Two Articles About Amazing Women
One Shorter, One Longer
The second of these is from The Washington Post and may require a subscription.
Marga Richter, groundbreaking composer and champion of women in classical music, dies at 93.
Though she was active in a period when women composers struggled to be taken seriously, her music attracted regular performances by high-caliber musicians such as the pianist Menahem Pressler, violist Walter Trampler and soprano Jessye Norman.
Richter lived to see a more enlightened attitude toward female composers emerging in the 21st century, although she bristled at how “women’s music” can be presented in a token fashion, and not judged seriously on its own merits.
“People do realize that women write music — good music,” she told the Star Tribune. While she was a co-founder of the New York-based League of Women Composers, “my goal is as soon as they accept women on the same basis as men, we should disband the league.”
Read the rest of the obituary here.
Madeleine Albright: ‘We are like the worst possible example of things. And it is hurting us.’
Madeleine Albright, 83, served in the Clinton administration as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and as the country’s first female secretary of state. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Her latest memoir, “Hell and Other Destinations,” was published earlier this year.
You allude in the title of your latest book to something you’ve said many times over the years, that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” You’ve gotten flak for it, been applauded for it. Can you talk about where that came from in your own experience, what you’re hoping to convey?
It was the single-most famous thing I ever said; it ended up on a Starbucks cup. So this is where the story comes from: I'm working on a PhD. My twins are between 1 and 2 years old. And other women would say to me, "Why aren't you at home with your children? Why are you in class?" And then, as the children got older: "Why aren't you in the carpool, waiting for your children?" "My hollandaise sauce is better than yours." And I thought: This is the problem, that women are very judgmental about each other; we're not supportive of each other. Another part I noticed was what I called the queen bee syndrome. You know, if there's only going to be one woman, then I'm going to be it, and I don't have room for you. I learned, in my own experience, that it was important to have more than one woman in the room. We need to support each other. And I think women have to learn to interrupt. Because, if you raise your hand, sometimes you don't get called on until it's not germane. And so when I went to teach, I told everybody — because it's a coed class — that nobody can raise their hand; everybody has to interrupt. Most of my classes were a bit of a zoo.
As somebody who has served as a diplomat at the highest level, how do you assess the state of civil discourse in our country today?
I think, at the moment, we have proof that it’s been a disaster. Having a leader pitting one group against another instead of trying to get a common answer. By the way, the book that I wrote just before this one was called “Fascism: A Warning.” The reason I decided to write it was because I was seeing the rise of authoritarian leaders in a variety of places in the world and was trying to figure out why that had happened. So I went back, and obviously looked at Mussolini and Hitler. Interestingly enough, both came to power constitutionally. Mussolini was an outsider who was a good speaker and a mobilizer. He took advantage of that by identifying himself with a group at the expense of another.
The best quote in the book was from Mussolini, who said, “If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices.” I was noticing an awful lot of feather-plucking going on. Obviously in some of the countries in Europe or Philippines or Venezuela, but also in the United States in terms of groups that were deliberately setting each other against each other. That has had something to do with discourse, obviously. And by the way, authoritarianism and fascism are not ideologies. They’re a process for taking power. A leader who identifies himself with one group at the expense of another [group] that then becomes a scapegoat, who thinks he’s above the law, criticizes the press, and is part of a group of other leaders like that who support each other.