On this penultimate day of Women’s History Month, I celebrate the telling of our stories. This is, to me, the essence of the importance of Women’s History Month. For millennia, our stories, the stories of our sisters, were silenced, belittled, ignored, erased. We must never allow this to happen again. We will not allow this to happen again. We will NOT be silent.
“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
When I was in high school in the early 1970s, I read (and re-read) Sisterhood is Powerful by Robin Morgan.
The phrase has many ancestors, but is often attributed to Shulamith Firestone.
(In NY in the late 1960s) Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone founded the action-oriented radical-feminist group Redstockings. Soon after, Willis reported, from a fly-on-the-wall perspective for The New Yorker, a group of some thirty women wreaked havoc on an abortion-law hearing of the all-male New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Public Health, demanding to testify as the “real experts” on illegal abortion. . . . . (T)he Redstockings’ winning tactic (was) forcing their stories into the public record—of which their disruption that day was just one early example . . . . The advance guard of the second wave showed that by casting off stigma and shame to speak out they could open the floodgates of women’s rage to change the culture and the law.
The Power of Andrea Dworkins Rage (NY Review of Books)
"Silence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth." ~ Robin Morgan
After I joined the ranks of traveling organizers — which just means being an entrepreneur of social change — I discovered the magic of people telling their own stories to groups of strangers. It’s as if attentive people create a magnetic force field for stories the tellers themselves didn’t know they had within them. Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.
~ Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
We will tell our stories; we will NOT be silent about sexual assault and harassment.
(Written for actor Mhairi Morrison by Sadie Jemmett for the the survivors of sexual assault or harassment. 'To celebrate our bravery, our tenacity, our beauty, courage and resilience.)
Airlines have a history of sexual assault and a tendency to not handle the subject well. New allegations against JetBlue pilots, as well as the company’s response, appears to follow that unfortunate trend.
According to a lawsuit filed against the airline, two JetBlue pilots drugged and raped fellow JetBlue crew members while on a layover in Puerto Rico. The allegations state that three female crew members met Flight Officers Eric Johnson and Dan Watson on the beach and shared some beers.
Read more here.
Seven months have passed since that same Columbus vice officer, Andrew Mitchell, shot and killed a young mother named Donna Dalton during a prostitution arrest. Already under criminal investigation by his own department, Mitchell faced even more scrutiny after Dalton’s death. This month, Mitchell was indicted on federal charges of abusing his role as a law enforcement officer, obstructing justice, witness tampering, and making false statements to investigators. According to the indictment, he had kidnapped multiple women and coerced them into sex in exchange for their release from his custody.
Read more here.
We will NOT be silent about the violence being perpetrated against our indigenous sisters.
Carolyn DeFord, a Puyallup tribal member, grew up with her mom, Leona Kinsey, in a trailer park in La Grande, Oregon.
Twenty years ago, Leona disappeared on her way to her friend’s house, and was never seen again.
She is part of an epidemic of Native American women who have gone missing and never been found.
(snip)
Leona’s case has never been solved. Since her mother’s disappearance, Carolyn has worked to help the families of other missing and murdered indigenous women.
Listen to Carolyn DeFord’s story here.
We will NOT be silent about domestic violence — or the efforts of the NRA to arm the perpetrators.
"The National Rifle Association is preparing to punish lawmakers for voting to protect women from their stalkers and domestic abusers. The gun lobby announced this week that it will dock its grades for politicians who vote to renew the Violence Against Women Act. The legislation, first passed in 1994, is up for reauthorization this session — augmented by a provision that could give law enforcement officials the power to confiscate guns from men who hurt or menace women.
“NRA spokesperson Jennifer Baker told the National Journal that this 'red-flag' provision — intended to protect women against gun violence from men who are exhibiting violent or dangerous behaviors — is an unacceptable encroachment on individual gun ownership rights.”
Read more here.
We will NOT be silent about insidious efforts to take away our Constitutional right to control our own bodies.
Now, with the Trump Supreme Court widely anticipated to overturn Roe in the coming years, a number of states are taking a fresh look at their restrictions on later abortions, and some have moved to codify Roe’s terms in their own legal codes. These are efforts to protect what has been the legal status quo on abortion in this country for almost a half century.
These efforts are a response to a very real threat.
Red states have been passing a flurry of new legislation to sharply curtail access to abortion or ban it outright. In recent weeks, anti-choice lawmakers in Georgia offered a “fetal heartbeat law” that would ban abortions early in the first trimester, when many women don’t yet know that they’re pregnant, and another bill that would make abortion a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison if Roe is struck down. Governor Brian Kemp supports both measures. And last week, lawmakers in Montana considered a referendum that would amend the state Constitution to ban all abortions.
We will NOT be silent about this vile Administration’s efforts to restrict the rights of women in other countries.
The Trump administration will withhold funding from foreign nongovernmental organizations that give money to foreign groups that perform abortions, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday.
In an expansion of the administration’s anti-abortion policies, Mr. Pompeo also said the government was “fully enforcing” a law that prohibits groups from using United States aid to lobby on abortion issues.
“We will enforce a strict prohibition on backdoor funding schemes and end-runs around our policy,” Mr. Pompeo said. “American taxpayer dollars will not be used to underwrite abortions.”
We will NOT be silent about LIES.
The Guardian reviews a new movie released “just in time for Easter.”
In a dim-witted Christian drama part-financed by the disgraced founder of a pillow manufacturer, a woman discovers abortion is evil.
(snip)
The film concludes in celebration. The local Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, closed. (True story!) There’s nothing in here about the hardship restricting women from their own constitutionally protected reproductive health has on the community. Only shaming women for “killing babies for convenience”.
We will NOT be silent about the evil of gender inequality, anywhere in the world.
Fundamentally linked to human development, gender justice requires ending inequality and redressing existing disparities between women and men, according to a high-level United Nations forum on the situation in Arab States, chaired by Jordan’s Ambassador to the UN, Sima Bahous.
We will NOT be silent about our accomplishments, or those of our courageous sisters.
We Will Not Be Silent.
As always, this was a group effort. Thank you to Besame, Angmar, SandraLLAP and Tara the Antisocial Social Worker.
