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.
Women, Information, and Estates of Governance
Women require information to govern in a democratic fashion just as do men. Understanding the evolution of a government, the systems from which it emerged, is essential to preservation, and betterment, of that government. Trajectories are real aspects of living systems and exert influence on contemporary processes.
From 18th century France, there were three estates of society:
- the clergy (religious heads)
- the nobility (rulers)
- the commoners (everyone else who is not a slave)
Among the political commentators and thinkers, the media has been labelled as the fourth estate of modern day.
In modern democracy, the three pillars include:
- the legislature (makes laws)
- the executive (president or prime minister)
- the judiciary (the courts)
The media has been labeled as the fourth estate of modern society.
The Fifth Estate, which has been labeled citizen journalism, has beeen broken down, I would argue incorrectly, into two types of journalism. The first being an extension of The Fourth Estate and the second as some sort of standalone pillar. In fact, to take the property analogies of estates and pillars of society one step further, I contend that information that can stand alone apart from a voice that speaks it, as is the case in a pamphlet, a book, or a digital transmission is the beam, brace, or buttress that makes pillars on estates into the cultural home in which we live.
Living systems, and we live within and are a part of a living system, are open systems.
I am not going to go any deeper into systems theory, self- organizing systems, or cybernetics, (but I would note, as an aside, that if you want to understand systems science through a woman’s eye, look at some Lynn Margulis quotes.)
Life requires change and the ability to bring in new elements and energy, as well as to delete, turn-off, or store-away other elements and processes, including tinformation paths and flow.
The transitions we are experiencing in the world are becoming more and more dramatic as we are living on the fulcrum of a tipping point where we cannot long balance; change will happen and the slightest actions, or inaction, by individuals can and will change the direction, the trajectory, of the path upon which we will find ourselves.
We do not know how this will all shake out. New technology brings new behavior. Gutenberg could not have known, nor could Martin Luther, that when Luther posted his 95 Theses, 500 years ago, that others would find his words so moving that they would use the new tech of the printing press to print and distribute hundreds, then thousands, of copies of Luther’s discussion points in what was literally the first viral post.
Women’s voices are strong, and the distributed nature of the digital web is quite feminine and whether we are using hashtags (#meto #timesup #shepersisted) or writing our own theses, we are engaged in public communication as people have been since the first humans gathered around an evening fire. Citizen journalism is a good thing if done with care. Most of us know which people we can rely on to give us good information. We know which bloggers, editorial writers, and cartooniswts we can trust to base their works, including opinion pieces, to be based in fact. How those facts are interwoven into “truths” are far more problematic. When we give our time and eyes to uncritically watching or reading “news” that is not reporting facts but into building viewers or followers, we are hurting ourselves and world that we communally build with our consumption and conversations.
We must, as women who are approaching 100 years of having the vote in the United States, become as responsible and careful with the information we create or share as we are with the food we give our children and families to build bodies. We are powerful and we hold the information that builds our children’s minds and our future knowledge used by our society in our hands.
Our mothers and grandmotherws figured out how to make cakes during the rationing of sugar during World War II.
We must figure out how to make our homes and businesses equally celebratory as we ration ourselves to verified information.
We must educate ourselves and navigate the current estates and pillars with a fervor that only mothers acting to preserve what they love can act.
My 2 Cents Worth on Parkland Florida
I feel the need to start #wombsplaining things, and I hope my smart writerly researching friends will do the same.
1. The medical system and social care network obviously let down a boy who grew up to become a murderer of 17 people yesterday in Parkland Florida. If you look at a picture of him, you can see that there may be physical reasons for the adjustment problems he had. He looks like he may have some of the characteristics of FAS. He was adopted. Both of his adoptive parents died. He’d been expelled from school and identified as a potentially dangerous individual to the school. Our system let him down and because of that 17 people, thus far, are dead. Hundreds or thousands have been traumatized because of this one mass murder.
https://youtu.be/uUZ6LBbaML4
2. I am nauseated when I see Governor Rick Scott talking about the well-being of his constituents. This man has no concern for people, he was the CEO of Columbia/HCA during the time when the company committed the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in U.S. History. The company paid $1.6 billion criminal and civil fines for Medicare fraud. The people who committed this crime went, literally, Scott-free. Corporate crime takes money away from the healthcare and social support systems that is desperately needed for dealing with the health and well-being of the cast-offs of American society (rightists often call thsee things entitlements.)
3. The crimes committed by Scott’s company occurred when yesterday‘s shooter was in utero and a small child. Now this immoral corporate white man is “guiding” the state in which there have been two mass shooting recently and dodging questions on gun safety.
