November 2018 – ‘She said’: women’s authority, #MeToo and Margaret Cavendish
Joanne Wright for the SSEMW Blog In 1989, students and staff at Columbia University hung a 170-foot wide banner off the top of Butler Library featuring the names of women writers, from Sappho and Christine de Pizan to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Virginia Woolf. As Laura Brown, who designed and made the banner, pointed out, “Great women do not get their names inscribed on buildings.”[1] To this end, the Columbia University Banner Project provided a symbolic counterweight to the list of iconic Western men that permanently adorn the building in stone. Later, in 1994, when designing another banner…