I have always loved the month May. In the area of the U.S. in which I grew up May was filled with blossoms. Probably due to being a May baby, the lilac blossoms, peony blossoms, trillium, lily of the valley, hepatica, and so many more seemed like they heralded the arrival of my personal holiday.
May is a boom time for blooms. What is blooming where you live? Saguaros are not quite blooming,yet, a bit early, where I live. But many cactuses are in blossom. What is the the official flower of your state? (
May 1st
May Day
May is welcomed in with celebration, or at least it once was. May Day, May 1st, was a time for festivals, maypoles, may baskets, May Queen, washing in the early morning dew so you will be beautiful throughout the year. May Day traditions lived on in the Rural United States with pageants, Queens, and poles through the early part of the 20th Century. (6 prompts.) And then of course there is the enigmatic Led Zeppelin lyric involving, “a spring clean for the May Queen.”
Labor Day
And of course everywhere but the U.S., or so it seems, observes Labor Day on May 1. International Workers of the World and all that.
Beltane
Beltane was observed in Celtic regions on May 1st and most likely was forebearer of the more recent May Day. Beltane is the halfway point between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. Beltane would be the beginning of Summer in any calendar that considers the Summer Solstice to be the height of Summer, the longest day, and often the hottest day of the year.
Mothers and Others
May closes the contemporary rituals of Spring that celebrate the female and renewal. We have those? Yes we do! International Women’s Day, March 8th, starts the contemporary celebration of women. Earth Day follows as the second node of this new tripartite set of events. Mother’s Day of course provides the third point.
Mother’s Day as a “card and cake” celebration is a recent invention and not one ever intended to be celebrated so superficially. I previously wrote about the Two Mothers of Mother’s Day. Both trace to the post-Civil War era when the U.S. was still mourning the staggering loss of life in that war and dealing with the self loathing associated with the slaughter of kindred. But as that article states the momentum toward creating a Mother’s Day that remembers the sentiments behind its conception.
In the meanwhile, let us remember all mothers throughout time. The love of mothers through time is proved time and again, most recently in the 4,800 years old remains of a mother and child found in Taiwan.
Now moving from scenes of birth to celebrations of birth, let us turn to women worthy of a few words by you, if you are so inclined:
May 4, 1916 (2006) – Jane Jacobs, journalist, author, and urban studies activist, wrote The Death and Life of the Great American Cities in 1961. She opposed the “urban renewal” that demolished supposed urban blight and destroyed vibrant, urban, and chaotic communities.
May 5, 1942 (1998) – Tammy Wynette, country music singer, after first success in 1967 had more than 20 songs go to #1, Grammy Award for “Stand By Your Man” (1968)
May 5, 1864 (1922) – Elizabeth Seaman, pen name “Nellie Bly,” investigative journalist, wrote expose of mental asylum (1887), set a record for circling the world in 72 days (1890)
May 11, 1894 (1991) – Martha Graham, modern dance innovator and choreographer, first dancer to perform at the White House
May 12, 1907 (2003) – Katharine Hepburn, actor, performed for more than 60 years, won four Academy Awards for best actress including “The Philadelphia Story” and “On Golden Pond,” named top American screen legend of all time by American Film Institute (1999)
May 18, 1970 – Tina Fey, television writer, producer, and actor, first female head writer for “Saturday Night Live” (1999), creator of television series “30 Rock”, youngest winner of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (2010)
May 26, 1951 (2012) – Sally Ride, astrophysicist, first American woman astronaut
May 26, 1924 (1977) – Thelma Hill, dancer, choreographer, educator, co-founder of the New York Negro Ballet Company (1954), one of the founders of the dance troupe that became the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, after an injury focused on teaching dance
Rachel Carson , 1940. Official Fish and Wildlife Portrait.
May 27, 1907 (1964) – Rachel Carson, scientist, environmentalist, and author of several books. “The Silent Spring” which became a cornerstone of the modern environmental protection movement was her most successful and influential work.
