Dorothy Pitman Hughes, pioneering feminist who co-founded Ms. Magazine, dies at 84

From NBC News:

Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneering Black feminist, child welfare advocate and activist who co-founded Ms. Magazine with Gloria Steinem, formed a powerful speaking partnership with her and appeared with her in one of the most iconic photos of the feminist movement, has died. She was 84.

Hughes died Dec. 1 in Tampa, Florida, at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, said Maurice Sconiers of the Sconiers Funeral Home in Columbus, Georgia. The home said it did not know the cause of death.

Hughes was not as well known as Steinem, but the two forged an important partnership at a time when feminism was viewed as a very white, middle-class movement. Steinem credited Hughes with helping her become comfortable speaking in public.

In one of the most famous photos of the movement, taken in October 1971, the two raised their right arms in the Black Power salute.

Hughes, a pioneering voice in child care, organized the first shelter for battered women in New York City and co-founded the New York City Agency for Child Development.

She met Steinem in 1968, according to a biography on the Ms. Magazine website, when Steinem, then a journalist, was writing a story for New York Magazine about Pitman Hughes’ child care center. From 1969 to 1973, they spoke across the country at college campuses, community centers and other venues on gender and race issues.

Hughes was born Dorothy Jean Ridley on Oct. 2, 1938, in Lumpkin, Georgia, her family wrote in an obituary posted by the funeral home.

Dr Helen Pankhurst: 'The suffragettes were violent freedom fighters."

Comment in the Telegraph by Dr Helen Pankhurst:

As a new exhibition about women's suffrage opens, Dr Helen Pankhurst, the great granddaughter of suffragette leader Emmeline, explains why it made her chuckle and recalls the truly damaging tactics of her ancestors.

One hundred years ago, the National Portrait Gallery was issued surveillance photographs of suffragettes, including my great-grandmother Emmeline Pankhurst, by the Criminal Records Bureau. It was hoped that, as a result, staff would be able to recognise women planning to attack the gallery’s artworks in their campaign of political protest. Such concerns were justified: on March 10 1914 Mary Richardson slashed the Rokeby Venus, hanging just a few steps away in the National Gallery, with a small axe. She was also arrested for arson, vandalising the Home Office and bombing a railway station.

Now the internal warning memos and surveillance images of my great-grandmother and her fellow campaigners are themselves part of a fascinating exhibition at the NPG, entitled “Suffragettes: Deeds not Words”. I must confess that I chuckled on first seeing the display. What a wonderful irony it is that the Gallery is now positively promoting those whom it once looked out for in fear. Trouble makers have, over time, become worthy of tribute.

Read entire article here @ the Telegraph

Searchable Map For Ireland’s Mystifying Sheela-Na-Gigs

More than 100 ancient Irish sculptures of women brazenly baring their genitals have been plotted on an interactive map. The bizarre sculptures, found in medieval tower-houses, church sites and holy wells, have puzzled historians for decades.

Experts are still not quite sure what to make of the sheela-na-gig. The small, often stylized and exaggerated stone relief carvings of women exposing their genitals typically date to the medieval era, and can be found all across Ireland and the British Isles in churches, castles and other notable structures. And while the sheela-na-gig has recently become a recognizable symbol inextricably linked to Irish culture, its significance remains debated among experts.

Heritage Council head of policy and research Beatrice Kelly said in a release for the project: “Sheela-na-Gigs are very evocative symbols of the feminine in old Irish culture and their prominent positions in medieval churches and castles attests to the importance of the female in Irish society. 

Read more here @ the Observer and @ the Daily Mail and @ Irish Central

Access the map here @ Heritage Maps

Womens' Suffrage Marches

WHY YOU MUST MARCH

Because this is the most conspicuous and important demonstration that has ever been attempted by suffragists in this country.

Because this parade will be taken to indicate the importance of the suffrage movement by the press of the country and the thousands of spectators from all over the United States gathered in Washington for the Inauguration.

So said the broadsheets handed out and so they gathered. There were three notable marches recorded for posterity - the first in Washington, the next two in New York.

