update: My mom and brother have filled me in on some details. My grandmother was born in 1890 (wow) and she worked as a hotel housekeeper to keep her family afloat.
Last night at our weekly Mexican food fix with friends, Jeff posed this ponderable:
A man and his son were in a terrible car accident. The man was pronounced dead at the scene and the boy was rushed to the hospital. The ER doctor came into the trauma room and announced, “I cannot treat this patient because he is my son.”
Who is the doctor?*
Folks were stumped… but when that ponderable is posed to a group of high schoolers or college students they look confused because the answer is so obvious to them.
This past Sunday (August 26) was the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 87th anniversary giving women a right to vote. To vote! 1920. Amazing.
My grandmother, Edythe Davis, was 20 when this happened. I wonder what she thought of the struggle. She was a milliner - she made those funky hats seen in the pictures of the time. I don’t remember much of my paternal grandmother, I was Katie’s age when she died. I remember playing at her house with a shoebox filled with toys – wooden thread spools, this little circular cage with a small hole for marbles, a little plastic doll. She lived in an apartment in L.A. without much yard. To be honest, visits to Grandma’s house were not all that exciting. It probably had more to do with the reality that visits to my maternal grandparent’s home was filled with swimming (they had a pool), fireworks (they lived 3 blocks from Disneyland) and lots of wild adventures (they even made shopping for groceries a thrill – I’m not kidding!).
But it is my Grandma that I was reminded of when I read the news about the anniversary of the 19th amendment. I wish I’d been old enough to ask her about it. To hear her perspective on it all. I wonder where she stood on the issue. She was divorced when it wasn’t socially acceptable. She raised my dad, aunt and uncle pretty much by herself I guess on the money she made from selling hats. She was independent, strong, and like a good Davis, stubborn. I’m grateful to her and to the women and men who fought long and hard to make the right to vote a non-issue for me.
Things change – sometimes too slowly. I hate (yes, Mom, I use that word intentionally) that Katie will still face walls because of her gender but I am grateful for my grandmother for changing life for me and for Katie.
Oh, the doctor in Jeff’s ponderable? The son’s mother. Yep, a woman doctor. What’s next, women preachers?