Women’s Achievements of May
May 1, 1950 – Gwendolyn Brooks becomes the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. named Library of Congress’s Consultant in Poetry (later called Poet Laureate) in 1985
May 8, 1914 – Anna Garvis succeeds in having an official day honoring her mother and all the mothers that held Mother’s Friendship Day Gatherings after the Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson signs a Proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.
May 21, 1932 – Amelia Earhart Putnam becomes the first woman to complete a solo-transatlantic flight by flying 2,026 miles
May 29, 1977 – Janet Guthrie becomes the first woman to qualify for and complete the Indy 500 car race
Music
The music prompt for this month is an image by John Paul Filo – Pulitzer Prize, 1971 – of an event at Kent State on May 4, 1970 that prompted Neil Young of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to write, “Ohio.” Now go write or record up a storm about these folks, you, and/or the month of May!
My grandmother saved seeds; my grand-daughters are served non-GMO food whenever possible. This one sentence, personal vignette is a story of five generations of women. It involves changes in farming, from truck gardens to agribusiness. It is a reflection of how women procure food for their families. Hints, implications, context, and reference are implicit nuance, almost incidental, in all we document and share. Cultivate that richness. Layer meaning.
So much of women’s history, the real nitty gritty bits of everyday lives, involves food.
When writing about your family history, writing your memoir, or planning for a weekend with family, consider including food conversations and activities. They are so integral to life that we forget how evocative they are.
The politics of food is women’s business, and always has been either overtly or covertly. The price of staples, the quality of produce outlets whether they are farmers markets or big box stores, locations bakeries used for weekly purchases or seasonal celebrations, and where to find the best cut of meat for a good price and where to purchase a Christmas ham — women in charge of a household or family have very strong views on these subjects. There are always exceptions, and customs change from generation to generation, but cultural lifeways are taken personally given great importance.
Water and food are life. And family water and food concerns largely fall to women the world over. Food blogs are everywhere, and some of the best blog templates are designed with food in mind. Recipes are wonderful repositories of family culture. With a tiny bit of effort nuance can be folded in as easily as egg whites.
For example, my mother used half of an empty egg shell as the basic measure for ingredients when adding liquid to the dry ingredients when making egg noodles. No three tablespoons of milk or 1/4 cup of milk in these family recipes can be directly used with any reliability. Mom knew that her mother used half an egg shell of milk when a 1/4 cup was called for. That is family history. It also implies that the shells from the eggs from her hens were sturdy enough to hold up to being used as a measuring cup. It also meant that different size eggs would adjust liquid automatically. Flour was already adjusted through kneading and the addition of flour until the proper elasticity was reached.
Share the little things you remember. It might not really be so little after all.
WLP is in a bit of a summertime slump. We are based in Tucson and when it is over 110° F the Editor/Publisher goes into siesta mode! But never fear, we are here. Just really behind.
Let us start with the basics, what the florists and jewelers are hawking this month!
Birthstones of June
Moonstone.
If you are born in June with your sun in Gemini, then your birth stone is pearl, and we all know what the lustrous gemstone pearl looks like, no image necessary. But if you are born in June with your sun in Cancer, then it is a moonstone. There is a small image to the left showing a piece of moonstone jewelry. I did not know what Alexandrite, the third birthstone which supersedes both pearl and moonstone if you want use the modern take on birthstones, looked like. So I looked and looked for a public domain image of Alexandrite I could post here, one worthy of the stone at any rate, but did not find one, so do yourself a favor if you are mineralogically-inclined and check out the American Gem Society’s images of this chameleon-esque stone. Alexandrite is a rare chrysoberyl that takes on one of two distinct colors, green or pink, dependent upon the type of light within which it is viewed.
Flowers of June
One of June’s flowers of the month – the rose.
Honeysuckle. The other one of June’s flowers of the month.