Suffrage Parade - 6th May 1912 - New York City

It was a bold tactic, adopted by suffragists and the more militant suffragettes shortly after the turn of the century. Although some women chose to quit the movement rather than march in public, others embraced the parade as a way of publicizing their cause and combating the idea that women should be relegated to the home. (Source: World Digital Library)

Suffrage Parade - 3rd March 1913 - Washington.

In 1913, the first major national efforts were undertaken, beginning with a massive parade in Washington, D.C., on March 3 -- one day before the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson. Organized by Alice Paul for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the parade, calling for a constitutional amendment, featured 8,000 marchers, including nine bands, four mounted brigades, 20 floats, and an allegorical performance near the Treasury Building. (Source: The Atlantic - March 1st, 2013)

Women from countries that had enfranchised women held the place of honor in the first section of the procession. Then came the “Pioneers” who had been struggling for so many decades to secure women's right to vote. The next sections celebrated working women, who were grouped by occupation and wearing appropriate garb—nurses in uniform, women farmers, homemakers, women doctors and pharmacists, actresses, librarians, college women in academic gowns. Harriet Hifton of the Library of Congress Copyright Division led the librarians' contingent. The state delegations followed, and finally the separate section for male supporters of women's suffrage. All had come from around the country to “march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded.” (Source: Library of Congress - Official Program: Woman Suffrage Procession).

Read more here:
- The Atlantic
- Library of Congress
- Women of History - Suffrage March of 1913
- Smithsonian - Original Women's March

- Activist New York


Suffrage March - 23rd October 2015 - New York

On October 23, 1915, over 25,000 women marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City to advocate for women’s suffrage. At that point, the fight had been ongoing for more than 65 years, with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 first passing a resolution in favor of women’s suffrage. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t find success for another five years. New York’s 1915 suffrage parade was the largest held in the city until that time. (Source: Behind the Scenes: New York History)

Read more here at:
- The Bowery Boys: New York City History
- The Feminist Majority Foundation


Suffrage March - October 1917 - New York

This NY Times article covers the Fifth Avenue Parade in 1917. Many leaders from various groups, including NAWSA, were a part of this event that used the fighting for democracy in World War I to help promote their cause for fighting for democracy at home. This parade, filled with patriotism for our troops, also used President Wilson’s suffrage endorsement to support their cause. While women, like Carrie Chapman Catt, walked in the parade, NWP members were in the crowd passing out their newspapers and encouraging the protest of the war time President. (Source: New York Times)

Read more here at:
- Women's Suffrage in the United States (wikipedia)
- New York Times: 1917 - When Women Won Right ToVote
- Yates County History Centre
- Night of Terror
- Timeline of Women's Suffrage in United States (wikipedia)
- National Archives - Women's Suffrage Party Petition
- New York Rediscovered
- Digital Documents - Women's Suffrage

Ancient Egypt was one of the most feminist societies ever

Ancient Egypt was one of the most feminist societies ever, here's how

Although the West tends to nod to ancient Greece when remembering its cultural heritage, there is at least one important cultural movement whose roots are firmly buried in ancient Egypt: Feminism.

Ancient Greek women – with the exception of the Spartans – had virtually no rights. In fact, they weren't even regarded as citizens, were excluded from many public spaces and were basically seen as the property of their fathers and husbands.

Even though Spartan women were an exception to this practice, their rights and freedoms still fell far short of those afforded by ancient Egyptian women. You see, in Ancient Egypt, men and women were regarded essentially as equals.

"From our earliest preserved records in the Old Kingdom on, the formal legal status of Egyptian women - whether unmarried, married, divorced or widowed - was nearly identical with that of Egyptian men," a professor of Egyptology Janet Johnson told Al Jazeera.

So, thousands of years before Women's Suffrage was a thing in Europe and America, Egypt had things more or less figured out. 

Meet the feminist pioneers who helped shape Central Australia

Meet the feminist pioneers who helped shape Central Australia - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Life in Central Australia is a tough, isolated existence, and for women in decades past confined by the gender roles of their era, the challenges were enormous.

Bringing up children, trying to cook nutritious meals, and running households thousands of kilometres from family and friends meant these women had to make the most of what was available to them.

