By Suzanne Braun Levine
March 8 commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of the official recognition of the world’s women. Over that century American women got the vote, became economic entities, and were granted equal rights in most spheres. And we found our voices. We have been speaking up and speaking out about the conditions and experiences of our lives, and as a result much of our story has emerged from the obscurity that history has relegated us to.
“Lost Women”
In the early days of Ms .magazine we developed a feature we called “Lost Women,” which told the stories of accomplished, brave, and inspiring women whose achievements – as impressive as any of their male contemporaries – had been swept under the patriarchal rug. The message of that feature was that it wasn’t for want of skill and enterprise that women didn’t show up in our history books and the objective was to reclaim many of those women. Later, when I was working on the HBO documentary She’s Nobody’s Baby: American Women in the Twentieth Century (which won a Peabody Award, I’m proud to say), there were whole chunks of our experience for which there was no news footage; to show how it was for women at home in the fifties, for example, we had to use ads for the appliances she was told to buy in order to be the good housewife she was expected to be.
Over the years we have been filling in the blanks…
On both the political and personal levels. Women’s history programs proliferated and mothers, daughters, and grandmothers began to tell each other the truth about being a woman. But the story is still not being fully recorded. Witness the recent furor about the finding that only 13% of the active contributors to Wikipedia are women, and even worse, the entries about women are also anemic. A reporter for the Women’s Media Center website found that “the entry for the fictional Susan Mayer from Desperate Housewives was double that of suffragist Susan B. Anthony.”
One reason for this sad record is a misguided reverence for “facts” over “fiction” which translates into valuing quantitative descriptions over stories, events over individual experiences. Back in the Ms. days, we got lots of laughs over the distinction male journalists made between the “hard news” they admired and “soft news.”
And to some extent we have bought into that thinking, even though we personally choose the reverse .I can’t imagine writing the books I do without the stories of individual women or reading accounts of political events without the details of peoples’ lives. Despite all the journals we are working on, with the encouragement of such sites as SheWrites.com and despite the increasing number of women who speak about events with authority, with the encouragement of such sites as TheOpEdProject.com, our full story still isn’t getting recorded for posterity.
Honoring Women, Sharing Our Experiences
I can’t think of a better way to honor women past and present than by sharing our experiences. I hope many of us will enrich the accounts of women’s lives on Wikipedia and bring the stories of personal history – your own, your grandmother’s, someone whose life you admire – to the attention of local papers, groups you belong to, or your friends around the table at lunch. And please post them on my website too.
We cannot let our history be defined by imposed restrictions on how we tell it, any more than we can let others tell us how to live it. The story of how we are breaking free of being told what to do is our history.
Resources
To share your stories or learn more about organizations dedicated to making women visible in the media, history books and on the Internet, please visit: