Those most powerful women
Time magazine offers a list of the 25 most powerful women of the last century.
There’s always something a bit tiresome and arbitrary about such lists, especially if they spotlight some group such as “women” or “blacks,” but even if they don’t.
This one seems a particularly odd document with some odd inclusions. Angela Merkel, for example, isn’t a selection with which I’d quarrel, except for the fact that her power has mostly been in the 21st century, not the last one. But Virginia Woolf? Say what? Her inclusion seems to be sheer political correctness, because she certainly hasn’t had a lot of influence, except on university English departments.
And then there’s Margaret Sanger, whose Time bio constitutes a whitewash of major proportions. No mention by Time of her extreme racism, nor of her eugenics campaign against the mentally defective. Guess they didn’t have enough room.
Does Estée Lauder really belong there? Don’t think so. Coco Chanel, perhaps, for the end of the corset. But Madonna??? Sorry, I don’t see it at all. Rachel Carson yes, for better or for worse, depending on how you look at it (I view a significant amount of her influence as for worse).
I’m an Aretha Franklin fan, but what’s she doing there? Why not—oh, I don’t know, Marian Anderson instead? And how about some trailblazing businesswomen?
For that matter, I would have included Nancy Pelosi, much as I detest her. She was, after all, the first female Speaker of the House. And—assuming HCR has staying power, which I sincerely hope it does not—she was almost single-handedly responsible for its passage, if anyone was.
I agree, those lists are tiresome. However, to their credit, they did put Margaret Thatcher on there, probably begrudgingly.
And WTF Mao Zedong’s wife? That is probably the scariest one on there.
Interesting how they put Gloria Steinem and Martha Stewart right next to each other, Gloria must be rolling in her future grave. Do you realize how many people despise old Martha because she is a girly girl who encourages women to do girly stuff like cook and decorate?
The Left is obsessed with “powerful women”, which is a good tip off that they have to beat the bushes to find even passable facsimiles of them.
In fact, the 20th century, like the 19th, was, so far as gender goes, an age of men–“powerful” or not–and not women. It is only in the last 20 years or so that we have been pettifogged into squinting our eyes and pretending that the world is other than it is.
Replace the Marines at Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima with you dears and you will find it would have been a wholly different kettle of fish, so to speak.
We men should go about making lists of “powerful men”. Perhaps than women would see just how ridiculous they appear when they take up this nonsense.
If Hillary is “powerful” just who and what was Churchill, J. P. Morgan or Henry Ford?
“Powerful women”? In the envelope of human accomplishment, they are not even mediocrities. It is a mark of how decadent and debased we have become that we imagine otherwise.
It all goes to show the chief obsession of the Left: Power, by which they mean the satiation of all desires and appetites through the subjugation of all others.
It also amply demonstrates how they deal with their power lusts: the creation of false histories and false narratives. If the female sex were really all that capable of “power” then the history of word would be an altogether different one.
Of course, some of the greatest advances in civilization have been those which limited “power”, at least “power” of the sort that the left is concerned with, and that sort of thing required a great many “powerful men”. Whole armies of them in fact.
Not that that would get through the thick skulls of the boys and girls over at Time Magazine. Not a man in the bunch.
Madonna belongs there for the simple fact that she probably influenced the cultures of the western world more than all but a few of those other women. So many women in my generation tried to copy her in many ways and most of the current “sexy” female singers owe it all to her flaunting her sexuality all over the place.
IMO room could be created on that list of 25 for:
Lise Meitner
Ayn Rand
Edith Wilson (Woodrow’s wife)
and probably others.
gs: I never read the list, so if Ayn Rand was not on there, that IS a travesty.
I don’t agree with most of what she wrote in terms of the virtue of selfishness and things, but she’s done more to introduce people to certain types of libertarianism than anyone else over the past 50 years.
What was the criteria? If real impact in how we live is used, Coco Chanel and Rosalyn Yalow probably deserves to be on that list far more than politicians.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K460eqYBio4&feature=player_embedded
MercatusCenter | November 16, 2010 | 2 likes, 0 dislikes
Dr. Steve Davies presents:
The way we think about and understand the past shapes the way we view both the present and the future – Orwell’s famous slogan from 1984 captures this. Most of us without realising it have a unique vision of the past, a way of thinking about it that predisposes us to look at current events in a particular way. In general, we focus on power and its workings while overlooking other aspects of human existence such as voluntary exchange, cooperative interaction, innovation, and discovery. When these are brought to the foreground, a different kind of historical narrative emerges and transforms our ideas of important dates and significant figures in history,
Whatever you think of her, Phyllis Schlafly almost single handedly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment AFTER it was well on its way to passage. Seems pretty powerful to me.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick was a foreign policy wonk, staunch anti-communist, trusted adviser to presidents, and the first woman to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
I’m sure ommitting these powerful women from the list was an honest oversight and had nothing to do with their conservative politics.
What???!! Was Ethel Rosenberg not a woman? Had not Tokyo Rose a vagina? Impregnated, would Jane Fonda not bear, nor lactate?
It must be out of a sense of duty to the rest of us that Neo reads, digests, and comments on this sort of utter bilgewater.
How about Barney Frank on a write-in vote? /g
Brad: I find Madonna just about the most asexual person alive.
Of course, I’m not her target audience. But still, I can’t imagine why anyone would find her sexy. I’ve always felt something harsh and repellent about her.
Tom, crawl back under your rock….
I am not by any stretch of the imagination a Randian, but it is absurd to have Aretha Franklin on the list and not Ayn Rand. Rand’s influence has been truly massive – and persistent.
