Oct 30, 2014
I began calling myself old at about sixty-five, but I wanted to claim the title even earlier than that.
My friends in their eighties laugh at the notion that I’m old at sixty-seven. Still, how long can one go on being middle-aged? Middle-aged carries all sorts of responsibilities and burdens – working for a living, saving for retirement, caring for teenagers and parents. Old brings freedom and power.
image:usatoday.com
As an old woman, I’m free from hoping that men will find me sexually attractive. When I was younger I was on an everlasting honey-hunt. I dressed and walked and talked to entice the male of the species.
the honey-hunt image:businessinsider.com
I’m free from trying to be what other people expect me to be. I can’t say I’m free from worrying what other people think – ‘How can she let her daughter dress like that?’ ‘She only reads bits and pieces of the Times’ ‘She doesn’t compost’- but I no longer expect perfection of myself, having long since stopped expecting it of anyone else.
I don’t let her dress like THIS. image: amazon.com
I am aware that when I simply act like myself – blunt, profane, opinionated – some people enjoy it because I don’t fit their notion of sweet old grandma. But as I have told Amanda, who is in middle school and at the painful peak of self-consciousness, the only person who pays much attention to me is me. Everyone else is far too busy worrying about themselves.
As an old woman, I feel powerful despite the crumbling – the whiny joints, hole-y memory and various other ailments. When my hair began to go gray, it was a tweedy pepper and salt. I died it purple for a couple of years, and when I let it grow out it had become a lovely puffy white. Irrationally, I gained confidence from my white hair. I walk into a meeting and believe people think I know what I’m talking about and am worth listening to. This may be delusional; it is contrary to the common notion that old women become invisible.
worth listening to image:nydailynews.com
The world doesn’t want me to call myself old (insofar as it’s paying attention, having rather more pressing matters to attend to.). Huge amounts of internet verbiage are dedicated to avoiding the word. As soon as people find out that one or another synonym means old, and refers to them, they apparently get pissed off and the word becomes verboten in its turn.
I believe people shy away from the word out of fear. Along with freedom and power, aging brings loss. Regardless of what you call it, the last twenty years or so of the journey will have challenges and growth that we never imagined when we were younger.
One of the lesser challenges is how to respond to young people who insist on denying we are old. A waiter recently asked, “And what will the young lady have?” Finally fed up with this sort of thing, I said, “I’m sure you don’t mean to offend, but I’m not a young lady. I’m old.” He actually began to argue. I insisted, “I’m proud to be old,” and he retreated, looking very uncomfortable. I left a good tip to make up for it.
image: huffingtonpost.com
A group of journalists interested in aging issues surveyed 100 journalists about appropriate ways to refer to old people. (They didn’t say whether any of these 100 were nearing 100.) In Words to Age by: a Brief Glossary and Tips on Usage, they came up with guidelines “intended to help journalists represent midlife and older people in socially neutral language that respects their individuality without appending presumptuous labels to them, either directly or indirectly.”
The favorite term was “older.” Than whom, I have to ask? They also approved, with much discussion and many cautions: elder, middle-aged, midlife, boomers, senior. They disapproved of: baby boomers, senior citizen, elderly. After a while of reading all this I stood up and yelled “OLD, OLD, OLD.”
So if I’m rejecting synonyms and euphemisms, and insist on old, is it old lady or old woman?
Hip young men used to refer to a lover as “my old lady.” Though the phrase has a nice musical sound, ‘lady’ belongs to a class system and a set of rules. The concept puts women on a pedestal. It’s a great place to be if you want to be revered, but it restricts travel. I never heard those hip young men call themselves gentlemen.
old lady image:enchantedserenityperiodfilms.blogspot.com
As a young feminist I rejected the sense of ownership, the elitism, and all the strictures that come with the name. My father used to tell me to sit like a lady – ie legs down and closed. A lady doesn’t admit to having genitals, or if she does, she calls them private parts. She doesn’t ever use bad language. Now, as an old feminist, I can’t possibly call myself a lady, since I’ve taken to dressing inappropriately, in warm weather wearing nothing but a caftan all over town, letting my body take the air.
