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Sunshine for
Women NOW or Never ToC | Home |
Greetings, I take great honor and pleasure in serving with Mary Roberson as your co-president for 1997-98. I am wonderfully pleased with the chapter's tenacity and enthusiasm in serving women and humanity and Tidewater, nationally and worldwide. I look forward to working with you, the chapter members, in accomplishing our goals and tackling the many political challenges that lie ahead.
On Oct 18, M. S. will organize a goal-planning session for 1998/99. We will develop our 2-year agenda for activism, recruitment, fund-raising, training, coalition-building, etc. along with our support of National's platform. I ask each of you to clear your schedule to participate in this important event.
To all in-active members, I ask that you continue to renew your membership and to support us financially. I also ask each of you to attend one of our monthly meetings before the year is out. Let us hear your vision.
P. C. deserves tremendous applause for producing a well-researched and written newsletter. Pat, thank you for your excellent service to the organization.
Again my appreciation to all. Let's stand together, tall and shoulders-wide, and move forward to improve the quality of life of women and humanity.
On a personal note, I'd like to express my condolences to M. R. on the loss of her brother-in-law. I also hope that C. H.'s son makes a speedy recovery from his automobile accident.
M. J.
To commemorate the Memorial Day holiday, this month we will recognize women trade unionists and working-class women's contributions to feminism. At the September meeting, we will host a program on Women and the Trade Union Movement. Come, celebrate this part of women's heritage and find out about past and present female trade union activists and what the unions have done to help women.
M. S. is still compiling information in order to write a history of Tidewater NOW. If you have information to share, please contact Tidewater NOW.
Volunteers are still needed for the Greater Richmond Pride Festival on September 14, 1-6 pm in the Carillon in Byrd Park .
Volunteers are also needed to staff the NOW booth at the Suffolk Peanut Festival (October 10 to October 13).
If you have not yet contacted your legislators regarding pending bills, please do so. Many of the items which appeared in previous newsletters can still be acted upon. Often, a legislator only received a handful of pieces of mail (hand-written snail mail is the most influential type of mail) on a particular bill. Only a few letters can make a big difference.
George Sweet, Jerry Fallwell protege and pastor of the several thousand member local Atlantic shores Baptist church, which has recently been investigated for misusing its tax-exempt status for actively supporting specific political candidates, was asked to resign by the church's board of deacons. Word has it that Sweet had an affair with a young woman in the church some time ago. When he approached the woman again, her husband became angry and took the matter to the board. Mark Early, Republican candidate for attorney general is a member of Atlantic Shores church.
Information from Virginia Pilot/ Ledger Star article Aug. 16, 1997 and from a former church member submitted by M. F.
Women are still relegated to the lowest wage, most unrewarding, unskilled jobs. Traditionally, progress and job security for such workers have only been achieved by forming strong trade unions. Many women have been and continue to be committed trade unionists. On October 18, there will be an international mobilization in support of the rights of Nike production workers - why not use this as a great excuse to refuse to buy your kids $60 tennis shoes when the $20 version is just as good?
Multibillionaire Nike founder and CEO Philip Knight, sixth-richest man in America, made his fortune by marketing high-status athletic shoes to image-conscious Americans. Nike itself never built a factory or made a single shoe: Nike contracts out all manufacturing jobs.
As labor costs rose and workers formed stronger unions in Korea and Taiwan, Nike's contractors moved production to Indonesia and China, and more recently to Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. There have been repeated reports of Korean and Taiwanese contractors hitting, verbally abusing and humiliating workers, 90% of whom are young women. Workers often have not been paid already-inadequate minimum wages, provided mandated benefits, or allowed minimally humane breaks during long hours of overtime that can double the normal 40-hour week in Indonesia. One group of Indonesian contract workers who had to strike in 1992 just to win legally mandated minimum wages, $2.50 per day, is still fighting to get its jobs back. A former factory manager estimates that the direct labor cost in a typical $60 shoe is all of $1.20. Indeed, bribes to foreign government officials alone and advertising alone far exceeds direct labor costs.
Some "angry white men" blame the advances of women and minorities for their difficulties of finding a job that pays enough to support a family. But they seem to forget that they are competing in a global market place where corporations are powerful enough to transfer jobs to countries where workers earn less in a day than most Americans earn in 15 minutes. Companies have a lot of incentives to move jobs overseas - and not just low-wage, unskilled, manufacturing jobs. World-class scientists are available in the nations of the former Soviet Union for wages that would keep Americans in poverty, Indian accountants process computerized company financial records for a fraction of the cost of personnel in Western European nations, and Third World computer programmers zip software around the world at the speed of light by using the American-government developed Internet.
Economics and jobs, both at home and abroad, are feminist issues. Even the staunch capitalist, Henry Ford, paid his workers well because he knew that workers must be paid enough to afford the products they produce or there will be no market for the manufacturer's goods. Until corporate executives again learn this lesson, living standards for middle-class and working-class Americans will continue to stagnate or deteriorate. Eventually the fortunes of the well-to-do will follow the fortunes of the American middle-class.
Excerpts from an article in the LA Weekly Jun 19, 1997 "Just Doing It: Inside Nike's New-Age Sweatshop" by David Moberg and it came to me via a posting to the FEMECON-L list serve.
