We are Goddesses but not the kind you put on a pedestal and worship. We are Goddesses who do the bloody baby birthing, harvest food from crop fields, lead nonviolent revolutions, and nurture the sick. We direct corporations and households; create art; make change in the world and at the grocery store check-out. We are Goddesses who are told we are too loud, too pushy, too frowny. We suffer assaults, belittlements, and sneers, sometimes from other women.
We are Warriors but not the kind who carry deadly weapons or strategize to establish domination. We constantly rise again and again to claim our rights, our spaces, our authorities. We spring back stronger when we raise each other up, amplify voices, and acknowledge that the most dominant among us must support our sisters whose lives must focus on survival, on making ends meet. Women Warriors protect those who are marginalized or vulnerable. We even protect those women who have bound themselves to the patriarchy. Warriors protect women no matter what forms their bodies and lives take.
Clearly, there is no simple “one-shot” cure for a lifetime of conditioning to dependence. Women can raise each other’s consciousness of it, and encourage each other to take the risks necessary to become free.” Mary Daly
warrior goddesses march
Next weekend we march, first in the Women’s March 2018 on Saturday Jan 20th. There are about 350 marches announced in the U.S. so far. The Women’s Day of Action main event on Sunday Jan 21st in Las Vegas will kick off the year long campaign #PowerToThePolls.
On January 21, 2018, Women’s March will gather in Las Vegas, Nevada for Women's March: Power to the Polls, an event that will launch a national voter registration tour one year after the historic Women’s March on Washington. This next stage of the movement will channel the energy and activism of the Women's March into tangible strategies and concrete wins in 2018.
The national voter registration tour will target swing states to register new voters, engage impacted communities, harness our collective energy to advocate for policies and candidates that reflect our values, and collaborate with our partners to elect more women and progressives candidates to office.
The coordinated campaign will build upon Women’s March’s ongoing work uplifting the voices and campaigns of the nation’s most marginalized communities to create transformative social and political change.
Find your Women’s March
- A Facebook group lists all the sister marches associated with the Women’s March.
- To join the Daily Kos groups meeting to march together, check the daily information in Connect, Unite, Act (publishes at 7:30am).
- The Anniversary Event page allows you to enter your zip code to find the Women’s March event nearest you.
- Ms Magazine created Ms.Marches Facebook group to offer information about marches, rallies, and protests near you to help women meet-up with other feminists.
“If you hear the dogs, keep going.
If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.
If there's shouting after you, keep going.
Don't ever stop. Keep going.
If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”
― Harriet Tubman
equality in the workplace
When the BBC was forced to publicly name the highest paid employees, Carrie Gracie, BBC China Editor, learned she was paid less than 50 percent of her male colleagues and quit in protest. A vast majority of the highest paid employees are men.
“We are by no means the only workplace with hidden pay discrimination and the pressure for transparency is only growing. I hope rival news organisations will not use this letter as a stick with which to beat the BBC, but instead reflect on their own equality issues,” she wrote.
“It is a century since women first won the right to vote in Britain. Let us honour that brave generation by making this the year we win equal pay.”
Director Ridley Scott decided to reshoot sections of his film “All the Money in the World” to remove Kevin Spacey (accused of sexual harassment and assaults) and all the money went to the male actor Mark Wahlberg. The woman actor, Michelle Williams, received less than 1 percent of his pay. “Wahlberg was paid $1.5 million to reshoot his scenes, while Williams received a per diem of $80 per day, totaling less than $1,000.” Wahlberg and Williams are represented by the same talent agency.
"I said I'd be wherever they needed me, whenever they needed me," [Michelle Williams] told USA Today at the time. "And they could have my salary, they could have my holiday, whatever they wanted. Because I appreciated so much that they were making this massive effort."
Loudly protesting this inequity yielded results! Today, Wahlberg announced he and his talent agency, William Morris Endeavor are donating $2 million to a fund dedicated to fighting pay inequity and harassment of women in Hollywood. The donation will be made in the name of Michelle Williams.
“The current conversation is a reminder that those of us in a position of influence have a responsibility to challenge inequities, including the gender wage gap,”
“We were the people who were not in the papers.
