02-04-1995 Women of Achievement and Herstory

      We have written several times about how historians erase women
from history by simply not seeing them, only looking at their own
images in the mirrored past.  Often it is inadvertent but intentional or
not, it makes women's accomplishments and experiences non-existent. 
      There are two notable examples of erasing women's terrors in 
modern mayhem by ignoring them.
      There were originally no women's names on the Viet Nam War
Memorial ... But women raised a fuss and now for the first time in our
nation's history, a national memorial lists some of the women who
perished defending their country during that awful conflict.
      The other is even more indefensible, though probably *completely*
unintentional: the almost total absence of women's lives and experiences
at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  Probably as
many women as men died in the holocaust, Nazi Germany's concentration
camps. At Auschwitz, 348,820 men's suits were found and 836,515
women's dresses. In addition to the "usual" tortures - hunger,
overwork, etc., women were also subject to even greater horrors:
biological reproduction experiments, forced prostitution, and rape, object
and penile.
      The Los Angeles NOW _Call for Action_ letter says, "They did an
amazing job of encapsulating the experience but the stories/history of
women are suspiciously absent.  Throughout the entire museum, the
question arises, "What about the women?  In the artifacts, what
belonged to the women?  The museum, only two years old, is considered
far from complete and we must make sure that the experience of women
is included.  Both the director and the head of the research institute
need to be made aware of this lack of inclusion and representation
through the entire museum experience." 
      Write Jeshajahu Weinbert, Director and Michael Barenbaum, Director
of Research, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Pl.,
SouthWest, Washington, DC, 20024. Ask: Where are the Women?

Anniversaries -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

B. 02-04-1913, Rosa Park, refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a
white man on 12-01-1955 in Montgomery, AL, and started the modern
black civil rights movement.  This brave woman is hailed as the mother
of the civil rights movement but is much more than that for she was an
outspoken black rights advocate for more than 20 years, long before
the movement was popularized by speechmakers. Her occupations were
seamstress, housewife, and congressional staffer. 

      B. 02-04-1918, Ida Lupino, actor and director, after a series of
pretty-face movies, finally got the cockney role of Bessie _In the Light
that Failed_ (1939) and quickly became a Hollywood star everyone loved
to hate with a series of psychopathic and evil roles, turned to directing
and became the most renowned women director since the silent movies. 

      B. 02-04-1921, Betty Friedan, writer, social activist.  One of the
founders and first president of the National Organization for Women
1966-1970, founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, 1971.  Wrote
_The Feminine Mystique_. Her mother was editor of the women's pages
of a Peoria, IL, newspaper who had to quit when she married.  Friedan
was a battered wife even after her NOW activities began. 

Quotes du jour -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

      "History as taught in most schools is largely a matter of the
struggle for power among men and nations.  It is the dates of battles
and the names of kings and generals noted for alternately constructing
and destroying fortresses, palaces and religious monuments." 
             -- The Chalice and the Blade.

(C) 1995 Irene Stuber, PO Box 6185, Hot Springs National Park, AR
71902, irenestuber@delphi.com. Distribute verbatim copies freely with
copyright notice for non-profit use.