Women's History Month Quotes

Most people write me off when they see me. They do not know my story. They say I am just an African. They judge me before they get to know me. What they do not know is The pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins; The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people; The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community; The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance; The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it. Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning. So you think I am nothing? Don’t worry about what I am now, For what I will be, I am gradually becoming. I will raise my head high wherever I go Because of my African pride, And nobody will take that away from me.

History, too, has a penchant for giving birth to itself over and over again, and those whom it appoints agents of change and progress do not always accept their destinies willingly.

Throughout history, men have broken women’s hearts in a particular way. They love them or half-love them and then grow weary and spend weeks and months extricating themselves soundlessly, pulling their tails back into their doorways, drying themselves off, and never calling again. Meanwhile, women wait. The more in love they are and the fewer options they have, the longer they wait, hoping that he will return with a smashed phone, with a smashed face, and say, I’m sorry, I was buried alive and the only thing I thought of was you, and feared that you would think I’d forsaken you when the truth is only that I lost your number, it was stolen from me by the men who buried me alive, and I’ve spent three years looking in phone books and now I have found you. I didn’t disappear, everything I felt didn’t just leave. You were right to know that would be cruel, unconscionable, impossible. Marry me.

All the eggs a woman will every carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old foetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as en egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. Be perfectly okay with being who YOU are. Fully embrace yourself, flaws and all. Love yourself right where you are. Strive to do better, but don’t beat yourself up for every shortcoming that you may have. Be brave in your journey! Hold your head up high, and keep moving forward.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie. All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.

The Pill was introduced in the early 1960s and modern woman was born. Women were no longer going to be tied to the cycle of endless babies; they were going to be themselves. With the Pill came what we now call the sexual revolution. Women could, for the first time in history, be like men, and enjoy sex for its own sake. In the late 1950s we had eighty to a hundred deliveries a month on our books. In 1963 the number had dropped to four or five a month. Now that is some social change!

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. We all share the blood of the first mother. We are truly children of one blood.

The musician has the most brothers, and the dancer the most sisters.

I defend the authority of women and explore its meaning for them rather than assume they need to be more accommodating or sensitive.

As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.

our tragedy begins humid. in a humid classroom. with a humid text book. breaking into us. stealing us from ourselves. one poem. at a time. it begins with shakespeare. the hot wash. the cool acid. of dead white men and women. people. each one a storm. crashing. into our young houses. making us islands. easy isolations. until we are so beleaguered and swollen with a definition of poetry that is white skin and not us. that we tuck our scalding. our soreness. behind ourselves and learn poetry. as trauma. as violence. as erasure. another place we do not exist. another form of exile where we should praise. honor. our own starvation. the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley. and angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats. that give us slight rest. to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of my own bursting extraordinary self. and to have this be called education. to take my name out of my name. out of where my native poetry lives. in me. and replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot… (what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.) and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies. (years later. the conclusion: shakespeare is relative. white literature is relative. that we are force fed the meat of an animal that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition. is not relative. is inert.)

When female stories are muted, we are teaching our kids that their dignity is second class and the historical accounts of their lives [are] less relevant. This lowered value carries over when women face sexual objectification and systemic brutalization from inside and outside the community.

To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a "false negative" recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account.

I tried to lose myself in books. Our house is packed with them, and we keep adding more. Like my mother, I love mystery novels and can plow through one in a single sitting. Some of my recent favorites are by Louise Penny, Jacqueline Winspear, Donna Leon, and Charles Todd. I finished reading Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels and relished the story they tell about friendship among women. Our shelves are weighed down with volumes about history and politics, especially biographies of Presidents, but in those first few months, they held no interest for me whatsoever. I went back to things that have given me joy or solace in the past, such as Maya Angelou’s poetry: You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise. . . .

But the history of Hopkins Hospital certainly isn’t pristine when it comes to black patients. In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children—most of them from poor black families—to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher didn’t get consent. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit claiming the study violated the boys’ civil rights and breached confidentiality of doctor-patient relationships by releasing results to state and juvenile courts. The study was halted, then resumed a few months later using consent forms. And in the late nineties, two women sued Hopkins, claiming that its researchers had knowingly exposed their children to lead, and hadn’t promptly informed them when blood tests revealed that their children had elevated lead levels—even when one developed lead poisoning. The research was part of a study examining lead abatement methods, and all families involved were black. The researchers had treated several homes to varying degrees, then encouraged landlords to rent those homes to families with children so they could then monitor the children’s lead levels. Initially, the case was dismissed. On appeal, one judge compared the study to Southam’s HeLa injections, the Tuskegee study, and Nazi research, and the case eventually settled out of court. The Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation and concluded that the study’s consent forms “failed to provide an adequate description” of the different levels of lead abatement in the homes.

We know that Antony pined for Cleopatra months later, though she wound up with all the credit for the affair. As one of her sworn enemies asserted, she did not fall in love with Antony but “brought him to fall in love with her.” In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized; there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventurer and the adventuress. There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. Antony arrived in Tarsus fresh from an affair with the queen of Cappadocia. The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can at least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. So Cleopatra has Antony under her thumb, poised to obey her every wish, “not only because of his intimacy with her,” as Josephus has it, “but also because of being under the influence of drugs.” To claim as much is to acknowledge her power, also to insult her intelligence.

A few months later, in honor of Women’s History Month, ESPN released a special on Thomas. Of all the female athletes who could have been chosen, someone who was not even born a female was handpicked. These actions are regressive and misogynistic. No female swimmer was honored during this Women’s History Month special by ESPN. Only Thomas.

Men are instruments, not partners. Their presumed superiority over women throughout history has made them complacent and stopped them from adequately evolving, and so now they are no longer fit for long-term use. They serve a purpose and then they expire, and I need the excitement of new shiny things at least once a month, if not every two weeks.

Jack Byrne’s Fiction House became known for its powerful, invincible female heroes. At a time when many publishers had none, Fiction House employed more than twenty women artists.46 The popularity of comics soared. Gaines, who did not tend to hire women to do anything except secretarial work, began publishing All-American Comics in 1939. That same year, Superman became the first comic-book character to have an entire comic book all to himself; he could also be heard on the radio.47 The first episode of Batman appeared in Detective Comics #27, in May 1939. Three months later, Byrne Holloway Marston, staff artist for the Marston Chronicle, drew the first installment of “The Adventures of Bobby Doone.

Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own. But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state? The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

Over the past several months, Amelía’s Google history had become a reference of her despair: “can’t have children, reasons for infertility in women, reasons for infertility in men, discussing infertility with husband, price of surrogate mothers, signs of depression, adoption agencies, infertility support groups…” The endless searches only provided two categories of results: medical sites that took pride in listing every worst-case scenario, and blogs written by white women with phrases like “silent suffering” and “living with uncertainty,” mixing in Bible verses about God’s Grace, none of which filled the void or helped Aimee ignore the fact that Mother’s Day was a month away and she would have to watch her family celebrate the one thing she wanted most and might never have.

Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the month, and better it be when the moon is full, then ye shall assemble in some secret place and adore the spirit of Me who am Queen of all Witcheries . . . And as the sign that ye are truly free, Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men And women and ye shall dance, sing, feast, make music, and love, all in my praise. —The Charge of the Goddess

Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on her practice, mostly among women and children. She believed strongly in diet, exercise, hygiene, and mental health. She organized a Ladies Physiological Society in 1843 where she gave monthly talks. She remained single, defying convention here too.

