To acknowledge the end of the second millennium, various individuals and organizations promulgated lists of the most influential people of the millennium, almost all of whom were men. Such lists included
      warriors (Napoleon, William the Conqueror, Ghengis Khan),
      statesmen (Bismark, Richlieu),
      revolutionaries (Marx, Stalin, Mao),
      scientists (da Vinci, Copernicus, Newton, Pastuer, Darwin, Einstein),
      (political) philosophers (the French and English philosophes of the 18th century Enlightenment and their predecessors - Descartes, Montainge, Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Condorcet, David Hume, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon),
      the American Founding Fathers (Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Monroe),
      artists (Michelangelo, Raphel),
      inventors (Gutenberg, Witney, Watt, Edison),
      theologians (Aquinas, Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Martin Luther, John Calvin),
      religious figures (Hildebrand, Dominic de Guzman (founder of the Dominican -- hounds of the lord -- order), the Jesuits (another religious order),
      travelers and explorers (Marco Polo, de Gama, Columbus),
      writers (Shakespeare), and,
      on the darker side, Hilter, Pope Gregory IX (founder of the Inquisition which brought untold suffering into the world), and Torquemada, men whose names are synonymous with suffering and death.

      So many of these men are noted for the death and destruction, raping and pillaging, that occurred under their guidance and the guidance of their later followers. And many of the other men are noteworthy because they used their intellect to undermine the power of those who brought death and destruction into the world.

      On the other hand, our list of influential women of the Millennium, although not entirely free of women who brought death into the world in the name of God (Isabella of Spain), consists mostly of women who tried to improve the lives of the people around them, and, eventually, their own lives..

      Comparing these lists, we see that men's history is filled with war, conquest, death, and destruction while women's history is filled with giving and nurturing life in the home, the extended family, and the community.

      Yet, perhaps the most influential women of the millennium were the mothers and daughters of the common people, people who bore, raised, and trained each generation. Women always worked hard to sustain their families -- there is a reason that the saying, "A man works from sun to sun, a woman's work is never done" is regarded as a truism. Women were vital forces in the family and in the community. They not only bore and raised their children and tended to their husbands, they created homes -- they tended the cows in the dairy and turned the cow's milk into butter and cheese, raised the chickens and other barnyard animals, made the soap and candles, preserved the harvest, cleaned, spun, and wove fiber into cloth, made clothes, cared for the kitchen garden, and created herbals for treating sickness, as well as maintained the home by cleaning the house, doctoring for the sick, washing the clothes, and preparing the food.

      These women may not have left behind great works of art and literature or monuments to their ability to bring death and destruction into the world. But they did leave behind a world in which the lives of ordinary men and women gradually improved over time. When the millennium began, Europe was emerging from the darkest part of the Dark Ages; as the millennium ends, Europe is on the threshold of a new way of valuing humanity - not by the color of one's skin, not by the way one worships or envisions God, not by the language one speaks, not by the sex-organs one was born with, but by valuing human life in all of its diversity simply because it is human life. And it is women who are on the forefront of this new way of envisioning the world. Take pride in being a woman for you come from a long line of illustrious forebears, for as Frenchman M. Thomas wrote in a letter published by Thomas Paine "Occasional Letter On The Female Sex"

If a woman were to defend the cause of her sex, she might address him in the following manner:

"How great is your injustice? If we have an equal right with you to virtue, why should we not have an equal right to praise? The public esteem ought to wait upon merit. Our duties are different from yours, but they are not therefore less difficult to fulfill, or of less consequence to society: They are the fountains of your felicity, and the sweetness of life. We are wives and mothers. 'Tis we who form the union and the cordiality of families. 'Tis we who soften that savage rudeness which considers everything as due to force, and which would involve man with man in eternal war. We cultivate in you that humanity which makes you feel for the misfortunes of others, and our tears forewarn you of your own danger. Nay, you cannot be ignorant that we have need of courage not less than you. More feeble in ourselves, we have perhaps more trials to encounter. Nature assails us with sorrow, law and custom press us with constraint, and sensibility and virtue alarm us with their continual conflict. Sometimes also the name of citizen demands from us the tribute of fortitude- When you offer your blood to the State think that it is ours. In giving it our sons and our husbands we give more than ourselves. You can only die on the field of battle, but we have the misfortune to survive those whom we love most. Alas! while your ambitious vanity is unceasingly laboring to cover the earth with statues, with monuments, and with inscriptions to eternize, if possible, your names, and give yourselves an existence, when this body is no more, why must we be condemned to live and to die unknown? Would that the grave and eternal forgetfulness should be our lot. Be not our tyrants in all: Permit our names to be sometimes pronounced beyond the narrow circle in which we live. Permit friendship, or at least love, to inscribe its emblem on the tomb where our ashes repose; and deny us not that public esteem which, after the esteem of one's self, is the sweetest reward of well doing.".

      Happy New Millennium.

Sunny

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