Created this infographic based on my years of protest with CodePink Women for Peace in DC and my years as a security manager at a major museum.
Save the image or click for PDF .
Monday Musings on The Year Ahead
I insist my on being happy this year. Many friends say 2016 was the worst year ever, but I disagree as my brilliant and beautiful daughter married a wonderful man in 2016.
This past year I learned a great deal about transitioning through my life stages because of my daughter’s marriage. This year will most likely see many posts based on my notes on wedding planning and all I learned as an anthropologist turned mother-of-the-bride.
I will also be turning 60 this May so there may be a piece or three on zero years, decades, the perception of time, and the concept of birthday celebrations.
And more political theory and women’s place in governance will find their way into our articles than ever before. The power of naming will be center stage next week as we look at why “he who must not be named” may be an extremely sensible tactic to use in 2017 and beyond.
There will also be another Women’s History Month Her Story series. More on that quite soon.
An August Legacy – Prompts
Legacy, Flowers & Stones
According to recent trends to have months be dedicated to concepts, August is Legacy month. I can go with that. August means respected or venerated, so legacy is an august concept. It is the beginning of harvest season for many cultures, including Gaelic culture when August 1, or the midpoint between Summer Solstice and Autumnal Equinox, was observed as Lughnasadh.
Peridot is a semi-precious gemstone of a crisp bright green with a hint of yellow in it, much like the fields of August that begin to ripen with a hint of gold, and is the birthstone of the month. The gladiolus or “sword lily” which pierces the heart (much like Cupid’s arrow) and the poppy are the flowers of August. Red poppies signify pleasure.
Back to School
August is back to school month for most of the U.S. Because this is an election year I think that this month is a perfect time to look back at education in light of U.S. culture and what was valued when women gained the vote. This is a most enlightening exercise when we look through the lenses of the current political history making Presidential campaign with the first woman candidate nominated by a major party.
So I suggest that all women interested in the intersection of education, governance, and women’s culture use this month to examine parts of the 6th McGuffey’s Reader, the last in the series of readers that educated our populace 100 years ago. It can be downloaded in various formats on Guttenburg.org. I used the PDF version as it was digitized from the edition in circulation at the time when women were granted the right to vote.
Yet the very habit of proposing these questions, however they may be answered, will involve the calling of ourselves to account for our reading, and the consideration of it in the light of wisdom and duty. ––– Noah Porter. Chapter CXXXVII. A DEFINITE AIM IN READING. in McGuffey’s 6th Eclectic Reader Series.
Wisdom and duty informed by the outcome of reading and questioning. What a novel concept. Women, as the essential teachers of human kind, must remain vigilant and continually re-educate ourselves so that we can educate our children to understand wisdom and duty in this year when we vote to for the person who is to lead our still young country as some of the first generation of women to be born as citizens with the right to vote have the the first opportunity ever in this land to vote for a woman for President.
No matter how you chose to cast your ballot, it is an historic moment for women, our country, and our form of governance.
For U.S. women August 26th is celebrated as Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution. Let us use this day, this year, to contemplate the weighty responsibility it is be a part of the group that comprises the majority of voters, and how important it is to cast an informed and well-considered vote.
August Women’s History Events (info from NWHP)
August 6, 1965 – The Voting Rights Act outlaws the discriminatory literacy tests that had been used to prevent African Americans from voting. As the National Women’s History project notes, “Suffrage is finally fully extended to African American women” with this passage.
August 10, 1993 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in to serve on the US Supreme Court. She is the second woman and 107th Justice on the court.
August 26, 1920 – The 19th Amendment of the US Constitution is ratified granting women the right to vote.
August 26, 1971 – Celebration of the first “Women’s Equality Day,” initiated by Representative Bella Abzug, is established by Presidential Proclamation. It is reaffirmed annually annually.
August 28, 1963 – More than 250,000 gather for a march on Washington, DC, and listen to Martin Luther King Jr. give his “I Have a Dream” speech at a march on Washington, D.C. where over 250,00 people listened to him speak.