The concept of feminism, as we know it today, was not one society recognised, but these tenacious and resilient pioneers certainly left their mark.

ABC Local Radio spoke to family members and others who have been touched by the legacy of these remarkable women.

Continue reading here =>>>

Tikva Levi & Mizrahi

From Haaretz:

Tikva Levi was only 52 when she died on August 1, but during her short lifetime she wielded a great influence on Israeli society. She was an active presence on a variety of important battlefronts: feminist, Mizrahi, educational, political.

"The ability to combine these battles, the awareness of the fact that they are not separate from one another, was one of the things I admired and loved about her," says Prof. Ella Shohat, a preeminent cultural studies scholar and Levi's fellow traveler and soulmate.

Levi is now recognized as one of the prime movers who managed to connect issues concerning Mizrahim, feminists and Palestinians. Indeed, as far as Shohat is concerned, "Tikva is a metonymy for these battles and a metaphor for a different future space. I admired her ability to connect ideas and to connect to people, and to try to convey these ideas even to those from whom there was presumably no such expectation - those who had been rejected, whether by the left or by feminism.

Further links:- Interview with Rachel Smith

Obit: Joan Uebelhoer

From the News Sentinel:

When no one else spoke against inequality, Joan Uebelhoer did. Uebelhoer, longtime activist for the rights of women and the poor, died Saturday at 83 years old. Formerly a petite woman who did not appear as one to stir up debate, Uebelhoer often marched herself into battle for the rights of others.

Some of Uebelhoer’s platforms included advocating a woman’s right to have an abortion, legalizing birth-control pills, and fighting for equal pay among men and women.

Iran: Women Banned From University Programs

From Ynet News:

Universities in Iran have announced that dozens of academic programs in the coming year will be "single-gender," which effectively means they will be exclusively offered to men, the Telegraph reported Monday.

Iran's most celebrated human rights campaigner, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, has urged the UN to probe the reform, claiming that the real agenda was to reduce the proportion of female students to below 50% – from around 65% at present – thereby weakening the Iranian feminist movement in its campaign against discriminatory Islamic laws.

Feminist Sikh - Guru Nanak

From the Vancouver Sun:

“Guru Nanak is to me a feminist,” says Sikh scholar Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh.

That’s why the Punjabi professor can’t accept how her religion has become so patriarchal; filled with “machismo” and a “warrior” mentality that often contradicts its original teachings.

The founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak (1469–1539), was a truly “egalitarian,” “inclusive” man and a champion of women’s rights, Kaur Singh said this week before giving a lecture at the Asian Centre at the University of B.C.

The author of a dozen books, including the just-released Of Sacred and Secular Desire: An Anthology of Lyrical Writings from the Punjab (I.B. Tauris), laments how virtually all sacred duties within the 23-million-member religion continue to be performed by men.

Mormon Feminism Is Back!

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

A new kind of feminism seems to be sweeping across Mormonism.

LDS women are connecting on the Internet, exploring women’s issues, debating theology and sharing their personal joys and agonies in the arms of their male-run church. Unconcerned about possible disapproval — and even hearing hints of encouragement in sermons — the faith’s “silent majority” is reaching out to tell its stories in new ways and new places to new audiences.

A prominent British newspaper, the Guardian, published an essay this week by LDS blogger Tresa Edmunds, who unabashedly explained her dual nature as a Mormon and a feminist. Also this week, Newsweek featured Neylan McBaine, founder of a website that profiles lively and unique LDS women, examining the changing views of Mormon motherhood.

This summer, Exponent II, the decades-old quarterly for Mormon women that stopped printing in 2006, was reborn.

From Feminists To Terrorists

From So Feminine:

In northern Iraq, which is predominantly Kurdish, polygamy and the oppression of women are widely condoned. Kurdish women in Turkey and the militant rebels of the PKK, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, are now fighting to change this.

For women in the region, having the support of the PKK is one of their few possibilities of gaining rights and recognition. In some instances, the party is actually the last refuge for a woman in danger of falling victim to an honour killing.

