 | |  On the Eastern seaboard? Host a clambake in honor of Mary Starbuck Coffin, Nantucket's "great lady" of early America. Besides being its leading light politically and religiously (as a Quaker, she made sure everybody got on board that train), Mary sold seafood in her general store.
Take your daughter (and her friends) to court; let them see how justice works, and what it's like to be a lawyer. | Host a ragin' cajun Uppity Women dinner for your friends. Serve gumbo, dirty rice, jambalaya, and other ole New Orleans dishes, courtesy of Madame Langlois, the redoubtable cook for early Louisiana colony governor Jean Baptiste Bienville. |  | | In 1704, she showed the first women settlers to New Orleans—two dozen young Frenchwomen from Acadia—how to cook with okra, peppers, sassafras, crawdads, and other local ingredients. The savory result? Cajun food. Give out voodoo party favors—to remember Marie Laveau, the Big Easy's most powerful voodoo queen. | 
| | Buy a historic stamp of Sybil Ludington, the female "Paul Revere". (They are available through any stamp dealer, very inexpensive.) Give one to your favorite young teen, along with Sybil's story. Make sure your kids—and others less fortunate—get all their shots. Tell your kids, and others, about Lady Mary Montagu: herself a scarred survivor of smallpox, she brought inoculation to England and America from Turkey, years before Edward Jennings. Surprise yourself: write a poem about freedom; post it in the women's john, next to the "frankie loves johnny" graffiti. Need inspiration? Read one of the narratives of a former slave. Mary Prince wrote a marvelous one in 1631, and it's on the web at docsouth.unc.edu/neh Involve your favorite group—whether it's Crones, writers, teen rebels, AAUW, a reading group, an online newsgroup or just your own gang of women who hang together on a social basis—in Uppity Women Day. Sponsor an event, do a poster, or do something outrageous as a group. Make March 8 the day you jump into a lost cause; tilt at windmills; go for broke; surf the edge. Apply to Harvard and Yale. Take up bullfighting. Organize a union. Be the first to step up, even when it seems foolish.
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| Fax or call your local public or community radio station with a few requests, and we don't mean music: ask them for more calendar items, features, and special stories on uppity women, past and present, to be aired during Women's History Month. While you're at it, go crazy: ask them to air more shows like this during the other eleven months. Speaking of music: go ahead, ask your community radio station to play more music by women composers from the past. If they ask for names (and they will), refer them to the excellent lists of women and their existing works in the Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. To start with, suggest Hildegarde of Bingen; Barbara Strozzi; Francesca Caccini; and the works composed for orphaned female musicians of Venice—which include many works by Vivaldi, their teacher for 40 years.
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