Horrible Histories: The Suffragette's Song

I was mentioning The CBBC programme Horrible Histories to Dog Gone, this series was based on the Terry Deary book series of the same name .

Here we have the  Suffragette's Song, which I dedicate to Dog Gone:

Women's History Month - 4

In the 2012 campaign, it is a lesson of history we should learn from the 2008 presidential race.

Sarah Palin at the time, appeared to those of us not blinded by the obsessive loyalty, or driven by ideology and partisan conformity, to be a disaster, an umitigated and unqualified mistake.  There have been many women in politics and roles in government, on both the right and the left, who are not so severely flawed as Palin was and is.

I find myself wondering about the qualifications for this year's right wing candidates, and how many of them are a significant improvement.

Or NOT much of an improvement at all?

Palin just announced she would not 'close the door' on being the candidate selected by a brokered GOP convention.   IS the GOP that stupid, that desperate, that flawed?  Palin certainly hasn't appeared to learn her lessons, to improve and correct her mistakes or to strengthen her weaknesses.

Anything is possible, but those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

A dramatization of that very history lesson, one which is more accurate than say Tennessee Tea Partiers attempts to make education more dishonest, untrue, and factually INaccurate is this:

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Certainly neither of these women in right wing presidential politics, Palin or Bachmann, have the qualities that one finds in women like Hilary Clinton or Condi Rice.  It is about quality, not gender, and not ideology, that success and failure hang.

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Michele Bachmann would have had different flaws, mostly different weaknesses, but would have been in many ways a poor choice for the GOP and the Tea Party for the same reasons as Palin. The party and the voters appeared to have figured that out; Bachmann, not so much, based on her assertions throughout the campaign before she quit. I guess either God changed his mind after telling her to run for the Presidency, OR, she has been hearing voices in her head that aren't really there all these years.  I have always been deeply unconvinced, profoundly skeptical, of the premise that God likes some people, or some countries, better than others.

In any event it appears the religious right, at least some of them, wanted her out, because they did not feel that it was appropriate for a woman to fill the role that was in authority over so many men. Some of our citizens, on the right, are not fully living in the current century, when they believe such things. Heck, if you go back to the Victorian era, and further, you could successfully argue they have missed some very important eras of world history relating to strong women leaders.

Sadly, not only is the right making the same mistakes which have garnered for them record high DISapproval ratings, worse for the Republicans than the Democrats; worse for the Tea Party than the Republicans; but they are doubling down on those mistakes, going further right, hurrying faster off the cliff of extremism and over-reaching arrogance.

March Is Women's History Month - 3

These are videos from the recently held third Women in the World Summit Conference.  They provide interesting insight into the middle and recent past, and present, for women.  It represents the living and dying of women.

 

and


and in conclusion, in a speech which addresses other parts of the world as well as the EXTREMISTS on the right, the Christian would-be Taliban equivalent, THIS video is the jewel in the crown of the videos.


What Ms. Clinton addressed ranges from the trans vaginal ultrasound legislation (although not specified), and the right wing mandate to force medically inaccurate information on women, to the defunding a major source of women's health care, to THIS, where women are stoned for their choice of clothing and self-expression.  Like Santorum and the other Theocracy's candidates running for representative office, they bang on the gong of SATAN, to agitate their ultraconservative base to action.  Like Santorum and others, they are bigots, intolerant, controlling, coercive, and even sometimes violent.  And like the right, they deny anything is wrong, when it clearly IS wrong, bad, harmful, unlawful.

From Reuters and the Canadian National Post

At least 14 youths stoned to death in Iraq for wearing Western-style ‘emo’ clothes


Reuters Mar 12, 2012 – 9:55 AM ET

Mario Tama/Getty Images/Files

At least 14 bodies of youths have been brought to three hospitals in eastern Baghdad bearing signs of having been beaten to death with rocks or bricks, security and hospital sources told Reuters under condition they not be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.



