08-09 TABLE of CONTENTS:
She Traveled with the Stars after Being Born in a Hovel
Gendered Television Coverage and the Olympic Games
Did Washington Marry for Money?
Gold Medal Gave Her Husband Riches and a New "Friend"
Superb Still Life Artist Stopped Painting at Marriage
Queen Mab
Helen Aberson Wrote Dumbo
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letty M. Russell, and Marie Manning .
She Held More Aviation Records than ANY Other Person, Male
or Female!
"I
might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind
and stars," so said Jacqueline Cochran,
U.S. aviator who held more aviation records than any other person - male
or female.
Jacqueline Cochran was a
foundling, a new born infant abandoned at Pensacola, Florida, who was taken
in by a very poor family. Her birthdate or parentage is unknown. She was
raised in abject poverty, forced to leave school in the third grade to
work in the mills and tobacco sheds (as was everyone else in her adopted
family). From the lack of schooling, JC remained virtually
illiterate her entire life and took most of her aviation tests and conducted
her business verbally. She had a prodigious memory.
She
organized the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) during WWII, who
transported military aircraft of all kinds - from testing unknown planes
to moving wrecked and condemned planes from landing strips to junking locations.
They also helped in the training of male fighter pilots
for combat. JC flew an unarmed U.S. bomber to England during World War
II (and got straffed by an unknown plane) proving that it could be done
by a woman, but U.S women were limited to transporting military aircraft
to the U.S. and Canada because of what has been described as men's fear
of losing their macho image.
She won the Bendix Air Race in 1938, the second
woman to win that grueling trans-continental race of the best machines
and pilots (primarily male).
In 1953 she became the first woman to break the sound
barrier and at age 57 set a new world's record for speed at 1,429.2 miles
an hour - two hours from sea to shining sea. In 1969 she was promoted to
colonel in the reserves, from which she retired in 1970.
JC was elected to the U.S. Aviation Hall of Fame
in 1971. She received several honorary doctoral degrees as well as the
Billy Mitchell trophy in 1938, the Cross of the Legion of Honor from France
in 1940, and the Gold Medal of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale
in 1954.
In 1959-1963 she was the first woman president of
the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale,
and she was also a member of many other aviation and service-connected
organizations.
She remained a "rough" character all
her life and was shunned by many of the socially elite even though she
married a millionaire and was, on her own, a highly successful cosmetic
business executive.
While working in the most menial of jobs in the repressive
South where women were not expected to amount to anything except obedient
and supportive wives, her amazing ambition enabled her to somehow squeeze
out enough time to get her beautician's license.
It was just about the only way that someone in her
social class had of breaking out of her childhood poverty.
Remember, she was virtually illiterate so the accomplishment
that included talking examiners into allowing verbal rather than written
answers was even more remarkable. One wonders why Hollywood has never done
her story... She indeed traveled close to the stars until her death 08-09-1980.
Her birth is estimated to be in 1910.
"She is fearless of death..."
said her husband, industrialist Floyd Odum who met her when she moved to
New York City, and in 1934 founded Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics, a highly
successful cosmetics company and was designated Woman of the Year in Business
by an Associated Press Poll of newspaper editors in 1963.
Industrialist Floyd Odlum with whom she had a four-year
affair before their marriage in 1936 encouraged her to take up flying in
1932.
After only three years flying experience, she was
one of the first women to enter the Bendix Transcontinental Air Race in
1935, and in 1938 she became the second woman woman to win it. Louise Thaden
was the first woman to win the Bendix race.
In
WWII JC served as a captain in the British Air Force Auxiliary and helped
organized the women pilots who not only flew planes from factory to places
of deployment for the RAF, they also moved planes away from coastal airfields
where they were in danger from Nazi fighters and bombers.
The women also moved damaged aircraft from RAF fields
to repair sites - a job that was considered too dangerous for the limited
manpower of the RAF because the planes were usually very badly shot up
and damaged in rough landings - often on the verge of being completely
unflyable.
Attempts to organize such a program in the U.S. including
flying planes across the Atlantic to beleaguered Britain failed. However,
through the intercession of Eleanor Roosevelt who arranged for JC to speak
with President Roosevelt, The Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs)
were organized with JC as its director.
The plan was opposed by most military men and the
WASPs never received military recognition and very little support. They
had to buy their own shoes! They did not get the $10,000 life insurance
policies that the men doing the same kind of flying did.
