Women’s History
What Do Academy Awards and Women’s History Month Have in Common?
No, I’m not talking about Melissa Leo’s use of that other-than-feminism “f-bomb” at the Academy Awards last Sunday evening. I want to compare two of this year’s Oscar winners and how they illustrate the way women’s history is told—or not.
EVE Says: Put Amelia Earhart back in the skies!
One of the most exciting new efforts to achieve gender parity is called “EVE: Equal Representation Everywhere.” If you can only be that which you can see, then girls need to be able to see as many women in leadershsip roles as men. And that includes in statuary, on stamps. and everywhere else that we give recognition to people who have made significant accomplishments.
Right now EVE is looking at making sure women are represented in parade balloons such as will be wafting above July 4th parades all around the country. Here’s how you can help:
Join EVE’s 99 Club to help fund the new Amelia Earhart balloon!
We need 99 donors to give $99 each. Visit our secure online donation page to contribute today — and put Amelia Earhart back in the skies!
Want Equal Rights? The Truth Is – Just Take Them!
“If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.” —Sojourner Truth, former slave, abolitionist, Methodist minister, and early U.S. women’s rights leader
International Women’s Day began 99 years ago. With so much progress accomplished since 1911, yet so much more remaining to be done, it seems to me that it’s time for women to change our approach to something closer Sojourner Truth’s.
Her advice to women as she stated it in the above quote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when they met in 1853, comes from a position of knowing her own power. Despite being been born into slavery and experiencing oppression, poverty, and discrimination far greater than most women reading this blog in 2010, Truth was way ahead of many of us in her perspective about how to advance equal rights.
Without question, in many places around the globe, women remain as oppressed as Sojourner Truth–born Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, and once sold for $100 and a herd of sheep–was before she “walked off” from her master.
Read MoreConvictions to Action: Margaret Sanger’s Legacy and Leadership Lessons
Folks have asked me to post this speech that I gave at the Brooklyn Museum Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on September 13. Today, September 14, would be the 130th birthday of the founder of the American Birth Control Movement, Margaret Sanger. So here you go!
I just got back from my high school reunion in West Texas. It was a long journey from teen mom with little sense of power over or intention for my life to a movement leader and an activist for women’s human right to reproductive self-determination.
So when I tell you I’m amazed to be here with you, so near 46 Amboy Street in Brownsville, where Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic 93 years ago next month—believe it! This is hallowed ground.
Read MoreWho Will the Woman of Tomorrow Be?
It seems only right that as Women’s History Month draws to a close, we don’t just look backward but that we also focus forward to ask what women of the future might or should become.
Who do you think will be the woman of tomorrow? How would you define her character and characteristics? What external forces will influence her? How will she define herself? What are your aspirations for women’s lives five, ten, 25 years hence? Please post your comments here and let’s discuss these questions. Here’s one to start you off:
Will she be a “Powered Woman”? When I asked this question via Twitter (I’m Heartfeldt there), @MadamaAmbi replied with her ideas about the “powered woman“. I love that we both chose the same adjective–“powered” rather than “empowered” or “powerful”–to describe where we think women are and/or will be. It’s a subtle but significant language shift that to me implies women are at a historic point of choice.
Read MoreAnd Now a Word From the Media
I wanted to write a long and erudite post today about the history of women in the media and the media on women. But the hour is late and the task far larger than I can do with full justice. For the bigger picture, let me refer you to:
- the Women’s Media Center for stats that will knock your socks off and so will their programs to fix the imbalances,
- WIMN for Jenn Pozner’s smart and specific media criticism and a lively group blog
- Media Matters excellent reporting on media treatment of women
- FAIR’s Women’s Desk
- This website that has documented both sung and (mostly) unsung media women through history
In 1970, Time Magazine published this article entitled “Liberating Women”.
Read MoreThe Value of Work Deja Vu All Over Again
There has been a marked change in the estimate of [women’s] position as wealth producers. We have never been “supported” by men; for if all men labored hard every hour of the twenty-four, they could not do all the work of the world. A few worthless women there are, but even they are not so much supported by the men of their family as by the overwork of the “sweated” women at the other end of the social ladder. From creation’s dawn. our sex has done its full share of the world’s work; sometimes we have been paid for it, but oftener not.
