Reply
Honored Contributor
Posts: 9,025
Registered: ‎05-23-2011

Re: Women's History Month!!!


@GSPgirl wrote:

One of our large school counties had a walk out by women teachers ok'd by the supervisor.  Guess who will be subbing those classes?  Women!  How does that exactly help the cause? 


@GSPgirl Please go back and read the OP, you have totally misunderstood her point!

You Don't Own Me- Leslie Gore
(You don't Know) How Glad I Am- Nancy Wilson
Honored Contributor
Posts: 15,627
Registered: ‎01-06-2015

Re: Women's History Month!!!

I celebrate all women who paved the way. Famous or not.

 

And all women doing it every day. 

"You call him The Edge, I just call him The"
Esteemed Contributor
Posts: 5,069
Registered: ‎05-27-2016

Re: Women's History Month!!!

[ Edited ]

March is Women's History Month
The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history.

 

 

 

 

 

Arabella Mansfield (May 23, 1846 – August 1, 1911), born Belle Aurelia Babb, became the first female lawyer in the United States in 1869, admitted to the Iowa bar; she made her career as a college educator and administrator.

*Call Tyrone*
Highlighted
Esteemed Contributor
Posts: 5,069
Registered: ‎05-27-2016

Re: Women's History Month!!!

THE ORIGINS OF WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

Women’s History Month in the United States grew out of a weeklong celebration of women’s contributions to culture, history and society organized by the school district of Sonoma, California, in 1978. Presentations were given at dozens of schools, hundreds of students participated in a “Real Woman” essay contest and a parade was held in downtown Santa Rosa.

 

Did You Know?

 

To coincide with Women's History Month 2011, the White House issued a 50-year progress report on the status of women in the United States. It found that younger women are now more likely than their male counterparts to hold a college degree and that the number of men and women in the labor force has nearly equalized.

A few years later, the idea had caught on within communities, school districts and organizations across the country. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation declaring the week of March 8 as National Women’s History Week. The U.S. Congress followed suit the next year, passing a resolution establishing a national celebration. Six years later, the National Women’s History Project successfully petitioned Congress to expand the event to the entire month of March.

 

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

 

International Women’s Day, a global celebration of the economic, political and social achievements of women, took place for the first time on March 8, 1911. Many countries around the world celebrate the holiday with demonstrations, educational initiatives and customs such as presenting women with gifts and flowers. The United Nations has sponsored International Women’s Day since 1975. When adopting its resolution on the observance of International Women’s Day, the United Nations General Assembly cited the following reasons: “To recognize the fact that securing peace and social progress and the full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms require the active participation, equality and development of women; and to acknowledge the contribution of women to the strengthening of international peace and security.”

*Call Tyrone*
Esteemed Contributor
Posts: 5,069
Registered: ‎05-27-2016

Re: Women's History Month!!!


@Greeneyedlady21 wrote:

I celebrate all women who paved the way. Famous or not.

 

And all women doing it every day. 


I so agree with you @Greeneyedlady21.  Many women, yesterday, today and even more tomorrow.  Somewhere, there is a woman doing great things.

*Call Tyrone*
Esteemed Contributor
Posts: 5,069
Registered: ‎05-27-2016

Re: Women's History Month!!!

[ Edited ]

Mary Eliza Church Terrell (1863-1954)

Mary Eliza Church Terrell organized a strategy for African-American women to become full citizens of the United States. Terrell lectured throughout the country on the importance of the vote for black women. She deemed the vote essential for the elevation of black women and consequently the entire black race. Terrell saw education as essential in obtaining racial uplift and respectability.

 

As president of the National Association of Colored Women, Terrell campaigned tirelessly among black organizations and mainstream white organizations for black women’s suffrage. She even picketed the Wilson White House with members of the National Woman’s Party in her zeal for woman suffrage. Following the passage of the nineteenth amendment, Terrell turned her attention to civil rights. In 1948, Terrell became the first black member of the National Association of University Women. In 1950 she worked to desegregate the John R. Thompson Restaurant in Washington, D.C. and her effort came to fruition with a 1953 Supreme Court decision banning discrimination in public places in the District of Columbia. Terrell fought for woman suffrage and civil rights because she realized that she belonged “to the only group in this country that has two such huge obstacles to surmount…both sex and race.” She lectured, organized, and battled to better the lives of African American women throughout her life.

 

 

Mary Kies broke that pattern on May 5, 1809. She became the first woman to receive a U.S. patent for her method of weaving straw with silk. With her new method, Kies could make and sell beautiful hats such as this one, and, by law, no one else could sell hats just like hers.

