March 3 was World Writer’s Day. It’s not a day off. What’s Right: Why Do Writers Take Vacations? They do nothing but write, and everyone can write. Kidding!
But joking aside, I realized a long time ago that when the figure of the Writer appears in any modern film or television series, then it is an extremely strange character.
When you write, it is not clear. But he drives expensive cars to fancy restaurants, squanders money, and flirts with beautiful women no worse than James Bond. I don’t think filmmakers really think of writers that way.
Still, they treat them at the level of film adaptations. But, apparently, this is how they imagine they are represented by the mass audience and work on their applications. The writer is a henchman of fate. Up to your ears in fabulous rates. And handsome, too, of course.
I will not refute this stereotype. For the most part, writers would probably like to see themselves that way. But in reality, today it is almost impossible to make money from literature, publishing in magazines and even publishing books. Units are successful. And this, believe me, costs them a lot of work.
So Writer’s Day, established by the international PEN Center in 1986, is a holiday for workers at the pen and keyboard, and not for lazy and idle revelers, which, however, abound among writers. Only nobody knows them.
On March 8 we will celebrate another holiday – International Women’s Day. He has his own fund. Clara Zetkin proposed establishing it at the International Conference of Socialists in Copenhagen in 1910. This conference was dedicated to the women’s struggle for universal suffrage. This seems to be a thing of the past, because today there is equal suffrage for men and women in all civilized countries. But most modern men do not realize how many tears and strength the women’s liberation movement in the USA, Europe and Russia spent, so that women only in the 20th century, and not even at the beginning of it , they achieved the legal right. that made women full citizens. Most men imagine March 8 as such a day, “only once a year”, when women need to be congratulated on something (with what, because they are women?) And give them flowers. Starting with the office workers. with alcohol. And to the wife – in the afternoon.
My Brazilian translator, who left the USSR in the 1960s, told me that she hated March 8 for the rest of her life and did not consider it a holiday. “The husband comes home drunk and brings flowers.”
When a Writer appears in a movie or TV series, he is a strange character.
While working on a book about the early Russian feminist Lisa Dyakonova, I dove into the history of women’s struggle for their rights in the 19th century. And I was blown away by this story! It was a real battle between the weaker and the stronger sex, in which the starting positions were obviously unequal, because the State and society at all levels were governed by men. They made the laws and enforced them. When my heroine Liza Dyakonova, the daughter of a merchant, a graduate of Bestuzhev’s courses, came to an appointment with the Minister of Education with a request to allow her to listen to lectures at the Faculty of Law (“daring”, she dreamed of becoming a! lawyer!), they answered him with one short word: “No!” She went to the Sorbonne. There it was possible. But when she arrived in Paris in 1900, a great event took place there. Paris honored the first French woman, Jeanne Chauvin, to graduate with a law degree. She was the second woman in the world that men allowed to work as a lawyer. The first was Olga Petit, by the way, of Russian origin.
The 20th century began. And in enlightened Europe, a female lawyer was seen as something exotic.
But if you think that in France it was better with women’s rights than in Russia, then you are very wrong. According to the Napoleonic Code, the main civil code of France in the 19th century, when a girl married, she passed all her property to her husband, even if she inherited it from her parents. Therefore, financially, she became utterly powerless. It was not so in Russia. In Anna Karenina, Steve Oblonsky must get Dolly’s permission to sell her property.
At the same time, the amazing story of Bestuzhev’s Higher Women’s Courses is the story of the long and painful struggle of Russian girls for the right to higher education. The courses were opened in Saint Petersburg in 1878 thanks to enthusiasts for women’s education such as NV Stasova, MV Trubnikova, AP Philosophers, who were supported by professors from Moscow University, among whom were Beketov, Mendeleev, Grevs and other luminaries of Russian science.
But the girls who graduated from them did not receive a higher education diploma, but a certificate that they had taken the courses. Where can they go? To the governess! And the career peak of “bestuzhevka” is to become the director of a women’s gymnasium. Do you remember Olga in “Three Sisters”?
Happy holidays, dear women! Your cause is correct! Won!
So all the talk of men that a woman is not very suitable for intellectual work is shameless talk. You need to know at least a little about the history of women’s education and be amazed by the fact that in the 21st century women are gaining more and more positions over men in all areas: science, art, pedagogy and even business. That there are almost more talented women writers in Russia today than men. Although back in the late 1980s (late 20th century!) literary groups (“New Amazons”) had to be created in order to prove the right to write.
Happy holidays, dear women!
Your cause is correct! Won!
