To be a woman, with a vote.

From the comments at Shakesville:

Her voice was careful and quiet (she was clearly holding herself together so hard for the cameras, the weight of it all very heavy on her) and even with the tears, it still felt fitting, because this–this wondering and thinking and finally deciding on your own vote–this is what the suffragettes dreamed for all of us, eighty-eight years ago.

To be a woman, with a vote.

Continue ReadingTo be a woman, with a vote.

Happy Leap Day 2008

Leap Year 2008
Leap Year 2008

We can take some comfort in the fact that we’ve made SOME progress on the sexism front in the last 100 years. Not that much, since the only female Presidential candidate we’ve ever had has men telling her to iron their shirts, but at least women can ask ask men out on dates more than once every four freaking years.

Postcard Leap Year Maidens Are 1908
Postcard Leap Year Maidens Are 1908

Isn’t it surprising to see stuff like this and realize how bad things used to be?

Leap Year Poscard Sexism
Leap Year Poscard Sexism
Leap Year 2008
Leap Year 2008

A few year back, I blogged about finding Anti-Women’s Suffrage buttons on eBay, and how they were being bought by museums and universities for huge amounts of money. But seeing the postcards and texts were huge eye-openers, not because people’s attitudes have changed all that much, just that they’ve gotten more subtle/less open about their messages.

Continue ReadingHappy Leap Day 2008

Tactics and Techniques of the National Woman’s Party Suffrage Campaign

suffragetteSomething that caught my eye as I was wandering through the Library of Congress photographs of the women’s movement

Tactics and Techniques of the National Woman’s Party Suffrage Campaign
Summary

Founded in 1913 as the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), the National Woman’s Party (NWP) was instrumental in raising public awareness of the women’s suffrage campaign. Using a variety of tactics, the party successfully pressured President Woodrow Wilson, members of Congress, and state legislators to support passage of a 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women nationwide the right to vote. In so doing, the NWP established a legacy defending the exercise of free speech, free assembly, and the right to dissent.

The NWP effectively commanded the attention of politicians and the public through its aggressive agitation, relentless lobbying, clever publicity stunts, and creative examples of civil disobedience and nonviolent confrontation. Its tactics were versatile and imaginative, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources-including the British suffrage campaign, the American labor movement, and the temperance, antislavery, and early women’s rights campaigns in the United States.

Traditional lobbying and petitioning were a mainstay of NWP members, but these activities were supplemented by other more public actions-including parades, pageants, street speaking, and demonstrations. The party eventually realized that it needed to escalate its pressure and adopt even more aggressive tactics. Most important among these was picketing the White House over many months, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of many suffragists.

The willingness of NWP pickets to be arrested, their campaign for recognition as political prisoners rather than as criminals, and their acts of civil disobedience in jail shocked the nation and brought attention and support to their cause. Through constant agitation, the NWP effectively compelled President Wilson to support a federal woman suffrage amendment. Similar pressure on national and state legislators led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

Alice Paul Picketing
Alice Paul Picketing

Alice Paul
Alice Paul
Continue ReadingTactics and Techniques of the National Woman’s Party Suffrage Campaign

The Handmaid’s Tale springs to life?

According to the Washington Post:

Forever Pregnant
Guidelines: Treat Nearly All Women as Pre-Pregnant
New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves — and to be treated by the health care system — as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.
Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.

Combine that with this information from the New York Times:

Wider Use of DNA Lists Is Urged in Fighting Crime
The F.B.I.’s DNA database can now be searched only for exact matches to DNA found at crime scenes. But with slight modifications, it could be searched for close relatives of whoever left the DNA.
“Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual to the family,” the scientists, Frederick R. Bieber and David Lazer, say in an article in today’s issue of Science.

And then there’s this interesting information about the company providing data-mining to the Federal Goverment:

The leader in the field of what is called “data mining,” is a company, formed in 1997, called, “ChoicePoint, Inc,” which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans — and I know they’ve expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds — but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was “the number one” provider of DNA info to the FBI.

All I can say is, you’re on some dangerous ground, Federal Government.

Continue ReadingThe Handmaid’s Tale springs to life?

“Marriage Contract” of Iowa Man

Via Smoking Gun: Check out what this guy Travis Frey from Iowa wrote up for his wife as a “marriage contract.” He’s under arrest currently for kidnapping his wife and holding her hostage in their home. I have to admit, I’ve never read anything like this. And I hope never to again.

FEBRUARY 17–This country, as you know, is filled with the deranged. And then there’s Travis Frey, a 33-year-old Iowa man who is facing charges that he tried to kidnap his own wife (not to mention a separate child pornography rap).

Frey, prosecutors contend, apparently is a rather demanding guy. In fact, he actually drew up a bizarre four-page marriage document–a ‘Contract of Wifely Expectations’–that sought to establish guidelines for his spouse in terms of hygiene, clothing, and sexual activities.

