We are celebrating Women’s History Month this year with images that inform and empower, and often, when you learn the backstory, piss you off. On social media we will be using the hashtag #WHM18 on our posts so you can follow along.
I personally adore this image from the program of the Suffrage Procession. It is so proud and positive. White, purple, and gold were what we would today call the pallet of the brand of women’s suffrage. The image movement is forward or to the right. The banners, regalia, and horse signify strength and determination.
You can find out more of the specifics of the Women’s Suffrage Procession, including the entirety of the procession pamphlet, at the Library of Congress (LOC).
The LOC page about the Procession presents a good amount of information from before and after the event, including the assault on the march by men in town for the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson the next day. Hundreds were harmed, and in a vein similar to many current day protests and marches in the U.S., the police stood by and did little to protect the marchers and seemed to enjoy the actions and rudeness directed at the women. “One policeman explained that they should stay at home where they belonged.” Personal and group opinion with law enforcement determining which laws to enforce and interpreting the law for themselves has a long history. But the Chief of the Capitol Police lost his job, and in a backlash against the harassment and violence directed toward the women marchers the movement was re-energized and gained followers thanks to the press coverage of the attack.
This recording from 1958 certainly suggests that the “movement” did not end with the women’s vote and begin again only with the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The suffragettes are better referred to as suffragists. The struggle continues.
I Am Here as She Is Here and We Are All Together
I’m writing in the lobby bar of the J.W. Marriott in the L.A. Live complex getting ready for the BlogHer annual conference to commence tonight, Thursday, August 4th. I arrived here in LA on Tuesday night, but went to Long Beach via the metro and a bus on Wednesday to catch a ferry to one of the Channel Islands, Santa Catalina Island.
Yesterday was a personal pilgrimage to a place where a woman who influenced my understanding of what how a woman, a writer and a scientist could combine these constraints. She was a writer of simple, and sometimes saccharine tales of the midwest of her childhood in the mid-late 1800s. Gene Stratton-Porter wrote best-selling novels between 1904 and 1924. She also leveraged her celebrity and ability to sell books with her publishers so that she was able to write and publish an amateur science nonfiction book between each novel.
I grew up knowing about her forays into swampy and wetland areas where she used ethological practices to document the hatching of birds and other previously undocumented behaviors. The techniques she used would not be put into common practice until the likes of Jane Goodall began using non-intrusive methods to document animal behavior. Stratton-Porter also influenced Rachel Carson to work non-destructively within the living systems she loved and documented. Without the generations of influence of women who understood the world in different ways than the male-dominated science and governmental systems that controlled science and our understanding well into this century, we would live in a poorer world for lack of the nuanced understanding they brought to us and interjected about living systems. Their influence is still unfolding. They are all with us still.
I grew up amid remnant bits of swamp in the waterlogged mid-west, I know the settings of Stratton-Porter’s books. I grew up in them. I wanted to see the island she grew to love later in her life. So I took an afternoon trip the day before the conference started to Catalina Island in the Channel Islands off the California Coast.
I whole-heartedly recommend taking the ferry from Long Beach to Catalina. Here is a brief overview of my all too brief of a trip.
This trip oriented me in an unanticipated way for the largely female attended conference I attended over the next three days. For me, and perhaps through me, the past all the way back to the 1800s touched the future of women’s communications throughout the 21st Century. Gene would be proud.
Tucson, Five Years On
Lives changed as lives were lost five years ago today when Tucson changed forever. It was not the first time Tucson opened her arms and gathered survivors of mass gun violence to her breast to hold and heal families in her embrace.
October 29th 2002
Robin E. Rogers, Barbara Monroe, and Cheryl McGaffic, all instructors in the U of A School of Nursing were gunned down by a disturbed and failing student who also shot himself. All died. This was the first time Tucson met with a mass shooting in recent history. A student killing his instructors and professors was personally unsettling. My husband is a Professor at this same University.
January 8th 2011
A gunman attempting to assassinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords killed six other Tucsonans: Christina Taylor Green, Dorothy “Dot” Morris, John Roll, Phyllis Schneck, Dorwan Stoddard, Gabriel “Gabe” Zimmerman.
13 other people were gunned down, but lived.
January 8th 2016
Five years later, today, there will be bell ringings and memorial services at a few places in Tucson. A survivor invited me to attend the bell ceremony at the university hospital down the street at 10:10 a.m. I want to attend.
This day reminds me of the precious, tenuous nature of life. My daughter is in Tucson with her fiancé and in the few days we have together while she is here, we are planning her wedding that will take place later this year. So while I cannot be at the commemoration, I write, remember and hold those who were there in the light.
