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US: why Women's History Month?
Every generation of little girls and women needs to learn its past so that it can imagine a future in which gender equality is the norm and not the exception. As part of openDemocracy's International Women's Day series, Ruth Rosen argues that it is still necessary to have a token month every year devoted to women's lives
Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin "helping" them. Such a world does not exist -- never has (Gerda Lerner )
Aside from the Republicans relentless War on Women, let me offer you another reason why even one token month is still necessary to Americas political culture.
Ive just finished reading a book titled The Season of the Witch, written by David Talbot, who founded Salon.com in 1995, the first web magazine in the United States, known for breaking investigative journalistic stories. The book is an evocative political, social and cultural history of San Francisco from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Since he dealt with every trend and movement, often in overheated prose, I kept waitingand waiting--for him to describe the sudden explosion of the womens liberation movement.
Astonishingly, Talbot didnt even write one paragraph about the womens movement, which certainly transformed American political and social culture more profoundly than did the two chapters he devotes to the San Francisco 49ers football team.
Did his publisher tell him that half the population was dispensable? Did his agent convince him that including feminism would diminish the appeal and profits? Is he just ignorant?
This is just one example why we need Womens History Month in the United States. Its to prevent students, teachers, intellectuals and writers from forgetting about half its population.
The origins of this month reflect an era in which the grassroots efforts of a few prescient individuals created a national month dedicated to informing the public about womens lives. It was during the late 1970s when a growing number of women, grasping the subordination of women in the present, began to wonder about what women did in the past. The idea of women history was still very new, and yet a group of women on the Sonoma County (California) Commission on the Status of Women initiated a "Women's History Week" celebration for 1978.
. . . .
This is why we still need Womens History Month.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ruth-rosen/us-why-womens-history-month
loyalsister
(13,390 posts)Last edited Mon Mar 10, 2014, 12:55 PM - Edit history (1)
American history as we know it was written by white men.
In contrast to the romantic visions men have written about in regard to western expansion and homesteading-
Women's letters (mostly excluded from historical records) included "accounts of madness, childbirth, loneliness, and grief" from their perspective.
This makes the point very well.
On edit: She reads an excerpt from "Women's Diaries of The Westward Journey" The stories were written but largely ignored. They certainly weren't required reading in my 70s - 80s classrooms.
sufrommich
(22,871 posts)hfojvt
(37,573 posts)on GD, this thread with 116 views, four recs, four replies
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"More evidence an innocent man was executed"
561 views, 26 recs, 16 replies
DU, then, has voted
"the life of ONE man" > "the lives of ALL women"
not exactly, I know, but metaphorically it sorta looks that way
niyad
(112,435 posts)hfojvt
(37,573 posts)or believe that most people believe that
but since it IS women's history month, it would be nice if more people took notice.
Maybe I should bake some cookies to celebrate it
niyad
(112,435 posts)cookies for the legislators when we went to speak to them-- you know, to show them that we were still ladies, even if we were fighting for our rights.
I KNEW there was a reason we should have cookies to celebrate women's history month.
I used to do a lot more baking, but I mostly made "crimes against humanity".
From a Fox Trot cartoon. The youngest boy was discussing with his friend "What do you call a chocolate chip cookie that has no chocolate chips in it?" and his older sister walking by, grabbed a cookie and said "Personally, I would call it a crime against humanity" and the younger brother said "Paige, we are trying to have a serious discussion here." but his friend said "I think she has a point."