Susan Swartz

Why do we have to keep dredging up women’s history? Why do we
need all of March to talk about it? I mean, after all, that was
then, this is now.
Can’t we just move on? We’ve got Hillary. We’ve got Nancy. We
win Olympic medals. Women make history all the time. Yes, but we
still have a couple of thousand years of male-dominated history to
balance.
Thirty years ago a group of women in Sonoma County started doing
the research on “where were the women?” and strove to do no less
than rewrite, edit and fill in the blanks in history books. The
Sonoma County Women’s History Project blossomed into the national
women’s history project and March became women’s history month,
recognized in all states.
One founder of the Women’s History Project was the late Mary
Ruthsdotter of Sebastopol. Mary died this winter and her memorial
was fittingly planned for this celebrated month. It will be
Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Finley Community Center in Santa
Rosa.
Mary really knew her history and would talk about the gutsy
women of the past like old friends she’d just had over for coffee.
One she described as “totally cool” was Jeannette Rankin from
Montana, the first woman elected to Congress and who dared to vote
against America entering World War I. “You can no more win a war
than you can win an earthquake,” said Rankin – suffragist, peace
activist and Republican.
Bay Area filmmaker Louise Vance claims Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
the women’s rights organizer, for her favorite. She tells the story
of Stanton growing up and hearing her father, a judge, tell women
who were beaten by their husbands that they couldn’t run away.
“The law supported her being recaptured and returned to him,”
said Vance, adding that Stanton vowed from then on “to tear out all
the pages in her father’s law books that made women cry.”
Vance has made a film called “Seneca Falls” that launches this
month on PBS television stations across the country. It’s about
America’s first women’s rights convention in 1848, a huge public
protest by radicals demanding that women be freed from their
social, political and legal slavery. It’s barely mentioned in
history books.
The film follows a theater troupe of teenage girls from San
Francisco who went to Seneca Falls in 1998 to perform a play at the
150th anniversary of the women’s convention.
When Vance field-tested the film last year she showed it to
junior high and high school girls in Ohio. They were angered by
what they saw and told Vance they had never spent one minute on
women’s history in school. Same thing happened when she showed it
to a group of high school girls in San Francisco.
It’s because what women were doing then wasn’t valued enough to
be written down. Getting the vote was a huge story but there was so
much more going on in terms of women’s rights. “How about the fact
that it was once legal in some states to whip your wife,” said
Vance.
What about women not being able to inherit property? Or not
being allowed to go to college? Mary Ruthsdotter’s grandmother told
her, “Some men used to think women belonged to them like their cows
and pigs.”
So, yeah, we have to keep acknowledging our history.
And Vance has another idea. She wants to find a legislator who
will push for a national bill mandating that women’s history be
taught in all public schools.
Imagine the squeals and growls over that idea from those who
still haven’t learned how to share.
Susan Swartz is an author and local journalist. You can also
read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear
her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is
[email protected].