I ran across a small article about this woman in a really interesting newsletter highlighting women in Islamic history. Considering the world climate I thought I’d highlight a woman from a historic and religious background most of us have a lot to learn about.

Walladah was born in 1011 to a politically powerful family during the tail-end of the seven hundred year Moorish rule in Spain, when provinces were divided into small Caliph-ruled states.

Her father was Caliph of Cordova from 1023 and 1131, her mother was an Ethiopian Christian slave whom her father had impregnated and married. Andalusia was a fairly advanced and tolerant region compared to the rest of the western world at the time; where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived together in daily life in relative peace. Literacy and art were regarded over religious beliefs, and modern city services, such as streetlights and cobble-paved roads, were implemented long before they were in Paris and London.

Walladah’s father was illiterate and disliked by many, despite his direct descent from Abd Al-Rahman Al-Nasir, who was one of the most famous Caliphs in Andalusia. In the midst of a rebellion in 1131, he was poisoned and her family lost control of the government. When she turned 30, Walladah inherited a great deal of family wealth.

With her newfound financial independence she cast off the veil and opened a literary salon, where she entertained writers and artists, hosting many discussions, poetry readings and musical evenings. She had a unique reputation for wit, eloquence and intelligence. A contemporary biographer purportedly said “Her presence encouraged the old to behave like the young.” Famed for beauty as well as independence, Walladah inspired verses from other poets, such as her famous lover, fellow poet and vizir Ibn Zaydan, who wrote:

…being beguiled by Walladah’s promises
Is like a fleeting mirage or a lightning flash

She is like water, difficult to hold in hand:
Its seething foam prevents getting it easily

In addition to inspiring poetry she wrote her own as well. This is one of the many poems she wrote for Ibn Zaydan:

Can’t we find some way
to meet again
and speak of our love?

In winter with you near
no need for coals -
our passion blazed.

Now - cut off, alone
day darkens deep
the fate I feared

Nights pass. You’re still away
Longing chains me
and Patience brings no release

Where morning find you
may God stream down upon your land
refreshing, fertile rain

She also embroidered her original verse on robes, influenced by the embroidered arts of women in the court of Harun Al-Rashid in Baghdad. These verses were found on one of her robes:

I am, by God, fit for high positions,
And am going my way, with pride!

and

Forsooth, I allow my lover to touch my cheek,
And bestow my kiss on he who craves it.

They were showing the recent remake of The Lion in Winter last night so I thought I should profile her today.

Born around 1122, Eleanor was the daughter of William X, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitiers. Upon her father’s death in 1137, Eleanor inherited Aquitaine and Poitiers. That same year, at the age of 15, she married Louis VII, King of France.

Eleanor was a very intelligent woman; many considered her superior in intellect to her husband. Eleanor was lively and educated, courageous and passionate, whereas Louis was considered grave and pious. In fact, Eleanor and her retinue, dressed in battle attire, joined Louis VII on the Second Crusade.

On their journey to the Holy Land, they first stopped at Antioch, where Eleanor’s uncle, Raymond of Tripoli, had been appointed prince of the city. Raymond advised against their previous plans and, attempting to heed his advice, Eleanor refused to continue with her husband to Jersualem, threatening divorce. Louis, however, took her by force. The expedition failed and both returned to France in separate ships. While the marriage continued for a time, the couple finally separated after the birth of their second daughter. The marriage was annulled in 1152 and Eleanor’s vast estates reverted back to her control.

Six weeks after her divorce, Eleanor married Henry, duke of Normandy, who soon afterwards became Henry II of England. During her marriage to Henry, Eleanor continued to rule Aquitaine, which consisted of Guienne and Gascony. Eleanor bore Henry five sons and three daughters, including Richard Coeur de Lion (Richard the Lionhearted), who ruled England from 1189 - 1199 and John Lackland who ruled from 1199 - 1216.

In 1169, disgusted by Henry’s numerous infidelities, she set up her own court in Poitiers, which soon became a center of culture with many troubadours, musicians and scholars in residence. In 1173, she encouraged her sons to rebel against their father, giving them military support. The revolt failed and Eleanor was thrown into prison, where she remained for sixteen years, until her husband’s death. (It is during this imprisonment the fictional The Lion in Winter takes place) In 1189 she was released from prison by order of her son, Richard, when he took the throne. Richard then named her as regent when he want on crusade.

While she undoubtedly underwent much deprivation during her imprisonment, she did not, when she obtained power, use it to punish her enemies, but rather devoted herself to deeds of mercy and piety, going from city to city, setting free all persons confined for violating the game laws, which in the latter part of Henry’s life, were cruelly enforced. In 1202, Eleanor retired to the monastery at Fontevrault, Anjou, in NorthWest France where she died in 1204. She is buried in Fontevrault Abbey next to Henry II with her beloved son, Richard, nearby. The image of her on her tomb (seen above) is the only authorized likeness that was made in her lifetime.