Just half the collection
Old woman. The words come to a full stop. The sound is forceful, not flowery. Woman is strong, generative, sexual. Since I stopped being a girl I’ve been a young woman, middle-aged woman, and now I’m happy to call myself old woman.
Old is a proud title. By the time we are old most of us have walked many miles and climbed many mountains. We have survived our own mistakes. We’ve had lots of sorrow and lots of joy, some triumphs and accomplishments. We may have the wisdom to keep regret and pride in proper proportion. We have a lot to think about: our past is a multi-volume novel, and our future looms close with some of the biggest challenges of our life. I am awed, and yes, scared. I know I may have a very hard journey toward the big End. It will be no easier if I try to deny it.
Mar 1, 2013
In 1970 I was a 22-year-old hippie with a 3-month-old son. The baby’s father had gone off to Tahiti to build us a hut on the beach – his dream of the week. In the previous week’s dream I would support us while he finished high school, college, and a PhD in nuclear physics. The morning he left for Tahiti I told him I would not follow him. I had my own inchoate dreams. I was going back to Ann Arbor, where I had friends to help me get started again.
With other young mothers, mostly single, I formed a baby group. We talked while the children played, and it soon became a consciousness-raising group. We read Our Bodies Our Selves. We examined each others’ cervices with a transparent plastic speculum, and tried to see our own in the mirror.
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We all tried to figure out where we were going, and what we would do next. Even the married women didn’t want to be “just” wives and mothers. We would not be defined by a relationship to a man, nor hitch our wagons to a man’s life, but make our own course.
I had not been raised to support myself. The goal was a husband and children – I would take care of the home, he would bring in the money. That was what my mother did.
Now it was obviously up to me. So I went back to college. I would become either a children’s librarian or a lawyer, the former because I loved children’s books, and the latter because I wanted to change the world. By the time I finished college I had decided on law school.
I was a full-blown feminist, bristling with outrage. When I wasn’t wearing flamboyant minidresses, I used to wear brown overalls and hiking boots. I was quick to flare up at a man who assumed I was looking for a leader rather than a lay.
My father and brother teased me when I visited. “Look at the feminist fixing breakfast for her baby.” “You’d better shut up or somebody will get kicked in the balls,” I snarled, and raced off to tell my sister what I’d said. We didn’t speak like that in our family.
The bristles are soft now, the edges and prickly bits smoothed out. Forty years and raising a son have done that.
Some 70’s feminism seems comical now. Popular media defined the movement through symbolic acts, sometimes invented by the media, without acknowledging what the symbols represented.
Bra burning. Flikr.com click
The movement suffered from internal politics, and from a perception that it ignored issues of class, race, and sexual identity, and addressed only white, middle-class, heterosexual women’s issues. But though certain organizations were self-annointed or selected by the media to represent feminism, the movement of the 70’s was anarchic, and way broader than any group. Women of all kinds were telling the truth as they saw it: Robin Morgan, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich.
True, these were intellectuals, mostly not subject to the indignities of welfare or the hourly wage. And many middle class women did focus on their own issues. Some professors, free to come and go on their own schedule, complained when a secretary stayed home too often with a sick child. They organized around barriers to tenure rather than the abysmally low pay of custodial staff.
9to5org.blogspot.com click
But others: writers, lawyers, community activists and organizers, took on welfare, childcare, health care, domestic violence and rape. The women’s movement I knew was not about a few leaders selected by and filtered through the media. It was about women supporting and valuing women. It was about changing the world so that women could be self-supporting and achieve power in the workplace while still valuing motherhood. It was about encouraging men to expand their role in the family and share as equal partners.
Some of the changes fueled by the movement are minuscule, some are being eroded by reactionary forces. Some made things worse for poor women. Welfare reform’s fraudulent veneer of empowering women to work failed to conceal the intent to reduce welfare roles by any means necessary. But without the feminist movement of the 70’s we would not have domestic violence shelters, rape shield laws, the glorious flowering of women’s history, and younger generations of women who assume they are equal to men: equally entitled, equally capable.
