On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 10:03 AM, 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
My all-time favorite article I've ever worked on is a biography of Elsie MacGill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsie_MacGill
who I knew nothing about, but stumbled across and she was so cool that I had to do some serious research. She was a Canadian who was the world's first female aircraft designer, during WWII, and was a major part of Canada's aircraft industry during the war; she had a comic published about her called "Queen of the Hurricanes"! She later went on to a career advocating for women's rights. She did all this despite being disabled by polio and never learning to fly herself.
Also: if anyone is looking for an article subject, I just stumbled on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Borg_Institute_Women_of_Vision_Awards Lots of redlinks and promising article subjects in there!
-- phoebe