Joan Of Arc Press

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 and begin a life-long friendship that takes them on different paths, facing the obstacles of sexism, racism, and the ever-present turmoil of the Vietnam War. Their saga continuously forces them to choose between the aspirations of the human spirit, and the temptations of the flesh. Will they choose the spirit or the beast ... or languish in the middle state?