Name that Face

 I present for your consideration a few portraits.  I have placed pictures of  two famous people who were active in their careers  and who were both highly visible to the public in their respective time periods. I am curious about our ability to not only recognize, but name important historical figures.  Do you recognize them?  Can you name one or both of them?

Mid 19th Century:

We Want Our Rights! 

All Of the Rights! For Everyone!

Early 20th Century:

SCIENCE!!!

Seriously! I <3 Science!!

Still really early 20th Century:

Vrooooooooooom!!

Look, the people you are after are the people you
depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash
We guard you while you sleep. Do not... F**ck with us.

Mid 20th Century:

Still changing lives today!

This one is pretty much a freebie.

How many did you guess correctly? Did you know more men, or more women?( This list could have continued for pages, spanning both the world and time, but I will not belabor the point.)

These are people who received a great deal of media attention in their time. We may recognize the faces of both the men and the women in these pictures, but whose names do we know? 

It is fairly easy to say "yes yes, we know, women were under-represented, and it has been that way for hundreds of years, and nobody cared what the women did, blah blah."

But that is clearly not true. All of the women above were featured in prominent newspapers, photographed, and were hot topics in the news outlets of their day. 

Why do the names and faces of men stick and the names and faces of women fade away? Why are we allowing them to continue to be forgotten?  Or only bothering to seek them out when we search for important women we should know during any respective "History Month"? 

When we think about the past, the majority of names and faces that come to mind are men (and mostly white). This is due, in part, to the rushed and extremely antiquated way in which teachers are told they must teach history. (Many teachers are doing an awesome job trying to subvert this, but it is still prevalent.)  A huge disservice is being done to both young women as well as young men.  Not because everyone should be able to list off a completely integrated list of the most influential men and women of all colors for the past two hundred years, but because how we see and remember our past influences our current modes of thinking .  

It is also due to choice. Who do we choose to remember? Whether in history books, articles or movies, whenever a woman is featured it is  a story about a woman changing history  otherwise known as, you know, HISTORY.  We may have come a long way baby, but until we can think of both the successes and failures of the past as a shared effort, instead of a history of mankind with a few exceptional women peppered in along the way, Baby, we've got a long way to go.

Many people, both men and women have struggled and fought for many of the "basic" rights we have today.  Those rights, however, are not basic, and the moment we take them, as well as our forefighters  for granted, they will be slowly, but very surely stripped away.

They fought for us before we even existed. We can learn from their mistakes, as well as continue their legacy of activism. The least we can do is learn about them equally, integrate them into our shared memory of our history, and remember their names.

                                                                                                                                                                     

Names for those pictured above:

Mid - 19th Century

Frederick Douglass       Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Early 20th Century

Albert Einstein          Marie Curie

Still Early 20th Century

Henry Ford         Emma Goldman

Mid- 20th Century

Martin Luther King Jr.        Angela Davis

Now go look them up, and have fun exploring these fascinating people - I know I did!