Immy Humes | The 2022 MAKERS Conference

Immy Humes at the 2022 MAKERS Conference.

Video Transcript

- Please welcome Immy Humes.

IMMY HUMES: I can't believe this. I just want to say I've been so blown away. And to follow all these brilliant and amazing, just mind-boggling women is my greatest honor and challenge. [LAUGHS] So, it's been really, incredibly interesting to see how all our talks connect in various underground or other obvious ways. And I feel like this-- I'm here to talk about my book, and it is definitely connected to a lot of our themes that have been emerging today.

What I can bring you is pictures. My book is brand new. It's called "The Only Woman." I'm here to talk about how I got into it and what it suggests about our future. It's a selection of 100 favorites from my collection that I've been working on for a long time of historical photos, archival photos. And they're all groups of men with only one woman among them.

So, for example, we have hundreds of these ladies, but this is one of my favorites. Anna Searcy here in the back row. Unmistakable in her amazing hat. I hope you can see it. She's with a class of medical students in Missouri in 1897, and they're professors. And someone up front called Bones. Labeled Bones for over 100 years. She was IDed as secretary until recently.

A woman professor at the medical school recently discovered that she was, in fact, the first woman to attend their school and to graduate as a doctor. So not only an only, but a first. And then, for another example-- whoops, I'm sorry. I went too fast.

This is actually-- we cut off the photo. Well, maybe not. I think we cut off the photo, but Andrea Motley Crabtree was the first deep sea diver for the US Navy. US Army. Gosh, I'm nervous, I'm sorry. US Army.

And if you can see her here, I think it's pretty much-- I think most of us would feel admiration and respect for this woman pioneer. But if you can see the guy on the left, I don't think he felt that way. And she said that he was experiencing terrible envy.

So this is the one that got me started. You know, these photos are really cut off. It's too bad. I guess we can't-- oh, anyway, she's surrounded by a circle of men, and they're all the filmmakers from an early filmmaking movement that created independent film in the United States. And Sally Clarke, in the middle, was often described as the only woman filmmaker in that group.

I'm a documentary filmmaker, and I'm making a film about her. And I got almost fixated on this picture and what it said about her career. But when I saw this one and I was constantly checking this one out, I got some sort of distant memory bell ringing. And it reminded me of another photograph, which is this one, which is an iconic image from "Life" magazine of all of the most famous postwar American artists, all white men.

Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, you name it. And then there's Hedda. But almost everyone who sees this picture says, like, who's she? And so, Hedda Sterne said that the men in the group were really pissed. They didn't want her in the shot.

She was a brilliant artist. Totally original. Very difficult to label. And she outlived them all.

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It seemed this artist seemed to be especially into this thing of all guys with just exactly one woman. This is a great example of the young Ming Smith on the lower left in 1973, who was the first woman member of the very distinguished Kamoinge collective of Black photographers. She's still creating beautiful artworks today, and also winning overdue recognition.

But then, my joy was discovering this only woman phenomenon in every walk of life. So, for example, ever since the American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists met in Denver in 1946, Elizabeth Roboz went unidentified. Let me see-- yeah, she's in there somewhere. There she goes.

The new head of the society, who's now a woman scientist-- the society still exists-- she sleuthed out for me who this woman, this only woman, was. Elizabeth Roboz was a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who went on to become a giant of science, a discoverer of the human growth hormone, and, incidentally, she ended up marrying Albert Einstein's son. But let's see.

Next, another example is Martha Gellhorn. The photos led me to incredible stories like hers. War correspondent, and just incredibly fearless war correspondent. Gellhorn literally stowed away to cover the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy. As the Allied forces set out from England, she pretended to be a nurse and snuck onto a medical ship and locked herself into a closet with a flask of whiskey for the overnight voyage to France.

And in the morning, she snuck out all by herself, mixing in with the male soldiers who were making that incredibly terrifying and bloody landing on the beaches. She was literally the only woman among 150,000 men. That's Martha.

Here we have-- we're at Cannes, world's most glamorous film festival, not very long ago. And I note that this was not the men's room line. If you can see the only woman here, she's Jane Campion, right in the middle. She's got blonde hair and sunglasses. She was the very first woman to win the Palme d'Or, which is Canne's highest honor, in 1993 for her stunning film "The Piano," if any of you remember.

But to Campion's disbelief and anger, it wasn't until 2021 that the next woman won the Palme d'Or. French director Julia Ducournau, last year. So it took 28 years for the second woman. So, some firsts remain onlies for so long that they're more like great exceptions. They're exceptions that prove the rule to the patriarchy-- the rule being that women don't belong. But we do.

This is another very famous photo now here of Ieshia Evans-- you may recognize her-- at a protest in Baton Rouge in 2016 after Alton Sterling was killed by police there. Ieshia is a nurse and a mother, the only woman in this photo, and yet she represents millions with her courage. The images of these onlies and firsts and telling their stories help us build a future that is more equitable and inclusive.

Together, the photos, for me, serve as a kind of forensic evidence of patriarchy, and also to our resistance to it. How a man's world persists, and how we continue to tear it down. I'll leave you with one more.

This is Katherine Switzer. She's very beloved person here at MAKERS. She's spoken here, and she's amazing. But anyway, in 1967, when only men were allowed to run in the Boston Marathon. So Switzer registered using only her initials, and was able to take off with the other runners.

But before long, the race director spotted her and furiously tried to yank her out of the race. However, she did finish the race that day. And ever since, she's dedicated her life to advocating for women in sports-- and everywhere, really.

I was overjoyed to get a note from her recently about the book. She wrote, "I never noticed myself as the only woman in the Boston Marathon in 1967 because I thought of myself as a runner, not of gender. Yet you are right, each only woman tells a much bigger story. And it's often only years later do we see it for the first time and know what it means."

As we look back on how far we've come, remember our incredible four sisters, even the ones who were tiny faces in a photo. Each one of them fought like hell so we could be here today, making our new tomorrows. So, thank you so much, everyone.

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