“Oh Lordy Lordy.”
That is what my mother might have said. Were she alive today, she would be 102. She was born before women had suffrage in the U.S.
I’ve been looking for a phrase that is tame enough to not offend, but that anyone who knows me will know I am turning something on its head when I use the phrase. I am considering this one. I am not one for Lords. Nor even Ladies. Caste systems do not appeal to me. When something wonderful happens and I want to acknowledge it, I throw my hands to the sky and say, “Thank you Goddess.” I do not believe that the great organizing principle in the sky is male, nor female, nor even sentient in any way we understand the term. And me, well, I am egalitarian to the core, grown up on a farm where horse drawn plows tilled the land until shortly before I was born, tossed from a public U.S. Senate Armed Services committee for calling, rather loudly, Donald Rumsfeld a liar on my 49th birthday in 2006. That about sums it up.
For the last few days I have been quiet, thinking, listening. Doing a lot of listening… to audiobooks. I am also looking forward to attending an evening with John Cleese and Eric Idle later this month in Together Again At Last…For The Very First Time. My choices for reading/listening are telling.
First, I finished listening to The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood the award winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale. This is the second title in the MaddAddam Triology. Oryx and Crake was the first book in the series. I am on the hold list for the third volume with my local library. I listen via Overdrive, an app I love. Somehow reading, re-reading, listening to end-of-the-world, disaster, and dystopian novels always improves my mood when I am really down. I used to read Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle every time I was really, really depressed.
I cannot praise the Maddaddam series enough. The Canadian author blends contemporary scientific knowledge with a nuanced understanding of what religion does for society and individuals as well as a rather enlightened ability to talk about society and cultural evolution. Intelligent, pertinent, and skilled. What more than that can I say?
Oh, I can wish Margaret Atwood a happy birthday. Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939. She lives in Toronto.
The second book was different from my usual dystopian fix. It was Zoo by James Patterson. I’m not a James Patterson fan. I made it through the listen, but I was disappointed. The characterization was lacking and personal motivation in characters was almost totally lacking. The science was not even laughable – more like groan provoking. I should have listened to Animal Farm. But it is good to stay on top of what the masses are being fed. Best-selling should never be confused with award-winning.
The third book is an old one, Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac from 1988. Greenpeace and monkey-wrenching are thinly disguised as slightly different entities and actions in this eco-thriller. He captures the era, the feel and mindset of the 1980s incredibly well. I wanted to revel in anti-corporatist elements of the novel but instead I am listening with an ear to how he conveys the time in which he is writing. But the thoughts of monkey-wrenching are very pertinent.
American women have an enormous task ahead of us to hold the fabric of our society together. Environmental degradation is escalating and empowering corporatism, as we have just done, will only hasten the collapse of the ecosystem. Devaluation of women and all we do destabilizes progress toward equal pay and creation of support structures that allow us to act as full citizens in a society where family probably doesn’t live nearby to help with daily family functioning such as childcare.
Gun Violence – A Women's Issue
From Julia Ward Howe’s September 1870 “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world.“
These words were written as a women’s response to war. This Appeal is now often referred to as The Mother’s Day Proclamation. The gun violence of today tallies deaths comparable to those of war.
“But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.
Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears ! Say firmly : We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”
I have been thinking about the words of Julia Ward Howe as I try to take in the horrific carnage loosed on Orlando, Florida this past Sunday and determine what response I will have to yet another assault on the children of Mother America. My reaction is one of numb grief. I’ve been oscillating between tears and confusion.
I do not know what to do. The quandary is that I only have my words. I have been a politically active person throughout my life. But as I built this site and began to create a map of how impactful the loosening of cultural restraints on the flow of women’s information has been and how much more feminine impact we can have by amplifying certain messages, I steered clear of political speech as much as possible.
I realize now that it is silly for me to attempt to be apolitical. I will keep this site non-partisan, but being a woman in and of itself is a political act. Our foremother’s words and actions shifted the political climate. Ours do too.
Julia Ward Howe, the woman who penned the words, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…” must have struggled with the concepts and contradictions of violence and peace. To have written, by request to replace coarse lyrics, what are considered some of the greatest inspirational lyrics to a Battle Hymn, a marching song for soldiers, and then, less than ten years later to write, “Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause,” in a call to women to come together and determine how to create a world where such carnage as that of the Civil War would not happen.
There were multiple branches of action within the women’s movement 150 years ago. WLP does not align with any one interpretation of waves or starting and stopping of groups focused on specific issues within women’s movements. Suffragist, Non-violent, Womanist, Liberal, and Cultural interpretations have all played roles in changing the situations in which women find themselves. Groups supporting votes for women and supporting peace and freedom overlapped significantly.
We have similar conundrums today. The vast majority of women do not want the children of their families and communities to die due to violence, nor do most women want children to grow up to kill.
The Civil War killed 620,000 soldiers. At the current rate of 89 gun deaths a day in the US, it now takes us a little less than 20 years to match the number of Civil War soldier deaths. But when we look at civilians killed in the Civil war we find that at least 50,000 civilians were killed in the war. So it takes just a bit under two years for U.S. civilian gun deaths to match the number of civilian deaths due to the Civil War.
Violence is a woman’s issue. The legacy of contemporary women will speak to violence in our society. How it speaks, and what will be said, is still being decided.
WLP is considering several different options to encourage women to engage in and maintain action toward building a non-violent world. Because we are located in the U.S. our actions will be skewed toward U.S. concerns, but women all over the world are welcome and encouraged to participate in our efforts.