4. If the shooter was given up for adoption, unwanted, and suffered from birth defects, I wonder if his birth mother thought about abortion? I wonder if she had access – physical and economic – to all the medical care she needed? (I am allowed to say this as I was an unwanted child and was psychologically tortured by my mother because I was unwanted. No child should have to live with knowing they are unwanted. It warps them.)
—
Perhaps corporations should be killed (dissoved without the ability of owners/board etc. to reform corporate entities) when they do things that kill.
Perhaps immoral people like Scott behind corporate crime should not be allowed into leadership positions ever again.
Perhaps we should not allow weapons of war designed to kill great numbers of people rapidly to be sold to civilians.
Perhaps people should be able to get the healthcare they need regardless of their SEC.
Same Old Dreams, Despair, and Determination
We dream for our babies, our children, nieces and nephews, those we teach, and those we heal.
We women are used to situations that do not make sense. I struggle with this myself. I know I spend much more time trying to unravel the knots in logic that are fed to me by various data-streams from the world at large into my little corner of the world than most women I know.
Some say I do this because I have more time than they do to do this. I have 24/7 just like everyone else. Some say I do not work. I will not even honor that with detailed debunking. I do all the work that women have always done, plus I have three other primary jobs. Yes, I am a researcher and anthropologist by nature, but I learned and studied how to do these things toward which I was drawn through my 18 years of schooling and through another 20 plus years of work in institutions of higher education. I work on books, websites, help my husband with his company when he is overwhelmed by research and teaching at the University.
I have set out on my own exploration which I share through my writing.
My opinions most often are based on research and have value. I have references for things I say or cite. Just ask if I do not list them.
I have been knocked down and dragged through the mud and excrement more times than I can count.
I was born dirt poor, a pig and chicken-raising, egg-selling farmer’s daughter, on a small, mixed-crop farm in Indiana. My mother raised me to believe I was sickly, that there was something wrong with me and this led to isolation, loneliness, and depression as a child and which has moved right along with me as I age.
My stubbornness and tenacity kept me alive. Literally. I did not do the #metoo disclosure, but I support others who do. I am not a joiner. I have dedicated myself to a group trying to achieve an end at a couple points in time. I was a successful person in these endeavors in that I achieved my end, but I did not work and play well enough with others to make many close friends. I just never got the hang of close social bonding.
I was born to mother who told me that she never asked for me to be born, and that whose comforting of me as a teenager experiencing suicidal self-doubt and fear, was to say that I while I was not pretty, just plain, true, but that it wasn’t all that bad.
Imagine being thrown in to the nasty world of the teenage social milleau without the preparation of real peer interaction through school immersion in grade school. I was absent as much as I was present in grades 1 through 8. I did not have the slightest idea about girl/boy relationships as I entered high school. It did not go well. During the next 15 years I was sexually assaulted and raped several times. My first time was rape. I was assaulted again by another older male within six months of that. I withdrew from that world and lived in social isolation until I found a boy who was slow moving and predictable a couple years later.
During those critical late years of high school I was being groomed for seduction by an adult male who taught and had other roles in that school. I turned 18 and graduated from high school the same month. Within a few weeks of graduation he had convinced me to have sex with him. It took me a couple of years to get him completely out of my life and realize how it was sick and abusive to have sex with him.
I moved in with the slow-moving smart guy and lived with him for 13 years. It became an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship. It was not physically or sexually abusive at first. I was probably a common law spouse, the state had common law on the books, so the next rape I experiencesd was marital rape. It took me a few years and a couple of moves, the last one across country, to escape from Mr. Slow who turned into a stocker.
Of course there were other usurious guys in my younger days, but nothing with them that approached assault. Inappropriate workplace behavior is another story. I ran out of fingers counting those. I left the university after a boss told me as a way conveying condolences after my brother’s death, that “he had so many things he wanted to do before he died; he’d never slept with a black women.” I was cornered in isolated library spaces by supervisors. A trusted mentor suggested we travel to a professional meeting together when there was no reason for me to attend and when his marriage was on the rocks.
I have seen most of the sleezy ways in which society can treat women. Yes, that includes unfortunate specialization in dead-end professions where I worked for, and had to fight to get to the upper end of, the $20,000 a year range at the very end of the last millennium. That was when I quit working for anyone other than myself.
It took about 10 years for healing to occur through counseling, learning to trust my instincts and my knowledge, after I left the university. I also had to to repair a marriage in which my husband did not know how to support me through a very turbulent time and severe depression, but in which we were neutral at best and downright destructive at other times. This was during some of the absolutely hellacious teen years of my vivacious daughter.
