| 12-15 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Ellen Demorset
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
William Leuchtenburg, Marianne Williamson, and Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre
English.
A Ninteenth Century Businesswoman
"I
do not claim that all women, or a large portion of them, should enter into
independent business relations with the world, but I do claim that all
women should cultivate and respect themselves with an ability to make money
as they respect their fathers, husbands and brothers the same ability."
-- Ellen "Nell" Louis Curtis Demorset, a businesswoman both before
and after her marriage. She and her husband (who had not been successful
before marriage in fact was a chronic loser) packaged paper dress patterns,
and promoted them through a magazine that was outspoken in support of women's
rights, abolition and temperance.
She was sole administrator of the company and supervised
the manufacturing - one of the first employers in the U.S. who hired blacks
on equal terms with whites where they worked side-by-side. Not surprisingly,
there was some who refused to buy the patterns because of her integration
policy. In 1876 alone, more than three million Mme. Demorset's paper patterns
were sold.
Demorset's attempts to claim prior design of paper
patterns failed; Eleanor Butterick has that distinction. In addition to
her multi-million dollar business, Demorset founded Sorosis, a women's
organization, as well as a home for abused women and children.
| PRIOR DATE |
| HOME |
| WOA INDEX |
| NEXT DATE |
| RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
|
12-15 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 12-15-1787, Mary Russell Mitford, British
dramatist, poet, and essayist.
B. 12-15-1861, Vida Dutton Scudder, helped
organize the Women's Trade Union League, professor of English at Wellesley
College, joined a semi-religious order to promote social harmony, and authored
a number of scholarly books.
B. 12-15-1887, Marianne Moore, 1952 Pulitzer
Prize winning poet.
B. 12-15-1896, Eslanda Cardoza Goode Robeson,
anthropologist and author.
B. 12-15-1906, Betty Smith, novelist best
known for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943).
B. 12-15-1913, Muriel Rukeyser, writer, poet,
translator, noted for her writings on
feminism, other social/political issues, social injustices with dramatic
and lyrical power, member of Bd. of Directors of Teachers-Writers Collaborative,
1967.
Event 12-15-1931, Maria Teresa Norton became
the first woman to chair a Congressional committee.
B.12-15-1932, Edna O'Brien, Irish novelist,
short-story writer, and screenwriter, whose works are banned in her
native country because of her honest portrayal of women, their lives, and
their desires.
| PRIOR DATE |
| HOME |
| WOA INDEX |
| NEXT DATE |
| RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
|
QUOTES DU JOUR
LEUCHTENBURG, WILLIAM:
"By
1930 more than ten million women held jobs. Nothing did more to emancipate
them!"
-- William Leuchtenburg.
WILLIAMSON, MARIANNE:
"This
is a book about a woman's inner life. Here, we are our real selves, while
in the outer world we are impostors. We're not sure why we're posing, except
we have no clue how not to. We have forgotten the part we came here to
play. We have lost the key to our own house. We're hanging out outside
the door. The stress of being away so long from home is hurting us, even
killing us. We must not stay away; we must find the key. For until we do,
we will continue to shrivel - our faces, our breasts, our ovaries, our
stories. We are drooping down and falling apart. If we knew how to moan,
they would hear us on the moon.
"But the dirt around us is moving, making room
for tiny sprouts. Like every woman, I know what I know. Something is starting
to happen. New things lie in store for the earth, and one of them is us.
Womanhood is being recast, and we're pregnant, en masse, giving birth to
our own redemption."
-- Williamson, Marianne. A Woman's Worth New York: Random House,
1993. ISBN 0-679-42218-8.
EHRENREICH, BARBARA:
"...in
our legacy of repressed energy and half-forgotten wisdom, lies the understanding
that it is not [women] who must change but the social order which marginalized
women in the first place and with us all 'human values.'
"The romantic/rationalist alternative is no longer
acceptable: we refuse to remain on the margins of society, and we refuse
to enter that society on its terms. If we reject these alternatives, then
the challenge is to frame a moral outlook which proceeds from women's needs
and experiences but which cannot be trivialized, sentimentalized, or domesticated."
-- From that incisive and well researched For Her Own Good, 150 Years
of the Experts' Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English.
In the book, Ehrenreich and English recite how men have tried to twist
and turn women's bodies and lives to fit their needs and obsessions.
The duo makes a strong case for the feminism of women's values as the true
human values.
The Mother Jones magazine review: "A
sophisticated and penetrating analysis of 150 years of quiet warfare between
American women and 'expert' professionals."
| PRIOR DATE |
| HOME |
| WOA INDEX |
| NEXT DATE |
| RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
|
|
