| 12-10 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Emily Dickenson
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTE by
Gloria Steinem.
Emily Dickenson
Born 12-10-1830, Emily
Dickinson, the great poet of Amherst, Massachusetts. Criticisms of
her work have ranged from condescendingly referring to "that little
wisp of a girl" (at 53!) to calling her the greatest female poet since
Sappho, and now many seem settled on adoring her as the greatest American
poet of either sex.
Her reclusiveness is believed to have been the only
method she had of protecting her craft and individuality in the male-dominant
culture of the 19th Century when marriage meant constant pregnancies and
complete servitude to children and husband.
She experimented with poetic rhythms and rhymes. With
the exception of only three poems, all her work was published posthumously.
Almost as intriguing as her poetry is the riddle of
her life. She dressed all in white, was a recluse, and yet carried on an
extensive correspondence with a large number of people. Yet almost no one
knew she wrote poetry and certainly not in the quantity her sister discovered
after her death.
Her surviving letters never fully reveal her "love
interests," but she expressed great emotion for several women, while
standard biographer/critics claim she had unrequited love for several men.
Again, read several biographies and by all means her correspondence and
her poetry. Again try to get the latest publications since many of her
earlier biographies as well as her poetry and correspondence were censored.
Regardless of her "love" life, like so many artists, men or women,
she lived most truly for her art.
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12-10 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 12-10-1741, Aagje (Agatha) Deken who
with Betje Wolff-Bekker authored the first Dutch novel De historie van
mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart (The History of Miss Sara Burgerhart) in
1782.
B. 12-10-1815, Augusta Ada King Lovelace, English
mathematician, created a program for the prototype of a digital computer
invented by Charles Babbage. She has been called the first computer programmer.
Event 12-10-1869, the Wyoming territory
adopted woman's suffrage amidst laughter - it was a joke to the male legislators
who anticipated rescinding it later.
B. 12-10-1891, Nelly Sachs, German writer
won the Nobel Prize in literature (1966) for her poetry; known for her
writings describing the sufferings of Jews during W. War II.
B. 12-10-1903, Mary Norton, British children's
writer who created the Borrowers, a race of people only 15 cm tall
who secretly lived with humans and borrowed what they needed to live
B. 12-10-1907, Rumer Godden, British author
of Black Narcissus and In This House of Brede. Her sister
Jan G. has written more than ten novels. RG's children's books are almost
as famous as her adult novels. She was raised in India. Her first husband's
debts used up the royalities from her earlier books.
B. 12-10-1925, Clarice Lispector, Brazilian
novelist and short-story writer.
Event 12-10-1931: Jane Addams is awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize, the second woman given that honor. She gives all
the money to the Women's International League.
Event 12-10-38: Pearl Buck becomes the first
American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Recently critics
began downgrading her work as "sentimental," but one must wonder
if this is another case of trying to erase women from history instead of
giving her books the time and space that older books by men are awarded.
Event 12-10-1948, adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations, perhaps Eleanor
Roosevelt's finest hour.
Event 12-10-63: Maria Goeppert-Mayer becomes
the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize for physics (for her
work on the shell structure of atomic nuclei) and the second woman of any
nationality to receive the award in physics. Marie Curie was the first
in 1903.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
STEINEM, GLORIA:
"A
white minority of the world has spent centuries conning us into thinking
that a white skin makes people superior - even though the only thing it
really does is make them more subject to ultraviolet rays and to wrinkles.
Male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis-envy
is 'natural' to women - though having such an unprotected organ might be
said to make men vulnerable, and the power to give birth makes womb-envy
at least as logical.
"In short, the characteristics of the powerful,
whatever they may be, are thought to be better than the characteristics
of the powerless and logic has nothing to do with it."
-- Gloria Steinem in her essay If Men Could Menstruate.
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