| 10-12 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Women Aren't Expected to Reach Pay
Parity with Men Until 2060
Nurse Edith Cavell Shot for Her Spy/Espionage
Work in WWI
Princess Te Puea Herangi - Probably
the Most Notable Woman of New Zealand's History
Flotsam from the Files of Women of
Achievement and Herstory
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Naomi Wolf, Roslyn S. Willett, Louisa May Alcott, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley
Hufstedler, and Jean Kerr.
Women
Aren't Expected to Reach Pay Parity with Men Until 2060
The average lifetime, cumulative earnings for
a 50-year-old woman vs. a 50-year-old men is $496,000 for a woman vs. $11million
for a man. According to a Working Woman article by James Breenan women
will not achieve pay parity with men until 2060.
If this doesn't make you angry and into the voting
booths to change things by electing women and pro-women's rights men, read
on. (The following information regarding the economic and leadership positions
of women in 1999 are excerpted from an article in the AARP newsletter):
The number of women in entry and medieval managerial
positions has risen from 34% in 1983 to 48% in 1998 which translates into
almost as many women as men in the "pipeline" aimed at glass
ceiling.
"We talk about the
fact that women have to be "overripe" for promotion - they have
to demonstrate they can do the next job before they get promoted to it,
while men are promoted much earlier when they're hungry, not when (they're)
ready." says Jennifer Allyn of Catalyst,
a New York search group. The group also saw that top women executives only
make 68 centers on each dollar earned by their male counterparts.
* * *
Cynthia Trudell, General Motors Corp vice president
and Saturn car division president says that her company reflects the consumers
who buy their machines. Trudell says 40% of her senior management teams
are women.
"Companies on the
cutting edge know it is to their advantage to dismantle these barriers
(against women in business). There is a big war on for talent - companies
just can't find enough good employees."
* * *
"Women are ambidextrous. We're used to doing
two or three things at once. In business, it's a natural."
--
Marsha Serlin, President of United 'Scap Metal in Cicero, Ill, a top U.S.
executive.
* * *
Midlife women were the most affected by pay inequalities.
In 1998, women on an average earned 76 cents of every dollar a man earned
but women by age 55 earned just 69. The disparity translates to much less
retirement earnings by women.
* * *
Women are also entering male-dominated professions
in greater numbers. Between 1970 and 1998, the proportion of women in law
grew from 5 percent to 29 percent and in medicine from 10 percent to 27
percent.
The number of women engineers grew fivefold and the
number of women architects more than quadrupled.
(It is generally conceeded that to substantially change
things, the critical mass in almost every field is 36%, i.e., when a minority
position reaches the magic 36%, it can substantially redirect the whole.)
And record numbers of women entrepreneurs are circumventing
the glass ceiling by starting up their own businesses.
In 1998 there were more than 9 million women-owned
businesses, up from 400,000 in 1972.
* * *
Women by the Numbers
* * *
A woman's median annual private pension income
in 1995 was $3,000 a years as compared to $7,800 for a man.
* * *
According to the U.S. Census Bureau the official
number of working women:
(WOAH author notes that it should be stated that
many times census takers never even asked if the women worked outside the
home - and so-called, self-described part-time work was generally ignored
with the census taker never asking how many hours a week constituted "part-time."
( I know some of this from personal experience as late as 1960.) Census
takers (by their own admission) often chose not to record the fact that
many women did work outside the home - and many times there was no place
on a census form to record such information.
Noting such omissions is why HERstory is so necessary.
The census always dealt with Head of Household who
was assumed to be the man. His wife's (or other female family) income was
not considered. (The same way it was ignored in credit checks until banned
by federal law in the 1970s.)
However, not even the law acknowledged a woman's work
and contributions in family businesses. A divorced farm woman had no claim
on the value of the family farm which was considered to have been worked
and made valuable by her husband's sweat alone, none of hers (she got free
room and board, didn't she?)
And the census form never had a place regarding husband
and wife businesses such as grocery stores, candy stores, or business ventures
for the wife serving as secretary and treasurer because all business was
considered conducted in her husband's name. And many women hid the fact
that they worked because men considered it shameful that their wives worked
- although they used the money.
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Nurse Edith Cavell Shot for Her Spy/Espionage Work in
WWI
Edith Cavell was shot as a British Spy in Holland during World War I
by the German invaders.
