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Happy Women’s Equality Day!
By Ellen Snortland Pasadena Weekly Columnist
For many years now, my female friends have received an unusual invitation from me regarding Aug. 26, Women’s Equality Day (W.E.D.).
About 16 years ago, at a mutual friend’s home, I met national treasure, women’s historian hero and advocate Molly Murphy MacGregor. After that auspicious meeting, I vowed to create the biggest brouhaha I could over the still barely mined world of women’s history. And the perfect day to do that is on Aug. 26: the day in 1920 when women’s right to vote was formalized in the U.S. Constitution. It’s party time!
For my first W.E.D. party — the first of many — I set up six round tables, each seating four, in our cozy, crowded house. Each table had purple, white and gold tablecloths and accents and a female-themed centerpiece. In our house, walls and shelves are crowded with female figurines and women’s arts and crafts from my travels. The whole joint screams global women’s visibility to visually compensate for our virtual invisibility.
In the party invitations, I issued instructions on attendance — how queenly of me! I “commanded” that each woman brings three things:
1. Bring a potluck item that represents your mother, enough to share
with at least eight people. I served rhubarb pie. My mother was an excellent baker, and rhubarb pie quintessentially represents our Great Plains homeland. Some women brought pizza, while others brought soup. One woman brought a bottle of vodka to represent her heart-breaking home life with her mom. I put the “luck” back in potluck and didn’t dictate who brought what. (Since then, we’ve had some very odd meals!)
2. Bring a picture of your mom and a short anecdote about her. The story can be good, bad, comic and/or tragic, like the woman who brought the vodka.
3. Bring a joke that would never be told by a woman in your grand-
mother’s day, and be prepared to tell it. Why? I have never heard a man say, “I can’t tell jokes; I screw them up,” even though women often say this. Guess what? Many men can’t tell a joke, but it doesn’t stop them, even though I sometimes wish it would. I aspired to help women get over their years of being told, “Women aren’t funny.” Oh, yeah? Watch this!
I met each of the 23 W.E.D. guests at the door and draped them in a necklace with a famous woman flashcard on it. I then swung it around so the card was on their back, where only the other guests could see it. We introduced ourselves, and as an ice breaker we played 12 questions regarding the woman on our back or, more accurately, whose back had carried us forward. Ice and invisibility broken quickly! After all, history is learned more eagerly when it’s fun, right?
Please join me in the movement to have Aug. 26 declared a national voting holiday. A day devoted to registering people to vote is what is precisely needed and wanted in these times. And there are no holidays in August! For the more materialistic among us, August could use a reason to buy cards and gifts. Are you listening Hallmark, American Greetings and Jacquie Lawson?
While Memorial Day and Veterans Day commemorate those we lost to war, no other holidays celebrate peaceful, nonviolent social change. Let the suffragists become an icon for just that! Gandhi watched the suffrage activists in England, the United States and New Zealand and got many of his ideas about civil disobedience and nonviolence from watching the gals.
It’s astounding to consider how a committed number of very human, very vulnerable, nonvoting women worked tirelessly to get the vote for all women, knowing they may never get to vote themselves. They were every color, every background, every level of education. They knew human rights for women started with the vote. They demonstrated that a generous, wise human being is the kind of person who will plant a tree, even if they know they’ll never enjoy its shade or its fruit.
Meanwhile, also consider having a viewing party of “Iron Jawed Angels on HBO Max, which aptly demonstrates the courage of the foremothers whose shoulders we stand on. It’s also a tribute to “my, how times change,” as around 30 years ago, I pitched a similar idea about female suffrage to Lorimar Television for a Movie of the Week. I was told the subject matter was too boring; not enough people care about women’s history. Flash forward to 2020 to 2021 and the wealth of mainstream coverage there has been on the centennial of women winning the vote. I am buoyed by this and dismayed by how the same bastards are still trying to disenfranchise us.
Do something to celebrate this year’s W.E.D! Toast Molly Murphy MacGregor for making us all more aware of women’s history. Bake a cake, tweet a remembrance to women and girls, burn a bra. On this date, remember and honor the suffragists any way you can.n.
Ellen Snortland has written “Consider This…” for a heckuva long time, and she also coaches first-time book authors! Contact her at ellen@ beautybitesbeast.com.
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City of Hope Helford Clinical Research Hospital is located in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley. City of Hope offers world-class cancer expertise, innovative clinical trials and compassionate care close to home.
CAR T AND THE WEDDING OF HER DREAMS
BY LETISIA MARQUEZ
For almost half of her young life, Raeleen Whitt has battled cancer.
She was first diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia when she was 16 years old. Since then, the cancer has returned three times.
Her latest remission, however, has lasted nearly four years due to an innovative immunotherapy treatment — chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy — developed at City of Hope.
This approach utilizes a patient’s own immune cells, which are genetically modified to recognize a protein on leukemia cells. These modified immune cells are then able to target the cancer, hopefully leading to remission. This is sometimes followed by a bone marrow or stem cell transplant to further solidify the remission.
Whitt is just one of approximately 30 patients who came to City of Hope with advanced acute lymphoblastic leukemia who have achieved remission thanks to a clinical trial that utilized this CAR T cell immunologic approach.
Before the CAR T therapy, Whitt’s cancer was not under control and she had few, if any, options for treatment. After the CAR T therapy, similar to the other patients in the clinical trial, Whitt achieved a complete remission and tolerated therapy well with minimal side effects.
City of Hope now has one of the most comprehensive CAR T cell programs in the world, with nearly 50 clinical trials that are either ongoing or soon to open, treating both cancers of the blood and immune system, as well as solid tumors. More than 600 patients have undergone CAR T cell therapy at City of Hope, and more than 17,000 patients have undergone a bone marrow or stem cell transplant.
For Whitt, CAR T therapy went remarkably well. She said the most serious side effect was a high fever.
“It got me back into remission, which was the main goal,” she said.
There was also another major concern. Whitt had to decide if she wanted to get an umbilical cord stem cell transplant after the CAR T cell therapy. Radiation would wipe out her bone marrow, and then the cord transplant, using two different donors, would replace her bone marrow, hoping to help eliminate any remaining leukemia in her body.
Following achievement of remission with the CAR T therapy, Whitt then underwent the transplant, hoping that the combination of the remission achieved by the CAR T cells and the transplant of donated healthy stem cells would finally lead to a cure. At the present time, she continues to be in remission.
City of Hope patient Raeleen Whitt poses with her husband, Kyle, on their wedding day.
Whitt, now 30, is an aesthetician and recently wed her fiancée, Kyle, in Lindon, Utah, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It was the dream winter wedding she’d always wanted.
