The Friday Four, Part 119

~1~

The Whitney Awards winners were announced last Saturday and I did pretty well with my predictions! Of  the four categories, I guessed two completely right and my pick for the third won the fourth instead.  Not bad!

~2~

Ardis Parshall runs a fabulous website called Keepapitchinin dedicated to bringing Mormon history to a wider audience. She recently started a series of posts called "She Shall Be an Ensign" about how women are portrayed in Church history. So far she has four posts (edited to add: five as of this morning!):

Women as Actors in Church History (and an addendum)
Wicked Witches
Damsels in Distress
The Princess in the Tower
The Heroine's Journey (added this morning!)

Photo credit

Ardis points out the dearth of women in the official Church histories, especially of women who are active participants rather than bystanders or caricatures, and then looks at some of the ways women who are included are portrayed as less than fully realized human beings. I'm really looking forward to the rest of the series!

~3~

Check out these maps of the most popular books, movies, and TV shows set in each state. Kind of silly, but fun!

~4~

I've never watched an episode of Mad Men, but I found this article - "How Mad Men Helped Me Understand the Anger in My Mother's Feminism" - fascinating. Some people have a stereotypical image of the "angry feminist" stuck in their heads and dismiss all of feminism without trying to understand why that anger might have been - might still be - justified.

I called my mother to talk to her about the show recently. She didn’t like it, she told me. It harkened back to an unpleasant and familiar time. It was then that I realized, this was what my mother came from. No wonder she was so angry. I was born 25 years later, by then, my mother and the women who joined her at the feminist retreats on the weekends had already accomplished much of the bitterly hard work to change the parameters for women. I was born into a time that felt so different precisely because of all that their mode of chest-beating feminism had achieved. I was lucky, I realized, that my mother’s breed of feminism felt so remote.