On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth@gmail.com> wrote:
All,

I just ran across a short Wikipedia article I wrote a couple years ago, and thought I'd share it. It's a bio of Frances Fuller Victor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Fuller_Victor

Victor was generally known as a novelist of the 19th century American West, but she also ghost-wrote tremendous quantities of history for publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, without attribution. She was a feminist:

"But just so long as women content themselves to be parasites, no matter how graceful or beautiful in their dependence, so long will they degrade the idea of work for their less fortunate sisters, make more thorny the path of the honestly struggling of their sex, reduce the wages that woman receives for her work, and perpetuate their own moral enslavement" ([Dorothy D.], "Poor Ladies," San Francisco Daily Morning Call, April 25, 1875, 1).

Another article that may be of interest is Pat Barker's bio. Sue Gardner started the article a while back, and several of us have chipped in along the way; I think it's a pretty strong bio, about a compelling woman. Barker is an award-winning, contemporary English novelist, whose work centers around memory, trauma, survival and recovery:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Barker

I thought, along with the more serious deliberations, it might be nice to occasionally share interesting Wikipedia content we've worked on related to gender. If you've worked on something that may be of interest to this list, please share your links too!

-Pete

Pete, this is a great idea! I've enjoyed reading the articles that people have shared.

I have a few favorites but one that stands out is a biography of a living person that I wrote. I rarely create BLPs because of the concerns that I have with them being filled with unsourced negative content.

But JoAnn H. Morgan stood out as a glaring omission that I couldn't pass on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JoAnn_H._Morgan

Morgan was the first female engineer at Kennedy Space Center when she went to work there in 1963, and she remained the only one for a long time. Back in the 60's she helped design the rocket launch computer systems for the initial NASA flight programs. For advancement she decided to go into management instead of flight, and later she was the first woman to serve as a senior executive at Kennedy Space Center.

There is loads more information about her in books, and more good images since she worked for the US government,  so her article could be expanded more.

Katherine Bement Davis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Bement_Davis

or

Ellen_Hardin_Walworth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Hardin_Walworth

are  more typical of the people who I write about.

I enjoy writing about women who were trailblazers during the late 19th or early 20th century. Many of them were well known during their time but fell out of common knowledge because they did have positions in society that were recorded in textbooks.

Sydney Poore
User:FloNight