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

was born in Russia, but traveled with her family to the States, where they decided to stay. She studied at the Arts Students League in New York City. She also studied under Diego Rivera. While he painted frescos, her medium of choice was wood, and later steel and aluminum. She built structures to be exhibited on walls. There was a repeating belief in her life and work, the strength women hold and a freedom that should be universal.

“What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.”

claimed ”. . . in my life – maybe because my life has been so traumatic, so absurd – there hasn’t been one normal, happy thing. I’m the easiest person to make happy and the easiest person to make sad because I’ve gone through so much.”

“When I work, it’s only the abstract qualities that I’m working with, which is to say the material, the form it’s going to take, the size, the scale, the positioning . . . I don’t value the totality of the image on these abstract or aesthetic points. For me it’s a total image that has to do with me and life.”

Works use space while considering scale, and the less than perfect forms complete visions that inspire with complexity. Her sculptures seem to use simple materials, such as wire and rope.

drew style from Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. She is another artist that created pottery and paintings. While first located in British Columbia, Carr moved to San Francisco in 1890. Traveling back and forth, she studied at London’s Westminster School of Art and at the Academie Colarossi in Paris. Cornwall, Bushey, Hertfordshire, and San Francisco were other locations where she was taught.

“You will have to experiment and try things for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That’s alright, you are feeling your way into the thing.”

getting an idea to make progress on this list, I’ll try to find fifty female artists that either interest me, or who create art that strikes me. First, Georgia O’Keffe. For awhile, I’ve considered her my favorite artist. But I knew little about her work beyond being able to identify it by her style. She is considered a major artist since the 1920s. Much of her paintings use an abstract language of color, line, and shape. These elements make forms of natural shape the subjects of pieces. Her landscapes are composed mainly of flowers and skulls, with shells. I found it interesting that when her eyesight started to become less clear, her medium of choice was no longer only painting. She used clay too, and created pottery.

A quote of hers, “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”

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!

I accepted to do this in a weak moment.

I have no little girls of my own and behave like a little girl myself, a great deal of the time (even though the expiration date on my little girl days has long since lapsed, but that has nothing to do with this subject). So you see, worrying if you have the right role models is not exactly something that keeps me awake at night. I spend time with you when we are both in the mood for each other. Shhhh, but I even break some of the rules with you. Should things look like they are about to get sticky, I call your mum.

I find myself writing this because of EBear. I met him around here and was instantly drawn to irreverence and a wicked sense of fun. Before I realized the man has loads of substance, I was hooked into eFriendship (and later into eSiblingship because of his substance, but that again has nothing to so with this Thing).

I have no idea how this Thing worked its way into my self indulgent set of Things. I routinely turn down good Things that are too much trouble. EBear says I could sell ice to eskimos. I am sending the headhunters out to recruit him for the team on this mission.

Who am I kidding? What are the chances that any little girl is going to read this?

If the wise woman in me writes this, a few adults who have no need for women role models may read this and nod their heads.

If the little girl in me writes this, it my be good for a few laughs by half (probably less) of the above mentioned set.

But since I took this on, here I am.

We have already established that the chances of any little girl reading this are bleak. I come from the Corporate background, we start by establishing a target market. Even for unrealistic products. So before I launch into listing names, I feel I must establish one thing. Which set of little girls who wont read this, am I addressing?

Is it the little girl of middle-class India, caught between tradition and its expectations of a woman’s role that are so contrary to the fast emerging world of equal opportunity?

Is it the little girl of the Western world (where this issue is passe because women established liberation is the 1970s) who lives in an environment that is understood by me only from books, movies and business visits?

Is it the little girl of yuppie, upwardly-mobile, double-income, Indian parents, living in an almost Western cocoon, who could have been mine?

Hmmmm…

I pick the little girl who is wondering what she wants to be. Uber-cool or reasonably cool? Nothing-matters-so-what-is-the-point or everything-matters-and-I-can-make-a-difference? Super-model or Leader of corporation/cause-that-matters/country?

A woman can be both. Or everything. Fun and serious. Glamorous and intelligent. Soft and independant. Quirky and responsible. I know of women who are, and it will be fun to list them.

Good. In establishing who you are little girl, I killed two birds with one stone (ugh…nasty expression…birds are not for killing).

Bird 1: Identified you, although you will never read this.

Bird 2: Identified the selection criteria for role models. Uni-dimensional ones are out. Which is good. I find the uni-dimensional ones rather tedious.

(Before we move on … the birds are alive and unhurt…may all stones thrown at birds strike the thrower instead.)

This little girl, was just the preamble. The list itself will come later. Since no little girl is reading this and waiting with baited breath, the next instalment can afford to take its time.

but could not get to fifty.
Not even my 17 yr old daughter could contribute!