Any idea when this statement was made? OK, a clue: I recently ran across it in a speech given by Harriot Stanton Blatch at a suffragist convention–in 1898.
Blatch went on to raise issues much like what Ai-Jen Poo said at the “Unfinished Business” program 111 years later, what Moms Rising has organized itself to organize the troops about now, and what dozens if not hundreds of bloggers will be talking about this weekend over at Fem 2.0:
Unpaid work never commands respect; it is the paid worker who has brought to the public mind conviction of woman’s worth…If we would recognize the democratic side of our cause, and make an organized appeal to industrial women on the ground of their need of citizenship, and to the nation on the ground of its need that all wealth producers should form part of its body politic, the close of the century might witness the building up of a true republic in the United States.
Yep, don’t agonize: organize. Band together to make the workplace and worklife such that people of both genders can both earn a living and have a life. This is the necessary next wave of the feminist movement, one in which both men and women must participate. Because these days, men want to participate in their children’s lives as women have always done.
Read MoreSportswomen – How Alice Marble Led the Way for Althea Gibson
Sports isn’t my strong suit. But it’s only appropriate that women who have led the way in the sports world should be highlighted within my Women’s History Month posts. So I asked my friend Beverly Wettenstein, who often writes and speaks on this topic, to guest post this article, originally published on Huffington Post.
Althea Gibson’s induction into the US Open Court of Champions last year, on the 50th anniversary of her historic title victory, was inspiring. The Opening Night Tribute, to celebrate living African-American women who have also broken barriers in sports, entertainment, politics and the arts, was impressive. Venus and Serena Williams paid fitting tribute to Gibson by winning their opening night matches. Serena Williams became the first African-American woman since Gibson to win the US Open in 1999. The next year, Venus Williams was the first African-American woman since Gibson to win Wimbledon.
However, Alice Marble’s significant role, as the leading public proponent and catalyst for Althea Gibson to break the color barrier in U.S. tennis, should not be overlooked. Women’s contributions are often not properly credited in history and sports books and media coverage. Researching my Women in History and Making History Today — 365-Days-A-Year Database and A WOMAN’S BOOK OF DAYS, I’ve confirmed that less than ten percent of the references in new history textbooks are about women. “Anonymous” may be a woman.
Read MoreMy Little Red Book
Today’s Women’s History Month post deals with one of the most universal women’s issues: menstruation.
Nora Ephron got this sage advice in her novel Heartburn: invest in something people use once and throw away. So she invested in tampons and made a lot of money.
I thought of that when I met a young woman named Toyna Chin, whose company produces Petite Amie, an appealingly designed kit containing a custom designed mix of products a tween or teen needs when she has her monthly period. Not only was Toyna investing in products people use once and throw away, she was packaging them as a stylish health and beauty product rather than a tacky sterile necessity that smacks of embarrassment when plucked from the shelf.
Petite Amie is perfectly in synch with changes in how girls approach menstruation now compared to previous generations. In the same way that girls today learn to compete because Title IX increased their access to competitive sports (Think Sarah “Barracuda” Palin), they are much more likely to embrace and talk frely about the tangible evidence of puberty than the women who birthed them, and certainly more than their grandmothers, for whom “the curse” was just that.
Read MoreCourageous Leadership and the Equal Rights Amendment
Today, March 22, is the anniversary of the U.S. Senate’s passage in 1972 of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a constitutional amendment that would–IF it had been ratified by 3/4 of the states by its ten-year deadline in 1982– have ensured equal rights could not be denied on the basis of gender.
Let me tell you a story about leadership, persistence, and courage.
The original ERA, first introduced in Congress in 1923, was written by Alice Paul, a women’s rights activist Alice Paul toasting the passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to votewho was instrumental in the 1920 ratification of the 19th amendment, which guaranteed women’s right to vote. Paul also started the National Women’s Party, believing that otherwise women’s concerns would never be taken seriously by politicians.
The ERA has been re-introduced in nearly every session of Congress since then. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? We don’t hear too much about it, bu it’s still very much alive and with the election of Barack Obama there’s a resurging movement to restart the ratification process and get the three additional states needed to give women equal rights in the Constitution that didn’t even consider them citizens when it was written.
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