Women's Space

Help defend women’s rights and pursuit of equality. Join Americans all across the United States on April 28th, 2012, as we come together as one to tell members of Congress in Washington DC and legislators in all 50 states. “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”

All Americans have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, including the right to contraception without interference from government, business, or religious institutions.
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Everyone is invited to join, plan, and march as WE STAND TOGETHER to demand that every person be granted equal opportunities, equal rights, and equal representation.

We Are Woman March On Washington: About.

It’s my hope that the public will start seeing us trafficking and prostitution survivors as people society has wronged .  I hope they’ll understand we’ve been changed by the pain and harshness we’ve experienced.  Public denial of the violence we experience and prostitute-blaming forces many of us into hiding.  If this stopped, we survivors would be empowered to bring something new and beautiful into being.

Terrible Beauty: Angel K on Prostitution & the Inadequacy of Language.

“Gertrude Beasley’s memoir of growing up dirt poor in and around the Bible Belt town of Abilene, My First Thirty Years, was released in 1925 by Contact Press in Paris. That’s the same press that published James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. H.L. Mencken hailed Beasley’s book as one of the best coming-of-age books ever …

“Despite these accolades, her memoir is largely unknown. Its violent and sexually deviant material caused it to be banned in Britain, where Beasley was living at the time. Most copies were destroyed by Scotland Yard and U.S. Customs. The few that made it to Texas were mostly yanked off shelves by the Texas Rangers, probably on the orders of prominent Texans maligned in her book. Then the author vanished. She was 35.

“My First Thirty Years was Beasley’s only work, but it stands the test of time. In his letter, McMurtry writes that her memoir “is one of the finest Texas books of its era; in my view, the finest.” On the letter’s envelope is a penciled question scribbled by my mother: “Cut the pages?” The originals of Beasley’s book were printed in hand-pressed style, so my mother had to slice the leaves open to discover the reason Beasley was one of the first female American writers to be banned. ‘Thirty years ago,’ it begins, ‘I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied.’”

Read the rest here, thanks to Max Dashu, Suppressed History Archives blog on Facebook

Australians call chickens “chooks”.    I’ve tried letting my chickens range in the garden, but I’ve found, like The Witch’s Kitchen blogger has, that they are too destructive.  I haven’t had chickens for a couple of years now, but would love to try the method she describes:

they have a moveable roost, and a water bucket and laying box, and an old kids “shell” pool propped up to provide bit of shelter from heavy rain, and I have a fresh new chook run, complete with a few weeks supply of greens, every month. I throw the chooks the weeds, household scraps, azolla, grass clippings, and any other organic matter I can get my hands on, along with a few bags of horse or cow manure which they scratch through looking for insects and in the process mix nicely with all the other organic matter.

Using the Chooks to Garden.

…our cabbage from the garden is just about finished.  We are still eating lots of Rotkohl (braised red cabbage) since the Ruby Ball cabbage is holding very well, but the end is near.  We are entering the hungry months where a variety of methods of growing, preserving and eating come in real handy.  Sauerkraut is a staple in the winter months along with the fresh cabbage or kales we can glean from the garden.  Wiggle room comes in the form of eating what we can from the plants in the garden and saving foodstuffs from the preserving season for the hungry months.

Read the rest of Throwback at Trapper Creek’s nourishing post (and other writings).

Sunday musings and banana crumble muffins.

Farm women have the most delectable blogs!

Free My Beautiful Boss, My Friends and Colleagues at SCM!.

Syrian blogger Gazan Rhazzawi has been freed from prison but eight of her journalist colleagues remain imprisoned.  Please spread the word and put as much pressure as possible on Syrian authorities.

Photo by Kathleen Masterson / Harvest Public Media

Doermann lives alone in her farmhouse perched atop a hill in Anamosa, Iowa.  Now in her 80s, Doermann became the sole farm owner when her husband died suddenly some 40 years ago.

“I was teaching, one girl was in high school, one in college,” she said. “We had the funeral. Gathered our parts up and went on.”

Doermann quickly found a renter, someone whose family she and her husband had worked with before. Because part of the farm is quite hilly, Doermann and her husband had put in contour strips —planted rows running along the hillside designed to prevent erosion.

Doermann explained to her renter that he needed to farm along the contour strips, not just plant up and down the hill. But he ignored her.

“He planted up and down the hill — I told him not to do it again the next year,” she said. “We had big rain in the night; he was feeding cattle, saw me in nightgown — looking where water going under road. He knew he’d been had.”

The rain had washed out the soil and the corn he’d planted — the next year, he gave up on corn and seeded with oats, as Doermann suggested.

In her own way, Doermann worked it out with her renter.

