PUSHING BOUNDARIES
Friday March 4 7:30pm
Saturday March 5 1:00pm
Saturday March 5 8:45pm
Sunday March 6 5:00pm
$5
Meet Ellouise Schoettler: A 1950s “I love Lucy” type housewife who morphed into a national activist for the Equal Rights Amendment. Like many women, she tried to make a difference and along the way found herself. Eyewitness to history. Funny and touching. Behind the scenes Washington story.
Ellouise Schoettler, Storyteller
www.pushingboundariesstory.com
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Storytelling Solo Performance, 45 minutes, Rated PG
Latecomers permitted within 15 minutes
I have seen Ellouise in three different Rogue performances. Each years she gets better as a story teller. This year’s was wonderful, full of the personal and political. For those of us who lived through the years that Ellouise tells of, it was a trip down memory lane. I hope she tells this story in schools so our young people can get a taste of women’s history from a great storyteller.
As I listened to Ellouise, I was reminded of the years we struggled to be noticed and never dared to be different, I was humbled by her courage to defy the rules and restrictions that were imbued in us all and come out of it, a shining star, fighting for all the privileges that all women now take for granted. We are all so busy bemoaning what we have not yet achieved that we forget what it was like when (IF we were lucky enough to get to college), our choices were only four: teaching, nursing, secretarial jobs and library work. What a shame some of you missed this inspiring treatise of what women can accomplish once they make up their minds and believe in their cause.
Great to see this show dealing with the rise of women artists in the 1970s amidst the Spectrum Gallery exhibit of three local women artists.
Excellent performance! Ellouise is a great story teller who makes this important time in history come alive through her personal experience.
Go see this show!
What a great storyteller is Ellouise Schoettler! Her history is the history of the women’s movement for the last 60 years. Her show is a must for all who want to know how far women have come and the need for continuing on to bring equal rights to all!
Ellouise Schoettler tells it like it was and is, in a way that makes you just want to listen!
What a wonderful history lesson…this is one story you won’t read about in the history books! With a soft, beautiful, confident voice, Ellouise Schoettler was able to communicate the importance of of the Women’s Movement in the United States as one who really lived it. Thank you for bringing it to the Rogue.
SEE Ellouise Schoettler! Watch a 50′s housewife go from a June Cleaver innocent to ERA activist and Washington lobbyist. You’ll meet up with some famous figures of the Women’s Movement, but you’ll understand the journey from a world where women had four career choices to mark time before they became wives and mothers to the possibilities. It’s all told with warmth and wit. Ellouise has blossomed as a storyteller over the space of her three Rogue appearances; she’s stronger, confident, and she knows that she is her own best story.
Well, I went to the Rogue show PUSHING BOUNDARIES, and it was EXCELLENT! Made me realize how much was lost when the ERA was defeated. The Ledbetter Equal Pay for Equal Work Act – it can be overturned. Not if we had the ERA. You know that rape redefinition proposal? Impossible – could not even be introduced – if we had the ERA.
* ERA was the Equal Rights Amendment – banned gender discrimination – it fell 3 states short of ratification — Illinois was an unlikely non-ratifying state – a Blue State, and IOWA ratified (and later rescinded it but only after Moral Majority etc swept America)
This solo spoken word prose 1 woman storytelling event is autobiographical, by a woman who played a major role in the fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, Eloise Schoettler.
She goes all the way to the beginning – High School graduation, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The question by her high school counselor. “What are you going to do?” It was 1953 – what was there for a woman to do?
And from there, the story of an extraordinary life unfolds.
I was annoyed by all the racket coming through the front lobby – made me miss parts of the show. I think somebody played the entire Side 1 of The Who’s “Who’s Next” album while the show was in progress. You will otherwise be very moved. If you like history, civil rights, women’s rights, equal rights history, or if you are curious what the real unique story of a real “wimmins libber” was like, catch the last show! It’s TODAY, Sunday, March 6!
Me? I’m off to enjoy two more weeks of Rogue.
Ellouise Schoettler is a wonderful storyteller who to tells about the second wave of Feminism as one who was there. She embraced many unexpected changes in her life as it paralleled the Women’s Movement beginning in the late 1950s. She speaks with honesty and humor and asks other women who were involved in the movement to share their stories.