05-08 TABLE of CONTENTS:
LAPD Captain Betty P. Kelepecz, "continuing
the legacy."
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Leslie Woodcock Tentler and J. M. Redman.
LAPD Captain Betty P. Kelepecz
"I need to pave the
way for other women as those before me did for me," LAPD Captain
Betty P. Kelepecz said."I'm continuing the legacy."
Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams formally presented Capt.
Betty P. Kelepecz with a commander's badge May 8, 1997 that made her the
highest-rankingfem ale officer LAPD history.
Kelepecz earned a law degree and become an attorney
while rising through the department's ranks, is noted as an effective leader
and administrator.
Just before Kelepecz's promotion, an internal report
confirmed former Det. Mark Fuhrman's allegations that a group of male officers
in the West Los Angeles police station repeatedly harassed female colleagues.
Such harassment is not unique to LAPD.
"We didn't see it as harassment
back then, we saw it as playing along, doing what you needed to do to survive,"
Capt. Kelepeecz said. "Some male officers would
say to me, 'I don't think you belong on the job.' "
She said that the attitudes of some of her
male colleagues toward women during the early part of her career would
not be tolerated in today's LAPD. She recalls enduring inappropriate and
demeaning comments and even outright hostility as a young officer.
Penny Harrington, director of the National Center
for Women in Policing and a former chief of the Portland, Ore., Police
Department, from which she retired after continued political harassment
cost her her health said the promotion is "long overdue."
"I'm glad they're appointing
her to this rank," she said. "But
most police departments throughout the United States have had women in
these ranks for years. I hope they take this opportunity to promote the
other women to top jobs so this is not just a token promotion."
At the time of Kelepecz's promotion, LAPD was
17.3% female.
[Additional information
for this article from the Los Angeles Times.]
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05-08 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS
05-08 Anniversaries B. 05-08-1662, Countess Maria Aurora Konigsmark,
a typical non-existent (female) political power from the annuls of history.
She was an emissary sent to Sweden for peace talks and dozens of other
missions. As mistress of the King of Poland, she exerted great power at
the Saxony court - as did thousands of other royal wives, mistresses, and
mothers and sisters in other nations throughout history.
B. 05-08-1821, Ella E. Gibson, U.S. ordained minister and army chaplain
before she became an atheist and wrote The Godly Women of the Bible,
by an Ungodly Woman of the Nineteenth Century (1878).
B. 05-08-1835, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, U.S. novelist whose
work is critically described today as sentimental and overblown, woman-stuff,
but it sold very well in the mid 19th century. The unstated fact is that
more than just women read her works. A Civil War report states that a Union
general ordered all copies of her book , Macaria, in the possession
of his troop was to be burned and the soldiers forbidded to read it. Heady
actions for a book that only women read! Macaria was written in
support of the Confederate position.
B. 05-08-1910, Mary Lou Williams, U.S. arranger, composer, and pianist
known as the "Queen of Jazz."
A child prodigy, she toured while still in elementary
school. Her piano playing was outstanding.
She wrote a number of well known jazz tunes and is
considered a main contributor to the development of bebop.
She arranged and created music for most of the big
bands from Duke Ellington to the Dorseys.
MLW converted to Catholicism after an emotional crisis
while she was touring in France and went into a retreat. She composed several
masses and religious music but she returned to the jazz/swing stage.
She was artist in residence at Duke University. Her
recording of the History of Jazz - lecture and music - as well as
the later Embrace are outstanding.
B. 05-08-1912, Ray Lev, Russian-born, U.S. classical pianist.
B. 05-08-1943, Toni Tennille, singing half of the popular 1970s
duo, Captain and Tennille.
Event: 05-08-1950: Lieutenant Commander Bernice Rosenthal Walters,
becomes the first woman assigned to a naval vessel, the hospital ship Consolation.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
TENTLER, LESLIE WOODCOCK:
"American women began
to work outside the home in significant and increasing numbers after 1875.
Most of it was done by the daughters of the working class.
"Did the employment interval - generally 6-8
years between school-leaving and marriage - alter in fundamental ways,
the values, behavior, and expectations of young women? Did the work experience,
for example, deter early marriage among working class girls and cause them
to center their adult lives less exclusively around the family than their
mothers had done?"
-- Leslie Woodcock Tentler,
Wage-Earning Women, Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States,
1900-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1979.
REDMAN, J. M.:
" 'I'm trying to sort
out some things for myself,' (a very strict, anti-abortion Catholic woman)
said.
" 'I...Do you think it was God's intention that
those women be punished?' (Several women had been murdered because they
had abortions.)
" 'Why would He bother?'
" 'What do you mean?'
" 'Those who sin spend an eternity in hell, right?'
"She nodded.
" 'How long is eternity?' I asked.
" 'How...one can't know that,' she replied. 'Forever.'
" 'And the average human life span? Seventy or
so years?'
" 'About that, yes.'
"With an eternity in which to punish us, why
does God need to bother with the few years we have here? Since death is
inevitable, how much of a punishment can it be? If confession and repentance
are really possible, why take that away to give a punishment that is inevitable?
To send the guilty to hell fifty years early? What's fifty years to eternity?"
-- J. M. Redman in her
novel Deaths of Jocasta which deals with the violence against women's
clinics.
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