Curio Cabinet / Daily Curio

Today is International Women's Day.
 

At the 2019 State of the Union, members of Congress wore white clothing and red lipstick to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment.
Passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the amendment states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Although suffragettes began campaigning for women's right to vote before the Civil War, the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 is often-cited as the solidifying moment for the movement. During the convention Elizabeth Cady Stanton produced the Declaration of Sentiments, also known as the Women's Rights Declaration, arguing that, "all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." By the turn of the 20th century, American suffragettes were easily identified by their white garments, symbols of virtue and purity.
 
In 1912, makeup maven Elizabeth Arden joined the suffragettes. Marching down Fifth Avenue in New York City, she handed out free tubes of red lipstick. The bold color quickly grew in popularity with leadership—not only did it shock men, but it also served as a sign of liberation and rebellion. Suffragettes in Europe and the British commonwealth also adopted the red lip as a sign of global solidarity. Of course, lipstick has been around since antiquity, serving as a marker for status (be it royalty or sex worker) as well as race. Although the suffragette movement in the United States is primarily associated with white, middle- and upper-class women, women of color actively contributed to the movement. Such narratives are rarely highlighted in feminist history. This exclusion is particularly important to understanding the suffragettes movement. After all, the 19th amendment really only gave affluent white women the right to vote. Moreover, women of color continued to be chastised for wearing a bold lip, while white women were (and are) praised for the same choice. So when the congress women pictured above wore bold lips in 2019, they made a statement about the importance of inclusivity in women's rights—be it equal pay or equal representation. And yes, even the right to wear red lipstick without criticism.

 
[Image description: Members of Congress at the 2019, including Nita Lowey, Nydia Velazquez, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Judy Chu, and Eleanor Holmes Norton in the front row, wearing white and red lipstick.] Credit & copyright: Tom Williams, CQ Roll Call, Getty Images.

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Now these are a group of Amazons who can really get down and loud with International Women's Day. That's right, the Working Women's Union or the "Shouting Amazons" as they were dubbed by The Chicago Tribune, championed an eight-hour workday, the abolition of child labor, equal pay for equal work, and scaled income tax. On May 3, 1886, the women led a peaceful march through downtown Chicago as part of a larger labor rally. Several hundred women and girls, mostly seamstresses from a local cloak factory, jubilantly marched down the streets singing, "Eight Hours," a song with lyrics like, "We mean to make things over, we are tired of toil for naught / With but bare enough to live upon, and never an hour for thought." Like many in the working-class, the women toiled in hazardous conditions for 10 to 12 hours a day and paltry pay. The protestors' ebullience quickly dampened that evening when police attacked demonstrators at the nearby McCormick Reaping company. The next morning, May 4, 1886, laborers gathered in Haymarket Square to protest the police brutality. During the rally, someone threw a bomb, killing seven officers and four protestors. These events, known as the "Haymarket affair," invigorated labor reformers around the world. In 1889, the Marxist International Social Congress established International Workers' Day on May 1 in honor of the Chicago laborers. President Cleveland signed the federal holiday into law in 1894, but selected the first Monday in September to avoid the movement's socialist, communist, and anarchist roots. So today, as you're enjoying respite from a 40-hour workweek, raise a glass to the Shouting Amazons.
 

Image credit & copyright: Women delegates to the 1886 Convention of the Knights of Labor, Library of Congress, 1886

The lack of presidential pets in the White House over the last four years was pretty unusual. President Joe Biden's inauguration was also a celebration for animal lovers who welcomed his two German Shepherds, Champ and Major, and the presence of pets back in the White House. Major is also the first shelter-adopted dog to live on the grounds, an event marked by his former caretakers at the Delaware Humane Association with an "Indoguration" ceremony and fundraiser on Zoom. The event had over 7,500 virtual attendees, and raised $200,000. The two shepherds have even earned the Twitter hashtag #DOTUS, and have a fan account called The Oval Pawffice to track their activities on social media.
 

So what does the average day for a White House pet look like? The Washington Post recently uncovered the "day-to-day doggie logistics". The pet care responsibilities are generally decided by the First Family with the Executive Residence staff (responsible for all living quarters duties) offering support when required. George H.W. and Barbara Bush were known to take on all of the responsibilities of dog ownership, even bathing their Springer Spaniels Millie and her pup Ranger by themselves. Gerald Ford's pregnant Golden Retriever Liberty was once the cause of a Secret Service emergency when the residence doors were bolted shut and the elevators had been shut down after the president took her out for a 3am potty walk. For more serious issues, veterinarians will make house calls, and the Chief groundskeeper Dale Hanley serves as a volunteer dog trainer. Hanley has worked with Presidential pets for decades, beginning with Richard Nixon's Irish Setter King Timahoe in the 1970s, and he's already been spotted out and about with Champ and Major. The training is welcomed, as most pet interactions are pleasant, but every once and a while a Chocolate Labrador Buddy Clinton can nearly cause a messy catastrophe by running full speed towards a holiday dessert display in the Grand Foyer. Otherwise White House pets are allowed to roam the grounds as they please, often adding levity and fuzzy fun to the serious work performed at the executive branch. Now who's up for a game of fetch on the South Lawn?