We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print.
It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
Margaret Atwood — The Handmaiden’s Tale
why women hesitate to report rapes
New York City police solved a 1994 rape case that the newspaper called a hoax. Even after the police reported they’d collected semen from the victim’s body and clothing, the male reporter Mike McAlary continued to call for the victim’s arrest saying she made it up.
This week the NY Police Chief told her the rapist had been caught, “...the woman wept with joy when she was told the case had finally been cracked.” She has asked the Daily News and NYPD to apologize for how she was treated. Her lawyer said, “The newspaper stories, which were relentless, day after day, were nearly as traumatizing as the rape itself,”
A woman was walking through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park during the daytime in 1994 when she was attacked by a stranger, who choked her from behind, dragged her up a wooded slope and raped her.
The then 27-year-old Yale graduate had been out jogging and was heading home with groceries. She gave police a detailed description of her attacker but the NYPD initially cast some doubt on her account and shared its skepticism with the media.
The late New York Daily News columnist, Mike McAlary, wrote that he had heard from a police source that the woman invented her story because, as an activist, she thought it would bolster a speech she was planning to give at a rally protesting violence against lesbians.
the united states has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world
Serena Williams was nearly one of these statistics despite her high profile as an famous athlete. As happens to many women in medical settings, she had to fight to have her symptoms taken seriously. Black women are three times more likely than White women to die or have a serious illness due to pregnancy: at least 40 deaths per 100,000 live births (compared to 14 for White women).
...only hours after giving birth through a major surgery, Williams needed to convince the medical personnel that she was in need of care—and run them through what she needed. Though she luckily survived, Williams became one of the estimated 150,000 women in America to experience serious illness or near-death experiences around pregnancy every year. Because her history of blood clots made her aware of the symptoms, Williams was able to save her own life. Unfortunately, between 700 and 1,200 American women every year don’t live to describe the experience of giving birth.
Native American women say that childbirth has become dangerously medicalized and are reclaiming the right to birth on their own terms. “Woman is the first environment . . . With our bodies we nourish, sustain, and create connected relationships and interdependence. In this way the Earth is our mother, our ancestors said. In this way, we as women are earth.”
Aboriginal or indigenous midwifery is seeing a resurgence as conventional health-care policies in hospital and clinics perpetuate an environment in which most contemporary pregnant Native women are considered pathologically unhealthy. [...]
Birth has become dangerously medicalized for them. Cut off from traditional diets, support networks, and community midwives due to colonization and assimilation, many Native women have chronic health conditions that mean giving birth is a high-risk activity—and one that requires travel to well-equipped hospitals. [...]
Forcing Native women to birth in hospitals is another in a long line of colonial acts of violence, explained Kanahus Manuel, a member of the Neskonlith Indian Band of Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, Canada. “Birth is the ultimate act of decolonization and resistance,” she said.
shitty media men list maker outed
The woman who created the whisper list intended it to be private and used to help clue in other women to the predatory men in the media. Rumors spread that the list creator would be outed and Harper’s confirmed they were publishing a piece in March by Katie Roiphe. Sometimes the people who harass us are other women.
On January 10th, the creator outed herself in NY Mag’s The Cut: I Started the Media Men List — My name is Moira Donegan.
In October, I created a Google spreadsheet called “Shitty Media Men” that collected a range of rumors and allegations of sexual misconduct, much of it violent, by men in magazines and publishing. The anonymous, crowdsourced document was a first attempt at solving what has seemed like an intractable problem: how women can protect ourselves from sexual harassment and assault. [...]
In the beginning, I only wanted to create a place for women to share their stories of harassment and assault without being needlessly discredited or judged. The hope was to create an alternate avenue to report this kind of behavior and warn others without fear of retaliation. Too often, for someone looking to report an incident or to make habitual behavior stop, all the available options are bad ones.
The police are notoriously inept at handling sexual-assault cases. Human-resources departments, in offices that have them, are tasked not with protecting employees but with shielding the company from liability — meaning that in the frequent occasion that the offender is a member of management and the victim is not, HR’s priorities lie with the accused. When a reporting channel has enforcement power, like an HR department or the police, it also has an obligation to presume innocence.
