A complaint
Right now, I'm listening to Frank Sinatra. Most people with an ear know his voice, but I'm willing to suppose that few know that he's said to have agreed with Reaganist Republicanism on most issues-- except for abortion. (In fact, Kitty Kelly alleged in a much-contested biography that his mother was a "part-time abortionist.") I love taking note of the things the history books don't tell, especially since that pile of knowledge is pretty large. American education—cultural and institutional—teaches what it wants to (what the government and media want it to), and that is often neither the entire story or what we need to know.
At the beginning of Manifesta's timeline is "The First Supper," a hypothetical gathering of biblical women. That would be one seriously small party. As Salma Hayek's character in the film Dogma says, "The whole book's gender-biased. A woman's responsible for original sin. A woman cuts Samson's coif of power. A woman asks for the head of John the Baptist. Read that book again sometime. Women are painted as bigger antagonists than the Egyptians and Romans combined."
The meaning of her statement isn't limited to the Bible. But why were women subordinated? Why are they? And whose stupid idea was that?
That's the kind of thing history should figure out, and, you know, get back to us.
Centuries later, Manifesta mentions Maryland's Margaret Brent requesting the right to vote. In 1648, which, as my calculator tells me, is two hundred seventy-two years before the Nineteenth Amendment. Can you imagine being put on hold for that long?
In 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted illegally. (She was also a travelling lecturer for women's rights for forty-odd years and died before the Nineteenth was ratified.) That's a rockin' thing to be on a silver dollar for*, but to be honest, all I'd learned in school was that she worked for women's suffrage. What's wrong with knowing the details of women in history?
I could go on and pick out events in American history—wouldn’t be a bit difficult to fill pages of what we don’t know—but the point is this: We need a foundation of knowledge. It’s so simple. Women deserve more than a series of footnotes, and so do the series of women’s movements, and so do a lot of groups and events that are next to ignored in history. Is it subversive to know where you came from? To know exactly how long and difficult the struggle for women’s suffrage was? To know more about the “sexual revolution” than that it “happened”? There’s nothing wrong with that, and pretending that we don’t have the time or the mentality to learn is contemptible.
End rant.
*The only other woman in American mint? Sacagawea, who, by the way, was sold as a slave to a fur trader, who married her to him and who was later hired by Lewis and Clark.