Peaceful Paths – Gainesville’s domestic violence program
click click
From feminism I learned the significance of being an outsider. For me the most important issues are still those affecting the least powerful. I know that poverty and injustice crush men as well as women, and I am thrilled to work with the (mostly) guys living in tents in the woods. I care more about what happens to them than I do about access to tenure, or a glass ceiling at the top of a business ladder, though I know those matter too.
coursepark.com
But as a group, I like women more than men. I understand and forgive our foibles. I see the world through a female lens, and value “women’s work.” My heroes are the suffragists, the welfare rights organizers, the women in the civil rights movement, and the countless women in the third world struggling against all the brutal forms of patriarchy. I am still a feminist, and proud of the name.
Johnnie Tillmon – welfare rights organizer click
Jan 31, 2013
Our Martin Luther King holiday weekend was filled with the sounds of “We Shall Overcome.” Three men sang it in church, accompanying themselves with guitars and trumpet. At the birthday rally at the Bo Diddly Community Plaza, we all joined hands and sang it together. I turned around and was thrilled to see Amanda holding hands with her two friends, and singing out.
Lamont Wallace speaks at rally; singing the song. Erica Brough.The Gainesville Sun
I have always thought of We Shall Overcome as a gospel song, but it never mentions God or Jesus. According to Wikipedia, it was a union protest song derived from a gospel song, and part of its tune is from the spiritual, No More Auction Block for Me. It shares with gospel the expression of faith, and like gospel it offers the solace and encouragement of a candle in the darkness.
I was 17 the first time I heard the song: January, 1965, my first semester at the University of Michigan, an all-night teach-in against the war in Vietnam. What 17-year-old, new to college, wouldn’t welcome the chance to stay out all night?
There were informative workshops, with maps and pointers, in small seminar rooms. I went to a couple, but mostly I joined the crowds of students milling around outside in the cold. At midnight we stood in a big circle on the Diag, holding lighted candles and singing We Shall Overcome.
Candles on the Diag, this time for Mumbai. ur.umich.edu
In high school I had longed to join the freedom riders on the buses going south, though I was probably secretly glad my parents would never allow it. The teach-in was my first taste of protest, and it fed my inchoate longing to make a better world. I only dabbled in those days – a few protests in Ann Arbor and Detroit, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago – but the spirit caught me.
A freedom ride. blackpast.org
In my 60’s I’m still a child of the 60’s, though the media claims we’ve all moved on. My watchword is “Light a candle AND curse the darkness.” I haven’t lost an ounce of idealism, and most people I care about haven’t either. I know a whole bunch of gray-haired, wrinkled-y people who feed the homeless, carry peace signs, act for social justice and speak truth to power.
minnpost.com
Amanda first heard “We Shall Overcome” a couple of months before, when we watched Eyes on the Prize. She had come home from school angry. “Why do they always have to talk about Black people and slaves and all those bad things that happened to them?” I had the sense that beyond Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, she had heard nothing of the Black heros and achievers. I stammered something about Dr. Charles Drew and blood banks, Benjamin Banneker and the design of Washington D.C., but I especially wanted her to know of the many thousands of people who were the Civil Rights Movement. So I bought Eyes on the Prize from PBS.
zazzle.com aaregistry.com
I should have screened it myself first. I had forgotten that it included the graphic image of Emmitt Till’s body, the pictures of the strange fruit hanging from southern lynching trees. But most of the first hour was about courage and strength and organizing. Our conversations since then, as well as her frequent singing of Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, reassure me that the movie, though strong medicine, was helpful to her.
After we came home from the rally and march, I told Amanda that many of the old people she saw there had been part of the Civil Rights Movement she learned about in the movie. They had marched, sat in at lunch counters, been the first black kids at all-white schools, gone to jail for the cause. And she said, “This might be wrong to say, but they were lucky. I wish I could have been there and seen how it was. I wish I could be part of it.”
Arlington, VA sit-in. crmvet.org
She has the idealism of so many children, the fierce desire to help, to do something that matters. When Joe can’t be home to watch her on Thursday nights, she rides the HOME Van with me. click click She’s happy as long as she gets to distribute candles and batteries, and she connects with polite friendliness to everyone she encounters.
I assured her the struggle is not over. There’s still plenty of work to be done, plenty of justice yet to be achieved. Who knows what Amanda will become – I can see her as a comedian, a child-care worker, a track star. I will be delighted if she grows up to be competent, kind and reasonably happy, with a life full of challenges and joys. And just maybe she will join the community of those who work for justice.