For decades, PKK rebels have been attacking Turkish targets from bases in northern Iraq. The PKK originated as a communist murder and terror movement, subsequently pursued the aim of a separate state. Many countries and international organizations – including the EU, the US, the UN and NATO – list the PKK as a terrorist organisation. Now, though, the PKK is trying to promote an image of itself as being "democratic" and "federalist."

In spite of these changes in direction, one aspect has remained constant: the PKK’s ability to attract women. The organisation has always fought for the abolition of patriarchal thinking (except where it concerns the patriarchalism of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan); their fighters have to attend courses with titles such as "kill the man in you". There are many female fighters in the PKK.

Less visible, and far more effective, though, is this: in south-eastern Turkey, spokesmen from the PKK are often a woman's last hope when she’s trying to escape an honour killing or a forced marriage. Some local community functionaries who are known to have connections to "the mountains" will go to the woman’s family and attempt to find a solution. In those situations they save lives. Elsewhere, terror attacks carried out by the PKK end lives.

This friendliness towards women is the best the PKK has to offer in a society which in many ways still operates along medieval lines. The effectiveness of this strategy is rarely fully appreciated.

In the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where honour killings, forced or desperate suicides by women and forced marriages are much more widespread than they are in the Kurdish region of Turkey, feminism is a powerful weapon – and recruiting tool – that the PKK can and has made use of. It is entrenched in the mountains, while elsewhere in the country, traditional tribal society rules.

Under pressure from the Turkish army, which is being fed with secret service information about PKK targets by the US, and dependent on the acquiescence of the Kurdish leadership of northern Iraq, the PKK has its back to the wall. A feminist offensive in northern Iraq might help it strengthen its base among the local population.

Jean-Claude Rochefort - Masculinist Activist

From the Toronto Sun:

Jean-Claude Rochefort, the man who defended the actions of killer Marc Lepine on his blog failed in his attempt to be released from jail Wednesday.

The court noted in its judgment that Rochefort's blog "invited men to kill women solely because they are women."

Rochefort, 61, defended his blog, which sung the praises of Lepine, the shooter behind the 1989 massacre that killed 14 women at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique. Lepine committed the shooting after multiple failed attempts to get into the school himself. He blamed feminism for ruining his life and disagreed with women being allowed to work in jobs that had been traditionally reserved for men.

The Crown, meanwhile, tried unsuccessfully to bring charges of inciting hatred towards women against Rochefort.

Rochefort will stand trial on May 3 for other accusations of uttering death threats against women, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail.

Germaine Greer: Lacks Female Understanding

From the Australian:

GERMAINE Greer was wrong about women: wrong about their attitude to romance, about how they would wield power, and how they would organise things, if allowed to rule to world.

Most of all, however, she was wrong about their desire for what she called "fripperies" -- shoes, pretty clothes, and make-up -- which they indulge in now more than ever.

These are the conclusions of the writer Louis Nowra in an essay in the independent The Monthly magazine marking the 40th anniversary of the publication of Dr Greer's seminal feminist text, The Female Eunuch.

The book, published in Australia in May 1970, and in London in October 1970, was a key text of the women's liberation movement. It has never been out of print, and has been translated into 11 languages. Sales figures are difficult to find, but they are in the millions. Dr Greer was in Sydney for the Writers' Festival last May and all her shows were sold out.

Nowra, an essayist and playwright, argues that Dr Greer must, however, be disappointed in the world of contemporary women, for it does not resemble the model she envisioned. Women are, for the most part, married, and have children. They live in nuclear families, in the suburbs. Their orientation is capitalist.

Nowra's critique of Dr Greer neither starts nor ends with The Female Eunuch, however. He says Dr Greer is now a "befuddled and exhausted old woman" who reminds him of his demented grandmother. "There is no doubt that fame and celebrity have seduced Greer," he writes. "She will say and do anything to get noticed."

Mary Daly

From Boston.com:

Fiercely and playfully -- often at the same time -- Mary Daly used words to challenge the basic precepts of the Catholic Church and Boston College, where she was on the faculty for more than 30 years.