In return for fulfilling certain requirements, Frey (pictured left) offered ‘Good Behavior Days,’ or GBDs. Each GBD, Frey wrote, could be redeemed by his wife to ‘get out of doing the things’ he requested daily. A copy of the proposed contract, which Frey’s wife never signed and later provided to cops, can be found at left.

While we normally point out the highlights of most documents, there are so many in this demented, and very graphic, contract, we really can’t do it justice. So set aside ten minutes–and prepare to be repulsed.

Continue Reading“Marriage Contract” of Iowa Man

Gap Clothes and Saipan Slave Labor, courtesy of Tom Delay

The island of Saipan is part of a U.S. Commonwealth, located in the Pacific, near Guam and the Philipines. Because of this, clothes made there can carry the “Made in the U.S.A” label, although that’s just a technicality. These clothes can also come into the U.S. tariff-free and quota-free, to highly profitable U.S. markets. What Saipan doesn’t have, though, is coverage by U.S. labor laws, or U.S. immigration laws (you can contact the Family Law Firm in Fresno to resolve any of your immigration or visa issues), which makes this something like heaven to the garment industry, who have set up massive sweatshops and reaped huge profits. For immigration related enquries, people can check https://colavecchiolaw.com/about-us/ this link and learn more! Clothes made there include Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap (which includes Old Navy and Banana Republic), Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne.

Here’s what’s going on in the sweatshops; women are recruited into them from China and the Philipines. The women pay their life savings to get into them, thinking that they are going to the United States. Instead they’re taken to Saipan, where the make less than half the U.S. minimum wage. As minimum wage for any employment is mandatory sometimes employees may sue employer for giving less wages in such cases employer has rights to consult attorneys to defend against wage garnishment .Many of them have to “pay off” their entrance fee but can never earn enough to pay their “debt” so they are basically indentured servants, or slave labor. There is evidence that some of the women are forced to participate in sex rings. The ABC undercover reports on this identified one 14 year-old girl who was forced to dance nude on stage and perform sex acts. Women who get pregnant are forced to have abortions. (Culture of life, indeed.)

Here’s where Tom DeLay comes in. When he was House Republican Whip, he prevented legislation to reform the labor laws of Saipan, although that legislation has already passed the Senate. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff paid for DeLay to go on a golfing trip to the U.S. commonwealth (that’s illegal, BTW) where DeLay said in an address to the sweatshop owners: “You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system.”

Now I’m suddenly really uncomfortable in all my Gap and Old Navy clothes. These are the kind of sleepless nights that the “Made in the U.S.A.” label is supposed to prevent.

Continue ReadingGap Clothes and Saipan Slave Labor, courtesy of Tom Delay

The Magdalene Sisters Documentary

I wrote a few months back about the Magdelene Laundries – In Mid-20th Century Ireland (until the last one closed in 1996), the Catholic Church ran commercial laundries, run by nuns, that were essentially prisons for wayward girls, who were deposited there by their families when they became pregnant, got in trouble or otherwise upset society.

The story of these prisons is now being told in a British documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate by Steven Humphries, and was then made into an award-winning (but denounced by the Catholic Church, big surprise) movie, The Magdalene Sisters by Peter Mullens, which is currently playing in the United States. I happened to run across an interesting article about the movie in Slate, and it occurred to me that, had I been born a few years earlier and in the wrong country, I would have been one of those girls.

Continue ReadingThe Magdalene Sisters Documentary

The Magdalene Laundries and the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church has a lot more to answer for than abuse of altar boys. For years the Catholic Church in Ireland enslaved young women in “Magdalene laundries” run by convents, where they were unpaid prisoners forced to work their entire lives for the Church. The last of these laundries closed in 1996.

Ireland’s Dirty Laundry
Wounds Still Fresh For Thousands of Women Enslaved by the Catholic Church
By Hilary Brown and Matt McGarry

C O R K, Ireland, Jan. 26
— A sudden spate of TV exposés, docudramas and a major motion picture have brought to light one of the most shocking episodes in the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland — the existence of the now-notorious “Magdalene laundries,” a sanctified form of slavery.

Operated by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order, the laundries were virtual slave labor camps for generations of young girls thought to be unfit to live in Irish society.

Girls who had become pregnant, even from rape, girls who were illegitimate, or orphaned, or just plain simple-minded, girls who were too pretty and therefore in “moral danger” all ran the risk of being locked up and put to work, without pay, in profit-making, convent laundries, to “wash away their sins.”

They were completely cut off from their families, and many lost touch with them forever.

Stripped of their identities, the girls were given numbers instead of names. They were forbidden to speak, except to pray. If they broke any rule or tried to escape, the nuns beat them over the head with heavy iron keys, put them into solitary confinement or shipped them off to a mental hospital.

