Hanna Reitsch and Women’s History Month

by philg

Here’s a tweet in which the author says we should celebrate people who were born during Women’s History Month (a.k.a. “March”) if they identified as “women”:

Today is the birthday of Hanna Reitsch, almost surely the greatest aviatrix who has ever lived (among other achievements, she taught herself to fly a single-seat helicopter in the 1930s). She held some political opinions that are unpopular today (e.g., “It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side”). Should that prevent people from including her in a course on Women’s History? Most history classes include information about people whose actions and moral beliefs were not laudable, e.g., anything about the Civil War, any course on the Roman Empire, etc.

  • “Ginsburg, on the other hand, has hired only one African American law clerk in her 25 years on the Supreme Court. This is an improvement from her 13-year tenure on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, when Ginsburg never had any black clerks.” (Washington Post 2018)

7 thoughts on “Hanna Reitsch and Women’s History Month”

  2. I celebrate Women’s History Month by repeating the following little ditty:

    “Fags suck dick
    Lesbians lick labia
    U.S. out of Saudi Arabia.” – Anonymous inscription on the bathroom stall of a lesbian-only bar in Ireland.

    My former boss was a friend of RBG. She would have unequivocally supported the ADL’s message. If she was a Nazi supporter, I have zero doubt that she personally and the ADL would have investigated her so thoroughly beforehand that she would never be considered.

    • You aren’t allowed to use the word “Fag” it’s like “N*gg*r” Verboten!

    • I guess I stand corrected! Feel free to use the word fag! I assume fag can refer to homosexuals or cigarettes or both. .

    • @Toucan Sam: If it hasn’t been memory-holed or the text hasn’t been edited to remove all the triggers, the quote is accurate and it actually existed on a bathroom stall in an Irish lesbian-only tavern at the time Rosemary Mahoney spent a year in Ireland decades ago:

      “Whoredom In Kimmage – The Private Lives of Irish Women” which is one of a small handful of Women’s Studies books that I can recommend, which I largely attribute to the prodigious talent of the author. It really is an unsung treasure.

      https://www.amazon.com/Whoredom-Kimmage-Private-Lives-Irish/dp/0385474504

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