Epilogue: Women’s History Month 2010: Words By Women

Women’s History Month 2010 has come to a close, but I hope the women writers presented during this month will continue to be of interest and inspiration to all who have read these posts. For myself, I have been intrigued by the breadth of women writers I have read (or have planned to read) over the years. Who knew! This month’s writers are listed below, along with an additional work not mentioned in the original post. Explore these women! Explore yourself!

Joy Adamson - Joy Adamson's Africa
Margery Alllingham - The Crime at the Black Dudley (spoiler alert)
Harriette Arnow - Hunter's Horn
Jane Austen - Mansfield Park (spoiler alert)
Maeve Binchy - Scarlet Feather
Pearl S. Buck - Sons
Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles (spoiler alert)
Colette - Mitsou
Anne Fine - The Road of Bones
Noël Riley Fitch - Hemingway in Paris
Fannie Flagg - Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man
Marilyn French - Shakespeare's Division of Experience
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar - The Madwoman in the Attic
Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Mollie Gregory - Triplets
Edith Hamilton - The Great Age of Greek Literature
Lorraine Hansberry - The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window
Lillian Hellman - The Autumn Garden
Katharine Hepburn - Me: Stories of My Life
P. D. James - Cover Her Face (spoiler alert)
Madeleine L'Engle - The Arm of the Starfish
Ursula K. Le Guin - Rocannon's World
Anne McCaffrey - The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall
Anaïs Nin - Under a Glass Bell
Michèle Roberts - Daughters of the House
Dorothy L. Sayers - Whose Body? (spoiler alert)
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Gloria Steinem - The Reader's Companion to U. S. Women's History
Maria Tatar - The Annotated Brothers Grimm
Fay Weldon - Down Among the Women


Image is from the website nwhp.org

Fay Weldon – Tuesday 22 September 1931 – still living as of this post

Introduction

The first literature festival I ever attended was The London Festival of Literature 2000 and it was where I first experienced poetry as performance. However, it was Fay Weldon’s appearance on Wednesday 27 September 2000 that was the spark of the festival for me. I was familiar with Fay’s writing through her short story collection, Wicked Women. At the festival Fay talked about her novel, Rhode Island Blues. There was a book signing and Fay wrote the following in my copy of the novel – “To Adrean, with best wishes, Fay Weldon London ‘The Word' – Sept. 2000”.

Excerpt from Chapter 1 in Rhode Island Blues

“My grandmother Felicity had seldom refrained from speaking the truth out of compassion for others, but I was too tired and guilty to argue, let alone murmur that actually she was only eighty-three not eighty-five. Felicity spoke from her white clapboard house on a hillside outside Norwich, Connecticut, with its under-floor music system and giant well-stocked fridge, full of uneatable doughy products in bright ugly bags, Lite this and Lite that, and I listened to her reproaches in a cramped brick apartment in London’s Soho. Her voice echoed through an expensive, languid, graceful, lonely, spacious, carpetless house: she kept the doors unlocked and the windows undraped, squares of dark looking out into even blacker night, where for all anyone knew axe murderers lurked. My voice in reply lacked echo: here in central London the rooms were small and cluttered and the windows were barred, and thick drapes kept out the worst of the late-night surge of noise as the gay pubs below emptied out and the gay clubs began to fill. I felt safer here than I ever did when visiting Felicity on her grassy hillside. A prostitute worked on the storey below mine, sopping up any sexual fury which might feel inclined to stray up the stairs, and a graphic designer worked above me, all fastidious control and expertise, which I liked to think seeped downwards to me.

Mine was a fashionable, expensive and desirable address for London. I could walk to work, which I valued, though it meant pushing my way through crowds both celebratory and perverse: the tight butts of the sexually motivated and the spreading butts of gawking tourists an equal nonsense. Was there no way of averaging them out, turning them all into everyday non-loitering citizens? But then you might as well be living in a suburb, and for my kind of person that meant the end.”


Yesterday’s writer – Maria Tatar

Source: Weldon, Fay: Rhode Island Blues. Flamingo, 2000. ISBN 0 00 225849 8. Excerpt: pages 1-2

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Rhode Island Blues
Center: Fay Weldon from the website redmood.com
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Rhode Island Blues

Maria Tatar – 1945 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Remember the fairy tales of your childhood - Rumpelstiltskin, The Golden Goose, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, The Fisherman and His Wife, et. al.? Well, welcome to adulthood and the truth behind the “Once upon a time…they lived happily ever after” stories. In The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar provides insights to the tales, in all their variety, published by the Brothers Grimm, as well as folklore in general. Fairy tales as you never knew them. Fairy tales as they never were.