Sep 13, 2012
The first time I married I was twenty-one. I married a French-Canadian man I had known eight days, and I became Mme. Lessard. The second time I married I was fifty-two. I married a man I had known four years, and I remained Elizabeth McCulloch.
The first marriage lasted fifteen months, until I moved from Montreal back to Ann Arbor with our 3-month-old son. I delayed getting a divorce to protect myself from another impulsive marriage. But when I finished college and applied for law school I wanted my own name. So I filed for divorce and a name change.
By that time I was a full-force feminist. I wasn’t going to give up my husband’s name and take back my father’s. Instead, I took a name from my late mother’s side. I remembered her telling me that her grandmother McCulloch was a suffragist. With all those syllables, Elizabeth McCulloch sounds strong and determined, a name not to be ignored. So I changed my name, and Elizabeth McCulloch I have been ever since.
In the courtroom it only takes a moment to change your name. In reality, it takes years. At first you don’t recognize it. A law professor calls the roll. There is a silence, and then you say, “Oh, that’s me.” You sign your name and absent-mindedly use the old one, the way you write the wrong year on a check in January.
It was a few years after the divorce that I learned I had chosen the wrong grandmother. Chambliss was the suffragist. McCulloch was the daughter of the Confederacy who hid in a cave and ate rats during the siege of Vicksburg. No slouch, certainly, but I would not knowingly have named myself for a Confederate hero.
CIVILIANS UNDER FIRE AT VICKSBURG. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
FRANCIS MILLET’S PAINTING OF FOURTH MINNESOTA INFANTRY REGIMENT ENTERING VICKSBURG. MINNESOTA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS
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By the time I discovered my mistake, however, the name was mine. It had blended into the new woman I was becoming. I still struggled with self-doubt, and was still a chameleon in love, coloring myself to match each man. But at home I was the only decider, and at work I had to assert my client’s cause. I was learning enough about a particular piece of the world – poor people in the justice system – to hold my own with the opinionated and knowledgeable men of my family.
Name changes run in my family. My father rejected his father’s surname and took his mother’s, changing from Jacobs to Eder. My nephew did the same, going from Eder to Garcia. My sister Luli changed from Eder to Gray, my mother’s maiden name.
When we adopted our granddaughter Amanda she was eight. We didn’t think she should or would want to change her name, but on the other hand, we didn’t want her to feel we were unwilling to share names with her. With great delicacy, we told her that the adoption judge could change her name if she wanted him to. She didn’t hesitate. “I want him to name me Jasmine Victoria Barnhill.” We get the straight-face medal for not laughing. We explained that she can take that name when she is eighteen, but in the adoption she could only choose our names. She decided to keep her name.
I began writing fiction years ago, and thought I would use the pseudonym Elizabeth Gladly, a name inspired by Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Jolley. That way I could protect my privacy from the hordes of fans who would want to follow my every move, and I could write honestly without jeopardizing my professional standing. But when I retired, I didn’t have to think about professional standing anymore, and I’ve long since given up fantasies of hordes of fans.
My husband Joe married Elizabeth McCulloch. I don’t recall discussing it; I don’t think it ever occurred to him that I would change my name. We get junk mail addressed to Joseph McCulloch or Elizabeth Jackson. But people who know us know our names.
We tempt the fates if we say never, but I believe I’ll never change my name again. It is part of me the way food and drink, the air we breathe and the life we live become part of us. I am Elizabeth McCulloch.
Jun 15, 2012
(The information below, as well as the photographs of ancient sheela-na-gigs, comes from Eamon P. Kelly, Sheela-na-gigs, Origins and Functions. 1996. Country House, Dublin. It’s available used from Amazon; I couldn’t find it anywhere else.)
Have you ever seen Celtic Woman, the wildly popular Irish music group? They are five young women: wispy, sweet-voiced fairies in flowing diaphanous gowns. Though the membership of the group changes, the face on all their albums remains the same – a fresh-faced redhead with a flirtatious smile half-concealed by her long curly locks.
