| 09-30 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Across 600 years, a Feminist Speaks
Political Leadership Positions Worldwide
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Will Roscoe, Margaret Sanger, and Kate Millet.
Across 600 years, a Feminist Speaks
"To you 'gentlemen',
let Lady Reason speak:
"Men have attacked women for other reasons: such
reproach has occurred to some men because of their own vices and others
have been moved by the defects of their own bodies, others through pure
jealousy, still others by the pleasure they derive in their own personalities
from slander...
"Those men who have attacked women out of jealousy
are those wicked ones who have seen and realized that many women have greater
understanding and are more noble in conduct than they themselves, and then
they are pained and disdainful. Because of this, their overweening jealousy
has prompted them to attack all women, intending to demand and diminish
the glory and praise of such women, must like the man who tries to prove
in his own work...
"As for those men who are naturally given to
slander, it is not surprising that they slander women since they attack
everyone anyway. Nevertheless, I assure you that any man who freely slanders
does so out a great wickedness of heart, for he is acting contrary to reason
and contrary to Nature: contrary to reason in so far as he is most ungrateful
and fails to recognize the good deeds which women have done for him, so
great that he could never make up for them, no matter how much he try,
and which he continuously needs women to perform for him; and contrary
to Nature in that there is no naked beast anywhere, nor bird, which does
not naturally love its female counterpart."
-- Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, translated
by Earl Jeffrey Richards. It was first printed in 1405 (1405!) indicating
feminism was alive and well 600 years ago. CP is considered the first woman
to earn her living through writing. The amazing(est) thing about this book
is that it was out of print for hundreds of years, thus an essential view
into women's history was erased until Richards made his marvelous translation
that (we are told) is faithful to the original verbage yet is made readable
to moderns.
We consider this book
as an essential part of the basic feminist/woman library.
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Political Leadership Positions Worldwide
* The number of female ministers worldwide doubled
in the last decade from 3.4 per cent in 1987 to 6.8 per cent in 1996 at
the cabinet level while in 48 countries, there were no women ministers
at all.
* A "critical mass" of 30 per cent women
at the ministerial level has been achieved in five countries - Barbados,
Finland, Liechtenstein, Seychelles and Sweden. (NOT the United States which
had 20%.) However, the pressure from the sub-ministerial level is itself
reaching critical mass proportions in many nations and is getting ready
to explode upward:
* At the sub-ministerial level, 136 countries
had no women in ministerial positions concerned with the economy.
* Globally, only 9.9 per cent of all sub-ministerial
positions (Deputy Minister, Permanent Secretary and Deputy Permanent Secretary)
were held by women. Women were slightly better represented in social ministries
in the Europe.
* A "critical mass" of 30 per cent women
at the sub-ministerial level has been achieved in six countries - Andorra,
Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Costa Rica, San Marino AND THE UNITED STATES.
* In eight countries, the proportion of women
at the subministerial has reached 25 per cent or more - Australia, Dominica,
El Salvador, Macedonia, New Zealand, Philippines, Sweden, and St. Kitts
and Nevis.
* In seven additional states, the proportion of
women at the subministerial level has reached 20 per cent or more - Barbados,
Colombia, Croatia, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana and Norway .
[Data compiled by the Division for
the Advancement of Women, United Nations, based on January 1996 information
from the Worldwide Government Directory 1996, Bethesda, Maryland,
U.S.A.]
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09-30 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 09-30-1811, Augusta (Marie Luise Katharina)
-German empress (1861-1890), consort of William I. She opposed and
held back Otto von Bismarck's grab for absolute power through a regency.
Event 09-30-1864: Rose O'Neal Greenhow drowns
when the boat she was in tried to run the blockade of the Wilmington, North
Carolina harbor. Her clothes were weighed down with Confederate gold meant
for supplies and weapons. A marker in downtown Wilmington commemorates
the tragedy.
B. 09-30-1875, Anne Henrietta Martin - U.S.
educator and suffragist. AMH led the campaign which gave women the
vote in Nevada in 1914, six years before national women's suffrage was
adopted. She was president of the militant National Woman's party, but
joined Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams in their Woman's Peace party.
Her writings were published in the leading magazines of the day.
AHM was active with Emmeline Pankhurst in London,
England, and was arrested for demonstrating there in 1910. She was the
first woman to run for the U.S. Senate from Nevada in 1918 and 1920 as
an independent, bypassing the national political parties which she opposed
and thought women should not support.
She wrote extensively on women's rights and suffrage.
She was head of the history department at the University of Nevada.
B. 09-30-1921, Deborah Kerr - Anglo-American
actor nominated for the Academy Awards six times. She never won. She
was given a special award by the Academy in the 1990s. Her best known film
was From Here to Eternity (1953).
B. 09-30-1932, Angie Dickinson - U.S. actor.
AD was a so-co character actor for 20 years before hitting stardom as TV's
Police Woman in 1974, an innovative series that showed a tough woman
succeeding. Her movie career, however, never matched her TV stardom.
B. 09-30-1943, Marilyn McCoo - U.S. pop singer.
B. 09-30-1960, Blanche M. Lambert Lincoln -
U.S. Senator from Arkansas elected 1998. She had been the congressional
representative from the third district of AR 1993-1998, declining to run
for reelection to the house because she was pregnant with twins. After
their birth, she resumed her political career becoming the second Arkansas
woman elected to the U.S. Senate. Hattie Carraway of Arkansas was both
the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
STANTON, ELIZABETH CADY:
"Come, come,
my conservative friends, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that
the world is moving."
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Women's Bible.
ROSCOE, WILL:
"Hordes of scholars
have read heterosexual behaviors and motives onto historical figures without
presenting evidence or discussing alternatives. [Behaving] like cradle
snatchers, their hetrosex[ist] assumptions preclude the possibility of
homosexual readings [of the circumstances evidence] before they are even
articulated. We should hold these scholars to the same standards that we
impose on ourselves (as gay and lesbian investigators of historical figures)
in the absence of conclusive evidence of sexual practices, a heterosexual
interpretation must be defended (and documented) no less than a gay or
lesbian one."
-- Will Roscoe, in a 1989 review of Joan Mark's A Stranger in her Native
Land, Alice Fletcher and the American Indian.
SANGER, MARGARET:
"Woman must
not accept, she must challenge. She must now be awed by that which has
been built up around her, she must reverence that woman in her which struggles
for expression."
-- Margaret Sanger
MILLET, KATE:
"Many women
do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could
be found of the totality of their conditioning."
-- Kate Millet from The Second
Sex.
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