Happy International Women's Day!

[maeve66]

This was always a big holiday in my house, when I was growing up. It involved going to political parties in the evening, with music and dancing and speeches and fundraising. I was a little taken aback to find, when I was older, that most people don't celebrate it. In Cuba, however, my father and stepmother and mother (who were vacationing together there, in 1994) got a flower and a kiss on the cheek from people in the streets.

Anyway -- Happy International Women's Day, Livejournal folks!

My niece is wondering who to do her March-is-Women's-History-Month report on. Her father is pulling for Helen Keller, socialist wonder woman. I like a lot of the international possibilities -- especially Alexandra Kollontai, who I memorialized this month in the March/April issue of Against the Current, with a slightly obnoxious article on Wikipedia and revolutionary women. But here is a list, off the top of my head of women who are interesting in history. I cannot limit it to Americans. Feel free to add! I'm surely deficient in lots of areas:

"Lucy" and other forebears learning to live in a dangerous environment
Venus of Willendorf -- statues representing Mother Goddesses
Hatshepsut, of Egypt (okay, I don't often cave to the Elite Women thing, but she's always fascinated me)
Sappho
Boudicca
Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (see Hatshepsut)
Artemisia Gentileschi, Renaissance painter
Nzingha, a princess in West Africa who resisted the Portuguese
Sacajawea
Abigail Adams
Angelina and Sarah Grimké, abolitionists
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Susan B. Anthony
Harriet Tubman
Sojourner Truth
Florence Nightingale
Clara Barton
Julia Morgan, California Beaux Arts architect
Victoria Woodhull, socialist, free lover, US Presidential candidate with Frederick Douglass, 1872
Jane Addams
Florence Kelley
Lucy Parsons
Helen Keller
Mother Jones
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Rosa Luxemburg
Clara Zetkin, FOUNDER of International Women's Day!!! Represent, German SPD!!!
Inessa Armand
Alexandra Kollontai
Nadezhda Krupskaya
Natalya Sedova
Raya Dunayevskaya
Dolores Ibarruri
Dr. Antoinette Konikow
Rosa Parks, especially if she was closer to the CP than one might think.
Ella Baker
Valentina Tereshkova, Soviet astronaut

My niece would add Eleanor Roosevelt and Shirley Chisholm.

ETA: Lady Murasaki, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louise Michel, Christine Dargent, Eleanor Marx, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Marie Curie, Jeannette Rankin, Benazir Bhutto

Comments

[jactitation.livejournal.com]

Happy IWD to you!

My Russian students would always wish it to me. They told me that when they were growing up, that's what you did for teachers. Uh...

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

Happy International Women's Day!

I'd add Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto to the list, as well as Margaret Thatcher and Lady Murasaki (author of what may have been the first novel ever written in the world).

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I might add Benazir Bhutto, though she and Corazon Aquino and Mel Carnahan's wife, and Aung Suu Kyuu and that woman in Indonesia... I don't know, about bourgeois women politicians who get exposure because of male family members.

I would never in five billion years add Margaret Thatcher. I look forward to her demise, as I did Reagan's.

I will definitely add Lady Murasaki!

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

Поздраляю тебя с восьмом марта! Literally: I congratulate you on the eight of March. Surprisingly (since old Russians in America I think tend to distance themselves VERY strongly from Soviet stuff), I just heard an old Russian woman wish the cashier at the Russian food store happy women's holiday. I muttered "с восьмом марта" on my way out because I wasn't sure if it was mostly for women to say to each other.

[jenlight.livejournal.com]

I vote for Rosa Luxemburg :)

Happy International Women's Day!

[ex-lunchmak.livejournal.com]

Amanda Maria Espinoza, Sandinista and namesake for the Sandinista women's organization in the 1980s

Ruby Duncan, welfare rights organizer in Las Vegas

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two trans activists active in Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in New York, c. 1969-1971 (Johnson's "P" stood for "Pay it no mind")

Margaret "Mom" Chung, Chinese American doctor and crypto-lesbian

[john-b-cannon.livejournal.com]

Happy IWD! I like the list. I'm trying to think of good additions, but most of the people I'm thinking of are theorists, and I'm not quite sure that's what this list needs.

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

Mary Seacole, perhaps? Her book is even online.

Or maybe some female pirates? lol

Happy IWD! :D

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Phoolan Devi - not a pirate, but a bandit :)

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

I love Phoolan Devi!

[goodliver.livejournal.com]

Jeanette Rankin

Margaret Sanger. Yeah, yeah I know about her fascist eugenics tendencies. I still admire her.

[zaofan.livejournal.com]

Awesome list -- though I think no list like this is complete without Wu Zetian.

But then again, I don't know whether a list like this can ever be complete at all...

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Mary Wollstonecraft
Joan Robinson
Angela Davis
Frida Kahlo
Miles Franklin
Lina Wertmuller
Nguyen Thi Minh Khai
Virginia Woolf
Simone de Beauvoir
Aphra Benn

There's one Australian in that list - I could name a few more.