Edith Margaret #Garrud, born Edith Margaret Williams, was one of the first female martial arts teachers in Europe. She is known for training a unit of bodyguards in #jūjutsu techniques for the Women's Social and Political Union, so that they could respond to physical attacks on them by some anti-feminist men.
Today in Labor History March 3, 1913: Thousands of women marched in the first Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. Its purpose was to "march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded." Up to 10,000 participated. Speakers included Anna Howard Shaw and Helen Keller.
In July, when Clare Lombardelli joins the BoE #interestrates setting group, the MPC, it will for the first time become majority #female... there is a long tradition in critical political economy, arguing that women can & would do #economics differently, so now we may have a real world experiment to see if that is really the case.... after all they can now outvote the men on interest rates.
I want to live in a world where Karen Ingala Smith does not need to compile the Femicide Census of women killed by men....
But until then, we should ensure the Femicide Census is well known & the murder of women not treated as some rare & unfortunate problem.... as the Counting Dead Women project emphasises this is a major social problem that as a country we seem to care little about.
Something about the hype around #Damsel just rubs me the wrong way. The whole "this is no fairy tale" spin is annoying. Have you ever read more than two fairy tales in your life? I can list you hundreds of traditional stories where women kill monsters and save themselves. Seriously.
Quit shitting on folklore without knowing it.
Also, I recently heard the term "add a sword feminism" and it is very accurate.
"I grew up watching feminist figures (there were very, very few of them on Japanese TV) being mocked, ridiculed, and called ugly hags. No wonder Japanese women of my generation are scared of being perceived as feminists." - Yuki Nivez
I had read it briefly before, but sitting with it reminds me of a kind of fiery, unapologetic, ready-to-throw-down feminism that has been drained from so much discourse. There are justifiable critiques of some of the conclusions or points, but it's that 20% heightened language that breaks through the suffocating blanket of "civility" that leads us to blunt our own arguments and be talked past.
Anyway, I'm going back to preparing a lesson for it because this is feeding a part of my soul.
In the 1970s a growing current within the women’s liberation movement began to embrace a conscious anarchist orientation. These activists rejected the liberal turn of the mainstream wing of the movement as well as the state socialism of Marxist feminists.
Small groups of women “rediscovered” Emma Goldman and began to theorize a synthesis of feminist and anarchist politics. The feminist historian Julia Tanenbaum explains that “most anarcha-feminists were initially radicalized by the political and cultural milieu of the antiwar movement, but it was their experiences in the women’s liberation movement combined with the influence of Emma Goldman that led them to develop anarcha-feminism as a strategy.”
Although self-identified anarchists formed only a relatively small portion of the women’s liberation movement, their political impact stretched far beyond their small groups and publications. The feminist movement generally practiced what Helen Ellenbogen called an “intuitive anarchism”: they organized in decentralized groups, rejected hierarchy, and embraced horizontal notions of sisterhood. Anarcha-feminists built on the classic anarchist principle that the state is an institution of hierarchy and domination.
A crucial innovation of anarcha-feminists within the 1960s–1970s women’s liberation movement was their analysis of the patriarchal nature of state power. As Arlene Wilson of the Chicago Anarcho-Feminists put it in a manifesto published in the Siren newsletter in 1971, “The intelligence of womankind has at last been brought to bear on such oppressive male inventions as the church and the legal family; it must now be brought to reevaluate the ultimate stronghold of male domination, the State” which she describes as “rule by gangs of armed males.”
Indeed, the manifesto declares that “we believe that a Woman’s Revolutionary Movement must not mimic, but destroy, all vestiges of the male-dominated power structure, the State itself.” [...] The state was inherently patriarchal because it replicated the paternal rule of the father over society. As Love and Rage later put it in its 1997 “Draft Political Statement,” patriarchy “operates as a foundation of state power, used to justify a paternalistic relationship between the rulers and the ruled.”
The state reproduces at a higher scale the father’s rule over the family, which is “disguised as protection and support” but is “often enforced through violence and sexual terrorism.” Thus the state could only be the enemy of all women. Simply electing women to the top of the government could never change the basic patriarchal structure of its hierarchical power.
looking for something to watch this weekend? "Trans People & Biological Sex: What the Science Says" started as a talk I've given at colleges & conferences, now updated & free for YouTube! addresses virtually all trans-skeptical talking points, as well as intra-community debates about "born this way" & "true trans": https://youtu.be/ZymYiwoRoC0 #trans#transgender#LGBTQ#LGBTQIA#science#biology#sex#feminism
"Subminimum Wage
Also included are individuals whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by a physical or mental disability, including those related to age or injury, for the work to be performed
Today in Labor History February 12, 1983: One hundred women protested in Lahore, Pakistan against military dictator Zia-ul-Haq's proposed Law of Evidence (would make the testimony of women worth half that of men’s testimony in courts of law). The women were tear-gassed, baton-charged and thrown into lock-up. However, they were successful in repealing the law.