Posts Tagged ‘women’s history’
Intrepid Women at the Pitt-Rivers Museum
On the eve of International Women’s Day, a standing-room only crowd of a hundred or so people squeezed into an upper gallery of Oxford University’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, a place known to generations of British school children as where they saw shrunken heads. The tsantsa, or shrunken heads, were removed from their display cases in 2020…
Read MoreBecoming a Late-in-Life Athlete
In the early days of the pandemic, I began sculling on a creek flowing into the San Francisco Bay – a waterway that’s home to egrets, herons, and the occasional northern spotted owl. Wearing a mask inside the boathouse, I joined other fledgling rowers on a novice master’s team. Four years later, I’m still rowing…
Read MoreUnited Nations and Human Trafficking
March is Women’s History Month and I’m thrilled to take part on Friday, March 19th in a virtual panel at this year’s United Nations Commission on the Status of Women NGO Forum. The event is being organized by the San Francisco Collaborative Against Human Trafficking, a public-private partnership established more than a decade ago by…
Read MoreHonoring Hawaii’s Queen
At a time when statues are toppling across the nation, one work of public art stands tall. It is the eight-foot-tall bronze of Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani, who faces the state Capitol in Honolulu. This beautifully rendered artwork, by the American realist sculptor Marianna Pineda, is even more powerful today than it was when it was…
Read MoreWho Should California Honor?
Father Junipero Serra. Christopher Columbus. Sir Francis Drake. Even Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem. What do most of the statues being toppled across California have in common? They’re figures from history who supported white supremacy. And they’re all men. So here’s a timely proposal. Why don’t we replace them…
Read MoreUnladylike2020
Women’s lives have long been overlooked by historians, especially the lives of women of color. But a new PBS project, UnladyLike2020, is producing 26 documentary shorts of unsung women heroes of American history. Part of PBS’s American Masters series honoring the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, just aired a film about Tye Leung Schulze. …
Read MoreDisrupting the Business of Human Trafficking – Then and Now
In 1874, a group of women opened a “safe house” on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Because their work disrupted the thriving trade in women between China and America, they faced endless legal challenges and even sticks of dynamite placed on their doorstep. By offering a place for survivors of sex slavery and other…
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