In contrast, the value of the spreadsheet was that it had no enforcement mechanisms: Without legal authority or professional power, it offered an impartial, rather than adversarial, tool to those who used it. It was intended specifically not to inflict consequences, not to be a weapon — and yet, once it became public, many people immediately saw it as exactly that.
sex trafficking laws hurt sexually exploited girls
Ms Blog
29 states currently retain the right to arrest and prosecute a children for prostitution. Even though the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) mandates that all children who are sexually exploited for commercial purposes are human trafficking victims, the majority of states criminalize them.
State prosecutors and law enforcement often cite the need to be able to control “non-compliant” sexually exploited minors as justification for threats of arrest and prosecution, and criminal justice officials also argue that putting CSEC victims in detention “protects them” from traffickers and sex buyers. These policies ignore the likelihood that incarceration may re-traumatize sex-trafficked children, since up to 90 percent of sexually exploited minors have prior histories of child sexual abuse and neglect, and that those with histories of violence often have difficulties trusting others, especially authority figures such as police. These policies also fail to consider that sex-trafficked children may be under the psychological control of their traffickers, due to trauma bonding.
The 1 in 3 Speakout: Justice for Jane
On February 27th at 1pm EST, women will speak out about their abortions in support of the undocumented minor girls being denied abortions by the U.S. government.
Jane Doe is an undocumented minor being held in detention by immigration officials. Per Texas’ onerous laws, Jane plead to a judge for permission to seek abortion care; she had to raise her own money for her abortion. She did all this – she got the money, she saw the judge. But immigration officials wouldn’t let her leave detention for the abortion she needed. The Trump Administration fought for months in court to delay her abortion and force her to give birth, until finally, a judge ruled to allow the abortion to go forward.
Jane got her abortion. But the Trump administration wouldn’t stop, and hasn’t stopped, attacking young women like her. At the highest level, officials continue to deny undocumented minors in detention the abortion care they ask for, and make malicious threats, including threatening to tell abusive family members about these young women’s pregnancies.
support black women candidates
Oprah gave a great speech and Black women voters have been essential to Democratic candidates in recent elections. If these actions inspire you, then support Black women candidates.
There are Black women not named Oprah running for office across the country
"Black women are tired and angry. We are recognizing our collective power and seizing the moment."
20 week abortion ban vote is coming
McConnell said the Senate will vote on the ban this month and it could be near the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
This bill has already passed in the House of Representatives, and President Trump has promised to sign the ban into law when it lands on his desk. The threat for women—and reproductive freedom—is greater than ever.
The bill makes it a crime for a doctor to perform or attempt an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for a woman’s health. The bill would leave a woman—and her healthcare provider—with no safe and legal option.2
Feminist activism is not trivial and is not vengeful, it is essential
Mainstream media outlets are criticizing how women are speaking out about important issues. The Trivialization of Modern Day Feminism exposes these attacks.
The underlying message of these criticisms? So long as American women are better off—if only by a little bit—than their counterparts in repressive, third-world dictatorships or dystopic alternative realities, they ought to shut up and be grateful.
The US has the highest #MaternalMortality rate in the developed world, is ranked 49th globally in #GenderEquality, and 1 in 6 American women are victims of #Rape or attempted rape.
The fights of today's #Feminists are far from trivial. They're existential.
Remember we are Warrior Goddesses who don’t live in the blank white spaces at the edge of print.
We are writing our own stories.
We keep going.
THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN PROVIDES A WEEKLY SUMMARY OF NEWS ON WOMEN'S ISSUES AND INFORMATION ON CURRENT POLITICAL ACTIONS. WE WELCOME ALL WHO ARE INTERESTED TO JOIN, TO WRITE FOR US, AND TO PROVIDE RELEVANT LINKS AND STORIES.
THANKS TO SANDRALLAP, RAMARA, TARA, noweasels, mettle fatique and officebss FOR THEIR HELP GATHERING THIS WEEK’S NEWS AND TO ALL THE WOW GODDESSES FOR THEIR SUPPORT.
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