list 50 women little girls should admire instead of symbols of stupidity and weakness

I seem to be only keeping this around so that I don’t lose a link to the list I compiled. I need to do a project with this list. Besides, I occasionally add names to it.

Today I discovered that the Womyn’s History Month exhibit I have been facilitating on our floor is “officially” considered graffiti. Any “signage” (don’t you love korporatespeak?) that has not been officially approved and branded is “graffiti.”

My solution is to affix bulletin boards to all the walls. But nobody has asked me for a solution. At this point, I have four displays up: Hulda Crooks, Lysistrata, Emma Goldman, and Mother Jones. It’s pretty obvious I flunked kindergarten – but assembling these things is hardware and I was a software geek. Now I’m in the social “sciences.” Neither field has trained me to assemble posters in a workman-like manner.

I did spend some time using the GIMP to colorize a pic of Emma Goldman. It didn’t turn out too badly and looks pretty good printed out on a 4×6 glossy sheet of photopaper.

I took the time to post some articles outside my office for Black History Month. That got me put in charge of March’s “Women of Significance” theme. I’m glad I’ve got this list to refer to!!!

Today, the Wikipedia entry on Lysistrata went up outside my door. Tomorrow? That’s my day off!!! But I hope to have pictures and articles of admirable women all over our floor in the next week.

Egg me on, everybody!

I’m keeping this goal alive, because I hope to do much more with my list. I’m not ready to lose it to the bowels of this goal. I may only copy the relevant Wikipedia entries into a document and print it out – but I’ll at least do something like that.

It’s African American History Month right now, and the morale committee at work has put up a bunch of informational articles about African Americans and their achievements. I hung a poem by Langston Hughes (let America be America Again) outside my office door. It’s a radical poem, a poem that challenges not only racism, but economic and social injustices.

I want to do something similar with my list of women. I’ve got one for every week of the year!!! Wow! And that’s w/o stealing everybody else’s entries (for non-commercial purposes, of course).

All the responses to this goal are an excellent resource. We need a chief editor and some volunteer Womyn’s Studies students to turn it into a reader – or a set of readers for different age groups!

A few women of note that came to mind immediatelyover time and editing:

1. Emma Goldman — The Anarchy Review
2. Mother Jones
3. Shirley Chisolm
4. Barbara Boxer
5. Jocelyn Elders
6. Dorothy Day
7. Hildegard of Bingen
8. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
9. Helen Keller
10. The ‘Bread and Roses’ Strikers
11. Maya Angelou
12. Melissa Etheridge
13. Oprah Winfrey
14. Barbara Streisand
15. The Dixie Chicks
16. Ellen Degeneres
17. Cindy Sheehan
18. Eleanor Roosevelt
19. Hannah Arendt
20. Elaine Pagels
21. Simone de Beauvoir
22. Susie Bright
23. Frida Kahlo
24. Maxine Waters
25. Susan Sarandon
26. Octavia Butler
27. Harriet Beecher Stowe
28. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
29. Harriet Tubman
30. Arianna Huffington
31. Jane Goodall
32. Marie Curie
33. Carrol Grady
34. Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
35. Jane Addams
36. Joni Mitchell whose Both Sides Now CD teaches more than a book ever could.
37. Suzanne Sterling whose Bhakti CD inspires, but barely scratches the surface of her depth, compassion, and power.
38. Starhawk
39. Rosa Parks
40. Virginia Satir
41. Mother Theresa
42. Joan of Arc
43. Indira Gandhi
44. Clare of Assissi
45. Chai Ling
46. Sacagewea
47. Marija Gimbutas
48. Arundhati Roy
49. Brinda Karat
50. Katherine Hepburne
51. Louise Bryant
52. Candice Bergen
53. Sojourner Truth
54. Lady Di
55. Wangari Mathai
56. Joanne (J. K.) Rowling
57. Hulda Crooks
58. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
59. Jeanette Rankin
60. Lysistrata
61. Billie Jean King
62. Hillary Clinton
63. Elaine Pagels
64. Lucy Parsons
65. Danica McKellar – actress and author – Math Doesn’t Suck
66. Betty Dodson
67. Benazir Bhutto
68. Michelle Obama
69. Karen Bradbury

Hilary made the list simply because there’s so much