Women's History Month

Mar 02, 2014 05:28

Hosted by gillpolack, if I were forty years younger and had the wherewithal to go overseas for the research, here is the woman I'd like to share with the world.

How about you--biography, novel, film, graphic novel series, who would you like to share with the world?

women

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Comments 32

jhetley March 2 2014, 14:16:51 UTC
My grandmother, who broke with the Mennonites, raised three children by herself, graduated from college, all her children graduated from college, the youngest being born in 1908 . . .

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sartorias March 2 2014, 14:27:22 UTC
Wow! She must have been fiercely determined as well as intelligent.

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jhetley March 2 2014, 14:32:55 UTC
Dad said "stubborn" . . .

Forgot to mention emigrating from Canada to the US, South Dakota. Which was no picnic at the end of the 1800s.

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sartorias March 2 2014, 15:12:49 UTC
That's for sure--again, wow!

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whswhs March 2 2014, 15:29:40 UTC
I actually did short biographies and character sheets for several women for the GURPS Who's Who series, but my favorites were Sei Shonagon and Maria Sibylla von Merian. It was harder work to find material on Merian, a seventeenth-century painter and engraver who talked the Amsterdam city council (if I remember correctly) into giving her a grant to travel to Surinam to paint the flowers and insects of the country (she did detailed studies of the life cycles of metamorphosing insects), and then published a large volume of engravings. She was a fine counterexample to the idea of women staying at home in premodern times while men had adventures. I also saw notes on her criticism of the practice of slavery in Surinam ( ... )

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sartorias March 2 2014, 15:31:48 UTC
Exactly--how I wish we had our Universal Translators NOW.

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whswhs March 2 2014, 16:40:02 UTC
Now I wouldn't put all that much value on a universal translator. It could presumably translate the core assertion or interrogation of a sentence; but could it capture all the nuances of meaning, let alone the phonological structure of poetry? That stuff matters to my appreciation, a lot. I suppose for purely factual matters it would be beneficial, but then in a biography a lot of the facts are things that people said. And for literature, well, the flavor of the language is a huge part of what I read for.

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sartorias March 2 2014, 16:50:45 UTC
This is true. But given the brevity of our lifetimes, I would still welcome a basic translator, or better some kind of brain download of basic vocabulary that would speed along the learning for subtleties and idiom and cultural and social meanings that are not immediately obvious.

"Is there language in that book? My kids are under twelve."

He said that driver is a douche. Does that not mean a shower?"

"Cats are floons."

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aamcnamara March 2 2014, 15:53:23 UTC
I really enjoyed writing my senior thesis on Anne Conway--I know that hardly anybody will read it, though, and sometimes wonder if I couldn't write something about her for more general audiences.

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sartorias March 2 2014, 16:02:03 UTC
You know her life and her thought and work well--is there a story or two in it?

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aamcnamara March 2 2014, 16:38:33 UTC
I've thought about it on and off, and so far haven't come up with anything, but that doesn't mean I won't!

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madrobins March 2 2014, 16:41:58 UTC
Oh, my. Perhaps Trotula di Ruggiero of Salerno--doctor, teacher, and wife (in 1050 Italy--she totally overthrew my notions of what a woman's role in the medieval world might be). Or--no, I think it would have to be Matilda of Flanders, great granddaughter of Charlemagne and King Alfred, and wife of William of Normandy (AKA William the Conquerer). Matilda appears to have kept William on his toes, kept him from killing their sons (with whom he had a seriously vexed relationship), and kept Normandy safe while he was off conquering England.

Liselotte sounds fascinating. I wish my French was better (my German is non-existent) so I could read more about her.

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sartorias March 2 2014, 16:45:38 UTC
There is a delightful English translation of some of her letters--will really make you want to read more.

Matilda! Oh, yes.

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sovay March 2 2014, 17:40:18 UTC
How about you--biography, novel, film, graphic novel series, who would you like to share with the world?

Joan Clarke, i.e., the reason the character of Pat Green annoys me more with every re-read of Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code (1986). I appreciate the dramatic value of a female codebreaker serving to remind the audience of other kinds of marginalization, another outsider who's invaluable in times of national crisis and then expected to conform and/or disappear once life has returned to "normal," it just happens that we're conditioned to accept the ways in which she does so (marriage, motherhood, domesticity) as less horrific than chemical castration and suicide; the problem is that Whitemore left just enough real-life particulars in the fictionalization that it cannot but feel, once you learn anything about actual Joan Clarke, like betrayal. Clarke was a codebreaker at Bletchley; she was Turing's closest female friend both during and after the war and even engaged for about half a year to marry him (in full knowledge of his ( ... )

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sartorias March 2 2014, 18:24:55 UTC
She is an excellent choice. I've been doing some reading about the Bletchley circle, now that information is emerging, and that place was full of interesting personalities by no means limited to the men.

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sartorias March 2 2014, 18:40:40 UTC
She is an excellent choice. I've been doing some reading about the Bletchley circle, now that information is emerging, and that place was full of interesting personalities by no means limited to the men.

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sartorias March 2 2014, 21:03:07 UTC
There were a lot of fascinating women at Bletchley, I've found, now that more information is slowly emerging.

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