Aug 26th The Day Women Won the Right To Vote

What are you doing on August 26th to celebrate the 91st anniversary of the suffrage Amendment?

http://www.vfa.us/

To celebrate go out and BUY the DVD,  Iron Jawed Angels.  Watch it and you will never regret it.







It is in women's interests to control their own bodies and their reproduction. Margaret Sanger worked for the interests of women and so became the most lied about feminist in history.  Her work has been deliberately distorted by the misogynists and right to life movement - all of whom never get their hands dirty actually trying to help the great masses of people in poverty.  They are those who tell us resources are unlimited while children live without medical care or even enough food. The answer, they say, is to donate to their churches. They do not offer to fund the special needs school classes or nursing home facilities where the severely disabled  babies are kept when they are adults.  They call Sanger a racist because she believed the way out of poverty and ill health was not to breed dependants whom society would abandon when they could not be exploited further. The corporatists wanted child labor for their sweatshops regardless of the suffering involved in unrestricted breeding for women and children. It is the same today. So they call her a racist and by extension all who fight for choice and against overpopulation.

It is in the interest of women to parent their own self until they are economically and emotionally self sufficient and healthy, rather than breed children to parent.  This is also the best interests of children.


TODAY in 2011 because of Sanger and Planned Parenthood women celebrated the FDA approval of the birth control pill 51 years ago.   Roe v Wade was decided, making abortion legal in the U.S., 38 years ago.   Compassionate care for rape victims was won 3 years ago.
And Planned Parenthood won contraceptive equity in insurance coverage just 2 years ago.

Older women are often living in poverty, especially single women.   Medical care was always a problem before age 65, and the 2008 election was all about that.  First we were promised a single payer and then a public option.  We received forced insurance at high premiums without cost controls even though the democrats controlled both houses and the presidency. 

Now Obama is trying to find a way to gut Medicare in the service of his funders. 

Most feminists believe that Medicare should be extended to everyone becoming the single payer system eliminating insurance companies' costs all together.  But the insurance lobby had more influence than the masses on the democrats, most of whom are millionaires and probably invested in the health care profiteers.  Forced insurance will be ruled unconstitutional, so the medical care problem was never resolved but only made worse and that tragedy compounded by BO's open borders policy. 

Must reading for Activists: A populist argument against medicare at Echnidne. I loved it and you will learn much that is important for women to consider.

Employment/wage discrimination 2011 covered here at Echnidne:http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2011_08_21_archive.html#7691531408844364137
and

http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2011_08_21_archive.html#1889543552019268303

This is the start of a summary and will grow into a map.

I identify with the interests of women as a caste.  I identify with "the female" in nature across species and across all man made divisions.  It is in the interests of women to be free to choose – autonomous - self sufficient - to find her own way – to make her own self definitions rather than to be defined by males in literature, in film, in fashion; by the way males want to see women, as objects rather than as equals.

It is in the interests of women to be free to be what she chooses and feels is her nature and natural talents without sex role stereotyping.  Freedom means without some other deciding that women  should not do that, or be that, but instead should be what men want them to be and do what men decide they should do.

I am woman identified because I see women globally as a caste and identify all our interests as interconnected.  In 2011, feminism has gone global.  The wars in the middle east have connected western feminists with Muslim women and their struggle.  Radical feminists had always viewed women as a caste....“Gynecology” by Daly.  Did you ever read it? “Women’s Inhumanity to Women” by Chesler?  But for most women it was an abstract thought, an intellectualization.  Women did not understand that women were still  held as slaves in several continents.  They did not deeply understand the construction of the forces that were aligned against these slave women.  For the first time they saw institutionalized, blatant, unchecked patriarchy as it operated against their own grandmothers.   There are examples of it in the US, especially in the various religious cults but they are easily ignored by the masses and glamorized bt the sexist media industry as is child sexualization glamorized and as porn is normalized. 

The Bush wars raised consciousness here in the USA and the desires and hopes of women globally.  They were a benefit to women everywhere.  No war against oppression, including our revolution and civil war, occurs without casualties as the Arab spring also illustrates. 

Radical Feminists never make any political choice without looking at how it affects women’s liberation from patriarchy.  That is why feminists will view the wars differently than the left or progressive movement.  Your political position on the Bush wars defines your priorities.  The left's priority is not women's liberation but that is the feminist priority.  The only question is how does the action affect the liberation of women.


Feminism is a labor union  for women fighting for gender equality and beyond that maximum freedom to make personal choices.  Solidarity in that union will make fundamental change in every society. 

Eco feminism is organizing.  Women have been writing alone finding the connections but they are just starting to materialize the theory.  Vandana Shiva and others ……………..

It is important to distinguish between women being used in the service of environmentalism and programs which lead to the sustainability of women's Independence.  Programs which elevate the status of women and increase their rights.  And not just one woman's liberation - a queen bee type doing global speaking engagements, making a good living being a "front", but the liberation of the women she claims to represent.   Are laws being changed, quotas met, land purchased, income elevated ? Tricky, tricky, tricky....

I believe animal rights is a feminist issue. As a feminist I relate to the female in every species.  The female birds, cats, lions, dogs pigs, cows, the female of every species is a sister.

As a feminist I relate to the female in every species. The way cows are treated, their motherhood utterly degraded, their children sold at 8 weeks for veal so the man can sell their breast milk. I feel that.

In WI you must drive between the veal cages on one side of the road and the mothers who have lost their babies in the barn on the other side of the road.

They are calling, screaming to one another, calling, calling.  It is as if driving through hell. 

I feel for those mothers and children from my own life as a woman, from my life in family court, from my own mother.