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Celtic Woman is to Irish culture as the Kingston Trio were to folk music. Lush instrumentals soar behind them; their movements and facial expressions are carefully choreographed. They perform at night in old Irish castles lit by flaming torches, with dry ice sending fog into the air. But if you visit those castles and look carefully, you may find a different Celtic woman, earthier and more vital than these five, despite her 900 years.
Sheela-na-gigs are carved into the cornerstones and keystones of Irish churches and castles. Their legs are spread and their hands point to or hold open the vulva. The figures are emaciated, with big heads. Breasts, if any, are small. The meaning of the name is uncertain; it may mean old hag of the breasts, or old woman on her hunkers.
Sheela-na-gigs seem to have evolved from ancient exhibitionist friezes in Ireland and along pilgrimage routes in Europe. The grotesque bodies with swollen vulva showed Hell’s punishment for lust, a sin particularly attributed to women.
The Church considered the Irish sinful and licentious, and disapproved of their married priests, as well as their customary laws on divorce and remarriage. The Norman invasion of Ireland in 1146 was part of Rome’s attempt to rein in the Irish church. The sheela-na-gigs, single figures carved on blocks, began to appear in the next century, first on the cornerstones of churches, and later on keystones of castles above the entrance, apparently as a protective figure. From the 17th century onward many were deliberately destroyed, and only about a hundred remain. These have been well-rubbed around the vulva, indicating they were considered fertility symbols.
Eamon Kelly says “It is clear that a deliberate effort has been made to represent sheela-na-gigs as grotesque, hideous and scary.”
I guess it’s in the eye of the beholder. I like the lady with the braids – but is that a moustache, or teeth? This other one looks quite contented, and given the position of the fingers of her left hand, may be about to be positively blissful.
I never liked the crotch shots in Hustler magazine; their airbrushed smiles and curves seemed unconnected to the wrinkly folds and openings below, as though the women had no idea what was going on down there. But I love the sheela-na-gigs. To me they say “This is mine, like it or lump it.”
Our sexual organs are hidden from view, and many young women may not know what they look like. When I was fourteen, about a year after I started my period, I decided to try tampons. Though I had examined the little drawing on the Tampax instructions, I didn’t realize there were three different holes. With great difficulty and a lot of pain I inserted the tampon in my urethra. I knew something was wrong but didn’t know what until I tried to pee and the tampon emerged soaked with urine. Fifty years later the memory still makes me squirm.
The word pudenda derives from pudere, Latin for “to be ashamed.” In the early 1970’s feminists celebrated female sexuality. In our consciousness-raising-cum-baby-group in Ann Arbor our bible was Our Bodies, Ourselves. We were determined to overcome shame and self-consciousness. With a hand mirror and a transparent plastic speculum, and a lot of laughter, we took turns trying to see our cervices.
click
My sister Luli has spent a lifetime being outrageous. One Christmas she gave me a delicately molded silver pendant of a vagina dentata. (A toothed vagina, and you don’t want to know.) It resembled a shark’s mouth. I wore it for about an hour, but I had to take it off – it felt too hostile.
When I told Luli of my discovery of sheela-na-gigs, she naturally had to make some, out of Sculpey® baking clay. Mine is delightfully exuberant. I used to hide it in a drawer, but now that Amanda is older I keep it on my desk. I have given her a hand mirror. I hope she will explore every part of her body, and rejoice in her sexual self.
Mar 2, 2012
For your amusement and edification, here is a compilation of anecdotes, quotations, and a bit of poetry in honor of Women’s History Month. At the end of this post I’ve included links to buy the books I used.
