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Born in Barnstable, Mass, Warren was probably the most influential female patriot during the Revolutionary War era. Like other women of her time, her formal childhood education was limited to the elementary level but she was allowed to attend her brother's lessons. Self-taught like other educated women of the time, she read many of her brother's (political and history) books including works by Cicero, Shakespeare, John Lock, Alexander Pope, and Walter Raleigh.
Through her often satirical plays and pamphlets, this first patriot playwright exhorted the colonists to break with England. Her play The Adultaeur (1772), which was serialized in the Boston newspaper The Massachusetts Spy, was one of the earliest propaganda pieces of the era. Since she was married to James Warren, president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, her home was a meeting place for the leading figures of the Revolution including George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, to whom she was not only a hostess but a confidant.
Her writings during the French Revolution (1790s) indicate that she understood, contrary to the understanding of most men of her era, that the American Revolutionary War would have an impact far beyond the economic and political domains, that it would produce a deep and profound shift in Western ideology toward democracy and egalitarianism.
She is best remembered for History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, (3 volumes, 1805) the only contemporary history of the American Revolutionary War from a Republican perspective -a lively and candid description of events and people of which she had much personal knowledge. The History remained an authoritative source on this era for decades.
Later in life, this playwright, poet, pamphleteer, historian, and letter writer chafed at the restrictions imposed on her due to her sex and she became a staunch feminist. She argued for educational reform for women and noted that artificial restrictions on women's achievements harmed both women and men and that such restrictions were a violation of the natural rights espoused during the Revolution.
Phallus: fancy word for penis
Phallacy: a fallacy centered on the phallus (penis)
Phalleocentric: phallus centered
Christian Identity members believe that white Christians are the direct descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, which they believe migrated to northern Europe. Numbering only about 40,000 members, Christian Identity shares many beliefs with classic Christian fundamentalism and, increasingly, they are Pentecostals. (Pentecostals believe in "spiritual gifts" such as speaking in tongues and faith healing, while most fundamentalists do not.)
Of the approx. 400 militia-type, paramilitary groups operating in the US, the vast majority of their members are Christians with Christian Identity adherents leading the way. Yet, these racist, sexist, gun-toting religious fanatics are not the most extreme members of the religious wrong.
A patriot and a feminist who was educated in the classics with her brother, Murray began writing in the 1790s to support herself, her ill husband, and her child. She encouraged Americans to think of themselves as Americans, not Francophiles or Anglophiles, and to emphasize education in English works as opposed to education in the Latin and Greek classics.
Considering women and men intellectually equal, she advocated intellectual independence for single and married women in essays published in Massachusetts Magazine (1790), 2 years before Mary Wollstonecraft published Vindication of the Rights of Women. Like the better known Englishwoman, she advocated education for women so that women could be self-supporting. Believing that if we women had enough respect for ourselves as people, we would not see marriage as a haven or as a way to gain respectability. She collected these essays into 3 volumes entitled The Gleaner (1798)
Under the noms de plume Constantia, Mr. Vergilius, Zephaniah, Doubtful, and Penepole Airy, Murray wrote essays, plays and novels to entertain and to enlighten.
For the first time in at least 150 years, her work has recently been published in Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray as part of the series Women Writers in English 1350-1850 by Oxford University Press. This series brings into print feminist works that have been out of print, some for hundreds of years. After generations of absence several publishers are bringing women's works into print - the first of which are the best extant feminist works. All books in this series, along with biographies of their authors, belong in our city and school libraries. Other works in the series include:
EEOC Funding
At a time when the commission may be pressing its largest sexual harassment and race & sex discrimination case ever (against the Mitsubishi auto manufacturing plant in Normal, IL) and with an increasing sexual harassment caseload, Republican leaders in Congress are, reportedly, planning to drastically cut the agency's budget for FY 97, even though the administration has requested an increase in funding. Congressional budget leaders plan to allocate the money to the Justice Department's expanded border enforcement effort.
Contact your Representative and Senators to urge them to fund an increase in the EEOC's budget so that it can adequately handle the Mitsubishi case and the increased sexual harassment caseload. If any member of your delegation is on an appropriations committee, it is important to get word to her/him as soon as possible.
Equal Opportunity Act of 1996 (H.R. 2128/S. 1085)
If it becomes law, the Dole/Canady bill would repealing affirmative action programs and allow sex discrimination.
Call your Representative and ask her/him where s/he stands on H.R. 2128. Call Senators Robb and Warner and let them know that women will not support members who vote for a bill which makes sex discrimination legal. Make this bill an issue at all of John Warner's campaign stops.
As a follow-up to the domestic violence workshop held in May, we would like to begin a local media watch campaign. But we need your help. If you see a news show that is insensitive to the issue of domestic violence, call the NOW phone line and leave a message including name of the show, date, time and channel on which the show appeared, and an identification of the speaker. If you read a newspaper article that is insensitive to the issue of domestic violence, clip it out and send it to the NOW PO box (along with the name of the date, date the article appeared, and page number).
Tim LaHaye, spouse of Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women of America, states that Michelangelo's depiction of nudity was the "forerunner of the modern humanist's demand for pornography." He also declared that humanism was the central mistake of the Renaissance.
from Church & State, a publication of American's United for the Separation of Church & State, June, 1996
In June, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) will introduce the Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban (S.1632) which will permanently bar individuals who commit serious spousal or child abuse, whether convicted of a misdemeanor or felony, from buying or possessing firearms.
Currently convicted felons are prohibited from buying guns, but domestic violence is usually prosecuted as a misdemeanor. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) forbids anyone who is subject to a restraining order for domestic abuse from buying or receiving a gun; however, many abusers obtain guns because their victims have not obtained such an order.
Some facts about guns and domestic violence:
Call, write, fax, or e-mail Senators Robb and Warner and urge them to co-sponsor and work for passage of this important measure. As Sen. Lautenberg says, "the bottom line is that batterers should not have access to guns."
The Olympic Charter proclaims that "All forms of discrimination with respect to a country or a person, whether for reasons of race, religion, politics, sex or any other, are incompatible with the Olympic Committee." Yet many countries which participate in the Olympics do not bring women team members, and one country, Iran, officially prohibits women from participating.
Several women's human rights organizations are petitioning the Olympic Committee to demand that the committee respect the charter, investigate countries that do not bring women team members, and enforce the Olympic Charter in regard to Iran's prohibition of women in the Olympics, as was done with the expulsion of South Africa.
For more information and/or a copy of a petition addressing sexual apartheid and the Olympics, write the Dr. Homa Darabi Foundation, PO Box 11049, Truckee, Ca 96162, phone (916)582-4197, or fax (916) 582-0156.
To complain to the Olympic committee, write
In June, an appeals court ruled that the "anti- obscenity" provisions of the CDA were too vague, voiding the act's provisions which would have prohibited frank and open discussion of medical and legal aspects of reproductive rights and abortion.
Several years ago, the evangelical National Religious Broadcasters held its annual meeting in a Washington, DC hotel. The hotel offered pay-per-view-in-room movies, including adult fare. After the conference, someone took the trouble to find out how many of the radio and TV evangelists took advantage of the adult movies. It seems that more than half of them did. When asked to explain, one evangelist said, "Research!"
Freedom Writer(May 1996)
sunshine@pinn.net
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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