Celebrity

‘The Only Woman’ in the Room

“Why with her that’s all she? “Oscar-nominated documentary Immy Humes The only woman (Phaidon, $ 29.95). She sees a 1961 photo of filmmaker Shirley Clarke with the cast, crew, and all 22 men. “What does her online mean?”

Once Hume’s noticed this phenomenon, it wasn’t hard to find more examples. 100 of them are images of 20 countries from 1862 to 2020, images of politicians, athletes, scientists, writers, college students, jazz musicians and painters. All men except one, with or without posing. Why was she there? Did the man consider her a “sneaker or top cherry blossom”?More importantly, how she Do you feel there?

“Tokenism is the first idea that comes to mind,” admits Hume’s, but Tokenism is an “inclusive performance” that requires an audience. Most of these groups have not yet felt the pressure to open the door to other excluded groups. “This was something else,” she concludes. “Something old.”

These women played a variety of roles. A “mascot” that gives good luck to pioneers in their field, surrounding men, wives and daughters, cooks and assistants. However, Hume’s writes that she is always the exception, the one who “proves the rules.” “The rule is that women do not belong here.”

Above, Shirley Chisholm appears with the Democratic presidential candidate at NBC’s “Meet the Press” in New York City in 1972.

American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn reported in 1944 from Cassino, Italy. Only a few months later, on June 6, she became the only woman to witness D-Day among the 150,000 women on the beach in Normandy.

At the Summer Palace in Beijing in 1903, when this photo was taken, Empress Dowager Cixi of China was “probably the most powerful woman in the world,” Hume’s wrote. Nonetheless, “Empress Dowager Cixi, while being a very female, can only rule in a deep patriarchal society because of her extraordinary ability to create an identity that adapts aspects of traditional male power. I was able to do it. “

Photographer Ming Smith poses at the Camoinge Workshop Collective in New York City in 1973, a year after she became the first female member (and youngest). “We have never seen an image of our wonderful culture anywhere, anywhere,” Smith said of the collective. The group, a derivative of the Black Power movement, approached images with the intention of “having a different perspective from what the media was showing us.”

Afro-Cuban Jazz “First Lady” Graciella (photographed in New York City in 1947) was born and raised in Havana, moved to New York in her twenties and sang with an Afro-Cuban band.

In Manchester, England, around 1945, at the beginning of Britain’s postwar decolonization, Oxford-educated anti-imperialist Amy Geraldine “Dyna” Stock was introduced to Ghana’s future president Kwame Nkrumah ( Sit on the far right) and meet. West Africa National Secretariat and West Africa Students’ Union.

Civil rights leader Gloria Richardson confronted the bayonet of the National Guard during martial law in Cambridge, Maryland in 1963 (a town with a black unemployment rate of 30%). “If I was upset enough, I wouldn’t have time to be afraid,” she said. “Fight for what you believe in, but stop being so great.”

British suffrage Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested outside Buckingham Palace on May 21, 1914.

Revolutionary Ieshia Evans is protesting police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2016. “Contrast is very important,” Humes writes for this now-famous image. “One-to-many, women vs. men, black vs. white, fragile and fluid vs. hard shells and robots, right vs. wrong, peace vs. violence.”


Lauren Christensen is the editor of the book review.

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