A freeborn African-American educator and anti-slavery activist, Charlotte Bridges Forten Grimke, was one of the most influential of abolitionists and civil rights activists of the mid-nineteenth century. In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Forten went to Port Royal, South Carolina, where slaves abandoned by their masters after they fled Union forces, were preparing for life after slavery. Forten established a school for former slaves. Her ultimate goal was to provide her students with the skills to live as free persons. After the war Forten worked for issues such as women’s rights and black civil rights.
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Mathematician and U.S. Navy rear admiral Grace Murray Hopper was a pioneer in computer science. Hopper was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and developed the first compiler for computer programming language. She helped to create UNIVAC I, the first commercial electronic computer, and the naval applications for COBOL, or com- mon business-oriented language. She is credited with popularizing the term “debugging.” Her nickname “Amazing Grace” came from the scope of her accomplishments and her naval rank.
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Raised as a girl in the early 1600s, Thomasine/Thomas Hall spent much of her adult life living as a man. Hall came to Virginia in 1607 and lived as a man until 1629, when she was discovered and ordered to assume female dress. Hall may have been a cross dresser, but she also many have been inter-sex, as there seems to be some confusion about her sex. In the 1630s a court ordered Hall to wear man’s dress, but a woman’s apron, suggesting the importance of clothing to colonial gender ideologies.
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Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.
The 1916 Motion Picture News Studio Directory credits Los Angeles native Ida May Park with twelve years of stage experience as a “leading woman in support of well-known stars” and with screen experience at Pathé and the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, where she was then employed as a scenario writer (134). Park flourished at Universal, where she wrote forty-four films, half of them feature length, between 1914 and 1919. Before 1917, Park’s husband, Joseph De Grasse, directed almost all of the films she wrote. In 1917, Park began directing her own scenarios and, according to a 1918 story in the Universal Weekly, a newspaper for exhibitors, editing them as well (29). She crafted a total of eleven features by this method in a scant two years. Park is important to understand as part of a strong creative presence that we now refer to as “Universal Women,” those who between 1912 and 1919 were promoted from acting or writing to directing and were credited on at least one hundred and seventy titles, a cohort that included Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Lois Weber, and Elsie Jane Wilson (Cooper 17, Denton 50). Park and De Grasse left Universal in the spring or summer of 1919 for reasons as yet unknown. On September 12, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lew Cody and manager-producer Louis J. Gasnier had signed her to direct motion pictures in which Cody would star (16). She made one such title, and, with De Grasse, directed two features for Andrew J. Callaghan Productions in 1920.
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Civil rights and labor activist Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta has made a life’s work of advocacy for farmworkers, immigrants, women, and the American Hispanic (Latino/a) community. Huerta is the co-founder of three major civil rights organizations, including the Stockton, California, chapter of the Community Service Organization (1955); the Agricultural Workers Association (1960); and the National Farm Workers Association (1962) with Cesar Chavez (1927–1993), which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW).
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Female pirate Anne Bonny operated in the Caribbean in the early 1700s. Though she never commanded a ship she was known for her ferocious fighting skills. She and Mary Read, another female pirate, were eventually captured by authorities. Read died in prison, but Bonny may have escaped or been ransomed. Both women were legendary free spirits who rejected ideas about women’s place and lived lives of relative freedom.
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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
Alright, so welcome everybody. Today because we’re just two days outside of Halloween, we want to talk about horror but we want to talk about women in horror because you don’t get a lot of that right? When we think about horror we think about a lot of famous male authors. Now we do think about some of the women — both writers and we’re gonna think about some stories that are famous stories that are female focused and how that affects us as we watch these types of things right? What they make us think about. What we should be thinking about? So when I think about horror, I think about this lady first, Guesses? Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley. When we think about Mary Shelley we think about what book she wrote? Frankenstein. Right? Frankenstein does double duty. It’s kind of a double genre piece. It’s science fiction but it’s also horror. When we think about Frankenstein, we think about the monster and the movies that we’ve seen. The costumes people wear for Halloween. A lot of people — until they read Frankenstein — don’t understand that’s not the name of the monster. That’s name of Dr. Frankenstein who made the monster right? So this was all concocted in the brain of a 19 year old young woman and that’s how important her work was. We’re still reading it to this day right and we’re still thinking about what does it mean.
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Sandra Day O’Connor’s place in history was secured when President Ronald Reagan appointed her as the first female to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, her role as the swing vote on an increasingly divided Court guaranteed that she will be remembered as far more than a pathbreaking symbol.
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Native American chief Glory of the Morning led the Winnebago/Ho-Chunk Tribe during the 1700s in what is now Wisconsin. During the 1730s and 1740s Glory in the Morning witnessed a great deal of warfare between the Fox Indians and the French in the area that is now Michigan and Wisconsin. She aligned her people with the Winnebagoes and the French and played a pivotal role in achieving an end to inter-tribal war in the late 1740s.
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While many film historians and teachers still don’t know the name of many of these marvelous female screenwriters from Hollywood’s Golden era, research shows they existed. It’s the job of this generation of scholars to bring these names into the larger conversation.
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![01 Introduction from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 18 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rmw-cpp-horror-01.jpeg)
