Leaping* Ahead to Women’s History Month
I realize that it is not yet March, but I’m eager to start the conversation about Women’s History Month this month.
A lot of us who work in the field of women’s history have mixed feelings about Women’s History Month.** On the one hand, we are pleased to have an excuse to celebrate the achievements of women—famous, forgotten and all variations in between. On the other hand, most of us feel strongly that we need Women’s History Month because as a culture we have failed to recognize that women’s history is in fact simply history. When history happened, we were there and taking time to consider the how and why of our involvement makes the story bigger, deeper, more complex. Just more.
As long as we need Women’s History Month, we’re going to celebrate it here in the Margins, and we’re going to celebrate it hard.
Last March I ran a series of mini-interviews called Three Questions and an Answer on my blog for women’s history month. Four days a week I interviewed people who write about or otherwise work with women’s history. Many of you told me you enjoyed, and so did I.
So this year I’m doing it again. I’ve widened my scope to included people who are running women’s history Twitter feeds, writing novels (in one case in verse), and building a women’s history library, as well as women who write non-fiction about the women who made history.
First up on Monday, three questions and an answer with Vicky Alvear Schecter, who writes about women of the ancient world, including—wait for it—ancient women warriors.
We’re going to have Big Fun.
*The allusion to Leap Year was unintentional, but since I can’t un-see it, I’m going to own it.
**Which started out as Women’s History Week in 1982.
In which I announce that Women Warriors is out in paperback–and immediately wander off topic
For historical reasons related to the sale of books that I do not entirely understand, new books almost always release on Tuesdays. Today it is my turn. The paperback edition of Women Warriors released today and I am jazzed.
I wish I could claim that I took the way new books are released into account when I decided that my blog posts would appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.1 But in fact, I was not looking that far ahead. I’m not even sure that I knew that books release on Tuesdays when I started History in the Margins back in 2011. I certainly didn’t understand the relationship between writing a blog and writing a book.
Back in August I calculated that I’ve written roughly 850 blog posts in eight years–obviously it’s been a few more since then. At an average of 500 words per blog post, that means I’ve written the equivalent of a short book’s worth of blog posts each year.2 People sometimes ask me why I spend time and energy writing blog posts that I could spend on writing books, or articles for paying markets. (For that matter, I could spend the time on tango lessons, or a class in conversational Spanish, or reading my way through the hundreds of books on my To-Be-Read shelves.)
But the fact of the matter is that History in the Margins helped make Women Warriors possible. It wasn’t a straight path from A to B.3 But in the course of writing all those blog posts, I exercised my writing muscles, I honed my voice,4 I explored ideas that interested me,5 and I found my people. Thanks for being along for the ride.
(1) Unless my schedule blows up on me. As it did last week. And the week before.
(2)Pro tip for those of you who are writers: Don’t ever do this kind of math about your writing life. It will make you nuts.
(3) Nothing in my life, or in my head, is ever a straight path from A to B. Things tend to look more like this:
(4) Including my penchant for chatty footnotes
(5) And a few that didn’t. There is a folder labelled “Duds” in the Scrivener project that is home to History in the Margins
History on Display: Capturing A German Submarine at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry
U-505 Conning Tower @ The Museum of Science and Industry
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a major attraction is within a five-minute drive* of your home, you will seldom if ever visit it.
It is not true that I have never visited Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, which is one of the major landmarks in my neighborhood.** My first two summers as a very poor graduate student, I would visit the museum regularly because it was air-conditioned, free, and a nice change from the university library.
But until last night, I had never visited one of the museum’s major exhibits, the U-505 submarine.*** If you want the short version: wow!
The exhibit has two major components. A significant portion of the exhibit demonstrates how a submarine works. This stuff is clear and often fun: think an interactive periscope-navigation section. But the biggest part of the exhibit—and the part I was there to see—was the story of how a U.S. Navy Task Group captured the U-505 off the coast of West Africa, and why it was important. The MSI approached that story in several different ways: a film clip that included the respective commanders of the submarine and the American task force talking about the capture from their own perspectives, panels and timelines that traced the voyages of the U-505and the American ships, artifacts from the submarine (including what I assume was a replica of the Enigma machine from the submarine ), and a tour of the captured submarine itself. ****
Here are the big things I came away with:
- Life on a submarine was miserable and dangerous.
- The Navy captured the U-505 on June 4, 1944—two days before D-Day. The German submarine not only carried an Enigma machine and related code books, but lots of other critical information.
- Because of the proximity to D-Day and the value of the captured information, the United States decided not to inform Germany that we had captured the submarine, leaving the families of the 59 sailors aboard believing that their sons/husbands/fathers/brothers had died at sea. I understand the thought process, but this was a definite breach of the Geneva Convention.
- The task force towed the submarine through open seas to the nearest safe harbor, which was Bermuda, 2500 miles away. (I still can’t get my head around the idea that there wasn’t someplace closer.)
If you’re coming to Chicago, or if, like me you live in Chicago but haven’t gotten yourself to the exhibit, I urge you to put this exhibit on your schedule. If Chicago isn’t in the cards, check out the on-line information from the museum HERE.
*Ten minutes, tops.
**Along with the University of Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and, more recently, President Obama’s house—depending on the interests of the person asking.
***I still haven’t visited the coal mine exhibit. Which may also be spectacular.
****Book a time slot for the tour ahead. For obvious reasons, each time slot can only accommodate a small number of people. And while I watched a glamorous young woman navigate the submarine with total ease in four-inch sparkling heels, I would recommend flat, non-slippery shoes.