Yvette Meltzer

My dad was born the year before the 19th amendment gave US women the right to vote. When I was born women had voted for only 26 years. This knowledge gives me some perspective on the attitudes and behaviors towards females that I experienced growing up in the 50’s and 60’s.

In my early 20’s I participated in a women’s group that read Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1969 by the feminist group, Boston Women's Health Book Collective. Just as the United States was launching a rocket to explore the surface of the moon (1969), women gave themselves permission to openly explore the landscape of their own bodies with mirrors and speculums. The original writers of the book stated that one of the main reasons they created a book about women’s bodies was to offer information because "bodies are the physical bases from which we move out into the world". Without this basic information, women are alienated from their own body and necessarily on unequal footing with men. The successive publications in the series paralleled the chronology of the lives of the women who initiated the collective through parenting and aging: The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, Ourselves and our Children, Ourselves, Growing Older.   Geraldine Ferraro, the first female Vice-Presidential Candidate on a national party ticket in 1984 is pictured in a garden with Copies of the "Our Bodies...." books. I remember my 18-month-old daughter announcing with pride that she had voted for Ferraro (I had taken her into the voting booth with me).

I included the photo of the Sanitary Belt (mine actually) because not only is it the 100th anniversary of the Woman's Vote but it is the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the Sanitary belt which liberated women to move about while menstruating. In the same year that women could first vote, Mary B. Kenner, an African American woman crafted a sanitary belt that kept a pad secured in a waterproof pocket. Inspired by her invention, companies like Kotex copied her, and menstrual pads as we know them were born. As much as I was stunned by how primitive menstrual products were 100 years ago—rags, clumps of grass, sponges–I was horrified to learn that racism almost prevented Ms. Kenner’s product from being produced!

The shattered glass references the 57 million cracks left in the glass ceiling during the 2016 election when the first ever female Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, garnered 57 million votes.  

I took the documentary photo of the woman with the poster stating “This Majority will not be Silent” picturing Rosie the Riveter with a reference to Vote at a Women’s March rally in 2018. Voting is not something anyone takes for granted even in 2020.

I used yellow in many of the photos and included some yellow roses in the photos as a reference to The Yellow Rose Project!