 
Credit and copyright: Delaware Humane Association / Pumpkin Petcare, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library / NARA, David Hume Kennerly / Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, White House / Michael Sargent

Below: former Presidents and their furry companions, including President Ronald Reagan with Lucky the sheep dog and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the Rose Garden; President Gerald Ford seated in the Oval Office and offering his golden retriever Liberty some good ear scrichies; and President George H. W. Bush with his Springer Spaniel, Millie, and her five puppies on the White House South Lawn.

Written by: Esther P.

Happy March! Our selections for the Books of the Month follow this Curio.  

Post-World War II, American babies born prematurely were given excessively high concentrations of oxygen in incubators. This unknowingly caused a blindness epidemic. Because babies' eyes rapidly develop in the last 12 weeks of pregnancy, babies born prematurely may not have fully formed retinas. Too much oxygen can inhibit eye development and lead to retrolental fibroplasia, abnormal and fragile blood vessels growing throughout the retina. Renamed retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), retrolental fibroplasia can cause scarring and retinal detachment, leaving babies visually impaired or blind. Between the 1940s and 1950s, an estimated 10,000 babies lost their vision due to ROP.
 

The blindness epidemic led to an influx of visually impaired students in the public school system. Schools for the blind, like the Perkins School in Massachusetts, sought ways to serve this population by modernizing assistive technology. 70 years ago, they consulted with David Abraham, a British carpenter and machinist, to reinvent the braillewriter, a mechanical machine for writing braille.
 

Whereas the modern typewriter was invented in 1868, the first modern braillewriter was not invented until 1892. The original design had six keys, one for each of the dots in a braille cell. In Braille, each braille letter or cell is made up of six numbered dots (i.e. dot 1, dot 2, dot 3, etc.). Unique combinations of dots represent different letters and numbers. The idea for the writing system came from the Napoleonic army—Charles Barbier, an artillery officer, invented an embossed note-taking system that allowed militia to read notes without needing to strike a match and potentially alert the enemy to their location. Louis Braille spent years standardizing this system. When the Perkins school commissioned Abraham to redesign the braillewriter, they had several goals. They wanted to design a machine that was lightweight, easy to transport, durable, and quieter. Abraham's design may look deceptively simple, but it revolutionized braille writing. Today, the reading and writing system has numerous variants, many of which the Perkins Brailler can accommodate.

 
[Image description: The Perkins Brailler, a blue-green colored machine with six black keys, a space key, and a line space key, as well as two side knobs for advancing paper.] Copyright by the Perkins School for the Blind.
 

Below, the Braille alphabet, and a demonstration of how the Perkins Brailler works.

Last week, Texas experienced unprecedented power outages amid Winter Storm Uri. This wasn't the first time the system, managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), dealt with freeze-related failure. In 2011, during Super XLV, generators failed, leading to rolling blackouts. Turns out many of those generators had similarly failed in 1989. To understand why these generators failing led to mass blackouts requires some background on how the United States gets energy to consumers. In the contiguous United States, there are three electrical power grids: the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and ERCOT. Formally established in 1970, ERCOT is a nonprofit organization overseen by the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the Texas Legislature, and an unelected board (one third of whom lived outside of Texas before resigning yesterday). ERCOT covers most, but not all of Texas—parts of the panhandle, like El Paso, and East Texas, receive utilities from nearby states.
 

Because Texas is "off the grid," that is not connected to the other 47 mainland states, it cannot borrow energy in times of crisis. This design was intentional. During World War II, there was a substantial need for power along the Gulf Coast. Separate utilities in North and Central Texas combined forces to send excess energy to the region. For Texas, this interconnection also offered another opportunity—to evade federal oversight. Several years earlier, in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act to regulate interstate energy commerce. Texas utilities vowed to keep all power created within the state, avoiding federal regulation. Even today, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission cannot interfere in the state's energy operations or wholesale electricity sales. This system has always been a point of pride for free-market advocates. In the late 1990s, Texas went a step further in deregulating utilities. The legislature broke up existing utility companies into power generating, transmission and distribution, and consumer-serving companies. Supporters have argued this decision benefited companies and consumers. However, Texas must now reckon with the devastating outcomes of a system that allowed companies to self-regulate. By ignoring recommendations to winterize infrastructure, Texas energy companies prioritized profits over people. Some even cashed in from the surge in demand as people died of hypothermia, burned their possessions to stay warm, and faced food and water shortages. Meanwhile other companies are facing financial ruin.
 

