06-27 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Winifred Black
Isabel Barrows, Stenographer
Countess Proskovya Bruce, "L'Eprouveuse"
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Marianne Williamson, Isaak Dinesin, and Carole Nelson Douglas.
Winifred Black
Winifred Black was William
Randolph Hearst's answer to Nellie Bly. Among her exploits were entering
Galveston Island disguised as a boy after the hurricane which took 7,000
lives. In addition to writing about the tragedy, she directed the relief
efforts of the San Francisco Examiner. Her fame and ability were such that
she was the chief writer of the Examiner as it covered the San Francisco
earthquake.
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Isabel Barrows, Stenographer
In 1868 Isabel Barrows who picked up stenography
watching her husband. She became a stenographer for Secretary of State
William Seward when her husband became ill. The next year Isabel Barrows
went to Austria with Dr. Mary Stafford and became the first woman admitted
to the famed University of Vienna medical school. Back in the U.S. Barrow
combined eye-surgery, lecturing at Howard University and stenographic work
to earn her livelihood.
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Countess Proskovya Bruce, "L'Eprouveuse"
Countess Proskovya Bruce became known as "L'Eprouveuse,"
(the tester) for allegedly investigating the amorous skills of young men
who caught the eye of Empress Catherine II of Russia. A multiplicity of
fantastic tales were told about Catherine in an attempt to discredit her
reign.
The tales continue today in order to overpower the
many accomplishments Catherine the Great succeeded with including setting
up a university and library and in general easing the yoke of government
from the people's necks.
A later, jealous Czar made it impossible for a woman
to ever head Russia again.
(Does this tale of defaming a previous successful woman ruler sound
familiar? Such tactics date back to Egypt, at least.)
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06-27 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 06-27-1841, Agnes Irwin - U.S. educator,
Dean of Radcliffe who created a program for awarding doctorate degrees
to women in conjunction with Harvard University and built Radcliffe's first
gymnasium, library, and dormitories. At the resignation of President Elizabeth
Agassiz, a man was appointed president of Radcliffe instead of Irwin. It
was a painful snub but it is a living example of the prejudice shown to
women. Radcliffe was the Harvard-attached women's college. It would be
almost 70 more years before the seven sister all- women colleges would
all have women deans and presidents. Radcliffe has since been fully integrated
with Harvard.
B. 06-27-1849, Harriet Hubbard Ayer - U.S.
businesswoman. HHA divorced her bankrupt, philandering, drunken, albeit
socially prominent husband and moved from Chicago to New York to earn a
living. She wrote books and a column on beauty, health, exercise, and mental
discipline. As a member of the Rany Daisy dress reform group she wore short
skirts at the turn of the century when proper attire dictated dresses were
worn to the floor.
She was not a suffragist or a feminist and advocated
many of the beauty myths that kept women from full adulthood: no sun, corsets,
cosmetics to hide age, etc.
She purchased a face cream formula in France from
a chemist who claimed it was that of a famous beauty in the Napoleanic
court, Madame Recamier. She marketed it in the U.S. and was highly successful,
but most of the profits were lost in legal fees defending against lawsuits
brought by various people claiming the formula was theirs.
In 1893 her ex-husband and daughter had her committed
to a mental institution and took over her business. Her husband claimed
she was suffering from severe depression following the death of her child
22 years before!
For many, many years, a husband (or ex-husband) simply
had to get the supervisor of a mental institution to agree with him regarding
his wife's condition and the wife (or ex-wife) could be committed without
medical examinations or a judicial hearing. It was a legal way for husbands
or ex-husbands to take control of a woman's fortune or business. Some say
such commitments were a money-making sideline (bribery) for supervisors.
By the time Harriet Ayer's friends arranged her release
14 months later, the company was ruined. The company which uses her name
today was formed after her death.
B. 06-27-1862, May Irwin - U.S. singer-actor.
She popularized ragtime with such songs "After the Ball" and
"A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." Her filmed kiss in 1896
brought demands for movie censorship.
B. 06-27-1869, Emma Goldman - Russian-born
American anarchist and labor leader who renounced violence as a method
for social change. Known in the press as "Red Emma," she was
arrested several times and imprisoned for speaking out on subjects frowned
on by the government, especially birth control.
Her feminist stand on birth control, working conditions,
free love (consensual love between two adults without coercion of church
or state), and her opposition to child labor got her into more trouble
with authorities than her anarchy and fiery speeches to unemployed workers.
She edited the magazine Mother Earth that advocated
extensive social change.
She opposed the U.S. entry into World War I and was
sentenced to five years in prison for opposing conscription.
