Women in their Underwear

What comes to mind are three women on frank display. These are not Maxim playthings, not cover girls. Think of your aunt. The eccentric one with the high IQ.

What some people may fail to appreciate, without a deeper examination, is what remarkable lives these grand women had.

The women are Bella Abzug (orange), Clara Fraser (blue) and the still vivacious, Greta Gaard (green), as depicted by Jiji Saunders in Valise Gallery’s April installation titled, “Carry On.”
What hangs on the wall is not lingerie. In fact, they are the aged linings of womanly valises. The faded, silky fabrics have been dissected carefully from three suitcases pre-dating the Nixon administration.

Years before 9/11, the items in a woman’s suitcase were especially intimate. What’s inside? Contraceptive foam? A new pants suit? That strange scissor-handled contraption used to shape eyelashes? But the metaphor runs much deeper.

What is inside a grown woman’s life? Where has she been and what has she endured on her journey?

The faded nylon fabrics are lovely. Look closely; there are stains from all the voyages. One subtle spot hints of lipstick? menstruation? plum preserves? Who knows.

The subjects of Saunders work are activists. Clara Fraser and Bella Abzug had rich lives. Born three years apart in the Roaring 20’s, both died in 1998. Greta Gaard carrys on as a writer and educator.

Clara Fraser was a feminist and socialist political organizer, who co-founded and led the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women. In being fired in 1975 for speaking out against sex-and-ideology discrimination at Seattle City Light, then being rehired seven years later, Clara Goodman Fraser improved life for many of the Seattle's working women, poor people and minorities.

Her headline-grabbing actions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s made Clara Fraser a familiar name. From then on her work in Seattle's Radical Women and Freedom Socialist Party, both of which she helped found, became high-profile.

So did Ms. Fraser herself, a dramatic, husky-voiced former laborer who loved chocolates, cigarettes and mystery novels. But for more than a quarter-century before, she had agitated for women, people of color, union workers, gays and prisoners. Divorced herself, she helped write the state's first divorce-reform bill and organized Washington's first abortion-rights rally. She also campaigned for university-funded child care at the University of Washington and worked to get women into electrical and engineering careers.

Bella Savitsky Abzug was an American lawyer, Congresswoman, social activist and a leader of the Women's Movement. In 1971 Abzug joined other leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan to found the National Women's Political Caucus. She famously declared "This woman’s place is in the House—the House of Representatives" in her successful 1970 campaign to join that body. She was later appointed to chair the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year and plan the 1977 National Women's Conference and led Jimmy Carter's commission on women.

Greta Claire Gaard (born 1960, Hollywood, CA) is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, vegetarianism, and animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currently a professor of English at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities.

I see three dames, posing proudly in their underwear.