~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Virginia Woolf, in a speech entitled “A Room of One’s Own,” wrote about what it meant to be a woman: “She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.”
Ever hear of Aphra Behn? She lived in17th century England and wrote poetry, novels, essays and 19 plays, which were produced then…and still are?
A Google question – “Were there female painters in Paris?” is a hint of how women artists were treated in the past. Nineteenth-century French portraitist and landscape artist Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun painted more than 600 portraits; two of her prominents – Marie Antoinette of France and Catherine the Great of Russia. Her art may hang in the Louvre and the National Gallery in London, but she’s seldom mentioned in the books on artistic movements.
Even Jane Austen, who wrote and published in the early 1800s under “By a Lady,” was not known by name until 60 years later, when her brother wrote a biography of her. She remains famous to this day, with countless publications and iterations of her main novels: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility –amazingly so considering her anonymous writing days.
Many decades after Britisher Anna Atkins self-published a book of photography in 1844, she was recognized publicly as the first female photographer. She happened to be interested in botany, and the scientific endeavor resulting were photos of all the specimens of algae found in the British Isles.
Among the many interests of New Englander Maria Mitchell was astronomy, and in 1846, she became the first woman to discover a comet by telescope. She became the first astronomy professor at Vassar, only to discover after some time that she was paid less than male professors. In 2019, 130 years after her death, a book, Figuring, was written about her.
A Washington, D.C. woman named Belva Lockwood opened a co-ed school (a rare feat) there in the 1880s. She was one of the first women to pass the bar, helped pass legislation to allow women to argue before the Supreme Court, won a case awarding the Cherokee nation $5 million, ran a campaign as the first female presidential contender, and passed on to future generations of women this notion: “…the general effect of attempting things beyond us even though we fail, is to enlarge and liberate the mind.”
C.J. Walker, the first child in her family born into freedom, in the early 1900s in Denver, started a woman’s hair tonic business and became the first self-made female millionaire in the country. She gave awards to her top saleswomen as well as to the top charitable ones among them and left two-thirds of her fortune to charity.
Alice Guy-Blache’ became the first woman filmmaker in the world, and then she opened her own production company in New Jersey directing, writing and producing more than a thousand films, all the while experimenting with color, sound and techniques of filming, not to mention, interracial casting from the late 1890s through the 1960s.
Marlene Sanders, a journalist not quite as well-known as her male contemporaries, became the first female vice-president of ABC News Division after being the first female correspondent in Vietnam and the first female anchor on an evening news show. She regularly reported on the women’s movement and the status of women and opened the doors for the plethora of women who’ve taken over broadcast.
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Women did remarkable things over the centuries, sometimes even being recognized in their own time as the poets, healers, warriors, artists, educators, scientists and inventors they were. Once in a while in their own era, they were mentioned in a history book.
But until the last century, they seldom wormed their way into the writing of history books, which is where the tale is told.
A male friend of mine suggested to me that we women should be happy – men don’t get a month. This might be called total unawareness, perhaps even myopia: he and his have been recipient to 5,000 years of top billing in the PR department.
Men did blow their own horn for millennia, but women are overtaking them now; not to the detriment of males, but to the fairness of it all in regard to a more precise relating of facts.
Like Black History Month, Women’s History Month is a blip in the scheme of truth in propaganda. The history of Black Americans, like the history of women, has been sketchily recorded, as we are learning rather rapidly during this era.
