Another cop-out in a way but I thought people might find this interesting. See, I didn’t really like history in school. Even in college I was a slackass despite my art history minor - visual memory is a completely different thing for me. It wasn’t until I didn’t really have the pressure to memorize dates and names and had access to A&E and its spinoff channels that I really became interested in history. Probably the visual thing again.

Even though I was fascinated by women in history, art history in particular, it wasn’t until the late nineties that I started taking it fairly seriously. That’s when I started gathering information for a book about the women in American Art - African American Women Artists in particular. There is a ginormous pile of stuff I’ve gathered over the years. And essays I pick up and write on every once in a while. Scans and reproductions. And, as I’ve said before, a respectable private collection of books on the subject. Who knows if my little history book will ever be published but even if it never is I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time.

So far the only time I’ve ever been paid for my interest in history was when I worked for a website that recreated historical houses in (ready for this?) The Sims. Yeah. How nerdy can someone be to take such a popular video game and make it not just into building digital dollhouses, but digital historic dollhouses. Hehe. How punk rock am I? Ok, so not really.

For the most part I created more modern houses in a particular style and mid-century re-creations. And some of you are already familiar with the eerily accurate re-creation I made of our house. My main job was usually to identify and document all the little downloaded doohickeys my buddy Gigi used when building her houses. This was no small feat, she had thousands upon thousands of object, wallpaper, and floor files. Several gigabytes worth. And I would have to remember who made each one and where to download it. The good news is that a person with visual memory was particularly useful for that job.

Yes, people paid to download these houses and I would provide links to all the stuff they would need to go download somewhere else to have it work properly. That might seem strange to non-gamers out there but people spend money on their hobbies and this was just another weirdo hobby. For my knitting friends: think of it as paying for a really good pattern but still needing to get the yarn and needles.

You might be asking “Noelle, what the hell does this have to do with Catherine the Great?” or maybe “Will you stfu about this history stuff and post more knitting and spinning?” For those of you with the second thought I have a great knitting post today I just have to take photos.

There was a bio about Catherine the Great on the Biography channel last night and I remembered the huge reproduction Gigi made of Alexander Palace, which Catherine built for her grandson, and Catherine Palace, which was restored and heavily redecorated during Catherine the Great’s reign but had originally been built for Catherine I.

So I thought you all might find that odd architectural view of Catherine the Great’s life interesting. You don’t have to pay to look at the screenshots but you still have to pay to download it. So just go peek at the screenshots and check out how a couple of gals took a nerdy hobby and made it even nerdier.

We’d all wandered off to other interests by late-2003 or so. After receiving a cease and desist from the Jekyll Island historical society and then the director of the Ivy Green museum (even though the floorplans in both cases were likely in public domain) our hearts just weren’t in it anymore. There was a brief migration to a free server with a more modern slant but it didn’t hold our interests like the historic reproductions did. Kind of sad but we enjoyed it for a while.

In the unlikely event that you’re interested in some of the houses I made that remain free to download you can still join my extremely old Yahoo Group. I actually won a few awards for those houses. I guess I should add that these are all for the original Sims games with all the expansion packs that were available up to the point the houses were created. I never installed the last expansion though.

I am in a seriously cranky mood today. So I think it would be best if you went and read about this really cool midwife in Ethiopia over here. I’m going to go take a pill and possibly a nap.

Gouyen, meaning Wise Woman, was born in Arizona into Chief Victorio’s (Lozen’s brother) Warm Springs Apache band in the 1850’s. She was famous among her allies for never getting injured or harmed in any way during battle, even when overwhelmed by the numbers of soldiers and their bullets.

On October 15, 1880, while the group was resting near Tres Castillos, New Mexico, they were attacked by Mexicans. When the offensive was over, seventy-eight Apaches had been murdered and only seventeen had escaped, including Gouyen and her young son, Kaywaykla , later known as James, whose interviews later in life would provide a great deal of information about running with Victorio and the region. Her small daughter, however, was murdered and shortly afterwards her husband was killed in a Comanche raid while visiting the Mescalero Apaches.

A legendary tale is told about the revenge of Gouyen. One night following her husband’s death, she put on her buckskin ceremony dress and left the camp carrying a water jug, dried meat, and a bone awl with sinew for repairing her moccasins. She found the Commance chief who had killed her husband engaged in a Victory Dance around a bonfire with her husband’s scalp hanging from his belt. Gouyen slipped into the circle of dancers, seduced the Chief an led him off into the high grass. At first she had hoped to get the Chiefs knife, but ended up attacking his throat with her teeth. They grappled and fought but eventually she won. Gouyen scalped the Commanche, cut his beaded breechcloth from his body, tore off his moccasins, then stole his horse. When she returned to her camp she was exhausted but managed to present her in-laws with the Comanche leader’s scalp, along with his clothing and footwear.

