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“History is written by winners... and the bad witch is old.”  

—Child, interviewed on PBS program, “The Goddess Remembered”  

March is Women’s History Month. Why a celebration of the history of women in particular? It’s an annual recognition that recorded history still omits the history of females, and that when something is noted about them, it is often distorted.  

Circa 1968, linguists, sociologists and feminists began pointing out that traditional history often ignores 50 percent of the population or misrepresents women’s achievements. The word history is from the Greek root for the concepts of inquiring, knowing, learning. Herstory was coined to emphasize that women’s lives, deeds and participation in human affairs have been neglected or undervalued in standard history books and official documents. In 1981, Congress declared a national Women’s History Week, following lobbying by the Women’s History Project. By 1987, the week had turned into a month. 

March can be a time for reexamining and celebrating the wide range of females’ contributions and achievements. Consider California herstory. How many of these California heroes can you identify?  

1. California’s first woman lawyer, she was active in women’s rights, social welfare and politics.  

2. The owner and editor of the West Coast’s oldest black newspaper, the California Eagle, who, in l912, seeing no black workers on a visit to the County Hospital, appealed to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, which agreed to hire if she sent qualified women; she continued to pressure, and 10 years later the first black secretary and nurses were hired. 

3. She silently absorbed countless ancestral epic sagas told by her mother, Brave Orchid, and other California Chinese who influenced her Stockton childhood and her best-selling memoir.  

4. She grew up in Whittier, lived in France and Marin County, where her book on aging, Sister Age, was written when she was 75, well known as a gourmet-author.  

5. Although regarded as an “office worker” by some and never named Carillonist, she began ringing the University of California, Berkeley’s Sather Tower bells in l923 and continued until her retirement 50 years later.  

6. She is an award-winning Berkeley author born in the Mission, published in a variety of genres, the author of 10 novels, including Confessions of Madame Psyche (American Book Award, 1987) and five plays, including Dear Master (Bay Area Critics Circle Award, 1991).  

7. This economist lectured on labor and social policy and wrote stories until she met Jane Addams at the California Women’s Congress in 1895 and was inspired to write the classic Women and Economics, since published in seven languages.  

8. When it was rumored that women were being mistreated at the City Hospital, this San Francisco Examiner journalist threw herself in front of a truck; taken to the hospital by horse cart, her resulting expose caused reforms. (See answers, page 19.) 

American presidents, governors and mayors have waffled in proclaiming recognition of National Women’s History Month and of International Women’s Day, annually celebrated worldwide on March 8. 

Its American origins may date back to 1857, when 40,000 American women textile factory workers protested sweat-shop conditions. In March 1908 thousands of women garment workers, many of them socialists and immigrants, took to the streets of Manhattan’s lower East Side, demanding the right to vote and an end to sweatshops and child labor. Late on Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire led to 146 deaths, mostly young Jewish and Italian women; it came to be known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and the two men who owned and operated the unsafe Manhattan building were acquitted.  

A group of American women struggling for women’s rights had attended a conference of the Socialist International in Copenhagen in 1910 and requested passage of a resolution supporting the working women of the United States. The Party responded by creating a Women’s Day to demonstrate in favor of woman suffrage. 

German socialist Clara Zetkin put forth a resolution to internationalize Women’s Day, first celebrated on March 19, 1911 in Germany and Austria. March 8, 1917 signified one of the most important events in the overthrow of Tsarist Russia; in St. Petersburg, thousands of women organized and demonstrated.  

With the advent of World War I, many nations stopped celebrating Women’s Day, but in the United States, antiwar demands were added, and, in 1916, American women called it International Women’s Day. Observance of International Women’s Day waned until it was revived by American feminists following the rebirth of the contemporary Women’s Movement in the 1960s.  

The year 2005 marks the tenth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, which mobilized the global women’s movement into strategic alliances and collective power that resulted in commitment of participating nations to the advancement of women as outlined in its “Platform for Action.” The decennial Fifth World Conference on Women would have been held in 2005, but it is not to be. The United States has still not reaffirmed the United Nations Platform of Action on Women’s Rights. 

Women have always served their compatriots as part of their nations’ military. They have volunteered and spied, been conscripted, and served in combat and as prisoners of war. The account of 12th Century B.C. Deborah is told in “Judges,” chapters 4 and 5; she is an unusual biblical figure because of her evident command over the male leaders of the tribe at the battle of Taanach. The first woman sea captain recorded was fifth Century B.C. Greek Artemisia of Halicarnassus.  

In 1782 Massachusetts school teacher Deborah Sampson (1760-1827) enlisted as “Robert Shurtleff” in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment. She sustained sword and musket wounds from several skirmishes until her identity was discovered and she was discharged from the army. Congress awarded her a small pension for her services. 

She published an account of her experiences, The Female Review, in 1797. Sarah Edwards (1841-98) left her Canadian home at fifteen to enlist as a man in the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War. As an aged widow without income, she “confessed” in order to receive a government pension.  

In 1942 Congress passed a bill introduced by Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, establishing the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. Its passage had been stalled until after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Later, the word “auxiliary” was dropped, and thousands of women who enlisted received full U.S. Army benefits. 

The WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) became an official part of the Navy. Duties ranged from clerical staff to flight instructors. In 1947 Congress passed the Army-Navy Nurse Act, providing nurses permanent commissioned officer status in the U.S. military. Until then, they could achieve relative rank, but not the pay and benefits of full officer’s rank.  