This was when my mother and another brother passed away and my remaining two brothers developed dementia. It was also during that time that I finally realized my mother and I were in a possible Münchausen-by-Proxy relationship and definitely a factitious-by-proxy relationship in my early life, which lead to other factitious relationships through my twenties.
The past eight years I have written publicly about personal things. From this I learned even more about healing myself. I will never give up on learning until I reach an old age filled with dementia and drool.
I try to apply what I learn to the world at large. As a social scientist I see patterns of behavior across culture and how I also am a part of creating and being created by those patterns.
This past year has been no different and I am now ready to talk about dangers I see in political communication and societal constraints that have shifted dramatically in the country in which I live and the democracy in which I participate. Yes, in many ways this is the same old same old, but I see some areas in which I can find hope.
Subscribe to keep up with my ever evolving theory of how women can save the world.
February Thoughts of Women and Spring
This month, February 2018, continues a now year-long streak of heightened, and potential, change as well as challenges for women, societal interactions and perceptions. This is true, dear reader, no matter where you fall into or upon any political spectrum. The only political opinion expressed here is that “not to make a decision is to make a decision.” Laying low is not opting out of discourse. It is support of the status quo, the people in power, the way things are. I was taught this by a woman, Mary, I worked with at Purdue long, long ago, at the Periodicals and General Info Desk.
Events in the U.S. in the last year will continue to shift attitudes, actions, laws and norms concerning pay scales, business formation, education, healthcare, and every other practice within the sphere of women’s lives.
Role models, informative examples, do more than inspire. They guide. It is our intention that this month’s collection of women and women-related topics will inspire, but will also guide. This is especially important as we prepare for Women’s History Month (March) and International Women’s Day.
So this year as always women must construct a strong present upon which to build the future , especially in as the year of the cock ends and the year of of the Brown Mountain Dog begins on February 4th.
The beginning of January is not a good time for me to start new things or make life changes. The middle of Winter just does not motivate me. I am sure I am not the only person who feels this way. So by February I have recovered from the holidays and am ready to seek renewed purpose with the beginning of the Asian Lunar New Year. So (male, brown, mountain…) Dog Year, I am ready for you. Those who follow such things expect the year to be a roller coaster and that is good for corporations. Still: #She persisted #Resist #Time’sUp
Maybe this Groundhog Day Cailleach, with a brown dog at her side, will stay by the fires or gather firewood thus predicting the length of winter remaining.
Cailleach, a Gaelic/Celtic Goddess, arrives as a crone at Samhein after the Harvest has her last flurry of activity before leaving sometime around now near Imbolc, Candlemas, or Groundhog Day which all fall at or near the mid-point between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox. Contemporary Earth-centered religions call it a “cross quarter holiday” which denotes it is a midpoint date between a solstice and an equinox. Folk belief states that if Cailleach is out and about, and can be seen gathering firewood for the remainder of Winter, then Winter will continue on for a long while. If the day is rainy, or dreary and damp, she cannot gather firewood and Winter will not last much longer.
The connections between the early February holidays seem obvious to me; so I suggest we rename the famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, Punxsutawney Philomena. Groundhog day is February 2nd. Imbolc, the currently favored name in earth-centered religions, denotes something about ewe’s milk linguistically, probably as milk coming in and lambs being birthed in spring. This midpoint is February 1st this year which is also St. Brigid’s Day. Brigid is the Patron Saint of Ireland. Candlemas, also celebrated on February 2nd is when Mary would have had purification rites, 40 days after Jesus’ birth, and when Jesus was presented at temple. These observances, to me, are all interconnected. The ending of Winter was a heavy constant on the minds of early sedentary or agrarian peoples, reserves are low if not depleted, and the Spring with its light and promise of food is only a few days to a few weeks away.
Unlike the coming of Winter, when the goddess enters as an old woman, the coming of Spring, when the crone leaves, finds her more youthful, ready for the Spring and rebirth. She mirrors the cycle of seasons, or the Wheel of life, and the role of women to bring new life to the world even as they age. Cailleach inspires. Imbolc and Cailleach go hand in hand along with Saint Brigit and the Goddess Brighid, who are not the same person or entity. Some say that Imbolc is the celebration of Goddess recovering after giving birth to the God. As stated in The Right and the Wrong of Imbolc The Saint and the Goddess continue to intermingle into the present day. I suspect this is one more example of the covering or layering of Christian observations (Candlemas), not the creation of Candlemas, over indigenous ritual celebrations so as to supplant the Old Gods and Goddesses of a region.
No matter what you believe, Spring is coming. And Spring is female.
