02-04 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Example of how women are erased from history
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Riane Eisler.
Herstory Erased
Historians sometimes
erase women from history by simply not seeing them, only looking at their
own images in the mirrored past. Often it is inadvertent but intentional
or not, it makes women's accomplishments and experiences non-existent.
There are two notable examples of erasing women's terrors in modern mayhem
by ignoring them.
There were originally
no women's names on the Viet Nam War Memorial... But women raised a fuss
and now for the first time in our nation's history, a national memorial
lists some of the women who perished defending their country during that
awful conflict.
The other is even more
indefensible, though probably unintentional: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C. exhibits opened with an almost total absence
of depictions of women's lives and experiences. Probably as many women
as men died in the holocaust, Nazi Germany's concentration camps. At Auschwitz,
348,820 men's suits were found and 836,515 women's dresses. In addition
to the "usual" tortures - hunger, overwork, etc., women were
also subject to even greater horrors: biological reproduction experiments,
forced prostitution, and rape, object and penile.
Los Angeles NOW wrote
a Call for Action letter which said, "They
did an amazing job of encapsulating the experience but the stories/history
of women are suspiciously absent. Throughout the entire museum, the question
arises, 'What about the women?' In the artifacts, what belonged to the
women? The museum, only two years old, is considered far from complete
and we must make sure that the experience of women is included. Both the
director and the head of the research institute need to be made aware of
this lack of inclusion and representation through the entire museum experience."
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02-04 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 02-04-1887, Sheila Kaye-Smith English novelist.
B. 02-04-1906, Mirra Komarovsky, legendary chair, department of Sociology,
Barnard College.
B.
02-04-1913, Rosa Parks, refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a
white man 12/1/1955 in Montgomery, AL and started the activist civil rights
movement. This brave woman had been an outspoken black rights advocate
for more than 20 years, long before Martin Luther King popularized the
movement.
On Tuesday, June 15, 1999, President Clinton
and top lawmakers honored civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks with the prestigious
Congressional Gold Medal of Honor. "This medal
is encouragement for all of us to continue until all have rights,"
said Parks, 86, during her brief remarks. Parks' refusal to give
up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, on December
5, 1955, triggered a black boycott of the city's bus system that lasted
more than a year and eventually led to laws that ended legalized segregation.
B. 02-04-1918, Ida Lupino, actor and director, after a series
of pretty-face movies, finally got the cockney role of Bessie In the
Light that Failed (1939) and quickly became a Hollywood star everyone
loved to hate with a series of psychopathic and evil roles, turned to directing
and became the most renowned women director since the silent movies.
B. 02-04-1921, Betty Friedan, writer, social activist. One of
the founders and first president of the National Organization for Women
1966-1970, founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, 1971. She
wrote The Feminine Mystique.
Her mother was editor
of the women's pages of a Peoria, IL, newspaper who had to quit when she
married.
Friedan was a battered
wife even after her NOW activities began.
Event: 02-04-1976, Kathryn Lis, Susn Kollmeye
and Cynthia Snead became the first U.S. Coast Guard Academy cadets
by finishing in the top one percent of the more than 10,000 men and women
who competed for admission.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
EISLER, RIANE:
"History
as taught in most schools is largely a matter of the struggle for power
among men and nations. It is the dates of battles and the names of kings
and generals noted for alternately constructing and destroying fortresses,
palaces and religious monuments."
-- Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade.
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