Iris is a Messenger of the Gods of Olympus who travels on the rainbow. She is the Goddess of the Sky and Sea, and of communications She travels between Mount Olympus and the world of mortals to dispense messages from the Gods.
She also carried water in a pitcher from the River Styx to people who perjured themselves and puts them to sleep. She is often mentioned in the Iliad but not in the Odyssey. I confess I had overwritten her with Hermes and Mercury, but that was ignorance. I am so glad I rediscovered her.
Of course a Goddess who can travel between sea and sky, between Heaven and Earth, between the living and the world beyond the River Styx essentially travels between states of being. Only information, which Gregory Bateson defined as: any difference that makes a difference can flow in this manner.
We need a Goddess of Information for this Age of Information. Iris is perfect representation of this. Information can flow anywhere and everywhere. I have stated before that the internet is a woman. Check out my Googling Gaia from 2015 and The Feminization of the Interwebs from 2012 for some of the basics about this assessment.
The distributed nature of the internet was created as a base layer of ARPAnet the decentralized communication backbone for military ground communications in the Post World War II era in the U.S.This is how women naturally communicate. Linear communication is a male strategy. Networked information provides multiple linkages to the same bit of data so no one linkage failure endangers access to critical communication. This is essentially the village in the proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
At this time when the generation of data is accelerating exponentially and it is becoming increasingly feasible to encode dense context with the data, but we still need human interpretation to make it meaningful. Meaning can be implied improperly when we allow sloppy out of context decoding and other intentional distortion of information. But the ancient understanding of communication and messaging knew that it takes women’s communication methods to handle the important stuff, and when mortals perjured themselves, lied, the appropriate punishment was meted out by the same goddess that controlled the proper handling of information and messages. This seems quite pertinent in today’s world. The complexity of women’s type of information storage and delivery systems, with built in redundancy, needs to be re-incorporated into society. We need women, of a critical number, in governance and leadership positions. A more integrated method of organizing and utilizing information in our culture could address many of the problems we currently face. Prediction never works, but we do know that single channel structures are not serving us well.
Iris approves. It is time for her comeback. Communication is iconically women’s business.
Iconic H: Hype, Hyperbole, and Hymens
If we are going to cover the iconic elements of THE FEMININE some space has to be given to discussion of the concept of virginity and the hymen. This is a brief article, but a necessary one, as an iconic aspect of how women are defined depends on this trait that is largely a culturally constructed concept and not a biological state.
Whether a hymen is intact, or ever existed, is a definitive sign of nothing. This inner labial membrane does not exist in all girls; variation is the norm, with all degrees of presence and absence of the trait found in neonates.
There is no one physical presentation of this trait. So to have the social status of a girl or woman defined by something that can not be verified is not only ludicrous, but dangerous.
It is tempting to think that in the 21st Century a person cannot have her life ruined by the conjecture of others, but many extant fundamentalist religions seem to be based on such belief and men’s control over it.
The definition of a virgin is someone who has not had sexual intercourse, and the proof of this state is the presence of an anatomical state that may never have existed.
No one should need to prove such a status. That such a state or thing is believed to exist, and essentially has to be confirmed by another person, is inherently a matter of social control – not one of fact.
Language around this topic backs up the social control aspect of the concept of virginity. As most people know there are many ways to have sexual relations with others. There is nothing binary about sexuality or ways to be intimate with a sexual partner. There is no one thing that can be given nor taken.
There are many quite good explorations of this topic, some quite graphic, and I need not go into detail here and will just link to an article in the Atlantic.
Many feminist studies of this trait, as defined and managed by a patriarchal culture, see this as one of the major proofs that men seek to define and control all aspects of women in what is considered the default or basic state of relationships. This is changing for some, but no one is immune to such a s deep historical belief that spans all cultures to at least some degree.
Iconic G: Generation of Women's Generational Icons
In this post from the A to Z compendium of The Feminine Icon. We are at the letter G today. I decided to look at the way we have associated whole groups of women with a single term that captures some element of what has changed for women in a specific time period.
Most things remain the same, but difference is what is noted and categorized as capsulizing an entire generation.
Also it only takes only a few generations until you can have a totally mythic ancestor or icon, with god like properties; usually it is stated as 6 generations. So the icons covered here are only going back to late 1800s. People still living today remember people who were born in the late 19th Century.
