[Day 2] Women in the Arts
Last year, rageprufrock wrote about women like the burst-open lips of figs, about how women have worn their history as odalisks and sacrifices and mothers and daughters and victims like jewelry -- she wrote about how despite all of this, we sometimes forget how far we have come, and more importantly how far we have yet to go.
It's 2007 and the third most powerful person in American politics, second in line to take over the presidency, is a woman: Nancy Pelosi -- but half of the coverage she earned after her first State of the Union was about the color and cut of her clothes. Hilary Clinton is a two-term senator of New York and former first lady bracing to run for the Office of the Presidency in 2008 -- and yet people are preoccupied by her gender, by how pretty she might be and how she does her hair, whether or not she got plastic surgery. Women are still being raped and killed in Darfur; the Chinese countryside still has families practicing infanticide despite the country's rapidly skewing sex ratios. Girls are still giving themselves eating disorders comparing themselves to impossible standards of beauty, still acting less intelligent than they really are -- to be non-threatening, to be liked. One in three women will still experience sexual assault in her lifetime. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.
It's 2007 and women are still odalisks and sacrifices and mothers and daughters and victims -- and we owe ourselves and all other women more than that, we owe ourselves better. We can do more.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
Women in the Arts
Visual arts, performing arts, language arts, and culinary arts. Women have broken into every branch, sometimes with ease, but more often through force. Women used the arts to allow themselves a career, to give themselves freedom beyond what was allowed in their time, to express themselves. Whether through book or painting, on a stage or in a chef's kitchen, in a piece of stone or expressed in song, women push, pulled, and banged down the doors.
Women's contributions have helped push social change, such as in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. What would the world be like without the contributions of Billie Holiday, Mary Cassatt, Pearl S. Buck, Frida Kahlo? And yet, despite the numerous important contributions that women have made, they are rarely recognized or known.
Georgia O'Keeffe said, "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." The arts gave voice to millions of women, gave them an opportunity to say what they would, express themselves as they saw fit, and to do so using whatever medium appealed to them. So much would be lost without their contributions, the face of art, music, and literature would be drastically altered. Yet, how many people know that Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time or that The Tale of Genji, one of the first novels ever written, is attributed to Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese noblewoman?
We shouldn't forget Maya Lin, the sculptor and architectural designer responsible for the design of the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, or Lucille Ball, who in addition to her comedic work, was the first female studio head in Hollywood. We should acknowledge the contributions of Judi Dench, Maria Tallchief, Zora Neale Hurston, Nellie Bly, and Madonna.
These women have changed the face of their professions, inspired countless of young girls and made them believe that they could be more, do more. These women have told us their stories and the stories of others through their work, making the world and themselves infinitely more beautiful and precious in the process.
How do we give back to these amazing women? Buy their books, watch their movies, go to their theaters, and listen to their songs, support places such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Give to them as they have given to us.