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SIERRA VISTA — It was a talk-show host’s wildest dream come true.
Eleanor Roosevelt told how her Uncle Teddy threw her into a lake to teach her to swim and later confided that being sent to school in England at age 15 helped her overcome her shyness.
Betty Friedan expressed her own surprise at how America was surprised when she wrote in “The Feminine Mystique” about the frustration of women with college degrees, trapped in suburbia, who were not using their educations.
Declaring that birth control must be the right of all women, particularly the poor, Margaret Sanger with authority and then a wink, added that free love was merely a secondary benefit.
 Helen Hiddeson portrays Elizabeth Cady Stanton during rehearsal Thursday for a Women’s Equality Day program scheduled for Aug. 25 at the Palms. Stanton was an early activist for equal rights for women. (Beatrice Richardson-Herald/Review) |
These remarkable women of history, along with abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, actress Katharine Hepburn, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, and Oprah herself gathered Thursday in Winterhaven to prepare for their role-plays at the luncheon on Aug. 25 celebrating Women’s Equality Day.
“This crosses party lines,” said Donna Austin, president of the Democratic Women of Southeastern Arizona, sponsors of the lunch. “I know for a fact some Republicans are coming. It’s about the momentum, the driving force of women to change society.”
It also was mesmerizing entertainment.
Each of the dozen role-players has dived into research on the real-life person they will portray, and at Thursday’s rehearsal it was clear not only have they done their homework, but have been affected by the oft-neglected historical impact of their adopted personas, and the nuances of those women’s personal lives.
“I was born in Brooklyn in 1924,” said Luvenia Brown as Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American to seek the presidential nomination in 1972. “My parents worked in a factory, and after I got a B.A. in sociology in 1942, I couldn’t find a job.”
Chisholm became a child-care center worker, civil rights advocate and was eventually elected to the New York state assembly in 1964 and then to the House of Representatives. Her urban background, and possibly her race and gender, led to a congressional assignment to the nation’s forestry committee.
“I protested,” she said in her calm, no-nonsense fashion. “They re-assigned me to education and labor. I was there to start a revolution.”
Women’s Equality Day commemorates the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1920, giving women the right to vote. The White House annually publishes a proclamation honoring the visionaries who “have made America a more perfect union by advancing women’s suffrage.”
But the suffragist movement began in the mid-1800s and many of the dedicated and passionate women who were scorned, arrested or forced to flee the country to avoid prosecution never lived to see the fruition of their lifelong sacrifice as women “ahead of their time.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m so proud of Arizona,” said Isabella Greenway (aka Kathy Crow, a Sierra Vista Democratic Party precinct committeeperson). “We came into the Union, right off the bat, with women’s right to vote written in to our state constitution in 1912.”
Crow found it “terribly easy” to enter into the mindset of Isabella Greenway, businesswoman, socialite, founder of the Arizona Inn, and the state’s first woman elected to the House of Representatives.
Greenway was a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, married two of “Uncle Teddy’s” Rough Riders, and was regarded as a charming and shrewd influence throughout the New Deal.
“I’m a history buff anyway,” said Crow, a lifelong Democrat who worked for the campaign — and met — John F. Kennedy while living in Colorado.
Each of the 12 women of history will dress in costume, sit at a different table with luncheon guests and remain in character for the two-hour activity. The keynote speaker is Francine Shacter of Tucson, who was present for Thursday’s role-play practice at the home of lunch co-chair Karen Beckers.
“I feel so compatible here in Sierra Vista,” said the energetic and plain-spoken public servant who took a run at the Democratic nomination for Congress last year upon the retirement of Rep. Jim Kolbe.
“Tip O’Neill said that politics is the ‘art of the possible,’ and I loved how all these women from history we saw today pursued their beliefs in a non-confrontational way,” Shacter said.
The convivial and fascinating rehearsal ended on high and humorous notes, as the women bid goodbye using each other’s fictional names, and joked that everyone should receive “two credits in women’s studies” for what they had learned about women and American history that morning.
“For me, it was never about being anti-male,” said Judi Marshall, as Betty Friedan. “The theme that runs through all this is that men are as good as us, we’re as good as them, and we need to live alongside each other, retaining the uniqueness on both sides.”
REPORTER Cindy Skalsky can be reached at 515-4611 or by e-mail at cindy.skalsky@svherald.com.
Pat Kinsman wrote on Aug 18, 2007 6:40 PM: