Inside of a Dog, It's Too Dark to Read

March 6: Annie Smith Peck

Reminds one of the old feminist saying '...but in high heels and backwards!' Imagine mountain-climbing in long skirts?

*blink* Um... it's still morning in Hawaii? [posts hastily]

March 4: Kateri Tekakwitha

NOW I remember what I forgot yesterday.

In the great tradition of American TV (and because I was just not prepared!), I will bring you reruns from my 2004 commemoration of American Women's History month. To spare your Flist displays, they'll be linked rather than literally reposted.

Some of you have seen these before; some haven't; and the ones who have, maybe you'll like revisiting them. ^_^

March 1: Susan B. Anthony

March 2: Deborah Samson

Laurie Anderson



Who is Laurie Anderson?

A poet, writer, visual artist, and social commentator, she is perhaps best known as a recording artist, one whose technical wizardry and live shows have earned her a reputation as one of the most eccentric performers in the business.

She's a lot of things. In general she's known as a "performance artist." A performance artist is an artist who works in the medium of live performance. Laurie's performances use a bewildering variety of media, including film, electronic and acoustic music, slides, costumes, and other weird effects that don't even have names.

Laurie is also a recording artist with Warner Bros. Records. She has made several albums, and all of them are more or less "avant-garde." She began to actually sing recently, starting with the Album "Strange Angels." Otherwise the vocals were primarily spoken.

Some common themes in her works are airplanes, dogs, family, the United States, dreams, and language. ¹

Laurie Anderson was born in Chicago in 1947. One of eight children, she studied the violin and, while growing up, played in the Chicago Youth Symphony. She graduated in 1969 from Barnard College in New York, and went on to study at Columbia University, working toward a graduate degree in sculpture. The art scene of the early 1970s fostered an experimental attitude among many young artists in downtown New York that attracted Anderson, and some of her earliest performances as a young artist took place on the street or in informal art spaces. In the most memorable of these, she stood on a block of ice, playing her violin while wearing her ice skates. When the ice melted, the performance ended.

Since that time, Anderson has gone on to create large-scale theatrical works which combine a variety of media - music, video, storytelling, projected imagery, sculpture - in which she is an electrifying performer. As a visual artist, her work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo, New York, as well as extensively in Europe, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She has also released seven albums for Warner Bros., including Big Science, featuring the song "O Superman," which rose to number two on the British pop charts. In 1999, she staged "Songs and Stories From Moby Dick," an interpretation of Herman Melville's 1851 novel. She lives in New York. ²

1992 - STORIES FROM THE NERVE BIBLE was presented in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel

"I worked with local laser artists who designed complex laser structures for the performance. These amazing looking structures are strictly illegal in most other countries because the lasers are aimed directly at the audience, resulting in a kind of non-specific group eye surgery." -LA ³

The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson

Opened on November 10, 2003 at PAC-Milan, Italy
The Musée Art Contemporain of Lyon in France has produced a touring retrospective of Laurie's work, encompassing installation, audio, video and art objects and spans her career from the 1970's to her most current works. The show was first exhibited in Lyon from March 6 - July, 2002 and then moved to the Museum Kunst-Palast in Düsseldorf, Germany from May - October 18, 2003. This show will continue to tour european museum through 2005.
Stay posted for further updates about the show!

In 2003-04, Laurie is the first artist-in-residence of NASA.
Stay tuned for updates about this amazing opportunity! ⁴

NEW SOLO WORK TOUR 2004

Thursday, February 19 - Sunday, February 22, 2004 8:00pm
WORK IN PROGRESS
Presented by: Usine C
Venue: Usine C
Montreal, Quebec
www.usine-c.com ...

¹ http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jimmyd/laurie-anderson/faq/
² http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/anderson/
³ http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jimmyd/laurie-anderson/biography/wb.html
⁴ http://www.laurieanderson.com/projects.html

Hillary Rodham Clinton



Hillary Diane Rodham, Dorothy and Hugh Rodham's first child, was born on October 26, 1947. Two brothers, Hugh and Tony, soon followed. The children grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois, as a close-knit family. An excellent student, she was also a Girl Scout and a member of the local Methodist youth group. Hillary also enjoyed sports, was a member of the National Honor Society, and was always interested in politics. ^{1, 3}

She entered Wellesley College in 1965. As an undergraduate, Hillary mixed academic excellence with school government. Speaking at graduation, she said, "The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible." Graduating with high honors, she moved on to Yale Law School, where she served on the Board of Editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action and interned with children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman. While at Yale, she developed her special concern for protecting the best interests of children and their families. It was there that she met Bill Clinton, a fellow student. The President often recalls how they met in the library when she strode up to him and said, "If you're going to keep staring at me, I might as well introduce myself." The two were soon inseparable -- partners in moot court, political campaigns, and matters of the heart. ^{1, 3}