*Call Tyrone*
Trusted Contributor
Posts: 1,372
Registered: ‎04-16-2011

Re: Women's History Month!!!

Itiswhatitis, you are so wonderful to start this topic and include Mary Church Terrell.  She and a few other Black women: Mary Jane Patterson,  Anna Julia Cooper (consider H. L Gates, Jr. as the protypical Black feminist for her book, A Voice from the South (1892?), Edmonia Lewis (sculptor), and poet Georgia Douglass Johnson--were some of the first graduates of Oberlin College.  We also have to remember Dorothy Height, the long-term president of NCNW, Inc; she is the  USPS's 2017 February Black Heritage Stamp honoree. 

 

 

Esteemed Contributor
Posts: 5,069
Registered: ‎05-27-2016

Re: Women's History Month!!!

[ Edited ]

@Zernia Rose wrote:

Itiswhatitis, you are so wonderful to start this topic and include Mary Church Terrell.  She and a few other Black women: Mary Jane Patterson,  Anna Julia Cooper (consider H. L Gates, Jr. as the protypical Black feminist for her book, A Voice from the South (1892?), Edmonia Lewis (sculptor), and poet Georgia Douglass Johnson--were some of the first graduates of Oberlin College.  We also have to remember Dorothy Height, the long-term president of NCNW, Inc; she is the  USPS's 2017 February Black Heritage Stamp honoree. 

 

 


Thank you @Zernia Rose.

 

To think of Georgia Douglas Johnson as only a poet would be to call her out of her name.  Add the labels of musician, playwright, fiction writer, mother, wife, friend, mentor, intellectual and gracious host, and one would begin to approach more of who she was-- a creative woman of her time.  One of the most loved and cherished participants of the Harlem Renaissance period, Georgia Douglas Johnson was the nurturer who gave to others not just her cadenced words, but much of her heart.  While acknowledging the oppressed position of women in her lifetime and documenting how this stiffled the creative spirit, she nevertheless proudly wore the mantle of the woman poet and fully embodied this restriction for herself.


(Schomberg Center).

Life was not easy for Georgia Blanche Camp, the name given to her at birth. She was born on September 10, but her birth year has been variously reported by equally validated sources as 1880, 1886 or 1887.  It was not unusual for women of her generation to conceal their ages, so the uncertainty only underscores Georgia's standing as a woman of her times.  Judging from what is known of her school and work history, the year 1880 seems most likely the correct one.  

Her parents were George Camp and Laura Douglass.  Their combined legacy of English, Native American and African American blood gave Georgia her light hue, a distinct advantage in the color-conscious world in which she grew up. Little is known about her early life, but through letters and anecdotes from friends, we learn that she was separated from her father as a young child.  Her mother moved with her from Rome to Athens, Georgia and shortly remarried.  There is no evidence that Georgia ever had contact with her birth father again and her relationship with her mother was not a close one.  In one curious remark, reported by Claudia Tate in her introduction to Douglas Johnson's Selected Works, Douglas Johnson once admitted that her mother was "rather resentful of her daughters."  Douglas Johnson was very private about her past, and the conventions of the kind of poetry she wrote did not allow for much confessionalism.  She was clearly educated in the classical rhetorical forms that her poetry never moved beyond.

 

Educated in the public schools of Atlanta, Georgia, she then taught there for about 10 years after graduation.  Music seems to have always been an important part of her life (she taught herself to play the violin and she played organ in her church), so after years of teaching, she went on to formally study music (taking courses in harmony, violin, voice and piano) at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Cleveland College of Music, both in Ohio.  Several sources also report that she studied music at Howard University in Washington, DC.  Whether this occurred before or after her attendance at Oberlin, or before or after her public school teaching remains unclear.  What is known is that after completing these musical studies, she went back to teaching and then became an assistant principal in Atlanta.

 

While there she met and fell in love with Henry Lincoln Johnson.  As was the norm for women then, she resigned her position to marry and they were wed on September 28, 1903. Uncharacteristically, Georgia dropped her father's last name and claimed a shortened version of her mother's maiden name to use forevermore as her middle name.  " Link," as her husband was known, was a Georgia delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention.  An ambitious politician looking to establish his own law firm, Link moved the family, now including two sons (Henry Lincoln, Jr, born in 1906, and Peter Douglas, born 1907) to Washington, D.C. in either 1909 or 1910,.  In 1912, Link was appointed by President Taft to the prestigious position of Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia.

