P52 Week 44 -- Strong Women -- Photographer's Choice

Week 44 – Photographer’s Choice – Strong Women.

Strong women. I have been thinking about strong women.

Recently, I heard about a new series, available on Netflix, called Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries. I perked up immediately as the program is set in Melbourne, Australia in the 1920s. My roots are in Sydney, and there has always been a rivalry between the two cities, but nonetheless I set aside my bias and watched.

Over the past two weeks, I have plowed through the whole three seasons. I am enchanted! Miss Fisher is a delightful flapper and a vamp. She’s smart, elegant, irreverent and sexually liberal. She pushes every social boundary.

I think of my mother, who pushed social boundaries in Hungary in the 1930s by being one of the first women to graduate from Szeged University – in the sciences, no less.

I think of my sister, who forged into the engineering profession in the seventies – one of a few – at a major aerospace company.

I think of how I was one of a wave of women who swelled the ranks of the medical profession in the 1970s.

I bow down to my daughter and daughter-in-law, both with bachelor nursing degrees. They work in complex, highly skilled areas – trauma and pediatric intensive care. They are smart, and independent enough to equal any physician. Perhaps they are even smarter in that they chose not to sacrifice their balanced lifestyle – as I did for a time.

I receive the magazine from my old school in Sydney. I read how robust the curriculum has become compared to when I was enrolled at Loreto Convent in the sixties. I relish how accomplished its students and graduates are. This week, one alumna became the first female jockey to win the Melbourne cup, the most prestigious horse race in Australia.

There is a new movie out that I look forward to seeing: Suffragette with Helena Bonham Carter, Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan. Can you imagine, it’s only been one hundred years – in my parents’ lifetime – that women have had the rights to own property and to vote? Imagine!

There is no doubt that women have been strong through the ages, but now we are expressing our strength more fully. We are manifesting our dreams, breaking through barriers and entering into arenas that, in the past, have been restricted to men, and we are transforming professions that have traditionally been ours. There’s no question that we have a long way to go, but I celebrate what we have already achieved.

We’ve come a long way.