The War on Women Continues

 Every year when calendars mark International Women’s Day on March 8th many people take no notice. But a lot of women around the world do, as we mourn the travesties that are still being perpetrated against females of all ages in most places on the globe.  It’s worrying to note that we must begin this year witnessing (or ignoring) a staggering increase in political, personal, and cultural misogyny ranging from sexual abuse, anti-woman legislation, and violence.

Take for example a CNN report about the Taliban which has just decreed that men can beat their wives  “so long as they don’t break bones or leave lasting wounds.” A husband could be jailed for 15 days if there is physical evidence of assault. 15 days!  That is if a woman seeks justice even though her testimony will be worth half that of her husband’s.

Not all oppression of women is so dramatic. An article in The Guardian cited the street behavior of men who push women aside on the pavement, or ogle and cat-call them. “Loosening the grip men hold over all public space would go a long way toward helping women feel less oppressed,” Lucy Pasha-Robinson wrote in the article, adding that “men who are so angry they are lasing out at random women for their need to feel power.”

In between those two examples there are myriad ways to keep women in their place, which in many cultures, is seen by feminists as the angel in the house or the madwoman in the attic.

Consider the ominous restraints on women’s autonomy articulated in the infamous Project 2025, which are now becoming the mantra of arch conservative legislators here in our so-called developed nation.  Bans on abortion. Legislators going so far as to advocate executing women who have them. Imprisonment for miscarriage. Attempts to keep women from voting, and more, as Open Democracy points out citing legislative proposals and policy agendas that are on the table since Congress became dominated by conservative, rightwing zealots .

Then there’s the narrowing of how sex is defined, the reduced funding for reproductive health services which could save women’s lives, the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and the possibility of reinstating the Comstock Act to remove access to abortion medication. Add to that the lack of childcare, aimed at physically and psychologically limiting women’s autonomy, economic security, and self-determination. It’s all about keeping us barefoot, pregnant, and afraid. All of that suppression constitutes acts of violence.

 So does the attempt to establish fetal personhood. The far right also wants to go further by defining “sex” as a biological assignment at birth which of course is meant to discriminate against transgender women. Other proposed bills are designed to eliminate funding for family planning, and limit contraception based on income. Then there’s the SAVE Act that would require people to show proof of citizenship to vote, creating barriers for married women who took their husband’s surname.

All these repressive legislative ideas and proposals are clearly forms of controlling women’s lives, including their access to education, healthcare, economic security, and a public presence in most sectors of society. The draconian idea of incentivizing women monetarily to bear children while restrictions on childcare and parental leave speaks loudly to an insidious agenda articulated by men who fear women’s intelligence, energy, competence, and agency.

When you connect the dots, it soon becomes clear that “the rising global far right is violent, racist and misogynistic – and depends on exploiting women,” as Sian Norris put it in Open Democracy.”

If you prefer a visual that represents political violence against women and girls, you have only to see ICE shooting Renee Good in the face or dragging women by their hair out of their cars and putting them in choke holds. You could watch the Epstein/Maxwell survivors who are brave enough to share their stories.  Or you could shudder to see pictures of babies and children being torn from their mothers at schools and workplaces while adolescent girls, called Blue Butterflies, are sequestered in separate spaces likely to be sexually abused or trafficked.   If that doesn’t work, look at nearly 200 beautiful faces of Iranian little girls slaughtered in their school, or peek at Burka-clad women with male escorts in Afghanistan streets while their female children are forbidden to attend school.

It’s important to understand that violence against women and girls in any form violates their basic human rights. These violations are grounded in centuries of patriarchal societies who have viewed women as a threat to male power. That threat goes beyond individual men.  It occurs at numerous structural levels and in male-dominated institutions in both private and public sectors.

