Madame Blanchard postcard
From Chapter 2
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Drawing on feminist and material rhetorics, the authors of Women Making History demonstrate that, by creating postcards, Helaine Victoria Press aimed to do more than provide a convenient writing surface or even affect collective memory; instead, they argue, the press generated feminist memory. The cards, each with the picture of a woman or group of women from history, were multimodal. Pictures were framed in colors and borders appropriate to the era and subject. Lengthy captions offered details about the lives of the women pictured. Unlike other memorials, the cards were mobile; they traveled through the postal system, viewed along the way by the purchasers, mail sorters, mail carriers, and recipients. Upon arriving at their destinations, cards were often posted on office bulletin boards or refrigerators at home, where surroundings shaped their meanings.
Women Making History shows that Helaine Victoria Press’s cards, like the movement from which they emanated, were dynamic and participatory. They were, in short, a multidirectional, open ended, rhetorically evolving process of transforming feminist consciousness. The print edition includes many images from the press’s records, and the digital edition offers additional images plus audio and video clips from press participants.
This is the first book to demonstrate the relationships between the feminist art movement, the women in print movement, and the scholars studying women’s history. Readers will be drawn to both the large quantity of illustrative materials and the theoretical framework of the book, as it provides an expanded understanding of rhetorical multimodality. Scholars of gender and women’s studies, art history, media studies, and the history of rhetoric, as well as members of the public with interests in feminism, Lesbian feminist culture, postcards, fine letterpress printing, and papermaking will be inspired by this richly produced history.
About the authors
Julia M. Allen is professor emerita of English at Sonoma State University.
Jocelyn H. Cohen is an artist, arborist and co-founder of Helaine Victoria Press, Inc.
The complete manuscript of this work was subjected to a fully closed (“double-blind”) review process. For more information, please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines.
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From Chapter 2
Mme. M. Blanchard headed the commercial and military air forces (one balloon) under Bonaparte and Louis XVIII, until she was killed by an accident aloft over Paris in 1819. Her work often included appearances at weddings and festivals, etc., where her ascent was the dramatic feature of the day. She was the widow of J.-P. Blanchard, first balloonist to carry international air mail (France to England).
From Chapter 3
Phyllis Carter (1880-1980), midwife, storyteller, sage, quilter and oral historian in Tift County, Georgia, was known as “a woman who never forgot.” Aunt Phyllis had clear recollection of the post-reconstruction period of her childhood, when fear of lynch-mobs and desperate poverty drove her family to flee their home late one night. One favorite tale concerns how a small poisonous snake was left inside the leaves of a large cabbage. Because Black cooks working for oppressive white families were not allowed to taste from the pots or cut up vegetables, the snake was undetected. “I remember once the colored woman cooked the cabbage whole, kilt the whole family out. I been here a long time, Sister.” Carter bore 10 children and outlived four husbands, “two good ones and two devils.” Deeply religious and unembittered, she grew up to a wide friendship with and encyclopedic knowledge of her community, both Blacks and whites. They said of her: “She was one of the very best midwives,” and “She can tell you anything you want to know and never forgets a name or face.” At 86, she saved a child from drowning while fishing, and carried the fishhook in her foot until she died. She went to school three days and acquired her vast lifetime knowledge without literacy. She charged very little for her midwifery and quilting, believing that all her skills were divine gifts, not meant for personal gain.
Mary Astell, title page to her 1694 treatise, published anonymously, advocating for equal educational opportunities for women and career options beyond mother and nun. A SERIOUS PROPOSAL To the Ladies, attributed to Mary Astell, refutes the 17th century theory of women's incapacity. It is the lack of education, Astell says, which brings about untrained judgment in women and leads them to wrong decisions. She proposed a college with a double aspect: a retreat from the world for those who desire it, and also an institution to fit women to do the greatest good in their own time and to improve the future. The teachings were to be not only religious but secular, including languages, philosophy, literature. In 1697 she wrote Part II, wherein she stirs her reader (whose equality she has already proven) to carry out her own development. Women, she says, should reason things out for themselves, determine their own acts and not rely on custom or be imposed upon by their fathers and husbands.