Women’s Space

The power of your presence is requested at a memorial. All are welcome.

Re-membering Mary Daly
A celebration of her life and work will take place on Saturday, May 1, 2010 at 2 P.M. at:

The Auditorium of Washburn Hall
Episcopal Divinity School
99 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA

It will help in our organizing if you visit www.marydaly.org by April 4, 2010 and let us know your plans to attend.

Linda Barufaldi, Emily Culpepper, Mary E. Hunt,
Nancy Kelly, Nancy O’Mealey, Jennifer Rycenga

Directions: http://www.eds.edu/sec.asp?cat=16&page=139
Parking: http://www.eds.edu/sec.asp?cat=198&page=188

Warriors and Heroines

This is the Time

International Women’s Day, Iran, 1979, Part 1

International Women’s Day, Iran, 1979, Part 2

Women and Water

Women and Land, and Food

Immigrant Mothers and the Children Left Behind

Million Women Rise 2010

The Women, The Women, the Amazing Women

For Women and in Sisterhood,

Heart

The story of what happened to the Irish is the story of Native Americans is the story of indigenous and aboriginal people throughout the world is the story of women is the story of all colonized people.

OK, I want to talk about Ireland
Specifically I want to talk about the “famine”
About the fact that there never really was one
There was no “famine”
See Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes
All of the other food
Meat fish vegetables
Were shipped out of the country under armed guard
To England while the Irish people starved
And then on the middle of all this
They gave us money not to teach our children Irish
And so we lost our history
And this is what I think is still hurting me
See we’re like a child that’s been battered
Has to drive itself out of it’s head because it’s frightened
Still feels all the painful feelings
But they lose contact with the memory
And this leads to massive self-destruction
alcoholism, drug adiction
All desperate attempts at running
And in it’s worst form
Becomes actual killing
And if there ever is gonna be healing
There has to be remembering
And then grieving
So that there then can be forgiving
There has to be knowledge and understanding
All the lonely people
where do they all come from
An American army regulation Says you mustn’t kill more than 10% of a nation
‘Cos to do so causes permanent “psychological damage”
It’s not permanent but they didn’t know that
Anyway during the supposed “famine”
We lost a lot more than 10% of our nation
Through deaths on land or on ships of emigration
But what finally broke us was not starvation
but it’s use in the controlling of our education
Schools go on about “Black 47″
On and on about “The terrible famine”
But what they don’t say is in truth
There really never was one
(Excuse me)
All the lonely people
(I’m sorry, excuse me)
Where do they all come from
(that I can tell you in one word)
All the lonely people
where do they all belong
So let’s take a look shall we
The highest statistics of child abuse in the EEC
And we say we’re a Christian country
But we’ve lost contact with our history
See we used to worship God as a mother
We’re sufferin from post traumatic stress disorder
Look at all our old men in the pubs
Look at all our young people on drugs
We used to worship God as a mother
Now look at what we’re doing to each other
We’ve even made killers of ourselves
The most child-like trusting people in the Universe
And this is what’s wrong with us
Our history books the parent figures lied to us
I see the Irish
As a race like a child
That got itself basned in the face
And if there ever is gonna be healing
There has to be remembering
And then grieving
So that there then can be forgiving
There has to be knowledge and understanding
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from

Family and friends alike had been stunned by my decision to keep the farm after the divorce.  How could such a practical, reasonable person lose touch with reality?  they worried.  Even I had trouble explaining the decision…

But two years had gone by and still I stayed.  ”The place is killing you,” my brother would say almost every time he saw me.

I had taken two jobs to keep up payments.  I’d sold the goats because I couldn’t take care of them and work full-time too.  I’d kept the chickens and geese, but I had not planted any new trees or had a garden since the separation.  I did make a list of things that I wanted to do with the place and hung it in the kitchen.  The list was four feet long.  And untouched.  My sister told me once that after any visit, the conversation in the car the first few miles from the farm was always about that list.  How did she stand it?  Why did she abuse herself this way?  When would she come to her senses and sell the place?  Keeping the farm was too tough, too expensive for one person, and a woman at that.  This was obvious to them:  why not to me?

Well, actually, it was obvious to me.  I stayed at first, I told myself, just to rest from the stormy year preceding … But two years of this I knew was inertia, not rest.  I had become so busy trying to survive that I’d not even hiked the hills.  What was the point of living in such a place if I had no way to enjoy it?