A part of Jutta does not want to take the letter. Does not want to hear what this huge man has traveled a long way to say. Weeks go by when Jutta does not allow herself to think of the war, of Frau Elena, of the awful last months in Berlin. Now she can buy pork seven days a week. Now, if the house feels cold she twists a dial in the kitchen, and voilà. She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history. Sometimes she looks at the eyes of her older colleagues and wonders what they did when the electricity was out, when there were no candles, when the rain came through the ceiling. What they saw. Only rarely does she loosen the seals enough to allow herself to think of Werner. In many ways, her memories of her brother have become things to lock away. A math teacher at Helmholtz-Gymnasium in 1974 does not bring up a brother who attended the National Political Institute of Education at Schulpforta.

Feeblemindedness,” in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify—the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a “mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months”—but imbecile and moron were more porous categories. On paper, the terms referred to less severe forms of cognitive disability, but in practice, the words were revolving semantic doors that swung inward all too easily to admit a diverse group of men and women, some with no mental illness at all—prostitutes, orphans, depressives, vagrants, petty criminals, schizophrenics, dyslexics, feminists, rebellious adolescents—anyone, in short, whose behavior, desires, choices, or appearance fell outside the accepted norm. Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons or idiots.

Posters appealed for volunteers in Massachusetts: “Men of old Essex! Men of Newburyport! Rally around the bold, gallant and lionhearted Cushing. He will lead you to victory and to glory!” They promised pay of $7 to $10 a month, and spoke of a federal bounty of $24 and 160 acres of land. But one young man wrote anonymously to the Cambridge Chronicle: Neither have I the least idea of “joining” you, or in any way assisting the unjust war waging against Mexico. I have no wish to participate in such “glorious” butcheries of women and children as were displayed in the capture of Monterey, etc. Neither have I any desire to place myself under the dictation of a petty military tyrant, to every caprice of whose will I must yield implicit obedience. No sir-ee! As long as I can work, beg, or go to the poor house, I won’t go to Mexico, to be lodged on the damp ground, half starved, half roasted, bitten by mosquitoes and centipedes, stung by scorpions and tarantulas—marched, drilled, and flogged, and then stuck up to be shot at, for eight dollars a month and putrid rations. Well, I won’t. . . . Human butchery has had its day. . . . And the time is rapidly approaching when the professional soldier will be placed on the same level as a bandit, the Bedouin, and the Thug.

Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population—a traditional ‘Romanianist’ obsession—he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted, if at all, only in the presence of a Party representative. Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut. The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: as the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. Over the ensuing twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted in the death of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week—the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceauşescu was overthrown the death rate of new-born babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children. The

While George W. Bush was in office, the killing of women and babies in Gaza could be accepted even by the American administration as part of that holy war against Islam. The worst month in 2006 for the Gazans was September, when this new pattern in the Israeli policy became all too obvious. Almost daily, civilians were killed by the IDF: 2 September 2006 was one such day. Three citizens were killed and an entire family injured in Beit Hanoun. This was just the morning’s harvest; before the end of the day many more were killed. In September an average of eight Palestinians died every day in Israeli attacks on the Strip, many of them children. Hundreds were maimed, wounded and paralysed

The Council Wars era from 1983 to 1986 and the brief months from 1986 to 1987 when Mayor Washington gained control over the council were among the most dramatic periods in Chicago's history. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, and homosexuals gained real power at City Hall for the first time. Opposition to Reaganomics and support for the city as a nuclear weapons-free zone were led by the mayor and his department heads, not just opposition groups. The growth machine of the old Chicago regime, which favored urban growth focused on major public works projects and development in the downtown Loop area, was replaced by a balanced program of neighborhood, as well as downtown, economic development.33

In terms of understanding the patriarchal struggle for control of women's bodies, the issue of blood is a major preoccupation. For not only did women bleed every month, from girlhood for all over their adult lives; every stage of their journey as women, every passage from one state to the next (menarche, defloration, childbirth) was also marked by the flow of blood with its frighteningly ambivalent signal of both life and death. The greater the danger the stronger the taboo. All these "courses" of women's lives have triggered an intricate and often savage set of myths, beliefs and customs in which the containment of cultural fears overrode any personal concern for the female who was ostensibly the cause and center of it all.

Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges—Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of the Great Panic, when everyone else was running, literally, for the hills, three hundred students chose to make a stand. They turned the Women’s College at Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall. While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten thousand, over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified.

claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE LEMBA       One of the most outstanding cases of  Black diaspora Jewry is the case of the Lemba of southern Africa. The Lemba have long claimed that they are Jews or Israelites who migrated to Yemen and from there to Africa as traders. Amazingly, DNA evidence has backed the Lemba claim of Jewish ancestry.   Today, the Lemba can be found in southern Africa countries like Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Many of their customs are similar to Jews such as the wearing of  yarmulke-like skull cups and observing kosher laws such as the requirement not to eat pork. Interestingly they also avoid eating rabbits, scaleless fish, hares and carrion. In short, the Lemba follow the requirements in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Old Testament.     The Lemba claim that about 2500 years ago, their ancestors left Judea for Yemen. Only males are said to have sailed to Africa by boat. The migrants took local wives for themselves. They built a city in Yemen called Sena. From Sena they traveled to Africa where they dispersed. Some remained in East Africa and others traveled to southern Africa. Lemba women do not have 'Semitic' admixture, and this is in line with their oral history.     Professor Tudor Vernon Parfitt, a professor of Jewish Studies then at the University of London, spent several months among the Lemba. He later travelled to Yemen and to his

It does not require much wisdom to trace every war back to a similar cause. Let us take our own Spanish-American war, supposedly a great and patriotic event in the history of the United States. How our hearts burned with indignation against the atrocious Spaniards! True, our indignation did not flare up spontaneously. It was nurtured by months of newspaper agitation, and long after Butcher Weyler had killed off many noble Cubans and outraged many Cuban women. Still, in justice to the American Nation be it said, it did grow indignant and was willing to fight, and that it fought bravely. But when the smoke was over, the dead buried, and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent—that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree—it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the consideration of the price of sugar; or, to be more explicit, that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of American capitalists, which were threatened by the Spanish government. That this is not an exaggeration, but is based on absolute facts and figures, is best proven by the attitude of the American government to Cuban labor. When Cuba was firmly in the clutches of the United States, the very soldiers sent to liberate Cuba were ordered to shoot Cuban workingmen during the great cigarmakers' strike, which took place shortly after the war.

In the abolitionist movement I see particularly young men who have a very rich feminist perspective, and so how does one guarantee that that will happen? It will not happen without work. Both men and women—and trans persons—have to do that work, but I don’t think it’s a question of women inviting men to struggle. I think it’s about a certain kind of consciousness that has to be encouraged so that progressive men are aware that they have a certain responsibility to bring in more men. Men can often talk to men in a different way. It’s important for those who we might want to bring into the struggle to look at models. What does it mean to model feminism as a man? I tour the campuses regularly, and I was speaking at the University of Southern Illinois during a Black History Month celebration and I came into contact with this group of young men who are members of a group they call “Alternative Masculinities” and I was totally impressed by them. They work with the women’s center. They have been trained in how to do rape crisis calls. They were really seriously engaging in all of that kind of activism that you assume that only women do. And then I remembered that many years ago in the 1970s there were a couple of men’s formations like Men against Rape, Black Men against Rape, Against Domestic Violence, and I remember thinking then that it’s just a matter of time before this gets taken up by men all over. But it never really happened. So I was reminded by these young men in “Alternative Masculinities” that after all of these decades they should today represent a far more popular trend. But this is the kind of thing that needs to be happening.