June is Midsummer, Midsummer is the Summer Solstice
The fields of Europe, the place from which the dominant North American culture came, are planted at this time of year. Fields of grain, fruit of the trees, and garden vegetables are growing and ripening.
The land is effectively pregnant and bringing forth life.
The Romans associated the month, obviously, with Juno, Goddess of Women and childbirth, but also associated with the month and women and childbirth was Lucina (derived from the word Lux, light). As the day of the year with the greatest amount of light, it makes sense via what we know of the worldview of the time to also associate the bringing of children from the dark of the womb into the light of the world as related.
Some contemporary writers probably unconsciously, but possibly with religious motivations, say that the traditional use of Litha as a term for Summer is of totally modern use and origin. But from what I have been able to find out looking at translations of early English history, litha was used to describe the summer months.
English monk, theologian, and historian; known as the Venerable Bede,(Circa 673–735) wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed in 731), a primary source for early English history. An earlier work of Bede, The Reckoning of Time, referred to in this 12th Century compilation of this writings, describes what we would call June and July as ærra-litha and æftera-litha.
8th-century monk Bede, also writes about the inclusion of an inclusion of a third summer month on occasion because of the the disparity between moon cycles and year length.
Julie Coleman in her January 2001 writing for the University of Glascow” noted that Bede simply states that the reason for the unequal length of days is due to the globular shape of the earth, thus explaining the three-dimensional nature of the earth and refuting the notion that early medieval people believed that the earth was flat. Emphasis mine.
Litha is neither pagan nor heathen, but is used by English speakers and those who parse the year by seasons and note the longest day of the year with festivity, bon fires, and celebrations. Pan-european celebrations continue to this day and give testimony to the importance attributed the Summer Solstice by pre-Roman European cultures.
June Brides
In Christian Northern Europe appointed clergy might only make the rounds to all parishes intermittently, perhaps 2 or 3 times a year. So betrothals and temporary marriages often preceded church sanctioned nuptials. Handfasting, the ribbon wrapping of the hands of the bride and groom, was sometimes done at weddings, but also at public, non-church, announcements of young lovers pledges to each other at which a fire might be jumped to seal the deal. Such fire occurred at both May Day and Summer Solstice. June weddings are age old.
Unpromised young women were advised to stare into the fires so that they might have visions of their future husbands.
Women of June
I’m including only a few of the amazing women with June birthdays who are well-deserving of a few moments of reflection on their lives. These and many more can be found at 30 Badass Women born in June.
June 1 1926 Marilyn Monroe ( Norma Jean Mortenson/ Norma Jean Baker), iconic film star.
June 7, 1917 (2000) – Gwendolyn Brooks, first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950)
June 8, 1900 (1981) – Estelle Griswold, birth control advocate and pioneer, defendant in the Supreme Court case “Griswold v. Connecticut” which legalized contraception for married couples in 1965
June 12, 1929 (d. 1945) Anne Frank, German diarist, murdered in the Holocaust.
June 15, 1920 (1994) – Amy Clampitt, poet and author did not see her first poem published until she was 58
June 15, 1916 (1989) – Olga Erteszek, Polish immigrant, established the Olga Company in 1960, maker of women’s undergarments, one of the first companies to offer employee profit sharing
June 28, 1946 (1989) – Gilda Radner, comedian, and original cast member of “Saturday Night Life”
June Events of Women
June 4, 1919 – The U.S. Senate passes the Women’s Suffrage bill.
June 10, 1692 – Bridget Bishop is hanged in Salem, Mass., for witchcraft.
June 14 1907 –Women in Norway win the right to vote.
June 18, 1873 –Susan B. Anthony is fined $100 for attempting to vote for president.
June 18, 1983 – Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space.
June 19, 1963 – Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, becomes the first woman in space.
June 24, 1647 – Margaret Brent demands two votes from the Maryland Colonial Assembly: one as a landowner and one as the legal representative of the colony’s proprietor, Lord Baltimore. She is refused.
