Talk About It

Heroic women are all around us

I’m thinking, perhaps history’s greatest writer of dialogue for women, who gave them voice with the greatest dignity, was a man. William Shakespeare.

Read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a silly Rom-Com with magic faeries and a man with the head of an ass — a literal ass. Not exactly highbrow. But right off the bat, we see a young woman who must marry a man she loves not, forsaking him she loves, because the custom of the day and the law itself makes her chattel. Her only alternative is death, or consignment to solitude for life. Her frail body has no power to resist, her status moves no one, she has no protector, not even her father. But she has the will, the heart, to declare that so shall she live, so shall she die, she will not give herself up to the yoke of an unwanted master.

Or how about that same young woman, when promising to meet in secret her true love, swearing “by all the vows that men have ever broke, in number more than women ever spoke.” True dat.