"Gentlemen,
It is time to update our data base regarding the state of the 19th Amendment. You will recall that the last survey which included a question on women's suffrage resulted in 80% of us advocating (in confidentiality) the repeal of this Amendment. This survey also will be held in confidence, so feel free to 'vote your heart' and not to concern yourself with 'political correctness' or what the feminists say."
Remember, if your right to vote wasn't a source of power for women, men would not be trying to take it away from us."
Quote from http://fathers.zq.com/19thsrvy.txt, a Men's Rights website.
Men's misogyny manifests itself in many ways in various times and in various cultures. Verbal Violence Against Women means using words that sting and burn to control women and includes belittling, interrupting, ignoring, name-calling, and using controlling words and behavior.
Numerous Women's Property Acts were passed in the second half of the nineteenth century permitting women to own, control, buy, sell, and bequeath property in their own names. The Feminist Chronicles, 1953 - 1993, Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, Women's Graphics, 1993
Compiled by the majority staff of the Senate
Judiciary Committee (July 31, 1990)
The most serious crimes against women are rising at a significantly faster rate than total crimes: during the past 10 years, rape rates have risen nearly four times as fast as the total crime rate.
Taken from the inforM website. Questions or comments should be directed to inform-editor@umail.umd.edu.
Historically, male trade unions and union activists have had a mixed relationship with their female counterparts. Just as white working men felt threatened by black or Chinese working men, they also felt threatened by working women of all races. Many believed that women not only took men's jobs and reduced their wages, but that women wage earners were "out of their natural sphere."
Only when men did not feel threatened by women's union activism did men support them. For example, when men and women had close family or civic ties (such as the Irish dominated Troy laundresses' in 1865), when men benefited directly from women's increased wages or decreased working hours, when women were assisting in organizing men, and when women organized other women in female-dominated industries, men supported their efforts.
Women were slow to become unionists for a variety of reasons.
One of the earliest successful women's trade unions arose in Troy, NY among the shirt-collar ironers. At the time, Troy was a major industrial center specializing in shirt, collar, and cuff manufacturing and the iron industry. This women's union of relatively skilled women workers had at least 400 members and lasted for almost 6 years (1864-1869) - longer than many men's unions at the time. The women raised their wages to a level almost equal to the average earnings of working men. Their union was crushed only when the shirt-collar manufacturing cartel choose to support their contractors efforts to break the union.
"We Are Nothing but Women: Irish Working Women in Troy" by Carole Turbin, found in Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, Women of America: A History, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1979
Labor leaders, male and female alike, in both her time and ours, regard Fannie Sellins, a contemporary of the much better-known Mother Jones, as a leading union organizer and a heroine of the labor movement.
Widowed and with four children to support, Fannie Mooney took a job in a garment shop. Eventually she moved to Chicago where she became involved in the unionism. She helped organize the United Garment Workers of America, became secretary of her garment workers' local, and in 1911, participated in a major strike.
Later, because of her outstanding abilities, she became an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America. While working in the nonunion coal fields of West Virginia, she was charged with "inciting to riot" and was sent to prison. After serving six months of her sentence, she was pardoned by President Woodrow Wilson.
In 1917 Sellins moved to New Kensington, Pa. to work as an organizer and troubleshooter for UMWA District 5 where she organized miners in the Allegheny Valley, a notoriously anti-union area. It was known as the Black Valley because of "the vehement, and often violent, opposition that union organizers met at the hands of mine owners. Due largely to Sellins efforts, many thousands of miners and other workers in this district were organized."
She spread the tenets of Americanism among immigrant miners, and as she changed their expectations, they became disenchanted with their poor living conditions and began to demand more for their labor. Understanding that no laborer's household could sustain a strike unless they had the backing of the women, the "Angel of Mercy" went into the miners' homes, talked to their wives, took care of the sick, and helped in other ways.
Sellins was "a thorn in the side of the Allegheny Valley coal operators." A marked woman who could have "set her own price to move out of the valley" she refused to betray or desert the miners. The operators openly threatened to "get her."
Although eye-witness accounts of the events of the night of August 26, 1919 exist, we know the following facts: a little while before the night shift began at the Allegheny Steel Company in West Natrona, Pa., Sellins and Joseph Starzeleski were murdered with the complicity of the police.
In 1920, UMWA District 5 members erected a memorial at Sellins' grave in Union Cemetery at Arnold, Pa. The inscription reads:
"In Memory of Fannie Sellins and Joe Starzeleski, killed by the enemies of organized labor, near the Allegheny Steel and Coal Company, at West Natrona, Pa."Area miners, steelworkers, and other union workers have conducted memorial services, labor day celebrations, and other events at the memorial site over the years since then.
In 1989, 70 years after her death, Sellins' grave was designated a Pennsylvania state historic landmark and an historic marker was erected which read:
"An organizer for the United Mine Workers, Fannie Sellins, was brutally gunned down in Brackenridge on the eve of a nationwide steel strike on August 26, 1919.To learn more about her and other women active in trade unionism, visit The Illinois Labor History Society website at http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs, write them at 28 E. Jackson, Chicago, IL 60604, or phone (312) 663-4107Her devotion to the workers' cause made her an important symbolic figure. Both she and Joseph Starzelski, a miner who also was killed that day, lie buried here in Union Cemetery, where a monument to the pair was erected."
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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