Herstory

by Lise LaSalle Having enjoyed Tim Burton’s movies through the years, my curiosity went on high alert when I read about his new biopic Big Eyes set to be released this Christmas in a theater near you and me. Adam Parfrey who runs Feral House Books, a little house of darkness promoting ‘pure information and…

History is written by the victors, but also by the scrapbookers, the collectors, the keepers, the pack rats. By those who show up, at the beginnings of things and with the right technology. History sometimes comes in pieces. It needs to be reassembled. Pasted and coaxed. Sometimes the finished product still has holes.

In one corner of the climate-controlled manuscript division, on a series of otherwise empty shelves, sits Lilli Vincenz’s unprocessed collection. ...

Twelve boxes. Cream-colored. Heavy. Inside: meticulous fragments of the gay rights movement of the latter half of the 20th century. Political pamphlets, sociological surveys, photographs and obituaries. Diaries of a young woman who was nervous about going into her first gay bar but whose Arlington living room later became the default place for gay women to feel at home.

this is an original antique lithograph from late 19th century it is a book plate printed in leipzig, germany in 1894 the print measures

The women born between 1905 and 1909 were the same young girls who grew up during the years of the women’s suffrage movement in the US. They would have seen the struggle, heard the talk, and knew they could have greater freedom of choice in living their lives. They too would see, if not quite be, part of the flapper movement. Activism and parenting being almost completely at odds with one another, some may have opted not to have children — and at this time, birth control, thanks to Margaret Sanger, was becoming a realistic option.

And, just as these young women were perhaps thinking of starting a family…

Along comes The Great Depression — the one of that started about 1929, not the one some say we are approaching now — and the birthrate fell about one-tenth globally from the rate during the “prosperous” 1920′s. In America, the birth rate dropped below the replacement level for the first time in history.

Vintage suit slips mark a change in women's lives.

Sexism is alive and well, unfortunately. Look at items from our past; see today.

A bunch of little gems found in The Club Hotel, Limited: Guide Book of Yokohama, Tokyo and Principal Places in Japan, printed at the “Box Of Curios,” No. 58, Main Street, Yokohama, Japan. There’s no copyright or publication date, but the book is circa 1880s to 1910s.

I’m too old to claim to have logged hours of watching She-Ra or He-Man — or any childhood memories from that MOTU period. But that won’t stop me from having an opinion