Thursday, March 11, 2010

If Your Body's Sexed Female, Who's First in History How?

It's interesting how history is written this month.  Yes, this month in 2010.  What's written is making (sexed) history.  In some month some time from now, some of us or our grandchildren will look back and see how we've gendered our memory:

Via my iPhone, I get news feeds and some of those feeds include "history firsts."  On March 9, for example, I got these two items.

Notice in this first one below, there's mention of 19 males but only 3 females, if you include also the plastic doll "Barbie."  The history spans from 1454 to 2010.

http://www.answers.com/topic/tuesday-march-9-2010-from-today-s-highlights-archive

Now see in this second one here, written by a woman even to focus exclusively on women, the history is given month by month but only goes back to 1805 and never makes it forward past 1995.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/03/09/v-mobile/2026277/a-look-at-womens-history-milestones.html

I'm sure these "histories" are only random samples of other writings of history that are much better, much more accurate and fuller representations of people who are firsts in history.  But as my children increasingly get history bits through technologies like I'm trying to adopt, well I wonder.

One encouraging piece comes via the WhiteHouse App on my iPhone from US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis.  Maybe its the stories more than the soundbites that will endure.  Here's Solis's first:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/09/values-behind-international-women-s-day-0

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