Overdue, Lost, & Now Remembered: On Overlooked Women

I didn’t learn to read until I was 8 years old and in the third grade.  As if I understood that I was a late-bloomer, I embraced books from then on, reading all the time.  I read on the school bus, during recess and lunch, secretly in class when I should have been doing math, walking home from school, floating on an air mattress in the pool, stretched out on the sofa, and in bed by the street light at night.  I read as if to make up for lost time.  I can remember looking at the stacks and stacks of books in the library and thinking with a shivering joy of the books yet to be read. 

I was thrilled on the day that I found a uniform collection of historical American biographies in the Weldon Elementary School Library.  I stood in front of the rows of books and gloried in the happy hours of reading ahead of me.  And then I read about these Americans, in alphabetical order, so that I wouldn’t forget a single one.  From John Adams to Daniel Webster and every person in between, I devoured these books over a two year period, fearful that I wouldn’t finish before I completed 6th grade.  I read quickly and only slowed my pace when the biography was about a woman.

There weren’t very many and they were mostly 20th century women —- Babe Didrikson, Amelia Earhart, and Eleanor Roosevelt stand out in my mind today.  I remember that the Harriet Tubman volume was thin, leaving me many unanswered questions.  For every woman featured in these 1970s-era books, there were more than 10 men.  I know because I counted and felt the unfairness of it.  I felt then that there were women in our past who had done amazing things that I would never learn about.  Now, 40 years later, I realize that for all the stories told there are countless women who never even got the chance to be great.

I thought of all of this when I opened the New York Times this morning to find that they would be writing obituaries for the women they have overlooked in the past 160 years.  It's a fitting choice for International Women's Day, a treat I would have loved as a girl.  I devoured the first 15 stories, grateful for a snow day that permitted the indulgence.  The NYT has promised to tell more women’s stories and I will watch carefully so I don’t miss a single one.  I will direct the children I teach, girls and boys, to these stories.  I will be grateful for amazing women now being remembered.  But I will still wonder at the talents lost to a time when women were always marginalized and excluded.  I will miss what they would have accomplished.  And I will re-double my efforts to ensure it doesn’t continue to happen.