And in case you're wondering clean energy is not to blame for the crisis. Texas only gets 1% of its energy from solar power, 11% from nuclear power, and 17% from wind power. (It turns out wind turbines thrive in cold places...even Antarctica.) The rest of the state's energy comes from natural gas and coal.
 
[Image description: The three large electric interconnections that span the United States, large parts of Canada, and a small part of Mexico. A very modest amount of power flows among these three regions over direct current cables so that the 60 Hz power is not synchronized among the regions. Hydro Québec, which is not shown, provides power to many states in the northeastern United States.] Credit & copyright: U.S. Department of Energy, 2016.

Every year in the United States, we celebrate Black History Month in February. But what, precisely, does that mean? Celebrating the accomplishments and contributions of black Americans as part of the official historical record began with Carter G. Woodson. A historian, Woodson was the second black man after W.E.B. DuBois to earn a PhD from Harvard. As the child of ex-slaves, Woodson witnessed firsthand the impact of slavery on black families, their cultures, and their communities. Yet, these voices were not part of U.S. History–they weren't taught in schools or recognized by historical institutions. In 1915, Woodson created a display about black progress and achievements at an event celebrating Illinois' ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the U.S. Thousands of African-Americans from across the country were in attendance. Inspired by their presence, Woodson established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), and began publishing The Journal of Negro History in 1916. In 1924, Woodson helped his college fraternity Omega Psi Phi, an African-American organization founded at Howard University, promote Negro Achievement Week.
 

Just two years later, Woodson would take the project nationwide, promoting Negro History Week in a February press release from the ASNLH. In choosing mid-February for Negro History Week celebrations, Woodson acknowledged the traditions of black Americans celebrating Abraham Lincoln's and Frederick Douglass' birthdays (February 12th and 14th, respectively). Both men shaped the outcome of the Civil War, forever altering the history of black Americans. Negro History Week was a runaway success, with the ASNLH opening local branches and providing study materials like teacher lessons, plays, and calendars with important dates.
 

Woodson himself proved a model worthy of study as well: his intent was to have Negro History Week be a phase of a much larger and substantive change to the way history is taught and its previous omissions of Black achievement. He also famously rejected efforts to commercialize, whitewash, or trivialize Negro History Week just so U.S. companies and grifters could profit off of the popular event, even once going so far as to warn teachers not to invite speakers who had less knowledge of African-American History than the students themselves. Woodson's influence no doubt had an impact on students who would later become leaders and other activists of the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1960s, Frederick H. Hammurabi and the House of Knowledge cultural center for African consciousness in Chicago began celebrating Negro History Month. And in 1970, the Black United Students at Kent State University celebrated the first Black History Month. Under President Gerald Ford, the tradition of issuing proclamations endorsing Black History Month became an annual tradition. If Carter G. Woodson were alive today, we bet he'd be amazed at how far his Black history project has come, and how far still it has to go in transforming the ways history is taught in our country.

 
[Image description: Black and white headshot of a young Carter G. Woodson]. Credit & copyright: Archives Center, National Museum of American History

 
Written by: Esther P.

Talk about a phenomenal doll! Late author, activist and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Dr. Maya Angelou, best known for poems like Phenomenal Woman, Still I Rise, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is the latest figure to be made into a Barbie doll in Mattel's ongoing "Inspiring Women" series. Launched in 2018, the "Inspiring Women" series is meant to pay tribute to "incredible heroines of their time; courageous women who took risks, changed rules and paved the way for generations of girls to dream bigger than ever before," according to Mattel. Dolls in this line include Ella Fitzgerald, Rosa Parks, and Florence Nightingale, among others. None of them adhere to the "standard" Barbie proportions or appearance. Instead, each doll's face and body is sculpted to resemble the person it is portraying, with clothes and accessories based on real outfits and objects that the person wore or used. Fans of Angelou will recognize her doll's bright orange, floor-length, floral-patterned dress and matching headwrap as one of her signature looks. The doll also holds a miniature copy of Angelou's acclaimed 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
 

While some have questioned whether Angelou would want her image marketed by a toy company, many have praised Mattel's recent efforts to be more inclusive and empowering, not just with the "Inspiring Women" line but also the "Role Models" line, which features dolls based on living female role models, and the "Fashionistas" line, which includes dolls with differing body sizes. Mattel has also committed to featuring women of color as more than 50% of its dolls going forward. For their part, Angelou's living relatives are pleased with her doll. In a recent interview, Angelou's son, Guy Johnson, said that he was "delighted" at his mother's inclusion in the "Inspiring Women" line, and that he hoped it would "inspire new generations of teachers, writers and activists." The general public has certainly responded well to Angelou's doll. It sold out within five days of its release, in late January, leading Mattel to announce that a second round is coming soon. That's one popular Poet Laureate!

