http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002399644Oh my.
The malarial primitive, who has to take back-seat to nadin:
malaise (89,926 posts) Profile Journal Send DU Mail Ignore
Happy International Women's Day DUers
2012 Theme: CONNECTING GIRLS, INSPIRING FUTURES
If every International Women's Day event held in 2012 includes girls in some way, then thousands of minds will be inspired globally.
Each year around the world, International Women's Day (IWD) is celebrated on March 8. Thousands of events occur not just on this day but throughout March to mark the economic, political and social achievements of women.
Organisations, governments, charities and women's groups around the world choose different themes each year that reflect global and local gender issues.
"Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures" is the 2012 theme of the international womensday.com website and this has been widely used by hundreds of organisations including schools, universities, governments, women’s groups and the private sector. Each year the United Nations declares an overall International Women's Day theme. Their 2012 theme is “Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Povertyâ€. Many organisations develop their own themes that are more relevant to their local contexts. For example, the European Parliament's 2012 theme is "Equal pay for work of equal value".
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/theme.asp
You know, I'd never heard of "Women's Day" until I was wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants, after which it was explained to me.
Now, usually commemorations of people are for what those people did, accomplished, rather than for what those people
were. Such as Mother's Day, which commemorates women who have borne and raised children, surely a significant accomplishment.
But to "celebrate" women simply because they were
born women struck me as absurd; how about, then, a "Right-Handed Persons' Day" or a "Brown-Haired Persons' Day" or a "Short Person's Day" or, God forbid, a "Deaf Persons' Day"?
People should be celebrated for what they do, not for what they're born, especially since one has no control over what one's born. It's bullshit.
Withywindle (8,462 posts) Profile Journal Send DU Mail Ignore
1. Thank you sister.
View profile
Let's make this thread about great women we love and admire, in any place or historical period.
One of my favorites: Ada Lovelace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
malaise (89,926 posts) Profile Journal Send DU Mail Ignore
2. Great idea
Wow I knew nothing about her.
niyad (18,579 posts) Profile Journal Send DU Mail Ignore
3. one of my personal favourites--aphra behn
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn (10 July 1640 – 16 April 1689) was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.
Contents
Early life
One of the first English women to earn her livelihood by authorship, Behn's life is difficult to unravel and relate. Information regarding her, especially her early life, is scant, but she was almost certainly born in Wye, near Canterbury, on 10 July 1640 to Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth Denham. The two were married in 1638 and Aphra, or Eaffry, was baptized on 14 December 1640. Elizabeth Denham was employed as a nurse to the wealthy Colepeper family, who lived locally, which means that it is likely that Aphra grew up with and spent time with the family's children. The younger child, Thomas Colepeper, later described Aphra as his foster sister./
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Behn was firmly dedicated to the restored King Charles II. As political parties first emerged during this time, Behn was a Tory supporter. Tories believed in absolute allegiance to the king, who governed by divine right (246). Behn often used her writings to attack the parliamentary Whigs claiming "In public spirits call’d, good o’ th’ Commonwealth…So tho’ by different ways the fever seize…in all ’tis one and the same mad disease." This was Behn’s reproach to parliament which had denied the king funds. Like most Tories, Behn was distrustful of Parliament and Whigs since the Revolution and wrote propaganda in support of the restored monarchy (248).
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In author Virginia Woolf's reckoning, Behn's total career is more important than any particular work it produced. Woolf wrote, "All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Vita Sackville-West called Behn "'an inhabitant of Grub Street with the best of them, . . . a phenomenon never seen and . . . furiously resented.' She was, as Felix Shelling said, 'a very gifted woman, compelled to write for bread in an age in which literature . . . catered habitually to the lowest and most depraved of human inclinations. Her success depended upon her ability to write like a man.' . . . She was, as Edmund Gosse remarked, 'the George Sand of the Restoration,' and she lived the Bohemian life in London in the seventeenth century as George Sand lived it in Paris in the nineteenth." (Entry on Behn in British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary Ed. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1952. pg. 36.)
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Whooop-de-doo.
I dislike showing off my eggheadedness to the primitives, but franksolich was aware of Aphra Behn long before the feminists were. She was a famous English dramatist, after all. And franksolich still has two biographies of her, one of them signed by the authoress.
franksolich looks at Aphra Behn as a play-writer, not "just" as a woman.
