Just because Marilyn Monroe played the dumb blonde, doesn’t mean she was one.
She grabbed control of her career. She was the third woman in the United States to start her own movie production company.
Dumb Blonde? Look Again
Missing the Women
Central Park has 22 statues of historical people.
None of them are women.
Image by H0n0r at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
Amelia Earhart the Spy?
The mysterious disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart has always fascinated us. She was bold and brave, a risk taker. The first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. And on July 2, 1937, she boarded her plane with navigator Fred Noonan, intending to fly around the globe. She was never seen again.
Under their category of Weird News, the Huffington Post noted a new book proposes that Earhart was spying on the Japanese for the United States. It reports that she was shot down, taken as a prisoner of war, and then released at the end of the war. Strangely it purports that she lived until 1982 under the name of Irene Craigmile Bolam.
I wondered about this new look at the history of Earhart. Is it good or bad for her reputation?
As an informal scholar of Ancient Rome, I’ve always been suspicious of who writes history. The ancient Roman writers, all male, wrote about women as an exercise of teaching others a lesson. Women whom they thought were “good” were exonerated and women who they were thought were “bad” were disparaged. Today scholars are taking another look at Ancient Rome, and now they see women in a more balanced way.
Is this new theory good for Earhart and her reputation?
If Earhart served as a spy (and although there is apparently no documentation that supports this theory), I can understand it. The world was ramping up to war in 1937, and China and Japan were already fighting. Certainly someone with Earhart’s ability could gather information for the United States.
If Earhart was captured by the Japanese and survived as a prisoner-of-war, then she had strength and fortitude and luck. I would admire her for all of those things.
I cannot understand why she would assume another name and live the rest of her life incognito. It’s almost as if being a risk-taking aviator was not who she was. That she would give up doing all the bold things she once did, as if they weren’t part of who she was. It would suggest that she was somehow “broken.”
It doesn’t make sense to me. And it doesn’t help her reputation.
Louisa May Alcott: Keep At It
“I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t.”
~Louisa May Alcott
Keep at it.
That’s the lesson from Louisa May Alcott. At one time, she was earning the equivalent of $2 million dollars per year from Little Women. But it wasn’t always like that.
Alcott grew up in brutal poverty. Her father could not keep a job or run a school, was constantly out of work. As a Transcendentalist whose well known friends such as Ralph Emerson and Henry Thoreau, he struggle to earn a living wage as a writer and philosopher. His wife and four children suffered by facing mounting debt and moving 12 times before Louisa was seven-years-old.
Years of near-starving made Alcott vow for a better live. At sixteen, she wrote in her journal that “I will do something, by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t.”
She tried them all: sewing, teaching, acting, and writing. Anything to make money and to help her family out of the mounting debt accumulated over the years. In one of her moves to Boston, she sold her writing, worked part-time as a governess, and took in sewing.
“I took my little talent in my hand and faced the world again, braver than before and wiser for my failures.”
“Stick to your teaching; you can’t write,” advised the publisher of the Atlantic Monthly married to Alcott’s distant cousin. He even offered her an unsolicited load of $40 to set up her schoolroom.
Her reply was “I won’t teach. I can write, and I’ll prove it.”
She continued to practice by selling short stories to other publishers and was able to increase her rates. She worked at other jobs to make money, taking work offered by her richer, higher status cousins as a poor relation. She must have felt ashamed.
Little Women’s popularity wasn’t entirely a fluke. One of her publishers suggested that she write it for the growing market of children’s books.
In the end, she had redemption. A care game called “Authors” includes Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare. The only woman included is Louisa May Alcott.
Source: Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: the woman behind Little Women (2009)
A Guide to Independent Princesses
I admit it. I’ve always wanted to be a Princess.
No, not the Walt Disney kind, where I’m waiting around for Prince Charming to show up. I want to be the kind that can jump on a horse, slay a dragon by noon, and be back in the castle by 5:00 to be served a nice dinner. That’s a wonderful life.
How do we pick between the images of those princesses that wait around to be kissed and those that actually do something?
A Mighty Girl is here to help. This website has a list of over 200 books about “independant princesses.” They define them as “smart, daring, and aren’t waiting around to be rescued – more than likely, they’ll be doing the rescuing themselves!”
Several categories divide the books into the appropriate ages for kids, but there’s no category for grownups. Every now and then, though, I read a book geared towards Young Adults.
One of the authors who shows up twice on the list is Gail Carson Levine, who has written a number of stories about princesses for the Young Adult market. In an interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith, Levine noted that she likes putting a spin on the same old fairy tale.
How did Levine tackle the Sleeping Beauty tale, which is a classic wait-for-the-handsome-prince story? In her book Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep, Princess Sonora is 10 times smarter than anyone else. Everyone in the castle finds it tiresome. Princess Sonora tries to outwit her destiny of having her finger pricked by the spindle and falling into a deep sleep, but fate intervenes. Her mother screams, the princess runs to find out what’s the matter. She collides with her mother, who is holding the spindle. Fate takes over.
When the prince comes to find the sleeping castle to answer to why the sheep in his kingdom are balding, he is initially repulsed by the sleeping princess. (“What’s was that on the her cheek and in the corner of her mouth? Spit? Bird droppings? Ugh!”) But he hears her muttering wisdom in her sleep and decides to kiss her after all.
Undoubtedly Princess Sonora becomes wiser. That’s a good lesson for any princess, independant or not.
Image by Guy Ormiston (Guy Ormiston (SONY DSC-S600, 1/25, f2.8)) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
A Female Jedi to Celebrate
I don’t do that anymore. But I’ve kept these things anyway—to remind myself of how far I’ve come, I guess.
~an entry in Rey’s journal
I haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie yet. But the movie The Force Awakens has a female character that I’m looking forward to watching.
Entertainment Weekly writer Nicole Sperling writes that Rey as a revolutionary female movie character. Smart, daring, and powerful. In her final battle, it’s about the fight for good and evil. It doesn’t have anything to do with gender.
Dreamworks currently uses Disney as its film distributor. Luckily, Rey doesn’t hold back and wait for her Prince Charming like other Disney princesses.
Image by Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons