Vivilore

Mary Ries Melendy, M.D., P.h.D.

“One fact of especial interest is that certain striking difference between the brain of the male and that of the female. We see this in the shape of the skull; in the gentle arching upward of the woman’s forehead and the decided elevation at the top and near the center of the cranium. Few skulls of the female fail to show this peculiarity, which is lacking, as a rule, in the male. Phrenology are and scientists generally agree that Nature has thereby put her mark upon woman as the more moral, the more conscientious and more highly developed in the spiritual qualities. Here, in the loftiest portion of her cranial construction she is proclaimed superior to man in many of the finer and higher sentiments which distinguish the human race from the brute creation.”

The author of Vivilore: Mary Ries Melendy, M.D., P.h.D.

Vivilore by Mary Ries Melendy, M.D., Ph.D.

On April 24th, 2016, on my 31st birthday, I made my way through the levels, layers, stacks, drawers, nooks and crannies of one of my favorite stores in South Minneapolis: Hunt & Gather. The name is perfection for the experience of this deceptively sized shop. It looks tiny from the outside & upon entry, you see only the first 2 rooms to your right and left. But make your way further in, and you find that what seemed like a small shop is really room after room after room, upstairs and downstairs, filled from floor to ceiling with trinkets, furniture, books, art, every day items & oddities from days gone by. You truly have to pick your way through it, hunting for items you’re either hoping to find, or just waiting for the right items to reveal themselves. This book is one of those items. I don’t remember what room or what level it was on, nor if I had to dig or if it was front & center.. I just remember seeing it, picking it up & being fascinated by it’s outward patina and the interior contents. As someone who grew up at the end of the 20th century & has become a woman at the beginning of the 21st, I found myself laughing at the absurdity of some of the content and yet recognizing things that have changed very little in over a century. I don’t have a particular goal for this blog. Just that I want to share its contents with the world. Will it be a sort of social commentary on women’s issues? Maybe. Will it remind us how far we’ve come and yet how very far we still have to go? Probably. Will I approach it with wisdom or snark? Very likely both. Let’s see where this takes us.