| 12-28 TABLE of CONTENTS:
"Why didn't we know about these women?"
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Betty Power, Naomi Thornton, Virginia Woolf, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Dale Spender on Women and History
"For
years I had not thought to challenge the received wisdom of my own history
tutors who had - in the only fragment of knowledge about angry women
I was ever endowed with - informed me that early in the twentieth century,
a few unbalanced and foolish women had chained themselves to railings in
the attempt to obtain the vote.
"When I learnt, however, that in 1911 there
had been twenty-one regular feminist periodicals in Britain (see Elizabeth
Sarah, l982b), that there was a feminist book shop, a woman's press, and
a women's bank run by and for women, I could no longer accept that the
reason I knew almost nothing about women of the past was because there
were so few of them, and they had done so little. I began to acknowledge
not only that the women's movement of the early twentieth century was bigger,
stronger and more influential than I had ever suspected, but that it might
not have been the only such movement. It was in this context that I began
to wonder whether the disappearance of the women of the past was an accident.
"Why didn't we know about these women?
Was it possible that we were not meant to? And if women who raise their
voices against male power became but a transitory entry in the historical
records, what was to be the fate of the present women's movement?
"For me, the comfort of finding so many women
of the past began to give way to the discomfort of wondering about the
present. I began to ask quite seriously how are women made to disappear?
If such a huge movement as that in 1911, with so many and various voices,
could have so effectively disappeared within the space of fifty years,
what were the implications for the apparently smaller movement of my own
time? What was the process by which women were erased; and was it still
in operation?
"These questions are the substance of this book.
I have come to accept that a patriarchal society depends in large measure
on the experience and values of males being perceived as the only valid
frame of reference for society, and that it is therefore in patriarchal
interest to prevent women from sharing, establishing and asserting their
equally real, valid and different frame of reference, which is the outcome
of different experience."
The above is from Chapter 1 of Dale Spender's
marvelous book Women of Ideas and what Men Have Done to Them, London,
New York: Pandora Books, 1990.
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12-28 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 12-28-1789, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, writer,
early, influential stylist of the American novel.
B. 12-28-1932, Nichelle Nichols, actor,
first black woman regularly featured on a weekly TV show, activist of great
force in NASA's first recruitment drive of minorities and women, but better
known to Trekkies as Uhura of the Star Trek series, Whoopi Goldberg
in the eulogy of Star Trek originator Gene Roddenberry's funeral with whom
Nichols had been lovers said that 25 years earlier she was a kid from the
projects who saw Uhura as "The only vision
of black people in the future," autobiography
Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories (1995).
B. 12-28-1934, Maggie Smith, British screen
and stage actor won Academy Awards for her work in The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and for California Suite (1978).
Event: 12-28-1944, Lietuenant Aleda E. Lutz
of the Army Nurse Corps is awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross posthumously.
Event 12-28-1967: Muriel Siebert pays $445,000
plus $7515 initiation fee as the first woman to own a seat on the New York
Stock Exchange.
B. 12-28-1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, first
so-called test tube baby to be born in the U.S.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
POWER, BETTY:
"When
you know something about the reality of the world that those who stand
in ignorance do not know, then you can't not educate."
-- Betty Power, 1987.
THORNTON, NAOMI:
"The
minute a woman's age is known she is not see for what she is -- or for
what her fantasies are - but quickly tagged by others with a certain mental
set. She is pinioned by her years, able to go neither backward or forward."
-- Naomi Thornton
WOOLF, VIRGINIA:
"One
of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with
other human beings as we take our place among them."
-- Virginia Woolf
ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR:
"Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really
are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make
that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live
anyone else's life, not even your own child's. The influence you exert
is through your own life and what you become yourself."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
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