History gives historian her due

By SUSAN SWARTZ
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Published: Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 6:02 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, March 10, 2007 at 9:00 p.m.

Mary Crawford turned herself into Mary Ruthsdotter because there were too many other Mary Crawfords. Two at UCLA where she went to school and a sister-in-law.

"It felt like, take a number."

She had no problem with her first name. Mary fit her Midwestern solidness. But Crawford was her husband's name, and though she loves the man - they've been married for 42 years - she wanted something that belonged to her.

"Golly gee," she said. "First I was my father's property and then my husband's."

She legally changed to Ruthsdotter in 1978, a time when many women were morphing their identities into creative hybrids and shaking up the patrimony tradition.

Ruthsdotter seemed a natural because friends of her mother often commented, "You must be Ruth's daughter."

Then there's a Scandinavian tradition (although she's not Scandinavian) where people add "dotter" or "son" to a name, although usually the first part is a Leif or an Erick.

The name sensitivity served Mary when she and three other Sonoma County women started the National Women's History Project in 1980, which is all about names - of women ignored by history.

Mary's role was "to get the word out" to teachers, schoolkids, researchers, librarians and media around the country, which she did so well that the local project grew into a major national resource.

Each March, which is Women's History Month, the national organization comes up with a new list of not-to-be-missed women, and Mary Ruthsdotter is on this year's. Sitting in her Sebastopol kitchen, she's a bit embarrassed about the tribute. "It seems a little unseemly, for an organization to honor a founding member." But despite her reluctance and a recent bout with cancer, she'll go to Washington on March 21 to "some snazzy event" where she'll likely spend more time telling stories about the other honorees than herself.

Mary is a proud and loud feminist who comes from a line of un-proclaimed feminists. Mary's grandmother Esther once told Mary that some men thought women "belonged to them like their cows and pigs."

But Esther had her ways, insisting on going out to vote when she was hugely pregnant and should have properly stayed inside. Esther also raised three kids by herself after her husband took a government job and told her "he travels fastest who travels alone."

Mary's mother, Ruth, married to a Marine pilot, helped start new schools on two military bases and drove a Red Cross relief truck. "I was just a military wife," she said from her home near Chico, "but I felt I had to do something else."

Mary's daughter Alice, a university professor living in Australia with her husband and two sons, calls herself a third-wave feminist. "The core values of feminism," which she picked up pretty much by osmosis, "made as much compelling sense to me as the law of gravity," she said in an e-mail.

Mary scoffs at the off-and-on rumors that feminism is dead. "Those people are just plain mistaken. Ask any single woman about her access to credit or ask a married woman about having separate bank accounts. It's in the culture."

Daughter Alice acknowledges that progress can be questionable. She cites media stories "making a big drama about the low self-esteem of girls - their dieting, boy obsessions, Paris Hilton cheesiness and wearing heels to chemistry class."

But she thinks the real opportunities for women "in work, love and how they conduct their lives" are greater now "than any generation before them."

Put that in your history books.