The First Day of Spring

Here with the first day of spring yesterday in the midst of heavy snowfall—98 inches on the mountain, the most in many years—I am announcing the Revolution, the bloodless yet dramatic change in U.S. society that we feminists, and others, have been slowly pushing forward for the past forty years (at least!).

I’m using as my examples the full coverage of our achievements in Sunday’s The New York Times, admittedly a limited example but still pertinent since big media is the slowest to change.

First, the book reviews, which have over the years scanted women writers. “Tomb Raider”—a very misleading headline; the old reaction to the deeds of powerful women will take a long time to eradicate—chronicles the achievements of the great woman archeologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt’s and her extraordinary work in Egypt in saving the giant statues of Rameses II and the Abu Simbel temple from destruction due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam. If you have read my biography, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke you will remember that Duke also journeyed to Egypt as an amateur to try to buy the temples along the Nile and have each one transported to a capital of an American state, frustrated by Nasser’s demand for too much money. As Lynne Olson explains in Empress of the Nile, Desroches-Noblecourt succeeded as “the most accomplished woman to break into that men’s club” of archeologists.

On the other side of the world, Jennifer Wright describes in Madam Restell how the so-called Abortionist of Fifth Avenue cared for her wealthy clients’ needs until her arrest in 1878 at “the hands of the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstalk.” This is a battle we are engaged in even now, and the review’s illustration with a particularly dour image of Restell does only a little to detract from the lengthy and respectful review.

In the world of modern dance, a review of Lynn Garafola’s La Nijinska, Choreography of the Modern rescues from the shadows the long and important career of the woman usually buried beneath our fascination with her brother. Garafola’s biography examines “the setbacks and triumphs of her career,” as she crossed continents, designing sixty modern ballets performed occasionally even now, and asks, “Why has it been difficult for women in particular, and for Nijnska in particular, to achieve artistic longevity despite the quality and artistic volume of their work?” No answer is offered but the fact that this biography could be written and published and paid for and given a page-long, largely respectful review, speaks to the success in this field of our revolution. We can all provide an answer to the review’s unanswered question.

Finally, to bring the Revolution into the present, we will soon be seeing Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu performing in the movie Shazam! Fury of the Gods as two powerful female gods—not goddesses!

And daily protests across the country that continue since the overturning of Roe V. Wade by a Supreme Court blinded by its own testosterone shows that we will not be defeated.

So let us welcome spring!

In Women, Writing The New York Times