My Roots and Hidden Lives

To get the Women of the Year blog started, prior to our official kick-off on January 1, 2013, I need to honor the three women whose innate common sense, dedication, good humor, and compassion are a legacy to me ("Common sense? Beth?!" I can hear my mother say): Virginia Hartke Whittingham, my paternal grandmother; Gladys Weaver Bragger, my maternal grandmother; Jean Whittingham, my mother. To borrow from George Eliot's Middlemarch, "that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." These three, as you can see, were beautiful women. Their talents and accomplishments were heralded in private, but deserve recognition as much as if they'd hosted the first television cooking show, designed the Pope's robes, or won Wimbledon. To me, when I think of the families they nurtured in both bust and boom times with the absolute certainty that they would never fail us, they were heroic.