By Kathy Y. Wilson

I have a close friend who tells me hokey is OK sometimes. This collection of stories is about healing. In my book, healing as a concept is pretty hokey, pretty New Age.

But it's all about context.

So the Women's Issue 2000 isn't about crystals, incense, hugging and weeping. It's about issues. It's about identifying past wrinkles and setting them straight.

In this issue, CityBeat staffers thought and wrote about things -- relationships with their mothers, identity and religion -- in a manner they hadn't before. Some of them, like advertising coordinator Tracy Walker and production artist Rebecca Lomax, aren't writers by profession. But when asked to participate, they stepped up and wrote elegant, even titillating, stories.

See, that's the thing about women. Rarely do we let our fears or anxieties interfere with the larger cause. We try, and while doing so we're not fixated by or sidelined because of some ideal we possess of how things should be.

Reality is a mutha, and we're cool with that.

Speaking of causes and ideals, rarely does any issue -- besides perhaps race and gay and lesbian rights -- spark the level of opinion that Feminism does. When asked on the readers' questionnaire if they thought Feminism was "dead," Greater Cincinnati women responded in either succinct, one-word answers ("Yes") or came back with thesis-length diatribes as to why such a question was stupid to ask in the first place. Of course it's not dead, some said.

Such questions almost make it seem silly to publish a Women's Issue or, for that matter, a Men's Issue. It's almost like Black History Month -- a ghetto set aside for one group to bask in a manmade spotlight, never to be heard from until the same time next year.

Can't we all just get along? Of course not.

We need this fifth annual Women's Issue as much as the world needs women. And that's a helluva lot.

E-mail Kathy Y. Wilson

Locals Only (April 27, 2000)
Get on the Bus (March 2, 2000)
Family Affair (February 24, 2000)
more...

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My Mother, Myself
Living in black and white

Generation Next
College campuses debate the life, death and redefinition of Feminism

What Would Jesus Do?
A female minister answers the call

Girl, Interrupted
A daughter reckons with her mother's past and a time when abused women had no place to turn

Take My Mother, Please!
My mother takes life's lumps one laugh at a time

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