June 25, 1903 Marie Curie announces her discovery of radium.
June 27, 1833 Prudence Crandall, a white woman, is arrested for conducting an academy for black women in Canterbury, Conn.
Music
A Few Top 40 Hits from 25 Years Ago (June 1991)
Madonna – Holiday
Divinyls – I Touch Myself
REM – Shiny Happy People
Kirsty MacColl – Walking Down Madison
Some Top 40 Hits from 50 Years Ago (June 1966)
Frank Sinatra – Strangers in the Night
Beatles – Paperback Writer
Mamas & The Papas – Monday, Monday
Percy Sledge – When a Man Loves a Woman
Rolling Stones – Paint It Black
Troggs – Wild Thing
Simon & Garfunkel – I am a Rock
Dusty Springfield – You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me
In the first part of this multi-part article, I discussed how blogging may no longer be the best word to describe online writing. I “grokked” this emergent property of the communication system, a complex system, when I attended BAMC16 – The 2016 Bloggers at Midlife Conference, in Las Vegas Nevada – last month. Well, I didn’t actually say that in so many words, but that is the essence of Part 1.
Writing processes merged with publication and distribution processes as writers and creatives moved online. The content creator now can maintain control over all the steps of publishing her content, work collectively, or hire experts to handle various stages of publishing her work.
Agents and big city publishing houses are still integral to some writer’s ways of life, but many writers and bloggers have no intention of ever querying an agent or publisher.
The Bloggers at Midlife Conference provided examples of several publishing trends, demographic and otherwise.
Many of these examples, though they might appear as quite distinct from one another, contain a self-published blog as part of an entrepreneurial business. They publish various types of content. These women understand that a blog must be a core, valued product within her business. In some cases it is the primary product. Often the blog is not the primary revenue generator, but it is not an add-on, and never “just” marketing.
Business, Technology and Publishing Expertise is Us
The group of women at the BAM conference was among the smartest and filled with the greatest percentage of women “movers and shakers” I have experienced since I attended the BlogHer BET|Entrepreneurial and Tech conference in early 2011 in Silicon Valley.
There are bloggers of all stripes at blogging conferences, but I suspect that bloggers who identify as mid-life or beyond are rather different from the typical blogger who attends BlogHer Conferences for instance. In a totally non-statistical analytic summary of BAM I found most of the people in attendance to be:
Female.
A bit beyond the actual demographic midpoint of life. (Women in the U.S. live to the median age or 81.94 years, so the median midpoint is 40.97 years) Okay, we women at BAM more than just a bit beyond the midpoint, but we were not elderly in any sense of the word.
Competent and independent. Women who have had successful previous careers whether as supportive spouses, actively involved parents, in the corporate world, or the most common situation in which all these roles and more had been navigated for decades.
Most considered themselves to be writers. Many were authors of multiple books.
Actively building upon their brand using social media as a promotional vehicle.
These women have invested in secure platforms, professional design, and know their way around ROI and CRM – and not just for the profit. Relationships and investments are truly a part of their personal integrity, not just a business persona.
The next post in this series will feature some of the authors and business women I met at the conference so you can see the caliber of connections that a “midlife” network can bring with it. I have been known to call such networks “old girls club” (per TV’s Mad Men and “old boys clubs.”)
I recently attended a small (200+ attendees) gathering of people who curate and publish via a blogging platform.
Today I am talking about general aspects of writing conferences in light of the existence of blogging. So yes, this was a blogging conference, but it was also a writing conference, but it was not like the writing conferences I once attended. Those 20th Century conferences are now anachronisms in my book. At least most of them anyway. “Writing Conferences are so 20th Century.”
Writing Conferences were usually formal and stuffy events at which we all hoped to meet and wow the one person who could make my publishing dreams come true.
It did not really take all that long to learn that such conferences are mostly a waste of time in the sessions upon sessions where individual “published” authors shared their secrets of getting published, and that it is damn hard and most often unrewarding work. The pointers were fine, but they seemed to always condense to this:
Write.