Feminists for Animal Rights  http://www.farinc.org/about.html

also:

http://vegina.wordpress.com/

 http://www.navdanya.org/diverse-women-for-diversity

http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/openeye/sp000943.txt
http://www.thegreenfuse.org/ecofem.htm
 http://veganfeministagitator.blogspot.com/2011/05/universal-mother.html

The below excerpt explores how eco feminists are formed and describes a typical experience. More here: http://www.cyberchimp.co.uk/research/manifesto.htm

Josie Donovan and I articulated what we saw as the radical insight of feminism in our introduction to Animals and Women:

‘We believe that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities.

We believe that all oppressions are interconnected: no one creature will be free until all are free – from abuse, degradation, exploitation, pollution, and commercialization.’1

When we begin to explore what it means to be ‘animal beings,’ too, we often begin by acknowledging our commonalities: we bleed, we experience pain and express it, some of us females share the experience of pregnancy and lactation.

I think such politics of identity can be both promising and limiting: while having lactated makes me sympathetic to the degradation and miserable experience of nursing pigs and cows [page 121] under confinement situations, I would not want to imply that experience is required to cultivate sympathy for suffering. Yet, lactation is an example of continuity across species, and many such examples of experiencing continuity or commonality exist.

2 An anti-Vietnam war activist told me that she traced her vegetarianism to the day she stopped at a slaughterhouse to get blood to use for an anti-war protest, walked away with the blood in hand, sickened with the thought, ‘what’s the difference?’

As you know, I had to postpone this interview because of a medical emergency. And it was in midst of this crisis that I was reminded of what it means to be an animal. A close friend had to have her right leg amputated to the knee. After the surgery they had a problem adequately medicating her for the pain. Apparently some amputees feel no pain. For her, this was not the case. She returned to the room after being in the recovery room, crying ‘my leg, my leg.’ That was horrifying, but I didn't have time even to feel that horror because the nurses summoned me in to hold her hand so that she would not have to have her hands bound to the bed. My partner was holding one hand and I the other as five nurses worked to settle her in. She was trying to grab at the bandage around the stump, and so the necessity of not letting go was urgent. When the pain medication finally took hold and we sort of slumped into chairs by her bed, all I could think was ‘and animals will bite off their own legs to escape a leg-hold trap!’ (Trappers call this a ‘wring-off’.3) Seeing the pain she endured from the amputation, I could only imagine the pain that animals must endure in such a trap that they will self-amputate to escape it.

When I give an example such as this of trans-species commonalities, am I drawing an analogy, identifying grounds for empathy, acknowledging continuity?   Or all three and something more as well?

And do we have to have similarities established in order to stop harming animals?   Do we perpetuate a biological approach to other animals? I admire Barbara Noske’s proposal that we need an anthropology of other animals, not a zoology.4    

BOOKS go here:

GYNecology
Mary Daly
 We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us. One does not rape a sister. 
Review here:
http://www.saidit.org/archives/jun06/Remembrance.html
I admit that some of her writing made me uneasy, but so many of her fearless insights helped me, and countless other women, to see with “Other Eyes,” through the deceptions of patriarchy. Through her books we’ve learned about atrocities committed in a world in which females are systematically treated as “derivative beings.” At the same time, she pointed us toward possibilities for uncompromised female selfhood. She verbally wove for women a ground to walk on, a “womansland,” where there is yet none. She pounded out powerful Labryses to take on the “drones,” the “fixers,” the “plug-uglies” and the “snools” that get in our path, rendering them energetically impotent through mere descriptive accuracy. She created a feminist base camp that a woman could carry with her, in her mind, even years after reading her work.
Rape of the Wild
Collard and Contrucci
"One of the really significant books to come out of the women's movement." -- Mary Daly

User Review: It exposes sciences exploitation of the animal world, linked by the author with man's exploitation of women. It is an impassioned plea for a feminist ecological revolution... It is also a perceptive and timely analysis of man's use and misuse of his environment...what is happening in laboratories, forest, deserts, and other natural habitats (as those habitats diminish and disapper ever more rabidly) It is very clear what will happen if science continues on its present course.        


Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
Susan Griffin
User Review - Kami - Goodreads

Two words: read this. Never before have I read a book so intense yet direct, emotional yet historical. Susan Griffin weaves the stories of the oppression of women and the transhumanistic rise of technology in prose that cannot be matched. No review can do this book justice. Read this. Read full review

The Politics of Meat
Carol Adams
- And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree,  in which is the fruit of a tree, yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Soil Not Oil
Dr. Vandana Shiva
Industrial globalized agriculture (IGA)is heavily implicated
in climate change.   IGA contributes to the three major greenhouse gases:

carbon dioxide (CO2) from the use of fossil fuels,

nitrogen oxide (N2O) from the use of chemical fertilizers,

and methane (CH4) from factory farming.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC),
atmospheric concentration of CO₂ has increased from a pre–industrial
concentration of about 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in 2005.

The global atmospheric concentration of CH₄ has increased from pre–industrial concentration

of 715 parts per billion to 1774 parts per billion in 2005.

The global atmospheric concentration of N₂O, largely due to use of chemical fertilizers
in agriculture, increased from about 270 parts per billion to 319 parts per billion in 2005.

Industrial agriculture is also more vulnerable to climate change which is intensifying droughts

and floods. Monocultures lead to more frequent crop failure when rainfall does not come in time,

or is too much or too little.

Chemically fertilized soils have no capacity to withstand a drought. And cyclones and

hurricanes make a food system dependent on long distance transport highly vulnerable
to disruption.

Genetic engineering is embedded in an industrial model of agriculture based on fossil fuels.
It is falsely being offered as a magic bullet for dealing with climate change......................more at the end of this post:
http://blog.greenconsciousness.org/2011/07/deep-green.html