Link

Photo by Jerry Hagstrom/For the Capital Press

In October of 2001, nine of the approximately (at that time) 150,000 women farmers in the US filed suit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for discrimination against women farmers in the administration of USDA farm loans.

Rosemary Love (center in the photo), who had grown up on a Montana farm and then became a rancher herself, had applied for a farm loan in Montana after a series of natural disasters during the economic recession of the 1980s.   Although male ranchers all around her were being given loans by the (all-male) FSA decision-makers, her applications were repeatedly denied.  When a loan was finally approved, it was with the imposition of the harshest of conditions, among them, that she must liquidate her ranching operations.  She was the only rancher upon whom such loan conditions were imposed.  She developed cancer, and during her treatment, she was hounded by USDA authorities about completing the liquidation.  At one point, 48 hours after she had undergone cancer surgery, an FSA supervisor visited her in the hospital demanding that she comply or agree to the filing of yet more government liens against her property. She could not run her farm, her animals were going without food as she lie ill, and finally, she sold her sheep and livestock to male ranchers in her area and declared bankruptcy.  She was left with nothing but her land. She went to work at a grocery store as a sales clerk. Continue reading »

Dear Sisters -

I write this from a place of love, and a desire for the prostituted to fully seen and known by radical feminism. This is not so for now.

Let me say loud and clear, the vast majority of radical feminists either through experience or from their hearts are completely behind abolition of prostitution, and fully back the Nordic Approach.

That is fabulous, and I deeply proud to be with and by you.

What saddened me, is that are words and language is used sometimes with no credit, or even in the worse scenarios – our language is re-claimed or stolen. and made that out it all thought of by non-prostituted women.

We are mined for our experiences and ways of seeing the wider picture – but rarely are we allowed leadership roles in the battle against the sex trade.

This keeps us as sub-humans – we are used as examples, we are made pets, we are kept as “victims” who must be spoken over.

This is hard to say – for like most exited women I am a radical feminist, it was the only real route to finding freedom for most of us.

But daily, there are small parts of radical feminism that betrayed the prostituted class.

Read the entire post here at Rebecca’s place.  Just excellent.  Rock on, sister, deep respect.

 [Note:  I apologize for the length of this post, but I deeply and sincerely believe this is worth everyone's time to read.  -- Heart]

At this point, if I think about it in too much depth, I will melt in my tears… I came here to promote love. I came all the way from California to introduce myself so you could see with your own eyes what a gay Christian looks like. I left my young son to do this. I wish to be recognized as a sister in Christ. I have been a Christian all my life.” – Jillian Nye, 29, Soulforce Equality Rider

If you would like to gain insights and understanding as to the shape of things to come should the Religious Right/Patriarchy Movement/Quiverfull/Christian Reconstruction movement achieve its ends,  if you care about the future of this nation and of the entire world, please, please educate yourself by watching the video I’ve posted above and by reading what I have to say here and clicking on the links. Continue reading »

This is the board of directors of “Jam’iat e nesvan e vatan-khah“, a women’s rights association in Tehran (1923-1933).  These women are the great-grandmothers and great-great grandmothers of the women of today’s Iranian Women’s Movement, one of the most inspiring movements for human rights of this generation. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

I am one of those people who are against including children in protests at times of revolutions, children should stay home, especially in cities like Homs and Idleb. But the children martyred last night in Karm El-Zeitoun were home, and that did not protect them, it rather killed them. Yesterday regime army bombed the neighborhood of Karm El- Zeitoun in the city of Homs and destroyed several buildings, two whole streets were evacuated, and 27 civilians killed, many were injured…

The names of children killed by the regime in Karm El-Zeitoun Massacre 26-1-2012 are:

1-Waed Hamsho
2-Sana’ Akrah
3-Najem Akrah
4-Samira Bahader
5-Sidra Bahader
6-Abdel Ghani Bahader
7-Kinana Akara
8-Ali Akrah

The above is an excerpt from iconic Syrian Blogger Razan Ghazzawi‘s February 13 blog post.  Ghazzawi, who was born in the United States, has been blogging courageously under her own name since 2009 and has been arrested in the past.  As of today she has been arrested again, for what she’s been writing, along with human rights activist Mazen Darwish, who heads the Syrian Center for Media and Free Expression.  Women bloggers put human, human faces on the horror of war.  There were not just “eight children killed” in “fighting in Syria.”  The children whose names are written here were killed by the Syrian regime.  For atrocities like this to end, ever, the dead must have faces and names.

Anyone giving information to international media or international NGOs may be targeted,” said Soazig Dollet, Middle East and North Africa researcher for Reporters Without Borders. She said in the past, arrested Syrian journalists have been interrogated, tortured and kept in solitary confinement. (More here)

Learn about the war in Syria here.

