SISTERS ON A JOURNEY

Presented by Brenda J. Davis, March 3, 2002

Unitarian Universalist Church of Loudoun

 

 

March is National Women’s History Month.  I thought you might first like to know a little history about Women’s History Month.  In 1981, the National Women’s History Project, in Santa Rosa, California spearheaded the drive for the National Women’s History Week, choosing the week of March 8 (which is actually International Women’s Day) to show the international connections among women.  That year the U.S. Congress passed a resolution declaring National Women’s History Week.  In 1987, due to popular demand, the week was expanded to the entire month of March - National Women’s History Month.

 

International Women’s Day came about because of a protest that occurred in Russia in 1917.  Coming on the rise of long struggles and many strikes, International Women’s Day 1917 inspired thousands of Russian women to leave their homes and factories to protest the terrible shortages of food, the high prices, the world war and the increased suffering they had bitterly endured.  In the early days of its observance, International Women’s Day was celebrated as a socialist holiday honoring working women.  With the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960’s came a renewed interest in International Women’s Day.

 

There are many ways to celebrate Women’s History Month.  By acknowledging the incredible contributions of strong, successful and outstanding women; by remembering the struggles and honoring the pain endured by women who dared step outside the boundaries of societal, cultural and familial expectations; and by looking forward at the possibilities yet to be realized.

 

There are so many incredible women that I want to talk about today -

Louisa May Alcott was tutored by Henry David Thoreau and she kept an “Imagination Book” journal from the age of 10 and of course, was the author of Little Women and other works.

Marian Anderson was the first black member of the Metropolitan Opera Company.  She was U.S. delegate to the United Nations and was awarded the Spingarn Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Susan B. Anthony was a well-known Women’s suffragist.  She challenged the Fourteenth Amendment which led to the women’s right to vote.  She was also the first woman featured on U.S. currency.

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to earn a Medical Degree and practice as a physician in Europe and the U.S.  She was also co-founder of the first woman’s health center in New York.

Emily Dickinson an American poet, had only two poems published in her lifetime, and almost 2,000 poems published post-humously.

Because it was so difficult for early American women writers to get published, they often wrote under a male pen name, or used only their first and second initials and last name so that editors would not reject their writing summarily or relegate articles automatically to the women’s page or the style section of the paper.

Amelia Earhart - I have a special affinity for Amelia Earhart.  Maybe because I have secretly always wanted to learn how to fly and one day get my pilots license.  She was the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic Ocean and first female to make the same flight alone.  Author of Last Flight, she was lost in the Pacific Ocean while attempting to fly around the world.  My favorite quote from Amelia Earhart is : “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.”

Another woman pilot who is perhaps less well known but also made history in flight, is Jerrie Cobb - she and twelve other women pilots passed the rigorous tests for astronauts in the early nineteen sixties.  Cobb reported to the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on February 14, 1960 to begin the Mercury astronaut tests.  She was understandably nervous, knowing that far more than her own future depended on the results.  She later said, “Here was the chance, perhaps the only one, to prove a female space worthy.”

 

Cobb spent eight or more hours a day at the center for the next five days, taking 75 different tests.  On one day, for example, she pedaled an exercise bicycle to the point of exhaustion and beyond.  Machines monitored her pulse, blood pressure and the amount of oxygen she breathed.  On another day, to test her heart and circulation, she lay on a table that was moved from a flat to a tilted position.  Even strong, healthy pilots sometimes fainted or became dizzy when the position of their bodies was changed suddenly like this because too little blood reached their brains.  She passed every one of the tests.  Dr. Secrest, the man in charge of her testing, told her she was “a remarkable physical specimen.”  Dr. Lovelace described Cobb’s tests at a scientific meeting in Sweden in August.  The results suggested, he said, that women might be better suited for space travel than men.  “Women have lower body mass, need significantly less oxygen and less food, and may be able to go up in lighter capsules, or exist longer than men on the same supplies.”