Eliminating the injustices and deep harm these longstanding practices and behaviors cause women is a monumental task. We must recognize it, understand it, care about it, and condemn it for more than one day or month a year, because as writer Rebecca Solnit has said, “We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

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Elayne writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

Women Who Change the World: La Pasionaria Past and Present

Throughout history women have left their mark on the world in numerous, and often unknown, unrecognized, or forgotten ways. What better time to honor some of them than Women’s History Month, especially the “pasionarias.”

La Pasionaria, a term that has come to encompass powerful, activist women whether by word or deed, derives from a Communist leader in the Spanish Civil War, named Dolores Ibarruru. According to the Encyclopedia  Britannica, she became known as La Pasionaria - “The Passionflower” in Spanish – because of her brilliant oratory and her war cry, “No pasaran!” (They shall not pass!) Her oratory led to her imprisonment several times, but she never stopped talking on street corners and other venues. When Franco became Spain’s dictator, she fled to the Soviet Union where she represented her party at Kremlin congresses until 1960, returning to Spain in 1977, where she served in the Spanish parliament until her death in 1989.

  Not all pasionarias are as forceful in their rhetoric as Ibarruru, but she is matched by one of my favorites -- Sojourner Truth, who knocked the socks off the white men who heard her fiery speech, “Ain’t I A Woman?” at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Ohio  “…..That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere,” the petite, illiterate truthteller before them said. “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? ….Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? … From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him…” From her slave roots to the White House at the invitation of Abraham Lincoln, the itinerant preacher never stopped advocating for abolition, civil and women’s rights.

Some women exercise their power by speaking publicly, but others use words in other irreversible ways. One of them was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the pioneering work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. In her groundbreaking treatise she argued for women’s right to education, surpassing other pleas on the same topic by calling for national education systems. While her ideas languished in her own time, by the middle of the 19th century her impact was being felt by women’s rights leaders, including Emmaline Pankhurst in England and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues in America, who included numerous rights for women in their demands.

Women who entered the realm of politics were often pasionarias. One of them was Jeannette Rankin, the first woman member of the U.S. Congress, a Republican representing Montana from 1917 to 1919, and again from 1941 to 1943, thus serving during both WWI and WWII. A social worker by training, she campaigned for women’s suffrage for years before gaining the right for women to vote in Montana. An outspoken pacifist, she voted against war with Germany in 1917 and again in 1941, ending her political career, but she continued advocating for social reform and peace. “If I had my life to live over again,” she once said, “I’d do it all again, but this time I would be nastier.”

Many lesser-known women have had major political, literary, and rhetorical impact. I was privileged to know some of them when I worked in Washington, DC on behalf of women. There was Mildred Marcy, who wrote the sentence that became known as the Percy Amendment, so that women became equal beneficiaries in U.S. foreign assistance programs.  Virginia Allen saw to it that every state had a Commission for Women. Others quietly effected change behind the scenes.

Among that generation of outstanding women who helped create a constituency for the life-changing women’s movement was Esther Peterson with whom I had a special friendship. She worked on behalf of women from the days of FDR to the Carter and Clinton administrations. The first woman lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, she was assigned to lobby a young legislator named John F. Kennedy, Jr. They became fast friends. When JFK became president, he asked Esther what she would like to do in government, That’s how she became head of the Women’s Bureau at the Labor Department where she was recognized for her quiet, highly effective leadership.

Many women throughout history from all countries, cultures, and walks of life have been, and are, worthy of being called pasionarias. From the Roman Hortensia who was renowned as a skilled orator, and Aspasia of Greece, who held influential salons attended by Socrates, to today’s Emma Gonzales, whose oratory after the Parkland school shootings stunned a nation, to Greta Thunberg, who as a teenager shocked United Nations representatives with her condemnation of climate change cliches, and Malala Yousafzai, who, like Mary Wollstonecraft, became an influential leader advocating for girls’ education, the tradition of women’s wise and powerful words, whether written or spoken, goes on.

As Dolores Ibarruru and all the others who have gone before us might have said, “Brava, Pasionarias, Gracias, and Abrazos! We commend you, and we are ever grateful.”