Heart

I represent the morbid side of the women’s movement. …Robin Morgan calls it “atrocity work.”  And that’s pretty much what it is. I deal with what happens to women in the normal course of women’s lives all over this planet:  the normal stuff that is abusive, society at large.

…The women’s movement is  like other political movements in one important way.  Every political movement is committed to the belief that there are certain kinds of pain that people should not have to endure.  They are unnecessary.  They are gratuitous.  They are not part of the God-given order.  They are not biologically inevitable.  They are acts of human will.  They are acts done by some human beings to other human beings.

…[The women's movement] is a movement against human suffering.  There is no way to be a feminist and to forget that.  If you are a feminist, and if you have forgotten that our purpose is to end the suffering of countless unnamed and invisible women from the crimes committed against them — and yes, we may also end the suffering of men who are committing the crimes, yes, we probably think we can — then  your feminism is hollow and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t count.  This is a movement against suffering.  So in between the lines when you hear people say that this is a movement for freedom, for justice, for equality — and all of that is entirely and deeply true — you must remember that we are trying to eliminate suffering too.  Continue reading »

Gene Logsdon is a long-time writerly-farmerly hero of mine.  Decades ago I bought, devoured, and re-devoured his wonderful books, Homesteading:  How to Find New Independence on the Land, Two-Acre Eden and Gene Logsdon’s Practical Skills.   I still have the books and they still inspire me.  He’s written many books since on the practice, the science and the art of farming and agriculture.  From a recent (kickass) post on his Contrary Farmer blog:

“The most obvious and promising sign of the new agriculture is the leadership that women are taking in the movement.  Women have always played the key role in farming but at least in the last two centuries in America, they have rarely gotten credit for it. Farming is a man’s world, American culture wants to believe, and, as is true of all culturally-treasured myths, no amount of plain everyday evidence to the contrary matters..

“Farm Journal felt the best way to handle the situation was to have a Farmer’s Wife section to appeal to the women with recipes and folksy charm about farm life. The real hardcore business of farming went in the front of the magazine. Amazingly, no one seemed to see the dreadful prejudice on display. I asked one time what would happen if we put a section in the back of the magazine designated as The Farmer’s Husband. All the men editors laughed, thinking that as usual I was making jokes. The women editors did not laugh.” 

Link

Starhawk, in the Washington Post, October 17, 2008:

“In the normal course of events, I’m a pro-anger kind of a gal. I came up through the feminist ranks in the seventies, when we were energized by the realization that all our lives, we women had been told to be ‘nice’, sweet, to placate the guys and not get them riled up. If we got angry, we either looked ‘cute’ or were unattractive raging b-words (rhymes with Witch). Anger was a rational response to the constrictions and dis-empowerment we faced as women, and it became a driving force in our efforts for cultural change. Ironically, one of those results is Sarah Palin’s candidacy. It is a triumph of feminism that we have so changed the culture in this country that the same kinds of reactionaries that wouldn’t have voted for a women in 1968 and would have opposed a woman voting in 1908 now have to turn to one to energize their base.

“Anger, however, is a dangerous emotion. Continue reading »

Michael Coates cries after Dr. Heather Olson, left, of the Auburn Community Dental Clinic, tells him his blood pressure is too high for her to administer a pain-relief injection. Coates, suffering with four infected wisdom teeth, got the shot later but cannot afford to have the teeth pulled as needed.

Note: I originally posted this last February and have bumped it to the top again because people who really really need help continue to find it and post to it, and their situations are just so wrong and disturbing.   Is anybody who can make a difference — like the candidates for president — even thinking about this kind of issue?  That this situation exists is just disgusting in a country with the resources of the United States.  — Heart

This photo and the accompanying article were on the front page of the Seattle Times one day last week. The difficulties poor, working class and even middle class people have finding affordable dental care is a subject that has had me fired up for a long time, but never have I seen things so bad as they are right now for poor people.

I have struggled with this myself over many years, and still struggle with it, because I have such a large family to care for. I pay for dental insurance through my employer and most of my kids are or have been also covered through their biological father’s insurance; nevertheless, dental care is horrifically expensive. What’s worse, where I live, at least, many dentists will not treat a patient — even someone in obvious pain, as this man is — without first being paid the estimated patient’s share of the bill up front.

I remember years ago, dentists would work with you, let you make payment arrangements for necessary treatment. From what I have witnessed, not any more. If you don’t pay up ahead of time or right away after you’ve been treated, even in instances in which most of your bill is covered by insurance, they send you to collections. If you don’t pay up quickly once your bill has gone to collection, you will end up sued, then garnisheed. Continue reading »