So then I began telling myself that I kept at it because I’d hoped the problem was temporary, that I would figure out a way to support myself and the farm too. But was this a fantasy?  Was a future hope worth years of stress?  Why did I want a farm in the first place?  Friends would ask that question and I had no good answer.  Why did I stay?  I had a friend in town I was avoiding because every time I talked to him he tried to tell me my stubborn attempt to keep living in the country was destroying me.  I avoided him because I was afraid I might start to agree with him.  And I did want to stay, didn’t I? — Patricia Tichenor Westfall in Real Farm– Encounters with Perception

Rebecca Mott requested that I post her recent post below to my blog, and it is my great privilege and honor to do so.  Rebecca, these are incredible, invaluable, unforgettable writings.  I have seen thousands of essays in my life, not just in my personal reading, but as an editor.  I have never seen any writings like yours.  I want the entire world to read them.  Respect and Love, Heart

A Whore’s Rage

by Rebecca Mott

Whores are never listen to – unless they say they are happy.

Whores are not allowed to speak of pain. To speak of being made nothing. To speak of hatred of the sex trade.

Whores are not allowed to have rage – they must be quiet, perform at other’s will or command.

Well, whores have a rage that is not from one individual – they rage from centuries of sexually billions of whores in every culture.

Whores rage as they read histories of prostitution always written from the sex trade’s point of view.

A history that without any evidence from whores said they were always happy, always empowered – but always there is the other, the prostituted woman/girls. She is always enslaved, always treated with extreme sadism, always getting fucked until her soul is dead.

Whores are not allowed to speak of pain. To speak of being made nothing. To speak of hatred of the sex trade.

Whores are not allowed to have rage – they must be quiet, perform at others’ will or command.

The whore rages as there is no middle ground – always both the whore and prostituted woman/girl are never given the right and dignity to be a human. Only a fantasy, a cause, a means to an end.

History has no interest in the thoughts, dreams and backgrounds of the whore or the prostitute.

To see her and all her sisters as humans would mean thinking, maybe even the happiest whore has no freedom in the sex trade.

Whether she was an elite whore in ancient Athens, whether she was a courtesan in Versailles, whether she is a high-class whore to the Hollywood elite – or even some stupid whore- dream of sci-fi TV.

All whores are not allow to have a past, or to to dream of a future – and her present is made dead to her.

Read so many great male novels – and the whore is often there. Teaching the hero how to be a man, comforting him when no-one else understand him, being the bad to show how good the good is, an excuse to write porn and say it is literature, the character that can be murdered and the reader won’t give a damn.

The only time that counts to be a whore is the time johns, pimps, managers and all the sex trade are controlling your thoughts, what happens to your body – all else has no relevance.

A whore may as well be a machine.

A whore has place in culture, her only place is to formed into whatever image or concept that will protrays the sex trade as harmless fun.

Many whores see the arts and feel sickened.

The whore hears music, the many song and trends are built on her misery.

Listen to jazz and the blues, and so much romance of brothels in that culture. I personally hate “House of the Rising Sun”, get well piss off with the legends of Louis Armstrong being a child in a whore-house, sick that jazz fans see whores as some fun decoration to the music.

Read so many great male novels – and the whore is often there. Teaching the hero how to be a man, comforting him when no-one else understand him, being the bad to show how good the good is, an excuse to write porn and say it is literature, the character that can be murdered and the reader won’t give a damn.

In art galleries she stares down, she is is named model who the artist can fuck and throw away. In the paintings she is stripped of emotions, she just a husk for the artist to show his power and greatness.

The whore knows she is on TV. Usually the body being cut up in CSI, the background to show the characters are in a dodgy part of the city. She is often the whore with the heart of gold, the damaged whore, the whore who murdered some johns, the whore who jolly and make erotic a costume drama.

She is always a minor character, just there for spice, or to give the main character’s hidden depths. The whore can never has a 3-D, it would shatter all cultures for the whore to be human. Continue Reading »

2010, Year of the Natives in America, video via Mitzi Belliveau on Facebook. How might things be different had we all grown up seeing images like this all of the time, all around us, instead of the images we’ve all seen, over and over again?

Annie Lennox and All Green, both of whose music I have loved for decades. The clips are from the movie “Scrooged.” H/t to my brother Bob on Facebook. <3

Heart

Heart

Photo of spiral dance from from Starhawk’s blog

I do think women could make politics irrelevant by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen, just so far from peoples’ ideas of state structures and viable social structures that it seems to them like total anarchy, when what it really is is very subtle forms of interrelation which do not follow some hierarchical pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal.  The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, and I think it’s women who are going to have to break the spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.

–Germaine Greer introducing Sinead O’Connor’s Fire on Babylon on the CD The Universal Mother.