Shakespeare's sisters - women in history erased, ignored, jailed, institutionalized

[KitSileya]

"Absences of women in history don’t 'just happen,' they are made." queereyes-queerminds

- Women in combat: "Women have not lived in a protective bubble untouched by combat for all of history. Women have been killed, wounded, and captured in combat, and tortured after. We are not living a world where these are hypothetical situations women have yet to prove they can handle. Unfortunately, they have, they can, in the future, they probably will, again and again. Soviet women served as partisans, snipers, tank drivers, fighter pilots, bombers. And more."

But after the wars, Rosie the riveter was thrown out of her job and told men deserved her job more. And women soldiers were certainly invisibilized - integrated AA units in WWII were more efficient than all-male ones, but we still hear that women in combat would harm the army. In the Soviet Union, the name for front line female soldiers became synonymous with 'whore', and female veterans had to hide their medals and never talk about their experiences.
http://themarysue.tumblr.com/post/91997117099/tamorapierce-doctorscienceknowsfandom

- “A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.”
—
Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg
http://bonesbuckleup.tumblr.com/post/91667005677/a-woman-from-the-audience-asks-why-were-there-so

Do you have other examples of this throughout history?

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. DU Rec.

[ladjf]

2. Don't forget to mention the female aviatrices that

ferried newly manufactured warplanes across the Atlantic. They should have been allowed to fly them in combat.

[KitSileya]

6. Very true. Women were involved very early in avionic history.

Yet the only one we hear about is Amelia Earhart. (To be honest, I think that is precisely because she was lost and presumed dead - she could then be used as a "safe" example of what happens if women do what they want rather than what they "should" do.)

[ismnotwasm]

3. Found this

6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism

In April, National Geographic News published a story about the letter in which scientist Francis Crick described DNA to his 12-year-old son. In 1962, Crick was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, along with fellow scientists James Watson and Maurice Wilkins.

Several people posted comments about our story that noted one name was missing from the Nobel roster: Rosalind Franklin, a British biophysicist who also studied DNA. Her data were critical to Crick and Watson's work. But it turns out that Franklin would not have been eligible for the prize—she had passed away four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the prize, and the Nobel is never awarded posthumously.

But even if she had been alive, she may still have been overlooked. Like many women scientists, Franklin was robbed of recognition throughout her career (See her section below for details.)

She was not the first woman to have endured indignities in the male-dominated world of science, but Franklin's case is especially egregious, said Ruth Lewin Sime, a retired chemistry professor at Sacramento City College who has written on women in science.

Over the centuries, female researchers have had to work as "volunteer" faculty members, seen credit for significant discoveries they've made assigned to male colleagues, and been written out of textbooks.

They typically had paltry resources and fought uphill battles to achieve what they did, only "to have the credit attributed to their husbands or male colleagues," said Anne Lincoln, a sociologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, who studies biases against women in the sciences.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science/

[Tuesday Afternoon]

4. That deserves its own OP ... I double dog dare you to post in The Science Group

who loves ya, baby?

[KitSileya]

7. I agree with Tuesday Afternoon. It deserves its own OP.

This is such an important history to tell. Thank you for adding it to the list.

[theHandpuppet]

5. Don't know if this qualifies as it's about women who are still being ignored

But thought I'd post it anyway. Throughout the years women artists have really struggled for recognition and unfortunately that struggle continues. It's an issue that's always really stuck in my craw.

Why do we ignore female artists?
This is a great age for visual art. But why has no one noticed that virtually all today's finest artists are women?

Everyone knows the problems with the visual art world, as indeed with all established arts hierarchies. First and foremost, it's steeped in misogyny. The artists are Great Men, worshipped in person and in print by art groupies of both sexes. Secondly, it's racist, and remains in thrall to the Anglo-American market and its expectations. Thirdly, its wealth makes it a corrupt system in which monetary value exists in an arbitrary relation to a work's artistic excellence. "Classic" big-name (male) artists get traded between old rich guys for investment purposes, much like vintage cars or deluxe properties.

But there's another tale to be told. I think we're living through a great age for art, and that today's most important artists are virtually all women. I'm thinking here of Rachel Whiteread, whose work has a contemplative stillness and breathtaking physical beauty. Consider the casts she made of the spaces under chairs and inside baths, glowing jewel-coloured resin-resembling blocks of pure pigment arrayed on a palette. Think of the house she cast in concrete. It was ridiculed, called meaningless and ugly, but it had a perky secretive humour to it, its grey lines making it look like a kid's sketch blown up to lifesize. Then there are the enigmatic white boxes filling the Tate Modern's turbine hall like a giant 3D game of Tetris, or the haunted and haunting Austrian war memorial with its lines of reverse-cast, closed books. Whiteread creates all this with total confidence, a correct knowledge of her own importance.

It's a similar story in other media. Sam Taylor-Wood's photography is pungent with glamour, its high-quality surfaces deceiving the eye into thinking it is observing a fashion shoot or a worshipping celebrity portrait. Instead, she wields a powerfully female gaze loaded with political significance. In her portraits of Robert Downey Jr and David Beckham she consciously uncovers male vulnerability and deconstructs the macho myth. Consider her boldness in the light of a photographer whom many consider (bafflingly to me) to be superior: Diane Arbus. Arbus's work, though so technically perfect that it gives you a chill, reverberates with depression. Taylor-Wood, by contrast, has a complexity and levity, a liveliness of intelligence and a technical smoothness which put her on a par with Cindy Sherman, another art world hero.

One of the greatest living young painters is the New-York based Cecily Brown, whose canvases crackle with colour. Again, that massive show at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford was a rightful acknowledgement of her importance. Her sexily sylvan scenes are disrupted in a mesh of technicolour brushstrokes, so fluid that they resemble pulsing electricity or a flagrant mash-up between all the Impressionists and all the Expressionists, ever....