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Vermont. www.elayne-clift.com

Finding Their Voices: Black Women Writers and Literary Truthtellers

Finding Their Voices: Black Women Writers and Truthtellers

Last month was Black History Month and this one is Women’s History Month. What better time to honor women of color, who with other female writers, reveal the courage it takes to tell the truth about women’s lives through the written word?

The late poet Muriel Rukeyser once asked this now iconic question: “What would happen if just one woman told the truth about her life?”  Her answer was: “The world would split open.” Historically silenced and admonished to be “good girls and fine ladies,” women who took up the pen in past centuries and decades were ignored, trivialized and punished, but many of them bravely broke with convention. Among them were black women writers whose courage, conviction and talent made a difference in a world where words can become verbal monuments.

Nineteenth century poet Phyllis Wheatley was born a slave in West Africa and seized at age seven. Luckily her Boston mistress taught her to read and write. At age 13 she published a poem that made her famous.  By the age of 18 she’d written a poetry collection, published in London. In one poem she wrote, “Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”

Zora Neale Hurston, a Harlem newcomer in 1925, “knew how to make an entrance.” Rising above poverty, she became the most successful, significant black woman writer of the early 20th century. Writing prolifically in various genre, she is remembered for her 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sadly, she died in poverty in 1960, age 69, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Florida. Alice Walker placed a marker there, and then resurrected Hurston’s work.

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet, Alice Walker, is best known for her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, which explored female African-American experience through the life of its central character, Celie. Walker also wrote about the taboo topic of female genital cutting in her novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, a tribute to her courage as part of the black feminist movement.

Toni Morrison, who died in 2019, saw books as “a form of political action.”  Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, proved the point when it told the story of a young black girl obsessed with white standards of beauty. Her later novel, Beloved, based on a true slave narrative, won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing, through a woman’s life, the evils slavery wrought. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Fiction for “visionary force and poetic import, giving life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou shared the story of being raped by her mother’s boyfriend at age seven. Reading black authors Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois aided her recovery and she became Hollywood’s first female black director. In the 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild meeting James Baldwin and others. She became a civil rights movement leader, using her pen to write about relevant issues. Later she was the first black woman to have a screenplay produced. She is remembered for writing and reading the inaugural poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” for President Clinton.

Audre Lorde was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” whose work dealt with the struggles of ordinary people. She championed women breaking their silence, never better than in The Cancer Journals when post-mastectomy, a nurse admonished her for not wearing a prosthesis to help other women’s morale. Who, demanded Lorde, identifying as a warrior against cancer, told Moshe Dayan to remove his eye patch to make people feel better?  She took on racism, sexism, classism and homophobia in her writing and her contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory addressed broad political issues. The iconic activist was the recipient of many awards and honors, and was New York’s poet laureate in 1991-2. She died of breast cancer shortly afterwards.

Gwendolyn Brooks, poet, author and teacher, dealt with personal celebrations and struggling people. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 becoming the first African American to receive the Pulitzer. She was also the first black woman to be a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and she served as poet laureate of Illinois. Her work was often political, especially in regard to civil rights. Like Phyllis Wheatley, she was 13 when she published her first poem and was publishing regularly by age 18. She died in 2000.

Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat and Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie deserve attention, among other non-American black women writers. Danticat writes about women’s relationships as well as issues of power, injustice, and poverty, and Adichie is said to be her generation’s Chinua Achebe, another noted Nigerian novelist. Purple Hibiscus, Adichie’s first novel won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book in 2005.

And now comes Amanda Gorman, who read her amazing inaugural poem at President Biden’s inauguration. Her first two books of poetry are already bestsellers before being in print.

That’s just a short list of black women writers. Imagine what else there is to discover in their work and that of other female truthtellers. And imagine what else is to come!

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Elayne Clift writes (and teaches) from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com