As we all know, storytelling is the lifeblood of history. Many storytellers use their skills to drive home the absurdities of current events (see our upcoming review of Fool for A Client), but Ellouise Schoettler uses this mode of preservation in its purest form in her Fringe Festival offering, Pushing Boundaries: to pass on her experiences as an activist for the Equal Rights Amendment to a new generation. Schoettler started her adulthood as most women did in the 1950s, with the choice to bide her time as a nurse, teacher, or librarian (she choose the first one) until she found a husband. In 1968, with three kids in elementary school — and a tragedy with the fourth — she decided to go back to school, where she quickly and unexpectedly discovered the modern women’s rights movement.
This is Schoettler’s personal story, however, couched in the vibrant, exciting era of the 1970s where opportunities for activism were “like picking fruit off a tree.” Days like the 100,000-woman march on D.C. are whipped past with a mere “it was an exciting day”; the real story here is this former housewife’s quick rise to the top, and her resulting interactions with Polly Bergen, Alice Neel, and even Gloria Steinem. In fact, her story tips its hat to D.C. history as well: Schoettler describes her days at Dunbarton College of Holy Cross (closed in 1973), a basement-dwelling women’s art collective on Q Street NW, and her involvement (sort of) with the National Museum of Women in the Arts before it even had a building.
Schoettler isn’t trying to write our formal history books, but instead fill in her version of the template that many of our mothers, grandmothers, sisters and wives experienced while trying to codify women’s rights into our Constitution. Perhaps I just felt this one personally — my mother cut paths for women in the military before retiring and becoming a peace activist — but I suspect that’s the point: this is a personal story that most people in attendance should be able to identify with one way or another, and Schoettler reminds us to pass it on ourselves. And if you can’t identify, well, perhaps you’re the most important listener of all.
Pushing Boundaries has three more performances during the Capital Fringe Festival: July 13 at 8 p.m., July 17 at 1 p.m., and July 24 at 2 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut.
