Women's History Month

March is Women's History Month in the United States...

It is, truth be told, a tad shameful that it's necessary to block off portions of the calendar in the year 2013 of the Common Era to salute the contributions to this nation by women, blacks, Hispanics or any other group.  But lingering vestiges of racism, sexism, political and religious prejudice are still unfortunately strong enough to justify the need to remind ourselves that all Americans are equal...

[These unfortunate remnants of discrimination trace back, at least partly, to our history in the evolutionary sense.  Early humans faced a multitude of challenges, two of which included the need to find food and the many years needed to raise young humans until they were old enough to reproduce and ensure the survival of the species.

Charles Dana Gibson: Love in a Garden (1901)

Primitive hunter-gather societies found they were far more likely to survive as a group if one sex concentrated on locating food and driving away interlopers from other tribes or bands while the other gender reared the young and maintained the living environment.  Although such gender-based roles proved useful in primitive times, they offer little or no value in today's complex society and arguably may be counter-productive to our efforts to survive as a species.]

In the United States, Women's History Month (also celebrated in March in Australia and Great Britain) lurched toward becoming a political reality in 1981 when Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican senator from Utah, and Barbara Mikulski, a liberal Democratic representative from Maryland sponsored a Joint Congressional Resolution proclaiming Women's History Week... 

Charles Dana Gibson: The Crush (1901)

Hatch and Mikulski been inspired to do so by a weeklong celebration in a school district in Sonoma, California, commemorating the first International Women's Day on March 8, 1911. (Senator Hatch certainly must have seen true merit in the notion since IWD began as a holiday celebrated by the Socialist movement.)  By 1987, Congress expanded the well-received Women's History Week to a month long affair...

Changes in social roles and attitudes, as we know, are reflected in the commercial and popular arts of a nation...

Russell Patterson: Where There's Smoke, There's Fire (1920s)

Two of our images this week come from the pen of satirical illustrator Charles Dana Gibson.  He combined themes found in earlier popular art depictions of women (i.e., the "fragile" slender respectable lady and the "voluptuous" woman possessed of ample bosom and hips and bottom) to create a new ideal American beauty in the late 1890s and early 1900s...

Few who enjoyed "Gibson Girl" drawings recognized these well-dressed and obviously upper class lasses represented subtle changes in the social roles played by women in the wake of the Industrial Age.  They were not quite the meek and submissive beauties of Victorian times.  Nor did they need strong masculine apes with clubs to fight battles for them...

Flapper on an ocean cruise, circa 1929

Although Gibson Girls carefully avoided political discussions (and certainly would have never been so vulgar as to actually demand the right to vote), they thought it their right to work outside the home in jobs they enjoyed and they thought it their right to attend the college.  Nor were they naive innocents-- a Gibson Girl was aware of her sexuality and knew even the richest and most athletic of handsome men would act like a damn fool around her in hopes of her amused and slightly contemptuous smile if he thought it possible that smile would lead to more procreative activities...

The Gibson Girl's granddaughter was even more liberated...

Rosie the Riveter: World War II icon and heroine

She was the product of a changing America which had set itself on an inevitable course of becoming a more urban than rural society by the early 1920s.  Henry Ford's Model T (introduced in 1908 and within financial reach of most Americans) and its competitors in the automobile industry guaranteed a mobile and restless population.  Radio and silent movies labored non-stop to create a common national mass culture...

Popular magazine articles called her a "flapper" and she wore her hair bobbed and her skirts short and she guzzled Demon Bathtub Gin and smoked cigarettes and she listened to jazz and danced the night away and she didn't mind if the right young man wanted to explore what her short skirt concealed as long as he knew she wasn't about to let him go too far...

Cartoon celebrating the first anniversary of
the Navy's Women Accepted for Volunteer
Emergency Service, or WAVES program.

Despite the impressions created by our illustrations, the Flapper was more than a party girl.  She had the right to vote and she exercised it (although not quite enough to suit suffragettes who fought long and hard to give her access to the ballot box).  And, while she had no real dislike of women who chose to be housewives, the Flapper wanted to earn her own money and choose her own friends.  She also tended to be a bit more skeptical of religion and traditional moral values than her Victorian great-grandmother.  This was, after all, the Age of Freud and Darwin...

A worldwide Great Depression lowered the Flapper's skirts and the prudes who decided to clean up the motion picture industry banished her and her like from the movie studios and the silver screen until her granddaughters went to work for independent film makers in the 1960s and 1970s...

Patriotic "cheesecake" photographers never passed an opportunity
up when it came to celebrating both the beauty and courage of
American women.

That same Great Depression helped facilitate the rise of Fascist dictatorships in Europe and Asia and fueled groups with similar ambitions in the US.  The totalitarian strongmen heading those dictatorships were ambitious and hungry for territory. 

America found herself attacked and plunged into a world-wide war.  Her sons heard the call to arms, traveling over the waters of two oceans to fight on the land and on the sea and in the air.  Her daughters took the places of their brothers and husbands and sons in factories, working and prodded the government to give them more meaningful roles in the armed services...

I suspect the Gibson Girl smiled down from her heavenly reward during these dark and terrible years.  Her Flapper daughter was something else, a joyous force of nature who faced life on her own terms and refused to sit in the backseat of American life.  But, with grandkids like Rosie the Riveter and the WAACs and WAVES and their brothers ready and willing to stop genocidal tinpot tyrants, GG had done a lot more than just OK...



 

 

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Louis Nugent: Fan Dancer

 

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Erika Weber: Law West of the Pecos

 

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Sharon Mick: Louisiana Bayou

 

CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: 1943 WAVES First Anniversary cartoon from nav.mil