Gouyen remarried an Apache warrior named Ka-ya-ten-nae. Later, she and her family were taken prisoner by the U.S. Army and held at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where she died.

Maria Montessori was born in 1870 in Ancona, Italy, to an educated but poor lower middle class family. When she was twelve, her parents moved to Rome to enable their only daughter to receive a better education. They encouraged her to become a teacher, which was the only career open to women at that time. Maria excelled at mathematics and had originally chosen a career in engineering but she became interested in biology while attending a technical school for boys and enrolled in medical school.

n 1896, Maria Montessori became the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome Medical School, and joined the staff of the University’s Psychiatric Clinic. Through the university’s free clinics and her private practice, she came into frequent contact with children and families of the working class. When she was invited to represent her country in two international women’s conventions and other speaking engagements in Europe she spoke vehemently supporting peace efforts, the women’s movement, and child labor law reform.

In 1901, Montessori became the Director of the University of Rome’s new orthophrenic school where she began to work with the reform wave for mentally handicapped children. She was was among the first to take a scientific approach to the education of these children, following the clinical studies by Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard and Edouard Seguin., two French physicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After research and trials with a boy “raised in the wild” Itard postulated the existence of developmental periods in normal human growth. This idea later became the cornerstone of Dr. Montessori’s philosophy. From Edouard Seguin, she drew further confirmation of Itard’s work, along with a more organized and specific system for applying it to the everyday education of challenged students. Through Dr. Montessori’s study of Seguin, she came to attune herself more actively to the “normal” child, applying all that she had previously learned.

Montessori combined these studies and developed educational studies based on observation and experimentation. This approach was referred to as the Child Study School of Thought. The next few years were devoted to work based upon the careful training and objectivity she had learned as a biologist.

In 1906, Dr. Montessori was invited to head the organization and orientation of preschools in one of the model tenements in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. The first Casa dei Bambini or “Children’s House” was opened on January 6, 1907. From her experience here, Dr. Montessori developed her philosophy and observations/experimentation methods for the education of young children.

The busy schools turned out to be very hectic, however, she had the older children help out and provided some puzzles that she had invented for the handicapped children. The results were that the children began to settle themselves, played with the puzzles, and learned daily living skills. Through observational studies Montessori discovered that children teach themselves when given the proper tools and environment. They have an almost effortless ability to absorb knowledge from their surroundings, as well as a tireless interest in manipulating materials. This self-creating process of the child is the cornerstone of what has been known as the Montessori Method. Eventually she was teaching these young students to read and write - four and five year olds were working on problems originally intended for third grade students. She would continue to develop equipment, exercises, toys, and methods based on what she observed children to do “naturally,” by themselves, unassisted by adults. She also built tables and chairs instead of desks so the students could interact and learn more with each other.

As Montessori schools were set up throughout Europe and in America, Dr. Montessori ended her medical career in order to devote all of her energy to advocating the intellectual potential and rights of children. A good portion of modern traditional education is based on Dr. Montessori’s philosophy and resources, including the development of personalized instruction, manipulative learning materials, educational games, programmed instruction and the developmental classroom concept.

She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times—in 1949, 1950, and 1951. Maria Montessori died in Holland in 1952, but her work lives on in teachings based on her methods and through the Association Montessori Internationale, the Amsterdam-based organization she founded in 1929 in order to continue developing and teaching the methods most conducive to children teaching themselves.

Katherine Dexter McCormick was the second woman in history to earn a degree in science from MIT. In 1904 she received her BS in biology and married an heir to the International Harvester fortune, Stanley McCormick, youngest son of Cyrus McCormick who invented the mechanical harvester. Two years after their marriage, Stanley was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Katharine built a fantastic castle, Riven Rock, in Santa Barabra, Ca, so she could live with Stanley surrounded by a peaceful atmosphere. Despite the tranquil surroundings her husband’s episodes would wax and wane throughout his lifetime. Katherine earnestly believed that his illness was genetically-related so she resolved never to bear children. By 1909, Stanley was declared legally incompetent and the lawyers for the Cyrus McCormick estate battled to restrain Katharine’s power to spend the money in Stanley’s trust fund without court approval.

Katharine made small contributions to numerous causes, including the woman’s suffrage movement and, later, Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood Federation. Most of her charitable spending went into neuroendocrine research. As long as her husband remained alive, her spending would be monitored by the probate court in Chicago and as long as she spent money on research into causes of and treatments for her husband’s disease, her spending was easily approved. Only after his death in 1947 would she inherit the funds and be able to spend the funds at her own discretion.