Sitting in a bar for hours on end wouldn’t help matters, but Tristan Archer figured he might as well try it out. It may take him far longer to get drunk than it would if he were human, yet he figured he’d give it a go. After the hellish few months he’d had, he would try anything at this point. He ran a hand through his short, auburn hair that tended to look brown in the bar’s lighting and sighed. He shouldn’t have accepted his friend Levi’s invitation to dinner and drinks at Dante’s Circle in the human realm. He should have rejected the offer and gone back to the thousand other things he had to do within the fae realm and inside the Conclave. Tristan wasn’t just any fae. He was a nine-hundred-year-old fae prince with responsibilities that lay heavily on his shoulders. He was also a Conclave member, where he helped govern every paranormal realm in existence with another fae member and two others from each race. That was how he’d become friends with Levi, a wizard and prince in his own right. So here he was, in Dante’s Circle, a bar owned and named after a royal blue dragon; the meeting place of seven women and their mates with a history he couldn’t immediately comprehend. Of course, it was because one of those women that he’d rather be in the fae realm instead of the dark bar with oak paneling and photos on the walls that spoke of generations of memories and connections. He’d been here a few times in the past, always on the outside of the circle of lightning-struck woman and their mates, but never fully excluded. They’d welcomed Tristan into their fold, even if they didn’t understand why it hurt him so to be that close to what he couldn’t have. Or maybe they understood all too well. After all, one of their own was the reason for his confusion, his torture. The object of his desire. “If you keep glowering at her over in the corner, you’ll end up scaring her more than she already is,” Seth said from his side. Tristan closed his eyes and took a deep breath, immediately regretting the action as soon as he did. The man next to him smelled of the sea. And hope. His heart ached and his dick filled. Seth Oceanus was a merman, a friend, and his mate. His true half. Or at least one of them. Not that he or Seth could do anything about it when the other part of their triad didn’t feel the same way.

In Belarus, as elsewhere, local German policy was conditioned by general economic concerns. By 1943, the Germans were worried more about labor shortages than about food shortages, and so their policy in Belarus shifted. As the war against the Soviet Union continued and the Wehrmacht took horrible losses month upon month, German men had to be taken from German farms and factories and sent to the front. Such people then had to be replaced if the German economy was to function. Hermann Göring issued an extraordinary directive in October 1942: Belarusian men in suspicious villages were not to be shot but rather kept alive and sent as forced laborers to Germany. People who could work were to be 'selected' for labor rather than killed - even if they had taken up arms against Germany. By now, Göring seemed to reason, their labor power was all that they could offer to the Reich, and it was more significant than their death. Since the Soviet partisans controlled ever more Belarusian territory, ever less food was reaching Germany in any case. If Belarusian peasants could not work for Germany in Belarus, best to force them to work in Germany. This was very grim reaping. Hitler made clear in December 1942 what Göring had implied: the women and children, regarded as less useful as labor, were to be shot. "This was a particularly spectacular example of the German campaign to gather forced labor in the East, which had begun with the Poles of the General Government, and spread to Ukraine before reaching this bloody climax in Belarus. By the end of the war, some eight million foreigners from the East, most of them Slavs, were working in the Reich. It was a rather perverse result, even by the standards of Nazi racism: German men went abroad and killed millions of 'subhumans,' only to import millions of other 'subhumans' to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves - had they not been abroad killing 'subhumans.' The net effect, setting aside the mass killing abroad, was that Germany became more of a Slavic land than it had ever been in history. (The perversity would reach its extreme in the first months of 1945, when surviving Jews were sent to labor camps in Germany itself. Having killed 5.4 million Jews as racial enemies, the Germans then brought Jewish survivors home to do the work that the killers might have been doing themselves, had they not been abroad killing.)

She worked there for several months as a slave in a Mexican family until they sold her to a wealthy Hispanic man from Santa Fe, N.M. He also purchased another young captive Apache woman from New Mexico to accompany them. Both women were loaded onto an oxcart bound for Santa Fe in a journey that could take at least three months.

once the Republicans won control of North Carolina’s general assembly. In a matter of months, they enacted conservative policies that private think tanks had been incubating for years. The legislature slashed taxes on corporations and the wealthy while cutting benefits and services for the middle class and the poor. It also gutted environmental programs, sharply limited women’s access to abortion, backed a constitutional ban on gay marriage, and legalized concealed guns in bars and on playgrounds and school campuses. It also erected cumbersome new bureaucratic barriers to voting.

In Hobbes’ state of nature, when a male individual conquers (contracts with) a female individual he becomes her sexual master and she becomes his servant. Rousseau’s conjectural history of the development of civil society tells how women must ‘tend the hut’, and in La Nouvelle Héloise Julie superintends the daily domestic business at Clarens. The story has been told again more recently – this time as science – by the sociobiologists. E. O. Wilson’s story of the genesis of the contemporary sexual division of labour in the earliest stages of human history is held to reveal that the division is a necessary part of human existence. The story begins with the fact that, like other large primates, human beings reproduce themselves slowly: Mothers carry fetuses for nine months and afterward are encumbered by infants and small children who require milk at frequent intervals through the day. It is to the advantage of each woman of the hunter– gatherer band to secure the allegiance of men who will contribute meat and hides while sharing the labor of child-rearing. It is to the reciprocal advantage of each man to obtain sexual rights to women and to monopolize their economic productivity.4 That is to say, science reveals that our social life is as if it were based on a sexual contract, which both establishes orderly access to women and a division of labour in which women are subordinate to men.

Technically, Sheena predates even Superman, having first appeared in the primordial dawn of comic books in 1937. But her true origins are older than that. Sheena is often described as the female version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 creation, Tarzan. The majority of Burroughs’ popular works revolves around a tension between the savage and the civilized, also seen in Sheena’s adventures. Burroughs’ work, like that of fellow adventure writer H. Rider Haggard, came out of the colonial era, and was written for men and boys who yearned for an escape from stifling modern life, through tales of dangerous worlds and exotic women. The common theme of these stories is that a man from the civilized world finds his way to a fantastic, often barbaric, world of adventure, where he falls in love with an intoxicating savage princess. While most of Burroughs’ heroines, like Dejah Thoris or Dian the Beautiful, were in need of rescuing, Haggard’s 1886 novel She introduced a stronger heroine. The novel’s English protagonist encounters the beautiful queen Ayesha, the ruler of a lost city in Africa. Ayesha is referred to as “she who must be obeyed,” and is a creature that provokes both fear and lust. Ayesha was the ultimate fantasy of civilized man: the beautiful, savage white queen, ruling a kingdom unhindered by the laws of modern morality. This brand of men’s fiction produced the swirling foam of exotic and erotic fantasy from which rose the jungle Venus known as Sheena. (...) Now that we have some historical context on these female monarchs, let’s talk about their specific origins. In the 1930s, there were several studios that produced art and stories for the various publishers who were getting into the new field of comic books. One of the most successful and prolific was the Universal Phoenix Studio, operated by two young artists named Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. In 1937, they created a female Tarzan-type character named Sheena for the British tabloid Wags. The strip was credited to the pseudonym W. Morgan Thomas, and the heroine’s name was meant to remind readers of H. Rider Haggard’s She. Demand for new comic book material was growing in the United States, and American pulp magazine publisher Fiction House was looking for material for a new comic book. Sheena made her American debut in 1938’s Jumbo Comics #1, just three months after Superman’s now legendary first appearance. She was the first female adventure character in comic books. This would be just one of her claims to fame.

