Today's Columbus Day Quote

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. 

Author Unknown

Today's Quote... A True Hero

"Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences." 

Susan B. Anthony

Our Heroes

From the New York Times, 1921

Honoring Yesterday's Heroes

Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet, born June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, CT. was an American abolitionist and the author of the famous slavery novel, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', one of the most important novels in American history.  She died in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1896. 

Quote of the Day

Because women’s work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we’re the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it’s our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we’re nymphos and if we don’t we’re frigid and if we love women it’s because we can’t get a “real” man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we’re neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we’re selfish and if we stand up for our rights we’re aggressive and “unfeminine” and if we don’t we’re typical weak females and if we want to get married we’re out to trap a man and if we don’t we’re unnatural and because we still can’t get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can’t cope or don’t want a pregnancy we’re made to feel guilty about abortion and…for lots of other reasons we are part of the women’s liberation movement.  

Author unknown, 
quoted in The Torch, 14 September 1987

Honoring Yesterday's Heroes

"When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff."

Archangela Tarabotti

Archangela, born February 24, 1604 in Venice, Italy was a Benedictine nun and a writer. The eldest of nine children, her father forced her to give up her dreams and enter the convent because she was lame and considered unmarriageable. It was also custom among the Italian republic’s richer families. Archangela  took her final vows under protest and spent her life protesting the practice of forcing young girls to enter a convent against their will.

Her book, 'Paternal Tyranny' was not only  a passionate condemnation of the family who dumped her into the convent, but also a carefully argued carefully argued declaration against the oppression of women by the Venetian patriarchy. She died of consumption in Sant'Anna on February 28, 1652, at the age of forty-eight. Archangela was a feminist who lived way before her time.

 "See for yourself the absolute truth of my words! Go and ask one of these [male] children, who as yet cannot put two syllables together, let alone a whole word: "What will become of your sisters?" Immediately, without a moment's hesitation, prompted by that cunning disposition shaped by his father's upbringing, he will say, "They'll become nuns, because I want to be rich." -- book 1, 74

Remembering Yesterday"s Heroes

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves. 

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 

Mary, born August 30, 1797, was an English novelist.  Her mother, one of the foremost feminists her generation, Mary Wollstonecraft,  died from puerperal feverten days after the Mary's birth. By the time Mary was 19 had written one of the most famous novels ever published--Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. Mary was the wife of Percy Blythe Shelley.  

Sadly, throughout her life she suffered from psychosomatic illnesses and nervous attacks and died from a mysterious paralysis on February 1, 1851 and was buried between her mother and her father at St. Peter's churchyard in Bournemouth.