By age seventy-one McCormick was wealthy in her own right and determined to develop a cheap, easy to use, safe, effective, artificial contraceptive pill. In 1951 McCormick met with Gregory Goodwin Pincus who had been working on developing a hormonal birth control method since the 1930s. McCormick agreed to fund Pincus’ research into oral contraception and in 1954 she and Pincus got Dr. John Rock to conduct human trials. The FDA approved the sale of the Pill in 1960. During her lifetime and in her will, she contributed $2 million to develop the birth control pill, not a single cent of the government’s money went into developing the most revolutionary pharmaceutical invention of the century. Nor did any corporation finance the development of a birth control pill: corporate executives refused to believe there was a market for a drug that prevents women from becoming pregnant. Without Katharine McCormick’s funding, the birth control pill would probably not have been invented, tested, or marketed for a very long time.

She strongly believed in using her fortune only to aid unpopular causes which, in addition to controversial political movements, included the visual arts and music. She also donated money to MIT to build women’s dormitories in her husband’s name which are still used today. Following her death in 1967, her will provided $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which funded the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library in New York City.
According to Planned Parenthood, The Library serves the research and information needs of planned parentood, affiliate staff and volunteers nationwide, as well as researchers, other sexual health professionals, writers, and journalists. Last year the libaray drew from its collection of more than 6100 books, 23,000 articles, pamphlets, journals, and historic photographs and videotapes to respond to nearly 5000 requests for information and to create and publish fact sheets, white papers, bibliographics, and resource listings.

Vera Hall was an African-American woman born around the turn of the twentieth century in a small house just outside Livingston, Alabama. She grew up with a supportive family and community, but in an extremely poor area around the central Alabama-Mississippi state line. This area, also known as the Black Belt because of its rich, dark soil, was particularly impoverished even for the notably poor South and severely incongruous financial times. Her grandfather was an emancipated slave who had taken up work as a tenant farmer. His son, Hall’s father, worked on his father’s farm then rented his own plot after the original landowner died. Hall’s mother was a stern, practical woman who had a great appreciation of song. Hall and her family took great solace and strength from their community church, Shiloh Baptist Church of Livingston.

At a young age, Vera Hall (sometimes known as Vera Hall Ward, Adel Hall, Vera Ward Hall, Vera Ward, and Adel Ward) became a respected and devout member of the church, and remained so for the rest of her life. But in her late teens, she also fell in with more worldly crowd, for whom blues, craps, and alcohol were the primary entertainment. The dichotomy of these two worlds– that of spirituals and the church and that of blues and the juke-joint– was a recurring theme throughout her life (as it has been for many blues singers) and a notable influence in her music. She drew upon both perspectives to cope with and overcome her life’s perennial difficulties. She experienced many personal tragedies, including the death of a young brother, both parents, a daughter, a sister, and her husband by 1930. To support herself and her remaining children she was forced to take up cooking and washing for a local household. But she continued to sing.

Ruby Pickens Tartt, a local woman working for the WPA, had taken an interest in local folk music and art. She was particularly passionate about black culture and the storytelling, singing, preaching, and handicrafts that it produced. She was integral in introducing Vera Hall to John and Ruby Lomax. They would conduct extensive interviews and recordings with Hall, among other southern folk artists, throughout the late thirties and forties. There are 29 songs by her in The Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center (some of which can be heard here and here).

The only time she left Alabama was in 1948 when she performed in New York in a concert organized by Alan Lomax. She died in Tuscaloosa in 1964, right before the resurgence of folk music appreciation had rediscovered her music.

Vera Hall was known in particular for the passionate moans in her songs. Her rendition of Wild Ox Moan was probably her most well known, which was later recorded by Taj Mahal. More recently her accapella Trouble So Hard was sampled by Moby for his song , Natural Blues, on the album Play. Her songs are still available, usually on Southern folk music compilations.

She was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame in March 2005 and celebrated by the Alabama Blues Project last October, where they launched a fundraising campaign to buy a marker for the cemetary where she’s buried in an unmarked grave. There is an amazing website with a lot more information about her life called The Vera Hall Project.

You can read about more women in history in my archives and at Pesky Apostrophe.

continuing with Women in History..

Midwife, teacher, and author, Trotula di Ruggerio’s treatise on gynecology, Passionibus Mulierum Curandorum (The Diseases of Women), in which she identified herself as a woman, was used in medical schools for centuries. Long regarded as one of the preeminent medieval scientists, Trotula lost her place in the history of medicine only in the beginning of the 20th century when historians became unable to accept that such a woman could exist in eleventh-century Italy.

