| 02-24 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Excerpts from the autobiography of
Anna Howard Shaw
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Dale Spender and Marya Mannes.
Anna Howard Shaw, continued...
[Part 1 of excerpts from the autobiography of women's
rights pioneer Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919) is in WOA02-23.]
When her father sent his family to a log cabin with a dirt floor and
uncovered openings for windows and doors in the wilds of northern Michigan,
he stayed in the city back east. She was 12.
"When my father took
up his claim and sent us to live there alone until he could join us eighteen
months later, he gave no thought of the manner in which we were to make
the struggle and survive the hardships before us.
"He had furnished
us with land and the four walls of a log cabin. We were one hundred miles
from a railroad, forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen
miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats; we were wholly
unlearned in the ways of the woods as well as in the most primitive methods
of farming; we lacked not only every comfort, but even the bare necessities
of life.
"...We had brought
with us enough coffee, pork, and flour to last for several weeks and the
one necessity father had put inside the cabin wall was a great fireplace,
made of mud and stones, in which our food could be cooked. We found a creek
a long distance from the house; and for months we carried from this creek,
in pails, every drop of water we used, save that which we caught in troughs
when the rain fell... we had been in our new home only a few months my
brother fell ill and was forced to go East for an operation. He was never
able to return to us, and thus my mother, we three young girls, and my
youngest brother, who was only eight years old, made our fight alone until
father came to us, more than a year later.
"During our first
winter (the log cabin was unchinked so snow and the cold blew freely) we
lived largely on cornmeal, making a little journey of twenty miles to the
nearest mill to buy it."
(Ah, the good 'ole days when men were men and took care of their women
- according the HIStory. Why aren't women taught the truth about what life
was actually like for them in the past and why don't we tell our daughters
the truth?)
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02-24 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 02-24-1887, Mary Ellen Chase, professor
of English at Smith College and author of Windswept and Sila
Crockett (1935).
B. 02-24-1890, Marjorie Main, actor with
the gravelly throat best known as the crusty hillbilly Ma Kettle in the
Ma and Pa Kettle series of movies.
B. 02-24-1917, Dorothy Florence Raedler, founder
and director of the American Savoyards
which presented Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the U.S.
B. 02-24-1956, Paula Zahn, TV personality.
Event 02-24-1975, Alice Rivlin
assumes the post of Director, Congressional Budget Office.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
SPENDER, DALE:
"For many women, for
many years, a crucial consideration in daily life has been male power;
it has been a problem in numerous ways: it has had implications for virtually
every aspect of women's existence. That we have not inherited a tradition
in which male power is perceived as a problem, in which it is described,
analysed or criticised, is not because it has not been a fundamental issue
to women, nor because they have not attempted to explain it, but because
male power is not ordinarily a problem for men, and it is men who ordain
what the real and significant issues of society are to be."
--
Spender, Dale. Women Of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. London:
Pandora. 1982, 1988, 1990.
MANNES, MARYA:
"Women are repeatedly
accused of taking things personally. I cannot see any other honest way
of taking them."
-- Marya Mannes,
U.S. writer born 1904.
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