.Comments Email Twitter inShare.3.By Ahmed Rasheed and Mohammed Ameer

BAGHDAD — At least 14 youths have been stoned to death in Baghdad in the past three weeks in what appears to be a campaign by Shi’ite militants against youths wearing Western-style “emo” clothes and haircuts, security and hospital sources say.
Militants in Shi’ite neighborhoods where the stonings have taken place circulated lists on Saturday naming more youths targeted to be killed if they do not change the way they dress.
The killings have taken place since Iraq’s interior ministry drew attention to the “emo” subculture last month, labeling it “Satanism” and ordering a community police force to stamp it out.
Related  ‘Honour killing’ perpetrators deserve harsher sentences, say Iraqi women
Iraqi student kills American teacher, shoots self after argument
“Emo” is a form of punk music developed in the United States. Fans are known for their distinctive dress, often including tight jeans, T-shirts with logos and distinctive long or spiky haircuts.
At least 14 bodies of youths have been brought to three hospitals in eastern Baghdad bearing signs of having been beaten to death with rocks or bricks, security and hospital sources told Reuters under condition they not be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Nine bodies were brought to hospitals in Sadr City, a vast, poor Shi’ite neighborhood, three were brought to East Baghdad’s main al-Kindi hospital and two were brought to the central morgue, medical sources said.
Six other young people, including two girls, were wounded in beatings intended as warnings, the security sources said.
“Last week I signed the death certificates of three of those young people, and the reason for death I wrote in my own hand was severe skull fractures,” a doctor at al-Kindi hospital told Reuters. “A very powerful blow to the head caused these fractures which totally smashed the skull of the victim.”
A leaflet distributed in the Shi’ite Bayaa district of east Baghdad seen by Reuters on Saturday had 24 names of youths targeted for killing.
“We strongly warn you, to all the obscene males and females, if you will not leave this filthy work within four days the punishment of God will descend upon you at the hand of the Mujahideen,” the leaflet said.
Another leaflet in Sadr City bore 20 names. “We are the Brigades of Anger. We warn you, if you do not get back to sanity and the right path, you will be killed,” it said.
In a statement last month the interior ministry said it was monitoring “the ‘emo’ phenomenon, or Satanism” which it said was spreading through schools, particularly among teenage girls.
“They wear tight clothes that bear paintings of skulls, they use school implements with skulls and wear rings in their noses and tongues as well as other weird appearances,” it said.
After reports of the stonings circulated on Iraqi media, the interior ministry said this week that no murders on its files could be blamed on the reaction to “emo”.
“Many media have reported fabricated news reports about the so-called ‘emo’ phenomenon – stories about tens of young people killed in various ways, including stoning,” the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
“No murder case has been recorded with the interior ministry on so-called ‘emo’ grounds. All cases of murder recorded were for revenge, social and common criminal reasons.”
CLERICS DENOUNCE KILLINGS
Iraq’s leading Shi’ite clerics have condemned the stonings.
Abdul-Raheem al-Rikabi, Baghdad representative for Iraq’s most influential Shi’ite cleric, Ali al-Sistani, called the killings “terrorist attacks”.
“Such a phenomenon which has spread among young people should be tackled through dialogue and peaceful means and not through physical liquidation,” Rikabi told Reuters.
In a response to questions on his website on Saturday, Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shi’ite cleric whose followers dominate Sadr City, described “emo” youths as “crazy and fools,” but said they should be dealt with only through the law.
“They are a plague on Muslim society, and those responsible should eliminate them through legal means,” he said.
Abu Ali al-Rubaie, a leading Sadr aide in Sadr City, said the cleric’s followers had nothing to do with the killings.
“In this issue and in all such problems we always use peaceful and educational methods to correct any wrongdoings. We are not connected in any way to those groups allegedly responsibility for killing those young people.”
In the years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, most of Baghdad’s neighborhoods were under the firm grip of Sunni and Shi’ite religious militias which enforced strict dress codes.
Today, the militias have largely disappeared, Baghdad is far more peaceful and many youths experiment with Western styles, although much of Iraqi society remains conservative.
On the streets of Baghdad, people said they had heard of the killings through the media. Many expressed disapproval of the “emo” style, but said murder was no way to respond.
“I saw them a couple weeks ago … a bunch of girls, high-school aged, walking together, dressed in black. They had long black eye makeup and bracelets with skulls and chains on their handbags with skulls,” said Abdullah, 31.
“If they are close friends who have something in common, that’s all right. If other things we hear about them are true, like sucking each other’s blood or worshipping the devil, that is not accepted in our society. But I think this is just a trend to imitate the West.”

