Thank you so much. It always gives me sort of a special thrill to see the signing that's going on over here.

I think these people who understand sign language will perhaps know the name of Thomas Hopkins

Gallaudet who brought the sign language to this country.

There is a college in Washington, D.C. named after him, and he happens to have

been my great-great-grandfather.

So I can remember my grandmother trying to teach me a little bit of the sign language which

she had had to learn in order to talk to her grandmother because my great-great-grandmother

was the second student in that school for the deaf that my

great-great-grandfather had founded in Hartford, Connecticut.

Let me mention two books which bear on the things that I'll be talking about tonight.

One is what I gave my daughter for a wedding present.

It's called Let Me Be a Woman.

This was written way back in the mid-1970s when the feminist movement was becoming more and more powerful

and I realized that my daughter belonged to a generation that was being fed a lot of clap trap

about what it means to be a woman. Oddly enough, feminists avoid the word femininity like the plague.

This book is about femininity.

And then a more recent book is called a path through suffering,

discovering the relationship between God's mercy and our pain.

My topic tonight is a measured portion. Another one of the characteristics of a joyful woman.

She has a royal position.

She has also a measured portion. I have a good friend who is quite well to do, has no children, lives in a very beautiful house, and invited my husband and me, along

with her husband, to a weekend in a very luxurious hotel. And since then, we've become good friends. a

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