Mehitabel Haskell, speaking at the Worcester Convention, October 15, 1851:
“…This meeting, as I understand it, was called to discuss Woman’s Rights. Well, I do not pretend to know exactly what woman’s rights are; but I do know that I have groaned for forty years, yea, for fifty years, under a sense of woman’s wrongs. I know that even when a girl, I groaned under the idea that I could not receive as much instruction as my brothers could. I wanted to be what I felt I was capable of becoming, but opportunity was denied me. I rejoice in the progress that has been made. I rejoice that so many women are here; it denotes that they are waking up to some sense of their situation…” (Tanner, Leslie B.,ed. Voices from Women’s Liberation, p.63. Signet. New York.1970)
VICTORIAN SCHOOLGIRLS SCHOOLGIRLS IN AFGHANISTAN
Sojourner Truth, speaking at the Broadway Tabernacle, September 6, 1853:
“…Now, women do not ask half of a kingdom, but their rights, and they don’t get them. When she comes to demand them, don’t you hear how sons hiss their mothers like snakes, because they ask for their rights; and can they ask for anything less? … But we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming. Women don’t get half as much rights as they ought to; we want more, and we will have it…”
(Tanner, p. 73)
PHOTOBUCKET.COM by WOMAN-HEART
Reverend Olympia Brown was the first woman ordained by the Universalist Church. In 1867 Lucy Stone asked her to go to Kansas to work for suffrage there: a referendum was coming up on a constitutional amendement granting suffrage to Blacks and women. She tells us about that summer and fall:
“Kansas was just then emerging from the great struggle for freedom which culminated in the civil war. Many of her men had been killed… The crops that season had been destroyed by grass hoppers. Many of the pioneers were suffering from malaria and other diseases incident to the settlement of a new country. There were few public conveyances, either by rail or stage or livery. The outlook was not encouraging. [The party had made the speaking engagements without any knowledge of the country, and they were often fifty miles apart]…. In many places there were no roads, only a trail across the prairie and sometimes not even that. Under such circumstances, to lose our way became almost a daily experience… But on we went, and the most remarkable thing about the campaign was that notwithstanding all these difficulties, the speaker did not, during the whole four months, miss one appointment.” [The amendment was rejected.] (Stratton, Joanna L. Pioneer Women:Voices from the Kansas Frontier, p. 261. Simon and Shuster, NY. 198l.)
KONZA PRAIRIE TRAIL, KANSAS RAKING AND BURNING GRASSHOPPERS
Mississippi Winter IV, by Alice Walker:
My father and mother both
used to warn me
that “a whistling woman and a crowing
hen would surely come to
no good end.” And perhaps I should
have listened to them.
But even at the time I knew
that though my end probably might
not
be good
I must whistle
like a woman undaunted
until I reached it.
(Walker, Alice, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, p. 22. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. New York. 1984.)
At the founding meeting of The National Colored Labor Union in 1869, the needs of working women were ignored, and the women challenged the group. A delegate from Newport, Rhode Island, spoke:
“…Are we to be left out? we who have suffered all the evils of which you justly complain? Are our daughters to be denied the privilege of honestly earning a livelihood by being excluded from the milliner, dressmaker, tailor, or dry good store, in fact every calling that an intelligent, respectable industrious female may strive to obtain, and this merely because her skin is dusky? These privileges are all denied colored females of Newport. However well they may be fitted for other positions, they are compelled to accept the meanest drudgeries or starve… Therefore the colored women of Newport would ask that you remember us in your deliberations so that when you mount the chariot of equality, in industrial and mechanical pursuits, we may at least be permitted to cling to the wheels.” (Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter, p.69. Bantam Books. Toronto. 1984.)
NATIONAL COLORED LABOR UNION CONVENTION
Ida B.Wells, a Black journalist from Memphis, is best-known as leader of a campaign against lynching. “It was 1884, and Ida B. Wells took her seat in the “Ladies Coach” of a train bound for Memphis from Woodstock, Tennessee. But by that year, customs in the South were changing. A conductor demanded that Wells leave the first class section for the smoking car. When she refused, the conductor attempted to force her from her seat – a mistake, he quickly realized when he felt a vicelike bite on the back of his hand. He called more conductors to his aid, and to the standing cheers of the White passengers on the train, the three men dragged [her] out of the car.”
