By Carol Putnam ~ I can’t really blame my mother for what she did. My father was an abusive alcoholic. I had seen him hit her on numerous occasions; once hard enough to make her mouth bleed. My sister and I were punished with a belt or backhanded. Yet despite what happened during the week, we still made it to church every Sunday morning. On that particular day we were all “good Christians." Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr Life for my mother was a living hell. (It was no picnic for us kids either.) But like I said, I can’t blame her. She was born in a small, backwater town in the North Dakota badlands during the Depression . Hardship was just a way of life, and a “good Christian woman” had to endure without complaining. The nuptial phrase “for better or worse” meant literally that. Divorce was viewed as a one-way ticket to Hell. At the very least, it was a scandal no decent woman could abide. Over the course of our lives my mother tried desperatel...

By Carol Putnam ~ T his simple yet profoundly insightful question was posed by my neighbor's six-year-old daughter, Jillian. It was inspired by her twelve-year-old sister Sarah's recent emergence into womanhood, i.e. the onset of her first menses. Rather than try to put a positive spin on this life-changing and often traumatic event in a young woman's life, their mother—an Evangelical Christian—explained to the girls that this was the curse the great Jehovah put upon Eve for her disobedience in the Garden of Eden. Image by d u .r. M a c i e l via Flickr      I nearly choked on my cucumber sandwich when I heard her say that. ( Does anyone even use the term "The Curse" anymore? I wondered.) Apparently some ECs do. And in doing so, they continue to burden their daughters with the same guilt, shame and degradation that for thousands of years have kept women the world over subjugated by the specious dictates of an ectoplasmic tyrant with some seriou...