 

In September of nineteen sixty, Cobb went through more tests, then a third round of tests in May of nineteen sixty one.  Meanwhile, Dr. Lovelace was giving the first group of tests to 22 other experienced women pilots.  As I mentioned - twelve of whom passed the tests.   But just before the women were to go to Pensacola to take the navy tests, Lovelace told Cobb that the tests had been cancelled.  The navy refused to carry out any more testing without orders from NASA, and the orders had not come.  Cobb won the right to a Congressional committee hearing in July of 1962, but they were unable to make NASA change its mind.  The U.S. did not accept female astronaut candidates until 1978, almost 20 years after Jerrie Cobb was first tested.  Sally Ride, the first American woman to go into space, went on her space shuttle in 1982.

 

Anne Frank is another favorite of mine in women’s history.  Such a brave and articulate young woman.  I cannot imagine how she and her family found the strength to make it through each day.  On a trip to Amsterdam in the nineteen eighties, I visited the house where Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding.  Visiting that house had a profound affect on me.  This was the beginning of my love for women’s history.  My favorite quote from Anne Frank is: “I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.”

 

Helen Keller, Margaret Mead, Golda Meir, Georgia O’Keefe, Eleanor Roosevelt - my favorite quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, “A woman is like a tea bag.  You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Mary Wollstonecraft and countless other women made incredible sacrifices and withstood criticism, punishment and even death for their efforts to be respected as individuals.

 

The struggles women have endured are sometimes told in the deeper meaning of words or sayings.  For instance, how many people use the term, “Rule of Thumb”?  This is a term that was used in colonial times and it comes from an old British law that said that a man could beat his wife with a stick as long as it was no bigger around than his thumb.  But that was then and this is now.

 

But we still have a long way to go baby!  In the mid-nineteen nineties, there was a scandal at Walmart.  Some company had the audacity to produce a t-shirt that said, “Someday, A Woman Will Be President,” with a cartoon depiction of an excited little girl.  Well, the upstanding people who make decisions for Walmart decided that this outrageous t-shirt was “too controversial” and had to go.  So they pulled them from the shelves and refused to sell them any more.  The Feminist Majority, and many other women‘s advocacy organizations led an effort to boycott Walmart, with little success.  So they decided to create something good from it and they came up with this great doll (I hate to admit it, but I can’t remember her name).  She has freckles and glasses, and funky hair - I just love her - she kinda reminds me of Pippi Long Stocking who was one of my favorite characters as a child.  And she is wearing a t-shirt that says, “Someday, a woman will be PRESIDENT!”  I went to the Feminist Majority Web site yesterday and I didn’t see the doll there, but they do have lots of other really great and empowering books for young feminists and old feminists like me, they also sell crafts handmade by Afghan women refugees and 100% of the proceeds from the sale of those items go back to the Afghan women who made them.  Their Web site is www.feminist.org.

 

I was flipping through channels one night a couple of months ago and (I hate to admit this publicly), but I stopped on “Celebrity Fear Factor.”  I don’t get much time for TV, and I really hate this show, but Donnie Osmond was on there and I grew up with him and I just think he’s really think he’s cute - so I watched and became so infuriated that I had to watch the whole thing.  Throughout the entire show, Coolio (I think he’s a wrap singer) kept trying to psych out one of the female contestants (Kelly something - I think she’s John Travolta’s wife - I told you, I don’t watch much TV - so I’m not sure).  Anyway - Coolio was relentless toward Kelly through the whole show and what made me so angry was that he was making derogatory remarks toward her that would not be acceptable if they were made to just about any other group.  He kept saying, “I’m not gonna let a GIRL beat me - you are weak - you can’t keep up with a man - I have to beat you because how would I explain to my boys that I let a GIRL beat me.”  Now, unfortunately, this is a familiar refrain and might not sound very harmful.  But flip this around and substitute the word GIRL with BLACK.  What if Kelly whatsername had said, “I’m not gonna let a BLACK person beat me - you can’t keep up with a white girl - I have to beat you because what would my white friends say if I let a BLACK person beat me.  The cumulative affect of comments berating women are as damaging to women as berating comments about any other group of people.  They instill self-doubt, low self-esteem, and a distrust of our own abilities.