Was she naive and believed she was merely doing a
humanitarian work? Or too trusting in believing her own soldiers wouldn't
betray her? Or just an ordinary patriot whose luck had run out?
Or was she actually sophisticated enough to be deserving
of the firing squad for being a spy/espionage agent behind enemy lines?
English nurse Edith Cavell became head of nursing at the Birkendael
Medical Institute in Brussels, Belgium, in 1907. It was a training school
for nurses. After the Germans overran Brussels in World War I, Cavell,
although a British subject, remained and treated the wounded regardless
of their nationality or political allegiance.
However, she also allowed the school to be used as a stop in an underground
railway for British soldiers crossing enemy lines to go to the Netherlands.
Perhaps hundreds of soldiers, British as well as French, were passed along
through Cavell's school. Dozens could be located there at times.
The English soldiers, bored while waiting for safe passage home and
believing in their own invincibility, failed to use common sense and disregarded
dangers. They put everyone in the hospital in danger when they went into
Brussels to drink and carouse.
Naturally, by their drunken talk they betrayed the
school and in August 1915, Cavell along with eleven workers at the school
were arrested by the Germans.
She was court-martialed by the German high command,
found guilty. She was executed by a German firing squad October 12, 1915.
She was 50.
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Princess Te Puea Herangi - Probably the Most Notable
Woman of New Zealand's History
Princess Te Puea Herangi, probably the most notable
woman of New Zealand's history died 10-12-1952. TPH, born in 1884, was
the granddaughter of King Tawhiao.
Maori custom of the time did not encourage women to
adopt a public role, certainly not to speak in public, but Te Puea was
independent and outspoken.
As an adult, Te Puea received open criticism, and
accusations of arrogance and not "knowing her place."
Historians tell us this disapproval ended when
Te Puea dragged the King Mahuta to safety from a stampede of horses.
She became known far beyond her own tribe, and community
leaders increasingly consulted her. During a great influenza outbreak in
1918 she cared for the sick and improved the sanitation conditions for
the Maori people.
In the 1920s and 1930s she led a resurgence of
pride in the Maori race. Te Puea set an example in the development of Maori
lands by taking part in the the hard physical labour necessary for turning
idle fields into productive units.
Although married, she had no offspring, but she adopted
many young children in order to give them a start in life (one of the many
babies for whom Te Puea cared was her grandniece, who is the current Maori
Queen).
She was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE)
in 1937, in the King's Birthday Honours List.
She was the first modern Maori women of more than
tribal significance, and in New Zealand she is remembered with admiration
by people of all races."
-- (Information supplied to WOA from Archdeacon Reg Nicholson, Hamilton,
New Zealand. We thank you.)
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Flotsam from the Files of Women of Achievement and Herstory
Did you know - The Barbie doll was the first child's toy to have breasts.
The company developed "Growing up Skipper" doll whose breasts
developed as the arm was turned. It was removed from the market after two
years. The company cited feminists opposition but in reality, the sales
were low.
Did you know - In 1927, in Buck v Bell, the very revered U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that three generations of imbeciles
are enough and sustained the rights of society which included vaccination
to "prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,"
by cutting a woman's Fallopian tubes.
Did you know - Minerva Bernardino, born in 1907, was one of the four
women to sign the charter of the United Nations. She was minister for the
Dominican Republic and was recognized as one of the best known feminist
leaders in Latin America. She was secretary of Acciuon Feminista Domingo
whose actions led to the granting of suffrage and civil rights to women
in 1942.
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10-12 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
10-12-1840, Helena Modjeska, Polish-American actor. Though she
was the reigning queen of the Warsaw stage, HM was barred from Poland because
of her anti-Russian attitudes. HM took intense English lessons while in
her 40's and became one of the greatest actresses of her day in England
and the United States. Her autobiography is Memories and Impressions of
Helene Modjeska (1910).
12-1842, August Emma Stetson - U.S. religious personality. AES
was an early reader with the Christian Science movement. She established
the First Church of Christ Scientists with a school for training practitioners.
Although a cult grew up around her and she was eventually excommunicated
from the church, she continued to pledge loyalty to Mrs. Eddy and continued
to preach her brand of Christian Science and live very nicely.
She attempted to replace the "unChristian and
anti-British" Star Spangled Banner with the piece Our America. It
received some support from World War I sentiments but like many other such
attempts, soon died away.
