I Love Being a Girl
BY CYNDI GREENING, ARIZONA, USA — Last night, I watched ELIZABETH on cable. the film stars Cate Blanchett as the Virgin Queen. The film emphasizes the years when she first came to power, when she was vulnerable and England was weak. The film was on my mind and I started chatting about it while running errands. There was a discussion about how Elizabeth never married because she didn't want to be dominated by and have the King of England to be a man from another country.
Eleven-year-old Ciera commented that there were a lot of places in the world where it wasn't very good to be a girl. She went on to say that countries that could have Queens seemed to be better. I suggested that there were a lot of "Queens" in San Francisco but I don't think she got it. In spite of that, I said that there weren't all that many women with political power in the U.S. And, while we have had an Equal Pay Act in the U.S. since 1963, I told her that the wage gap for men and women still hovers around 69¢ to the dollar.
In spite of all that, the U.S. remains one of the better countries to have been born female. And I do love being a girl.
Speaking of extraordinary females, Beverly Sills passed away today at the age of 78. I was never wild about opera but I sure loved Sills. She was the Director of the New York City Opera for a decade and later served as the Chair of the Metropolitan Opera. Sills was an avid supporter of the Arts. She died from inoperable lung cancer. A sad passing of an American icon.