Network.
Repeat.
Then in recent years they added:
Develop social media presence and brand yourself.
Basically there are variations of this model in the “network” segment that might be contact agents, talk to editors, join writers group, and so on.
Online writing and marketing (and, “Yes, marketing yourself and your work is now integral to the writing process.”) are part of every publication process unless you were so successful last century that can hire someone to be your social media person.
I have attended blogging conferences throughout the last ten years. Some are huge, national and international affairs such as BlogHer, and some are smaller and regionally or demographically focused, such as Blended. Nationally-focused small blogging conferences are another beast entirely. I attended the Bloggers at Midlife Conference, aka BAM or #BAMC or #BAMC16, a blogging conference aimed at an age- or stage- separated group of women who are beyond the Mommy Blogger demographic.
By the way, my use of the phrase mommy blogger is not pejorative. Young mothers with children have a need to communicate. Communicating through a blog is as natural today as a telephone conversation was to the mother’s of the 1960s.
There are other contemporary groups that have figured out how to meet communication needs through serial online publishing, which is how most blogs (web logs) are best described. Serial online publishing is really the niche that blogs fill what was once the niche of print periodicals, newspapers, magazines, and journals as in academic journals. Blogs also fill the niche of personal journals and letters. Things evolve and change, and we are watching women’s communication blossom and cross-pollinate old and new technologies with met and unmet needs.
In the next installment on this topic, we go beyond the recognition that writing, online writing, and blogging are morphing into an all encompassing form of communication. This form is less segmented by the chasm that divided writing from publishing. Our current focus is less fixed on how you create content, as there are many ways to create, all the way from legal pad with pencil to tablet video creation. The writer or creator now has more more access to and influence over what we once would have called publishing and distribution. Go to Part 2
Cailleach: The Prototypic February Female (9 prompts)
Cailleach, a Gaelic/Celtic divine crone associated with the Winter months has her last flurry of activity around Imbolc, Candlemas, or Groundhog Day which is the mid-point between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox. Folk belief states that if Cailleach is out and about, and can be seen gathering firewood for the remainder of Winter, then Winter will continue on for a long while. If the day is rainy, or dreary and damp, she cannot gather firewood and Winter will not last much longer.
The connections between the early February holidays seem obvious; I suggest we rename the famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, Punxsutawney Philippa. Groundhog day is February 2nd. Imbolc is February 4th in 2016. Candlemas, celebrated on February 2nd is when Mary would have had purification rites, 40 days after Jesus’ birth. They are all interconnected.
Votes and Valentines (15 prompts)
Leap years, as defined by the presence of a 29th day in February take a bit of the splash of Valentines Day away as the neatest thing about February. But one of the coolest things about February is the anniversary of the Utah Territory giving women the vote on February 12, 1869. That is a great lead up to how on February 14th, perhaps we should celebrate the far seeing non-partisan, League of Women Voters that was founded founded February 14, 1920, six months before the 19th amendment was passed, rather than a martyred man.
Leap years are are always U.S. Presidential election years. The next Leap Year after this one will take lots and lots of extra planning and celebration as 2020 will be the 100th Anniversary of women gaining the right to vote with the passage 19th Amendment in 1920.
The following video, of which the first few minutes may be skipped, gets us familiar with some of the types of organizations who are involved in the 100th anniversary.
Nancy E. Tate, of the League of Women Voters, speaking in Page Herrington panel, Women’s History on the Horizon: The Centennial of Woman Suffrage in 2020.
So let us continue on in these women-centric Celtic and political discussions with the 29th Day of February as Leap Year Day, the day that marks a long-standing role reversal by a women being “allowed” to ask a man to marry.
The marriage proposal inversion of who may ask whom to marry on February 29th did not arise from Scottish law as is frequently stated and restated. The day thus has no proven Celtic connection. But leap years are always Years of the Monkey, Dragon or Rat in the Chinese Calendar. This year, a Year of the Red Monkey, begins February 8th.
