I think that's the one that sets off a firestorm if it's written that way as a federal hammer against any state actions.
Stupid Luck and Happenstance, Thread II
- Thread starter Peabody-Martini
- Start date
I think that's the one that sets off a firestorm if it's written that way as a federal hammer against any state actions.
Kristine's vocation, in the medical profession, is also a softer sell than other careers for famous women of their time, like astronaut, or anything on Kat's CV. She's not the first royal to do that, either. And they would expect some... eccentricities from Kiki, since she's both a princess and European.
Some people will love her for what she is, some would hate her for what she represents, but her very presence would stir interest and change for the American society.
The fact is that Prinzessin Kristine von Preußen can influence and change the world in a way doctor Kiki Fischer cannot.
Some people will love her for what she is, some would hate her for what she represents, but her very presence would stir interest and change for the American society.
The fact is that Prinzessin Kristine von Preußen can influence and change the world in a way doctor Kiki Fischer cannot.
Another book for later on:
Captain, Doctor, Princess - the many faces of the modern German Monarchy.
Gloria Steinman
A look at the evolution of the German Monarchy from the end of WWII based on the example of Princess Dr Kristina Von Preußen and her departure from "traditional Princess" roles, via the military into her medical career, as well as looking at the role-models that helped to shape her life including Katherine Von Mischner-Blackwood, Jehane Thomas-Romanova and Dr Nora Berg.
Is Nancy on this trip?
If so we could get an update about Beatrice bed roommate at UW, when we last saw her she was living in Portland Oregon with her husband and children and her husband was sending signals to Nancy that he was open to having an affair with her.
I would not be surprised to learn that Beatrice is now divorced and had to get a job only to find out that her MRS. degree is basically worthless.
If so we could get an update about Beatrice bed roommate at UW, when we last saw her she was living in Portland Oregon with her husband and children and her husband was sending signals to Nancy that he was open to having an affair with her.
I would not be surprised to learn that Beatrice is now divorced and had to get a job only to find out that her MRS. degree is basically worthless.
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I suppose the fact that in ITTL there is no Rosie the Riveter allowing women to show not just men but themselves what they can achieve is part of holding things back. IOTL American women worked at home, served abroad and gained a sense of independence and self worth that hasn't happened ITTL. Little wonder this society struggles to understand people like Kat or Kiki.
Princess Kristina may be invited to address a group of Girl Scouts and Kiki may cause a fuss when she insist that the audience is integrated and the seating is not segregated with African-Americans put in the back, bonus points if the talk is at Constitutional Hall owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
The talk could be about how Germany won the war against Communist Soviet Union by using women to fill vital rolls and point out how women like Grafin von Mischner was not much older then herself, she should point out that women who were widowed still had to make a living to provide for their families after the war and reforms were made to protect women their rights to equal employment, education, and property.
So in other words a non-controversial talk to impressionable young women is in order.
What would also be nice if Kiki can get in contact with a Mrs. Olivia Andersen of St. Cloud MN.
The talk could be about how Germany won the war against Communist Soviet Union by using women to fill vital rolls and point out how women like Grafin von Mischner was not much older then herself, she should point out that women who were widowed still had to make a living to provide for their families after the war and reforms were made to protect women their rights to equal employment, education, and property.
So in other words a non-controversial talk to impressionable young women is in order.
What would also be nice if Kiki can get in contact with a Mrs. Olivia Andersen of St. Cloud MN.
I don't think that she'd demand to be so (not really her style), but she may publicly express amazement that it isn't.
Its likely that the Supreme Court happened only ITTL. Given the changes of OTL and specially post war, many of those laws were simply ignored or replaced by newer laws that adecuated things to the OTL status quo on some aspects, while keeping the ones that the bible thumping gang wouldn't compromise about....
The problem is that if Princess Kristina speaks before a segregated audience it will cause a backlash in the German press back home.
It actually seems pretty unlikely for Germany to have a more than miniscule amount of blacks, the colonies were pretty short lived, and slavery was never a thing,
and because of language and colonies both Britain and France should be the more obvious "designations" for immigrants from Africa.
Which means something like black and white segregation should be one of the more obvious blind spots for the german press, while the gender discrimination should hit close enough to german political issues for the press to jump on it.
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Part 86, Chapter 1328
Chapter One Thousand Three Hundred Twenty-Eight
16th May 1959
Rock Creek Park, Washington D.C.
A seventeen-year-old with a chip on her shoulder, who had who knew what sort of poison dripped into her ears by her elders was an international incident waiting to happen. Nancy’s worries were offset somewhat by Kiki’s inclination towards being nice. She hadn’t said or done anything untoward, yet anyway. It wasn’t helped by the usual sort of idiocy that infested Washington D.C. Anyone who said the Supreme Court wasn’t composed of politicians in black robes was deluding themselves. They had recently tried to side-step a direct challenge to the State of Michigan’s restrictive vice laws by ruling that the plaintiff in the case lacked standing. In their clumsy attempt to avoid making a definitive decision about a contentious issue, they had sited a late Nineteenth Century case that had some of the most odious quotes about women imaginable associated with it. Informed women everywhere were outraged by what had happened and regrettably that included Kiki herself.