 

The move to Washington certainly widened Douglas Johnson's view of the world.  Due to her husband's political career, she was bought into contact with the established Black elite society of Washington, D.C.  There she came into contact with Jean Toomer.  Douglas Johnson's encouragement of Toomer's considerable energy, talent and intelligence allowed him to "light a fire" under her own creative leanings.

Despite the demands of motherhood, wifedom, and not a lot of support from her husband (who urged for her the traditional homemaker role), Douglas Johnson was able to carve out time to write.  She had published her first poem in 1905 in an anthology called Voice of the Negro while she was still in Atlanta.  She credited an urging by Howard University Dean Kelly Miller to send some of her verses to William Stanley Braithwaite, a poet she greatly admired, with giving her encouragement and the confidence that she could write.  Because of Braithwaite's generous critique of the poems she sent, Douglas Johnson then began to take herself seriously as a poet.  In 1916, three of her poems appeared in The Crisis.  Two year later, her first book of poems, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems, was published.

 

*Call Tyrone*
Esteemed Contributor
Posts: 5,069
Registered: ‎05-27-2016

Re: Women's History Month!!!

SUSAN B. ANTHONY, 1820-1906

Perhaps the most well-known women’s rights activist in history, Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to a Quaker family in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Anthony was raised to be independent and outspoken: Her parents, like many Quakers, believed that men and women should study, live and work as equals and should commit themselves equally to the eradication of cruelty and injustice in the world.

 

Did You Know?

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived in a part of upstate New York that would become known as the “Burnt District” or the “Burned-Over District” because it was home to so many religious revivals, utopian crusades and reform movements: They swept through the region, people said, as unstoppably as a forest fire.

 

Before she joined the campaign for woman suffrage, Anthony was a temperance activist in Rochester, New York, where she was a teacher at a girls’ school. As a Quaker, she believed that drinking alcohol was a sin; moreover, she believed that (male) drunkenness was particularly hurtful to the innocent women and children who suffered from the poverty and violence it caused. However, Anthony found that few politicians took her anti-liquor crusade seriously, both because she was a woman and because she was advocating on behalf of a “women’s issue.” Women needed the vote, she concluded, so that they could make certain that the government kept women’s interests in mind.

 

In 1853, Anthony began to campaign for the expansion of married women’s property rights; in 1856, she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, delivering abolitionist lectures across New York State. Though Anthony was dedicated to the abolitionist cause and genuinely believed that African-American men and women deserved the right to vote, after the Civil War ended she refused to support any suffrage amendments to the Constitution unless they granted the franchise to women as well as men.

 

This led to a dramatic schism in the women’s-rights movement between activists like Anthony, who believed that no amendment granting the vote to African Americans should be ratified unless it also granted the vote to women (proponents of this point of view formed a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association), and those who were willing to support an immediate expansion of the citizenship rights of former slaves, even if it meant they had to keep fighting for universal suffrage. (Proponents of this point of view formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association.)

 

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups joined to form a new suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was NAWSA’s first president; Anthony was its second. She continued to fight for the vote until she died on March 13, 1906.

*Call Tyrone*
Esteemed Contributor
Posts: 5,069
Registered: ‎05-27-2016

Re: Women's History Month!!!

Clara Hale Greatness Through Caring    

 


In 1940, Mrs. Clara Hale learned that she could become a foster mother. During the next 25 years, she became "Mommy" Hale to over 40 children of all ethnic and religious backgrounds.

 

As problems associated with drug abuse exploded in the Harlem community, Mrs. Hale's family implored her to take action. Within six months, she had 22 babies of heroin-addicted women in her five-room apartment. Soon, she had helped establish a home for infants addicted before birth. It was the first--and only known program--in the U.S. designed to deal with infants born addicted to illegal drugs.

 

In 1975, Hale House became the "Center for the Promotion of Human Potential," a licensed voluntary childcare agency. At that time, it was the only black voluntary agency in the country.

 

"Mother" Hale had cared for over 500 children at Hale House. She was a nurturing, loving, comforting woman who genuinely cared about the future of these otherwise friendless children.

 

"You can, you know you can--I know you can!" were words spoken by a woman who has proven the endless capacity of the human spirit.

Clara Hale was a rare individual who had left her loving imprint on the lives of thousands.

 

Mother Hale died in 1993, a tragic loss to children. However, Lorraine Hale, Ph.D., who had worked side by side with her mother for 25 years, carried the mission onward.

 

Women's International Center dedicated the Living Legacy Awards to the memory of the great Clara Hale in 1993, Lorraine Hale accepted our dedication to her magnificent mother.

*Call Tyrone*