In one example of the prejudices, men riding in
planes piloted by WASPs got overseas ribbons when they were ferried to
distant islands off the shores of California, the women pilots did not.
Seemingly minor, such incidents unmask prevailing unfairness.
JC and the WASPs themselves helped the military
cover up the death of a WASP pilot that was caused by a hot-dog male pilot
who broke formation to buzz the women's planes. Not the pilot he thought
he was, his wing cut into a woman's plane sending her to her death. It
was felt that if the death became known, the public would blame the women
(naturally) and the entire program would be killed. (He was not hurt.)
The women felt the WASPs were advancing the cause
of women's aviation - which it was - and suffered many incidents of harassment
and prejudice.
In 1953 she became the first woman to fly faster
than the speed of sound. She twice set the world jet speed record for women:
1961, 625 miles per hour (1,006 kilometersper hour); and 1964, 1,429.2
miles per hour (2,300 kilometers per hour).
She also set a new altitude record for women in 1961:
55,300 feet (16,855meters). She was a six-time winner of aviation's Harmon
Trophy.
In 1956 she received a Distinguished Service Medal
for her work in organizing the Women's Air Force Service Pilots in World
War II. (See WASPs in WOAH search for many references to that marvelous
organization's accomplishments.) In 1969, she was awarded the U.S. Air
Force Distinguished Flying Cross, the same year she was promoted to colonel
in the reserve. She retired from the Air Force reserve the next year at
age 60.
She received several honorary doctoral degrees
as well as the Billy Mitchell trophy in 1938, the Cross of the Legion of
Honor from France in 1940, and the Gold Medal of the Fédération
Aéronautique Internationale in 1954.
In 1959-1963 she was the first woman president of
the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale,
and she was also a member of many other aviation and service-connected
organizations.
In her autobiography, she relates that she hired
a private investigator to find out her birth background. When he presented
his report in a sealed envelope, she gave it to her husband to be unsealed.
He refused to open it, and the envelope was destroyed unread.
What was important to them was not where she came
from but what she had made of herself.
In one of the big twists of fate, history records
"under the tutelage of Chuck Yeager,
Cochran became the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound in
an F-88 jet fighter plane."
True, but what they leave out is that JC was financially
supporting Yaeger and his wife on her California ranch for some time. Mr.
Right Stuff didn't have the stuff to manage his finances. (She often supported
or housed a number of down-on-their-luck aviators.)
The U.S. Post Office on March 9, 1996 issued the
50 cent international post card-rate stamp featuring her image depicting
her as the 1938 winner of the Bendix race. She flew from Los Angeles to
Cleveland, Ohio, in eight hours and ten minutes.
Why no Hollywood films about this woman?
"When
I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision,
then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
-- Audre Lorde
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Gendered Television Coverage and the
Olympic Games
Gina Daddario. Women's Sport
and Spectacle: Gendered Television Coverage and the Olympic Games.
Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998. ix + 174 pp. Bibliographical references
and index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-275-95856-6.
Reviewed by ViBrina Coronado, The
Union Institute Graduate School. Published by H-PCAACA (July, 1999)
Included in WOAH with permission
-
It's only been in the last twenty years that women's
athletic competitions have been widely televised. This has been largely
due to Title IX legislation, which in 1972, mandated that federally funded
educational institutions must provide the same athletic programs for women
that they do for men.
While
this may lead the average television viewer to conclude that the playing
field has been leveled for female athletes, Daddario signals that we have
yet to reach parity on the ball court, track field, swimming pool, and
ski sloop.
In
Women's Sport and Spectacle, she shows how the media, sports organizations,
and educational institutions are complicit in keeping women in "sex
appropriate sports" by not considering
them serious athletes.
First Daddario interrogates the assumption that
men are naturally better athletes than women. Because men and women are
physiologically different - women have less upper body strength, for example
- there has been a tradition of seeing some sports as suitable for women,
swimming and figure skating among them.
Sexual
difference has been the reasoning that women can not compete in the same
sports that men do.
But
women's natural strengths have been ignored. For instance because they
have more stamina than males, females are better suited to endurance sports
like the marathon and triathlon. That televised programming showcases men
in some sports and women in others makes "sex appropriate sports"
seem like a "natural" extension of biological difference rather
than a media driven decision.