Wells sued the railroad. She won, and the railroad appealed. They offered her more money than the court had awarded her if she would just not contest the appeal. She refused. The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the award. (Giddings, p. 22)
IDA B. WELLS
Here is an anonymous pioneer on the Kansas frontier, speaking about the marriage vows:
I already had ideas of my own about the husband being the head of the family. I had taken the precaution to sound him on ‘obey’ in the marriage pact and found he did not approve of the term. Approval or no approval, that word ‘obey’ would have to be left out. I had served my time of tutelage to my parents as all children are supposed to. I was a woman now and capable of being the other half of the head of the family. His word and my word would have equal strength.” (Stratton, p. 58)
“Ella May Wiggins was born in 1889 in Appalachia. At sixteen, she married a logger. A few years later, he was crippled in an accident, leaving her the sole provider for a family of nine children, four of whom died of whooping cough. She moved the family to cotton mill country and worked for ten years as a spinner. She joined the National Textile Workers Union, engaged in ferocious struggle with the company bosses and used her own songs for organizing. In 1929, at the bloodiest moment in the union struggle, she was shot and killed on her way to a union meeting at the mill in Gastonia, North Carolina.” (Bernikow, Louise, ed. The World Split Open, p. 309. Vintage Books. New York. 1974)
Revolutionary Dreams by Nikki Giovanni:
i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i’d be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she’s natural
i would have a revolution
(Giovanni, Nikki, Re:Creation,, p.20. Broadside Press. Detroit.1970)
Septima Poinsette Clark was born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, and died in 1987. She was an unsung hero of the civil rights movement, who established citizenship schools throughout the South, recruiting hundreds of teachers who taught thousands of others to read, to register to vote, and to stand up for their rights. She said,
“I think that the work the women did during the time of civil rights is what really carried the movement along. The women carried forth the ideas. I think the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn’t started to speak up.
Women need to grab the men by the collar and do more. That’s the way I feel. We need women who will get these men by the collar and work with them. We still have a hard time getting them to see what it means to vote.” (Lanker, Brian. I Dream a World, p. 164. Stewart, Tabori, and Chang. New York, 1989.)
SEPTIMA POINSETTE CLARK. IMAGE BY BRIAN LANKER
Johnnie Tillmon, born 1926 in Arkansas, is the founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization. She says:
“I got this idea of organizing women on welfare who lived in the project. We stopped a lot of harassment. There used to be a time when they would look in your dirty clothes hamper for men’s clothes. They used to come to your house at midnight and they used to pump the kids, “Where’s your daddy?”
If your kids look clean or your house looks clean, then you must be doing something fraudulent, because they understand that you really shouldn’t be able to do what you do with the money you get. So when you trade a man for the man, you still got somebody telling you how to live your life.
There’s six white women to every black one on AFDC in this country. But nobody ever talks about that. I met a group of white women from Kentucky who said, ‘You cannot leave us out of this organization. We’re having the same problem with our welfare department that you have as a black woman.’ So that’s why the organization was made up out of everybody.
I believe in rhetoric to a certain extent. But you can only rhetoricize so long and then you have to deal with fact. Now, I can do as much rhetoricizing as the next person. But sometimes I had to start a mess to get to the facts.” (Lanker, p.92)
JOHNNIE TILLMON. IMAGE FROM BLACK KOS at DAILYKOS.COM
This is from comments by Audre Lorde, the poet, at a conference in 1979:
“As women, we have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” (Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider, p. 112. The Crossing Press. Freedom, CA. 1984)
THE MASTER’S HOUSE. IMAGE BY RIYANNICOLE at PHOTOBUCKET.COM
Remember? by Alice Walker:
Remember me?
I am the girl
with the dark skin
whose shoes are thin
I am the girl
with rotted teeth
I am the dark
rotten-toothed girl
with the wounded eye
and the melted ear.
I am the girl
holding their babies
cooking their meals
sweeping their yards
washing their clothes
Dark and rotting
and wounded, wounded.
I would give
to the human race
only hope.
I am the woman
with the blessed
dark skin
I am the woman
with teeth repaired
I am the woman
with the healing eye
the ear that hears.
I am the woman: Dark,
repaired, healed
Listening to you.
I would give
to the human race
only hope.
I am the woman
offering two flowers
whose roots
are twin
Justice and Hope.
Let us begin.
(Walker, p.1)
Buying the books:
Tanner, Stratton, Giddings, Giovanni, and Lanker are available from the Independent Online Booksellers Association. click
For Walker and Lorde try the Independent Booksellers Association website click. They will hook you up with a bookstore near you, which can order it if it’s not in stock.
Powell’s Books has all but Bernikow and Giovanni. click
Amazon has lots of dealers selling the Bernikow. click