To get rid of her, the U.S. government canceled HER
EX-HUSBAND's citizenship and said that the nullification of HIS citizenship
automatically canceled hers because a U.S. married woman could only hold
American citizenship in her husband's name. (At the time, native-born
U.S. women LOST their citizenship if they married a man who was not native-born!)
She was deported to Russia along with a large number
of others but she left there to tour Europe and Canada speaking out on
issues concerning the poor, the working classes, and women. She was also
an advocate of European and British authors. She spoke and wrote in support
of a number of the new writers including Ibsen and Shaw. She was bisexual.
B. 06-27-1880, Helen Keller - an icon of the
human spirit. HK was struck blind and deaf at 19 months old by scarlet
fever. She learned to communicate with the world through the efforts of
Anne Sullivan who helped her develop into the most admired woman in the
history of the U.S. - or the world.
She became a world-wide advocate for the blind and
handicapped by communicating through a system of tapping into the palm
of Sullivan and vise versa. She graduated cum laude from Radcliffe with
Sullivan at her side translating. (One wonders why Sullivan didn't get
some recognition since everything Keller did had to go through Sullivan
from being her ears to recording her thoughts.)
B. June 27, 1888, Antoinette Perry followed
in her aunt's footsteps to become an actor, but her forte was directing.
She directed nearly 30 plays on Broadway including The Barrett's of
Whimple Street and the even more famous Harvey. She established
the American Theatre Wing in 1947. The Wing now names its annual awards
for excellence in theater in her honor, recognizing her as one of the most
influential people in the history of American theater. The Antoinette Perry
Awards are popularly known as "The Tony's."
B. 06-27-1893, Crystal Dreda Bird Fauset, American
race relations specialist, state legislator, and first black woman
elected to a U.S. State legislature (Pennsylvania 1938). She helped create
the Swarthmore College Institute of Race Relations (1933).
B. 06-27-1912, Min‚ (Min&eactue;) Okubo
- award winning U.S. artist of Japanese descent was interned in 1942.
She founded the literary magazine Trek with other internees. She
illustrated the special Fortune magazine issue on Japan, exhibited
drawings and paintings from the Japanese relocation camps, and published
Citizen 13660 (1946) about her experiences in the camps. Major retrospects
of her work have been held on both coasts.
B. 06-27-1924, Efua Sutherland - Ghanaian playwright,
poet, teacher, and children's author. ES founded the Drama Studio in
Accra (now the Writers' Workshop in the Institute of African Studies, University
of Ghana, Legon).
B. 06-27-1924, Rosalie Allen - U.S. country
singer known as the Queen of the Yodellers.
Event 06-27-1986: The U.S. Supreme Court
unanimously held that "the elimination
of prohibited sex discrimination is a sufficiently important state interest"
to warrant investigation into charges of sexual
discrimination in religious organizations.
Event 06-27-2000: Cantor Ann Turnoss
from Boca Raton, Florida (a liturgical singer who conducts a Jewish prayer)
prayed at the Western Wall without being heckled, a rare occurrence in
Israel where the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community opposes the concept of
men and women praying together and women chanting the service.
Since women began to demand the right to pray at the
wall, orthodox Jewish men have shown violence towards the women who now
have a small portion of the wall set aside for their use (to insure that
there is no mixing of the sexes and as protection for the women from violence).
The men have thrown chairs, rocks, and other things
at the women and hurled verbal curses and epithets at them.
The lack of heckling, etc., towards Cantor Turnoss
was probably because of the large news contingency attending her appearance
and the recording of any violence. Praying and attendance
at the temples are strictly segregated in the orthodox form of the Jewish
faith. In fact, women are not expected to attend temple prayer services
and are usually segregated in balconies and do not take part, nor are they
recognized, in the services.
The orthodox Jews in Israel have shown violence towards
women who do not follow their rules even away from the wall. They have
thrown stones at women who wear short sleeves, slacks, or skirts that are
not dust-level - attire strictly forbidden by their standards.
QUOTES DU JOUR
WILLIAMSON, MARIANNE:
"If
we (women) knew how to moan, they would hear us on the moon."
-- Williamson, Marianne. A Woman's Worth. New York: Random House,
1993.
DINESIN, ISAAK:
"I
do not think I could ever really love a woman who had not, for one reason
or another, been upon a broomstick."
-- Isaak Dinesin
DOUGLAS, CAROLE NELSON:
"How unfair
it is that enterprise is called a harlot when it wears a female face....
You call her an 'adventurous' as well. Two centuries ago the word designated
a woman who lived by her wits; today it has been debased to describe a
woman who lives by her willingness -- especially in regard to men of influence
and wealth."
-- Carole Nelson Douglas in the novel Good Night, Mr. Holmes.
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