A shocking number of people incarcerated in the House of D were there for months because they could not afford even minuscule bail amounts of fifty dollars, meaning that they were considered innocent but held in a maximum-security prison because they were poor.

By the end of the year, X-ray burns were front-page news in virtually every prominent electrical, medical, and scientific journal. No one, however, paid a greater price than the men and women on the front lines of this new technology: radiologists and radiology technicians, most of whom saw themselves as noble warriors, “martyrs to science,” in their quest to save lives with X-rays. In November 1896, Walter Dodd, a founding father of radiology in the United States, suffered severe skin burns on both hands. Within five months, the pain was “beyond description” and his face and hands were visibly scalded. When the pain kept him awake at night, Dodd paced the floor of Massachusetts General Hospital with his hands held above his head. In July 1897, he received the first of fifty skin grafts, all of which failed. Bit by bit, his fingers were amputated. Dodd waited as long as he could before amputating his little finger because, as he said, “I needed something to oppose my thumb.” On August 3, 1905, at the age of forty-six, Elizabeth Fleischmann, the most experienced woman radiographer in the world, died from X-ray-induced cancer after a series of amputations. Fleischmann had gained international renown for her X-rays of soldiers in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. Upon her death, almost every major newspaper published eulogies about “America’s Joan of Arc.

And after some months, the exposure to beauty and wealth took a toll on his mind. He could not pinpoint it at first. Andrei thought human change came from decisions, but actually it came from observation. The brain was a special piano whose song history was never forgotten; one wrong key could destroy the instrument and necessitate years of healing. For Andrei, the multitude of wealthy guests, their walks, accommodation requests, secrets, women, and jewels had achieved his natural lust for luxury ten times over and turned him into a complete ghost.

Women hold the pen to history's and herstory's narrative. Let's rewrite it with courage and conviction.

In a world full of trends, (we) women can be a timeless example of grace, genius, and resilience.

Hysteria! And grief and bitterness. That's what goes on. Not satisfied that our fighters evacuated the city, the enemy went after their women and children whom they left behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, slaughtered them, and left their bodies stacked in grotesque piles in the muddy lanes, fly-covered, rotting in the sun. They went after our Palestine Research Center the repository of our culture and history in exile, whose treasures we had been collecting since the day we left Palestine, looted it then burned it to the ground. Fifteen thousand of our people, including boys under the age if twelve and men over the age of eighty, were picked up and put in a concentration camp called Ansar. Our community in Lebanon, half a million men, women, and children found itself suddenly severed from institutions (educational, medical, cultural, economic, and social) they had depended on for their everyday living, which the enemy destroyed. Our fighters, the mainspring of our national struggle, were shipped to thre deserts of Algeria, the outback of Sudan, and the scorching plain of Yemen. Our leadership sought refuge in Tunisia. And when the choked psyche of our nation gasped for air, some months later, we lunged atat each other in civil war, because we had failed our people and ourselves. Our promises had proved illusory.

Columbus on his fourth and last voyage, in 1502, left the Southern coast of Cuba, and sailing in a South-westerly direction reached Guanaja, an island now called Bonacca, one of a group thirty miles distant from Honduras, and the shores of the western continent. From this island he sailed southward as far as Panama, and thence returned to Cuba on his way to Spain, after passing six months on the Northern coasts of Panama. In 1506 two of Columbus’ companions, De Solis and Pinzon, were again in the Gulf of Honduras, and examined the coast westward as far as the Gulf of Dulce, still looking for a passage to the Indian Ocean. Hence they sailed northward, and discovered a great part of Yucatan, though that country was not then explored, nor was any landing made. The first actual exploration was made by Francisco Hernandez de Cordova in 1517, who landed on the Island Las Mugeres. Here he found stone towers, and chapels thatched with straw, in which were arranged in order several idols resembling women—whence the name which the Island received. The Spaniards were astonished to see, for the first time in the new world, stone edifices of architectural beauty, and also to perceive the dress of the natives, who wore shirts and cloaks of white and colored cotton, with head-dresses of

According to the Treaty of Versailles, the post World War I German Navy was only permitted to have six light cruisers. One of these was the Emden, with a length of over 508 feet and a draft of 17 feet 5 inches. She was launched on January 7, 1925 and commissioned over nine months later on October 15, 1925. The light cruiser had a standard displacement of 5,400 tons, and was the only ship ever constructed in her class. She was built by the Reichsmarine shipbuilding company in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. As a new ship the Emden became the German Navy’s training ship and conducted several world cruises to train future naval officers. In September of 1934, Kapitan Karl Dönitz, the future commander of the German Navy, the Kriegsmarine, took command of the ship and remained her master until the following year. The Emden visited Cape Town in December of 1934 and was there for the Christmas celebration at the Cape Town German Club, described on page 30 of “Suppressed I Rise.” It was then that Adeline danced with the renowned Captain Dönitz, who would later replace the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, as the head of state in Germany. The cruiser Emden was severely damaged by British bombers in February of 1945. On May 3, 1945, the Germans scuttled the ship, to prevent her from being captured by the Allies. Ultimately in 1949, the ship was taken for scrap. Her bow ornament is still on display at the popular Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Added to the shock of the routine violation of their bodies was the trauma of having to relinquish their children to unknown slave-holders. [W.E.B.] Du Bois considered this physical, mental, and spiritual abuse of black women--with its inevitable result being the destruction of the traditional African family--the highest crime committed by slave-holders and the one thing for which he said he could not forgive them.

Aung San spent the rest of 1940 in the Japanese capital, learning Japanese and apparently getting swept away in all the fascist euphoria surrounding him. “What we want is a strong state administration as exemplified in Germany and Japan. There shall be one nation, one state, one party, one leader . . . there shall be no nonsense of individualism. Everyone must submit to the state which is supreme over the individual . . . ,” he wrote in those heady days of the Rising Sun.8 He spoke Japanese, wore a kimono, and even took a Japanese name. He then sneaked back into Burma, landing secretly at Bassein. He changed into a longyi and then took the train unnoticed to Rangoon. He made contact with his old colleagues. Within weeks, in small batches and with the help of Suzuki’s secret agents in Rangoon, Aung San and his new select team traveled by sea to the Japanese-controlled island of Hainan, in the South China Sea. There were thirty in all—the Thirty Comrades—and they would soon be immortalized in nationalist mythology. Aung San at twenty-five was one of the three oldest. He took Teza meaning “Fire” as his nom de guerre. The other two took the names Setkya (A Magic Weapon) and Ne Win (the Bright Sun). All thirty prefixed their names with the title Bo. “Bo” meant an officer and had come to be the way all Europeans in Burma were referred to, signifying their ruling status. The Burmese were now to have their own “bo” for the first time since 1885. But six months of harsh Japanese military training still lay ahead. It wasn’t easy, and at one point some of the younger men were close to calling it quits. Aung San, Setkya, and Ne Win received special training, as they were intended for senior positions. But all had to pass through the same grueling physical tests, saluting the Japanese flag and learning to sing Japanese songs. They heard tales of combat and listened to Suzuki boasting of how he had killed women and children in Siberia.9 It was a bonding experience that would shape Burmese politics for decades to come.