Women do not need a special day, such as February 29th, to upend society norms and pursue their passions. A Leap Day baby exemplifies this perfectly.
Augusta Savage (4 prompts)
Augusta Savage was born Augusta Christine Fells on Leap Day, February 29, 1892. Her passion for sculpting emerged early in childhood. To say that her minister father did not encourage this pursuit is a complete understatement. But despite her father’s physical punishment for crafting graven images as a child in her small town Florida home, the family’s move to West Palm Beach, Florida allowed her to study and teach art after her father softened his stance. After her husband’s death shortly after the birth of their only child, and a move back in with her parents, she moved to New York to pursue her study of art. Keeping her second husband’s name, she was one of the influential artists in the Harlem Renascence and won many significant commissions. She also waged personal battles against racism to call attention to and eventually shatter barriers for those who followed. In 1934 Augusta Savage became the first black member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.
More Women of February (at least 16 prompts)
Ursula Nordstrom
Born February 1, 1910, Nordstrom started out at Harper & Brothers as a secretary beginning in 1931. She then became a children’s book editor, and then director of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls in 1940.
Nordstrom was the most significant editor of children’s literature in the 2oth Century. She edited many of the classic children’s books of the mid-20th Century such as Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart White, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and Elsie Minarick’s “I Can Read Books.”
Andre Norton
The “Grand Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy”, was born Alice Mary Norton on February 17, 1912legally changing her name to Andre Norton in 1932, one of the male names under which she wrote as a juvenile and young adult writer in the 1930s and 40s, while she worked as a children’s librarian. as well as for science fiction and fantasy novels writer for the last half of the 20th Century and on into the 21st.
She authored “more than 130 novels, nearly 100 short stories and numerous anthologies that Ms. Norton edited in the science-fiction, fantasy, mystery and western genres…” NY Times March 18, 2005
She was awarded more prizes than can be easily documented, and was one of the original eight members of SAGA (Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America). Never one to quit growing and testing boundaries, she even ventured into the world of early (role playing) gaming by writing Grayhawk-based books at the invitation of one of the originators of Dungeons and Dragons.
There are many more February women who could be discussed, but they are among the women mentioned every year as important women in Women’s History Month as well as February birthday lists: Betty Friedan, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Walker, and Elizabeth Blackwell to name only a few.
One prompt you could certainly spin off of this month is for Tell Her Story that will run on this site next month.
50 Years Ago (5 prompts)
Petula Clark and Nancy Sinatra were hot topics.
The #1 songs were:
February 05
My Love
Petula Clark
February 12
February 19
Lightnin’ Strikes
Lou Christie
February 26
These Boots Are Made For Walkin’
Nancy Sinatra
Nancy Sinatra, Frank ‘s daughter, has a #1 hit in the US and UK with “These Boots Are Made For Walking.” Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, was released by publisher Bernard Geis Associates. She figured out how to game the system and bought large numbers of her book at the stores used by The New York Times to determine its bestseller list. It quickly rose to number one best-selling novel.
The Directors Guild of America awards The Sound of Music Best Film.
These 49-plus prompts are just a few of the associations and ideas that you can use to generate writing topics this month.
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May 4, 1916 (2006) – Jane Jacobs, journalist, author, and urban studies activist, wrote The Death and Life of the Great American Cities in 1961. She opposed the “urban renewal” that demolished supposed urban blight and destroyed vibrant, urban, and chaotic communities.
Now go write or record up a storm about these folks, you, and/or the month of May!
The marriage proposal inversion of who may ask whom to marry on February 29th did not arise from Scottish law as is frequently stated and restated. The day thus has no proven Celtic connection. But leap years are always Years of the Monkey, Dragon or Rat in the Chinese Calendar. This year, a Year of the Red Monkey, begins February 8th.