Respect My Right to Vote, Valentine
Leap years, as defined by the presence of a 29th day in February take a bit of the splash of Valentines Day away as the neatest thing about February. But there is no Leap Day this year. So one of this year’s coolest things in February other than Valentine’s Day is the anniversary of the Utah Territory giving women the vote on February 12, 1869. What a great lead up to how on February 14th, perhaps we should celebrate the far seeing non-partisan, League of Women Voters that was founded founded February 14, 1920, six months before the 19th amendment was passed, rather than a martyred man (St. Valentine) And while we are at it, let’s work in one of the incredibly important things that happened on February 14th. Aretha Franklin recorded Respect at Atlantic Records Studio, New York City: February 14, 1967.
So, yes, I am advocating to make Respect by Aretha a central part of any and every Valentines Day celebration.
There is always more advocacy in which we need to engage. The next Leap Year will take lots and lots of extra planning and celebration as 2020 will be the 100th Anniversary of women gaining the right to vote with the passage 19th Amendment. Start planning now.
The following video of a panel discussion familiarizes us with some of the types of organizations who already are involved in the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.
Page Herrington’s panel, Women’s History on the Horizon: The Centennial of Woman Suffrage in 2020.
So let us continue on in these women-centric, Celtic, and political discussions.
Some Women of February
Andre Norton
The “Grand Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy” authored “more than 130 novels, nearly 100 short stories and numerous anthologies that Ms. Norton edited in the science-fiction, fantasy, mystery and western genres…” NY Times March 18, 2005
Elizabeth Key
Please do not forget to feature women in any Black History Month (February) writings you may do. Elizabeth Key was the first woman in The Colonies to legally win her freedom and whose case was then used against slaves and free persons to enslave more people based solely on their skin color or their parents’ skin color. Elizabeth’s story is critical to understanding that judicial rulings can take long-established rights away from individuals, and groups of people, as well as establish them.
Finally, let me mention one last link that focuses on some significant, oft overlooked women in black history for this Black History Month.
Carrie Newcomer: and that was Holy
A couple posts ago, I mentioned how excited I was and how much anticipation I was feeling about a workshop I was to attend. Well the workshop has happened and I am still glowing from the energy and hope I drew from the experience beyond the sheer pleasure that being at the conference, in the moment, brought to me.
The workshop was entitled, “Our Lives as Sacred Stories.” And, “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, it was wonderful,” as my maternal ancestors used to say.
Carrie Newcomer is a dear friend I have known since before disco-died. In the very late 1970s or extremely early 80s, I heard Carrie perform as a solo act at the Pizza Keg in West Lafayette. I am not sure if she had written “Survivors” as yet, and she probably performed “Black-eyed Susan.” Within a short time she was dating a good friend of my boyfriend, and I was eating veggie dinners of delightful stuffed mushrooms, and wine, at her place, and was marvelling at this woman who soaked soybeans and made her own soy milk and tempeh, and made a run-down upstairs apartment in central Lafayette, Indiana into a beautiful, homey haven from impending Reaganism, and on top of it all she was a singer-songwriter. I was in awe of her. Still am.
I was right there through the entirety of the Stone Soup era. I lived with the sound man. I wrapped a lot of cords. I wrote a thesis about underground networks of midwives attending home-births as she had a home-birth. I marvelled at her strength, and her belief in the path she was making, taking, or following (depending on your own world view) as her solo career began again.
We were both there at the beginning of the ending of some quite significant relationships for both of us. One of images my memory conjures up whenever I hear the word “angels” is of Carrie and I as we sat on a low concrete step connected the sidewalk in front of my student ghetto home. There was a sense of turmoil and sadness around us as we talked. There were some pretty hard times ahead for both of us. I listened as she told me how she saw angels. I did not really understand this nor the verse that she had referenced until I heard the song of hers, Angels Unaware, decades later.
We have rarely seen each other in the intervening decades, but there is still a connection when we meet. Two midwestern girls all grown up, in fact grown to an age where some become wise women (but not us…, nah, we both see ourselves as doing foolish things with some regularity) as we live very different lives across the continent from each other. She is fiercely gentle as she shares her story of love and the connectedness of all things.
One thing I know: “Never get between a Quaker… and her mission.”
So what did we do at the workshop?
She showed us how to write about a kindness received or given. Then, she showed us how to take that glowing feeling we had after writing and take it out into community and grow it larger, this time, into a song. She showed us that when we share this kind of experience and really listen to someone, and connect, it is then good to stop, and say, “and it was holy.”
Carrie is so good at walking the walk. It is like the difference between being lectured at and having someone share a part of her heart with you.