In 1973, Hillary became a staff attorney for the Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge. A year later she was recruited by the Impeachment Inquiry staff of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to work on the Watergate Impeachment proceedings. ¹

Eventually, Hillary left Washington and followed her heart to Arkansas, marrying Bill Clinton in 1975. She and Bill joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas Law School at Fayetteville in 1975 and Hillary joined the Rose Law Firm in 1976. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, and Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas. Their daughter, Chelsea, was born in 1980. ^{1, 3}

Serving as First Lady of Arkansas for twelve years, Hillary continued to work tirelessly balancing family, law, and public service, working in particular on behalf of children and families. In addition to chairing the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, she founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. She introduced a pioneering program called Arkansas Home Instruction for Preschool Youth, which trained parents to work with their children in preschool preparedness and literacy. Hillary also served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital, Legal Services, and the Children's Defense Fund. In recognition of her professional and personal accomplishments, Hillary was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and Arkansas Mother of the Year in 1984. ^{1, 3}

When her husband was elected to the presidency in 1992, she was undoubtedly the most overtly political First Lady ever. She was the first First Lady to hold the Master of Science degree (the second being Laura Bush). Just as her husband was the first President from the Baby Boom generation, she was its first First Lady. ⁶ When the Clintons arrived in Washington, D.C., Hillary felt that she had not only public responsibilities as First Lady, but also the important private responsibility to make the historic, and formal, White House a true home for her husband and daughter Chelsea. For example, because the private living quarters did not have an informal place to gather for meals, she decided to have the serving kitchen on the second floor converted into a family kitchen. There, the three of them could gather around the table just as they had in Arkansas. ⁴

As the nation's First Lady, Hillary continued to balance public service with private life. Her active role began in 1993 when the President asked her to chair the Task Force on National Health Care Reform. The controversial commission produced a complicated plan which never came to the floor of either house. It was abandoned in September, 1994. She continued to be a leading advocate for expanding health insurance coverage, ensuring children are properly immunized, and raising public awareness of health issues. She wrote a weekly newspaper column entitled "Talking It Over," which focused on her experiences as First Lady and her observations of women, children, and families she has met around the world. ^{3, 6}

Her 1996 book It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us was a best seller, and she received a Grammy Award for her recording of it. The book was a national call for all sectors of society to take responsibility for our children. In it, Hillary emphasizes that while parents are the most important influence in their children's lives, and have the primary responsibility in raising them, society also plays an important role in rearing our nation's children. She stresses that ultimately children will thrive only if all of society provides for them. ⁴ Unfortunately, the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child" was frequently lampooned by her opponents. ⁵

In 1997, the First Lady, along with the President, hosted two important conferences on children's issues. Hillary played a strong role at the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, where experts emphasized that the success a child has in reaching their full potential is influenced by what they experience during their critical early years. The White House Conference on Child Care drew attention to the struggle our nation's working parents face in finding child care they can afford, trust and rely on. This conference played an important role in developing the President's historic child care initiative -- the largest investment in child care in our nation's history -- to make child care better, safer, and more affordable for America's working families. She also worked to reform America's foster care system and promote adoption. ⁴

During her stay in the White House she was often controversial, weathering criticism about everything from her hairstyles to her involvement in public policy, her role in a questionable land deal in Arkansas (the so-called Whitewater affair) and other scandals. She also endured her husband's much-publicized affair with intern Monica Lewinsky and supported him during the subsequent impeachment hearings, publicly sticking by the President, initially claiming that the allegations of Bill's infidelities were the result of a "vast right-wing conspiracy", and even when the affair was confirmed, remaining by his side. The state and nature of their marriage has been the subject of much speculation, with some claiming it was a purely political arrangement and widespread stories about their regular arguments. On the other hand, some people say there is a deep respect for each other's political abilities and intelligence -- one that transcends their tiffs. Regardless, they remained together long after the political necessity for the marriage to stay together passed. ^{5, 6}

Undeterred by critics, Hillary nonetheless won many admirers for her staunch support for women around the world and her commitment to children's issues. ³ She continued to be a leading advocate for expanding health insurance coverage, ensuring children are properly immunized, and raising public awareness of health issues. She worked on lesser but noteworthy projects like shaping the CHIP, Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as breast cancer funding. ⁶ When President Clinton left the Presidency after his second term, the Clintons moved to New York State to establish residency. Respected and long-serving Democratic Senator Daniel 'Pat' Moynihan had announced his retirement, and Hillary wanted to run for the junior senator position to continue working for her chosen causes._[ed]