B. 10-12-1855, Julia Richman - U.S. educational reformer. An
outstanding teacher born into a family that contained from a long line
of rabbis, JR soon became a principal. Again her leadership was recognized
and promoted to supervisor and given the choice of all school district
in New York city. JR chose the crowded, shockingly poor lower East Side
district and moved there from her uptown residence. She was responsible
for 600 teachers and 23,000 students where she emphasized care of the child's
entire life and the need to improve its surroundings as well as instructing
them in a solid educational curriculum. She even opened her home as a resident
hall for some of her teachers and the social workers of the area.
"It is so much easier and
so much more picturesque to teach children to wave flags while singing
the 'Star Spangled Banner than to teach them to separate ashes from garbage,
as required by law."
She co-authored several books on educational methods
as well as on on Jewish ethics. She started a school lunch program, eye
testing for children, etc. Naturally, there was protest from some immigrants
that she was trying to destroy their ethnic individuality. When examined
today, much of the opposition was gender related.
She was also a leader in the movement to teach Jewish
immigrants to integrate into American society.
A rather remarkable woman.
B. 10-12-1860, Mabel Thorp Boardman - U.S. social worker. MTB
masterminded a palace coup that unseated the aging Clara Barton as head
of the American Red Cross. She also and engineered changes that led to
modernization and greater public confidence in the Red Cross by hiring
men for administrative positions.
She used her political powers to have the head of
the Red Cross appointed by the President of the United States who happed
to be her friend, Theodore Roosevelt.
Unfortunately, some presidents have used the appointment
as a political plum to their supporters or to pay political debts.
B. 10-12-1889, Perle Mesta - U.S. businesswoman, diplomat and politician.
A noted political hostess, businesswoman, diplomat, and feminist known
as the (Washington, D.C.) "Hostess with the Mostes'."
PM built a vast fortune on investments based on the
inheritance from her husband and father.
She was a member of the executive council of the National
Woman's party (1938) and campaigned for the ERA. She left the Republican
party after the conservatives failed to support Wendell Wilke after he
became the Republican nominee for the presidency in 1940. PM became a friend
of the Trumans and became the first hostess after he became president since
Bess disliked arranging large parties.
Her experience in the steel industry (after her husband's
death) qualified her for the post of Envoy Extraodinary and Minster Plenipotentiary
to Luxembourg, a tiny nation, but one of the world's largest producers
of steel. Newspapers (mostly Republican controlled) ridiculed her appointment
as a political joke or plum for her party-giving reputation, completely
ignoring her business experience.
Her life and elan became the unofficial model for
the musical Call Me Madam.
B. 10-12-1891, Edith Stein - Jewish born, Roman Catholic "blessed."
ES, born a Jew, renounced her faith at 13 to become an atheist, coincidentally
at the age when boys were bar mitzvahed and made part of the synagogue.
Girls at the time were not and never really became part of the religious
life. She went on to become respected philosopher.
She converted to Roman Catholicism at 30 after reading
the autobiography of mystic St. Teresa of vila. ES entered a Carmelite
convent and then was moved to the Netherlands where it was thought she
would escape the Nazi persecution of Jews along with her sister Rosa who
had also converted. It was there that she wrote her major work Science
of the Cross.
In spite of her conversion, after the invasion of
the Netherlands by the Germans, she was arrested as a Jew and sent to Auschwitz
in 1942 and she and her sister were gassed together.
In 1987 she was beautified by Pape John Paul II as
a modern martyr. If she is sainted, it may be the first time a Roman Catholic
was sainted for dying as a Jew. A number of Jewish organizations oppose
the sainthood.
10-12-1897, Lillian Smith - U.S. author and civil rights reformer.
The Massachusetts courts banned her best-selling novel Strange Fruit which
features interracial love. The U.S. Post Office instituted action to bar
it under the Anthony Comstock anti-pornography laws - the same laws that
attempted to withhold birth control information from women. The federal
matter was dropped when Eleanor Roosevelt intervened.
B. 10-12-1909, Dorothy Livesay - Canadian poet. DL won the 1947
Lorne Pierce Medal, Canada's highest literary award. Her poetry ranges
from intensely personal lyrics to angry protests.