From the Past
Gibson Girl
The idealized common woman, young and beautiful of course, of the 1890s and early 1990s was an image popularized by artist Charles Dana Gibson. The public domain image below is typical of how the girls, as they were called, were depicted. This one happens to be a beach scene.
The differences inherent to this idealized image are masculine aspects of the clothing. Not the tie and aspects of military uniforms. Corseting is still essential for anyone emulating this look, but the overall appearance is a curvy softness with hair loosely coiffed. Bare arms or neck are often featured, but usually not both. The Gibson Girl is confident and coy.
Suffragist
The next icon overlapped with the previous one. The suffragist at the turn of the 19th to 20th Century in the U.S. was seen as something quite different from any known societal element. This graphic, called the awakening, emphasized the novel west to east migration of votes for women. The classic Greek representational elements depict democracy on the move and women in the east reaching out to hurry an embrace of liberty.
But the truth is the Gibsonesque girl was a Suffragist and so was the Flapper. Both were around before women received the vote in the U.S.
In fact, this image from a Studebaker advertisement in 1920 shows aspects of all three early 20th Century types of women.
Flapper
The two images I’ve chosen to represent the Flapper shows the vast width of territory the icon covers, the fictionalized and symbolic one to the left and the reality to the right.
The artistic rendering of the Flapper in a Butterfly costume shows the new freedoms and celebratory decadence associated with the dancing and illicitly drinking woman of prohibition. Just as real as prohibition was the celebration of life that occurs after WWI.
The office workers in the Shorpy image shows more of the reality of women working so as to support the independence for which previous generations and older sisters had fought.
Bu
But then everything changed.
Dust Bowl Dorothy
Then there was this thing called the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
Dorothea Lange, above left, the photographer who took the pic of Florence Owens Thompson, center, created some of the best known photos which came to epitomize the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The fictionalized image of depression-era dustbowl female is Dorothy Gale as played by Judy Garland.
Independence, toughness, and something closer to reality – working photographer, mother struggling to feed her family, and orphan learning to appreciate what really matters in life – captures the iconic elements of living through the pre-WWII Great Depression.
Rosies
No one during the time of the U.S. involvement in WWII called anyone who joined to workforce to do traditional males jobs in support of the war effort a Rosie. But that is how we have come to know them.
The real factory-women working during WWII was far more diverse than the icon we have come to know.
Then by 1946 and the end of the war women were to revert to classic roles as though the men had never left and women had not grown accustomed to a lifestyle predicated on working outside the home.
Donna Reed
The perfectly coiffed, home-making, mother of many, who can bring a whole community together and have a casserole baking in the oven was exemplified by Donna Reed’s role in the 1946 Capra film, It’s a Wonderful Life.
The only problem with this image is that the idealized family of the post WWII era and the 1950s homemaker with the suburban barbeque that this image morphed into never really existed. These were Hollywood and advertiser s creation. That did not stop them from becoming iconic.
Then everything changed again… but not really.
Beatniks & Hippie-Chicks
The antithesis of the 1950s homemaker, the beatnik, a chick, had an outer appearance completely different from what had come before. Jazz infused, black turtleneck and skin tight black pant clad, with an existential bent, open relationship inclined, and at best a sidekick to the male cool-cats who ruled same as men before but without the cultural constraints that layered over traditional society.
This duality in rebellion continued on into the 1960s and on to the next icon of the hippie chick.
Living Icons
Women were still not thought of as independent agents in the world, but some of them began to act the part.
As we go through time more and more references are available to confound singular images as icons. But the elements of the Generation of hippie chicks may be best contained in Joni Mitchell or Carole King. Carole King married early at age 17, the same age when she wrote, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. By 1968 she was divorced and in 1971 her album tapestry Tapestry hit the top of the charts and stayed there for 15 weeks then stayed on the charts for 6 years. These women dominated the 60s and 70s as respected, intelligent, and immensely talented forces shaping and reflecting the times.
It is tempting for most non-Boomers to think of these iconic women musicians as Boomer icons, because they were of the same age as the hippies, but actually, they were born before the post WWII baby boom began in 1943.
