I dunno how many women devote their posts on Women's real cause

drdivas — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:21:10 -0600

I wonder how many blogher bloggers would compete with me in term of presenting issues related to women's emancipation?
:)

http://drdivas.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/iran-two-sisters-face-execution-...

DIVAS

You're all welcome

Kim Pearson — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:32:35 -0600

I'm glad you enjoyed the post. We're fortunate to live in a time when the forgotten voices of so many of these women are being recovered. I have found the stories of many of these women inspiring, infuriating, and fascinating -- sometimes all at once!

Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|

Bravo

Dana Loesch — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:10:53 -0600

Fabulous post. Thank you.

Dana
on KFTK 97.1 FM/Fox News Radio
Mamalogues.com

Agree with sleepingmommy

Denise — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:34:41 -0600

I love, love, love this post Kim.

Thank you for blogging this topic and providing such great links.

~Denise
BlogHer Community Manager

Flamingo House Happenings

Wonderful article

sleepingmommy — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:17:00 -0600

Thank you for taking the time to write an article placing what we do within the larger framework of Women's history. It's good to think about women bloggers (especially us moms) in the context of a larger historical arch.

Sleeping Mommy
"If sleep deprivation is an effective form of torture, then the CIA should seriously consider employing my children."

Blogging Women: A look at our historical roots

Kim Pearson — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:26:53 -0600

Before I came to BlogHer, the term mommyblogger meant nothing to me, even though I'm a mother and I blog. I was shocked that there was so much vitriol directed at women for whom motherhood was a focus for writing. It's perfectly logical that mommybloggers would be a political force, just as they are a marketing force. This weekend Jenn Satterwhite marked the mommybloggers’ political coming of age. On her personal blog, BlogHer CE Erin Kotecki Vest, a former television journalist, summed up what this moment means for the mainstream media:

I’m not sure if you’ve been paying attention lately, but traditional media seems to be a few steps behind social media.
They can’t break news as fast as Twitter. They can’t seem to get hot topics discussed as fast as blogs. And they can’t seem to get a hold of the one demo kicking their asses in politics-
The Moms.
I’m capitalizing that now. The Moms.

One day, we may look back at this time as a watershed in the efforts of women to lift their own megaphones in the marketplace of ideas. Women have been making media for a long time, but for most of our history, media representations of women that were created or controlled by men were dominant.

That realization made me think about how far we have come. Since this is the beginning of Women’s History Month, I thought it fitting to take a look at a few pioneers.

At the time we now call the Enlightenment, when the foundational ideas of Western democracy were forming, Mary Wollstonecraft published an essay, Vindication of the Rights of Women, promoting education and full citizenship for women. She was ridiculed and parodied . Eventually, she died giving birth to a daughter, Mary, who would go on to marry romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and pen Frankenstein.

The concept of the stay-at-home-mother is an artifact of Victorian domesticity, tied to industrial capitalism. Before that, free families functioned as small businesses -- everybody worked on the farm, or in the shop, or they hired themselves out to someone else's farm or business. Slave and indentured families, of course, are another matter. But the industrial revolution created a need for a professional and managerial class -- men who worked in an office while their wives (or servants, or concubines) remained stayed in a separate, domestic space.
Think about two of the popular images of women during that time: the Hottentot Venus and the Victorian mother. The woman known as the Hottentot Venus,Saartje Bartmann was taken from her home in South Africa and paraded naked through the salons of Paris and London in the early 1800s. When the men who had lured her to Europe were finished with her, they abandoned her, leaving her to die at just 27 years old. Then the scientist Georges Cuvier made a cast of her body, and took measurements of her brain and pelvis to support his theory that her race made her small of brain and big of libido. Her body was only returned to her people in South Africa in 2002.
In her pioneering 1990 book Black Feminist Thought sociologist Patricia Hill Collins theorizes that popular representations of Bartmann, such as this magazine illustration, might have be the beginnings of the modern porn industry. In Hill-Collins’ view, this objectification of one African woman created a paradigm for the objectification of women of all races.

The second iconic image, from Godey's Lady's Book, shows the ideal (white) Victorian mother – a woman whose greatest joy is found in having children clamber all over her. Godey’s was founded by a man in the early 1830s, but reached the height of its popularity under the editorship of Sarah Josepha Hale. Godey’s promoted the values of true womanhood: piety, submissiveness, purity and domesticity.
However, even back then, women continued to speak out on public issues, despite dismissal and ridicule. In the early 1830s, just a few years after Saartje Bartman died, Mrs. Maria Stewart, a free black woman, began writing and speaking against slavery and for women’s rights before “promiscuous” audiences. (That means that both men and women were present. They were racially mixed too.) Stewart, a widow who began writing for newspapers to earn money after being swindled out of her husband’s estate, railed against both race and sex discrimination:

“I have asked several individuals of my sex, who transact business for themselves, if providing our girls were to give them the most satisfactory references, they would not be -willing to grant them an equal opportunity with others? Their reply has been--for their own part, they had no objection; but as it was not the custom, were they to take them into their employ, they would be in danger of losing the public patronage.
“And such is the powerful force of prejudice. Let our girls possess what amiable qualities of soul they may; let their characters be fair and spotless as innocence itself; let their natural taste and ingenuity be what they may; it is impossible for scarce an individual of them to rise above the condition of servants. Ah! why is this cruel and unfeeling distinction? Is it merely because God has made our complexion to vary? If it be, O shame to soft, relenting humanity!”

Another pioneer, Anne Royall, became a noted journalist in the 1820s, writing about subjects ranging from travel to politics. Like Stewart, she took up her quill to earn a living after being robbed of her late husband's estate. Reportedly, she once extracted an interview from Pres. John Quincy Adams by sitting on his clothes as he took a dip in the Potomac River, refusing to get up until he spoke to her. Her persistence in this and other matters so upset the powers-that were that they put her on trial for and convicted her for being a common scold -- a charge reserved for quarrelsome women.

Unfortunately, Royall and Stewart would not likely have been allies; Royall was a slaveholder. But there were plenty of other abolitionist and suffragist women writers who would follow in Stewart's path: Jane Swisshelm, Sojourner Truth, Frances Gage and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to name just a few. These women were driving forces behind the temperance movement and many other social reforms of the 19th century, in addition to the efforts to end slavery and disfranchisement.

Today, Common Scold is the name of a blog published by attorney Monica Bay, who notes that the last case involving the charge was not resolved until 1972. Bay says,

“[T]he thought of those feisty women, not afraid of a little cold water, has always cheered me up and inspired me. I first used the moniker as the name of my humor column at the University of San Francisco School of Law many moons ago, and revive it now for this blawg!”

Obviously, there are many more women of whom I could write, and much more to say about the struggle women have had to undergo to get to this level of self-definition. But I think the point is made. We stand at a pivotal moment in history. While misogyny continues to be a persistent issue in our media, we are in a position to have our voices heard as never before.