Several months ago I tormented you with several versions of a short story I wrote. Well, forget all the previous versions of The Nurse aka Don’t Pick Up a Stranger. I’m reworking it for the umpteenth time, to prepare for the Mad Anthony Writers’ Conference (www.madanthonycbf.org) . Besides registering for the pre-conference Murder and Mayhem event (includes a trip to the morgue), I also signed up for a story critique by one of the presenters at the conference.

I had to do a little online research for the story, to make sure a school was in operation at a specified time. Gross factual errors will get a story slammed in a New York minute. While online, I also clicked some links from my Funds For Writers e-newsletter (www.fundsforwriters.com). I learned that March is Women’s History Month.

People wonder why women need their own month of history. What I figured out today is that women, blacks, and other groups omitted from history texts didn’t fight military wars. In my experience, history was taught from the perspective of war. We moved from explorers’ conquests of new lands to the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and on and on. That’s our nation’s history.

The marginalized groups, in the meantime, contributed to the social workings of this country. Perhaps a textbook needs to be written from a social history perspective with war being given a paragraph’s mention. I wonder what kind of a nation we would be?