 

The ERA, which has made legislators in Washington and throughout the states quake, has only 24 simple words.  It reads, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”  Objections have come from men and women and have ranged from fears of the inability to collect alimony to concerns over the possibility of women being drafted.  In regard to alimony - the ERA would require that the partner most able would be the one to pay - cases like this are already happening with regularity in this country as women amass more earned wealth - and we should expect that.  Alimony is not meant to be an income benefit for women, rather it is a safety net for a partner who sacrifices career opportunities which slow down or impede their ability to earn - male or female.  And, the ERA will not give Congress power it does not already have - Congress has always had the power to draft women.  In fact, women have been serving in military service since the Revolutionary War, tho largely unrecognized by history.  They have served as nurses, scouts and spies, and hundreds of women have fought in all our wars disguised as men.

 

Alice Paul, who suffered brutal incarceration (right here in Virginia - at the site which is now Lorton prison) and whose strategies finally won passage of the women's vote - the 19th Amendment, came up with the idea of an Equal Rights Amendment.  Although her exact wording was not ultimately used in the 1972 Amendment passed by Congress, she deserves credit for conceiving the idea.  Shortly after the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, giving women the right to vote, the leaders of the suffrage movement realized that suffrage alone was not going to give women full equality.

 

In 1923 Alice Paul authored the Equal Rights Amendment and it was introduced in each congressional session until it passed in 1972.  It was then sent to the states for ratification.  Only thirty five states had ratified the ERA by the deadline which Congress had imposed.  There are some efforts throughout the U.S. to get another three states to ratify the ERA.  The "Madison Strategy" calls for trying to get the last three states needed to make up the 38 necessary for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and then present it to Congress for certification.  Some people believe this strategy will work because in 1992, Congress certified the Madison Amendment (which concerns congressional pay raises) as still viable and therefore considered it ratified when passed by the thirty-eighth state 203 years after its original presentation to the states by Congress.  Now, the ERA will not provide Congress with the ability to authorize more money for themselves, so we’ll see how this strategy pans out!

 

By the way - don’t hold your breathe in Virginia.  Although the 19th Amendment passed in Congress giving women the right to vote, and just enough states ratified it to become a part of the U.S. Constitution in 1920, Virginia did not ratify a woman’s right to vote until 1958 - the year I was born.  Virginia does not have a reputation for being a trail blazer in women’s rights.

 

Before I close I want to mention two things.  I have placed copies of a Women’s History Quiz on the back table - the answers are on the back of the sheet - it’s fun to take the quiz and you might find out something you didn’t know about a woman in history.  The second is that I want to recognize one more woman in history - she was an inventor and her invention has had a huge impact on my life - mostly my hips - Ruth Wakefield  invented the Chocolate Chip Cookie - and I baked some “CCC’s” as we affectionately call them in my house and have placed those on the refreshment table in celebration of Women’s History Month.

 

Things are getting better, but we need to be reminded of the contributions of women more than just once a year.  We need to write women back into history.  Until then, The National Women’s History Project has a plethora of ideas and resources for celebrating Women’s History Month, including curriculum ideas for teachers, celebration ideas, etc.  I would encourage you to go to their Web site - www.nwhp.org and check it out.

 

Let’s make our children aware that it is Women’s History Month and remind them of the brave and wonderful things that the women in our families and in our lives have done and are doing to make the wheels of life turn - in or out of the board room, the kitchen, the soccer field, or the operating room - We are sisters on a journey.

 

I invite the women of the choir to join me up front for our closing song - “We Are Sisters On A Journey”
WE ARE SISTERS ON A JOURNEY - performed through song and dance by the women of the choir . . .

 

We are sisters on a journey, singing now as one

Shining through the darkest night the healing has begun, begun,

the healing has begun

 

We are sisters on a journey, shining now as one

Remembering the ancient ones, the women and the wisdom,

the women and the wisdom

 

We are sisters on a journey standing at the door,

Remembring what passed long ago, let’s turn the key once more, once more,

let’s turn the key once more

 

We are sisters on a journey watching life unfold

Sharing warmth of heart and hands, the knowledge of the old, the old

The knowledge of the old

 

Our dance motions are symbolic - Stepping back honors the past; Stepping forward honors the future.  Raising and lowering arms symbolizes the ebb and flow of life, and holding hands - the bonding of women in sisterhood throughout time.