Unfortunately
Daddario's wording of this concept is not always clear. In places, it seems
Daddario agrees that the differences in physiological mean men and women
should be playing different sports, even though she does not.
Along with this, Daddario examines the male heterosexual
initiative in sports programming because the audience for televised sports
is assumed to be male.
Viewing
women as sexual objects in the media carries over into the sports arena
because the producers of sports coverage are mainly men.
And
the chauvinism does not stop there.
Great
athletes are assumed to be masculine - otherwise why would be necessary
to put the appendage of woman on titles like Women's National Basketball
League or Women's World Cup. When a women is a particularly good athlete
she is accused of "playing like a man."
To add injury to insult, the Olympic organization tests female athletes
to make sure they don't have Y-chromosomes, which, it's reasoned, would
give them an unfair advantage.
Because of this partiality to male athletes, Daddario
demonstrates that female athletes are subject to a strict media critique
and that gender stereotyping abounds.
Commentators
saddle sports women with pet names; put a disproportionate emphasis on
their status as wife, girlfriend, sibling, or daughter; and paint them
as over emotional or little and sweet.
Their
athletic strengths are played down. If they don't live up to media-generated
expectations to win Olympic medals, they are often the targets of "compensatory
rhetoric," a questioning of their value
as athletes, while similar male athletes are seen as just unlucky.
To put the games in an historical context, Daddario
provides an overview of the Olympic games from Ancient Greece to 1996 from
the perspective of female inclusion.
One
interesting item is the created of the Federation Sportive Feminine Internationale
by French women in the 1920s to sponsor international games for women when
the Olympics barred track and field events for women.
When
these women's games became popular, the modern Olympic organization solicited
female participation in the Olympic games.
Robert Allen's definition of text as "a dynamic
relationship between texts and interpretive communities" serves as
Daddario's basis to analyze the "texts" of the summer and winter
Olympic games from 1992 to 1996.
In
this way she can include the audience of female sports viewers in her study
rather than relying on studies that focus on the sports audience as males
from a male perspective. This opens the possibilities of other readings
of the televised Olympic games since the meaning depends on the audience.
For the televised coverage of Olympic games Daddario
studies, she explains how the producers began to consciously court woman
viewers since more women than men watch the Olympics.
One
way they hoped to attract a female audience, as Daddario's original contribution
to the analysis shows, is by structuring the competition like a soap opera
using melodramatic elements.
This
structure, a montage of competition footage, the athletes' lives off the
playing field and interviews, transforms the competitions into compelling
stories.
Here,
for example, the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan "rivalry" is exposed
as a media hyped event.
There are problems with the book. The most glaring
is repetition. Daddario repeats examples and handfuls of information, although
thankfully mainly by paraphrasing. But in at least two places, paragraphs
on facing pages are verbatim! She also glosses over details that need definition.
She
writes about the various Olympic games as if she knows readers viewed the
televised coverage - but what of foreign readers or future readers who
will be too young to remember the specifics of 1992 Summer games? Careful
editing would have reigned in the repetition and over-familiarity. Luckily
these deficits are overshadowed by her intelligent arguments.
This text would be a good introduction to the
subject of gender, media and sports for undergraduates. It's an easy read,
accessible and the tone is even-handed, intelligent, and chummy.
But
if this text is used, it would be important to stress that the differences
in male and female bodies are not a basis for deciding what sports they
practice.
Library of Congress call number:
GV742.3.D33 1998
Subjects:
Television and sports - United
States
Women on television
Sex role on television
Winter Olympics
Olympics Women athletes - United
States
Citation: ViBrina Coronado. "Review
of Gina Daddario, Women's Sport and Spectacle: Gendered Television Coverage
and the Olympic Games," B. 08- 08-1896 H-PCAACA, H-Net Reviews, July,
1999. http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path= 267 67931291185.
Used in WOAH with permission - Copyright
© 1999 by H-Net and the Popular Culture and the American Culture Associations.
It may be reproduced electronically for educational or scholarly use. The
Associations reserve print rights and permissions. (Contact: P.C.Rollins
at the following electronic address: Rollins@osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu).
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Did Washington Marry for Money?
According to research conducted by Washington
and Lee University, Martha Custis, widow, who ran the huge Virginia plantation
Mount Vernon located on the outskirts of what would become Washington,
D. C., had a fortune of 29,650 pounds when she married the near penniless
soldier and surveyor George Washington.
