Why do we have to keep dredging up women’s history? Why do we need all of March to talk about it? I mean, that was then, this is now. Can’t we just move on? After all, we’ve got Hillary. We’ve got Nancy. We win Olympic medals. Women make history all the time.

Yes, but we still have a couple of thousand years of male-dominated history to balance.

Thirty years ago a group of women in Sonoma County (Ca.) started doing the research on “where were the women?” and strove to do no less than rewrite, edit and fill in the blanks in history books. The Sonoma County Women’s History Project blossomed into the national women’s history project and March became women’s history month, recognized in all states.

One founder of the Women’s History Project was the late Mary Ruthsdotter of Sebastopol. Mary died this winter and her memorial was fittingly postponed until March. Mary sure knew her history. She would talk about the gutsy women of the past like old friends she’d just had over for coffee.

One she described as “totally cool” was Jeannette Rankin from Montana, the first woman elected to Congress and who dared to vote against America entering World War I. “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake,” said Rankin – suffragist, peace activist and Republican.

Bay Area filmmaker Louise Vance claims Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the women’s right philosopher and organizer, for her favorite. She tells the story of Stanton growing up and hearing her father, a judge, tell women that they couldn’t leave abusive husbands. Even if they were beaten and ran away, the law said they should be recaptured and returned to the husband. And so, said Vance, “She vowed to tear out all the pages in her father’s law books that made women cry.”
(Stanton also edited out the “obey” part in her own wedding vows in 1840.)

Vance has made a film called “Seneca Falls” that will launch on PBS television stations across the country in March. It’s about America’s first women’s rights convention in 1848, a huge public protest by Stanton and other radicals demanding that women be freed from their social, political and legal slavery. It’s barely mentioned in history books.

When Vance field-tested the film last year she showed it to junior high and high school girls in Ohio. They were angered by it, said Vance. “They said they had never spent one minute on women’s history.” Same thing happened when she showed it to a group of high school girls in San Francisco.

It’s because what women were doing then wasn’t valued enough to be written down. Getting the vote was a huge story but there was a lot more going on in terms of women’s rights. “How about the fact that it was once legal in some states to whip your wife,” said Vance.

What about women not being able to inherit property? And not being allowed to go to college?
Mary Ruthsdotter’s grandmother told her, “Some men used to think women belonged to them like their cows and pigs.”

So, yeah we have to keep acknowledging our history. And writing it down.

Vance has another idea. She wants to find a legislator who will push for a national bill mandating that women’s history be taught in all public schools. Imagine the squeals and growls over that idea from those who still haven’t learned how to share.

Photo of Jeannette Rankin

With awards season upon us there are so many movies I vowed to see and they didn’t include “Precious.”

I had all the usual excuses for not going to a film about an illiterate, pregnant abused teenage girl. I knew from reading reviews that it was raw and relentless. And isn’t the news hard enough to endure without adding in extra cinematic suffering?
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We all have our limits on what we pay money to see. I avoid movies that involve torture, rape and sexual violence. I hate watching bodies being blown up and I don’t like war movies. I can’t stand to see people abusing children and sadistic killers.

Same with books. If a book starts out with the body of a murdered woman or a kidnapped child I usually stop right there. I even have a hard time with those nature movies where the grizzly bear stalks the baby buffalo and eats it, even though I know this is the natural way.

I would pass on “Precious,” I said. I didn’t want to spend time with that poor hopeless kid.

Then I sucked it up and went, mostly because I had two movie companions who know about the cruelty heaped on children – a friend who survived her own violent childhood and another woman I know professionally who directs a parenting program that works with abused kids.

If they could handle real life, I could handle a movie.

No one wants to watch abuse and suffering. In one of the more shocking scenes in “Precious” I threw my coat over my head. But maybe we need to see these things because if they don’t happen to us, they happen to others. It’s the same reason to see one more movie about the Holocaust, to not simply sit there and groan “how can people do this to each other,” but to bear witness so maybe those horrors won’t happen again.

Maybe after you watch a movie about a teenager who has every reason to scrawl “Why me?” on a piece of paper, you end up donating money to a safe house. Or you become a Big Brother or Big Sister, or work to keep social service programs alive. But you don’t leave untouched.