Nancy had spoken with Kiki about it and had convinced her that the American public didn’t want to hear about the times they fell short of their ideals by a teenaged visitor. At the same time, Nancy was very much aware that an outsider’s perspective was probably clearer than that of people who had spent their entire lives living on the inside. Not that the view from the inside was much better when one knew what they were looking at. Nancy had gotten an earful of woe when she had made the mistake of calling her friend Beatrice in Portland. Beatrice was convinced that her husband Ross was having another affair and she was terrified that she was pregnant again. Thirty-two years-old, five children and trapped in a loveless marriage because in Oregon getting a divorce required moving Heaven and Earth. Even if she was successful in giving Ross the boot, the odds were very high that Beatrice would lose everything in the process. If Nancy had wanted to be mean, she would have asked if this was a part of what Beatrice had been expecting when she had gotten married right out of school. At the moment, all Nancy wanted to do was go home and not have to think of any of this.
This afternoon, watching Kiki interact with a group of girl scouts in their green and white uniforms in was a reminder that she actually was good at this. The girls were eating it up as Kiki told them about enduring military training and her ambition to become a Surgeon of Emergency Medicine eventually. She was wearing the conservative civilian clothes that Kiki tended to wear whenever she didn’t wear some sort of uniform. With her glasses and slightly unkempt curly hair, she just looked like an ordinary collegiate. The ideas she represented were quite radical for America though. Aside from Nancy, no one else present had any idea that the dark blue beret that she was wearing to contain her hair was a sign that she was in the Militärischer Sanitätsdienst. Perhaps if Beatrice had met the likes of Kiki early on then perhaps her life would have changed for the better.
Presently, Kiki was sitting on a picnic table with the girls around her on a warm spring day. Every few minutes Kiki would say something and there be giggling. She certainly knew her audience, Nancy had to give her that much. The girls had loads of questions. Was Kiki really a Princess? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she live in a castle? Where her friends like her? Kiki was answering their questions patiently.
Yes, she was the Princess of Prussia. No, she didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment. Then she mentioned her dearest friends, Zella and Aurora. Zella was the daughter of a Markgraf, something that resulted in her getting a collective blank look, then she said Margrave and it happened again. Giving up on trying to explain that, Kiki said that Aurora’s parents were artists and that she envied the relative freedom that her ordinary friends had. The girls had not understood what she meant by that. Then Kiki was asked why she talked so funny. There was a bit of nervous tittering during the second or two it took Kiki to formulate a response to that. Most of these girls would be unlikely to encounter someone from Germany in America these days and had no idea that Prussia was even a place within it. In good humor Kiki said it was because she was from a far-away land with castles but no dragons. That resulted in giggling. Then Kiki spoke to them in rapid fire German, followed by French and Russian, describing what she was doing in the park. The girls were back to staring at her, unsure how to respond to that as she asked them if they had additional questions. They had dozens.
The meeting with Clive Heywood had gone nowhere near as well. Mrs. Heywood had come with her husband and had been absolutely giddy at the prospect of meeting Princess Kristina. The reality was far different than what they had been expecting. Mrs. Heywood was a big fan of the pageantry of the sort that Kiki abhorred. There had been an awkward moment when Kiki had explained that rather than being introduced to Berlin Society when she was sixteen, she had decided that the Joint Medical Service would be a better use of her time and cost the family trust considerably less money. The plans that her younger sisters were making were going to bankrupt the family trust, so her father needed all the help he could get. It was impossible to tell if Kiki was joking or not. Nancy knew Marie and Victoria and she wouldn’t put it past them to demand something extravagant for when they turned sixteen. Mrs. Heywood had no idea about any of that.
16th May 1959
Rock Creek Park, Washington D.C.
A seventeen-year-old with a chip on her shoulder, who had who knew what sort of poison dripped into her ears by her elders was an international incident waiting to happen. Nancy’s worries were offset somewhat by Kiki’s inclination towards being nice. She hadn’t said or done anything untoward, yet anyway. It wasn’t helped by the usual sort of idiocy that infested Washington D.C. Anyone who said the Supreme Court wasn’t composed of politicians in black robes was deluding themselves. They had recently tried to side-step a direct challenge to the State of Michigan’s restrictive vice laws by ruling that the plaintiff in the case lacked standing. In their clumsy attempt to avoid making a definitive decision about a contentious issue, they had sited a late Nineteenth Century case that had some of the most odious quotes about women imaginable associated with it. Informed women everywhere were outraged by what had happened and regrettably that included Kiki herself.
