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In a controversial and an historic move, San Francisco will require contractors who provide goods and services for the city government, such as office supplies and banking, to offer the same package of benefits to same-sex couples as to married heterosexual couples. Details of the implications of the ordinance have yet to be spelled out. For example, are airlines who use the San Francisco airport and who pay city tax for the use of the airport included? How 'bout non-profit organizations? Stay tuned for future developments.
AP story from the Dec 30, 1996 Virginia Pilot courtesy of M. R.
According to research conducted by Dorothy Espilage of Indiania University, Bloomington, violence by today's youth begins in the home. Today's violent youth are not learning non-violent methods of problem resolution in the home. Rather, their home lives are filled with violence and they learn to use violence to solve problems. These youth carry their violence outside of the home into schools, workplaces, and places of recreation. Espilage concludes that if we want a less violent society, we must stop violence in the home. Parents also need to take a larger part in their children's lives and teach them non-violent problem solving skills.
USA Today, Aug 12, 1996 courtesy of M. R.
The fireworks in the Republican Party that began over a year ago between religious extremists and party moderates escalated in January with the election of hard right-winger James Nicholson to succeed Haley "Good 'Ole Boy" Barbour as the Republican National Committee party chair. This most contentious national chair election in party history probably ended any hope of the party stopping its ideological infights. Instead, the party will continue its descent into extremism.
GOP In-Fighting Update 140 (1/20/97)
Rep. Cass Ballenger of North Carolina on why he voted for Gingrich as Speaker of the House: "In my considered opinion, there is nobody who can hold together the left wing of our party and the right wing of our party except Speaker Newt Gingrich." Sounds like the Republicans are in deep do-do.
From US News and World Report, Jan 20, 1997
The Revernd Jerry Falwell's Liberty University fended off the threat of foreclosure in November by agreeing to pay bond holders a partial payment totaling $1.1 million. Bondholders earlier rejected Falwell's offer to by back over $20 million worth of debt for less than $7 million. Seems religious right extremists are good at donating to political organizations and policy formulating groups but neglect educational institutions.
Church and State, a publications of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Jan 1997 A message to our white, female readers: Only 5% of the world's population is Caucasian, the remaining 95% of the world's people are people of color. Any man who can justify believing that he is superior to 95% of the people on this planet because of the color of his skin probably has little trouble justify a belief that he is superior to the 2.5% of the world's population who are white women. The next victim of prejudice and bigotry in a racist society may be you.
Proponents of parental notification/consent laws assert that such laws will decrease unwanted teen pregnancies, protect teen's health, and promote strong families.
Fact One: Parental notification/ consent laws do not decrease unwanted teen pregnancies.
Seven ways to help prevent unwanted teenage pregnancy:
From a brochure by the Association of Virginia Planned Parenthood Affiliates, 5622 Columbia Pike, Falls Church, Va 22041 submitted by S. B.
The STOP RACISM NOW Task Force has decided to re-form. Its first action was to attend the Old Dominion University Lecture Series on January 21 when Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), spoke. The Center has "for 25 years dogged the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, and now the militant militia movement" (Virginian Pilot 1/19/97). Dees' topic was "Teaching Tolerance."
To help secular & non-secular educators teach tolerance, the SPLC developed a kit by that name. For more info , write to SPLC, 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, Al., 36104.
In keeping with the goals of National NOW to bring women of color into the mainstream of American life, in every way, the task force was formed to take political actions and educate ourselves and others. We believe that the issues of sex, race, and class are inextricably intertwined and that an understanding of this is vital to alleviating the oppression which an intolerant, selfish, and power hungry patriarchy imposes.
To this end, the STOP Racism NOW Task Force will present a program on February 18 (7 pm) entitled "Sex, Race, and Class: How Aware Are We?" at the YWCA in Norfolk. We will periodically inform you of our findings.
The Task Force cannot hope to vigorously pursue goals without your help. Please let us know about action issues, ideas, education materials, or community events. Support us. Join us. The experience of a woman of color - for good or ill - may or may not be YOUR experience, but the concerns of any woman must be the concerns of ALL women. (In sisterhood, M. F.)
