Lock Her Up by Tina Parker

Wow. This is heavy stuff. I cannot read the words in the title without hearing them ring through a huge crowd of people with a political enemy stoked by men who had themselves committed crimes beyond what she never envisioned, let alone committed. Empathy – that precious trait of those we admire most – jumps out at me when I pick up this book because I know Tina Parker as a sweet mother and housewife very different – except in the very most elemental ways - from those she memorializes in this collection. Yet Tina knows that in a patriarchal society, men have the power to lock up women who are not obedient, and she empathizes with those who “there, but for fortune, may go you or I” – an old saying made into one of Phil Ochs’ great song lyrics and then made famous by Joan Baez’s compelling voice. Tina Parker researched this book in the archives of the Southwestern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, not far from where she grew up. And when I think about the state of Virginia and punished purport