OUT OF THE SHADOWS
2018
“I appreciate a well organized act of civil disobedience,” said Frances McDormand, accepting one of her awards as Best Actress playing very uncivil, disobedient, ass-kicking, justice demanding, grief-stricken mother Mildred Hayes in the film Three Billboards. “I stand in full solidarity with my sisters in black and I also am thrilled that activists all over the world have been inspired… have taken to the streets…”
1858
Lucy Stone was the first woman to be arrested FOR civil disobedience. She wouldn’t pay her property tax. Lucy Stone owned property. If one owned property, one could vote – if one were a man. So she wrote to the tax collector: Sir: Enclosed I return my tax bill, without paying it, my reason for doing so, Women suffer taxation, and yet have no representation, which is not only unjust to one half of the adult population, but is contrary to our theory of government.”
To help her overworked, sick mom, twelve year old Lucy would get up early, “…do the washing for the family of ten or twelve persons, hang out the clothes to dry, walk a mile to school, walk back at noon and bring in the clothes and return for the afternoon session.” *(From Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman’s Rights, the book her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell wrote in 1830.) Are you a Lucy Stoner? Read about her here… http://sheshistory.com/site/fabulous-female-fact-lucy-stone/
1917
Alice Paul was arrested many times for civil disobedience, and most famously in 1917 for “Obstructing Sidewalk Traffic” while peacefully, legally, picketing the White House for the right to vote. She learned about civil disobedience from the great Emmeline Pankhurst, the British Suffragette who went around London smashing windows to get attention and win the vote. Brilliant, ballsy, Ivy-league educated, hunger-striking, Nineteenth-Amendment-passing Suffragist Alice Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923.
2012
Malala Yousafzai was 11 years old and living in Pakistan when she started blogging for the BBC about life under the Taliban, the group of militant religious men who just don’t believe girls should be educated. In 2012, they shot Malala in the head while she sat in her school van. But she miraculously recovered, and at the age of 16, addressed the United Nations, went on to write a book, established The Malala Fund and has become a leading activist around the world for girls’ education. She is presently attending Oxford University. Her story is amazing and inspiring!
(Photo: Dan Kitwood – WPA Pool/Getty Images)
1916
Jeannette Rankin becomes the first woman elected to Congress. They had to build a Ladies Room for her… “I may be the first woman member of Congress, but I won’t be the last.”
1971
At the age of 50, Bella Abzug gets elected to Congress. There were 435 members in The House of Representatives; only eleven of them were women. SHE was one of ’em. “I spend all day figuring out how to beat the machine and knock the crap out of the political power structure.”
January 2018
Two March’s later, and a year away from the 100th anniversary of women FINALLY LEGALLY being GRANTED the right to vote (the Nineteenth Amendment was passed on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920), Rebecca Traister writes below…
To date, 390 women are planning to run for the House of Representatives, a figure that’s higher than at any point in American history. Twenty-two of them are non-incumbent black women – for scale, there are only 18 black women in the House right now. Meanwhile, 49 women are likely to be running for the Senate, more than 68 percent higher than the number who’d announced at the same point in…. (click on the links below for more).
https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/women-candidates-2018-elections.html
The sheer tenacity and courage of these women – and SO MANY MORE unknown, unheralded, forgotten women is WHY I do SHE’S HISTORY! I have been writing and performing about women for over ten years. Every year, I have heard, “It’s the year of the women.”
But this year … is different.
Paraphrasing Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper’s daughter and civil rights icon, who in 1964 said: “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
We don’t know our women’s stories. It’s time to get them out of the shadows.
Learn their lives. Tell their stories … TIME’S UP!
Amy Simon
SHE’S HISTORY!
March 2018