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Women

‘Suffragette’ Foregrounds Working-Class Women

November 29, 2015 Linda Gordon, www.portside.org , , ,
By Linda Gordon for Portside. Movie Review - An industrial laundry in 1912 London, the steam infusing the air, the sweat on the workers' faces so vivid the viewer herself feels the heat. These laundries were not only literal sweatshops, but surrounded workers with burning toxic lye. This opening scene in Sara Gavron's new film, Suffragette, is as powerful as any that follow. It is intended to surprise-not what one expects from a film about the British woman suffrage movement, because the history books have mainly told us about its elite leaders, Emmeline and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst.

Hunger Strike At Texas Detention Center Swells Into The Hundreds

November 12, 2015 Kanya D'Almeida, www.rhrealitycheck.org , ,
By Kanya D'Almeida for RH Reality Check - for The number of hunger strikers at a Texas immigrant detention facility has swelled to almost 500 since last Wednesday, an Austin-based advocacy group revealed in a phone call with RH Reality Check. When news of the protest action broke on October 28, about 27 women at the T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, 35 miles east of Austin, were reportedly refusing their meals. While grievances ranged from abusive treatment by guards to a lack of medical care, the women, hailing primarily from Central America, were unanimous in their one demand: immediate release.

The Suffragettes Who Learned Martial Arts To Fight For Votes

November 5, 2015 Tao Tao Holmes, www.atlasobscura.com , ,
By Tao Tao Holmes for Atlas Obscura - Beneath the folds of their Victorian dresses, the jujutsuffragettes concealed wooden clubs—preparation for hand-to-hand combat with the London police. The Indian clubs, shaped like bowling pins, were used in exercise classes of the era, flaunted in leg lunges, or alternatively, brandished against cops. When policemen heard that radical suffragettes were arming themselves, they began worrying about pistols and firearms; what they didn’t expect was to be met with an eclectic form of the Japanese martial art of jujutsu (also spelled jiujitsu or jujitsu). The women pulled out their clubs, the police pulled out their truncheons, and the sparring began.

Mississippi’s Women, Some of Poorest, Getting Organized

October 27, 2015 Kenisha Potter-Stevenson, www.billmoyers.com ,
By Kenisha Potter-Stevenson for Moyers & Company - When I think of it, I get chill bumps. I never thought I’d see the day when so many women — of all backgrounds, but mostly women of color — would come together to make Mississippi a better place for ourselves, a better place for our children and a better place for our future. But that’s what we’re doing right now with the Mississippi Women’s Economic Security Initiative (MWESI) — a movement to push an agenda that was developed the old-fashioned way: by talking to people about the obstacles they face and then addressing the issues they are concerned with.

Grassroots Women’s Response To Climate Change

September 30, 2015 Kahea Pacheco and Melinda Kramer, www.earthisland.org , , ,
By Kahea Pacheco and Melinda Kramer in Earth Island - In an event hall in the small village of Sirsi, on the edge of the Western Ghats in the Indian state of Karnataka, more than a hundred women gather to participate in the Malnad Mela, a decade-old festival organized by Vanastree, a seed saving collective of women farmers. These participants, as well as the 800 or more community members who visit throughout the day, have traveled long distances to be there despite a week of heavy monsoon rains and winds, uprooted trees, and power outages. Sunita Rao— seed saver, farmer and founder of Vanastree — believes that the mela is a critical opportunity to bring women home gardeners and farmers together to exchange skills, share and sell produce, and discuss solutions and adaptations to the growing threat climate change presents to the region.

Women Leading Protests Around The World

August 30, 2015 Carmen, www.autostraddle.com
By Carmen for Autostraddle - We have seen it in the United States, women are leaders of protest movement, e.g. Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, climate justice and extreme energy extraction, among others. Here are 95 photos of feminists from around the world protesting injustice. Feminism is alive and well, my friends. And I’ve got 95 photos from across the planet to prove it. (Click on them to find the source articles about the protests and movements pictured!) Including an image of a protest or images from a specific region doesn’t indicate any sort of endorsement of that region or movement’s politics — this is just about showcasing that the fight for women’s rights and gender equality is raging on around the world.

Poll: Women’s Issues Connect To All Issues

August 27, 2015 Ms. Foundation For Women, www.forwomen.org , ,
By Ms. Foundation For Women - The survey shows that people see issues in their community as interconnected and would rather hear candidates and elected officials propose solutions with this in mind. When it comes to community problems, issues around economic security rise to the top – not necessarily a new polling finding. What is new, however, is that the survey reveals which issues the public sees as having disproportionate effects between genders. While most feel that women and men approach problems differently and have different strengths, they are much more likely to feel that men — rather than women — are in positions to fix problems. Finally, the survey shows the term “feminist” may have lost some of its meaning. After hearing a very simple definition, the percentage of the public who adopts the label triples.

