Celebrate Women’s History Month!

By Stacey Anter

The Library Detective

Since we have one last week of March, I must not forget to mention Women’s History Month. I just started watching Downton Abbey, which is set just after the Titanic sank in 1912. Yes, I realize I am quite behind in the ball on this one, but I am trying to catch up. In watching this historical fiction program, it makes us realize just how far women have come. Remember, women did not get the right to vote in America until the Nineteenth Amendment was signed into law in 1920. So, in these ever-changing times, with a variety of personal views and beliefs, we still need to remember how things came to be and learn how people made a difference so that we may be inspired to do the same.  One way is to read a few biographies of famous and historical women.  Some very brave women who dared to play a man’s game were portrayed in the movie “A League of Their Own,” the semi-historically fictional story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.  If you would like to learn more about these ladies, you might like to read, When Women Played Hardball by Susan Johnson; or perhaps A League of My Own: Memoir of a Pitcher for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League by Patricia I. Brown. 

Actually, any woman’s biography will be inspiring. I could go on and on, but instead, I will just suggest a few. If you don’t know where to start, take a look at a variety of women’s biographies in Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work is edited by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels. For a series of autobiographical works, there are I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together In My Name, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, and The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou, which consecutively follow her life from childhood.  If memoirs are your cup of tea, read about the first woman Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in Madam Secretary: A Memoir or the first woman Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality.

Another way is to read or view historical documentaries. First, you should take a look at America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines by Gail Collins, which is a wonderful collective biography recounting many historical figures, some of which we have never heard about in our school’s history books.  Other historical documentaries are A Thousand Years Over A Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances by Laura Schenone; The Women Who Wrote the War by Nancy Caldwell Sorel about the women reporters during World War II; and Out To Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States by Alice Kessler Harris describes the journey of women and the world of work.

If you are online, you can always visit the National Women’s History Project and read about this year’s Honorees at  http://www.nwhp.org/  .  On the InfoPlease web site for Women’s History Month, you can peruse a myriad of biographies on famous women: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/womenshistory1.html.  Also, visit the National Women’s History Museum at http://www.nmwh.org/   If you are into women mystery writers, you could always visit the Sisters In Crime home page: http://www.sistersincrime.org/  and read up on some fiction short stories.  The HistoryChannel.com homepage is also a great resource to surf around for various women’s historical articles.