Oxford University Press is publishing the 40 volume series The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers. The books cover many genres, biography, autobiography, novels, magazine serial novels, short stories, newspaper columns and articles, essays, letters, journals, poetry, plays, and much more. Authors range from the well-known (Ida B. Well-Barnett) to the obscure (A. E. Johnson). Both topics that all women can relate to such as, love, marriage, family, friends, husband, children, and jobs, and topics that are of special interest to African American women, such as the special problems of Black women in a racist society are covered. I urge all women to read one or more volumes in this series and I urge all readers to encourage local librarians to include this series in their collections.
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981),
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984),
Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989)
Yearning, Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990),
Black Looks: Race and Representation, A Woman's Mourning Song (poems) (1993),
Sisters of the Yam: Black Women & Self-Recovery (1993)
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994),
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (1994), and
killing rage (1995)
African-American feminist theorist and historian bell hook's ground-breaking Ain't I a Woman exposed Black men's sexism - and white men's and white women's complicity in Black men's sexism by their unquestioning acceptance of Black men's sexist arguments about Black women, Black women's natural submissiveness, and Black women's sexuality.
She also discusses ways in which sexism and racism combine to make African American women's lives particularly retched. Specifically, hooks was one of the first writers to address the use of rape, both the actual rape of Black women by white men and the myth of the rape of white women by Black men, as a method of racial and sexual control.
hooks' later analyses broadened feminist understanding of oppression to include not just sex and race, but also class, age, ethnicity, physical abilities, and physical looks. Her insights enrich our understanding not only of sexism and of racism, but also of human nature itself. Every feminist, every student of human nature, Black and white, female or male, should read hooks's works.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), a teacher-turned-journalist and co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech , launched the antilynching movement in 1892, after a mob murdered three Memphis storeowners, one a close friend. She urged African-Americans to fight back, with guns if necessary but preferably by economic pressure. Spurred by her editorials, thousands migrated while those who stayed boycotted the newly opened streetcar line. She showed that interracial affairs were often behind many accusations of rape. Her newspaper articles on this subject sparked a city riot and while in New York she was encouraged not to return to Memphis for fear of her life.
Wells-Barnett transformed herself from a local agitator to an international crusader. Her pamphlets, Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895) analyzed the economic roots of lynching and linked the violence against Black men to the sexual exploitation of Black women. During the 1890s she toured the American north and west.
Wells-Barnett advocated Black militancy and self-help and hoped to turn public opinion against the south by portraying southern gentlemen, not as protectors of virtuous white womanhood against savage Black men, but rather as lustful rapists of Black women and the hypocritical murderers of innocent Black men. During her second tour of Britain (1894), she turned antilynching into a cause celebre among British reformers, and American white men found that their tolerance of racial violence earned them the reputation of unmanly savages in the eyes of the "civilized" world.
Slowly Wells-Barnett's campaign gained momentum. In 1896 the National Association of Colored Women took up the issue. By 1919, the 10 year old NAACP began lobbying Congress for antilynching legislation. Also in that year the white North Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs passed an antilynching resolution. But white support for the measure remained low for another decade.
Then in 1930, under the leadership of Jessie Daniel Ames, founder of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), white, Southern women joined the cause in a big way. These white women came to understand the link between the racist oppression of Black men through lynching and women through rape, and the sexist oppression of white and Black women by many means.
Although the antilynching legislation was never adopted by Congress, by 1942 the battle for public opinion had been won. The ground was laid for the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s and the Black women's liberation movement of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to these women freedom fighters, Black and white. None of us are free until we are all free.
Black Women in America, An Historical Encyclopedia , v. 1, A-L, Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, In. U. Press, 1993, p 38 - 41
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Sunshine for Women encourages you to support our feminist sisters by purchasing their books, reading them, disseminating the ideas they contain, but most especially, by making their book available to our sisters, our daughters, and the community at large by requesting your school library, your public library, and area bookstores to carry their books. Remember it is not enough to write literature, history, and theology, we must pass these works on to future generations. Help us to preserve these works for a new generation by putting them on library bookshelves.
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