Underappreciated Women Throughout History

by Lovissa Price

Throughout history, heroic and accomplished women have been hidden in order to reinforce the false notion that they are powerless. When these heroines are remembered, they are almost always compared to men who achieved similar feats. I’d like to tell the stories of a few trailblazing women without comparison or silencing.

“Celery and Peanuts” (Diligence & Wealth)

Ingredients:

Celery

Peanuts

Sesame Seeds

Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot was a French impressionist painter in the 1870s who, despite her stunning and innovative art, is vastly undervalued. Throughout her early adulthood, Morisot worked alongside her sister, Edma, under the training of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and often displayed her art at Paris’s legendary salon. However, while Berthe continued to pursue art until her death, Edma married and ceased the activity altogether. Berthe’s art soon after took a significant turn. She began to take up and even assist in the invention of impressionism, a style of art focusing on the impression received from a moment. Before the 1870s, art generally consisted of wealthy and powerful people (especially men) posing for a very purposeful picture with a clear focus. Morisot became bored of this. She often depicted women doing regular household chores in informal attire; redefining the previously flawless template to which women were expected to conform. When Morisot got married, she refused to let it absorb her life as was customary for women at the time: “Men are inclined to believe that they fill all of one’s life, but as for me, I think that no matter how much affection a woman has for her husband, it is not easy for her to break with a life of work,” said the artist. Berthe Morisot is a perfect example of a woman overlooked because of her gender. I highly implore everyone to look at some of her many feminist paintings, such as Young Woman Watering a Shrub, The Psyche Mirror, and Woman at her Toilette.

Cut your celery into chunks and mix with shelled peanuts and sesame seeds. You can either eat this dish raw or by pickling them first. The celery in this dish helps reduce urges of procrastination and laziness, encourages diligence and fitness, the peanuts means “to produce wealth” (or to grow flowers, if you read it backwards), and the sesame seeds resemble legacies/coming back each year.

“Quail Eggs with Apples” (World Peace)

Ingredients:

Apple Cubes

Quill Eggs

Ketchup

“Apple” has a nickname in Chinese, meaning “the fruit of peace/safety”. For this dish, serve boiled quail eggs (which sounds like “to be safe”) with diced apples (you can fry them beforehand for an extra little pizazz), and flavor it with some ketchup.

Enjoy!

Sybil Ludington

Sybil Ludington was a seemingly insignificant person during the late 18th century who became a regularly discounted Revolutionary War hero. Ludington was the daughter of a colonel in the American Revolution who lived in New York. When she was 16 years old, Ludinton’s father received a message that British troops were preparing to attack the town of Danbury, Connecticut, and Colonel Ludington’s militia was needed as a defense. He immediately appointed Sybil to alert the troops, who were 40 miles away (which would take about four hours on horseback). Sybil was scared but eager to help her country. She mounted her horse, Star, with a male saddle and rode 40 miles through pouring rain and arrived in Danbury, successfully alerting her father’s troops who then drove the British back to Long Island Sound. Excluding her father’s report of the night, Sybil was forgotten until 1961, when a bronze statue of her was erected in Carmel, New York. Ludinton’s is a classic instance of women’s stories being erased to bolster the stereotype that they are incapable.