somehow, my five-year-old brain had grasped the ideas the '-ess' was the culmination of all things feminine and highly desirable. it was a suffix that separated the girls from the boys in the best of all possible ways. princess, goddess, actress, countess. what was there not to love?... '-ess' made any profession sound glamorous. a laundress, a sorceress, an adulteress. to this day, i'm convinced that, if someone had only been enterprising enough to call female MDs 'doctoresses' and female scientists 'nuclear biologesses,' i would have been equally enthusiastic about becoming those, too
- hypocrite in a pouffy white dress
