wild wonderful wacky women

Okay. We're going to give you the full-tilt, unashamed, totally impassioned plea here.

Please make women's history a quiet cause of your own. Share it with your daughters, your nieces, and the girls living down the street. Share it with your sons and nephews. It will make the boys better men. And it will make the girls whole.

Women are still too often seen as self-obsessed, shallow, and dependent. Girls see hundreds of images of models daily. Where are the female entrepreneurs, CEO's, physicists, software developers, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and Nobel Prize winners?

So you're ten and female you have been patiently waiting for the world to give you some sign. The only sign you get says, "Be pretty, happy, helpful, kind, and thin."

That's in this country. And that's today.

Barbara Jordan, the great Constitutional lawyer and Congresswoman, never imagined becoming a lawyer until she saw a black woman lawyer at a high school career day. You can change a life, too. All by yourself.
--National Women's History Project

Well, National Women's History Month was March, so I'm a little behind. However, I believe that there is never a wrong time to tout the accomplishments of heretofore unsung women. So, y'all, these are two of my newest heroes.

Dr. Nora Volkow, Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse. A psychiatric researcher, Dr. Volkow has been deemed "obsessed with obsessions," as she investigates the exact physiology behind addiction. This article--which made the rounds in the office yesterday--focuses on her attempts to show exactly how the brains of addicts and non-addicts differ. Sounding the death knoll for the misguided and ineffectual "Just Say No" strategy, she notes, "If you can conceptualize [addiction] as a brain disease rather than a moral weakness or lack of willpower, you can more easily bring resources to bear." And her studies have implications beyond just drug addiction: she looks into dopamine functionality as it relates to a variety of cognitive pleasure mechanisms, like attraction to junk food in the obese. But there's more! Not only is she a courageous anti-"drug war"-rior, she is the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky! She grew up in the house in Mexico City in which he was assassinated! (As many of you know, I am a bit of a Slavophile and in awe of the fact that Frida Kahlo was Trotsky's lover during the time he spent in her country until he died in 1940.) Plus, she loves Bach and the novels of Haruki Murakami. I sense an obsession of my own coming on, á la dogooderlawyer with Ethan Nadelmann.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, U.S. Army surgeon during the Civil War and first female Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Dr. Walker is one of the posthumously eponymous patron saints of DC's Whitman-Walker Clinic, where I have recently begun to volunteer. Abolitionist, the second woman to graduate from medical school in the States, married to another doctor but kept her own name, chose pants and a man's coat as her standard dress: she was feminist before such a concept existed. Andrew Johnson awarded her the Medal of Honor in 1965, but it was rescinded in 1917, when Congress revised the requirements to include "actual combat with the enemy" (as a woman, she couldn't receive a commission but she served near Union front lines as an unpaid volunteer). Dr. Walker refused to give up her medal (a federal crime) and wore it until her death in 1919. However, Jimmy Carter reinstated the medal in 1977. After the war, she was an advocate for many women's issues, including suffrage and dress reform, calling women's clothing "immodest and inconvenient." Sadly, the stamp issued in her honor by the U.S. Postal Service in 1982 featured her in a frilly dress and a mane of curls. Also, she may have been a spy for the Union Army and certainly had a ship named for her during WWII.

Thus endeth, for today, the history lesson of the disenfranchised. Tune in next week as I begin part one of my series on underappreciated sports, starting with rollerskating!