Girls Can Be Wise

My Aussie friend, Gary Corby, is a mystery writer who specializes in ancient Greece and Persia. His blog is always fascinating. Check out this entry on Gorba, Queen of Sparta.

Happy Birthday Emma!

Emma Alice is 11 today! Happy firsteen birthday!

She-Shark

Well, ladies, today I had intended to tell you about Babe Didrikson Zaharias, one of the greatest American all-around athletes (perhaps THE greatest for variety) of all time. That's her in the picture.

But then I got side tracked and discovered this 1942 TIME Magazine article about another female athlete, Ruth McGinnis, one of the top female billiards players in history, so I thought I'd share. Another (very brief) biography of her that I found said that she was also a teacher of special needs children.

I'll go into Babe Zaharias' much longer story another time, but if you're impatient you can read the Wikipedia article about her here.

Women in History: Fu Hao

In the United States we lifted bans against women in combat in the early 1990s and in Russia women fought alongside the men during World War II (1939 - 1945), but the earliest woman warrior we know of lived long before our time.

Fu Hao lived in China during the Shang Dynasty, which lasted from ca. 1600 BCE to ca. 1050 BCE or, in other words, about 3,000 to 3,500 years ago. She was a consort of King Wu Ding, who made her one of his generals and gave her a feifdom to govern. She led an army of 13,000 warriors, defended Wu Ding's borders and conducted raids on other tribes.

Fu Hao died ca. 1200 BCE and was buried in a tomb in the Royal Cemetery at the Shang capital of Yinxu. Archaeologists discovered her tomb in 1975. It has been restored and was opened to the public in 1999. Here is a picture of a statue of Fu Hao that stands in Yinxu. The picture originally comes from Wikipedia, but I got it from this site, where you can find the full story.

Learn more here, and here, and also here.

Words you might not know:
Archaeologist - an archaeologist (ar-kee-AH-luh-jist) is someone who tries to learn about the past by studying things left behind by ancient civilizations, like bones, swords, and broken dishes.
BCE - This is an abbreviation for "Before the Christian Era", which is often shortened to "BC", meaning "Before Christ".
Ca. - "Ca." is an abbreviation for the word "circa"(SIR ka), which means "about". It's a word that historians use a lot when they don't know the exact date of something. (I wouldn't try it on your mom, EmmaGrace. If she asks you when you're going to be ready and you say, "oh, circa eight o'clock" she'll probably give you that look.)
Consort - In this case, it means the emperor's wife. Wu Ding seems to have had several wives, so calling her his "consort" probably means she was his main wife.
Feifdom - (FEEF dum) Kind of like a little kingdom that she would rule in his name.

Introduction

The inspiration for this blog comes from this page from a 1970s children's book. I saw it several months ago on a blog or message board somewhere and I've been carrying it around in the back of my mind ever since.

I was a child of the seventies and this was a common theme back in The Day. In my grade school the girls were never expected to compete with the boys, either athletically or academically. Boys were supposed to be strong; girls were supposed to be pretty. Boys were supposed to be smart; girls were supposed to be neat. Boys could play hardball on the big baseball diamond while girls were limited to softball in the field behind the swingsets. (Well, except for one memorable recess in the eighth grade when we ran them off the big field with baseball bats . . . .)

We have made a lot of progress since then. There are women astronauts, women soldiers, women pilots, women business leaders. If Admiral Mike Mullen has his way, there will soon be women submariners. Hillary Rodham Clinton made history last year with her presidential campaign and now, as Secretary of State, she is undoubtedly one of the most influential individuals (notice I don't say "women") in the world.

But still there is a long way to go. I lifted these figures from this site:

• 
  Only 1% of the world's assets are in the name of women.
• 
  Men in the Arab states have 3.5 times the purchasing power of their
  female counterparts.
• 
  70% of people in abject poverty-- living on less than $1 per day-- are
  women.
• 
  Among the developed countries, in France only 9% of the workforce and in
  the Netherlands 20% of the workforce are female administrators and managers.
• 
  Among the developing countries, in Ecuador and the Bahamas, 33% of the
  workforce is comprised of women administrators and managers.
• Women's participation in managerial and administrative posts is around 33%
  in the developed world, l5% in Africa, and 13% in Asia and the Pacific. In
  Africa and Asia-Pacific these percentages, small as they are, reflect a
  doubling
  of numbers in the last twenty years.
There are only 5 women chief executives in the Fortune 500
corporations, the
most valuable publicly owned companies in the United
States. These include the
CEOs of Xerox, Spherion, Hewlett-Packard, Golden
West Financial, and Avon
Products.
• 
  In Silicon Valley, for every 100 shares of stock options owned
  by
  a man, only one share is owned by a woman.

Also, according to the National Organization for Women:

For full-time, year-round workers, women are paid on average only 78 percent
of what men are paid; for women of color, the gap is significantly wider.

And on a more personal level, I'm currently working on renovating an Amish-built shed into a small cottage. I can't count the number of times, when discussing my project, that someone has said to me, "can't you find a man to come do that for you?"

So here we stand, half the human race, equal but . . . not. So I thought I'd like to do something to promote women's achievements, to profile women who have exceeded or who are exceeding society's limited expectations and to update that so very limited list of what girls can do.

This blog is partly intended as cheerleading for my gender and it is partly a neener neener aimed at anyone who ever said to me, "you can't do that! You're a girl!" But mostly it is written for the girls in my own family. For EmmaGrace* and Hannah and tiny MacKensie and baby Olivia (who is a week old today) and all their cousins I can't keep track of, and their friends and any other girls of their generation who care to stop by.

This is your century, ladies, and here's the new rule:

GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING!

*A note for anyone outside the family who reads this -- Emma and Grace are actually two children. When we mean them both, we just don't bother with the "and". :)