Let’s take a day off from the patriarchy, shall we, and celebrate the start of Women’s History Month. What began in California as Women’s History Week in 1978 has expanded into the federally recognized Women’s History Month (thank you, President Carter, for getting that ball rolling! What a prince). Thanks to efforts like these, over my lifetime, we have transformed education at all levels so girls and women can see how women’s work sustains and transforms societies.
The National Women’s History Month theme this year, I love it!
We have a long way to go to really have fully inclusive curriculums (we’ll know we’ve reached that goal when stand-alone women’s history or women’s literature courses are no longer necessary) but the transformation of education in the last forty years is really incredible, and is the work of mostly women educators and academics who have fought for Women’s and Gender Studies programs, and who have added courses to the curriculum and pushed back against ideologies that would have these stories silenced.
At Presbyterian College we’re very lucky that our own president Anita Gustafson is a specialist in Women’s History, and she has very generously agreed to give our Women’s History Month keynote lecture next week. If you’re in the area, we’d love to welcome you to campus March 6th at 6:00, with a reception to follow.
Hope you can join us!
And the next evening, on Thursday March 7th, my good friend Dr. Sarah Cooper, interim director of Women’s Leadership at Clemson and one of my favorite poets, will be hosting Evelyn Berry at M. Judson (our beautiful woman-owned bookstore in downtown Greenville). Just a snippet of a poem Sarah co-wrote with two other poets, Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, “Triage for American Women”:
…. No cars, no guns, nothing
but pumpkin pancake mornings and pigs that root
a squeal but are never slaughtered. Trustin your own soul, your own hearth and home
will be dangerous now, perhaps impossible to find
even in your blue retro Viewfinder.
Ask yourself--who will you save? What side
of your heart do you want to call home?
Who will answer? What, if anything, can nothingpossibly accomplish? Yet who can you trust
when God and man map your every route
and cycle?
Poetry is what gets us through.
Just to end with a quick ode to female friendship and how it can be a refuge and a solace and an inspiration (or can force you to start walking/jogging again by tricking you into signing up for the Cooper River Bridge Run in April, these mom friends really like to make me suffer).
When I was a baby academic, I presented at a conference with Keja Valens (almost twenty years ago!). Keja was at Harvard, and studying similar fields (comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, Caribbean literature). We became conference BFFs and have since traveled the world together (we mostly just see each other in Caribbean these days). But how lucky for me she just published her third book Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks and Recipes for National Independence and is coming down to PC in April to tell us about it (April 11th, save the date!). I love this project so much because she reads Caribbean cookbooks into the historical record, beautifully centering women and women’s work in the development of Caribbean nationalisms. Be sure to order a copy (or get your library to order a copy).
This cover is so fabulous!
And finally, another shoutout to Dr. Selena Blair, our intrepid and inaugural VP of Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, who was honored this week at the South Carolina Women in Higher Education conference with the Andrea Allison Advocacy Award. I work with so many incredible women.