Lynette Charters

From The Matilda Effect Series:
Missing Karen Carpenter
Acrylic and colored pencil on mounted vintage vinyl LP
(Thanks to Lantern Records).
12"d

When I was teeny in the 60s my parents kept the radio under our MCM sideboard. When Karen Carpenter started singing I would always crawl under so I could be closer to her beautiful voice. She was amazing. We still miss her.
“Every sha-na-na…”

They deemed her drumming too unfeminine so they forced her in front with the microphone. I watched the documentary recently where they seemed to blame her mother for her eating disorder...not the patriarchal system which created the family dynamic and also her eating disorder. Blame the mom, not the system. That's how patriarchy works.

This and other new pieces will be showing at LGM & LCS Studios at the South Sound Studio Tour May 30 & 31.

From The Missing Women Series:
Strang's Vita Sackville-West in a Red Hat with hand painted MCM wallpaper background.
Acrylic on board
3 X 4'

With all the red protest hats, I thought I’d join in.
Sackville west was a successful and prolific novelist and writer.
She published many collections of poetry and 13 novels. She was awarded the Hawthornden Prize twice. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her lover Virginia Woolf.

You can see this piece at the South Sound Studio Tour this year at LGM and LCS Studios downtown Olympia. Also will be showing Lucy Gentry, Lynn Helbrecht, and Rose Nicholas.
Hope to see you there.🌺

Today the federal court will rule on the ERA.
These are the women who drafted it.
Should be a no brainer. Who doesn’t want equality?

From The Matilda Effect Series:
Missing Crystal Eastman and Alice Paul
Acrylic, colored pencil and metallic detail on canvas pastry frames hung from curtain poles tied together with friendship bracelets.
24 X 40" (not including top ribbon).

Crystal Eastman and Alice Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment which has not been ratified for no good reason.

Many thanks to Andrea Weston Smart and her friend Morgan for custom making a donating the friendship bracelets. I'm truly grateful. 🙏❤️🌺

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Ho8Svuvi3/

When Gerda Lerner wrote that excluding women from history allowed men to develop “illusions of grandeur,” she was being exact. If you tell the story of civilisation as though men built it and women hovered at the edges, you shouldn’t be surprised when men grow up feeling central.

Most women now in their fifties and sixties were educated inside that version of the story. Even those of us who read de Beauvoir or Marilyn French and who felt the force of second‑wave feminism, were still handed a syllabus thick with male names. The architecture of knowledge was male. Women appeared, but often as insertions, brilliant exceptions threaded into an already solid structure. The structure itself didn’t shift and we absorbed that without meaning too.

Decades later, you can still feel it in rooms. There’s an ease some men carry that has very little to do with talent. It’s simply untroubled. They assume coherence and assume their thinking will stand. They assume the room will adjust around them. That assumption isn’t always conscious, and it isn’t always earned, but it’s there.

Many women of the same generation learned a different discipline. We learned to read the room before speaking, prepare over and beyond what was strictly necessary and to file down the sharper edges of certainty so that it wouldn’t be misread as hostility. After forty years, that vigilance feels like temperament and who you are. But it began as adaptation.

Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that man is treated as the default human still clarifies this. If you are the default, you don’t experience yourself as marked and being interpreted through your s*x. If you are not the default, you do. You are aware, however faintly, that you stand slightly out of type.

Virginia Woolf grasped the imaginative cost of that - Shakespeare could imagine himself as Shakespeare because there were men before him who had been permitted to be expansive. But his invented sister would have had equal talent and no such heritage. That absence does something subtle but profound. It changes the texture of ambition and makes it heavier and more self‑conscious.

By the time you reach your late fifties or sixties, the pattern becomes legible in retrospect. You can trace how often you translated yourself, softened a conclusion, and how often male confidence was accepted at face value while female confidence required reassurance. It accumulated and shaped posture, timing, even memory.

Lerner’s point cuts both ways. If men were inflated by history, women were compressed by it. Restore proportion and both distortions narrow. The male ease so often mistaken for depth begins to look like narrative backing. The female caution so often mistaken for nature begins to look like training.

That recognition is steadying. Some of what felt intensely personal wasn’t personal at all. Some of what seemed like inherent authority was reinforcement. Some of what felt like self‑doubt was inheritance.

By this stage of life, that’s important. Not because it rewrites the past, but because it resizes it. And once the scale is corrected, you see yourself and the men around you more plainly, without the magnification or the diminishment the old story imposed.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

Image: UW-Madison, CC BY 3, via Wikimedia Commons