B. 10-12-1911, Ann Petry - U.S. journalist and novelist. She
is best known work for The Street, a novel about a Harlem mother surrounded
by inescapable violence and limitations.
B. 10-12-1923, Jean Nidetch - U.S. founder of Weight Watchers (1963.)
Event 10-12-1932: Frances Willis, becomes the first woman chargé
d'affaires in US history, serving at Stockholm, Sweden, in a temporary
capacity.
B. 10-12-1950, Susan Anton - U.S. actor and singer.
B. 10-12-1952, Megan Robert - U.S. multi-media composer and performer
specializing in electronic music.
Event 10-12-1999: Dr. Nafis Sadik of the UN Population Fund said
the Vatican has given up attempts to stop family planning for women in
the poorest counties of the world.
She said that while the Holy See continues to express
its oppostion to contraception, it has stopped trying to hold up proceedings
by inserting reference to "natural methods" of birth control.
Quoted in a London Telegraph newspaper article, she
said: "They believe that the debate has been
lost. Even strongly Catholic countries such as Honduras or Malta have family
planning and sexual health programmes and the Church has let it go."
Dr Sadik said that in some countries UN clinics
and the Church's clinics were side by side and workers in the Catholic
clinic sent some patients next door.
She said: "This doesn't
mean that the Church at the top has changed its position. But it is accepted
that the international community has accepted that family planning is one
of the human rights of women. My opinion is that the Holy See has given
up trying to change that position at the UN, though it always says at the
end of the discussion that the Church maintains its position."
Some 350 million women - a third of all women of reproductive
age in developing countries - still did not have access to modern methods
of family planning, she said. About 120 million more women would use it
if it were acceptable. About 585,000 women in developing counties died
as a result of pregnancy and 70,000 died each year due to unsafe abortions.
Aids caused by unprotected sex was shortening lifetimes in many countries.
The UN population report says the fastest-growing
regions of the world are sub-Saharan Africa, parts of south Asia and west
Asia.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
WOLF, NAOMI
"Men We Love
must make a leap of imagination to believe in the female experience. They
do not call women nags or paranoid when we embark on the arduous, often
boring, nonnegotiable daily chore of drawing attention to sexism. They
treat it like adults treat driving lessons: if irked in the short term
at being treated like babies, they're grateful in the long term that someone
is willing to teach them patiently to move through the world without harming
the pedestrians. Men We Love don't drive without their gender glasses on."
--MS.
July/August 1992, page 31, from the article "Radical Hetrosexuality."
WILLETT, ROSYLN S.
"Finally, when
I did decide to have a child, most people, male and female were 'worried'
about my continuing to work. I did work until the night before the baby
was born...Two weeks after, I spent a day touring a client factory. My
feelings about work was clued by my observation of pregnant alley cats.
Belly or no, they continue to jump over fences. So can most women. When
I was asked how I could continue to work with such a massive handicap,
the answer was easy: a big belly only interferes with tying your shoelaces;
it does not impair your intelligence. Ask any man with one."
--Roslyn
S. Willett, "Working in 'A Man's World'; the Woman Executive,"
which appeared in Woman in Sexist Society, edited by Gornick and
Moran.
ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY
"Don t shut
yourself up in a bandbox because you are a woman, but understand what is
going on, and educate yourself to take part in the world s work for it
all affects you and yours."
--
From Little Women.
HIGHSMITH, PATRICIA
"She knew what bothered her at the store...It
was the waste actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from
doing what she wanted to do, might have done -- and here it was the complicated
procedures with moneybags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept people
even from serving the store as efficiently as they might -- the sense that
everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on an entirely
wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it
was that each life contained, never could find its expression.
"It reminded her of conversations at tables,
on sofas, with people whose words seemed to hover over dead, unstirrable
things, who never touched a string that played. And when one tried to touch
a live string, looked at one with faces as masked as ever, making a remarks
so perfect in its banality that one could not even believe it might be
subterfuge."
--
Patricia Highsmith, aka Claire Morgan, in her novel The Price of Salt,
1952.
HUFSTEDLER, SHIRLEY
"I empathize with those who yearn for a simpler
world for some bygone golden age of domestic and international tranquility.
Perhaps for a few people at some time in history there was such an age.
But for the mass of humanity it is an age that never was."
KERR, JEAN
"I know what I wish Ralph Nader would investigate
next. Marriage. It's not safe; it's not safe at all."
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