Trotula wrote with disarming frankness about gynecology, obstetrics, cosmetics, and skin disease in a sensible and humane manner. Passionibus Mulierum was far ahead of her contemporaries’ practices when discussing surgery, analgesics, and the care of the mother and child during the post-partum period. Her topics included the need for cleanliness, a balanced diet, and regular exercise, warned of the effects of emotional stress, and discussed birth control, problems of infertility, male infertility (a scandalous subject in itself), sewing (and avoiding) tears suffered in childbirth, repositioning a baby during a breech birth, and the problems of sex and celibacy.

She pioneered the use of hormonal treatments (derived from animal testicles) to cure infertility and to regulate menstruation. She also recommended the use of opiates to relieve pain during childbirth. The Catholic Church strongly opposed this, saying that women should suffer while giving birth. Trotula is perhaps most famous for finding several methods to simulate the loss of the hymen on the wedding night. One method was to apply a leech the day before the wedding and to remove it shortly before consummation.

Unlike many other works of the period, her cures rarely include prayers, incantations, astrology, or other forms of blatant superstition. She was married to a doctor named John Platearius. They had two sons, Matteo and John, who also became doctors. During her life, Trotula was referred to as Magistra Mulier Sapiens - “The wise woman teacher.” Trotula’s other book, De Aegritudinum Curatione, or De Ornatu Mulierum was commonly known as Trotula Minor. Despite a first hand account by Constantine of Africa describing her performance of a caesarian delivery of his son some scholars dispute that Trotula was a woman, or that she even existed.

Source: Hypatia’s Heritage, A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Alic

for more Women in History check out Peskymac’s site.

I have to admit that right now I’m using notes and articles I compiled and wrote last year and just never published. So I’m not working nearly as hard as it seems on this. Also, I’m not doing much editing so sorry if the writing’s choppy.

continuing with Women in History posts..

Suffragist, historian of women, author and lecturer, painter, woman’s rights activist and theorist, advocate for civil rights, and abolitionist, Matilda Joslyn Gage was a leading theorist and activist in the nineteenth century woman’s rights movement. Her trademark expression, ” There is a Word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven. That Word is Liberty,” summarized her life long struggle for the full equality of all humanity.

Although she operated a way station on the Underground Railroad and decried the brutal and unjust treatment of the American Indians, Gage focused most of her efforts on the woman’s movement. Her suffrage work included helping to form, being an officer in, and co-authoring many of the major documents of local, state, and national woman’s suffrage associations, editing The National Citizen and Ballot Box, the official paper of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), and running petition campaigns. Gage is, today, perhaps best known for co-authoring the 1876 “Declaration of Rights of Women” and the first 3 volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage.

In 1880, after women were given the franchise in school board elections, Gage organized the women of her village, Fayetteville, NY to run for and vote in school board positions where an all-woman slate was elected. Yet, Gage was becoming disenchanted with the quest for suffrage. When Susan B. Anthony maneuvered the merging of the more conservative American Woman’s Suffrage Association (AWSA) with the NWSA, Gage, in protest, refused to join the new NAWSA (National American Woman Suffrage Association) and she formed the formed the Woman’s National Liberal Union.

Still, as an historian of women, Gage was in a class by herself. In an era when most believed that the lives of women were slowly improving, Gage believed in an ancient, prehistoric, matriarchal society and wrote about the accomplishments of women throughout history. She wrote pioneering work on the source of women’s oppression, decrying the unequal treatment of the prostitute and her client, the “practice of non-conviction or of pardoning” in rape trials, unequal pay, the double standard, the incongruity of criminally prosecuting prostitutes and not their customers, wife battering, and the sexual abuse of female children, just to name a few.

Finally, Gage wrote Woman, Church, and State, an history of the church’s oppression of women and an analysis of the mutually reinforcing techniques that the church together with the state use to oppress women, calling it the “bulwark of woman’s slavery.”

Catherine Blake, daughter of a major figure in the NWSA, said “Mrs. Gage was a tireless student, a fine research worker, thorough in all she undertook; she had a deep sense of justice and at times an appalling frankness of speech - which I loved! One was never in doubt as to where Mrs. Gage stood…She was absolutely honest in all her dealings, and I would take her word at any time as against anybody else’s. I always loved and admired her greatly. I think that in some ways she was the greatest of those (suffrage leaders.) Someone should write an adequate life of this great leader.”

To learn about more women in history this month check out pesky apostrophe.

