A meditation on forgotten women

Mata H — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:52:18 -0500

Since I wrote last week’s column about women in leadership positions in world religions, I have felt rather sad. Oh, it was no surprise that it was hard to find dozens of examples. Any feminist would understand that. But I started to feel the cumulative effect of difficulty in tradition after tradition after tradition as I searched for examples of women in leadership.

But I cannot write about this as a lack only in religious circles. I can say that it is a deep spiritual wound the world over.

Women for centuries after centuries have been silent, have been silenced, have hidden behind men’s names. Yet we have had no less skills, no less hearts, no less intellect. The world has shortchanged itself of women’s contributions almost forever in almost every area. What spiritual price have we paid for this exclusion?

I am thankful that some of my fellow editors have posted about areas this month in which known women are in short supply. (Quickly, quickly, name 3 famous women graphic artists who are not Georgia O’Keefe. Now name 20 men. Which list was harder?)

What dreams have daughters lost through the centuries as they read “Silas Marner” by George Eliot, and then hear that it was really written by Mary Ann Evans, who felt she would not be taken seriously as a writer under a woman’s name (in Victorian England, a place/time where women wrote romances).

Look at orchestras/symphonies -- The first woman to direct a major American orchestra, Marin Alsop, just conducted her first official concert as the Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony. The first woman. What interpretations of music through a woman’s direction have we lost? She is the first. I celebrate and mourn all at once.

We laugh at the humor in the film “Shakespeare in Love” about how the actors in those times were all men and boys, even playing the women’s roles. The plot of the film turns on the fact that a woman actually is hiding playing a man. But were there not writers of stories, authors of screen-plays, actresses of the stage, who yearned for a voice?

What would equal amounts of women inventors, doctors, professors, captains of industry, politicians, world religious leaders have done to change who we are? What if women in the world since time immemorial had had role models who were free to express the passions of their hearts and minds? Do we cringe at how impossible that sounds?

What if women had been able to dream as big as men always dreamed? What is it to feel so unencumbered – to feel that one could take on any way of life without eyebrows being arched, barricades being put in place?
In the PBS special, African American Lives, commedian Chris Rock learns that he had an ancestor of significant achievements in his past. He begins to mist up. He talks of his life before comedy and says “If I had knownthis it would have taken away the [feeling of] inevitability that I would be nothing.” If we can hand our daughters a deep history of significance, what big dreams we can give them!

I love that this month commemorates Women’s History, but my mind tonight is on those women who never made it to the history books – the women whose dreams were squelched, and with women whose ambitions were so shaped by the world around them that they could never even imagine a future that aligned with their deepest desires.

Lets hold these sisters of our past in our hearts for a minute – let us offer what we feel as prayer for them. Let us look to our selves and our daughters and decide to affirm dreams, and to let imagination prosper and flow. “Yes, I Can.” “Yes, You Can.”

Sisters, beloved sisters – to all of us who have ever felt the sting of a limit because we are women – sisters, oh sisters, let’s laugh together at that limit as we move together right on through it.

Related Blogs:
Rebecca at Adventures in Applied Math talks about forgotten women in Computer Science. She links to an article about WWII era women and says

It was particularly telling that historians, upon finding pictures of women with these large machines, interpreted the women's presence as decorative. I am not surprised that these women's contributions would have been forgotten.

Debbie's Music Blog points to forgotten women trumpeters. I had not thought that certain instruments were regarded as more male than others, but now that she mentions it ....plus I have never seen a male symphony harpist.

Lane, in Down Memory Lane closes with one of my favorite brain-teasers. Here is how I heard it. Can you figure out the answer without looking at her site?

A boy was injured while riding his bike in front of his house by a passing car. The father, who was just arriving home from work, rushed his son to the hospital. The emergency room doctor, upon seeing the boy, exclaimed, "I can't work on this child. He is my son." How could this be?

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A meditation on forgotten women