Air Force officer Jeanne Marjorie Holm, born in 1921, joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942 and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant the following year. By the end of World War II she was a captain in charge of a women’s training regiment. She rejoined the services in 1948 and was transferred to the Air Force, advancing to the rank of major-general in 1973. She is a strong supporter of women’s rights, a member of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and founder and first chair of Women in Government. Aviator and business executive Jacqueline Cochran (1910-80) left her foster home and went to work at an early age. By 1935 she had a pilot’s license and her own cosmetics firm. She was the first woman to pilot a bomber across the Atlantic Ocean (1941). During World War II she served in the British Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying planes across the English Channel. 

After the United States entered World War II, she led the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots—the WASP, for which she received the Distinguished Service Medal (1945). She was responsible for training thousands of women and their testing and piloting transport and fighter planes. On May 18, 1953, flying an F-86 Sabre jet, Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier.  

The WASPs were women who were U.S. civilian pilots under contract to the U.S. Army who served as test pilots, ran target missions providing training for antiaircraft gunners, and ferried new aircraft to embarkation points in North America. Chinese American Hazel Ying Lee (1912-1944) of Oregon, already a skilled pilot, volunteered, trained, served and died as a WASP. 

She was one of 132 WASPs selected to fly the faster high-powered fighter planes, or “pursuit aircraft.” She was the last of the 38 WASPs killed in the line of duty. The families of those killed were responsible for paying to transport their remains and belongings. Despite the need for the WASPs and their outstanding record, Congress refused to make the WASP part of the regular military forces and dismissed the women in 1944. WASPs were accorded military status in 1979.  

During World War II, many American civilian women served as homemakers, prisoners-of-war, volunteers, and defense plant workers—the Rosies. 

Typical jobs available outside the home to American women in the 1930s—when they could get work—had been domestic, shop girl, waitress and cook. Depression Era women were often forced to give up their own interests and goals. Tillie Lerner Olsen, for example, was a promising writer in her youth, but marriage, care of four children, and need to earn a living stopped her writing. Many years later that situation spurred her to write Silences, published in 1978. 

An unprecedented demand for new workers was suddenly created by the United States’ entry into World War II. Women were asked to work outside as well as inside of the home. The media called on them to “Do the job he left behind.” The Rosie the Riveter persona was created, although not all women became riveters. They earned money, joined unions, and found new benefits in being in the labor force. Minority women for the first time entered major industrial plants. 

The women who got factory jobs worked in welding, machining, building aircraft, and on tanks. They were employed in armament factories doing jobs once held by men who had been drafted or volunteered into the military. Women were soon shown to have better motor skills than men (attributed to needle work) and were assigned work with wire fuses on bombs and filling metal casings with gunpowder. Despite safety precautions, many of these women were permanently disabled and some lost their lives. 

With the opportunity to demonstrate that they were as capable as men, they did “men’s work” so well that production levels rose. As the war continued, greater numbers of women began to take control of their lives. More than six million women took over for men in these occupations. And worldwide, women were learning factory skills, and they worked as journalists, drivers, farmers, mail delivery personnel, garbage collectors, builders, and mechanics. 

Notions of what was proper for women changed rapidly. But when the war was over and the Rosies wanted to stay on their jobs, the American economy and way of life no longer welcomed them. They were out of their place. 

In 1944 the average woman’s salary was $31.21 a week for her labor, while the men who remained on the home front averaged $54.65 a week. The women became accustomed to the overalls, uniforms, slacks and bandanas or snoods and continued to wear them in public. As the War drew to an end and GIs returned, these clothes were considered unfeminine. For a while, it had been a time when women were no longer forced into roles society created for them. They became free to create their own lives and sense of self, moving in the direction of sex/gender equity. 

Women workers’ increasing presence—they outnumbered men three to one in the labor force—and influence threatened many of the men who were still in the work force and who responded with harassment and discrimination that continued after the war. They had problems with the idea of women as wage laborers. The Rosie the Riveter recruitment poster had encouraged women to join the workforce by portraying their heretofore hidden strengths and by promoting power and pride.  

Connie Field at Berkeley’s Clarity Productions produced the 1980 motion picture The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. It garnered a long list of awards, for it differs from other documentaries depicting war workers. We see and listen as women workers delineate their lives before, during and after their World War II employment outside the home for wages. 

Molly Haskell in Ms. Magazine described it as “The best film on working women” she had seen. And yet this Rosie is not in local video collections. In 2001 the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historic Park was founded in Richmond. A permanent visitors’ center in the old Ford Plant is planned to open in 2009. Comparable projects have included the Manzanar National Historic Site, Boston’s African American National Historic Site, and the Women’s Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, New York.  

Today we hear about men and some women having “issues” with women doing certain jobs. The war had allowed women to get “out of the house” and “out of hand.” The liberated woman (the actual term took 20 years to surface) threatened traditional marriage and family life.  

ANSWERS 

1. Clara Shortridge Foltz (1848-1934) 

2. Charlotta Bass (1880-1969) 

4. Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher (1908-1990) 

5. Margaret Murdock (l894-l985) 

6. Dorothy Calvetti Bryant (1930- )  

7. Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860-1935) 

8. Winifred Sweet Black Bonfils /”Annie Laurie” (1863 - 1936) 

Helen Rippier Wheeler is a feminist and Berkeley resident who has taught Women Studies. From 1973-93 she ran Womanhood Media, a consulting firm. She earned her B.A. is from Barnard College, M.A. in human development from the University of Chicago, and her M.S. and doctorate from Columbia University. In 1984 she was a visiting scholar in Women Studies in Japan. 

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