Writing, Living and a New Project
My blog-writing has been recently derailed by life-living. Isn't that always the deal? Should I sit down and create life on the page, or go out and live, i.e., do all those things I need and/or want to do? But isn't writing also a kind of doing? Yes, if you are Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf or Flaubert. Also yes if you write for a living, if it's your job. I don't fit into either of those categories.
I don't have a compulsion to write. Although I call myself a writer these days, and indeed have two books to show for it, and several new ones in the works, I can't say that I can't not write. If you get my drift. I also can't say I've always wanted to be a writer. (If I did, I would have started ages ago, and not been a nurse and a hospital manager and a technology and healthcare business consultant for thirty years.)
But I do like writing. It's like solving a puzzle. What goes here? How can this piece work with this piece? I enjoy the research that's required for the kind of stuff I write. Having a final written product is a good excuse for trolling library stacks, used bookstores, special collections, and yes, even the internet. I travel, too—I like to see the places I'm writing about, and I like to talk with people, so I can write about the world as seen through eyes other than my own.
Right now I'm working on a talk I'll be giving in a couple weeks. It's about the women's suffrage struggle in Washington State, my home state. I've read a lot about women's fight to get the right to vote. It was a long battle—72 years from a small convention of women in upstate New York in 1848 to the final passage of the Constitutional amendment in 1920. Who today could imagine that the opposition was so strong and so successful for so long?
The interesting thing that you don't read about if you concentrate on the "big" names—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul—is that the western states granted women the right to vote long before the eastern states. Wyoming and Utah were the first two states to allow women to vote. Women in Washington had a tricky time—they got the vote in 1883 and then it was taken away when they started showing up on juries and convicting gambling bosses and owners of brothels. The powers that be (men) didn't like losing their recreational and financial pleasures. Washington women didn't get the vote back until 1910—still, though, a decade ahead of the national amendment, and ahead of any eastern state.
It's wonderful to look at photographs of those fighting women pioneers. Their turn-of-the-century long dresses, flowered hats, pins and brooches, gloves and shawls distract us today from their daring spirit and steely resolve. Who today is working (for free) as hard as they did for a cause as simple and undeniable as theirs?
