Category Archives: women’s history

A Day to Remember

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July, 1978

The ERA MARCH, Washington Mall, Washington, DC

More than 100,000 women wearing white – the connection to the women who fought for the Vote – marched in favor of Congress granting an extension on the time given to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

When the vote was taken that year  theygranted an additional three years.

I was there that day marching with a group under the flag of the Coalition of Women’s Arts Organizations.

It was an exciting, energizing, and hopeful gathering on a very hot and humid Summer day in Washington. We were part of women’s  history.

Those days were filled with challenges. The memories of the times and the people are vivid for me
and being a part of the 1970s Women’s Movement changed my life.

Pushing Boundaries is my personal story of those days – –

I will be telling PUSHING BOUNDARIES:

2 PM  Thursday  September 10 at the International Storytelling Center, Jonesborough, TN

7:30 PM  Wednesday, September 16, Friendship Heights Village Com. Ctr., Chevy Chase, MD

 
I hope women will come to hear this story and to remember their own.

An Eye-Opener

TWO WOMEN COLLAGE
Thumbing through some old journals I stumbled across an entry in one that brought back the memory of something I thought I would never forget ….. But I had.
 In 1999 I booked gigs in North Carolina for my first on-my-own storytelling road trip. I was performing at Meredith College in Raleigh and at the Museum of the New South in Charlotte for an event sponsored by the Mecklenburg County Women’s Commission. I was so excited about telling, Flesh on Old Bones, my stories about my North Carolina women that I did not think about the dreaded eight hour drive ahead.
Saturday afternoon before I was to leave on Sunday, I was moving fast around the house to get ready for the road trip. I stepped out onto the deck to ask my husband, Jim, who was working in the yard, a question. He answered and when I whirled around to go back into the house I tripped on the doorway. I splatted forward and met the kitchen floor full on my face. I felt my glasses dig into my cheekbone on the right side.
Jim heard the commotion and rushed in. “Stay still until I check you out.” His doctor-self always jumped to the rescue. He did his checking and then he helped me to a near-by couch.
“Ellouise, this eye is going to look bad. It is already swelling. I will ice it for you.”
 I reached up and when I touched my forehead and the area around the right eye it was tender.
“Jim, what will I do. I have to drive to North Carolina tomorrow.”
He was crushing ice in the kitchen.
“We will see. Just keep you head down for right now.”
” I have to go.”
His doctor’s voice answered,  “We will see, Ellouise.”
By next day my face was swollen and the right side was now a deep magenta. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror.
 “Jim, ” I called out. “I look like I have been beaten up. How can I tell stories to people?”
Please look at this, my eyelid is so swollen I can’t see out of my right eye.”
Jim carefully lifted my eyelid. Then he reached in the medicine chest and brought out the band-aid box. “This might work.” He taped my eyelid up so that I could see out of the right eye.”
“Ellouise, I don’t think you can drive to NC like this ….
plus the way you look you are going to scare people.”
“I am going.” And, I did. Changing the band-aids frequently and wondering how I was going to get along.
First stop was Meredith college where those folks were ever so delicately, so painfully polite they never mentioned my face. Only the young guy who wired me up with a lapel mic said anything –
 “what happened to you, Lady.”
 After that I told my hour program of stories feeling like a gold fish in a bowl as I stood in an amphitheater looking up into about 100 young faces who looked to me like they were wondering “what happened to you, lady.”
When I called Jim that evening he was encouraging,
 “Jim, they act like they don’t believe me when I tell them I fell.”
“ Honey I was pretty sure they wouldn’t.
“Sounds like your eye is all right. You are doing a good job. Keep it up.”
“That felt good but I would have felt better if there had been a strong warm hug to go along with it.
Next day, still using the band-aids to hold up the eye-lid so that I could see to drive, I drove on to Charlotte, to perform for the women’s commission event. A woman met me at the museum to help me set up. She gasped when she saw me. Then she explained that the issue they were working on for this year was Domestic Violence. We both agreed I looked like they had brought me in as a poster for the issue. I was embarrassed and felt a bit dumb, that I had not made the connection between my face and their issue work.
I swallowed hard and explained how I had tripped in the kitchen.
“Well, tell them that when you start your program. Some of the women will believe you – some won’t.”
At least that would be better than ignoring what a sight I looked like  as I had done at Meredith.
Oops. I had forgotten about my mother.
She lived in Charlotte, where I was born and raised. Part of my trip was a visit with her. Yes, she was coming to the performance – with my Aunt. Sure enough, they came all dressed up and a little early.
When I saw them come in  I hurried to the back of the room to greet them. They both gasped. Mama seemed to have lost her voice but my Aunt Katherine was never without words,
“Good lord a mighty Ellouise, what happened to you, girl”.  And I told them the thumbnail version of the story.
Mama had gotten her words back,” well, I knew Jim didn’t do that.” I hugged her..
The woman who spoke after my stories was a survivor of Domestic Violence who now spoke to groups to  educate the public. When she was called to the microphone she paused and waited a moment before she said –
“I used to look like that,” she looked over at me “but it wasn’t because I fell in my kitchen – like she did. It was because my husband hit me.”
They liked my stories that night – they laughed and listened and they told me so afterwards.
But there is no question that the story that was the “eye-opener” was the survivor’s story.