In a blaze of international media publicity, Hillary ran for the New York senate seat in 2000. Initially expected to face Rudy Giuliani, his cancer scare prevented one of the most eagerly anticipated political contests of the election cycle and instead she faced an inexperienced Republican opponent, Representative Rick Lazio. Despite considerable efforts by the Republican party to defeat her, and allegations of anti-Semitism, ⁶ Hillary was elected United States Senator from New York on November 7, 2000, in part by campaigning extensively in traditionally Republican areas of Upstate New York. She is the only First Lady ever elected to the United States Senate and the first woman elected statewide in New York. ^{2, 6} Now midway through her six-year team, Senator Clinton has proven to be a strong and fairly popular advocate for New York; she is the first New York Senator to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. ²

In 2003 Hillary published a 562-page memoir, Living History, detailing her eight years in the White House. ⁵ Her supporters are already gearing up for her re-election campaign in 2006. ⁷

The Senator has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Claude Pepper Award of the National Association for Home Care, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Medal, the Servant of Justice Award of the New York City Legal Aid Society, the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal, the Public Spirit Award of the American Legion Auxiliary, the Shalom Chaver Award for International Leadership of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, the Albert Shanker Award of the New York State United Teachers. <sup>2


1</sup> http://www.wic.org/bio/hclinton.htm
² http://clinton.senate.gov/
³ http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/firstladies/hc42.html
⁴ http://www.a-ten.com/biographies/hillary_clinton.html
⁵ http://www.who2.com/hillaryrodhamclinton.html
⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton
⁷ http://www.friendsofhillary.com/

Bessie Coleman



Bessie Coleman was born into a large family in Atlanta, Texas, on January 26, 1892, the tenth of thirteen children. By the time of Bessie’s birth, Susan and George Coleman, her parents, had been married for 17 years. George was of mixed blood—part African-American and part Cherokee. Migrating Georgians had founded the town some 10 years before her birth. Its residents numbered fewer than 1,000. ¹

As her older sibs started work in the fields, Bessie kept her eyes on her sisters and helped her mother work in her garden. She began school at the age of six and had to walk 4 miles each day to her all-black school. She was intelligent and established herself as an outstanding math student. However, Every year the routine of school, chores, and church was shattered by the cotton harvest. Each man, woman, boy and girl was needed to pick the cotton, so the Coleman family worked together in the fields during the harvest. ¹

In 1901, Bessie’s happy life took a dramatic hit. George Coleman left his family. He had become fed up with the racial barriers that existed in Waxahachie and all across the state of Texas. He returned to Oklahoma, or Indian Territory as it was called then, to find better opportunities. Unable to convince his wife and children to go with him, he left with a heavy heart. Soon after Bessie's father left, her remaining older brothers also left home, leaving Susan Coleman with four girls under the age of nine. ¹

Bessie saved her money and then in 1910 took her savings and enrolled in the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma. Bessie completed only one term before she ran out of money and was forced to return to Waxahachie. She continued her former life working as a laundress in the small Texas town. ¹

In 1915, at the age of twenty-three, she set out to stay with her brother, Walter, in Chicago while she looked for work. All she wanted was a chance to “amount to something”. ¹ Among her many gentlemen friends was Claude Glenn, a much older man whom she married in 1917, but lived with only briefly. ³ By 1918, Bessie's mother Susan and her three younger sisters, Georgie, Elois and Nilus, had joined Bessie and her brothers in Chicago. By 1920, 90% of the African American population of Chicago lived on the South Side, between Twelfth and Thirty-ninth streets on the north and south and Lake Michigan and Wentworth Avenue on the east and west. It was a pretty well-balanced place where the wealthy, the well-educated, the middle class, the poor and the hard-working co-existed in generally law abiding harmony. Bessie lived with her brothers Walter, a Pullman porter, and John, frequently unemployed. She decided that she would become a beautician to make ends meet. ¹

Walter and John had been serving in France during World War I and returned safely; Bessie, taking her cue from brother John's teasing claims that French women were superior to African American women because they could fly and had careers, decided she would become a flier. ^{1, 2}

Having secured funding from several sources and received a passport with English and French visas, Bessie departed for France in November of 1919. She completed in seven months, a ten month course at the Ecole d'Aviation des Freres Caudon at Le Crotoy in the Somme. Learning to fly in a French Nieuport Type 82, Bessie's schooling included "tail spins, banking and looping the loop." She received her license from the renowned Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) on June 15, 1921. Her birthplace was listed as Atlanta, Texas, but her age was listed as 25 (the figure she had given passport authorities in Chicago) rather than 29 that she actually was. The license did not indicate that Bessie was the first black woman to ever earn a license from the prestigious FAI nor that she was the only woman of the sixty-two candidates to earn FAI licenses during that six-month period. ¹ Flying as entertainment could provide financial benefits for an aviator but required skills that Bessie did not possess. Once again, Bessie departed for France, arriving in Le Havre on February 28, 1922. She received advanced training in the Nieuport, returning to New York in August. ¹

