The first time I read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game I was eight years old. Let’s see—that would put us around 1981. This murder mystery features an ensemble of characters, everyone with a part to play, but what I remembered then and enjoyed most this time (older and wiser) were the two sisters:
The eldest beautiful one who, when she realized people only spoke of her as a bride to be and a future wife of and that she herself could not name any other kind of self, decided to postpone marriage and study medicine first. And the younger, pugnacious, pig-tailed, one with a proclivity for kicking shins who makes a fortune and becomes the CEO of a large firm and who recognizing she has a perfectly fulfilling life choses not to become a mother.
Big deal eh? Women increasingly do these things, right? Not so much in the 80s when the ERA—strangled by women from the Christian Right with an assist from the otherwise despised by them Latter Day Saint women—was in its death spiral and advertisers were selling cigarettes made just for us cause we’d “come a long way baby” and perfume assured us we could bring home the bacon and still have time to satisfy a man. No, a young Utah girl didn’t have many examples of self-determination back then, not in her community, not in the media.
These sisters didn’t teach me to expect “more.” Their choices and outcomes described in this book as simply normal things women might do invited me to think about all life’s possibilities and imagine a way to become myself rather than a fall into a role in someone else’s play.