Wednesday, April 10, 2013

A Woman's (hi)Story


Last week, the magazine I write for (Her Voice) celebrated ten years of publishing, and with that, also received an award for second place out of all magazines published by newspapers in Minnesota.

At our Her Voice Gala, our editor spoke about the success of the magazine, the wonderful women profiled over those ten years, and also about how important those editions were to help preserve these women's stories for their families in years to come.  Women who, years ago, wouldn’t have had their story told, because years ago, women, for the most part, stood on the side-lines, kept in the background, and were rarely mentioned in newspapers or books.

Women in history, whose families will never know their story.

Over the years, I’ve written about a variety of women from central Minnesota, women whose stories deserved to be told.  One was about a woman who had to decide whether or not to pull the plug on her newborn daughter’s life, another was a woman who has spent her entire life in a wheelchair due to Cerebral Palsy.  There was also a wife who weathered more than seventy years of marriage, yet another who endured the Camps of WWII, and also a young woman who was forced to give her child up for adoption… the stories are endless.  Stories like these, and many others, have been preserved in our writings, because they needed to be.

I’m named after my great-grandma Hannah, a tall, strong, woman who ran her own farm and died the year before I was born.  Sure, there are a few family stories handed down about Hannah over the generations, but I sure wish someone would have been around sixty plus years ago to preserve her story for me.

I'm thankful we live in a time where society realizes women's lives are important enough to be written about, preserved for their family history, and especially, that men are reading these stories too, because they understand the importance of women in history.

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