Weaving Women’s Stories

Weaving Stories of Women’s History

February 15 was Susan B. Anthony’s birthday. She is a legendary women’s rights advocate from the early 19th Century who led the struggle for Suffrage so that today we women have the right to vote.

When I was reading through some past blog posts and I came across this one from October 2007.  It seems right to re-post it on Susan B’s birthday as an homage, a connection, and a bit of reminder for the gift she and the women following her won and passed on.

October 30, 2007 The Veteran Feminists of America held a reception at the Sewall Belmont House on Capitol Hill, DC. which was once Alice Paul’s home and the seat of the National Women’s Party, particularly during the fight for gaining women’s right to vote.  This evening was an induction ceremony and I was one of the inductees. So many familiar faces. For any one who had been actively involved in the many parts of the struggles of the 1970s it was a flashback of those days.

I came to be a part of this group on that evening because of my activism in several roles for national organizations during the struggles to gain equal rights for women artists and for work as ERA Campaign Director for the League of Women Voters the last three years of the campaign to ratify the Equal Right Amendment.  It was a proud evening!!!

I reported on it for my blog that night.

Well, a lot has changed since that evening.

For one thing, I stopped dying my hair shortly after that and my budget is grateful.

Since well before 2007 I turned the skills learned in my lobbying days toward becoming a professional storyteller.  I still keep women, their history,  and their lives at the center of my work. www.ellouiseschoettler.net

Last year I introduced a new story that is more personal to me than anyone would guess unless they knew my history as a feminist activist or know women’s history of being told to wait for years for the right to vote or for the Equal Rights Amendment – which, by the way, women do not have yet.

Months ago I discovered the story of THE HELLO GIRLS – switchboard operators who volunteered to the Army Signal Corps and served in France during WWI – and when they returned home after the war were denied their veterans benefits. Sound familiar? But they were determined to fight against this unfairness. They lobbied for 60 years – finally gaining their veterans benefits in 1977. Audiences gasp when they hear – “of 233 who served in France there were only 18 were still living.”

The “plucky” women of THE HELLO GIRLS have been left out of history books and remain in the shadows of history.

You can see, I am sure, why I am devoted to this story.

I consider my telling this story as lobbying for women’s rights but using a different megaphone.
THE HELLO GIRLS will return to the 2015 DC Capital Fringe in July. Perhaps they will show up in your area. Their story is our story.

Let’s celebrate Susan B. Anthony – she never gave up – – and neither can we, or our daughters, or all the women after us.