[Gendergap] Sharing an article

[phoebe ayers]

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth at 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