ed she was not as attractive as the legendary goddesses of the screen among whom she had to compete for the favor of men. She went through a number of failed relationships with men who used her to get ahead in their career. She also suffered a number of failed marriages. Even when she did find someone who loved her genuinely - Alan Campbell - the relationship was rocky, the couple remarried more than once, and the relationship ended in tragedy with "Campbell's death by an overdose of sleeping pills in 1963" (Bio 2, 2009, p. 3). Clearly the relationships with men in her life influence Parker's poetry but also were often depressing and may have led to thoughts of suicide in the self-taught writer.
Parker's activism is clearly revealed in her poetry. In The Lady's Reward, she provides another poem that is sarcastic and skewers male dominance of women in society by revealing that women must hide their true love of a man or they will be unhappy. As Parker (2009) advocates, "Lady, lady never start / Conversation toward your heart; / Keep your pretty words serene; / Never murmur what you mean" (p. 1). Like the glamorous on the surface celebrities she was surrounded by, Parker (2009) advocates keeping up a mask in this poem, "Show yourself, by word and look, / Swift and shallow as a brook" (p. 1). Parker is maintaining that men only like looks and like their women to be naïve or uneducated.
A "voracious reader" who never graduated high school, it is easy to see why Parker might have been jealous of the girls men chose who she knew were shallow and all appearances (Bio 2, 2009, p. 1). This is why she advocates adopting this behavior in her The Lady's Reward, since being intelligent and unglamorous on the surface never brought Parker any happiness. Parker continual loss of those close to her in her life also is revealed in the poem. She advocates adopting a silent demeanor about how one really feels about losin...