Over a period of 150 years, an estimated 30,000 women were forced into this brutal penance, carried out in secret, behind high convent walls.

Towards the end of the 20th century, the laundries began to close, as the power of the Church in Ireland diminished and as social attitudes became less puritanical. Incredibly, the last Magdalene laundry to shut down was in 1996.

‘We Were the Living Dead’

Mary Norris, 69, was committed to a convent laundry in Cork for two years. An articulate, intelligent woman, she was transferred from an orphanage at age 15 because she was “disobedient.” Her number was 30.

On one occasion, she said, the nuns actually ordered the girls to pray for those held in Soviet prison camps, a bitter irony, as she considers the convent laundries “an Irish gulag.”

Though it was clearly very painful for her, she took us around the convent — now abandoned — where she had suffered so much.

“In the winter, it was freezing cold, and in the summer, it was like the desert, it was so hot with the steam,” she said. “We were the living dead. We weren’t treated as human beings, as individuals. We were just part of the workforce. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Guilt by Illegitimacy

Sadie Williams, 64, spent a total of four years in two different convent laundries. She was 14 when she was virtually kidnapped by two women who had determined that she was “in moral danger.” Williams liked to take a walk in the evenings, after working all day at a bed and breakfast in Dublin. She said the women considered her much too attractive to stay out of trouble.

She was only 14 when she ended up in a convent laundry outside town as “Number 100,” and locked into a cell each night. She says she almost never saw daylight.

“Oh, it was dreadful,” she said. “I cried and cried all the time, and kept asking why, why wasn’t I getting out. And I would write begging letters to my mother. When I finally got out, she was already dead and buried three years. But I was never told, even though I was writing, still writing letters to her.”

She has since learned that the nuns stopped all her mail. Her mother wasn’t married, so Sadie was considered to be guilty of the sin of illegitimacy.

No Apology

There have been no direct reparations from the Irish Catholic Church to the tens of thousands of women it used as slave labor. Nor has there been a formal apology. It’s not even known how many victims of the Magdalene laundries are still alive: they are not organized, and many don’t want to talk about this terrible part of their past.

Very few Churchmen in Ireland will comment on the scandal. An exception is Willie Walsh, the Bishop of Killaloe. Over a cup of tea in his residence, he said that it is “a source of pain and shame.”

“These girls were rejected by society, and the Church in some way thought it was giving refuge to these girls,” he says. “I suppose … the Magdalene laundries was in some instances a form of slavery.”

The Rev. Patrick O’Donovan is more outspoken.

“It’s an appalling scandal,” he says. “You could compare them to concentration camps. … The nuns thought they were doing good. … They didn’t realize the damage they were doing.”

Mary Norris has campaigned to have a simple memorial built in the convent where she was held. Thirty names are engraved on a simple headstone; dating from 1876 to 1973. Some women spent their entire lives in these institutions. Having been cut off from their families, they had nowhere to go.

Norris says she no longer hates the nuns who oppressed her. “If I hated them,” she says, “they’d still be winning. They’d still have control over me.”

Continue ReadingThe Magdalene Laundries and the Catholic Church

Anti-Women’s Suffrage Buttons

Under the heading of “HOLY CRAP!” :Check out the price on this eBay auction. Now I know that women’s right to vote memorabilia does go for a lot of money, in general, but I’ve never seen anything like this.

UPDATE: since the item is no longer there, more info: the object was a simple lapel button from the early 1900s, and it was an anti-women’s suffrage button. The auction price was over $3,000. Part of this was because some universities were attempting to purchase it for their historical archives.

It’s sort of shocking to read some of the anti-women’s suffrage materials; try to check them out on eBay or on the internet. It’s tough to remember there was a time with this sort of thing was said out loud by people in public.

But when you think about it in the context of today’s issues, specifically gay rights, you start to recognize the same sort of bigotry. I tried to collect some of these items and managed to get a few postcards, but the cost of them is so high on eBay that they were tough to collect.

Continue ReadingAnti-Women’s Suffrage Buttons

Honor Killings

Every day, I find more stuff out about the world I live in, that pisses me off.

National Geographic — Thousands of Women Killed for Family “Honor”
Hundreds, if not thousands, of women are murdered by their families each year in the name of family “honor.” It’s difficult to get precise numbers on the phenomenon of honor killing; the murders frequently go unreported, the perpetrators unpunished, and the concept of family honor justifies the act in the eyes of some societies.

Most honor killings occur in countries where the concept of women as a vessel of the family reputation predominates, said Marsha Freemen, director of International Women’s Rights Action Watch at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Reports submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights show that honor killings have occurred in Bangladesh, Great Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Uganda. In countries not submitting reports to the UN, the practice was condoned under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan, and has been reported in Iraq and Iran.
But while honor killings have elicited considerable attention and outrage, human rights activists argue that they should be regarded as part of a much larger problem of violence against women.

Continue ReadingHonor Killings