 
[Image description: A doll with the likeness of Maya Angelou stands in front of a miniature painting and birdcage, holding a miniature copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in its hands.] Credit & copyright: Mattel

 
Written by: Maria C.

Inauguration Day fashion buzz typically focuses on what women are wearing to the Washington D.C. celebrations, but not this year. A snapshot of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders went viral after social media posts focused on his physical candor: masked, mittened, and socially distanced (maybe emotionally too?). In short, Senator Sanders was "serving a look." By the next morning the democratic socialist had been memed dozens of times over into famous images, including a seat at da Vinci's The Last Supper, riding in the cockpit of Star Wars' Millennium Falcon, and taking the Iron Throne in Game of Thrones. When asked to comment about his no-nonsense appearance, Senator Sanders said “In Vermont, we dress, we know something about the cold…. and we’re not so concerned about good fashion. We just want to keep warm. And that’s what I did [at the inauguration].”
 

All joking aside, BuzzFeed News was the first to find out who made Senator Sanders' brown and white mittens—Jen Ellis of Essex Junction, Vermont gave a pair to Sanders after he did not win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Ellis is a second grade teacher and knitting hobbyist who crafted Sanders' mittens from wool sweaters and an inner layer of recycled plastic-fleece. Ellis initially shunned the media attention, claiming she did not have the extra time during the school year to meet the flood of demands for Sanders-like mittens, and that his pair were a one-of-a-kind gift. Soon enough though both Sanders and Ellis realized the charitable opportunity on their hands, with Senator Sanders selling out shirts with his Inauguration image on them with 100% of proceeds going towards Meals on Wheels Vermont. He also encouraged Getty Images to donate their profits from the image sales. Ellis quickly made three pairs of mittens and auctioned them for a dog rescue organization, an LGBTQ+ youth outreach program, and her own daughter's college funds. At the end of January, Ellis teamed up with the Vermont Teddy Bear Company to begin manufacturing the "Original Bernie Mittens" to satisfy the over 18,000 requests she received for a pair of the Vermont Senator's gloves. It looks like Sanders and Ellis have really redefined the meaning of lending a (gloved) helping hand!

 
[Image description: Senator Bernie Sanders sitting alone on a chair at President Joe Biden's Inauguration.] Copyright & Source: Brendan Smialowski / Agence France-Presse.
 

Below: more images of a meme-ified Senator Sanders.

[Image description: Iconic photograph of several construction workers at the Empire State Building taking a lunch break, sitting on a steel frame high above New York City. Cross-legged Senator Bernie Sanders is photoshopped among them.] Copyright & Source of "Lunch atop a Skyscraper (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam)," Charles C. Ebbets, 1932.
 

[Image description: The six main characters from the TV show Friendstitle credits sit on a couch in front of a fountain with Senator Bernie Sanders sitting on the couch next to them.] Copyright by NBC.
 

[Image description: Cross-legged Senator Bernie Sanders sitting at the bus stop with the girls Satsu and Mei Kusakabe and the large Totoro creature from the animated film My Neighbor Totoro.] Copyright: Studio Ghibli.

 
Written by: Esther P.

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Happy Valentine's Day! If you are celebrating tonight with red roses, then you are part of a unique global economy. For these 24 hours, red roses are worth triple what they are the rest of the year. But getting fresh flowers to look good in the Northern Hemisphere in February requires serious effort. The flowers have to be grown in the Southern Hemisphere, then be hearty enough to withstand the torture of packing, transport, customs, arranging, and delivery. Not to mention be at their optimal stage of bloom! It's a billion-dollar market that lasts a single day. It takes the entire year to pull off.
 

Most Valentine's Day roses are grown in Kenya, Ecuador, and Colombia, with a majority of Americans' roses coming from the savanna outside Colombia's capital, Bogotá. They don't even celebrate the holiday there. The roses are planted in greenhouses the size of several football fields with precision planning, so they can be harvested on February 6th exactly with tight blooms. Given the weather, the farmers modulate the growth process using heat, hormones, or potassium. The stems are then packed by the dozen and chilled to sleep in refrigeration rooms, before being loaded on commercial flights to Miami. Each plane can carry 1.1 million blooms! Once in Miami, the flowers are inspected for cocaine and contraband before being shipped to florists, grocery stores, and Walmarts around the U.S. And almost every one of the 200 million red roses delivered on February 14th survives the journey in good health. In fact, the sturdiness of the red rose is why Americans give them on Valentine's Day. Traditionally, any flower variety was acceptable, but as suppliers had more success importing red roses, Americans grew more fond of them. In fact, the whole "red roses symbolize love" thing was invented by the flower industry after the fact! Well played, flower industrial complex, well played.