Much snow. Much much snow. Almost like living in Santa Fe again. Cody drove home from work Monday morning at 7 am in the rain. By ten am the snow was a’comin’ down just in time for our weekend. The roads were clear by the time we needed to go out to run errands around one today. After the less important errands like paying the water bill, getting the title for the car we’re selling out of the safety deposit box, and picking up some cat litter, we got to do the really important task: hit Fiesta Yarns’ outlet store again. Where there was much yarn-buying and knitting-present-planning.

new yarn
The puppy is tired from running errands with us today and is taking a brief break from her modelling career.

yarn from previous fiesta trip
The yarn had no complaints.


oldies but goodies
Snow photos tomorrow. I’m hoping to get some nice shots of the icicles on our yucca trees to go with the snowfall I got yesterday.

Oddly enough, this was our hedgehog’s original namesake before we renamed her Gorgonzola Pokypants. Seriously.

Hypatia of Alexandria was the daughter of Theon, a mathematician who taught at the great school at the Alexandrine Library in 355 AD Egypt. She traveled widely and corresponded with people all over the Mediterranean. We know of her only through her letters.

Hypatia was Alexandria’s most eminent neo-platonic philosopher and mathematician. She was renowned before the age of 30, in intellectual communities from as far away as Libya and Turkey. This was a time of great social and religious turmoil as the Christians gained strength in the region. The emperor forbade pagan cult practices in Egypt and rioting broke out between the Christians and the pagans.

While the Roman Christian government persecuted Jews and Pagans, the government honored Hypatia with an unprecedented, paid, public position as the head of the neo-platonic school of Plotinus. Hypatia’s prominence was accentuated by the fact that she was both female and pagan in an increasingly Christian environment. She headed the prestigious institution for 15 years as students, both male and female, traveled from afar to study under her. She taught geometry, mathematics, the works of Plato, Aristotle, neo-Platonism, astronomy, and mechanics. Letters written and addressed simply to the philosopher were delivered to her.

She is credited with the authorship of three major treatises on geometry and algebra and one on astronomy and invented several tools inluding an instrument for distilling water, an instrument to measure the specific gravity of water, and an astrolabe and a planisphere.

Shortly before her death, Cyril was made the Christian bishop of Alexandria, and a conflict arose between Cyril and the prefect Orestes. Orestes was disliked by some Christians and was a friend of Hypatia, and rumors started that Hypatia was to blame for the conflict. In the spring of 415 C.E., the situation reached a tragic conclusion when a band of Christian monks seized Hypatia on the street, beat her, and dragged her body to a church where they mutilated her flesh with sharp tiles and burned her remains.

These are three of her more well-known quotes:

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Revered as Japan’s greatest author of narrative prose, Shikibu Murasaki, a wellborn lady and courtier, wrote what is thought to be the first novel nearly 1,000 years ago.

Details of Murasaki’s life are few. It is known, however, that she was the daughter of a government official and she apparently started writing when widowed at a young age. Soon afterward she was appointed the tutor-companion to Empress Akiko. Murasaki kept a detailed diary at court that reveals her as a censorious and tart personality. She describes Akiko as “far too narrow and uncompromising,” while she herself is “kind and gentle” but viewed as “vain, unsociable … an ill-natured prig.”

“The Tale of Genji,” her long masterwork, covers the life and loves of the fictional Prince Genji against a background of an imaginary court. Murasaki’s sensitivity to human emotion and exquisite delineation of the various women were uniquely imaginative in her time. A Buddhist sense of the vanity of the world emerges toward the end of the book as the tone becomes deeper and more mature.

Following up the article from last week. The good news is the guys who were attacked are healing and the creep with the previous rape charge is probably going to be tried as an adult.

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery as Isabella Van Wagenen in 1797 to parents who were considered the property of Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh, Ulster County, New York. As a child she spoke only low Dutch and, like most slaves, never learned to read or write. She was forced into marriage in 1815 and bore five children with her husband, Thomas. After years of ownership by others she escaped with her infant daughter, Sophia, in 1826 - then formally received freedom on July 4, 1827 when New York state emancipated slaves born after 1799.

She lived with a Quaker family in New York for a while, who helped her win a landmark case winning her son, Peter, back from the family who had bought him. The ensuing years are full of hard work, membership in a failing evangelical communal colony, and several attempts to help her troubled son who disappeared on a whaling ship in about 1842.

At age 46, Isabella adopted the name Sojourner Truth and announced that she would travel the land as an itinerant preacher, telling the truth and working against injustice. After moving to Massachussets she met a vocal group of anti-slavery reformers (including Frederick Douglass), abolitionist feminists, and health reformers, who helped strengthen her resolve to travel and preach for change. In 1850 The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, was published by her friend, Olive Gilbert. Income from book sales and the sale of small portraits captioned “I sell the Shadow to support the Substance” provided income for her lecture tours.

Truth traveled around the east and midwest preaching for human rights and was a powerful figure in several national social movements, speaking forcefully for the abolition of slavery, women’s rights and suffrage, the rights of freedmen, temperance, prison reform and the termination of capital punishment. She became famous as an itinerant preacher, drawing huge crowds with her oratory wherever she appeared. She became one of an active group of black women abolitionists, lectured before numerous abolitionist audiences, and was friends with such leading reformers as James and Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

With the outbreak of the Civil War she raised money to purchase gifts for the soldiers, distributing them herself in the camps. She also helped African Americans who had escaped to the North to find habitation and shelter. Age and ill health caused her to retire from the lecture circuit. She died November 26, 1883, in her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, now home of the Sojourner Truth Institute.

