Women in the Spotlight: Sarah Palin

In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly says, "There are certain shades of limelight that will wreck a girl's complection." That's the spotlight I choose to shine on Sarah Palin this week. For centuries, women have fought for equal rights, both here in the U.S. and around the world. Sarah Palin is setting us back by a decade or two at least. Women already have to campaign harder to work their way up the political ladder and having someone as inept and blatantly idiotic as she is in the center arena does not make it any easier. A friend linked me to Vanity Fair's article "Palin's Resignation: The Edited Version" and it underscores just how unqualified this woman was for Vice President (or any other political position in my personal opinion). The saddest thing, though, is that she probably worked really hard on that speech and was proud of it. At least that was the attitude I encountered working at my first job proofreading content for apartment newsletters. I learned that many people in our country are so poorly educated in English that they don't even know how bad their writing is. And they got extremely agitated when I fixed the blatant grammatical errors (like subject and verb not matching in number) and say, "I worked on that for hours. How could you rewrite it?" And I wanted to tell them all, "I'm sorry, but you really shouldn't have." Meanwhile pondering how much worse the original version could have possibly been? (And immediately deciding that I'd rather not know.)
Now, this is all just speculation. I don't know how much time Palin spent on this speech or how she felt about it. Or even if it was her who wrote it (though VF made it sound like it). Regardless, she should be embarrassed for having given it, because it's one of the most poorly written (and factually inaccurate--she thought President Lincoln's cabinet was responsible for the purchase of Alaska. Isn't that the kind of thing a state governor ought to know?) things I've read since getting laid off from the newsletter company. My cousin wrote better than that in 5th grade. Sadly, most of her listeners probably saw no more wrong with it than she did. Which ought to serve as an indictment (or, preferably, a wake-up call) to us on the state of public education. Instead that's the first thing governments cut when budget crises strike (just look at California right now if you don't believe me).
Kudos goes to VF highlighting the spectacular-ness of editors. So many newspapers and magazines seem to be dispensing with these positions as they send things online. It's reassuring to know that someone is upholding the integrity of the written word in the media.

Women in the Spotlight: Augusta Ada King

One of my favorite things about my new job is that I learn something new every day. A minute piece of trivia that I stumbled across on Friday inspired me to create this new column on my blog. Every week I will spotlight a different woman in history. This is by no means intended as a biography or other in-depth study, but merely a means of bringing to light women whose accomplishments that have impressed me in some way but that I never learned about in school. I will begin with the woman who inspired it all: Augusta Ada King, Lady Lovelace, who is credited with creating the first computer program (which consisted of holes drilled in a wooden card as well as the basic concepts of structured programming that are still followed today). She was also the daughter of poet Lord Byron, though she was raised almost solely by her mother. She not only suggested a program for a machine created by Charles Babbage that would calculate Bernoulli numbers, she also foresaw that such machines could go beyond number-crunching and calculations to create complex music and graphics and as such be used for both practical and scientific purposes. She managed to be both creative and analytical, mathematical and poetical. Which makes me identify with her because I've always been good at math, but had a passion for creative writing (a trait I've not found to be common among my other creative writing-inclined friends). It is a marvel to me that such a woman could have been raised in Georgian-Victorian England--a time period not precisely known for looking kindly on women's education or rights. And it makes me even more interested in studying that period on a graduate school level.

(Sources: Ada Byron Network, "Ada Lovelace Biography" by Betty Alexander Toole, Ed.D. and "Ada Lovelace" - Wikipedia)