WOMEN: Goddess

Last week, in her native Philadelphia, a goddess died. No portent marked her passing, and though she had been a goddess for 48 of her 68 years on earth, few of her multitudinous devotees would have known that their divinity was dead if explanations had not been made in her obituaries. Few indeed of the millions and millions of worshipers who carried her effigy with them—at toil and at play, in sickness and in health—as their most valued icon, suspected that she had lived a mortal existence.

For, unlike the publicity-mad deities apotheosized nowadays...