Martha Custis Washington's fortune allowed Washington
to become an important person and to pursue a leisurely, gentleman farmer
life style.
By today's standards, the 29,650 pounds translates
into $5.9 million dollars.
Washington was a well-known "womanizer"
during his marriage.
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Gold Medal Gave Her Husband Riches and a New "Friend"
Lia Manoliu - Romanian athlete who competed in
six Olympic competitions throwing the discus. She won the gold in 1968.
People treated her differently because of her size.
She was six feet and weighed 187 pounds - not immense by today's standards,
but in those days it made her very different. She was known to have trained
by jumping with 300 pound weights on her back. "I
had to work for it all. For those moments of success, it's worth the price."
Her private life was
a shambles. When she won the gold, her husband bought and expensive American
car in Mexico where the Olympics were held, had it shipped to Bucharest,
and promptly drove away into the sunset with his very young girlfriend.
In an obituary, she is quoted as saying, "I
was a little in despair, after 10 years of marriage."
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Superb Still Life Artist Stopped Painting at Marriage
Louise Moillon (1615 75) - French artist, primarily
of still-lifes. An elegant artist and superior compositor, she used colors
lushly in such masterpieces as The Fruit Seller (1629).
Marriage and three children ended her brilliant career
that started when she was very young.
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Queen Mab
Queen Mab - the queen of English folklore fairies
who was mischievous but never did any real harm. Shakespeare refers to
her as the midwife who delivers sleeping men of their innermost wishes
in the form of dreams. She was replaced in folklore by Titania as queen
to Obernon's fairy king rulership.
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Helen Aberson Wrote Dumbo
Helen Aberson (Mayer) wrote the children's story
that inspired the 1941 Walt Disney cartoon, Dumbo. A graduate of
Syracuse University she had a talk-radio show before her marriage.
There is some confusion about the first publication
of the story.
The illustrator of the book was given co-authorship
in a 1939 version called Roll-A-Book, a scroll-like apparatus inside a
box. The first regular book was printed in about a thousand copies. Disney
bought the rights to it shortly after its publication.
The book has been republished by Disney almost exactly
as HA wrote it. She wrote other children's stories, according to her son,
but none were published. She died in 1999 at age 91.
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08-09 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
Died 08-09-0803, Irene, Saint - Irene was elevated to sainthood
in the Greek Orthodox church because she was instrumental in restoring
the use of icons in the Eastern Roman Empire.
Saint Irene is not to
be confused with Irene Ducas, the Byzantine ruler. Irene Ducas (b, circa
1066-d. 1120) was regent, then co-ruler with her son, and later was sole
Emperor. She was the mother of Anna Comnena.
B. 08-09-1669, Eudoxia was married to Peter the Great of Russia
when he was 17 and still only interested in war games. She was sent to
a monastery before she was 30 to clear the way for Peter's other conquests.
She was said to be beautiful but lacking in ambition and not very intelligent
yet was a pawn in various machinations including the treason trial of her
son and the accession of her grandson Peter II.
B. 08-09-1762, Mary Randolph - U.S. Southern cookbook author
who used specific weights and measures, breaking away from the English
cookbook - tradition in cookbooks of just listing ingredients.
B. 08-09-1816, Ann Peck Sill - U.S. educator. APS created, developed,
and led what became Rockford College in Illinois. Its most famous graduate
was probably Jane Addams (before it was a degree-awarding institution)
and it graduated hundreds of women leaders.
B. 08-09-1865, Janie Porter Barrett - Afro-American welfare worker.
She founded the Locust Street Social Settlement, the nation's first black
settlement organization.
B. 08-09-1869, Annie Minerva Turnbo-Malone - U.S. entrepreneur
and philanthropist.
B. 08-09-1883(?), Daisy Elizabeth Lampkin - Afro-American civil rights
reformer, suffragist, community leader. DL was most active with the
NAACP. She emphasized the need for black women and youth to become involved
in the NAACP so that their needs would be addressed.
B. 08-09-1899, P.L. Travers - Australian-born English writer
who created the irrepressible Mary Poppins.
The first of the eight
volumes of the life and time of Mary Poppins was published in 1934 and
the last in 1989. The various adventures of the British nanny were translated
into more than 20 languages.
