Blog
Ruth Bader Ginsburg March 15, 1933–September 18, 2020
The First Woman to Lie in State at Our Capitol Glass-ceiling breaker Ruth Bader Ginsburg (aka RBG) was the first female Jewish Supreme Court justice. She was fortunate that her parents encouraged her to get a B.A., and were able to pay for it. Her father was an...
Kate Germano (1971–Present), author of Fight Like a Girl
I first learned about Kate Germano from an advertisement for her book Fight Like a Girl: The Truth Behind How Female Marines are Trained. I’ve always been fascinated with people different from myself or from anyone I’ve previously known well. Even though I wrote The...
Christine Jorgensen (1926–1989) America’s First Known Transsexual
Headlines about George, who changed into Christine, hit newspapers all over the world: Ex-GI Becomes Blond Beauty. Christine Jorgensen, a woman trapped in the body of a man, was the first known transsexual in America. George’s first memory of wishing to be...
Sandra Day O’Connor, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1981–2006
By Alice Combs | August 19, 2020 | Based on Sex, Triumph over Discrimination | 0 comments To President Trump’s chagrin, the U.S. Supreme Court often reins in his hunger for power, and for the past ten years, women have comprised at least one third of the nine...
Lucy Stone (1818–1893)
By Alice Combs | August 5, 2020 | Based on Sex, Triumph over Discrimination The 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, became law one hundred years ago this month, and today is my thirty-first wedding anniversary. In celebration, I offer the following...
Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897)
Born a slave in North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs’s happy childhood ignorance of slavery ended when she was six years old. That was when her mother died, and Harriet became the companion and helpmate of her mother’s child-mistress. Over the following six years, Harriet...
Sojourner Truth (1797 – 1883)
Born a slave, Sojourner Truth towered over six feet. She became famous as a charismatic public speaker and songstress before, during, and after the American Civil War. Sojourner (then called Isabel) was enslaved in New York state, which mandated emancipation beginning...
Beauty Is As Beauty Does
Lizzie Velasquez was born with an extremely rare disease, which fewer than ten people in the world are known to have. In a video that got millions of hits when it was posted on YouTube, she was called “the ugliest woman in the world.” Some suggested she kill herself...
Coffee, Wine, & Wire
Now that I’ve mentioned four books about perseverance authored by women, I’ll throw in a biography of a man written by another man, The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers. The protagonist, Mokhtar Alkhanshari, was born in America to parents from Yemen, a war-torn Arabian...
Another Book Similar to The Lady with Balls
Julissa Arce’s My (underground) American Dream reminds me of The Lady with Balls. Julissa, a Mexican beauty, was an undocumented immigrant till her mid-twenties. She falsified her social-security information, and I falsified my W-2. We both committed felonies so as to...
