|
|
The Most Influential Woman in My Life |
| As an activist, and historian, and a woman, I have spent around fifty years paying attention to the women in my life, the future possibilities for women, and the lives and contributions of women who came before me. |
|
From Sappho to Gertrude Stein to the "Battle-ing Bard of Poteidia", Gabrielle; from Boudicca to Joan of Arc to Xena; from Nefretiti to Elizabeth I to Eleanor Roosevelt; from first doctors, first social workers, first astronauts, first tennis stars; from great writers, actors, singers, dancers, poets, inventors, scientists, teachers, saints, stargazers, healers, guides, renegades, I am made. I know these women. I've read about them. I've dreamed about them. I've fantasized about them. I've wanted to be them. I've marveled at their courage, their wisdom, their joy, and their commitment. I've wept at their words, deeds, sacrifices, and deaths. In my journey to be a woman of worth, I look at all these and know I far to go to compare. |
|
Excluding the women in my life, my Mother, my Sister, my family, the woman by whom I have been touched the most; I think, it has to be the unknown woman. The woman without a name…the woman who struggles in the sweatshop…the woman behind the throne… the woman who is also the farmer not just the wife… the countless women under the veil…the woman who has written, crafted, created, dreamed, and changed the world in secret; that is the woman. The woman who has torn my heart apart, the woman who inspires me to do the work I do, the woman who holds up half the sky, she is the woman who most inspires. We do not know her name, have, in fact, never known her name, and though she is seen everyday is not recognized. But she is there and has been there always. Cleaning our offices, clerking in the grocery store, making our clothes, marching for equal rights, gathering and hunting for her family. Doing the work, making the effort, living, loving, struggling, Without acknowledgement and most times without pay. Virtually invisible. Behind the scenes. Unknown. Anonymous. Against all customs, constraints, taboos, and cultural slavery; she achieves. In secret and at risk sometimes. But certainly without tribute always. When you see that which is attributed to anonymous, believe me, that deed or action or word was the accomplishment of a woman. For anonymous was a woman. Christine Jarosz |