Oh, this is lovely. Thanks for reposting it.

(Plenty of fatties amongst the sisters, by the way, despite those pesky vows of simplicity and poverty — could it possibly be that many of us naturally expand as we age?)

Somewhere I ran across an article rejecting the whole “calories in/calories out” formulation that used St. Thomas Aquinas” (aka “The Dumb [as in silent] Ox”), to demonstrate the fact that a low cal diet and exercise will not necessarily make someone thin, and that people eating the same diet (i.e., Aquinas and the others he lived with) will still display a wide disparaty of body shapes. Would that I had saved the thing…

When I was in college in the early 1970′s I was vaguely aware of feminists — but “they” were far off to the side of the issues I was thinking about (including how honored I would feel if someday I could wash a man’s socks as well as my own, and how sad I was that no man was falling in love with me, especially as I lived and suffered in deep unrequited love for one man after another.)

I remember when “Ms.” was a newfangled honorific. It took me years to start using it because it felt so silly at first. I remember when people started to fuss about gender neutral words and again I thought that was silly.

Then in the 1990′s I read about an essay about anthropology — the “study of man.” The essay had been written many years previously, and as I read about “man” — “he” does this and “he” does that — I imagined cigar chomping men going about their business and I wondered what the women had been doing. And I remembered thinking something similar when I was 7 years old or so, and asking about it, and people telling me that “man” means both men and women, and “he” means both “he” and “she”. Well, that bothered me at first because it obviously wasn’t true, but I got used to it and eventually I stopped questioning it.

I’m so very glad that other women didn’t stop questioning it. I’m so glad that other women thought seriously and acted to make things better for all of us.

So maybe I’m a bit late to the party, but I’m here now!

I’m a pagan, and they are about the only people I can discuss theology with because they are about the only religious people I know who are secure enough with their faith that other peoples disbelief doesn’t make them feel threatened. They believe in what they believe – and that is what matters to them.

My aunts are 3 of the best women I will ever know.