Women of Ohio

Do you need inspiration for the Women of Ohio art and poetry competition? Here are some thoughts on Ohio woman, Doris Day. 

Remember, you can enter the Women of Ohio competition and help celebrate their stories through visual art or poetry!

🖌️Submit a poem or artwork inspired by an Ohio woman – someone famous or a hidden figure meaningful to you. 

✍️ Open to all genders
📍 Open to Ohio-based poets and visual artists only
💸 FREE to enter
🏆 $200 top prize, plus prizes for runners-up

🔗 Submit now

Doris Day Doris Day (1922–2019) was born in Cincinnati, a beloved actress and singer known for her roles in classic films like Pillow Talk. She was also an advocate for animal rights, founding the Doris Day Animal Foundation.

Aja Romano writing on Doris Day for Vox, explains:

It’s easy to see what Day’s basic appeal was. Her voice was fresh and vibrant — she was heavily influenced by Ella Fitzgerald’s vocal style — and she had an energy and vivacity that came through even from her earliest roles. But Day also had the ability to present an enticing, almost fantastical picture of sexual purity. All of Day’s romantic comedies had a distinct formula designed to reward the female virgin for holding out: Time and again, her cheeky, assertive, yet firmly conservative ways would captivate a bevy of roguish leading men — Rock Hudson, Clark Gable, Cary Grant — and ultimately charm them into giving up their playboy lifestyles and proposing marriage.

Romano also comments however on the violent men that Day dealt with throughout her personal life and career. Romano notes that Day described “her first husband, a musician with whom she had one child, as a physically abusive ‘psychopathic sadist’.”  Romano notes that marriages that followed were less than successful, while another betrayal came from her third husband and agent Martin Melcher who “left her $500,000 in debt at the time of his death in 1968” and also contracted her without her knowledge to “a five-year TV series on CBS, The Doris Day Show”. 

Day is also remembered in relation to her friend, Rock Hudson, who she was loyal to and had as a guest on her show in 1985 when he was dying of AIDs.  Day described the end of the day of filming: “We kissed goodbye and he gave me a big hug and he held onto me. I was in tears. That was the last time I saw him – but he’s in heaven now.” Hudson died later that year. 

Read Romano’s full article about Day here.