Albert, friend to royalty,” Beatrix said later at the Rutledge Hotel, laughing as she sat on the floor of their suite and examined the new collar. “I hope you don’t get above yourself, and put on airs.” “Not around your family, he won’t,” Christopher said, stripping off his coat and waistcoat, and removing his cravat. He lowered himself to the settee, relishing the coolness of the room. Albert went to drink from his bowl of water, lapping noisily. Beatrix went to Christopher, stretched full length atop him, and braced her arms on his chest. “I was so proud of you today,” she said, smiling down at him. “And perhaps a tiny bit smug that with all the women swooning and sighing over you, I’m the one you went home with.” Arching a brow, Christopher asked, “Only a tiny bit smug?” “Oh, very well. Enormously smug.” She began to play with his hair. “Now that all this medal business is done with, I have something to discuss with you.” Closing his eyes, Christopher enjoyed the sensation of her fingers stroking his scalp. “What is it?” “What would you say to adding a new member to the family?” This was not an unusual question. Since they had established a household at Riverton, Beatrix had increased the size of her menagerie, and was constantly occupied with animal-related charities and concerns. She had also compiled a report for the newly established natural history society in London. For some reason it had not been at all difficult to convince the group of elderly entomologists, ornithologists, and other naturalists to include a pretty young woman in their midst. Especially when it became clear that Beatrix could talk for hours about migration patterns, plant cycles, and other matters relating to animal habitats and behavior. There was even discussion of Beatrix’s joining a board to form a new natural history museum, to provide a lady’s perspective on various aspects of the project. Keeping his eyes closed, Christopher smiled lazily. “Fur, feathers, or scales?” he asked in response to her earlier question. “None of those.” “God. Something exotic. Very well, where will this creature come from? Will we have to go to Australia to collect it? Iceland? Brazil?” A tremor of laughter went through her. “It’s already here, actually. But you won’t be able to view it for, say…eight more months.” Christopher’s eyes flew open. Beatrix was smiling down at him, looking shy and eager and more than a little pleased with herself. “Beatrix.” He turned carefully so that she was underneath him. His hand came to cradle the side of her face. “You’re sure?” She nodded. Overwhelmed, Christopher covered her mouth with his, kissing her fiercely. “My love…precious girl…” “It’s what you wanted, then?” she asked between kisses, already knowing the answer. Christopher looked down at her through a bright sheen of joy that made everything blurred and radiant. “More than I ever dreamed. And certainly more than I deserve.” Beatrix’s arms slid around his neck. “I’ll show you what you deserve,” she informed him, and pulled his head down to hers again.

Months after the release of Du Bois’s Darkwater, Mamie Robinson brought out the first recording of the great antiracist art form of the 1920s. “Crazy Blues” became a best seller. Record companies capitalized on the blues craze among Black and White listeners alike. Robinson, “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith sang about Black women as depressed and happy, as settling down and running around, as hating and loving men, as gullible and manipulative, as sexually free and sexually conforming, as assertive and passive, as migrating and staying, as angels and as “Wild Women.” Blueswomen and their male counterparts embraced African American cultural ways, despised the strategy of trying to persuade Whites that Blacks were okay, and were therefore despised by Talented Tenth assimilationists.

My Everest story would be incomplete if I didn’t give final credit to the Sherpas who had risked their lives alongside us every day. Pasang and Ang-Sering still climb together as best friends, under the direction of their Sirdar boss--Kami. The Khumba Icefall specialist, Nima, still carries out his brave task in the jumbled ice maze at the foot of the mountain: repairing and fixing the route through. Babu Chiri, who so bravely helped Mick when he ran out of oxygen under the South Summit, was tragically killed in a crevasse in the Western Cwm several years later. He was a Sherpa of many years’ Everest experience, and was truly one of the mountain’s greats. It was a huge loss to the mountaineering fraternity. But if you play the odds long enough you will eventually lose. That is the harsh reality of high-altitude mountaineering. You can’t keep on top of the world forever. Geoffrey returned to the army, and Neil to his business. His toes never regained their feeling, but he avoided having them amputated. But as they say, Everest always charges some sort of a price, and in his own words--he got lucky. As for Mick, he describes his time on Everest well: “In the three months I was away, I was both happier than ever before, and more scared than I ever hope to be again.” Ha. That’s also high-altitude mountaineering for you. Thengba, my friend, with whom I spent so much time alone at camp two, was finally given a hearing aid by Henry. Now, for the first time, he can hear properly. Despite our different worlds, we shared a common bond with these wonderful Sherpa men--a friendship that was forged by an extraordinary mountain. Once, when the climber Julius Kugy was asked what sort of person a mountaineer should be, he replied: “Truthful, distinguished, and modest.” All these Sherpas epitomize this. I made the top with them, and because of their help, I owe them more than I can say. The great Everest writer Walt Unsworth, in his book Everest: The Mountaineering History, gives a vivid description of the characters of the men and women who pit their all on the mountain. I think it is bang on the money: But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad… Three things they all had in common: faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance. If I had to sum up what happened on that journey for me, from the hospital bed to the summit of the world, I tend to think of it as a stumbling journey. Of losing my confidence and my strength--then refinding it. Of seeing my hope and my faith slip away--and then having them rekindled. Ultimately, if I had to pass on one message to my children it would be this: Fortune favors the brave. Most of the time.

Four months later, NOW was formed, with Friedan as its first president. It had only a small membership, most of whom were white, middle-class women who advocated legal equality. Then and later the organization had difficulty attracting blue-collar or minority women to its ranks, and it was cool, especially at first, to demands for sexual liberation.

Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.

I feel that the government should uphold the concept that it is there for us, “We the People.” That it does what we alone cannot do. By standing unified and proud, we have strength because of our numbers and the power to do what is right. That we always remain on the right side of history and care for and respect our less fortunate. Now, you may think that I’m just spouting out a lot of patriotic nonsense, which you are entitled to do, however I did serve my country actively in both the Navy and Army for a total of forty years, six months and seven days as a reservist and feel that I have an equal vested interest in these United States. If we don’t like what is happening we have responsible ways and means to change things. We have Constitutional, “First Amendment Rights to Freedom of Speech.” There are many things I would like to see change and there are ways that we can do this. To start with we have to protect our First Amendment Rights and protect the media from government interference…. I also believe in protecting our individual freedom…. I believe in one person, one vote…. Corporations are not people, for one they have no human feelings…. That although our government may be misdirected it is not the enemy…. I want reasonable regulations to protect us from harm…. That we not privatize everything in sight such as prisons, schools, roads, social security, Medicare, libraries etc.….. Entitlements that have been earned should not be tampered with…. That college education should be free or at least reasonable…. That health care becomes free or very reasonable priced for all…. That lobbyist be limited in how they can manipulate our lawmakers…. That people, not corporations or political action committees (PAC’s), can only give limited amounts of money to candidates…. That our taxes be simplified, fair and on a graduated scale without loop holes….That government stays out of our personal lives, unless our actions affect others…. That our government stays out of women’s issues, other than to insure equal rights…. That the law (police) respects all people and treats them with the dignity they deserve…. That we no longer have a death penalty…. That our military observe the Geneva Conventions and never resort to any form of torture…. That the Police, FBI, CIA or other government entities be limited in their actions, and that they never bully or disrespect people that are in their charge or care…. That we never harbor prisoners overseas to avoid their protection by American law…. That everyone, without exception, is equal…. And, in a general way, that we constantly strive for a more perfect Union and consider ourselves members of a greater American family, or at the very least, as guests in our country. As Americans we are better than what we have witnessed lately. The idea that we will go beyond our rights is insane and should be discouraged and outlawed. As a country let us look forward to a bright and productive future, and let us find common ground, pulling in the same direction. We all deserve to feel safe from persecution and/or our enemies. We should also be open minded enough to see what works in other countries. If we are going to “Make America Great Again” we should start by being more civil and kinder to each other. Now this is all just a thought, but it’s a start…. “We’re Still Here!

