I thought this blog did a great job of talking about the birth of Women’s History Month in the United States.

As word spread rapidly across the nation, state departments of education encouraged celebrations of National Women’s History Week as an effective means to achieving equity goals within classrooms. Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Oregon, Alaska, and other states developed and distributed curriculum materials all of their public schools. Organizations sponsored essay contests and other special programs in their local areas.

Also I think I need to write a MUCH longer post about motherhood, pursuing a career, and feminism.  Its always seems to be a contentious issues amongst feminists and women in general.

I want to gather my thoughts before I approach that.

Don’t no why WHM has got me thinking of this but….

Some people make assumptions about my opinions since I pursued a graduate degree in women’s studies

(1)  I hate men.

Answer: Well yeah I hate men but NOT because I took a few women’s studies courses.

(2) I *MUST LOVE* the fact that Senator Clinton is running for president.

Answer: Having any sort of opinion on her candidacy means someone will try to argue against your ideas until you see it his or her way or at least pretend to.  Or if you don’t have an opinion, it’ll look like you’re uninformed.

I voted for Hilary in the last two senatorial elections because she was the best option. Will she be the best option for president–as of now I don’t think so but time will tell.

(3) I abhor pornography and female strip clubs.

Anyway I answer this will get me trouble so NO COMMENT.

(4) Women who pursue graduate degrees but choose to stay home and raise their children are wasting their lives and educations.

Answer: NOT!

(5) President Bush isn’t doing much if anything at all for women.

Answer: DUH! 

Wrap up on Black History Month:

On February first, I promised a lot that I did not deliver.  I haven’t stayed true to my word of featuring news stories about black history month.  Trying to be a diligent blogger is one thing but trying to be an attentive wife, best friend, good daughter, an impending matron (hate that word) of honor (and oh yeah my day job) and blog diligently is even harder.

Still it would be hard not mention this story.

SO here’s my proposal, I’m going to write about notable African American women throughout this month…

WOMEN”S HISTORY MONTH!!!! 

Before I go any further, you must go to the website for the National Women’s History Project. Go and read everything there.  They recently redesigned their site and it rocks!

It’s only only appropriate to begin the celebration of this month by sharing how I first learned about women’s history.

From an essay I wrote in graduate school:

From the second grade on I remember national women’s history month as a part a regular part of the curriculum. It never occurred to me in 1988 that celebrating women’s history each year in March was a relatively new phenomenon. It just seemed so naturally that we would celebrate women’s history.  In my second grade class, I remember my teacher, Mrs. Bigelow, giving us tests each month.  Never a good test taker, I dredged these monthly horrors, as I never received above a B+.  So that march, I remember sitting down with my mother and going over all the names of the woman who would be on the women’s history month test the next day.

My nerves were eased as soon as I realized this would not be the usual sit down at your desk test.  Mrs. Bigelow had us sit around in a circle and asked us each a question.  If we got our first question right we received an A and were done.  I remember Mrs. Bigelow asking me who the first female pilot was to cross the Atlantic Sea.  “Amelia Earheart” I said loudly sure of myself.
I received an A.  It was the first A I received that year.  As I grew older and moved from public elementary school in Washington DC to my private middle and high school in New York City, I started to notice subtle inconsistencies as my history teacher’s distrust of the textbooks became more than apparent.  To supplement the blurbs in textbooks about women, we were given additional primary sources and essays for reading. As I grew older and graduated from high school and entered a liberal arts college, I found that I gravitated toward independent studies about women and feminism.  It was only natural that I would decided to pursue graduate work in history.

Long over due:

Top story: A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source

I first saw an earlier version of this story when I was reading a blog a few weeks ago. I don’t know what I would have done if wikipedia was a commonly searched source when I was in undergrad or grad school. I finished that part of my education right before wireless connections took over. I used google all the time but it was before google blogs, google maps–before many people “blogged.” The people I knew only had “online journals” at that point.

Sometimes, I do feel like I’m missing out out on a huge revolution in the way scholars are researching, citing, and using all these internet based sources. Simultaneously, I am glad that I do understand the value of a book. I know many students do understand this but relying on the internet to find an answer to a question can be a slippery slope. I am guilty of this arguably lazy dependence as well but one cannot deny the advantages of the web and all of the well-founded resources available. It just takes that discerning eye to comb through all of the links.

Other Stories:

(1) Teaching our young girls: “Being a sexual person isn’t about being a pole dancer”

(2) High school students in the Mexico given dolls to try to bring down the state’s soaring teenage pregnancy rate.
(3) Vietnamese women and Korean men make it work.

(4) The title of this piece made me look twice: Vagina Monlogues are part feminism, part fun.

Right because something can’t be feminist AND fun. A dude wrote and his article was pretty funny:

A reoccurring theme in “The Vagina Monologues” is the idea of women not really “paying attention” or “thinking about” their essence. “When was the first time you noticed your vagina?” they ask. There again, this would be impossible to ask a guy.

When was the first time you noticed your penis?