She intensely disliked
the Disney film version of Mary Poppins (1964) as was quoted in an obituary
when she died at age 96. She complained that Disney's version saying it
was too simplistic and had toned down the darker side of the nanny's character.
"They missed the point," she was
once quoted as saying. "It's not about sugar
and spice, but something from which we grown-ups can learn."
PL had a lifelong
interest in mythology. She was editor of the U.S. publication Parabola
that is devoted to myth and tradition. PL lived among the America's Navajo
Indians for a time to learn about their myths and culture. "I've
been looking for an idea all my life. I know what it is and sometimes I
come near to it, and that's all I will say," she told an interviewer
in 1995.
She was born Helen Lyndon
Goff, changed her name to Pamela Lyndon Travers but prefered P.L. She adopted
a son but never married.
B. 08-09-1914, Marika Tove - Finnish artist and writer-illustrator
of children's books which she wrote in Swedish, the language of the educated
Finn. Her books about the moomintrolls have been translated into most languages.
B. 08-09-1930, Betty Margaret Andersen, noted Australian nurse
and public health instructor.
B. 08-09-1948, Barbara Mason, singer.
Event 08-09-1956: South African women demonstrate against pass
laws.
B. 08-09-1957, Melanie Griffith - U.S. actor. Her mother was
Tippi Hedren, film actor who was Alfred Hitchcock's favorite actor. MG
is perhaps best know for her work in the movie Working Girls.
B. 08-09-1958, Amanda Bearse - U.S. actor. She is known for her
Marcy Rhoodes on Married With Children.
B. 08-09-1963, Whitney Houston - Afro-American, immensely popular
Grammy award singer. WH was the first female artist in the history
of the Billboard magazine's charts to have an album enter at No.
1. She did it again with Whitney '87.
B. 08-09-1968, Gillian Anderson - U.S. actor best known for her
role of Dana Scully in the long-running TV series X-Files. Her awards
included: 1991: Theatre World Award; Absent Friends 1995: Screen Actors
Guild; Outstanding Female Actor in a Drama Series, The X-Files 1996:
Golden Globe; Best Actress in a TV Series (Drama), The X-Files 1996:
Screen Actors Guild; Outstanding Female Actor in a Drama Series, The
X-Files. Her mother is computer analyst.
Event 08-09-1977: the Air Force released a news item saying that
for the first time women would fly military planes, completely ignoring
(and insulting) the thousands of women who flew military planes - from
experimental radio planes to fighters to bombers - during World War II
as members of the WASPs. Although women are still not allowed to fly in
combat, several women have been killed flying helicopters in "support"
roles during hostilities such as the Gulf war.
Event 08-09-2000: Three women and 12 men received the Medal of Freedom
from President Bill Clinton who awarded the medals each year of his
presidency. Year 2000 women honorees were Mildred "Millie'' Jeffrey,
Dr. Mathilde Krim and Marian Wright Edelman.
Mildred "Millie"
Jeffrey, a leading women's labor and Democratic party activist,
was the first female to direct a department of the United Auto Workers.
She worked for the UAW from 1945-1976, heading four departments and serving
as a secial assistant to president Walter Reuther. She also served on commissions
during the Kennedy and Carter administrations. (She was also president
of the Women s Political Caucus).
Jeffrey was also a noted
civil rights activist who in 1963 marched beside Martin Luther King in
Montgomery, AL and with James Meredith to the University of Mississippi
to support his entry to the state college.
In an Associated Press
interview before the award, Jeffrey, 88, said, "I
remember the parades" [in Iowa during the 1920s when she was
young.] "They had a burning cross, and the men
had the hoods over their heads and their gowns."
Since there weren't many
blacks in Cherokee, Iowa, for the KKK to target, they concentrated on Jews
and Catholics. Jeffrey said she was Catholic and had stones thrown
at her. "No Catholic could get elected to public
office, and I thought it was very wrong and that's when I became interested
in justice and politics,'' she said.
Jeffrey was the director
of the first woman's United Auto Workers department. She was the president
of the Michigan Women's Foundation and was on the Wayne State University
board of governors.
Dr. Mathilde Krim founded
the AIDS Medical Foundation in 1983, Dr. Krim was one of the earliest leaders
in the effort to find a cure for HIV/AIDS. She has had a distinguished
medical career, working on topics ranging from cancer research to human
genetics, and her foundation,which joined with the American Foundation
for AIDS Research in 1985, has poured millions of dollars into HIV/AIDS
research efforts. Her WOAH biography is here.
