View from the North 40: Thoughts from my pretty little brain

I was going to start this column with the eye-catching phrase: I am tired of being a woman. But that’s not true. I’m just tired of all the falderal around the status of womanhood as a whole.

Are we objects like doormats or arm candy? Are we being reviled, or are we being too sensitive? Are we being paid less than men; or is it the same amount in some financial mathematics form of “separate but equal,” making that discrepancy true; or is it less because we deserve it? Are feminists the saviors of my gender, or bad-publicity mongers for women, or just she-women, man-haters who disparage feminine attributes? And who was asking for what to happen to her with that loose behavior and those trampy clothes?

I almost long for the days when the only things beating me with a yard stick of femininity to which I could never measure up were women’s magazines and daytime television — neither of which would stop telling me the likes of how to dress, how to please my man in 10 easy steps or how to make my professional manicure match the décor in my latest home remodel.

(And, by the way, all my fingernails are dirty and mismatched, and half are broken or ratty, so they do match my décor after all. For the win.)

While I’m tired of the often vicious debate about the whole female condition, our place in society and whether or not we’re supposed to keep our silly mouths shut, I do have to say that I am enjoying reading more about women’s contributions throughout history.

A concerted effort started a few years ago to shed light on what women have managed to do beyond breeding, feeding, standing behind their men and vapor-locking at the first sign of blood.

In the Dark Ages, when I attended school, history classes were spattered with a boring short list of women who mattered: Cleopatra, Elizabeths I and II, Betsy Ross, Harriet Tubman, Marie Curie and Christa McAuliffe. As a product of the Montana school system I got the bonus woman of Jeannette Rankin, the first and only woman ever voted to represent Montana at the federal level. She had the gall to vote against joining both World Wars, and a Montana woman hasn’t gone to D.C. since.

Now I know about Cecilia Payne who should be as well-known as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein because she discovered the composition of the universe and the sun, which a male colleague gets credit for because he advised her not to publish her findings, then miraculously came to the same conclusions and published his own paper instead, just a few years later.

Author Margot Lee and Hollywood showed us, in “Hidden Figures,” African-American mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, who were referred to as “human computers” while working for NASA to put men on the moon.

The first Native American doctor was Susan La Flesche Picotte from Omaha Indian Reservation in Nebraska in the late 1800s. Turns out humankind had a lot of female doctors through the ages despite the fact that they were generally only allowed to doctor women or in a limited practice. Plus there’s that little inconvenience that at different times and places they were banished, imprisoned or outright killed for practicing medicine.

Women pirates were a thing, too, aaargh and all. Well, except for prosthetics, I didn’t read anything about a female pirate with a patch or a peg leg. Too bad.

I recently read about female painters who were famous during the Renaissance. I don’t know why this had to be kept secret, but I do know, starting after the flood of 1966, more and more female art restorers have moved to Florence to work, and they ruined everything. They have consciously chosen to restore a wide selection of works, not just the paintings by male artists, and the secret’s out.

Also, it turns out that nuns were scribes, too. During all those centuries when beautifully painted and gold-filigreed manuscripts were being created, it wasn’t just the monks.

I know, it’s easy to say that these details don’t matter because the main details are there in the history books. I mean, Paul Revere made his historic ride, and sometime later we rascally upstarts won the revolution against the British. Does it matter that a 16-year-old girl named Sybil Ludington made a similar, even more harrowing, ride of 40 miles (twice Revere’s distance), through the rain, two years later to warn militia of another key British military action.

Yes. Yes, it does. We build on the successes of those who went before us. If we don’t know that people like us have been brave and smart and have acted on their convictions despite social and legal obstacles, we think we have to forge all new paths.

Would Boris Johnson have dreamed of being British prime minister without someone paving the way to show him that a New York-born, troll-haired, populist nationalist with a sketchy understanding of the difference between facts and fake news could become leader of a world power?

We can all dream bigger when we are inspired by those like us who have already fought and won against the odds.

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And I mean that seriously at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com/.