This is how it was told to me by my mother.
She walked from the bathroom, down the hallway into their bedroom. She stood next to the bed and starred down at him, a tattered diaphragm dangling from her finger. “Damnit, Ruben! I’m pregnant!” “Damn you!” My mother shouted.
Nine months later, I was born – another girl. It was 1951. It was a horrific time for women when “Father Knows Best,” and “My Three Sons,” was portraying domestic paradises while women led lives of oppression, isolation, and cultural suffocation. My mother, a psychology major with a minor in chemistry, was restricted to a career as a secretary under the dominating authority of a white male boss. It was still a time when the white male hierarchy reigned.
Stellarella did not just come to me; Stellarella grew within me over a lifetime marked by subjugation and oppression. Stellarella developed out of my personal experience of growing up as a girl, becoming a woman, and finally being ordained in the Episcopal Church, a historical institution constructed to reinforce the authority of a male dominant society.
→ Read More