No one wants to be defined by violence. No person. No community. We cannot help but be shaped by our histories. What we do and how we live in the moment, in all those precious moments of life, are how families and communities, define ourselves. We must not forget the moments that shaped us, but it is far more important that we live fully and dedicate ourselves to changing what we can so that tragic moments need not recur.
Friends as Survivors
Suzi, Mary, Jim, Ron and Gabby range from friends, to friends of friends, to acquaintances, to a Representative I’ve lobbied and met with, and protested. I, like so many other Tucsonans, have their backs and are grateful for the strength and grace they continue show as you put one foot in front of other, in some cases after having to relearn how to do so.
Community
Our personal legacies and community legacy interweave around this unwanted anniversary. Legacy draws us together in the small town that is at the core of this large city. That legacy reaches back beyond historic times. There have been people here for thousands of years. Legacy is palpable here where cultures and histories blend into community. The community is sad but strong. Tucson grieves. Tucson heals. Together Tucson grows together into a stronger place towards a better tomorrow.
Of Rocks and Women Born
One of the sites visited during a recent “drive-about” was Rock Art Ranch south of the area between Winslow and Holbrook. I think the canyon we visited is now called Bell Cow Canyon.
Kokopelli, the flute player, beaver, eagle, and various hoofed and horned ungulates decorate the canyon walls with what might have been mystical or magical depictions. Or perhaps it was an art studio. Interpretation is always problematic or so I learned in school. I also learned when studying kinship that paternity is always problematic for the anthropologist to sort out. Kinship is reckoned differently by different people. And then there is deceit. Women sometimes choose not to share the identity of their lovers.
No matter what, though, women have birthed babies. Very few pre-literate societies have preserved images of birth. Conjecture about whether an image is one of fertility or fecundity, a prayer or blessing, a metaphor or giving thanks cannot be known.
No image out of prehistory is more evocative, at least to my mind, than the Hisotsinom petroglyph of the Birthing Woman.
Perhaps the Hopi elders know some of the intent of their ancestors, they still visit places on the ranch. Brantley Baird, the rancher who guides visitors through the material collections that evidence of thousands of years of human occupation, including regular visits by Hopi leaders, the last being only a few weeks ago, knows that as the current land-owner he joins a long line of tenants on this little bit of Earth who cherish it, and whose descendants continue to respect the land and lives that came into being there.
We are all children of the rocks and birthing women.
———
To find out more about the artists, as best we know, I suggest reading the report from the 2014 University of Arizona Rock Art Ranch Field School.
Reprint of "Ain't I A Woman" Redoubt
Most of this post is a republication of an article about a woman who inspired a little white girl from a county next to Kosciusko County, Indiana, where the woman, Sojourner Truth, infamously bared her breast to the congregated to prove her womanhood when pro-slavery infiltrators began to heckle her.
In 1858 in Silver Lake, Kosciusko, Indiana, just down the way from Hill Lake where my family homesteaded, Sojourner Truth was invited to speak at a United Brethren Church.
Many recountings of Truth’s stories depict the crowd as hateful, but this was not a complete picture by any means. She was an invited speaker. It was one of many stops in Northern Indiana during that speaking tour And there were hecklers. But people from that county, probably including my great-great-great Grandfather, John Hill, who were in that audience went on to enlist as a Union Soldier and to fight at Gettysburg and in many other horrific battles to end slavery.
Our stories are important. History touches lives in the here and now. While this part of Indiana today may be intolerant of many differences, and I can say that because I grew up in Whitley County, it was not always that way. Before the age of factories when small and transient corporations moved in and out of the area, the communities just west of Ohio and Fort Wayne Indiana were farming communities largely comprised of people who adhered to Anabaptist notions of community and Universalist (but not Unitarian) notions of equality, acceptance, and the goodness or potential of every individual.
Tent revivals were typical gatherings that were just as much social gatherings as as for Bible thumping. Here is an image from a few decades after the Civil War taken at Winona Lake, one of the several lakes that were home to religious gatherings in Kosciusko County in the late 19th and early 20th Century.
Interpretive contexts continue to evolve long after an event. Understanding current and previous filters fills out how events are currently interpreted.
Here is the reprint:
‘Ain’t I a woman’
By Leslie Feinberg
Women – Black, Latina, Native and White were a significant activist force in the 18th and 19th centuries to abolish chattel slavery in the South of what is now the United States. And women played a strong role against slavery, internationally, as well. Many of the 60,000 Irish people who signed an anti-slavery petition, in 1841, for instance, were women.
