Welcome to WOW2 — Mid-July!
WOW2 is a sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events just from July 13 to July 22. Since I’ve broken the data limit on individual diaries, I’m trying splitting WOW2 into three posts this month. Next Saturday, July 27, the Late July edition will post.
This is an on-going, evolving project. So many women have been added to the lists over the past three years that even changing the posts from monthly to twice a month, the pages kept getting longer and more unwieldy – an astonishing and wonderful problem to have!
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
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The biggest event in Women’s History for July is the Seneca Falls Convention, which launched American Feminism’s ‘First Wave’ — and the long fight for the right to vote. We all owe a huge debt to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martha Wright, Mary Ann McClintock and Jane Hunt, who conceived and organized these two days of revelation for the 200+ women who came together.
At a time when women had no public voice; when married women were legal nonentities; when control of where and how a woman was to live; of how her children were to be brought up; of her property; of any wages she earned — all these were controlled by a father, husband or brother . . .
Women came together.
And they spoke up. In public.
Some of them stood on the platform and gave speeches.
Women discussed and argued and hammered out, and they voted — for the first time in their lives — on how the convention would be run, on how much men would be allowed to participate in their convention, and finally, for a Declaration which would change not only their lives, but the lives of all the generations to come. They voted for a proclamation of the changes necessary so women would be no longer beholden even to the good men in their lives, and to end their subservience to the abusive ones.
Oh yes, it was a Revelation. And the start of a Revolution just as profound as America’s break with England — the ripples from Seneca Falls continue to spread in the world today.
What a long way we have come. How very far we still have to go.
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Many thanks to WOW2’s Assistant Editor libera nos — not only for
volunteering to be the proofreader for WOW2, but for also contributing
to the research. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught
computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5.
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For the entire previous EARLY and LATE JULY lists as of 2018,
click HERE for Early: www.dailykos.com/…
and HERE for Late: www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this MID-JULY 2019 page are the new people and events, or additional information and visuals,
found since last year.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
This Week in the War on Women
will post soon, so be sure to go there next to catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
You won’t want to miss the final installment of inspiring stories and events coming up for Late July, which will post next Saturday, July 27. Thank all of you for supporting this project!