| 12-16 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Women Who Win
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Kathe Kollwitz and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Cheryl Toussaint
Born
Dec. 16, 1952, Cheryl Toussaint, one of our greatest track runners showed
what she was made of early in her career. "Cheryl
had been training with us for only about two weeks," her
early coach Fred Thompson recalled, "but
I decided to enter her in a one-mile run, just to give her some competitive
experience. I said to her before the race, don't go out too fast, stay
with the pack, and just try to finish.
"Well,
the gun went off, and Cheryl was a hundred yards in front of the whole
field and running like a madwoman... Then, with about a hundred yards to
go, the oxygen debt really hit her, and she just about collapsed. She fell
down, then got up and started crawling on her hands and knees. It was unbelievable!
She stood up, staggered some more, got about twenty yards from the finish
line and fell again. She kept on going, crawling, still with nobody near
her, and then right at the wire another girl caught up and won.
"Cheryl
cried like a baby... I knew, at that moment, that this girl was going to
be something special. I had never seen anything like that before in my
whole life."
-- Excerpted from Women Who Win by Francene Sabin, Dell Publishing,
1977.
Many years later the world
through TV witnessed another woman, a marathon runner make that same oxygen
deprived, staggering, unbelievable fight to reach an Olympic finish line.
The dignity that everyone gave her, respecting her pure flame of purpose
as she stumbled blindly toward the goal she had spent her life trying to
reach... her coaches walked beside the track calling out encouragement
as she stumbled along. One touch by them, one wrong step would have disqualified
her...
The hushed Olympic stadium knew they were witnessing
something special in the superhuman spirit - yet at home we were forced
to listen to U.S. men announcers regaling her coaches for not stopping
her, implying that "she" shouldn't be allowed to decide her own
destiny. How little those who never reach for the stars know.
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12-16 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 12-16-1775, Jane Austen, English novelist.
Considered by many as one of the supreme creators of English literature
and certainly the writer who modernized novel writings by depicting people
acting in everyday life.
B. 12-16-1843, Josephine Shaw Lowell, after
years of administrative work in improving the care of the poor through
organizaed charities she acknowledged the dichotomy of able-bodied willing
workers unable to earn enough money to support themselves and their families
and turned to labor reform and supporting organized labor's efforts for
better wages and working conditions. She also organized the Woman's Municipal
League to enlist women in reform legislation.
B. 12-16-1847, Augusta Mary Anne Holmes, French
pianist and opera and orchestral composer who used the masculine pseudonym
Hermann Zenta.
B. 12-16-1901, Margaret Mead, American anthropologist
who revolutionized thinking about primitive life and female adolescent
sexuality by raising questions about rigid social mores in all cultures.
After her death efforts are being made to discredit her research and claim
she misread primitive tribes' female attitudes. Blackberry Winter,
1972, is her autobiography.
B. 12-16-1903, Elizabeth Hawes operated an
exclusive couturiere in New York
City, authored Fashion is Spinach (1938) debunking the fashion scene
including the uncomfortable clothes men wear. Was the first American to
display a fashion collection in Paris. She advocated pants for women, skirts
for men, and child care centers for children. In Why Women Cry (1943)
she detailed the hardship women suffer as working women. Her mother was
an early Vassar graduate and encouraged the careers of her daughters.
Event: 12-16-1904, in spite of dire predictions
of moral turpitude, nothing bad happened when the Majestic Theater
in New York City hired female ushers.
B. 12-16-1952, Cheryl Toussaint, one of our
greatest track runners got her start in a city-sponsored group. While
watching the meet, Cheryl was urged by friends to run in an "open"
race for girls. She ran second in borrowed shorts and borrowed tennies
that didn't fit.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
KOLLWITZ, KATHE:
"I
do not want to die until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and
cultivated the seed that was placed in me, until the last small twig has
grown."
-- Kathe Kollwitz: Diaries and Letters.
GILMAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS:
"In
spite of her supposed segregation to maternal duties, the human female,
the world-over, works at extra-maternal duties for hours enough to provide
her with an independent living, and then is denied independence on the
grounds that motherhood prevents her working."
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics.
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