Henrietta Hay's Column

Why do we have a Women's History Month? We don't have a Men's History Month. Actually, women have been around since the beginning. It's just that the historians never noticed.

There are a few women we know out of the past: Antigone who is famous because she retrieved her brother's body from the field of battle, Joan of Arc who got in trouble with the male warriors, Queen Victoria who got her job through her father.

A cursory search of my reference books would indicate that there were no women in America for the first couple of centuries. Well, there must have been a few, because in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, they eliminated 19 of them after the Witchcraft trials.

One of the earliest written records proving the existence of American women came from that great Abigail Adams. She wrote John, who was attending the Continental Congress, to "Remember the ladies and be more generous and favourable (sic) to them than your ancestors." Of course, he wasn't.

Dolley Madison was a real heroine, but my quick fix American history book records only the fact that the fact that she was charming and amply endowed, and that she decorated the White House. When the British approached Washington in 1814, however, Dolley was the last to leave the nearly empty mansion and barely escaped carrying important state papers and the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.

One of the first thoroughly modern women was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a plump, white-haired woman who looked like everybody's grandmother, but had the soul of a flaming rebel. Married to abolitionist Henry B. Stanton, she insisted that the word "obey" be omitted from the marriage vows. In 1848 she and three other women put their heads together and changed the world - or at least this country. They organized the Seneca Falls Convention, which was the first women's rights assembly in the United States.

The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments says in part," Resolved, That woman is man's equal--was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such...." Pretty heavy stuff in 1848 -- and in 1996 too for that matter.

Her good friend and fellow Quaker was Susan B. Anthony, who also made it into the history books. Stanton, the stay-at-home feminist mother of a brood of children and Anthony, the footloose unmarried woman with a burning cause made a great team. Together they spearheaded the women suffrage movement, and forced Americans to listen. It took 72 long years, however, from Seneca Falls to the passage of the 19th amendment to the constitution.

Another really great woman of those early years was ex-slave Sojourner Truth, six feet tall, with a fine oratorical style. At the Women's Rights Convention of 1851 she thundered, "...I have plowed, I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. Ain't I a woman? I have borne 13 children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! Ain't I a woman?"

Mother Jones was called by one prosecuting attorney the most dangerous woman in America. She swore and she drank and organized her first labor strike at the age of 47. For forty years she roamed the country looking for trouble and finding it. She disagreed with the suffragettes, shouting, "You don't need a vote to raise hell."

In 1954 Betty Friedan came along with a book called "The Feminine Mystique." Women had the vote, but they were still second-class citizens. Her thesis was that feminism was not a dirty joke. "The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply have been stopped at a stage of evolution far short of their human capacity." The book was an instant success. She went on to help found the National Organization for Women.

The second major female revolution had begun and is still going on.

Maybe by the year 2096 there will be no need for a Women's History Month, because all women's achievements will included in the history books.

We can dream, can't we?