reccing for props

is there room for one more

This kind of person, even though it was 50 years ago is important to all of us. She managed to overcome intense adversity to succeed and flourish. Many of those alive now fold at the first sign of frustration and bad luck. There is little will to move on and get back on track.

I'm 56 now, and I feel very old. If there is anything worth knowing about, and reading about, it's someone who has lived an incredible life.

There's a photo of her at this link:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/99999999/FAMOUSIOWANS/50114024/Reynolds-Adeline-deWalt

She was an amazing woman!

I'm glad you found that article. It was nice to read more about her.

I couldn't find it last night or I would have just added my post to this thread. (I don't imagine it was hard to find but it was getting late and I was sleepy and probably just skipped over it). But your thread inspired me to post up this one: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018127940

There are so many women whose stories got passed over throughout history because men wrote history, and women weren't of any significance for the most part. Still, there were exceptions, of course, so we know about Hypatia, the femaile pharoahs of Egypt, the queens who managed to rule. But most of the women who made it through so many trials in their lives were overlooked. Men were the stars, not "stupid" women who rarely got a very good education, only the entire responsibility to raising a household, never were able to work outside the home, or find a life of their very own.

Alot of this came out of the second world war. With most men fighting in some capacity, women had to go to work in factories, and other places where they had never been allowed to work.

I have always had a problem with the notion that the women in my mom's generation went to college to find a good prospect for marriage, and then, once married, they gave up their college aspirations. With our current generation fighting so hard to afford collegd, I am bitter that this happened so closely in our past. I never got my Bachelor degree because I couldn't afford to stay in college, but how different my life might have been! Nevertheless, there are so many women who have carved out a space for them in the latter part of the 20th century than those who contended with the 19th century. We must congratulate--and emulate--those who, despite rising odds, made their own lives a conscious decision, to make a life for themselves, not as a result of what the men in their lives wanted, but on what the women wanted.

Adeline de Walkt Reynolds probably did both. In the article that was so nicely linked to, didn't pursue an acting career when she was young because her father disapproved. That was likely normal in or about the early 1880s. Marrying and having children was her only choice when she was young. But she lost her husband in 1905, which placed her about 35-40 when she lost her husband. Without a husband, she probably had the first taste of real freedom for herself. As a widow, she would have been relatively independent, because no man was making her decisions for her. And working, in anything she wanted to do, was the way to do that.

In those times, women could only have such a "luxury" of thinking for themselves after the men in their lives were gone. I really wish women now could enjoy that same liberty for ALL of their lives, but so many women are still oppressed, not only by the men in their lives, but in their own way of interpreting the world. I am quite certain that many women who allow men to still dictate their lives don't have the intelligence to change that.

I often see a bumper sticker that reads (and I paraphrase here): Quiet women rarely make history. It's true, at least in this man's world we live in.

Like you said in your thread, let's start naming the women we have already known who broke through that entire men's world in the late 19th and early 20th century. Let's make sure it's not just the men who write history anymore--women are as important as and equivalent to men, and deserve to be treated as such.