March 25

Read more about Elvira Navarro here

Read about Fontana in "8 things you learn about Star Trek..." here

4. Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana Was a Regular Peggy Olsen — The Trailblazing Female in a Male-Dominated World Part

Gene Roddenberry’s production secretary Dorothy Fontana was the first person to read his original 12-page treatment for Star Trek in 1964 because he thought so highly of her he valued her opinion. By the time 1966 came around, she had briefly quit as his production secretary, insisting that she get a chance to actually write for the show even though it was a time when not a lot of women wrote for television shows. Roddenberry didn’t want to lose her, and apparently had no problem with using a female writer. So, he gave her a script which was in need of a re-write, and that turned into the first season episode “This Side of Paradise,” which we have argued elsewhere is the 2nd best Original Series episode ever. Fontana claims that if the Network or other writers were uncomfortable with her around as a female writer she never heard or felt it due to Roddenberry’s influence. However, her credited name D.C. Fontana did seem designed to make it less obvious the episode had been written by a female. Plus, the documentary fails to cover this, but she ended up a credited writer for 8 Original Series episodes, three of which were written under the male pseudonyms Michael Richards or J. Michael Bingham.

Fontana at minute 22:00: I was dealing with producers at that time [early 1960s] who didn’t care what gender I was. ‘Did I write a good story?’ was all that I was ever asked.

Minute 28:58: October 1966 I became story editor for Star Trek. It was working independently with writers as a story editor. No one was looking over my shoulder to see if I was doing it right.

Minute 46:30: (Interviewer) What were you doing to attract intelligent viewers?

Fontana: Writing intelligent stories. That’s what we did on Star Trek. We weren’t going to write science fiction trash. We had usually strong women, most of the time. We had really good actors who were involved in good stories.

Read a tribute to Toni Cade Bambara here

Read an excerpt from Bambara's story "Medley"

I could tell the minute I got in the door and dropped my bag, I wasn’t staying. Dishes piled sky-high in the sink looking like some circus act. Glasses all ghostly on the counter. Busted tea bags, curling cantaloupe rinds, white cartons from the Chinamen, green sacks from the deli, and that damn dog creeping up on me for me to wrassle his head or kick him in the ribs one. So, l definitely wasn’t staying. Couldn’t even figure why I’d come. But picked my way to the hallway anyway till the laundry-stuffed pillowcases stopped me. Larry’s bass blocking the view to the bedroom.

“That you, Sweet Pea?”

“No, man, ain’t me at all,” I say, working my way back to the suitcase and shoving that damn dog out of the way. “See ya round,” l holler, the door slamming behind me, cutting off the words abrupt.

Quite naturally sitting cross-legged at the club, I embroider a little on the homecoming tale, what with an audience of two crazy women and a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels. Got so I could actually see shonuff toadstools growing in the sink, cantaloupe seeds sprouting in the muck. A goddamn compost heap breeding near the stove, garbage gardens on the grill.

“Sweet Pea, you oughta hush, cause you can’t possibly keep on lying so,” Pot Limit’s screaming, tears popping from her eyes. “Lawd hold my legs, cause this liar bout to kill me off.”

“Never mind about Larry’s housekeeping, girl,” Sylvia’s soothing me, sloshing perfectly good bourbon all over the table. “You can come and stay with me till your house comes through. It’ll be like old times at Aunt Merriam’s.”

I ease back into the booth to wait for the next set. The drummer’s fooling with the equipment, tapping the mikes, hoping he’s watched, so I watch him. But feeling worried in my mind about Larry…

Read more about Thom Loverro here

Read about Gloria Steinem here

Gloria Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, to Ruth and Leo Steinem. Her father, an itinerant antique dealer, spent winters selling his wares from a house trailer, usually with his family in tow; as a result, Gloria did not spend a full year in school until she was twelve years old. In the summers, Leo owned and operated a beach resort at Clark Lake, Michigan, where little Gloria apprenticed herself to the nightclub entertainers and learned to tap-dance.

…Hoping for a career as a writer, she moved to New York City in 1960, a time when women were expected to be Gal Fridays and gossip columnists, not serious journalists. She managed to cobble a modest living from odd scraps of assignments—working with Harvey Kurtzman, creator of Mad magazine, on his new project, Help!, a journal of political satire, and contributing short articles to Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal, and other women’s magazines. She also did unsigned pieces for Esquire, which eventually published her first by-lined piece, a story about the then-new contraceptive pill. A year later, in 1963, Steinem herself made headlines when she got an assignment from Show magazine for which she took a job as a Bunny at the Playboy Club and wrote an exposé of the unglamorous working conditions of the club’s glorified waitresses—sex objects in rabbit ears and cotton tails.

In 1971, she cofounded Ms.— the magazine that roared — the first feminist periodical with a national readership and the first mass-market women’s magazine with a revolutionary agenda. In the decades since, her writing has appeared in innumerable magazines, newspapers, anthologies, television commentaries, political campaigns, and film documentaries in America and internationally.

The titles of her books suggest both the evolution of her ideology and her state of mind at the time each was written. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) is a collection of twenty years of her most enduring, powerfully argued essays, from the Playboy Bunny story to her satirical classic, “If Men Could Menstruate”; from her probing interviews of Patricia Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to the searingly confessional “Ruth’s Song,” a tribute to her mother. Marilyn: Norma Jean (1986) is a warm, sympathetic rendering of the life of Marilyn Monroe, revisited from the perspective of feminist analysis. Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) describes Steinem’s efforts to link internal and external change into a full circle of revolution, partly through a reconsideration of her childhood and the inner life that she had repressed in her lifelong effort to be “useful to people in the outside world”—first her mother, then all of womankind and every other marginalized group.

[from Jewish Women’s Archive – Gloria Steinem]

Read below an excerpt from the preface to Steinem's
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Their question really was: `Why aren’t young women more feminist than older women—as we expect them to be? I found myself explaining all over again the trends I reported seventeen years ago in “Why Young Women Are More Conservative.” It’s men who are rebellious in youth and grow more conservative with age. Women tend to be conservative in youth and grow more rebellious with age; a pattern that has been evident since abolitionist and suffragist times. This makes sense in a male-dominant society where young men rebel against their powerful fathers, and then grow more conservative as they replace them, while young women outgrow the limited power allotted to them as sex objects and child bearers, and finally replace their less powerful mothers.

Furthermore, young women haven’t yet experienced the injustices of inequality in the paid labor force, the unequal burden of childrearing and work in the home, and the double standard of aging. To put it another way, if young women have a problem, it`s only that they think there`s no problem.