"Bessie realized that to make a living at flying she would first have to dramatize herself, like Roscoe Turner, the great speed pilot who wore a lion-tamer's costume when he flew and took his pet lion, Gilmore, along in the second cockpit," wrote Doris Rich in Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator. "Speaking to reporters, Bessie now began to draw upon everything at her command —- her good looks, her sense of theater, and her eloquence—to put her own campaign of self-dramatization into high gear.... Everything she told them was purposefully selected to enhance the image of a new, exciting, adventurous personality." ³

Her first appearance was in an air show on September 3, 1922 at Curtiss Field near New York City. The show, sponsored by Robert Abbott and the Chicago Defender, billed Bessie as "the world's greatest woman flyer." More shows followed around the country including Memphis and Chicago. On June 19, 1925, Bessie made her flying debut in Texas at a Houston auto racetrack renamed Houston Aerial Transport Field in honor of the occasion. ¹

She flirted briefly with a movie career and traveled to California to earn money for a plane of her own. ¹ Although Coleman eventually succeeded, the only one she could afford was an ancient Curtiss JN-4, priced at $400. Days after receiving the plane, she was flying from Santa Monica, California to an exhibition in central Los Angeles in February of 1923, when it stalled at 300 feet, nose-dived, and smashed into the ground. She spent the next three months in the hospital with a broken leg, broken ribs, and several serious lacerations. ³

Discouraged by the loss of her only plane, her lengthy hospitalization, and continuing managerial problems, Coleman spent the next 18 months in Chicago ³ formulating a new plan. It was another two years before she finally succeeded in lining up a series of lectures and exhibition flights in Texas. Once there, she defied not only racial barriers but gender barriers as well. ¹

Bessie left for a series of lectures in black theaters in Georgia and Florida. After two months in Florida, she opened a beauty shop in Orlando to hasten her accumulation of funds to start the long awaited aviation school. Using borrowed planes Bessie continued exhibition flying and occasional parachute jumping. As she had often done in other U.S. locations, Bessie refused to perform unless the audiences were desegregated and everyone attending used the same gates. ¹

At the end of April in 1926, Bessie's Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company Jenny (JN-4 with an OX-5 engine) arrived in Jacksonville. On the evening of April 30th, she and her mechanic took the plane up for a test flight. ¹ The highlight of her performance the next day was to be a spectacular parachute jump from a speeding plane at 2,500 feet. ³ At 3,500 feet with Wills in the front seat, the controls jammed and the plane unexpectedly plummeted toward earth. Coleman, who wasn't wearing a seat-belt so she could peer over the cockpit to study the contours of the field below, fell out of the cockpit and to her death. ^{2, 3}

Wills tried but failed to regain control of the aircraft, and died instantly when it hit the ground. Although the wreckage of the plane was badly burned, it was later discovered that a wrench used to service the engine had slid into the gearbox and jammed it, causing the plane to spin out of control. Experts noted at the time that gears in more modern planes had a protective coating —- an accident like this need not have happened. ³

On May 2, 1926, thousands of mourners —- among them hundreds of schoolchildren who had heard Coleman lecture on the glories of aviation —- attended a memorial service in Jacksonville. Three days later her remains arrived in Chicago, where thousands more attended a funeral at the city's Pilgrim Baptist Church.

Her dream of a flying school for African American's became a reality when William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles, California in 1929. As a result of being affiliated, educated or inspired directly or indirectly, by the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, flyers like the Five Blackbirds, the Flying Hobos (James Banning and Thomas Allen), the Tuskegee Airmen, Cornelius Coffey, John "Brown Condor" Robinson, Willa Brown and Harold Hurd continued to make Bessie Coleman's dream a reality. ¹

"Because of Bessie Coleman," wrote Lieutenant William J. Powell in Black Wings, "we have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream." ³

A new organization known as the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club, open to women pilots of all races, was founded in 1977 —- some 50 years after her death —- by a group of black women pilots from the Chicago area. Every April, on the anniversary of Coleman's death, the Bessie Coleman Aviators, together with pilots from the Chicago American Pilots Association and the Negro Airmen International, fly low over Lincoln Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Blue Island to drop flowers on her grave. As an additional tribute to the life and courage of the world's first black woman pilot, in 1990, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley renamed Old Mannheim Road at O'Hare Airport "Bessie Coleman Drive." In 1992 he proclaimed May 2nd "Bessie Coleman Day in Chicago." Shortly thereafter, Coleman received national recognition when the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating her extraordinary life and accomplishments. <sup>3



1</sup> http://www.bessiecoleman.com/
² http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flygirls/peopleevents/pandeAMEX02.html
³ http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/coleman_b.htm
   (http://www.gale.com/servlet/BrowseSeriesServlet?
   region=9&imprint=000&titleCode=CBB&edition=)

http://www.libarts.ucok.edu/history/faculty/roberson/course/1493/readings/Bessie%20Coleman.htm