heritage a secret. This secrecy is probably a matter of protection for her and for Mordecai. As Ahasuerus is preparing for a new wife, as Mordecai is preparing Esther for a new life, Esther is preparing to be come a queen. It is important to notice that Esther is obedient and faithful without being certain of the outcome of this year. She has no guarantee of ever returning to her own life, she has no guarantee that she will become queen, so we must assume that she is not motivated by results in her service to the Lord. Esther is obedient without any promise other than the knowledge inside her that she will not be abandoned by the Lord at any time. She will be faithful regardless of foreseeable consequences, and the example that this kind of faithfulness sets for us is fantastic. Once evaluated by Hegai worthy of the expense of the preparations, each young woman must undergo Ahasuerus’ scrutiny as well. After a year, Esther is prepared to face the king, and is now awaiting her turn to enter his chambers. Each young woman’s turn came to go in to King Ahasuerus after she had completed twelve months’ preparation, according to the regulations for the women, for thus were the days of their preparation apportioned: six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with perfumes and preparations for beautifying women.Thus prepared, each young woman went to the king, and she was given whatever she desired to take with her from the women’s quarters to the king’s palace.In the evening she went, and in the morning she returned to the second house of the women, to the custody of Shaashgaz, the king’s eunuch who kept the concubines. Esther 2:12-13 After their period of preparation, the women go, one at a time, in to the king’s palace. They leave the women’s quarters in the evening and return in the morning… and their life’s course is determined within a period of 24 hours or less. Imagine the scene: these women were taken from their families and everything familiar to them a year or so before they are sent into the king. For a year, they are in the custody of Hegai the custodian of the women. Each step that these women take toward the palace is a step toward one of two things: either the beginning of a new life or the death of every possible dream that each one might have had for her life. A step toward becoming Ahasuerus’ wife and queen of Persia — tremendous honor and riches; or a step toward becoming one of the king’s concubines — a life devoid of true love or passion. Each candidate completed these twelve months and went into the king as a potential queen. The next morning, each woman left the king’s chambers as one of a countless number of mistresses in his harem. The history does not indicate that they were rejected and returned to their own homes. They were returned to Shaashgaz, the keeper of the king’s concubines. The finality and sadness of the conclusion of this year must have been excruciating. “She would not go into the king again unless the king delighted in her and called for her by name.” Esther 2:14 Like a splash of ice water, that sentence feels cold. A rush of emptiness and loneliness all of a sudden, they have been used and, for all practical purposes, thrown away. When they returned the next morning, they did not even go to the court that has been their home for the past year. These women went into the custody of Shaashgaz, the eunuch custodian of the concubines. That is quite a demotion for these young women — their future has just been decided, and they had no say in it. Hopes of marriage to anyone for one of these rejected women is completely over. “She would not go into the king again...” These women must have felt a tremendous loss and sorrow. Whether or not they had actually wanted to be queen (remember that they had no choice in the matter — they had to come to the palace either way), they had been preparing for this moment for a year. Perhaps they had waited even longer

MEN AND WOMEN who did almost nothing for a large part of the year tend not to figure prominently in history books. Studies and museums naturally highlight enterprise and undervalue the art of remaining idle for months on end.

Every corner of the island was ransacked; every human being that could be found, was slain or carried into captivity. Nothing was to be seen in the once smiling land but heaps of ruins, and a few ghastly inhabitants, wandering in a state of starvation among them. Ninety churches and forty villages were delivered to the flames; twenty-five thousand persons, chiefly full grown men, had been slain; forty-five thousand women and children had been dragged into slavery; and fifteen thousand had escaped into the neighboring islands in the last stage of destitution and misery, where the greater part of them died of grief or starvation. For several months, the markets of Constantinople, Egypt, and Barbary, were so stocked with slaves, that their price fell a half; and purchasers were attracted from the farthest parts of Asia and Africa, whither the Greek captives were scattered.

At last her effort paid off. In one of the magazines she got for the store, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Swallow learned that a new college for white women was opening just over the state line in New York: Vassar. Tuition and board cost $400; remarkably, at a time when teachers were lucky to earn $15 a month, she had saved and borrowed $300, and there were scholarships. Several thousand women took the Vassar entrance exam for one hundred places. Swallow made the cut. As she unpacked in her dorm room, dusty from the train, she wrote home, “Am delighted even beyond anticipation.”7 Swallow spent her two years at Vassar in a rapture.

One study of pregnant women with a history of childhood adversity examined chromosomal patterns in their offspring. There was direct correlation between the severity of the mother’s past childhood abuse and the degree of shortening of the infant’s telomere length (telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes), which was also associated with increased behavioral problems at eighteen months.

Black women's history is a tale of fierce determination, sass, and unyielding resilience. From Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech to Maya Angelou's poetic prowess, they've left a trail of fabulousness in their wake. With style, grace they've faced adversity head-on and emerged as queens of their own narratives. So let's raise a glass this February to the trailblazers, the game-changers, and the unsung heroes!