I agree with Brad on Madonna, actually. It may be unfortunate, but pretty much all of pop culture has been molded in essential ways by her. That doesn’t mean I disagree with neo that Madonna is “just about the most asexual person alive.” Still, if you ever listen to the newer crops of musical or other women celebrities, the first “role model” they usually mention is Madonna.
My sarcastic comment on the list:
“Dude, no Elena Ceausescu? COME ON!”
Madonna is so twentieth century.
Oops. This IS about the 20th century.
If you remove from any personal lists those that dont promote a certain ideology first, then they are not on times list. IE. in 100 years, when we are not here to point it out, people will look back and those other women, they will have been erased as if they never happened. a lot of Obama’s film posturing and projecting is not for today, its to make a valid subset of great stuff that later will make the legend seem more truthful.
Sanger is an old example of what is now a refined process. that if they keep hammering the big lie, and others dont constantly refute it or are cut from doing so, then over time, the big lie wins and they have remolded history…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEja-1emRic
its one reason that so many of them dont care as to how or what they do, as thats only for now, but the washed history for being loyal, thats for many lifetimes and memories.
just as much of the history i bring out is missing… it will be gone if no one keeps repeating it, Zinn will become the ONLY view, gone will be Hayek, Mills, etc…
Just as Meade a crank is known well, and Emmy Noether a mathematician and a woman Einstein credited for laying groundwork for his theories, and was key to the development of super symmetry.
You might think that since they want to prove that women can be as good as men, that they might have brought out the female mathematician who helped create super symmetry.
ah but that’s what it means to be a FRONT… your image is what people believe, not whats behind it
You know the REAL beliefs by the whole history of their heroe’s (and in negative relief who they ignore or erase), which they know and agree with.
If the heroes ideas that are negative you don’t like, and doesn’t match your idea whats right, then you have been supporting something completely different than what you thought it was… because to them, these people are heroes for that nasty stuff that they hide from you!!! (that is the real them)
see the Sanger video, and understand that she is not celebrated for what they say they are providing, but for what she created and are happy that they have been able to keep it going and dupe so many into defending it with rhetoric, as it still serves the purpose… for decades women have supported a movement whose major icons thought Ernst Rudin was a man with good ideas… (heck, they still love Heidegger)
by the way… Harmans newsletter Lucifer the Lightbearer was
“Originally produced by a local branch of the National Liberal League as the Valley Falls Liberal (1880-1883), Harman changed the title after he assumed sole editorship in 1883.”
Later… “After 24 years in production, Lucifer ceased publication in 1907 and become the more scholarly American Journal of Eugenics.”
which was hip to the Sanger’s Birth Control Review, which eugenics, scientific socialism, and euthanasia, was all the anarchists big thing…
as time passes and people look they will keep bumping into the same names over and over..
Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration
http://www.amazon.com/Modernism-Eugenics-Woolf-Culture-Degeneration/dp/0521806011
[please correct so you get link credit]
(now you know why woolf AND sanger are on the same list..
here is Cambridge discussing their like of eugenics
assets.cambridge.org/97805218/06015/frontmatter/9780521806015_frontmatter.pdf
as i said.. the leaders have commonality that the public doesn’t really know. if it wasn’t for the internet. sangers history would be scrubbed and anyone like me who read her autobiography would be called a conspiracy theorist, hater of women, didnt get laid enough, etc..
you should see people contort to try to save her rep, explain away her real history, writings, publications, biography, goals, and even others who wrote for her “birth control review”. like ernst rudin.. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R%C3%BCdin
Recognized as one of the fathers compare German Wiki of National Socialist ideology, his work was endorsed officially by the Nazi Party. He wrote the official commentary for the racial policy of Nazi Germany: “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring”; and was awarded medals from the Nazis and Adolf Hitler personally.
In 1933, Ernst Ré¼din, Alfred Ploetz, and several other experts on racial hygiene were brought together to form the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy under Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. The committee’s ideas were used as a scientific basis to justify the racial policy of Nazi Germany. The “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring” was passed by the German government on January 1, 1934. Ré¼din was interned in US 1945, but already released 1946, after Max Planck had used itself for him.
could make one think if one were disposed to.
kind of like the red pill blue pill question.
Trusted things were and are not trusted things
Is Time coming out in a comic book edition yet?
Pity. Time is TV Guide for the cognitively challenged.
Occam’s Beard Says: Pity. Time is TV Guide for the cognitively challenged.
Damn. I’ve been saving an insult for the right occasion, and almost let it fly recently.
“Good luck with your cognitive challenges.”
Scooped!
Here’s one to think about. Rose Kennedy. 3 of her 4 sons were U.S. Senators. All three ran for the presidency. One won it. Ironically, it was her oldest son, Joe Jr., who his father most wanted to achieve high office, but he was killed in a plane crash during WWII and never had the chance.
I have no idea how many of her grandchildren and great grandchildren are now or have previously been members of Congress.
I don’t know what Rose’s accomplishments were, but she had a pretty powerful womb.
I completely agree that Rand, Schlafly and Kirkpatrick should have been on the list.
As for Madonna, while not a fan, it’s hard to argue her impact on pop culture. She, with only the most mediocre musical talent, perfected the image reinvention/provoke outrage to get publicity shtick that is so common today. Every young tart singer today is sure to mention how much they loved and admired Madonna while growing up – either before or after their “controversial” girl on girl kiss, bondage-themed video, etc. Ugh!