother used to buy an extra big turkey for our Thanksgiving dinners so she would have an abundance of left-overs to last through the following week. My brother and I, from an early age, would begin the ritual by sneaking into the kitchen after dinner and picking at the carcass which always had ample meat left on it. After that came the turkey sandwiches, turkey hash, turkey salad, and ultimately – the soup. By that time even my brother and I were a bit tired of the turkey taste and I suspect much of that dish went down the drain.

At some point during my teenage years my grandmother (on my father's side) decided to take charge of Thanksgiving dinner. "To save my mother work," was the excuse. But my grandmother lived in a small apartment and didn't know how to cook, so taking charge meant eating Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant and she would pay for it. The nearest restaurant was on the first floor of her apartment house. A cold, cavernous room at the best of times, on Thanksgiving it was almost empty, except for a few lonely widows or widowers or others who lacked family ties. The waiters were stiff, the menus were stiff, the napkins were stiff, and as a result the conversation was stiff. Actually, we were afraid to raise our voices for fear an echo would come roaring back at us, like a Bush man's boomerang and knock us dead. And of course there were no left-overs. (The custom of taking home what you couldn't eat in a baggie had not been invented yet.)

Nowadays when my brother and I have families of our own, and we are together on Thanksgiving, I wait for him to give me the high sign, and while others linger over their coffee and pumpkin pie, we sneak into the kitchen to enjoy our ritual of picking at the carcass.

Robin Hathaway

Puppy Love, Pink Bats and Armageddon

It wasn't Jill Abramson's elegant elevation to the top of the tree at the Times that grabbed me. (Though I have total respect for any woman who could do that!)

It was the cover of her book, The Puppy Diaries.

That face !

Her golden retriever Scout, the highly acclaimed addition to the "dogoir genre", that grabbed my heart!

My own thriller series features a golden retriever named Honey. Though her coat is a bit darker than Jill's puppy, now I will always see her as a grown-up Scout!

The courage of Leon Panetta captures me at another level. That guy really loves his country!

Enough to leave his cherished walnut farm to fight as our SecDef in our "blizzard war."

A true blue wise man who leads us on multiple fronts, as needed, even in a possible unspeakable face of an Armageddon.

A rara avis who got all 100 votes from those folks in the Senate.

They say he "calls it as he sees it" – with a Midas touch of negotiating skills, who with little experience in spycraft won over that whole building of Langley spooks.

I'm a pushover for unique creativity.

I give a gold star to a woman named Alexandra Meyn, who has built herself a treehouse up against an old mulberry tree in Brooklyn, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant
section.

Talk about a childhood dream come true!

Her treehouse even has lights, a record player.

Pink bats on the wall!

Plus glass windows "that dangle on the ground floor level like earrings."

What a retreat!

What a writer's sanctuary!

If I had a treehouse with pink bats and those earrings, I bet I could win an Edgar or two.

Maybe a whole Nobel!!!

T.J. Straw

Made Ya Look

Phishermen and spambots are getting cleverer and cleverer about getting people to click on their toxic links. For example, someone called Helen Wotzername sent me an email with a convincing Facebook look to it, blue logo, everything, claiming to have posted a comment to my wall: "You're full of $&^%." That, of course, would be perfectly true about a lot of what I post on my wall, but most of my friends are too polite to say so. Furthermore I don't know anybody named Helen Wotzername.

Viewing my mail was the first thing I did this morning. I was not yet wide awake. The email offered me a link to click to view the comment thread, and, Lord help me, I clicked it.

Luckily the site had been somehow dismantled before I clicked the link. In any case I saw at once that it was bogus, and clicked right off again. But it could have been bad. And you could be offered stuff like that. "Look at this picture of you. LOL." That's another good one, tough to resist.

So what if I click on this link, you ask? Well, if it's a Facebook hacker, you could be made to look like a complete horse's patoot in front of all your friends, acquaintances, and Facebook frenemies. Posts signed by you will begin to appear on Facebook: "Ooo! Ooo! I'm having so much fun playing (fill in the game of your choice). Won't you come and play with me?" "I just won a free IPad! Clik here and u can win one 2!" And that's the best that can happen. Worst case, they'll steal your identity and clean out your bank account.

I suppose you're expecting me, as a self-declared left-leaning tax-and-spend Democrat liberal, to demand that the government do something about these sleazy intrusions into our cyberspace. Well, I'm not. The government has no place in our cyberspace or anyone else's. Let the government get its own house in order.

What I am going to say is, watch out. There is no law west of the Pecos, and it's all west of the Pecos out here.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Kate Gallison

I Am Grateful For...

The New York City Subway, the medicines my husband takes, my iPad, white linen, Netflix, fountain pens, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my Francis Francis espresso machine, Di Palo Italian grocery, my little red sports car, digital photography, sapone al melograno from the Farmacia of Santa Maria Novella, white Burgundy, pants with elastic waists, the moon, my electric stapler, a two-book contract, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Scrabble, curly hair, Faicco's sausage, the speed of light, steam heat, hot showers, the Chrysler Building, the weeping beech, lionesses, air travel, Wikipedia, red leather gloves, foie gras, comfortable shoes, spell check, the Ponte Sant' Angelo, reading glasses, peonies, the eastern box turtle, Don Giovanni, Tintagel,........

And these are just some of the THINGS.

I won't even try to list the people I'm grateful for. One of them is you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Annamaria Alfieri