Come and Celebrate 100 Years of Women All Over the World

Editor's Note: This article is written by Louzana Kaku, co-president of the Soroptimist International of Artesia-Cerritos Club.

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On Monday, March 14 three local women’s organizations – the AAUW, Soroptimist International of Artesia-Cerritos, and the Artesia-Cerritos Woman’s Club – will present a Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day.

The program, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Skyline Room of the . Light refreshments will be served.

This is the first time the three clubs have joined together on a project, though they hope it will not be the last.

“We’ve had such a wonderful time working together,” said Nancy Sousa, president of the Woman’s Club. “It’s three groups of like-minded women with a common cause: to celebrate women’s achievements of the last century.”

“We’ve even discovered members who belong to two of the clubs, so there is some overlapping membership,” added AAUW President Judy Figal.

“The actual anniversary is on March 8,” Soroptimist co-president Louzana Kaku pointed out. “But since that’s election day, we didn’t want any women put in a position where they had to decide whether to vote or come to our celebration. After all, one of the things we’re celebrating is woman’s suffrage.”

The women felt the Centenary of International Women’s Day was a great opportunity to pool their efforts in a big way, but hadn’t decided how to go about it during their first meeting. At first they thought of watching a movie on women’s suffrage and having a round table discussion, then they considered inviting women who’d achieved great success to talk abouttheir experiences.

“But we felt those were passive activities,” Soroptimist co-president Kathy Lovell explained. “We wanted something that would involve a lot of the members. Something that would educate members about the women who came before them and be entertaining at thesame time.”

“We wanted them to see the last century through the eyes of the women who lived it and shaped it,” Judy Figal explained.

That’s when the ladies hit on the idea of celebrating a few of the amazing women of the last century.

“Deciding which women we’d feature was very difficult,” Figal said. “We asked our members for suggestions, but when we brought the names together we had enough material for a full semester course.”

“There were some women we knew had to be featured,” Kaku said. “You can’t talk about famous women of the past century without mentioning Eleanor Roosevelt, but we also wanted to feature some ordinary women who did extraordinary things – and that the average person wouldn’t know about. And, since it’s International Women’s Day, we also needed to feature women who aren’t American.”

“We wanted to surprise our guests,” Sousa interjected.

And so they wrote a script focusing on the humanity of each woman, featuring 25 speaking parts, and using the words of the actual women whenever possible. And they hope you will join them on March 14 for what promises to be a fun look at history through the eyes and words of some amazing women.

“Her-story,” Kaku said. “Not history.”