August Birthdays (info from NWHP)
August 2, 1902 (1997)– Mina Rees, mathematician, first woman president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1971)
August 3, 1905 (1995) – Maggie Kuhn, senior rights activist, founded the Gray Panthers
August 6, 1886 (1916) – Inez Milholland Boissevain, the lawyer and suffrage leader; gowned in white and riding a white horse, lead a suffrage parade in Washington, DC, during Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration
August 6, 1903 (1999)–Virginia Durr, civil rights activist and author, founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (1938)
August 6, 1911 (1989)– Lucille Ball, comedian, actress, and television executive, starred in TV series “I Love Lucy” from 1950 to 1960, first woman to own a major television studio, Desilu Productions
August 11, 1941– Elizabeth Holtzman, youngest woman elected to U.S. Congress, (D-NY, 1973-81), first woman District Attorney in New York City (1981)
August 12, 1889 (1981)– Zerna Sharp, author, called the “Mother of Dick and Jane,” helped create the popular reading series with bright action picture stories and one new word on each page
August 13, 1818 (1893) – Lucy Stone, suffragist and supporter of rights for women and African Americans, boldly kept her own name when she married
August 13, 1893 (1986)– Eva Dykes, first African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree (in English from Radcliffe College in 1921), professor at Howard University, and Chair of the English Dept. at Oakwood College
August 14, 1911 (1991)– Ethel Payne, called “The First Lady of the Black Press,” first African American female radio and television commentator at a national news organization (CBS) in 1972
August 16, 1958–Madonna–Pop music icon who rose to fame in the 1980s who continues to reinvent herself, perform, and grab headlines today
August 17, 1893 (1980)– Mae West, iconic actress and sex symbol, started in Vaudeville, starred in plays, movies, radio, and television
August 17, 1927 (1997)– Elaine Hedges, educator, helped create the field of Women’s Studies, founding member of the National Women’s Studies Association, founded the Women’s Studies Program at Towson University, one of the oldest programs in the country, writer and editor for The Feminist Press
August 18, 1893 (1982)– Ragini Devi, American specialist in classical and folk ethnographic dances, won acclaim from dance critics, wrote Dance Dialects of India in 1972, later performed with her daughter and granddaughter
August 18, 1927– Rosalynn Carter, U.S. First Lady from 1977 to 1981, politically active while in the White House, focused on mental health, senior citizens, and community voluntarism, co-founded the Carter Center with her husband in 1982
August 19, 1895 (1987)– Vera Weisbord, radical activist, (Communist) labor organizer, and feminist, organized women textile worker strikes in the 1920s, active in the Civil Rights Movement, her autobiography, A Radical Life, was published in 1977.
August 19, 1920 (1999)– Donna Allen, founder of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press in 1972 to publicize and research women’s issues which she thought were ignored by the main stream media.
August 22, 1883 (1984)– Ruth Underhill, anthropologist and professor, studied with Ruth Benedict who encouraged traveling with native women to learn their history, wrote of the Papago Native American culture, and taught in the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools (Many people now think this later association is to her detriment.)
August 26, 1908 (1986)– Cynthia Wedel, first woman elected President of the National Council of Churches in 1969, president of the World Council of Churches from1975-1983. She argued that women should be treated as equals in the church.
August 26, 1935 (2011)– Geraldine Ferraro, first woman to run for Vice President of the U.S. on a major party ticket in 1984 with Democratic candidate Walter Mondale
August 30, 1907 (1992)– Luisa Moreno, labor leader and Mexican-American civil rights activist
Music
The music that rocked the month 50 years ago included hits such as: “Wild Thing,” “Summer in the City,””Sunshine Superman,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Cherish,” and “Reach Out I’ll Be There.”
Live Your Legacy Now
This month’s list of writing prompts is less interwoven and relies more heavily on the cited and linked sources than my usual women’s history prompts and links. I am preparing to drive to LA for a conference and to take a pilgrimage to a home of a woman who shaped both popular writing and natural science 100 years ago. I will write about her soon.
Have a wonderful month, and write, record, journal, and create your heart out this month.
Gathering the Past for the Future
I encourage everyone to gather their past in the way that is most meaningful to them. If you want to share aspects of what you have gathered, I recommend digital sharing. A project I made a few days ago can stand alone as a Facebook post or become part of a cookbook and memoir of my mother’s and grandmother’s kitchens. If I do make a book about our recipes, heritage, and tools, I know I will use another image “creation” I snagged and cleaned up from an out of print German cookbook from the 1800s.
This entire topic came up for me when I asked myself, what do I do with a book I found among my mother’s things that was probably a discarded book snagged from an academic rubbish bin. I almost just donated it to a thrift shop without flipping through the pages. What I found was that the original text of the book had been pasted over with other print cut from magazines. It had been turned into a scrapbook, cookbook, or diary sort of blank book.
My mother started school with a slate board and a piece of chalk. Quality paper was not a play-thing for children in the first few decades of the 20th Century. The use of a discarded book as the bones for a new book or project illustrates much about the early-1900s, frugality, play, and what little girls thought about.
I decided to turn a representative page, one that under close scrutiny faintly showed a cursive, penciled-in “Cakes” heading at the top of page. The childish scrawled subject heading did not scan well. So I decided to scan the page, add color, a title banner, and turn the Cakes page of the cookbook my mother made in early grade school.
My mother was a wonderful baker, and it is telling that one of my mother’s acts of play that was preserved for me to discover was a collection of cake recipes. She loved to bake.
I decided to share the modified page here, and eventually I will use it in a book, as a prompt, or as an example for a Women’s History Month series of posts where I and others share posts that are stories about about regular women, such as mothers, grandmothers, aunts and great aunts, or even further back in family history, as well as mentors and influential public figures, and the work they did not just the recipes they used, that is overlooked and in danger of being lost if we do not share it now.
How to:
- I scanned the page and saved a digital copy.
- On picmonkey.com I used free elements of their online graphic-editing software to apply a pinkish wash to the page which took away the drabness of the off-color, sad-looking, yellowed page.
- I watermarked the page with WomensLegacyProject.com so as to guide viewers of the image back to this article, should the image be shared without this accompanying text. I recommend doing this on any images of yours that you share via social media.
