Even today, HIStory silences the accomplishments of women

The Boston Herald

Since 1987, March has been designated National Women's History Month by the U.S. Congress. That's what Thomas Mann, a sixth grader at the Davis School in Brockton, wrote and told me. "It is a time set aside to honor women, both past and present, for their accomplishments," he said.

I'd read a blurb a few days before I received his letter, which mentioned National Women's History Month, but that's been it. There have been no in-depth feature stories; no "women of the day" highlighted every day throughout the month. No widespread recognition at all.

Which isn't a surprise. Women in history have always been in the background. You think history and you think men. Our foreFATHERS. Our founding FATHERS. Everyone knows George Washington is the father of our country. But who even considers that there could be a mother?

For almost a year now, I've had on my desk a book about women in history, not a dull, cumbersome textbook but a diary-like daybook of 19th century American women's words and accomplishments. I've picked it up and glanced at it a few times, but it took Mann's letter to get me to actually sit down and look at more than the pictures and pay attention to more than a single entry on a single page.

"Give Her This Day: A Daybook of Women's Words," by Cambridge resident Lois Stiles Edgerly, is a treasure. It's everything history should be: personal, alive and compelling. It's designed to be read slowly. For every day of the year, a woman, born on that day, is quoted and a bit of her life is revealed. The strength of the book, however, is not just its readability and economy of words, but the diversity of the women it chronicles. Their almost unanimous anonymity is difficult to fathom. If they had been men, we would recognize so many of their names.

Emily Balch, for example. She was born Jan. 8, 1867, in Jamaica Plain, and worked her entire life for world peace and freedom. In 1946, she became one of only two American women ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. So why is her name unfamiliar? Why isn't she mentioned in history books? Why had I never heard of her?

We've all heard of Albert Schweitzer and Dag Hammarskjold and Dr. Martin Luther King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, too. But Emily Balch? Has anyone ever heard of her?

Here's another one: Jessie Donaldson Hodder, born March 30, 1867, in Cincinnati. She was appointed superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women in Framingham in 1910 and so totally transformed the institution that penologists from all over Europe came to study it and model their own prisons after it. In 1925 she was the only female delegate to the International Prison Congress in London.

Jessie Donaldson Hodders isn't just world history, she's local history. And yet who among us is familiar with her name? Then there's Alice Whiting Putnam, born in Chicago, Jan. 18, 1841, the founder of America's kindergartens. I went to a state teacher's college in the 1960s. I took education courses by the dozen. I have a master's in education and studied the educational theories of Plato, Benjamin Franklin, John Dewey, Horace Mann, A.S. Neill and even Jonathan Kozol. But Alice Whiting Putnam? Never once did I hear her name.

"More moving than a novel and more accurate than the daily paper, each of these fragments begs us to remember that the past was once real life, and that it happened in kitchens and porches and back bedrooms," Laura Shapiro writes in the foreward of "Give Her This Day."

History has always been HIS story - the story of battles and conquests, of revolutions and counter revolutions, of world events paramount to HIM. "Give Her This Day" is HERstory - the story of 366 American women born in the 1800s. What is shown in their words and in the encapsulations of their lives, is that women did more than support their men and follow in their footsteps. They shaped this nation, too. They were thinkers and creators, doers and innovators, dreamers and shapers. Incredibly, even today they remain invisible, as unheralded and uncelebrated as the month set aside to honor them.