This promotional photo shows Ruth Millett's typewriter out on the living room table. But her twins, Pete and Lynne, say their mother actually wrote in her bedroom. When the weekly deadline for Millett's six weekly installments of her column loomed, the twins remember their mom disappearing into her room and shutting the door.
For a couple of hours, no sounds emerged from the room where Ruth Millett shut herself up to think and do her work. And then--suddenly--her twins would hear a burst of typing.
Thirty minutes or so after the rapid fire typing began, Ruth Millett would emerge, a neat stack of columns in hand, with corrections made in pencil. She would slip them in an envelope and drop them in the mail to her editor. Then Millett would turn her full attention back to the job of running her house and raising her twins, until the next deadline reared its head....
My 87 yr-old mother has entered nursing home, and in cleaning out her home I came across a small address book that belonged to my paternal grandmother. Affixed to the inside front cover is a photograph of my grandmother at age 18, and stapled to the back cover is an article by Ruth Millett entitled "Woman Must Learn To Stand Alone". My grandmother was widowed at age 42, when her husband (my grandfather) died of a streptococcal infection of the blood, treatable with sulfa drugs but sulfa drugs were being stockpiled for the war effort in 1942. Her only child, my father, enlisted in the Army Air Force in September of 1943. I am certain the article written by Ruth Millett held great importance for my grandmother, and now for me as I discover who this amazing columnist was. Thank you for your blog about Ruth Millett.
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