In this country, women were often in the leadership of crowds that freed Black people in the North who had escaped enslavement and were being forcibly returned after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793. A large group of Black women in Boston in 1836, for example, liberated two Black men from the custody of the sheriff who was returning them as “fugitives” to shackles in the South.(1)
Vigilance committees that united Black and White were organized throughout the North to stop bounty hunters and arrests, and to liberate those already in custody. Thousands- Black and White, women and men- took part in rescue attempts, many of them successful.
Black women and White women formed female anti-slavery societies. Some were all White and refused admission to Black women. Some, striving to unite against racism, had Black and White members and, in a few cases, supported the right of Black people – North and South – to self-determination. And Black women organized their own network of groups that had an anti-racist, as well as anti-slavery focus.(2)
While wealthy White women and relatively well-to-do Black women often played leading roles, poorer women activists- including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E.W. Harper and Maria Stewart – were prominent leaders in the Abolition movement, as well. And the ranks of the burgeoning movement were filled with washerwomen, domestic servants and factory workers. But all women who became active in the movement to end slavery faced sex and gender barriers that forced them to battle to expand their rights as women in political, economic and social spheres.
White women from all classes were trying to shatter the dominant, bourgeois ideals of “true” womanhood held aloft by the Northern patriarchal industrialist ruling class – the “cult of true womanhood.” Free Black women in the North were struggling, together with their entire oppressed nation, to overturn enslavement in the South and to fight for economic and social rights in the North under wage slavery. As a result, many Black women fought to shatter the vicious White-supremacist stereotypes of African women in relation to the “virtues” of White womanhood.
Knocking over the ‘pedestal’ European colonialists had attempted to wipe out any knowledge of the more complex organization of sex and gender prevalent in Native and African nations as part of its cultural genocide. Kidnapped African peoples represented many nationalities, spoke different languages and came from diverse cultures with beliefs about sex and gender that contradicted the rigid and repressive dominant concepts in 19th-century North America.
The same was true for diverse Native nations.
- When the Spanish invaded the Antilles and Louisiana, “they found men dressed as women who were respected by their societies. Thinking they were hermaphrodites, they slew them.”(3)
- Conquistador Nuño de Guzmán, describing his assault on indigenous people in 1530, wrote that the last Native person taken prisoner, who had “fought most courageously, was a man in the habit of a woman.”(4)
- The group Gay American Indians has documented what they refer to as alternative gender roles in 135 Native nations on this continent.(5)
The tremendous organizing and actual battles to abolish slavery gave rise to the demand to win greater sex and gender freedom. It was like a fresh wind that lifted the heads of many who strived for progressive societal change.
The following is a description from the November 21, 1866, New York Herald of those who attended the American Equal Rights Association, founded in May of that year to weld the struggles for Black and women’s suffrage into one campaign. It’s raw and offensive, yet it describes the breadth of the movement at that time and in language not unlike that of right-wing pundits today.
“All the isms of the age were personated there. Long-haired men, apostles of some inexplicable emotion or sensations; gaunt and hungry looking men, disciples of bran bread and White turnip dietetic philosophy; advocates of liberty and small beer, professors of free love in the platonic sense, agrarians in property and the domestic virtues; infidels, saints, Negro-worshippers, sinners and short-haired women. Long geared women in homespun, void of any trade mark, and worn to spite the tariff and imposts; women in Bloomer dress to show their ankles, and their independence; women who hate their husbands and fathers, and hateful women wanting husbands.”
‘Cross-dressing’ charge set back the movement
The Dress Reform movement in the mid-19th century, for example, challenged the law that declared only men could wear trousers. The Bloomer movement, which advocated replacing rib-snapping tight corsets and long skirts that dragged in the manure-filled streets with flowing pantaloons was met with violent outrage from the patriarchs of property.
It was literally labeled “cross-dressing.” Opponents quoted from the Bible, frequently Deuteronomy 22:5: “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”
While at least one of the leaders of the Dress Reform movement, Dr. Mary Walker, actually was a female-to-male cross-dresser, everyone who advocated rights for women became targets of anti-gay, trans-phobic and anti-intersexual bigotry. Alongside White supremacy, this divide-and-conquer attack thundered from on high, from the bully pulpit of newspaper editorials to the church dais.
When suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wore bloomers to an 1852 women’s rights convention, a journalist accused her of dressing like a man. But when organizers of a predominantly White, male, anti-slavery convention tried to deny Lucy Stone the right to speak because she was wearing bloomers, the noted Abolitionist Wendell Phillips successfully defended her against the gender-baiting. Phillips replied, “Well, if Lucy Stone cannot speak at that meeting, in any decent dress that she chooses, I will not speak either.”(6) However, the inability to stand up to the storm of sex- and gender-baiting resulted in the decline of the Dress Reform movement. And this defeat was a setback for the Abolition movement, as well, in which women played such an important role.