President Clinton's announcement
read: "Marian Wright Edelman
is the long time president of the Children's Defense Fund. Edelman began
her career as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund in 1964. She is the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi
bar. In 1976, she became the chair of the board of trustees of Spelman
College, her alma mater - the first African American and second woman to
hold that post. She also was the first African American woman elected to
the Yale University Corporation.
Ms. Edelman broke with the administration over welfare
reform passed by the Republican congress and signed by Clinton. However,
later she worked with Clinton who quietly worked through executive order
to repair the damage done to poor children by the mean-spirited congressional
reform. She is a longtime personal friend of First Lady Hillary Rodham
Clinton.
In 1999, President
Clinton awarded the Medal of Honor to Evy Dubrow. His award statement read:
"Evy Dubrow came to
Washington more than 40 years ago, ready to do battle for America's garment
workers - and do battle she did. When it came to the well-being of workers
and their families, this tiny woman was larger than life. The halls of
Congress still echo with the sound of her voice, advocating a higher minimum
wage, safer work places, bettereducation for the children of working families.
And in opposition, to President Ford and me, she also was against NAFTA."
(Laughter and applause from the audience attending the awards.)
"No
matter how divisive the issue, however, Evy always seemed to find a way
to bring people together, to find a solution. As she put it, there are
good people on both sides of each issue.And she had a knack for finding
those people. By the time she retired two years ago, at the age of 80,
she had won a special chair in the House Chamber, a special spot at the
poker table in the Filibuster Room -- (laughter)
-- and a special place in the hearts of even the
most hard-bitten politicians in Washington; even more important, for decades
and decades, she won victory after victory for social justice."
The second 1999 award to a woman went to Sister Iolina
Ferre. The President: "Sister
Isolina Ferre. For more than 20 years, in a poverty-stricken barrio in
Puerto Rico, Sister Isolina Ferre started passing out cameras to children.
She told them to photograph whatever they saw. The point of the project,
she later recalled, was not just to teach young people to take pictures,
but to teach them to take pride in themselves.
That
is what Sister Isolina does best: teaching people to see the best in themselves
and in their communities, and making sure they had the tools to make the
most of the gifts God has given them. Armed
only with her faith, she taught warring gangs in New York, City to solve
their differences without violence. In Puerto Rico, her network of community
service centers, the Centros Isolina Ferre, have transformed ravaged neighborhoods
by helping residents to advocate for themselves. Her passionate fight against
poverty, violence and despair have earned her many awards and countless
tributes from all around the world.
Sister Isolina once said that
a community grows only when it rediscovers itself. On behalf of the many
communities you have helped to make that wonderful discovery, a grateful
nation says thank you to you today. Formal citations are awarded all recipients."
Addendum: Sister
Isoline Ferre died August 2000. The President issued a statement that included
the above recitation of her many accomplishments and added:"Hillary
and I were saddened to learn of the death of Sister Isolina Ferre... Her
lifetime of selfless commitment to others will remain her greatest legacy.
Our thoughts and prayers are with her family and many friends."
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QUOTES DU JOUR
WOLLSTONECRAFT, MARY:
"...I wish to
persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body,
and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy
of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets
of weakness... [dismiss] then those pretty feminine phrases... supposed
to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel..."
-- Mary Wollstonecraft, A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
RUSSELL, LETTY M.:
"Women not only
seek identity in history but begin to seek out their sisters so that, in
community, they can build a strong feminist culture which supports the
ideas and actions of those who do not think persons are inferior because
of their sex. Here the emphasis is on vertical support from the past and
from women of the past, as well as horizontal support from sisters close
by, and in every part of the globe."
-- from Human Liberation In A Feminist Perspective, A Theology by
Letty M. Russell. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974.
MANNING, MARIE:
"Unbelievable
today was the apologetic spirit in which tax-paying women (were) asking
for a trifling betterment of laws concerning women and children (at the
turn of the century). Children at that time were working 8-10 hours a day
in cotton mills and the gentlemen on (Capitol) Hill were quoting scripture
to prove that the system was all that it should be."
-- Marie Manning, aka Beatrice
Fairfax in her autobiography Ladies Now and Then (1944).
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