Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: EXPECTATION (01/28/21)
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TITLE: Tillie Pickford Changes Her Tune | Previous Challenge Entry
By Ruthie Alekseeva
02/03/21 -
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“Why Tillie Pickford, how can you say that?” Dorothy says, straining to be heard over the jazz band.
Tillie pouts, crossing her arms, “I cherished their silk rosettes, and purple banners, snapping in the wind. Their rallies too. Their invocations always incited my support. Now, I castigate.”
Dorothy rolls her eyes. Fluffing her feathered headband, she eyes a fedora-hatted man standing by the punch bowl.
“ ‘Don’t get married’ they said. ‘You’ll regret it. Don’t have children. That’s wasting your life. If I had my time over, I wouldn’t do either. I’d be a career woman, that’s it’. Oh really, that’s all?”
Dorothy tugs at her fox-fur stole, a smile brightening her face as the pinstripe-suited man cuts through the crowded dance floor. “Tillie, after everything they’ve done for you.”
“Well, are jobs an expressway for avoiding disappointment and exploitation?”
“I’m doing fine,” Dorothy says, extinguishing her long-stemmed cigarette in an ash tray, then fidgeting with her long-beaded necklace.
“Are all managers kind, all colleagues amiable, all customers pleasant? A resounding no. Many business cubicles reverberate with words of malice and discord, and scads of those cruel personnel, and clients, are female. Some are the very same women who denounce their spouses and offspring as heartless.”
“They won votes for women,” Dorothy says, as the young man stands before her.
“They decry motherhood, lambasting it as boring and the cause of forfeited pleasures, but many vocations are humdrum and require sacrifice. Career women miss barbecues, parties, weekends, summer, Christmas, and sleeping at night. They even miss attending their ‘dreaded’ child’s concerts and sporting events, a great sacrifice. Umpteen females shirk working Christmas Day, and on ordinary days feign illness, knowing time with family, even a bad one, is far more fulfilling.
“And what about children of stay-at-home mothers, hearing they’re dull and a waste of their mother’s lives? Must we broadcast this message so regularly? Ask grown children of stay-at-home mums, a multitude will say, although not all women can stay home, they’re grateful their mum did.
“In some professions, making a wrong decision kills or maims, then your tossed in jail. And what about the agony of not finding anyone who will hire you, or losing your job, multiple times, not because of misdemeanour, but because you aren’t good at anything? For some, athletics or the arts is their sole talent. Becoming a professional in these fields requires exceptional expertise. If you aren’t phenomenal, you spend life squishing yourself into occupations you are bereft of aptitude, time and again highlighting your impotence for all to see. That’s not fulfilling or empowering. That’s excruciating and humiliating.
“Of course, jobs are crucial. In some places, if you’re without one, you die. Clearly, long-term unemployment is monotonous and harrowing, and marriage and motherhood has challenges. But, if you work for a spiteful boss, brutal associates and cold-hearted customers, employment can torment as much as it’s said marriage does, especially if a mortgage shackles you from hunting gentler working conditions.”
Dorothy takes the man’s extended hand, “Well, I can see you don’t need anyone around for this. I’m outta here.”
“There’s nothing stranger than toiling at work thinking, If it wasn’t for feminists, I’d be at a tea party right now. Or would I be? Apparently, before the suffragettes descended, women weren’t allowed to work, and at times rich, married women weren’t, but women have always worked. Adam tended the Garden of Eden, then God created Eve to be a helper for him. There were no clothes to mend, no houses to scrub, or children to rear. So, did Eve help Adam tend the garden too?
“In Bible times, women worked as perfumers, cooks, bakers, and spun blue, purple, and scarlet yarns. Tabitha made garments. Lydia sold purple. Ruth gathered wheat. Women even laboured under the apostles, the Bible saying not only did they work, they worked hard. Don’t forget Egyptians owned female slaves as well as male. Women will work during the end times too, when one mill grinder will vanish with the other left behind. So, Dorothy, if jobs haven’t gratified our much-hyped anticipation, should we persist in trumpeting them as the silver bullet for all women’s problems?”
Tillie exhales. She waits for Dorothy’s reply.
Nothing but music.
Tillie blinks, then glances about the room, “How rude. Now just where did that lassie go?”
Genesis 2:18 NKJV
1 Samuel 8:13 NKJV
Acts 9:39 NKJV
Acts 16:14-15 NKJV
Matthew 24:41 NKJV
Romans 16:6&12 ESV
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