Similarly the next phase of proto goth punky women, who were first represented by Patti Smith were older than the first Punks and were actually Boomers. Patti was born during the first year after WWI, in 1946.
Jumbled up Sorta Now
Proto -punk Patti Smith opened the floodgates into a Goth amalgam still presenting itself into the 21st Century. These Late-Boomer and Gen-X characters, and the real women who emulated and inspired them bridged and obscured the iconic Goth iconography that included some of male Beat ethos into their own fin-de-siècle self-expression.
The iconic goth image played opposite the gray-suited working woman. But a suit does not really have enough depth to be an icon in and of itself.
Please note that nearly all of these icons mentioned above are white. Maybe we haven’t evolved much.
Shortly after the 80s something happened. The 90s. At this point in the generational discussion I feel as though I should bow out as my millennial daughter is born.
But even I noticed that something was well… something began to happen in the 90s… the new women rising were in control in ways previous generations were not. Perhaps this video will remind you of what was happening.
Then the new century and millennium brought us fully into the age of the female warrior and protestor.
Needless to say perhaps but we have pride in those who serve and in those who stand up for what they believe. The making of icons is not an easy path.
Into the Future
Still being in the moment, almost, it is difficult to say what might become iconic. We rarely have control over our own cultural encoding, but we have far more than we used to.
I think there will be many strong iconic women who become the icons of new generations.
(2011) Intersectionality and mediated cultural production in a globalized post-colonial world, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35:5, 834-849, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.628035
Iconic F: The Fairy Lights of Marie Curie
F is obviously for female and feminine, but also for a woman’s passion for research and discovery as exemplified by the Fairy Lights of Madame Marie Curie.
“One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was a really lovely sight and one always new to us,” –Marie Curie
Uranium ore, thorium, polonium, and radium are all radioactive and the Curies worked with them all, in fact they discovered the last two. Marie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize; she actually won two Nobel Prizes.
For most people Marie Curie is just known as Madam Curie and if they know anything about her, they probably know that she worked with radioactive materials. But that is probably about it.
So here are a few nifty facts.
- Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland which was still part of the Russian Empire in 1867 when she was born. Her family was well educated but women were refused admission into University by law. She attended an underground university in Warsaw. Then she traveled to France to pursue graduate studies at the Sorbonne.
- She was a physicist and a chemist, a wife and a mother. She earned a university degree in 1893, and another in 1894. Marie returned to Poland but found that as a woman she was would not be hired at a university. She returned to Paris. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie. In 1897 she gave birth to a daughter, Irène. She taught at a University. She and Pierre worked in a shed they used as a laboratory behind the university at which he taught.
- She researched and published. Her work began in magnetism, continued into the electrical conductivity of the field of radiation around uranium, and advanced to the isolation of thorium, to which another research beat her to publication, and the discovery of polonium, announced in a paper by the Curies in July 1898, and in December of that same year she announced the discovery of radium. She coined the term radioactive, and advanced the theoretical understanding that radioactive radiation was an atomic level property.
- In 1903 she shared Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband and with physicist Henri Becquerel. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She also conducted medically related research, founded two medical research elements, and created portable x-ray technology.
- The Curie’s second daughter was born in 1904. Pierre died in traffic accident in 1906. IN 1911 scandal erupted when the public found out about her affair with a student of Pierre’s who was estranged from his wife. She was extremely active in the war effort of WWI, monetarily and medically, but received no acknowledgement from the French government for her efforts. She died from aplastic anemia in 1934.
Marie Curie had such a productive, rich life that it seems a wonder that more of her work, and her theoretical, practical, and technological discoveries are not well known.
The Substance
The carrying of radium in pockets, and its placement on night stands, by the Curies in order to admire and use the lovely blue green glow produced by radium certainly shortened Marie’s life. With today’s knowledge of how radiation interacts with living tissue, it is tempting to note the ignorance of the careless researchers. It was not just the Curies who did not understand the harm that could come with exposure to radiation.
I remember watching the hands move ever so slowly around the dial on a manually wound alarm clock numbers in the darkened bedroom where I was supposed to be napping as a little girl. I was too old for naps, but my mom made me lay down and learn to tell time by watching the clock if I did not want to nap. This took place around 1960 or 61, so radium-coated clock faces were still around and available then. Phosphorescent paint is now used.
