Fatherless, Fearless, Female: A Memoir - Paperback

by Mary Charity Kruger Stein (Author)

Mary, a Rust Belt farm girl, the bastard child of an unwed,
unconventional single mother, claws her way out of poverty and weds, but
soon stumbles over the myth of monogamy. When her first husband, Don,
dies, she seeks a more honest, equitable relationship, determined that
her infant son, Billy, will not be a fatherless child as she was. The
day before she leaves on a freighter for Greece, she meets Isaac in the
East Village, and their romance blooms as they shuttle back and forth
between Brooklyn and Crete. In addition to the distance between them,
however, Mary must also take on Isaac's conventional Jewish mother and
all her beliefs about how and where they should live.

Fatherless, Fearless, Female
follows the international adventures of the dauntless Mary as she moves
from a mob-operated strip joint in Chicago to the vineyards and
villages of Crete, from art schools in New York and Jerusalem to the
Imperial Iranian Air Force Base in Isfahan during the revolution of '78.
Along the way, she navigates through a maze of broken vows, broken
families, and broken educational systems--and learns, at last, the value
of love and the true meaning of her mother's deathbed story.

Author Biography

Mary C. K. Stein is a #MeToo octogenarian who started life as a Rust Belt farmgirl and learned the hard way the pitfalls that await the poor and unprotected in their quest for upward social mobility. After working for Bell Telephone, and then as a stripper in a mob-operated show lounge, and after that as a substitute teacher in an underserved middle school in Brooklyn, she began teaching AP/IB English abroad. That work took her to six countries on five continents: Greece, Egypt, Venezuela, China, Panama, and Taiwan. She wrote Fatherless, Fearless, Female in the hopes that it will give the current women's movements their own embodiment of exploited youth, a memorable Times Up Topsy, to help focus attention on their issues and bring about social change. She lives in Reno, Nevada.