Women Are At The Forefront Of The Zapatista Revolution

August 1, 2015 Hilary Klein, www.truth-out.org , ,
By Hilary Klein in Truth Out - In the 1980s, outsiders dressed as doctors or teachers arrived in Araceli and Maribel's jungle community and began asking the peasants why they were paid such low prices when they sold their coffee or corn. These outsiders talked about the fundamental injustices between rich and poor, and about the mistreatment their indigenous community had endured for more than five hundred years. They said that women had rights too. Villagers like Araceli and Maribel took a risk and joined "the organization." They attended secret meetings at night and recruited their neighbors. Some left home to live in the mountains and become insurgents - joining a scrappy indigenous army that was growing in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

Women’s Peace Walk Across The Korean DMZ Impeded

May 21, 2015 Code Pink, www.codepink.org , , , ,
International, Northern and Southern Korean women activists who plan to cross the Korean Demilitarized Zone said Wednesday they are determined to move forward with their walk, despite the announcement that United Nations authorities can't guarantee their safety if they walk from the North to the South at Panmunjom. Panmunjom is where the Korean War armistice agreement was signed, and it is critical to the delegates that the DMZ crossing take place at this symbolic site. Officials in Pyongyang have informed organizer Christine Ahn, a Korean-American peace activist, that without a formal letter from Seoul approving a crossing at Panmunjom they may have to cross at another location. Ahn said the group has been advised to consider crossing from nearby Kaesong on a highway that is used mainly for civilian and commercial purposes.

7 Teenage Girls Organize Mass Protest Against Austerity In The UK

May 15, 2015 The Bristol Post, www.bristolpost.co.uk , ,
Thousands of people flooded the streets of Bristol in an anti-austerity demonstration which was organised by a group of young yet determined women. A group of seven teenagers organised the march, which opposed the Government's austerity measures, on social media. Support grew rapidly for the group, which called itself Bristol Against Austerity, and evening thousands of people packed every corner of Park Street as the demonstration snaked round the city centre. Many of those who attended were angry, and the majority were young people bearing placards, who said they were disgusted at the Government's attitude to the NHS and welfare spending.

Women Around The World Rise Up To Remember Rana Plaza

April 25, 2015 Sarah Lazare, www.commondreams.org , , ,
Marking two years since the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, protesters are converging on the country's capital and feminist actions are sweeping the globe on Friday, to honor the lives of the 1,138 people—most of them women—who perished in the tragedy and to demand justice for those they left behind. News outlets are reporting that demonstrators have gathered in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, the city where the Rana Plaza factory was located. Among them are survivors of the tragedy and family members of the deceased, who say that, two years later, they still have not received adequate compensation. "I haven’t received any compensation from the government yet," Nilufar Begum, a worker wounded in the factory collapse, told Euronews. "I can’t support my family, my children can’t go to school. I’m crippled forever."

Kabul: Thousands March For Justice For Woman Killed By Mob

April 5, 2015 Staff, www.AP.org , ,
Thousands of people marched through the Afghan capital, demanding justice for a woman who was beaten to death by a mob after being falsely accused of burning a Qur’an. Men and women of all ages carried banners bearing the bloodied face of Farkhunda, the 27-year-old religious scholar killed last week by the mob. Farkhunda was beaten, run over with a car and burned before her body was thrown into the Kabul river. Organisers of Tuesday’s march estimated that 3,000 people took part, calling it one of the biggest demonstrations in Kabul’s history. Marchers chanted, “justice for Farkhunda!” and “death to the killers!”. The demonstrators also called for action against officials and religious leaders who had initially supported the attack on Farkhunda by saying her killing was justifiable if she had burned pages of a Qur’an. The country’s interior ministry said the spokesman for the Kabul police, Hashmat Stanikzai, had been fired over comments he made on social media supporting Farkhunda’s killers.

Co-ops Enable Low-Income Women To Work As Owners

April 2, 2015 Eleanor J. Bader, www.truth-out.org , ,
Co-ops not only give low-income and immigrant women a way to enter an often unwelcoming - and in some cases, hostile - economy, but also give them a way to exert some control over their work lives and simultaneously support themselves and their families. They have consequently been some of the early adopters in the not-yet-critical-mass movement of worker-owned cooperative businesses that has begun to catch fire in towns and cities throughout the United States. Melissa Hoover, executive director of the Democracy at Work Institute, estimates that there are presently between 300 and 400 worker-owned businesses operating domestically.

Finishing School For Pickets; Learning Insubordination

March 25, 2015 Paula Giddings and Howard Zinn, www.huffingtonpost.com , , , ,
Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women’s institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of “finishing school” in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of “true-womanhood”: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn’s students had morphed from “nice, well-mannered and ladylike” paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. “Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today,” Zinn concluded.

Peace And Reunification In Korea: In Our Life Time

March 13, 2015 Christine Ahn, www.opendemocracy.net , ,
A year ago, I went on this peacebuilding mission to Pyongyang to discuss an international women’s peace walk across the two-mile wide De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas. To my relief, Pyongyang responded very favourably towards our proposal, but with a stern caveat: only if the conditions were favourable. Today, despite New Year calls for engagement by both Korean leaders, tensions remain very high. And this month, the United States and South Korea are conducting a two-month long period of military exercises called Key Resolve and Foal Eagle, which the North Korean Rodong Sinmun believes are “aimed to occupy the DPRK through pre-emptive strikes.” The conditions are not favourable, but we are still planning the women’s peace walk across the DMZ this May.
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