When I announced to people that The Women’s Legacy Project was launching in the near future I wrote:
I think I have found the connecting thread within and between my interests, writings, academic & educational areas of dalliance: women, information and legacy. At first glance my interests may appear to be all over the place, but that is not quite the case.
Culture and demography delight me. I grew up memorizing genealogies and visiting cemeteries as though they were historical parks. The rather strange relationship I had with my mother fostered my early and ongoing interest in both the enabling and limiting constraints of women’s information systems, including the lack of historical depth in maternally linked information. The feminine divine inspires me and the continuously added nuances to the exclusion of women as players in the “major” religions of today disturbs me no matter what the type of fundamentalist group doing it.
Whether it be the stuff of a trunk in the attic or truck bombs in the neighborhood, women are concerned about the legacy we leave to our children. I have been an independent scholar for many years. While it surprised me to find legacy as the connecting theme in my writing, it should not have. My father loved history and valued what community over time could fashion. I am a cultural anthropologist by training and well-versed in the semiotic concerns of American Pragmatism.
Some of the recurrent topics in my writing over the years:
- American Women’s History
- Women’s Culture
- Women’s Information
- Feminization of the Internet
- Life’s Work
- Blogging as Women’s History
- Women’s Legacies
- Mother Earth and the State of the Planet
- Genealogy and Personal History
- The Creation of Meaning
- Tools and Toys
- Demography and Cohort Personality
- Peace and Social Justice Movements
So I am fashioning a site and a project called the Women’s Legacy Project.
Can a project last for decades? That is my intention for this one. It is not about my legacy, I have my memoir for that. This project is beyond blogdom. It derives from and extends beyond:
- the meetup group I have coordinated for three years
- the network of women writers and travelers of a certain age I have met and grown to trust as friends over the last seven years or so
- the wisdom I gained as I cared for my mother as she passed away in her home at age 92 and then watched as my brother, who began showing signs of dementia around the time of her death, and from which he died within a few short years, mishandled everything for her
- my knowledge and awareness of cultural processes that I see unfolding, developing, and filling new niches around me at an ever-escalating pace
- my desire to share information with those who might find it useful
Family and friends are the stuff of my own legacy. Mothers, fathers, brothers shaped me and all that I might leave behind one day. But friends, from childhood, mentors that became friends, and the wonderful and inspiring women I have met via writing connections in the last decade have influenced me just as greatly albeit in very different ways than family.
We take bits of the stories and lives of all those people we meet and incorporate them into our selves. When we give of ourselves to others, we give them a bit of all the souls who have touched us up until that time. When I view legacy this way it conjures up an image of a web of interconnection, of life energy and information that stretches out between the past and future the world touching a person and interweaving all the lives that have influenced another life in some small way.
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Day 6, The Letter F, April A to Z Blogging Challenge
Very interesting. One of the things that I am trying to work on is getting more women into technology. Only about 20% of the workforce globally is female in the ICT industry and it seems to be getting worse. Google and Facebook have much lower percentages.
I know. I went to a tech university, Purdue, although I studied something else, I learned to incorporate tech and analytic processes into what I do. Retrospectively, I should have continued with my “Fortran” coursework.
What an interesting project. I have some similar interests in women’s history. For me, it comes out in my research and writing of historical novels. My current novel, Cinderella’s Dress, is marketed more toward the fairy tale angle, but a story spark that started it was when I learned window dressing for department stores was primarily a male occupation until WWII, one of the reasons being, in New York at least, women had a working curfew of 10pm and the window dressing went on well into the wee hours of the morning. So I set my novel in the 1940’s so I could get my main character into that job.
Exactly. These bits of information can fill out and lend credence to a world of understanding. I will have to check out your work!