She is probably best known for her 1851 speech at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio…

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.

I got a request for a specific woman in history to profile. Feel free to send another one!

Marie Curie was born Maria Sklodowska on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, to a family that valued education but was riddled with health problems, death, and political persecution as strong Polish patriots living in a Tsarist Russian province. Despite the challenges Manya, as she was called by her family, was encouraged that anything was possible with a good education and was an accoplished and advanced student. Because women were not allowed to study at the University of Warsaw she joined a sort of ‘floating university’ using self-organized lectures meeting at changing venues to avoid detection. She worked several jobs to support herself and pay her sister’s medical school tuition as well as save money for her own education, all the while teaching peasant children to read and teaching herself laboratory sciences (both outlawed practices by Russian authorities).

In 1891 she had she finally made it to Paris to study mathematics, chemistry and physics. She registered for studies at the Sorbonne using the French spelling of her name, Marie, and managed to complete master’s degrees in physics and math in three years while living the extremely poor (but interesting) life of a student.

In 1894 a group of industrialists, the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, paid her to investigate the magnetic properties of different steels. She was introduced by mutual friends to Pierre Curie, the Laboratory Chief at the Paris Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry, in the hopes of using his laboratory facilities. With their shared interest in the sciences as well as a mutual history of failed romance they found a lot in common. He encouraged her to remain in Paris where her studies could be of more use while she convinced him to finish his doctoral thesis. A mutually beneficial and supportive relationship developed.

Marie and Pierre married the next year, had their first child, and decided to team up to conduct research on radioactive substances building on the results of German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen (who had discovered x-rays, rays that could travel through solid wood or flesh) and Henri Becquerel (who had discovered that uranium salts emit similar but weaker radiation). Marie discovered that the metallic element thorium also emits radiation and found the mineral pitchblende emitted even more radiation than its uranium and thorium content could cause. The Curies then carried out an exhaustive search for the substance that could be producing the radioactivity.

In July 1898 the Curies announced the discovery of the element polonium, followed in December of that year with the discovery of the element radium. They eventually prepared 1 g (0.04 oz) of pure radium chloride from 8 metric tons of waste pitchblende from Austria. They also established that beta rays (now known to consist of electrons) are negatively charged particles. They won the 1903 Nobel prize for physics for their discovery, sharing the award with Bacquerel.

In 1906 Pierre, overworked and undoubtedly weakened by his prolonged exposure to radiation, died when he was run over by a horse drawn wagon. Marie took over his post at the Sorbonne as the first woman to teach there.

She continued her work on radioactive elements and won the 1911 Nobel prize for chemistry for isolating radium and studying its chemical properties. In 1914 she helped found the Radium Institute in Paris, and was the Institute’s first director.

When the first world war broke out, Madame thought X-rays would help locate bullets and facilitate surgery. Since it was also important not to move the wounded, so she designed vans with portable x-ray machines and trained 150 female attendants. The International Red Cross made her head of its Radiological Service as a result and she taught several courses for physicians and medical technicians on the diagnostic uses of x-rays.

Her health began to decline in the twenties until July 4, 1934, a few months after her daughter and son-in-law, the Joliot-Curies, announced the discovery of artificial radioactivity (for which they also won a Nobel Prize), Marie Curie died of leukemia, thought to have been brought on by exposure to the high levels of radiation involved in her research. After her death the Radium Institute was renamed the Curie Institute in her honor.

I thought this was funny.

You are ‘Gregg shorthand’. Originally designed to
enable people to write faster, it is also very
useful for writing things which one does not
want other people to read, inasmuch as almost
no one knows shorthand any more.

You know how important it is to do things
efficiently and on time. You also value your
privacy, and (unlike some people) you do not
pretend to be friends with just everyone; that
would be ridiculous. When you do make friends,
you take them seriously, and faithfully keep
what they confide in you to yourself.
Unfortunately, the work which you do (which is
very important, of course) sometimes keeps you
away from social activities, and you are often
lonely. Your problem is that Gregg shorthand
has been obsolete for a long time.

What obsolete skill are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Theodora (born 497-510, died 548) was the wife of Justinian I and it is arguable that she was at least as powerful as her husband. She encouraged him to enact a number of edicts prohibiting the trade in women for prostitution throughout the empire, had her own civil service office, built several imperial churches (including Sergius and Baccus in Constantinople) and a number of monasteries and refugees for former prostitutes and women who had fled violent owners and husbands. She had a hand in almost everything Justinian undertook, including the reconquest of Italy and the building of Hagia Sophia. It was because of her bravery that Justinian didn’t flee the city during the Nika riots, and after she expressed her authority more openly, “co-reigning” with her husband. After her death in 548 A.D. Justinian continued to reign for another twenty years. The Emperor never recovered from the death of his wife, visiting her grave every day lighting candles in effigy.