Tonight," said Potapov, and his wrinkled nose quivered above his thin lips, "we intend to adopt a new resolution, not only for Ispas, but for all the villages in the region. From this moment on, until further notice, every breeder of horses, like you, Comrade Lazar, will endeavor— No, he won't try, he will succeed! - Yes, he will succeed 100 percent The pregnancy and birth of all female mares!" The fifty people in the hall fell silent, and Potapov asked, "Is that clear? Something unclear in my words?" "Something unclear in my words?" Isabel came back after him. "Yes, Comrade Potapov," said Roman. "There are some unclear things." Isabelle and Sissy pinched him, and Isabelle continued to whisper in Potapov's unpleasant tenor voice, "One hundred percent pregnancy and birth of all female mares!" Sissy almost laughed out loud. Roman broke away from his wife and sister and walked to the aisle between the pews, from which He could speak without interruption from them. "You said you were an animal enclosure expert from Moscow?" Roman asked. "Please teach us how to achieve such extraordinary results." Ostap rose - Ostap, who never spoke at these assemblies! Even Yana was shocked. "Forgive me," said Ostap, seeming not to believe his own impudence, "but that's what they call female mares in Moscow, 'mares women'? Because here in Ukraine they simply say 'mares'." "Never mind," said Potapov. "And the mares, by the way, don't give birth," added Ostap with eyes burning with hatred and in a low voice with contempt. "They give birth." "Well, let's talk." Potapov pointed to the members of the Lazar family who were sitting with Mirik and Petka. "Comrade Zhuk told me about you, the Lazar family," Potapov said. Petka immediately got up and moved to another place. Mirik also moved his chair a little further - only a few centimeters, but still! He was staying away so he wouldn't be lumped in with those troublesome lazars, Isabelle thought. Unbelievable. Problematic like his wife, himself and his flesh. "We believe," said Potapov, "that you are using your horses by means of sabotage against the Soviet state." "And how do we do that?" asked Roman, who stood beside his brother. By having your mares give birth only once a year!" I don't create a horse, Comrade Potapov, I only quarter him." The mare's gestation period is eleven months," Roman said. "If you need to improve! Why do your horses, which you are apparently so famous for, only give birth to one foal per horse?" Potapov asked. "Why is their pregnancy so long? Almost a year? It's unthinkable! Can't you speed up the birth earlier and quarter them again? Or see if there's a way to make a mare carry two foals in one place? That would be very productive!" The members of the Lazar family looked forward and not at each other, lest they openly express contempt and be arrested for the crime of rowing under the Soviet Union. It is impossible to respect something that is despised, the Christian Jesus was right in that, Isabel thought, and wished that Roman would bite his tongue. Vitaly and Stan, Oleg Tretyak, the evicted Kubal, and most recently Andreyush - all these poor people were witnesses and victims of Stalin's total dedication to the reign of terror. Soon even the pretense that the rule of law exists will be abandoned. Yana got to her feet with an effort and held the chair rest. "I have to go," she said. "As you can see, I'm a pregnant female about to give birth. But maybe the experts from Moscow should spend some time around the stable during the calving season before they start giving recommendations." Yana nodded to Roman and Ostap and left the hall with a wobbly gait. Isabelle thought that Yana was slowing down for Potapov's sake. Just a few hours ago she jumped on the back of a horse and then got off above him without help and without effort. Potapov paid no attention to Yana's words or to her departure. "We need to solve th''e horse problem!" said the man.

My mother personally knew Nusreta Sivac, who was held, tortured, and raped at the camp for two months. I admire Nusreta’s extraordinary courage and fortitude in enduring the horror of genocide and speaking boldly about her experiences. She is a champion for women’s rights and a hero of the Bosnian people. She motivated and vehemently advocated for justice by persuading other Bosniak rape victims to come forward and take legal action against their perpetrators. Thanks to Nusreta’s efforts, rape in the context of war is categorized as a war crime under international law. She was instrumental in helping convict her rapist and bringing him to justice. She was continually raped for two months in captivity. Sivac also spent years collecting evidence and testimonies from rape survivors and constructing legal cases which were presented to the ICTY. For centuries, rape was considered a byproduct of war. Are women just considered spoils of war? Her contributions are a powerful achievement because they mark the first time in history that an international court convicted war crimes solely for sexual violence. I applaud Nusreta for being a pioneer.

Mary and Anne wore traditional women’s clothing around the sailors, but, when prepared for battle, they always dressed in men’s fashion. When called upon to fight, the two women would stand back-to-back, each holding a pistol in one hand and a machete in the other. They literally had each other’s back. For two months in 1720, Jack, Anne, and Mary ruled the seas, and their fame spread far and wide. (You may not realize it, but they are all recalled in modern culture; for instance, Jack flew a black flag with a skull and two criss-crossing sabers imprinted in white on it, and that is the stereotyped pirate flag used in movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean.) A bounty was on Calico Jack’s head, so both other pirates and government officials sailed the seas hoping to capture him. One evening after Calico Jack had captured a large Spanish ship, his crew was celebrating with alcohol and were so intoxicated that the crew of a British government ship was able to come aboard his ship unannounced. Most of Jack’s men were in the ship’s galley and immediately surrendered. Anne and Mary, who were upstairs relaxing with Jack in the captain’s quarters, fought until they were clearly overwhelmed. All the pirates were taken to prison and most sentenced to death.  Anne snarled in frustration as the men were led past her, “If you had just fought like men, you wouldn’t be hanging like dogs.” Anne and Mary, though, both escaped the death penalty – but not prison - because they were pregnant. Anne was found to be carrying Jack’s baby and Mary was carrying a crew member’s child. Mary got a fever and died in prison, but no one knows what happened to Anne.

Whence it is that, in memory of the want we were then in, we keep a feast for eight days, which is called the feast of unleavened bread. Now the entire multitude of those that went out, including the women and children, was not easy to be numbered, but those that were of an age fit for war, were six hundred thousand. 2. They left Egypt in the month Xanthicus, on the fifteenth day of the lunar month; four hundred and thirty years after our forefather Abraham came into Canaan, but two hundred and fifteen years only after Jacob removed into Egypt.1 It was the eightieth year of the age of Moses, and of that of Aaron three more. They also carried out the bones of Joesph with them, as he had charged his sons to do.

Who or what gave May its name is unclear. Ovid’s poet admits being at a loss even after the Muses, Polyhymnia, Urania, and Calliope, offered him explanations (Fast. 5.1–5.110). Maiestas (majesty), sings Polyhymnia, lays behind the month’s name, for after the creation of the world and all the species, no god was more supreme than Maiestas. She then yielded supremacy to Jupiter. Urania’s focus is on the history of early Rome, the elders (maiores), and the Fathers (patres), on whom Romulus conferred his city’s government. Calliope points to the nymph Maia, the mother of Hermes, worshiped by the Arcadians. The Arcadian Evander, who founded a city on the spot where Rome eventually would stand, brought his gods, among them Maia, to Latium. If May can be linked to the linguistic root mag-, in a sense of increase, then one could further speculate that May was the month of growth.

Justice Beyond Month (Sonnet 1182) Pride that ends with the end of June, is but an episode of looney tunes. Divergence that dies with April's wake, is no inclusion but bark of buffoons. Black history that ends with the end of February, is not solidarity but a hashtag cacophony. Women's history that ends with the end of March, is no celebration but a sacrilege of equality. When AAPI are only visible in the month of May, It ain't no visibility but a mockery of life. When nativeness is welcome till October 15th, It ain't integration but desecration of light. Awareness is justice when it reduces prejudice. But one that's trendy only in specific months, is no awareness but a different kind of malice. Acceptance is awareness, awareness is life. 100 calendars fall short to celebrate mindlight.

I am not against Black History Month. But it should be celebrated in a way that doesn’t reinforce whiteness. For those who ask why there is no White History Month, the answer illustrates how whiteness works. White history is implied in the absence of its acknowledgment; white history is the norm for history. Thus, our need to qualify that we are speaking about black history or women’s history suggests that these contributions lie outside the norm.

Boston lay in shambles. During the winter months, shivering redcoats had chopped down trees in the Common and ripped apart old buildings for firewood. The Flucker mansion had been looted. Other homes and shops were abandoned, crumbling, ruinous reminders of Boston's pre-Revolutionary splendor.

I was told (by a man) "Women's History" month was just a "man made" (note the irony) observation that adds little to no value to society. Fortunately the woman who raised me, the women who mentored me and those who crashed through ceilings, kicked down doors, shattered stereotypes, forged paths to freedom or otherwise helped build a nation and change the world... disagree. As do I. So I will always pay it forward.

