Monday, February 25, 2008

Did You Know Early Flight Attendants Were Nurses?

I didn't know this - that in the early days of commercial aviation, flight attendants were nurses, but the airlines, aware of public concerns about flight safety (and, no doubt, aware as the patriarchy always is of the potential to use women to sell stuff), emphasized instead their availability as skybound sex kittens.

I'm also sitting here reading poetry of African-American women of the nineteenth century. You know, it really pisses me off how there just aren't enough hours in the day to educate myself properly about herstory. I am an educated woman. I even have a degree in Social Justice Issues, with a Women's Studies concentration. And yet, every hour that I am able to spend researching online, I learn just how little I really know. Our herstory has been erased. Erased! Why in the hell were these African-American women's poems not in my English textbooks? Why, dammit?

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