Vicki Le¢n is an uppity woman.
She has written more than 28 books in her 59 years, four of which are about other uppity women. She is a woman who chose to have a career and writes books for a living.
Le¢n pays tribute to “unsung women” by writing about them in her Uppity Women series.
She gave a lecture about her work on Monday at 7 p.m. in the Bakersfield College Forum building telling many stories from her books as well as her ideas on what makes an uppity woman.
“Right now we are going to go back in time, nearly 5,000 years or so,” she said. “That is when we begin to find the names of women who refused to back down or button up. Women who had gumption and humor and flexibility. Women who had businesses and careers, even when their family and society didn’t approve. These gals took risks. These women gambled on themselves, and I call them uppity women.”
Le¢n’s four books on uppity women begin with “Uppity Women in Ancient Times,” Le¢n’s favorite era because “I was drawn to it as a kid. The more I learned the more it all came together for me,” she said.
Born in Pueblo, Colo., Le¢n was fascinated with ancient history. She has lived most of her life in California where she attended Sacramento City College. But she did live many years in Spain working on research for her books. She has been divorced for 30 years and lives in Morro Bay, Calif.
According to Le¢n, uppity women in ancient times include Cleopatra and Sappho the poet.
She said the more she learns about women from the past, she finds more women in positions of power.
“Today we have many women in high government posts and that’s hot. But it really isn’t new,” she said. “As far back as the 13th century B.C. we had Madeleine Albrights and Condoleezza Rices doing shuttle diplomacy. Women who were achievers were not the exception.”
She also has written about women in medieval times, the Renaissance and the New World.
“(This is) putting a face to our female past,” she said. “When confronted with the word ‘history,’ a lot of people run the other way. It sounds dry, it sounds dusty, like an old book with no pictures and lots of footnotes. Let me tell you a secret I have learned. History isn’t just a collection of dates and battles, it is solid. To me this is real history. Getting a glimpse of a woman in all her wonderful work and all (her) contradictions.”
But Le¢n does admit that some of her research is not easy. The further she goes back in history, the less is known about the people, especially the women.
“After doing research for 32 years, I have come to think of myself as a historical detective, a time traveler if you will,” she said. “I follow clues and some of them are very, very faint. I learn to trust my hunches and follow them back in time.”
Le¢n said that the more research she does, the more women she discovers who were “uppity.”
“At some point in my research, I got a terrific insight. The more women I stumbled across, the more I realized that for the last 5,000 years or more, there have been women in every single generation who have done remarkable things,” she said. “Sure it was tough, but uppity women became power brokers and pirates and poets and philosophers, even pharaohs. They invented, they created, they explored, they even bankrolled religions.”
According to Le¢n, nearly every organized religion has gotten off the ground because of a woman’s work and money.
Another surprising finding of Le¢n’s is that more men than previously assumed supported their women in their “uppity” endeavors.
“There was another surprising realization I got as the years past. Yeah, there were plenty of guys long ago who scoffed at women’s achievements and exploited women and even abused them,” she said. “But I have been amazed at the number of men who have encouraged their daughters or sisters or wives. These guys bragged to anyone who would listen about the feats of their female relatives. I am glad they did. Because sometimes the only way we know about a given woman is through a memorial or tribute given to her by a man who loved her.”
Le¢n’s biggest gripe is with people who lament that women were not as creative as men.
Her response is “baloney. Many, many of these achievers left artifacts. They are still around. They left books and music and poetry and sculpture and works of architecture and works of art.”
She said she dislikes the fact that women are still underestimated, and sometimes get lost in the cracks of history.
Her books are filled with stories of women such as Martha Washington working behind a well-known man named George.
“Think about it the next time you see a picture in a book or a program on TV or a sweatshirt where the man is named and the woman is referred to as his wife or his sister or maybe not at all,” she said. “This is how women become invisible.”