Hotel La Fonda watercolor by Chandler O’Leary
I’ll start with Chandler O’Leary whose website is full of the delightful watercolor sketches she does on-site as she travels. She doesn’t use a GPS, saying it feels as though she is being led by the nose—I share that feeling!—but instead paints and draws, without a camera, striving to record every moment of her wanderings while acknowledging that’s probably impossible. But what a worthy goal! She has written a book called Dead Feminists to celebrate all the women over the generations, many forgotten, who contributed to the liberation many of us take for granted today.
Look her up. You won’t regret it.
We are fortunate to be in the midst of a perhaps short-lived interest in the lives of women—a parallel to our interest in all the people who have been left out of our museums, our books, our neighborhoods and our conversations. The Morgan Library in New York City is presenting “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia,” laying to rest the assumption that women of earlier periods couldn’t write.
The imbalance in the art world is well known. For several decades, the Guerilla Girls donned their masks—no one knew their names—and protested outside New York museums to induce them to include more women in their collections. The girls are now probably a little tired of protesting but one of their successes is Lynne Drexler (1928-1999), a lifelong artist who sold some of her work but was never given solid gallery representation and grew to hate the art world that excluded her. Two of her paintings sold for far more than their estimates at an auction last spring, and two New York galleries are organizing a show called “Lynne Drexler: The First Decade,” her first solo show in 38 years.
Drexler’s two recently sold paintings are described in an article in The New York Times as “mosaic-like fields of bright colors” leading me to wonder if painting flowers inevitably relegates women artists to the sidelines. Probably of greater consequence was Drexler’s attempt to play with the big boys of her time, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock in the toxic atmosphere of the Cedar Tavern in downtown New York. I remember how horrified I was at the same period by the atmosphere of George Plympton’s literary parties where we young women seemed mostly to be delivering drinks.
To brings things up to the present, the Washington Post recently recognized the work of Jess Wade who, having noticed the dearth of women scientists included in Wikipedia, set about to remedy the omission, researching and adding 1,750 remarkable women scientists to the listing we all depend upon without asking by what method names are included or excluded. Among many others, Wade researched Kim Cobb, an American climatologist, who received several scientific awards for her work but was not included in Wikipedia. In fact only 19 percent of the biographies on the British Wikipedia are of women, and I doubt that the U.S. version has many more.
But due to the liberalizing effect of all us “dead feminists,” there is now a WikiProject called “Women in Red” dedicated to addressing the gender gap. Two billion people a month consult Wikipedia, making it a crucial source of information that must be balanced and fair. To be excluded is to be forgotten.
Many women’s lives are not included in the obituaries published nationally or locally, blotting them out for the future. A class I hope one day to teach would instruct and inspire women to write obits for women they knew or knew of who were never given obits; we need to begin to fill these gaps, as crucial as the gaps in Wikipedia.
One who was not left out is Ewing Arnn Fahey who died recently in Kentucky, just 48 hours before her 100th birthday. An unusually long and informative obituary begins with the essential facts of her life: her mother’s commitment as “an early pioneer in the field of special education,” her father’s death when Ewing was 9 years old and the financial difficulties that followed, an experience that caused Ewing to learn” to accept life’s vagaries at an early age”—essential for a heroine. Then there were her summers at Chautauqua where she heard lectures by Amelia Earhart, among others, and her BA with a double major in Fine Arts and Art History from the University of Louisville in 1942 at the age of 19 through the National Youth Administration. As editor of The Cardinal, the University of Lousville’s newspaper she wrote editorials that sparked controversy—perhaps the first time she experienced the power of her words. Work as a fashion copy editor for McCall’s pattern sales and Norcross Greeting Cards led to more work in advertising, offset with her love of racing and sailing small boats on the Ohio River. And it goes on and on—she worked as a sculptor for four decades, past the age of 95, co-creating a sculpture of “earth, welded steel and neon filling a one-fifth acre site in Louisville…”
Among many other things. Ewing’s amazing life hints that perhaps a woman is wise to decide to stay in her birthplace rather than sinking in the morass of a big city.
And so we have four fascinating women, proving to all of us that guts, determination and talent win the day.
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