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I finally discovered the most recent era when female form and discernment were esteemed: The era was during the 1,000 years prior to the Egyptian civilization. That's some 7,500 years ago when females were most recently highly revered.
As you read this newsletter, there are some 40 armed conflicts happening simultaneously, and the repressive masculine media ignore impacts to women, mothers and their children. It appears women, children, and nature could be the top three threats to the male faculty of reason.
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn
Actor
1907-2003
Hepburn (November 8, 1907-June 29, 2003) is an iconic four-time Academy Award-winning American star of film, television, and stage, recognized for a sharp wit, New England gentility and fierce independence. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Hepburn as the number one female star in their Greatest American Screen Legends list (AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars).
Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, a successful urologist from Virginia, and Katharine Martha Houghton, a suffragette and birth control advocate, who, along with Margaret Sanger, helped to found the organization that became Planned Parenthood.
Hepburn's father was a staunch proponent of publicizing the dangers of venereal disease in a time when such things were not discussed, and her mother campaigned for birth control and equal rights for women.
The Hepburns demanded frequent familial discussions on these topics and more, and as a result the Hepburn children were well versed in social and political issues. The Hepburn children were never asked to leave a room no matter what the topic of conversation was. Once a very young Katharine Hepburn even accompanied her mother to a suffrage rally.
With their parents’ encouragement, the children were unafraid of expressing frank views on various topics, including sex. “We were snubbed by everyone, but we grew quite to enjoy that,” Hepburn later said of her unabashedly liberal family, who she credited with giving her a sense of adventure and independence.
Martha Graham
Dancer, choreographer
1893-1991
Martha Graham reached the pinnacle of success in the 1940s, when her innovations in modern dance were critically and publicly acclaimed, first in New York City, and then nationwide. Her name has since become synonymous with modern dance in the United States.
Martha Graham was to modern dance what Pablo Picasso was to modern art: the single greatest innovator of this century. Like Picasso, hers was a sweeping talent defined by a variety of styles and interests. In Graham’s work Grand Kabuki, Greek theater, German expressionism, psychoanalysis, Native American ritual, Puritanism, and American history and poetry combined in explosive fashion. The 1940s were her heyday. She produced dances of transcendent splendor and worked with some of the world's most famous composers. During the decade, her experimentation, earlier acclaimed in New York dance circles, became widely known; as modern dance was popularized, her name became synonymous with the form.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Artist, Painter
1887-1986
The American painter Georgia O’Keeffe created a distinctive iconography that includes startling details of plant forms, bleached bones, and landscapes of the New Mexico desert — all rendered with pristine clarity.
Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O’Keeffe studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York City. She worked briefly as a commercial artist in Chicago, and in 1912 she became interested in the principles of Oriental design. After working as a public school art supervisor in Amarillo, Texas, she attended art classes conducted by Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia University. She instituted Dow’s system of art education, based on recurring themes in Oriental art, in her teacher-training courses at West Texas State Normal College, where she served as department head.
Early in her career, she developed a personal style, favoring inherently abstract subject matter such as flower details and austere architectural themes. Many of her paintings are dramatic, sharp-focus enlargements of botanical details.
Marie Curie
Polish-French chemist and
physicist
1867-1934
Whenever Marie Curie was asked in her later years when she was going to write her autobiography, she responded, “[My life] is such an uneventful, simple little story. I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I have done my work in France.”
Thus did Marie Curie respond in her later years to those who asked when
she was going to write her autobiography. A brilliant physicist and tireless
researcher who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, she was always
exceedingly modest about her achievements and emphasized that they belonged
to science, not to her. Yet as Mollie Keller put it in her biography of
Curie, “This tiny woman with her decigram of radium turned the world
upside down, forever changing the way we look at, understand, and use
our environment.”
Jane Austen
Author
1775-1817
The English writer Jane Austen was one of the most important novelists of the 19th century. In her intense concentration on the thoughts and feelings of a limited number of characters; her insights into women's lives; her mastery of form and irony, Jane Austen creates as profound an understanding and as precise a vision of the potentialities of the human spirit as the art of fiction has ever achieved. Although her novels received favorable reviews, she was not celebrated as an author during her lifetime.
Jane Austen was born in 1775 at Steventon, in the south of England, where her father was rector of the parish. She was the seventh of eight children in an affectionate and high-spirited family. After Mr. Austen's death, the three women moved to the village of Chawton in 1809 where Jane Austen lived for the rest of her life. She never married, but received at least one proposal, and led an active and happy life, unmarked by dramatic incident and surrounded by her sister and brothers and their families.
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