‘Ain’t I a woman?’
But leaders of the most oppressed demonstrated great courage and clarity in the face of gender-phobic and trans-phobic epithets and anti-gay slurs. The rumor that she was really a man disguised as a woman hounded Sojourner Truth. In Kosciusko County, Indiana, a White doctor who led the pro-slavery forces disrupted her from speaking at an anti-slavery event.
“Hold on,” he shouted. “There is strong doubt in the minds of many persons here regarding the sex of the next speaker.” He demanded that this African woman, who had been stripped and whipped by slave owners, bare her breast to the women present. Sojourner Truth strode to the podium. She stood some six feet tall. Her voice was described as “rolling thunder.” “I will show my breast, but to the entire congregation,” she told the gathering as she undid the buttons. “It is not my shame but yours that I do this.”(7)
Ministers who disrupted a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 also baited her about being a man. Truth, the only Black woman present, reportedly rolled up her sleeve to exhibit the “tremendous power” of her muscles. She silenced the room with her powerful challenge: “I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as any man- when I could get it- and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?”
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the other 30 men who attended the first women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, N.Y., were labeled “hermaphrodites” and “Aunt Nancy Men.” But Douglass, who had escaped slavery only a decade earlier, never backed down. “I’m proud to be known as a women’s rights man,” he wrote and said publicly, again and again.
References: (1) Herbert Aptheker, “The Negro in the Abolition Movement.” (2) Shirley J. Yee, “Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860.” (3) Cora Dubois, cited in Richard Green, “Historical and Cross-Cultural Survey: Sexual Identity Conflict in Children and Adults.” (4) Francisco Guerra, “The Pre-Columbian Mind,” cited in Walter Williams, “The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture.” (5) “Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology.” (6) Anne L. Macdonald, “Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America.” (7) Jacqueline Bernard, “Journey Toward Freedom: The Story of Sojourner Truth.”
See also, Former slaves backed early movement (April 1, 2004)
Next: The most oppressed fought in solidarity with women’s rights
Reprinted from the March 25, 2004, issue of Workers World newspaper
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via email: www@wwpublish.com.
———-
reprinted from: http://www.fyicomminc.com/gaianews/speech23.htm
Xes, Sexes and Mitochondrial DNA
The X post is always a difficult but exceeding fun post to research and write for the A to Z Blogging Challenge. The X post that I wrote a while back, in April 2012, called The Exceptional World of The Letter X, on my personal blog is still a favorite of mine. Today I expand upon the X is for X chromosome element that I alluded to in this earlier post as well as brief mention of mitochondrial DNA. From the earlier post:
the X-chromosome that I like to think of as the complete and whole version of the poor misshapen Y-chromosome. This New York Times article about the X-chromosome is a fun read and a great link for Mother’s Day posts. The need for those is approaching with great speed.
There are actually two distinct ways that genetic female information is transmitted from generation to generation. Science is finding out more and more about how these function all the time. Most DNA is found within the nucleus of the cell, but there is DNA within another part of the cell, the mitrochondrion, too. The mitochondria are membrane-bound organelles found in all cells of every multi-celled creature. Mitochondria convert energy derived from chemical nutrients into ATP or chemical energy that fuels cell functions.
As we talk about genetics and archeology we do need to understand the basic biology of which we speak. We do not have to be experts but understanding whether we are talking about sex-linked genetic materials that are actively manipulated, rearranged, and turned on and off during reproduction, or about the mitochondrial DNA that flows to individuals directly from the mother.
At one point archeology and human genetic information were at odds and suggested very different timelines for human evolution and migration of human populations around the globe. But relatively recent understanding of molecular mutation rates, how the genetic timeline of human evolution is measured, has slowed the rate of proposed of genetic mutation in human populations by half, putting genetic and archaeological timelines on the same page, per human history, if not the same paragraph.
The only points in time over which I could find some agreement about what humans were doing include the following:
- 150 – 125,000 years ago we were with our last common mother in Africa.
- 75,000 – 60,000 years ago the last mother of all non-Africans was somewhere beyond the African Continent.
- 30,000 years ago we were creating sacred images of women.
- 10,000 years ago we settled down and took up horticulture.
- 5,000 years ago in the Early Bronze Age, patriarchal religions as evidenced by Abraham and monotheism, began to take take root and spread.
To talk about history, archaeology and biology requires basic understanding of agreement in the sciences. A very good article that discusses haploid testing and “clans” can be found on DNA-explained.com.