Word: emmette
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Last Saturday I went to lunch at Mrs. Emmett's for the first time this year. She kissed me at the door, admired my sheepskin coat as she took it into her bedroom, and led me into the livingroom of her small apartment overlooking the corner of Concord and Garden Streets. (One of the first things she did after moving in was personally to inspect the statue of the soldier built in the triangle between those two streets--if she was going to be looking at him every day, she wanted to know who he was.) She had made...
...Emmett seemed more worried this time than I'd ever seen her before. We talked about the disintegration of the family, which she sees as one of the worst changes since her time. "I went to a meeting of Radcliffe graduates who wanted to go back to work or school," she said, "and they were demanding child-care centers where they could stick their children all day--children six years old and under. Why, I think that's dreadful." When I argued that maybe day-care centers wouldn't be necessary if husbands would take half of the responsibility...
...never hire a woman lawyer or a woman doctor," she said. Another time she told me that if she'd been a man she would certainly have become a lawyer. There have been lawyers in every generation of her family since at least her grandfather's time, and Mrs. Emmett firmly believes that aptitude for a profession is largely inherited. "When my son was six years old," she said, "he came down to the breakfast table one morning and announced, 'I'm going to be a lawyer.'" Mrs. Emmett admires people who decide early what they want...
...Emmett takes her politics very seriously. "When I heard that women had been given the vote," she once told me. "I sat down and cried, because I thought of all the work that was ahead of me." She reads The Christian Science Monitor and the Sunday Times, and fumes about Mr. Nixon's latest imbecilities ("Well, what do you think about our current President?" she rejoined, after I had said that maybe things weren't going downhill as feel as she seemed to think). She is an adamant pacifist ("I've lived through five wars," she says...
BEFORE I LEFT her apartment on Saturday, Mrs. Emmett read me an article from the Sunday Times written by Loren Eiseley. ("He's one of the only modern writers I like," she said. "The others are so full of examining their feelings and describing their inner thoughts--I don't think such introspection gets you anywhere.") In the article, Eiseley discussed the glacial epoch in relation to man's fear of nature, described our current world situation as the depths of winter, and deplored the "heedless ones" who want "liberation without responsibility" (here Mrs. Emmett looked over the clipping...