- I put a banner and title on the page to guide the viewing experience.
- I also put a © on it as it is totally mine and I really want to only have people who request to use it, use it.
- I added a frame.
- I want people to make their own enhanced digital images of scraps of this and bits of that are meaningful to them. This is just an example of one thing I did to preserve my mother’s childhood project.
Update. 2022. The submissions project, below, was great, but ended several years ago.
More info on the Women’s Legacy Project call for submissions for the project I am coordinating for Women’s History Month may be found at Her Story, a page on this site.
MLK Day Turns 30
It has been 30 years since the first official national recognition of Martin Luther King’s birthday as a National Holiday in 1986.
Much changes in thirty years. Undoubtedly articles across the web today will mention how Arizona, the place I live, did not initially observe the Martin Luther King Federal Holiday when it was first designated as a Federal Holiday. Few will mention that universities in Arizona, such as the University of Arizona that is just down the street from me, now close for the day. Things change.
This is wonderful. No ifs, and or buts apply.
But Presidents’ Day is not observed here. So I think that culturally, Arizona, has learned to cooperate, but it has also learned how to maintain the status quo.
Arizona, as a state, as a political entity, represents the surface level, though probably not conscious action, of cultural incorporation of the most threatening element to the state’s existence.
This is how large scale culture works. Only the most threatening emergent processes are swallowed up by established processes. Incorporated or integrated processes are subsumed into mass culture.
Rome knew this. Its military did not destroy the lands and peoples it conquered. They incorporated them into the empire.
I firmly believe that the MLK Day controversy was a much deeper and more profound cultural controversy than it appeared when it was happening. It was not just about honoring a black minister who was the leader of a civil rights movement, although that facet of Martin Luther King’s life was more than worthy of such recognition. It was about all the changes that would be necessary to create a country in which character, a person’s enacted essence, matters more than any physical trait, level of education, or the amount of money had by the family of origin. The powers that were, and still are, did not want King’s egalitarian honor to be central to our nation.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
These “powers that be” may not even realize that they are engaged in the attempt to render ineffective that thing, concept, or process that they outwardly laud. We are all part of a hugely complex cultural system comprised of 8 million individuals with effectively infinite connections between those people and cultural norms derived from the efficacy of millennia of civic development that draws upon humanity through time and not just space. No one of us understands how culture works. We can identify pattens and talk about statistical likelihoods. We are a part of the system and cannot be apart from or outside the system. All our understanding is subjective and limited by our biological nature as part of the physical universe.
This lofty, and probably overly intellectual presentation, of the perspective that “things are not as they seem” boils down to a core sentiment, ancient sentiment expressed by Sun-Tzu that “we should hold our friends close, but our enemies closer.”
Women, minorities, and oppressed groups where I live have the same number of days off through Federal Holidays, if their workplaces observes MLK Day, which way more than 50% do not observe, according to a BNA report, than before this holiday was recognized. The number is the same because a previously state observed holiday, Presidents Day, was no longer sanctioned as a day off. The new holiday simply replaced the old one after the outcry about Arizona’s purportedly racist decision to not give state-employed workers an additional holiday with the Federal recognition of Martin Luther King’s birthday as a Federal Holiday. State and corporate employers juggled the system to their economic advantage, or at least not to their loss.
I’m not denying that racist individuals exist in Arizona. They do. But oligarchic concerns came out on top in the MLK-cluster-bleep that defined Arizona and economic loss beyond boycotts and football games.
We have much work to do to as women cultural leaders to bring that dream of a character-based culture into existence. National holidays should be honored because of the importance of the ideas behind them, not because of economic consideration. Honor and character need to be given more weight in our society.
"Doing" Gets Easier with Each "Done"
Sometimes you just have to go for it! Then before you know it, it is done!
That is what I did this morning with a relatively new platform: blab.im. I live-streamed.
If you watch this, I recommend starting this about 3 minutes in. It took me a while to get oriented.
This was a test broadcast without a scheduled guest, but it shows, quite well, the opportunities we have for sharing our expertise, perspective, stories, and methodologies. It is a wonderful time to be alive.
If you have a story about some aspect of women’s communication or women’s culture you would like to share, let me know. We can schedule a blab. It will be a good experience for you and a good experience for me!
I learned so much this time. Yes, there are parts that make me cringe, such as taking way too long to get started, but growth requires some discomfort.
Things I learned this time:
- I probably want to use my laptop that has a better camera.
- I will want to invest in a mike, but it is okay for now.
- Don’t hit record until you are ready to start talking!
- It is good to have a helper stationed on chat as well as an interviewee.
- Don’t sweat the process. All good things in time.
- You will be sent audio and video download links after the blab is over if you record the event.
- There is so much new free tech to access.
- Learn off the cuff or on the fly as there is no longer time to perfect a new tech before it all changes.
Everything really does become easier with practice. We are here to catch each other if we fall. That is what is great about Nets and NETworks. It becomes more and more obvious to me that the internet is female and reflects communication models we understand and have used for millennia.