A Beast No More

<p>Liberalized Radicalized Criminalized: Three Young Women in a World of Change. On a day in June of 1950 three baby girls are born at the same time in the same hospital. Baby Brigid goes home to a middle-class lily-white west Cleveland suburb where her Hungarian firefighter father and Irish homemaker mother instill traditional Catholic values. Baby Babs grows up in Shaker Heights an upper-class east Cleveland suburb where her Jewish father a NASA astrophysicist and her German Catholic mother a NASA scientist provide a stimulating life of intellectual inquiry even as they grapple with a challenging affliction that strikes Babs early in life. Baby Rosie lives in Cleveland's colorful west side where her Italian parents own the neighborhood grocery store and her father serves as city councilman. The girls meet up again fourteen years later at an all girls Catholic high school in Cleveland where they develop a deep bond and lifelong friendship. This friendship provides a foundation for survival as they struggle against the prevailing societal norms of sexism and racism. With a vibrant backdrop of rock and roll space exploration and explosive cultural change the girls enter college campuses in 1968. While there they are liberalized radicalized and criminalized. Their saga evolves into an intense bildungsroman as they confront their choices to obey the calling to a higher state or to wallow in the middle state between the divine and the beast or as the title quote from Hamlet suggests to become “a beast no more.”</p>