Dedication in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
“For Daniel & Lauren”

Excerpt from the chapter FACT And FANTASY: The Art of Reading Fairy Tales in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales

“One of the chief sources of irritation for the interpreter of fairly tales is the nature of folklore sources. For nearly every tale, there are at least a dozen versions, in some cases hundreds of extant variants. In other words, rather than a single, stable literary text in which even the finest points of detail may function as bearers if significance, we have an infinite number of corrupt “texts,” spoken and written, each representing one version of a single tale type, and an imperfect version at that. No matter how gifted the transcriber of a tale is, he cannot fully succeed in capturing and recreating the spirit of an oral performance. Much s fairy tales invite interpretation, the facts of their origin and diffusion imply the impossibility of textually grounded interpretation. Even the anthropologist who can go straight to the source, observe the teller, study the community in which a tale flourishes, and record that tale still has nothing more than a single version, one no more and no less authoritative than other oral variants….

When we read and interpret a fairy tale, it is important to bring to it some knowledge of national and international variants of the tale. Once we realize that German female Cinderellas did not outnumber male Cinderellas until the eighteenth century, we look at the Grimms’ version of the story with different eyes. The discovery of male Cinderellas and Snow Whites in modern Turkish folklore invites further meditations and investigations. That Russian folklore has a male Sleeping Beauty reminds us that we must show caution in drawing generalizations about female developmental patterns on the basis of that plot. And we are obliged to think twice about male hero patterns when we come across a collection of tales depicting heroines who carry out tasks normally put to male heroes alone or who denounce fathers too weak to protect them from evil-minded stepmothers.”


Yesterday’s writer – Gloria Steinem
Tomorrow’s writer – Fay Weldon

Source: Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-691-01487-6. Excerpts: pages 42 and 47

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Center: Maria Tatar from the website people.fas.harvard.edu

Happy Birthday Sharon!!!

Sharon was born on 28 March in the Twentieth century, somewhere in the land known as Canada. Sharon is ageless and artistically inclined. Over this past year we have visited several museums and I can attest to her diligence in experiencing all that they have to offer. Presented here are three visuals I photographed from two of the museums visited. So Sharon, however you and David celebrate the day of your birth, I wish you a joyous day and one full of beauty! Have much fun!




Images:
Left: LACMA gaslight sculpture. Photo is © An Adrean Darce Brent Image
Center: Neon Art Museum butterfly. Photo is © An Adrean Darce Brent Image

Right: LACMA abstract sculpture. Photo is © An Adrean Darce Brent Image

Gloria Steinem – Sunday 25 March 1934 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Don’t remember when I first heard of Gloria Steinem, this icon of the feminist movement. There was a time when I regularly read the publication she founded, Ms. Magazine, but it has been years since I’ve picked up an issue. In any case, Gloria Steinem has been involved in all aspects of feminism since the late Twentieth century and her collection of essays in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions presents the various topics associated with the second feminist wave.


Excerpt from the chapter Words and Change in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“The nature of work has been a major area of new understanding, beginning with the word itself. Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style. Though still alarmingly common, the term is being protested, especially by homemakers who work harder than any other class of worker, and are still called people who “don’t work.” Feminists have always tried to speak of work inside the home or outside the home, of salaried or unsalaried workers. Attributing a financial value to work in the home would go a long way toward making marriage an equal partnership, as the Equal Rights Amendment would also do, and toward ending the semantic slavery inherent in the phrase women who don’t work.

It would also begin to untangle the double-role problem identified in the sixties-that is, the double burden of millions of women who work both inside and outside the home-by defining human maintenance and home care as a job in itself; a job that men can and should do as well as women.

Equal pay for equal work, the concept with which we entered the sixties, fell short of helping women in the mostly female, nonunionized jobs of the pink-collar ghetto-another new term. Blue-collar workers, who are overwhelmingly male, usually earn far more than workers in mostly female jobs. What did equal pay do for the nurse, for instance, who was getting the same low salary as the woman working next to her? Equal pay for comparable work has become the new goal, and comparability studies are going forward on the many jobs done largely by men that require less education and fewer skills but still get more pay than jobs done largely by women.”

Yesterday’s writer – Zadie Smith
Tomorrow’s writer – Maria Tatar

Source: Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. ISBN 0-03-063236-6. Excerpt: page 155

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Center: Gloria Steinem from the website feminist.com