I feel kind of badly that I haven’t been posting about a new woman in history every day like I did last year. I don’t think I’m going to be able to post many detailed articles this time. I’ll probably just have a photo and a short blurb. I’m not up for much more work at the moment I’m already behind with the laundry, litter boxes, dishes, knitting projects, filing our taxes, reading that short story I was supposed to read for Cody, discovering the meaning of life, figuring out what the deal is with Scout’s comment form, and discovering the solution to carbohydrates as self-medication for depression. So. Not much time for this typing crap.

However, I’m still very proud of the articles I wrote last year. And peskymac is trying to write about a woman in history daily as well. So I think that should be a good celebration. At least it’s something right?

In other news I’m completely unsurprised to find out that two of the three people who’ve been burning the churches in Alabama turned out to be idiot asshole fratboy mutherfuckers from Birmingham Southern, a college that I went to for a while. I have a lot of family connections with that school. I watched my parents play in tennis tournaments there when I was a child, two of my childhood babysitters were theater majors there, my mother taught there, my sister and her husband went there. A lot of my friends stayed and graduated after I transferred to Santa Fe. I have a complicated love-hate feeling for the place. But honestly I’m not surprised at all. There is a definite privileged southern white maleness around the place, where “Old South” parties, permanent Bret Easton Ellis style preppieness, social bullies, bitchy comments, and alcohol related deaths and date rapes are still common. In that envirionment they probably really did think they were going to get away with it, that they should get away with it.

Just three deer huntin’, beer drinkin’, SUV drivin’, church torchin’ rednecks. Well shoot if that’s not the main export of my home state I dunno what is. Thanks for reinforcing that stereotype boys!

Wu Chao (as she was originally named) was born into a rich and noble Chinese family in 625. She was taught to play music, write, and read the Chinese classics. The Tang dynasty (618-906 AD) was a time of relative freedom for women. They did not bind their feet nor lead submissive lives. It was a time in which a number of exceptional women contributed in the areas of culture and politics. By thirteen years of age Wu was known for her wit, intelligence, and beauty, and was recruited to the court of Emperor Tai Tsung. She soon became his favorite concubine. But she also had eyes for his son, Kao Tsung.

When the emperor died and Kao Tsung took over, Wu was now twenty seven years old. In time she became a favorite concubine of the new emperor, giving birth to the sons he wanted. As mother of the future emperor of China, she grew in power. She managed to eliminate Kao Tsung’s wife, Empress Wang, by accusing her of killing Wu’s newborn daughter. Kao Tsung believed Wu, and replaced Empress Wang to marry the up and coming Wu Zetian.

Within five years of their marriage, Emperor Kao Tsung suffered a crippling stroke. The Empress Wu took over the administrative duties of the court, a position equal to the emperor. She created a secret police force to spy on her opposition, and cruelly jailed or killed anyone who stood in her way, including the unfortunate Empress Wang. With the death of Emperor Kao Tsung, Wu managed to outflank her eldest sons and moved her youngest, and much weaker son, into power. She in effect ruled, telling him what to do.

In order to challenge Confucian beliefs against rule by women, Wu began a campaign to elevate the position of women. She had scholars write biographies of famous women, and raised the position of her mother’s clan by giving her relatives high political posts. She moved her court away from the seat of traditional male power and tried to establish a new dynasty. She said that the ideal ruler was one who ruled like a mother does over her children.

In 690, Wu’s youngest son removed himself from office, and Wu Zetian was declared emperor of China. In spite of her ruthless climb to power, her rule proved to be benign. She found the best people she could to run the government, and treated those she trusted fairly. She reduced the army’s size and stopped the influence of aristocratic military men on government by replacing them with scholars. Everyone had to compete for government positions by taking exams, thus setting the practice of government run by scholars. Wu also was fair to peasants, lowering oppressive taxes, raising agricultural production, and strengthening public works.

During her reign, Empress Wu placed Buddhism over Daoism as the favored state religion. She invited the most gifted scholars to China and built Buddhist temples and cave sculptures. Chinese Buddhism achieved its highest development under the reign of Wu Zetian.

As she grew older, Empress Wu lessened the power of her secret police. But she become increasingly superstitious and fearful. Sorcerers and corrupt court favorites flattered her. Finally, in 705, she was pressured to give up the throne in favor of her third son, who was waiting all these years in the wings. Wu Zetian died peacefully at age eighty the same year.

To some she was an autocrat, ruthless in her desire to gain and keep power. To others she, as a woman doing a “man’s job,” merely did what she had to do, and acted no differently than most male emperors of her day. They also note that she managed to effectively rule China during one of its more peaceful and culturally diverse periods.