Updated February 2 "If a woman is ever to have an affair, it will be in March," columnist Erma Bombeck wrote in 1970. "Psychologically, it is a perfect month. The bowling tournaments are over. The white sales on bedding are past. Your chest cold has stabilized and the Avon lady is beginning to look like Tom Jones." Those words demonstrate Bombeck's style. Caustic to a fault, her writing about the struggles of American mothers was alive with cynical wit and suggested that if you acquiesced to patriarchal rule, the least you could do was be grumpy about it. Words were her weapon in the war for gender equality, a battle she also fought by campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment.