Tarnished and Gilded: Unearthing Women’s Past
Who celebrated Women’s History Month? Not me. I barely realized that Women’s History Month was upon us until one random email arrived in the form of an advertisement. There was no fanfare, no parade, and not one of my female friends called to say, “Hey, it’s Woman’s History Month, let’s celebrate!” Part of the problem is that Woman’s History Month occurs in March. March is a crap month and to assign women one of the crappiest months out of the year is just plain rotten. Nonetheless, it caused me to consider women’s trajectory over the last 100 years. The perception of women has changed – somewhat – but there are still legions of archaic ideologies that persist. By looking to the past we can observe how society perceived the female gender. Specifically, by looking through the eyes of a long-dead writer, we have an opportunity to witness women’s evolution. Fiction chronicles the prevailing social paradigms of its time. American writer William Sydney Porter was one of those chroniclers – better known to us as O. Henry.
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