Let me back up to what I said about Precious being this poor hopeless kid. She isn’t hopeless.

I saw the movie when the Haiti earthquake disaster was in its second week. I heard a pediatrician cry on the radio about the children she watched die because medical help came too late. But I saw a man find his wife under a building, alive after days without water, food or daylight. And there were triumphant rescue workers on the TV, crawling out of the rubble with a 15-day old baby.

There’s hope in Haiti and there is more than a spark of life in Precious, even in that fierce face, scrunched up against a world which seems to deliver only misery.

Tough important movies are best watched in a matinee which gives you time to shut down the awful images before you sleep. We went to the movie on a wet afternoon when rain pounded the roof and thunder rattled the theater. When it was over we went for tea. We all needed to talk.

We talked about unloved children and the importance of intervention when families can’t do it themselves. We talked about the unlikely places people find friends. And praised the kind determination of overworked teachers. We talked about the need to keep art museums open and children writing.

No surprise, the woman who runs the parenting program said stories about children like Precious are not unique to Harlem. They happen right here in beautiful Wine Country.

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com

Photo courtesy of ingridspeak.wordpress.com

It was surprising news that fashion designer Eileen Fisher is leaving her old love for a younger woman but those things happen. I sighed when I read that the New York designer known for her sophisticated styles and lush colors had decided to leave behind her Boomer sisters to go after a younger, cooler customer.

When I was young and cool I wasn’t an Eileen Fisher fan. When I got older and decided to occasionally treat myself I was drawn to Eileen Fisher. First by her models and then her clothes.

The models in Eileen Fisher ads were real women – high school principals and airline pilots. Some of them had silver hair and wore glasses. They looked brainy and fit and confident. They walked on the beach. They held books in their arms. They even smiled. They didn’t look angry and starved like other models. Nor did they stand pigeon toed in stilettos, like some porn star. They were grown-ups.

Eileen Fisher was one of us. She too favored classy but uncomplicated clothes, the kind you don’t have to yank on and adjust but that made you feel pretty and even hip. I liked what I read about her – that she gave her employees yoga classes and health and education benefits and helped women in poor countries start businesses.

Her clothes and marketing style portrayed women of her generation in a new way.

If you were going to describe a stylish classic American woman you might handily refer to her as an Eileen Fisher type.

Her models had both age and flair. Here was one shrewd business person who did not avoid the aging market but invested in it and celebrated it.

Imagine, then, our surprise to find that others thought her clothes had “as much style and shape as a burqa.” That’s what it said in a New York Times story that reported the Eileen Fisher line was trading in its traditional base to appeal to the youth market. This new line would be different from the old Eileen Fisher line that was “designed for graying bobos who dabbled in ceramics and had lifetime subscriptions to the New Yorker.”

Ouch, said this graying bobo - after I looked up the word “bobo,” which is a word coined by conservative columnist David Brooks, short for bourgeois bohemian. Bobo or not, I do not feel scorned by Eileen Fisher. I have enough of her clothes in my closet and really, in this economy I don’t see a big shopping spree in my future.

If she wants to go back to her drawing board — the new line is to include biker jackets and leggings – then she should. She’s 58, a good age to try something new.

But I’m just sorry that she feels like she has to go after the kids like everyone else. Maybe she’ll do great with the younger, cooler crowd who will one day say, “hey, where are those stylish black dresses and asymmetrical sweaters you used to make?” I’ll mostly miss the women in her ads who look like people my age and wear clothes that don’t require a full-length industrial strength undergarment.

She won’t miss me. I was not a heavy investor. I bought some sweaters on sale and once paid full price for a smart ivory colored jacket for my daughter’s wedding. I still wear it, mostly with jeans. My last Eileen Fisher score was a black linen shirt from a consignment shop in San Francisco. It cost 12 bucks and looks nothing like a burqa.

The headline writers say that Eileen Fisher is giving herself a facelift. Well, you know how those can go. Sometimes they work and sometimes they just make you look funny. Then there is no going back.