Two interesting childless women

Two interesting childless women that I've run across in my reading this week and wanted to share about here: 

I mentioned in my D.E. Stevenson group that I was reading "Lady in Waiting" by Anne Glenconner (my review here). Someone brought up the subject of "The Little Princesses" by Marion Crawford, and everyone started chiming in on whether they had read it and what they thought. (I read it myself when I was a young teenager, although I haven't re-read it in many years now.) 

"The Little Princesses" was one of the very first "tell-all"/behind the scenes books about the British royal family, written by a former employee. The author, Marion Crawford, also known as "Crawfie,"  was nanny/governess to Princesses Elizabeth (now Queen) and Margaret for 16 years, from 1932 to her retirement in 1948. 

By today's standards, "The Little Princesses" is pretty tame -- but when it was published in 1950, it created a sensation. There's some question about whether the Royal Family/Queen Mother had approved Crawfie's anonymous participation in magazine stories about the family, and also questions about the roles of Crawfie's husband and publisher. 

However the book came about, Crawfie was completely shunned by the family she had served for so long & so well. She moved out of the "grace and favour" cottage at Kensington Palace she had been gifted by the family for her service, which was supposed to have been hers for her lifetime (and which was later occupied by both Princes William and Harry and their wives). Reportedly, she was heartbroken by the ostracization, and attempted suicide at least once after the death of her husband in 1977. They postponed marriage for many years as the Queen/Queen Mother insisted they could not do without Crawfie, and finally married around the same time that Elizabeth & Philip did -- but by then she was in her late 30s, and she never had any children of her own. She wound up living close to Balmoral, but no one from the family ever came to see her, or even sent flowers when she died in 1988... one of many unsung women who devoted their lives to raising other people's children, at the expense of their own families. 

I Googled and found a couple of articles about her (some linked above), including this one from last summer. 

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I stumbled onto an amazing article from the Washington Post about Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway from Florida who just happened to be on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970 -- and became the subject of one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century. 

Vecchio is still just 64 years old (!) -- only a few years older than me. The fallout from that day has affected her entire life -- but she has made peace with John Filo, the student photographer who took the photo (and won the Pulitzer Prize for it and his other photos from that day), and has found some healing in helping others. She was deeply affected by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. 

She ended an unhappy marriage by the time she was in her 40s, and has never had children.