Dr. Daly emerged as a major voice in the burgeoning women's movement with her first book, "The Church and the Second Sex," published in 1968, and "Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation," which appeared five years later. That accomplishment was viewed, then and now, as all the more significant because she wrote and taught at a Jesuit college.

"She was a great trained philosopher, theologian, and poet, and she used all of those tools to demolish patriarchy -- or any idea that domination is natural -- in its most defended place, which is religion," said Gloria Steinem.

Dr. Daly, whose relationship with Boston College grew tempestuous as she insisted that only women could take her classes, died Sunday in Wachusett Manor nursing home in Gardner. She was 81 and her health had failed in the past few years, including recent paralysis due to a neurological condition.

Feminists in Resistance

From One World net:

Hours after Honduras' ousted president returned to the country and sought refuge in a foreign embassy, the military-backed regime launched a brutal attack against supporters of the former leader. "Early this morning, military forces attacked those of us outside the Brazilian embassy.

There are no words to describe the brutality of the attack," reported a member of the group Feminists in Resistance. "They chased us, threw bombs, beat us, and now are hunting down everyone who took refuge in the surrounding area." The women say there are 65 members of their group "under siege," hiding in houses as military squads search the neighborhood. Their reports were sent by email during a brief period when electricity had been turned on. "We can hear the military movements outside, the cars, helicopters, bombs, shots, clashing of metal, stomping of boots, sirens -- and in a cruel joke on all Honduran citizens they are playing the national anthem at full volume over and over."

The women say they have little water and no food, and tear gas hangs in the air. Some have reportedly been detained and taken to Chochi Sosa stadium on the far eastern edge of the city.

Gloria Steinem

Interview by Lori Sturdevant of the Star Tribune:

At 75, Gloria Steinem acknowledges her age, but yields little to it. The clarion voice of the 1970s women's movement demonstrated on Monday -- as the featured speaker at the annual Womenwinning fundraiser in Minneapolis -- that she has lost none of her passion nor her vision for a more gender-equal society. In a conversation with the Star Tribune's Lori Sturdevant, Steinem spoke about new wrinkles (pun intended) in the modern-day American feminist movement.

Duchess Harris

Brief article in Your Voices:

Duchess Harris, PhD is a tenured associate professor of American Studies at Macalester College. She is the author of "Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton" and co-editor with Bruce D. Baum of "Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity." She is a 2009 recipient of the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship.

Duchess' Blog: Sister Scholar

Marilyn French

From the New York Times:

Marilyn French, a writer and feminist activist whose debut novel, “The Women’s Room,” propelled her into a leading role in the modern feminist movement, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 79 and lived in Manhattan.

Her most significant work since her illness was the four-volume “From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women,” published by Feminist Press and built around the premise that prevailing histories had denied women their past, present and future.

From the Guardian, Hilary Mantle gives a review of "From Eve to Dawn" in her article The War Against Women:

From earliest history to the twenty-first century, French has taken us on a terrible journey. She quotes a Buddhist text: "Her face resembles that of a saint; her heart is like that of a demon. . . . A woman has no home in the three worlds." French explains, "she does not exist in the past, present, or future." Her battle is just to become visible; to be accorded full humanity, not to be regarded as some transient natural phenomenon, or an animal created for male use.

21stC Feminism

From the Independent:
"A new generation of feminists is fighting for the movement to have a clear and formidable image at a time when the economy is in danger of making it an irrelevance.

Leading feminist thinkers gathered in London yesterday to debate the next wave of the movement. While the first wave of feminism saw suffragettes demanding votes for women, and the second brought the women's liberation movement, the radical writings of Germaine Greer and the Equal Pay Act, the objectives of the third wave have yet to be decided.

Fears that hard-won women's rights may be eroded in the recession are reinvigorating the British feminist movement, with issues such as the pay gap, "workaholic cultures" and childcare taking centre stage.

But some feminists believe that the 2009 movement lacks coherence. "It is not clear what the feminist agenda now is," said the feminist writer Alison Wolf of King's College London. "Those women who supported Hillary Clinton just because she was a woman are from an older generation. The younger ones did not know what they were on about." "