Nancy had spoken with Kiki about it and had convinced her that the American public didn’t want to hear about the times they fell short of their ideals by a teenaged visitor. At the same time, Nancy was very much aware that an outsider’s perspective was probably clearer than that of people who had spent their entire lives living on the inside. Not that the view from the inside was much better when one knew what they were looking at. Nancy had gotten an earful of woe when she had made the mistake of calling her friend Beatrice in Portland. Beatrice was convinced that her husband Ross was having another affair and she was terrified that she was pregnant again. Thirty-two years-old, five children and trapped in a loveless marriage because in Oregon getting a divorce required moving Heaven and Earth. Even if she was successful in giving Ross the boot, the odds were very high that Beatrice would lose everything in the process. If Nancy had wanted to be mean, she would have asked if this was a part of what Beatrice had been expecting when she had gotten married right out of school. At the moment, all Nancy wanted to do was go home and not have to think of any of this.
This afternoon, watching Kiki interact with a group of girl scouts in their green and white uniforms in was a reminder that she actually was good at this. The girls were eating it up as Kiki told them about enduring military training and her ambition to become a Surgeon of Emergency Medicine eventually. She was wearing the conservative civilian clothes that Kiki tended to wear whenever she didn’t wear some sort of uniform. With her glasses and slightly unkempt curly hair, she just looked like an ordinary collegiate. The ideas she represented were quite radical for America though. Aside from Nancy, no one else present had any idea that the dark blue beret that she was wearing to contain her hair was a sign that she was in the Militärischer Sanitätsdienst. Perhaps if Beatrice had met the likes of Kiki early on then perhaps her life would have changed for the better.
Presently, Kiki was sitting on a picnic table with the girls around her on a warm spring day. Every few minutes Kiki would say something and there be giggling. She certainly knew her audience, Nancy had to give her that much. The girls had loads of questions. Was Kiki really a Princess? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she live in a castle? Where her friends like her? Kiki was answering their questions patiently.
Yes, she was the Princess of Prussia. No, she didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment. Then she mentioned her dearest friends, Zella and Aurora. Zella was the daughter of a Markgraf, something that resulted in her getting a collective blank look, then she said Margrave and it happened again. Giving up on trying to explain that, Kiki said that Aurora’s parents were artists and that she envied the relative freedom that her ordinary friends had. The girls had not understood what she meant by that. Then Kiki was asked why she talked so funny. There was a bit of nervous tittering during the second or two it took Kiki to formulate a response to that. Most of these girls would be unlikely to encounter someone from Germany in America these days and had no idea that Prussia was even a place within it. In good humor Kiki said it was because she was from a far-away land with castles but no dragons. That resulted in giggling. Then Kiki spoke to them in rapid fire German, followed by French and Russian, describing what she was doing in the park. The girls were back to staring at her, unsure how to respond to that as she asked them if they had additional questions. They had dozens.
The meeting with Clive Heywood had gone nowhere near as well. Mrs. Heywood had come with her husband and had been absolutely giddy at the prospect of meeting Princess Kristina. The reality was far different than what they had been expecting. Mrs. Heywood was a big fan of the pageantry of the sort that Kiki abhorred. There had been an awkward moment when Kiki had explained that rather than being introduced to Berlin Society when she was sixteen, she had decided that the Joint Medical Service would be a better use of her time and cost the family trust considerably less money. The plans that her younger sisters were making were going to bankrupt the family trust, so her father needed all the help he could get. It was impossible to tell if Kiki was joking or not. Nancy knew Marie and Victoria and she wouldn’t put it past them to demand something extravagant for when they turned sixteen. Mrs. Heywood had no idea about any of that.
The only thing worst doing that than finding no one speaks other languages, is finding out someone does speak the language and hasn't been letting on.
Had a lot of fun with that. Sitting behind two old ladies on a bus in Vancouver while they were dissing everyone on the bus, in Hungarian, not knowing I understood everything they were saying. As I was getting off the bus and passing their seat I leaned over and said, in Hungarian, "Good afternoon ladies" and left. Always wondered about their reaction.
So basically the Supreme Court has said that the issue was political one that should be left to the state legislature to handle and the Court used language from previous cases to back it up, unfortunately the language used was less than enlightened.
Kiki is going to be a hit in America and middle class parents of young girls will see her as an excellent roll model for their girls.
Kiki is going to be a hit in America and middle class parents of young girls will see her as an excellent roll model for their girls.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the Supremes getting into trouble by digging up some fossil and brute forcing the quotes into a totally different context. Nice, and a very savvy way to get this decision to happen.
AFAIK. ITTL's USA legal environment, a widow pretty much becomes the chattel of her father, father-in-law, uncle or other male relative and any assets go to him to do with as he pleases. Mention was made of a brain drain or emigration but, sadly, that's not going to happen unless the male owner allows it.
I wonder about self-defense laws. What would happen if the local constabulary came across a woman with a fresh nightstick fracture or black eye standing over a male body with a bullet through his brisket. Note that firearms like Derringers were probably commonly available