Sherry Chandler

Tough Old Women

Over at a blog called Disability Studies, Temple U, Penny L. Richards has this to say about women who are Really Old, Disabled…and Tough?

I like finding examples, biographical or fictional, of very old women with disabilities who don’t fit the stereotypes–they’re not miserable, they’re not idle, they’re not cute or sweet–they’re thinking, they’re active, they’re… tough, like Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Mary Stoneman Douglas was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton for her work in saving the Everglades. She was 103 at the time.

I have found my examples closer to home. The women I knew didn’t do anything world-changing, really, unless you count the example they set for me and other women of my generation to hew our own paths in the world. Their lives acted as a counterbalance to the June Cleaver image we were getting on tv.

Two of them died this week. Anna Catherine Toole was widowed at 36 with eight children. She raised them all on her own and, as my mother pointed out, in those days there was no welfare. She died on Easter Sunday at 91. Lillian Glass never married. She ran her family’s farm in Owen County, and could do her share of the work along with the men and keep a clean house. She died on Monday at 90.

Before that, there were my grandfather’s stepmother, Suzie Glore, who outlived three husbands and could still play a mean “Cotton-Eyed Joe” on the mouth harp. And Aunt Ad O’Banion, a widow who lived a quarter mile further along our dirt road. She worked hard and she wasn’t sweet and polite, as I was often admonished to be. I remember looking at her one day and thinking, “I want to grow up to be a mean old woman.”

I still do. I wrote a poem about it. It’s called “Manifesto, Age 59″ and it’s in the current issue of Kudzu, premiering tonight at Hazard Community and Technical College.

Link from Carnival of Feminists XIII at I See Invisible People.

Reminder: I am reading tonight at this event:

ECTC’s Morrison Gallery Poetry Series presents a National Poetry Month Celebration April 20th form 7-8.30pm. Featured will be Lisa Williams, this year’s judge and the winners of the 2006 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize Sherry Chandler, Woods Nash, and Christian Lund. There will be a short open mic and refreshments; this event is free and Open to the public.

Possibly related posts:

Women Who Write

Women and the oil wars

Standing Women, a reminder

The women and children

Different from Ordinary Women

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.