Per commentor Dave C:
I work from home. Josephine helps!
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Because I can: In the NYTImes, Elizabeth Word Gutting, “What My Mother Sees in Hillary”:
IN 1973, my mother’s first husband was killed in a car crash in downtown St. Louis. My brother, Jason, was nine months old. In swift succession, my mother lost the following things: the father of her first child; access to a credit card; her car insurance; and the ability to take out a loan. The first was terrible luck. The other things were taken from her because she was a single woman — with a son, to boot — it was the 1970s, and, as she put it, “you were not considered legitimate at that time unless you had a man in your life.”
Four decades later, my mom is looking forward to having the chance to vote, she hopes, for this country’s first female president. She and Hillary Clinton are a year apart in age. Though my mom’s experiences are so different from my own, they serve as a constant reminder to me of the work it’s taken for Mrs. Clinton to get where she is today, and the force of society’s attitudes about women, and their value, that she has been pushing against…
At a town hall a few months ago, a young man asked Mrs. Clinton why young people lacked enthusiasm for her.
She sounded a bit wounded, but she tried to explain what she’d been up against for so many years. Despite all the criticisms, she said, over the course of several decades in the public eye, all she could do was continue to stand her ground…
In the years when my mom was a single mother, people commented on her lifestyle with alarming frequency. Why wasn’t she living with her parents, they wanted to know. Wasn’t she worried that if she didn’t marry again soon, her son would grow up to be gay? Her landlord came over after her husband died, hemming and hawing, saying how sorry she was, but also that she was hoping my mom might move out to be closer to family, which would probably be better for everyone.
Well. My mother persevered. She smiled politely and bit her tongue and did what she had to do to survive those rough years…
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