You mean the dangling appendage that hangs off of my body? Oh I’ve always been pretty freakin’ aware of it.

I mean you’re born with it, and then they cut part of it off. As I’ve written before, it’s like its own independent city-state down there.

But I’m still lost on the writer’s point with the title.

(5) And finally, there has been a lot of media given to the soap opera lifestyles of two blonde women, one recently passed away and the other “losing it.”

Sure some of it is entertaining, but as the dooce said:

I would hope that other women and other mothers are looking at her with a little bit of compassion right now, if only for the sake of those two baby boys who are innocent in all of this. She is their mother.

is fast approaching.  I’ve been trying to read up on the pro-choice and pro-life movements and the history of abortion in the United States.  I’ve been feeling a need to beef up on some integral cornerstones of American women’s history or subjects I thought I already knew “too” much about in college when I was intellectually snotty and thought I was all that.
I read Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood by Kristin Luker.  I was first assigned to read this book my senior year of college.  But I never got around to it because I was in the midst of writing final papers and couldn’t be bothered to read about a subject I already “knew” about.  Well, I was full of it.  I learned a LOT from this book especially about the motivation behind the founding of the pro-life movement.  The truth is I don’t know that side of the story.  I still am pro-choice but I like to have an understanding of where pro-life women are coming from.  I do felt like the Luker did not really get into analyzing the inspiration behind the pro-choice movement as she did with the pro-life movement. 

The next book I read was When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 by Leslie J. Reagan. Reagan, a historian, is clearly pro-choice between the lines.  Her study provides a deep and moving history of abortion focusing on women in Chicago.  I also learned a lot from this book as well specifically what encouraged the illegality of abortion in certain areas.

Last year, I read How the Pro-choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, And the War on Sex which provided compelling reasons as to why the Roe v. Wade decision benefited women’s lives and health in numerous ways.  

The 24th anniversary occurs on January 22.  Whether your or pro-choice, kinda choice, pro-life, on the fence, it is impossible to deny Roe v. Wade’s undeniably vital place in American history.

BTW HI MOM & DAD!!!!!

(I know you’re reading.)

During my senior year of college in 2002, I interned at the Feminist Press in New York City. One of my projects included working on the reprint of Tillie Olsen’s Silences. I was just beginning to discover my passion for women’s history. Learning about Tillie Olsen’s Silences made me reconsider the way I had studied literature written by women up until that point.

Part of my work was to transcibe an essay written about Tillie Olsen’s work. In Silences, Olsen pointed out how succesful female writers either had no children or full time help.

She also initiated the movement to republish women’s forgotten work such as Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis. She suggested the Feminist Press publish the book and since then the Press has been dedicated to discovering women’s lost or ignored writing.

Tillie Olsen passed away on January 1, 2007 in Oakland, CA. I won’t ever forget how her work inspired me to reclaim history as women’s history. Here is her obituary.

Remembering some unforgettable women:

(1) How we got Women’s Equality Day–August 26th or Betty’s bourgeois antics.

(2) Everybody’s Wendy.

Frank Rich writes about Wendy Wasserstein’s desire for a private life and death, her powerful friendship and talent, and her contemplations about the “unfulfilled ideal of sisterhood among women of her generation” expressed through her exceptional and touching plays.

And because its news…

A Spanish woman has twins at 67

(1) High school senior sues school district for not letting him hang anti-arbortion signs.

(2) A man who can’t find a good woman in the states travels to Bangkok to find the perfect wife. “I think the feminist movement in America in the 60s really trashed American feminism” he said. No wonder American women didn’t want to marry him!

(3) Penelope Cruz decides its better to be called a lesbian than nothing at all.

(4) Mary Previte of Haddonfield has been recognized by the National Women’s History Project as a pioneer and advocate for juvenile justice.

(1) Lesbian mom-to-be (Cheney’s daughter) is slammed by all sides.

I’m going to come out (hahha funny!!!) and say I feel bad for Mary Cheney. She probably didn’t ask her dad to be the way he is. She could disagree with him on several issues BUT maintains a relationship because he is her dad and she loves her family. Someone has to be Dick Cheney’s child and so it has fallen onto Mary Cheney and her sister’s shoulders. She deserves some privacy RIGHT NOW! This is all I’m going to say about it.

(2) Girls wanna strip for other girls but feminist picketers don’t like it much

(3) Mom insists talking barbie doll says “slut”

(4) California parents seem to welcome HPV vaccine for their daughters

Well, kind of.

According to this article Name changes on campuses stir feminism debate:

The University of Waterloo student association changed the spelling of its Womyn’s Centre to the ordinary spelling of women.

However, on a more postive note,  the University of Guelph changed the name of Women’s Resource Centre to the Guelph Resource Centre for Gender Empowerment and Diversity.  While the second name encourages celebration it also replaces women with the word gender.  There is the idea that Universities say they have a Gender Studies program instead of a Women’s Studies program because it is more inclusive of men.  However, others argue that men have been in the scholastic spotlight for years and women deserve their own space.

Professor Judith McKenzie admits that feminism “has a long way to go.”