Thursday and day 27 ! 30 poems in 30 days !! Nearly there,,,

Today it's Amazing Anne Rhodes.
Here's a beautiful poem about "Grace"

POEM ….GRACE      © Anne Rhodes

Grace, when I first knew her, was tall and thin,
Sad to say that she wasn’t really kin.
She worked hard always with an inward grace
Of sore heartache she never showed a trace.

Placid and obedient to her mother,
Nonetheless she always loved another.
She loved my uncle who worked on the farm
Another gentle soul who caused no harm.

Poor Grace had promised to obey her Ma,
Who’d just been a skivvy to Grace’s Pa.
“Never marry anyone while I live”
Was the promise Grace had to give.

One of the quietest I ever knew
Most women chatter but there’s very few
who can sit silently just listening
To all the news that the family bring.

They’d got so used to their undeclared love
That even when Ma died and “went above”
They stayed single but true to each other
Neither of them ever loved another.

She was my Aunty just as if they’d wed,
‘Twas almost as if their vows had been said.
They farmed together, cared for sheep and cows,
Lambs and kittens viewed you with raised eyebrows.

Grace by name and nature right to the end
she would do anything not to offend.
She loved and cared for Uncle through all ills
And kept the farm going up on the hills.

Her bones got lumpy but she carried on
We still visited after Bill had gone
She was still my Aunty , she loved us all
Her day was made when on her we did call.

Grace by name and nature, all folk agreed
The Crem was packed and stories told indeed
Memories of the farm and her work out there
Of all her kindness and her loving care.

Facts about Spinsters

The first American woman to win the Nobel Prize was a lifelong single woman. The year was 1931 and the celebrated spinster was Jane Addams.

Coco Chanel was also a lifelong single woman.

“In one particularly telling 1962 poll, the majority of married women claimed that they were happy, but only 10 percent wanted their daughters to follow suit.

During the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, of the nearly two-hundred people accused of witchcraft…the majority were adult women at the fringes of society, whether poor single mothers or widows whose wealth inspired jealousy.”

“Of the tens of thousands executed for witchcraft in central Europe from 1450 to 1750, three quarters were widows over fifty who lived alone. Which is to say that her crime was the audacity of existing without a husband.”

The word “date” appeared in a mainstream publication (with quotation marks) for the first time in 1914.

Maybe the Victorian era wasn’t what we think and what women really wanted was freedom from having so many children: ” the so-called ‘passionlessness’ we attribute to Victorian women was their ingenious means of shutting down their own libidos, and those of their husbands, in order to abstain from sex at a time when birth control was unreliable and/or simply physically uncomfortable…”

About women in the workforce in the late 1800s: “Key to women’s ascent was the typewriter. Invented in 1867…In 1870, only 4 percent of stenographers and typists were women…by 1900, they were at almost 80 percent.”

Thanks Anne,