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2008/jun/25/whydoweignorefemaleartist

[KitSileya]

8. Thank you for this! In most cases, the stories of women erased are from STEM fields.

Or literature. So great to see examples of modern women artists who really should get more recognition.

[theHandpuppet]

9. Mothers of Invention

This article is over 20 years old -- an oldie but goodie. Too bad I can only post the introduction because it's a really interesting look at women inventors.

Mothers of Invention : Science: Recognition has long proved elusive for women inventors. Catherine Greene helped build the cotton gin, but Eli Whitney got the patent. And whoever heard of Hedy Lamarr the inventor ?
The Los Angeles Times
September 23, 1992
PAMELA WARRICK

The telephone. The light bulb. The automobile.

Quick. Name the inventors. Of course you can.

How about flat-bottomed paper bags, bullet-proof vests and Scotchgard? The dishwasher, the fire escape, AZT?

Of course you can't....

Discover them at http://articles.latimes.com/1992-09-23/news/vw-1156_1_women-inventors

[theHandpuppet]

10. Related articles

Women in the History of Technology -- Women Inventors
http://www.worldwideinvention.com/articles/details/14/WOMEN-IN-THE-HISTORY-OF-TECHNOLOGY-WOMEN-INVENTORS.html

Scholar Blames Patent Office for Distorting History : Women's Inventions: Are They Ignored?
http://articles.latimes.com/1985-09-15/local/me-23214_1_patents

Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America (book)
http://www.amazon.com/Feminine-Ingenuity-Inventors-Changed-America/dp/0345383141

Patently Female: From AZT to TV Dinners, Stories of Women Inventors and Their Breakthrough Ideas (book)
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471023345.html

[theHandpuppet]

13. Another book

The nice thing about this book is that it was written for young readers. This is one positive way to reclaim women's history.

Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women
Paperback – March 11, 2002
by Catherine Thimmesh

In kitchens and living rooms, in garages and labs and basements, even in converted chicken coops, women and girls have invented ingenious innovations that have made our lives simpler and better. Their creations are some of the most enduring (the windshield wiper) and best loved (the chocolate chip cookie). What inspired these women, and just how did they turn their ideas into realities?

Features women inventors Ruth Wakefield, Mary Anderson, Stephanie Kwolek, Bette Nesmith Graham, Patsy O. Sherman, Ann Moore, Grace Murray Hopper, Margaret E. Knight, Jeanne Lee Crews, and Valerie L. Thomas, as well as young inventors ten-year-old Becky Schroeder and eleven-year-old Alexia Abernathy. Illustrated in vibrant collage by Caldecott Honor artist Melissa Sweet.

Take a peek: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0618195637/ref=dra_a_sm_mr_ho_it_P1300_1000?tag=dradisplay-20&ascsubtag=4a251a2ef9bbf4ccc35f97aba2c9cbda

More great books about women that are written for kids:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/3564974011/ref=zg_b_bs_3564974011_1

[theHandpuppet]

11. Kit, I think you would enjoy this article

http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/
'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative
By Kameron Hurley

I'll post just one passage here:

Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories, and language tell us what’s important.

If women are “bitches” and “cunts” and “whores” and the people we’re killing are “gooks” and “japs” and “rag heads” then they aren’t really people, are they? It makes them easier to erase. Easier to kill. To disregard. To un-see.

But the moment we re-imagine the world as a buzzing hive of individuals with a variety of genders and complicated sexes and unique, passionate narratives that have yet to be told – it makes them harder to ignore. They are no longer, “women and cattle and slaves” but active players in their own stories.

And ours.

Because when we choose to write stories, it’s not just an individual story we’re telling. It’s theirs. And yours. And ours. We all exist together. It all happens here. It’s muddy and complex and often tragic and terrifying. But ignoring half of it, and pretending there’s only one way a woman lives or has ever lived – in relation to the men that surround her – is not a single act of erasure, but a political erasure.

Populating a world with men, with male heroes, male people, and their “women cattle and slaves” is a political act. You are making a conscious choice to erase half the world.

[KitSileya]

12. Yes, this is a very good article.

Llamas have ever only been cannibals, and can only ever be shown as cannibals.

Should we ever point out all the llamas that are not cannibals, or how every portrayal of llamas are as cannibals, and how society's view of llamas is harmed by the ubiquitous portrayal of them as cannibals, when in fact, they are omnivores and in fact, like to eat hummus, vegetables, and all sorts of things, we are shouted down as asking for special treatment.

More and more, DU is showing itself as a site where 'cannibalism' is considered sacred, and to want to talk about the repercussions on llamas in society when pretty much every llama in entertainment is a cannibal is to be a prude, cannibal negative, llamaist! It will engender at least 15 threads, all about how llamas have a right to be cannibals, and to want to discuss it critically it is censorship.

(replace llama with women, and cannibalism with sex/porn, and you have DU in a nut shell, especially lately with the tons of 50 shades threads. Ugh!)

[LanternWaste]

14. Although it was simply a one-hour television drama in the nineties, a program called Homefront

Although it was simply a one-hour television drama in the nineties, a program called Homefront, depicting life in the fictional Ohio town of River Run just after the ending of World War Two really dwelt on the struggle of one woman who had been an exemplary factory floor worker during the war, and her resistance to being moved back into the secretarial pool when the boys came home.

(Now that I thin about it, gender equality, racial equality, introduction of the union at the local plant, inter-racial romances and the reaction to it were all given strong story lines... not much of that on telly anymore)

[hrmjustin]

16. Don't quit do you!

[theHandpuppet]

17. Enjoy your stay.

Though it be brief.