The use of the illuminating element in paint, and the illness, suffering and death that workers who painted watch and clock faces by hand in the 1920s provides basis of the film, Radium Girls, which will debut April 27th at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Problems from other radioactive materials are relatively common. Water supplies in Arizona, and other uranium mining areas, have been and continue to be contaminated with deadly run-off. And of course there is the problem of nuclear reactor accidents and radioactive waste.
But the fairy lights were magical.
Iconic E: Erinnyes are Furious
I gave serious thought to doing the Every Woman thing, or even Every Town for Gun Safety, but decided the stretch would be possible but not fun.
Then, I had an epiphany, I remembered that the Furies were first called Erinyes. Furies were not females to be messed with.
According to Robert Graves in, The Greek Myths, of which you may download a PDF copy here, when Chronos, the youngest of the seven Titans, castrates his father and throws the testes into the sea.
But drops of blood flowing from the wound fell upon Mother Earth, and she bore the Three
Erinnyes, furies who avenge crimes of parricide and perjury — by name Alecto, Tisiphone,
and Megaera.
This lets you know how the ancients felt about killing one’s parents and about swearing a false oath.
Alecto castigated moral crimes against mortals. Tisiphone punished crimes of murder: parricide, fratricide and homicide. Megaera punishes people who commit infidelity.
Graves later describes them more fully:
Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera, the Erinnyes or Furies, live in Erebus, and are older
than Zeus or any of the other Olympians. Their task is to hear complaints brought by mortals
against the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, and of householders or city councils to suppliants—and to punish such crimes by hounding the
culprits relentlessly, without rest or pause, from city to city and from country to country.
These Erinnyes are crones, with snakes for hair, dogs’ heads, coal-black bodies, bats’ wings,
and bloodshot eyes. In their hands they carry brass-studded scourges, and their victims die in
torment. It is unwise to mention them by name in conversation; hence they are usually styled
the Eumenides, which means ‘The Kindly Ones’—as Hades is styled Pluton, or Pluto, ‘The
Rich One’.
No classic, ancient tale is complete without some confusion and contradiction. So it is with the Erinnyes.
They sprang from the blood of their castrated father, but the real unforgivable sin is shown in their torment of Orestes, which told in many narratives including the Orestes Tales of Sophocles is actually about matricide. Many, Graves included, thought this reflected the patriarchal usurping of the Mother Goddess.
But no matter what the Furies were furious about, just try to think about the phrase, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” which actually first read as a proper attribution of a woman acting like a Fury, now that you have read this article and not have an image of these ancient iconic fems cross your mind.
Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d
in the 1697 play The Mourning Bride (Act III Scene 2) by William Congreve.
Iconic D: Diapers, Yes, Diapers
I decided to have fun with the A to Z challenge this year. So as I was searching for the perfect Icon to discuss for my The Iconic Feminine, entry D, the only iconic female, real or mythic, that I found interesting was Delilah. Sampson’s downfall. Blame the woman, cast her as the harlot, a personal saboteur. Well at least this Old Testament villain is interesting… but I just was not excited to write about her.
So I went to bed and slept on it. I awoke wanting to steer clear of Biblical icons. Religion and politics are not fun. But what had decided to embed itself in my brain for the letter D was the word diapers. The iconic femininity of diapers? Yep. I had to think about that one a while.
Diapers. Poop. Children.’s butts. Wash or dispose. Train. Health. Sanitation. Yes, these are components of the, pardon my language, the traditional shit to which women are culturally assigned and which compose some of the less glamorous iconic elements of femininity. Taking care of business family.
So far we have looked at individual meaning and societal roles of two women both named Audrey at birth. A doll that was drawn from the upscale, retail, American, 20th Century ideas of femininity. An early European Goddess concept of age, wisdom, and dark mystery. And the “motherly” aspect of dealing with life’s shit makes up a part of the Iconic Feminine too. Diapers are the perfect icon for this.
Here is a scholarly article on the History of Diapers.
And here is an article about gendered unpaid work done by women around the globe.
So no matter whether it is changing a diaper, being sandwiched between aging parents and nearly grown children, bandaging a scraped knee at a soccer game, or doing the dishes that no one else thought to do, take comfort if you can in your iconic role, and if you can’t, keep on working to change culture and teach the next generation better.