Happy International Women's Day DUers

[malaise]

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 Poverty”. 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

[Withywindle]

1. Thank you sister.

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]

2. Great idea

Wow I knew nothing about her.

[niyad]

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.
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[edit] Early life

One of the first English women to earn her livelihood by authorship,[1] 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."[5] 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.)


. . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphra_Behn

[Withywindle]

4. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juana_In%C3%A9s_de_la_Cruz




A high-born gifted young woman who didn't want to be a wife/mother, she wanted to be a SCHOLAR. So she went into a convent, because she knew that there, she would at least get the opportunity to read and write. And she did both. And she turned out to be a great poet.


How much great poetry/art/music/engineering/astronomy/etc. has been lost over the millennia by keeping 51% of the human race down? We'd have had jetpacks and flying cars and world peace long ago if women's intellectual potential had been nurtured equally with men's all along. Patriarchy hobbles human potential. If women are kept down, it means that all we really get out of human intellectual capacity is 49% AT BEST (assuming every single man on earth really stretches his *intellect* as far as possible.)

[MichaelMcGuire]

5. K&R

[Withywindle]

6. Judy Blume

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Blume



If you were an American kid who liked to read coming of age in the 70s or 80s, you probably read at least one Judy Blume book.

If you were a girl worried about your physical development or your religious path, you probably related to 'Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret.' If you were bullied and wanted solace, you might have found some in 'Blubber." If you were male and freaked out about why your THING kept doing THAT, you might read "Then Again, Maybe I Won't.' If you were a disabled girl who still had questions about masturbation, you would have needed 'Deenie.' If you were older than that, like 16, and wanted to have sex with your boyfriend in a loving way with no regrets, then go for 'Forever.'

She is one of the most censored authors of all time -- because she wrote so frankly and well about what it's REALLY like to be a kid, with sexual awakening happening that you're not allowed to express. Only an idiot would actually think that sexual feelings in either gender only start up at 18 - Judy Blume wrote books that helped a couple of generations through difficult puberties. But only the ones who liked to read, alas. I felt blessed for being in that number!

[Withywindle]

7. Let's keep this thread kicked, for a place to talk about great women.

IWD is the 8th. I'm working on more posts/links.