I have always been wary of Black History Months and women’s studies departments, believing they confine their subjects to reconstructed ghettos. Of interest to black people. Good work for a woman. Those are the unspoken but absolute assumptions such programs unintentionally reinforce. I want to live in a world where everyone who studies American history reads Frederick Douglass and everyone who studies English reads George Eliot—just to stay with the nineteenth century. If they are cloistered, another generation will grow up thinking they can learn American history without Douglass, English literature without Eliot. Intellectual segregation is no better than any other kind.

The Napoleon of Temperance” or “Father of Prohibition,” activist Neal S. Dow helped to construct the “Maine Law” of 1851, outlawing the use of alcohol for reasons other than mechanical or medicinal purposes. He was the mayor of the city when “The Portland Rum Riot” broke out, leading to the militia shooting into the crowds. One person was killed and seven wounded when the people demanded to know why there was rum stored in the City Hall. Early in the American Civil War, on November 23, 1861, former mayor Dow was commissioned as a Colonel in the 13th Maine Infantry. On April 28th of the following year, he received a commission as Brigadier General in the Union Army. His service included commanding two captured Confederate forts near New Orleans and fighting in the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana. During this skirmish he was wounded and later captured. General Dow was traded and gained his freedom 8 months later from General William H. F. Lee, the son of Robert E. Lee. Neal S. Dow died on October 2, 1897, and was buried in the Evergreen Cemetery in Portland. His home, the Neal S. Dow house built in 1829, was used as a stop for slaves on the “Maine Underground Railway” and is located at 714 Congress Street in Portland. The historic building is now the home of the Maine Women's Christian Temperance Union.

In its earliest uses, a catfight meant an actual physical altercation between women. One of the first citings of the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in 1854 by writer Benjamin G. Ferris to describe scuffles between Mormon wives in his book Utah and the Mormons: The History, Government, Doctrines, Customs, and Prospects of the Latter-day Saints. After he spent six months observing the community, Ferris wrote about the Mormon men practicing polygamy, or having more than one wife, and described the styles of the houses they lived in, which were designed in order to “keep the women . . . as much as possible, apart, and prevent those terrible cat-fights which sometimes occur, with all the accompaniments of Billingsgate [vulgar and coarse language], torn caps, and broken broom-sticks.

The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. ... From a modern perspective, the most important figure to emerge from this milieu is Randolph Bourne. Viewed as a spokesman for the new youth culture in upper-middle-class New York, Bourne burst onto the intellectual scene with an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July 1916 entitled ‘Trans-National America’. Here Bourne was influenced by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. Yet he criticized the Liberal Progressive worldview whose cosmopolitan zeal sought to consign ethnicity to the dustbin of history. Instead, Kallen argued that ‘men cannot change their grandfathers’. Rather than all groups giving and receiving cultural influence, as in Dewey’s vision, or fusing together, as mooted by fellow Zionist Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1910), Kallen spoke of America as a ‘federation for international colonies’ in which each group, including the Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. There are many problems with Kallen’s model, but there can be no doubt that he treated all groups consistently. Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to: "Breathe a larger air . . . [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide." Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.

Akbar's Rajput policy, however, did not result from any grand, premeditated strategy. Rather, it began as a response to the internal politics of one of the Rajput lineages, the Kachwaha clan, based in the state of Amber in northern Rajasthan. In 1534 the clan's head, Puran Man, died with no adult heir and was succeeded by his younger brother, Bharmal. Puran Mal, however, did have a son who by the early 1560s had come of age and challenged Bharmal's right to rule Amber. Feeling this pressure from within his own clan, Bharmal approached Akbar for material support, offering in exchange his daughter in marriage. The king agreed to the proposal. In 1562 the Kachwaha chieftain entered Mughal service, with Akbar assuring him of support in maintaining his position in the Kachwaha political order, while his family entered the royal household. Besides his daughter, Bharmal also sent his son Bhagwant Das and his grandson Man Singh (1550-1614) to the court in Agra. For several generations thereafter, the ruling clan continued to give its daughters to the Mughal court, thereby making the chiefs of these clans the uncles, cousins or even father-in-laws of Mughal emperors. The intimate connection between the two courts had far-reaching results. Not only did Kachwaha rulers quickly rise in rank and stature in the Mughal court, but their position within their own clan was greatly enhanced by Akbar's confirmation of their political leadership. Akbar's support also enhanced the position of the Kachwahas as a whole -- and hence Amber state -- in the hierarchy of Rajasthan's other Rajput lineages. Neighbouring clans soon realised the political wisdom of attaching themselves to the expanding Mughal state, a visibly rising star in North Indian politics. [...] Driving these arrangements, though, was not just the incentive of courtly patronage. The clans of Rajasthan well understood that refusal to engage with the Mughals would bring the stick of military confrontation. Alone among the Rajput clans, the Sisodiyas of Mewar in southern Rajasthan, north India's pre-eminent warrior lineages, obstinately refused to negotiate with the Mughals. In response, Akbar in 1568 led a four-month siege of the Sisodiyas' principal stronghold of Chittor, which ultimately fell to the Mughals, but only after a spectacular 'jauhar' in which the fort's defenders, foreseeing their doom, killed their women and gallantly sallied forth to meet their deaths. In all, some 30,000 defenders of the fort were killed, although its ruler, Rana Pratap, managed to escape. For decades, he and the Sisodiya house would continue to resist Mughal domination, whereas nearly every other Rajput lineage had acknowledged Mughal overlordship.

For those who ask why there is no White History Month, the answer illustrates how whiteness works. White history is implied in the absence of its acknowledgment; white history is the norm for history. Thus, our need to qualify that we are speaking about black history or women’s history suggests that these contributions lie outside the norm.

One thing more makes these men and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that you write your representative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing support for the grape pickers or the coffee workers. Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy. Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.

tens of thousands of women to spinsterhood. In the American Expeditionary Forces, the 26,000 men killed in the Meuse-Argonne represented the greatest loss in a single battle to that point in the nation’s history.

[A few months after they came into office, Mrs. Ford discovered she had breast cancer.] This was, in some ways, the indelible moment when she first impressed herself on the American people. The whole Ford family did. It is really hard, forty years later, to conceive of the degree to which people didn’t talk about this disease. Euphemisms were employed. Even in obituaries, people didn’t die of breast cancer. They died of a “wasting illness.” What Mrs. Ford did was to bring this out in the open and, overnight, transform the way women, in particular, looked at this disease. For her, it was also a lesson. It was her first and most important lesson in the influence that a first lady could have just by being herself, by shining the light on a dark corner, by educating the public. It initiated a national conversation, a conversation among women, a conversation between women and their doctors. When it comes to women’s health issues, literally, history is divided into two periods: there’s before Betty, and after Betty.

Twenty two year old Connie Jones, who had boarded in the home of charismatic Methodist and pacifist Ormond Burton, was a member of the No More War movement and the Christian Pacifist Society. She first attended the Friday night public meetings at which the pacifists argued their case in 1941. She stepped onto the podium, stating, "the Lord Jesus Christ tells us to love one another," and was promptly arrested by Wellington's chief inspector of police. Charged with obstruction under the Emergency Regulations, she was sentenced to three months' hard labour with harsh conditions at the Point Halswell Reformatory - an experience that did nothing to dampen her commitment to pacifism.