| 12-07 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Excerpt from Herstory...
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTE by
Hirabayashi Taisko.
...A Record of American Women's Past
Ah, the glories of the "good
ole days" -- "Eliza
W. Farnham called the male population of Illinois in the early 1800s 'unequivocally
indolent. On a bright day they mount their horses and throng the little
town in the vicinity of their homes, drinking and trading horses till late
in the evenings.'
"Thomas Ashe, noted: 'On entering the house...
the Kentuckyan never exchanged a word with his wife or his children...
notwithstanding he had been absent several days. No tender enquiry, not
affection or sentiment, but a contemptuous silence and a stern brutality
which block up all the avenues to the heart.'...
"Women aged more noticeably on the frontier than
did men. Because of frequent childbearing and the immensely difficult job
of maintaining a home, caring for the children, and working in the fields,
a thirty-year-old woman was already old and worn out. One journalist commented:
'Woman is expected to daily endure a strain that no man would tolerate
for any length of time. Until what is modestly called housekeeping is recognized
as a noble science that it really is, and is carefully studied, the slaughter
of women by overwork will continue.'
"Feminist Lucy Stone visited a frontier area
of Illinois in 1856 and observed a wife who slept in an outhouse all winter
while her husband had his bed near the fire in the cabin. He was punishing
her for giving birth to a girl. The frontierswoman, whether the frontier
was Illinois in 1805 or Wyoming in 1860, faced all kinds of hardships with
courage and determination. She is the unsung heroic figure of the settlement
of the West - she, not the series of Daniel Boones who have been memorialized
in poetry and song."
-- From Sochen, June. Herstory: A
Record of the American Woman's Past, second edition. Sherman Oaks,
CA: Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. 1981.
[Ed. Note: In my studies of women's herstory and history
I have been struck by the number of histories written by eminent feminist
scholars that are almost unknown to the average student. One of the reasons,
of course, is that the women's books are considered "outsider"
histories about irrelevant things such as how people actually lived - and,
I am firmly convinced, to keep women ignorant of the true facts of the
past so they are not able to judge the present. The past was cruel, vicious,
and death-dealing to women. And before any of you start up, remember women
suffered the same kinds of deprivation as men throughout history, PLUS
all that she had to suffer as a female. No one is comparing past with present...
just men's past with women's past... and it ain't nice. --IS]
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12-07 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 12-07-1760, Marie Tussaud, Swiss-born Frenchwoman
founded the famous wax museum and the original Chamber of Horrors.
B. 12-07-1801, Abigail Hopper Gibbons, her
New York home was a stop for runaway slaves, worked and influenced
legislation to establish a reform woman's prison to improve conditions
for female prisoners who were often regularly raped by their men guards.
Event: 12-07-1925, Edith Frances Nourse Rogers
of Massachusetts begins the first of her
18 terms as a member of the U.S. House of Represenatives.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
TAISKO, HIRABAYASHI:
"I
have worn myself out trying to find a man who lived up to my idealistic
notions."
-- Hirabayashi Taisko, "Self-Mockery."
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