Other reports put the number of people killed for their fashion choice at 90, not 14.  Here is what has antagonized the conservatives into screaming Satan and killing people:

Dead

Alive....for the moment

Dead

Alive and making their own choices

March is Women's History Month - 1

It is during Women's History Month that we have had some of the worst recent attacks on women by right wing big mouth Rush Limbaugh.  It has been during Women's History month that we have had the controversy over the right wing judge in Montana using his official email address to send this:
The email forwarded -- from his official email address, on a government computer -- by Judge Richard Cebull:

Sign the petition:

The copy of the offensive email, one which is not only insulting to President Obama and his mother, but is offensive in how it portrays women and sexuality, and issues of race and racism, was accompanied by this email from People for the American Way, which I think makes a very good point.  

President Obama can easily ignore crap like this.  It is beneath his attention.  But to the extent that this affects the culture and social and cultural climate for women in this country, where the right wing is attempting to institute repressive measures against women, WE should not ignore this. This is an attitude from another era, an era when women were not equal, when women were subordinate.  It is an ugly part of our past; it should not be part of our present.

I hope that our readers who do believe women are equal, and deserve to be treated with respect will sign this petition, for themselves and for the women in their lives who matter to them:

UPDATE: Three right-wing state legislators in Montana have come to Judge Richard Cebull’s defense, with one even ridiculously thanking Cebull for exercising his "freedom of speech."

The judge's reckless and offensive email had nothing to do with free speech. A federal judge is free to hate the president and his policies, just as other Americans are. And he is free to privately tell his friends that, just as other Americans do. But Judge Cebull used his official government email address to make a statement that has now become very public.

It is important that Americans see their judges as neutral arbiters, not as political figures. Therefore, it is imperative that Judge Cebull resign.

Join the 60,000 activists who have already signed our petition demanding that Judge Cebull redesign -- please add you name now!

If a football referee is known to have grossly insulted some of the teams, then acknowledges that he did so because he strongly dislikes them, would anyone want him refereeing a game they cared about? Would anyone trust his calls?

Good referees are constrained in what they can say about the teams whose games they oversee, not because they don't have freedom of speech, but because they accept voluntary constraints as part of their job description. With Judge Cebull, we are talking not about the integrity of a sports league, but rather the integrity of the American justice system.

Judge Cebull is unfit to judge. Speak out now. And then please help spread the word.

Thank you for all that you do.

-- Ben

The right tries to excuse this as humor, the way Rush Limbaugh claims humor and entertainment to excuse his excesses.  It IS NOT satire, it IS NOT humor, it IS NOT entertaining.  It IS offensive, it IS intolerant and bigoted and prejudiced, it IS hateful.
It IS a reflection of a sick and twisted ugly right wing attitude towards sex and human sexuality.  It IS an expression of a perverse and ugly attitude towards race, especially towards individuals who are bi-racial, or who engage in relationships that were once banned under miscegenation laws.

It IS profoundly misogynistic. 
It IS profoundly right wing.
It is deeply and fundamentally WRONG.

The Wisconsin Budget, Taxation, and Lady Godiva: Women's History Month, March 7th



1955 movie promo
for "Lady Godiva of Coventry"
featuring Maureen O'Hara as
Lady Godiva

Given the repeated phrase that Governor Walker is intent on 'stripping' the unions of their collective bargaining rights, and claims that Walker is making a 'naked power grab', I could not resist. Walker is claiming collective bargaining relates directly to issues of taxation and revenues and balancing the budget,  reminding me of the most famous stripping, taxation protest figure from the mists of  history, Lady Godiva.

There is a modern festival celebrating this, in the original town where the historic event occurred, Coventry.  It is occasionally celebrated with a modern equivalent, a woman riding a motorcycle, naked except for her long hair (it is unclear if this includes wearing a helmet or not).  I think it would be hilarious if someone among the Wisconsin protesters picked up the idea, adapting it to the circumstances.  Perhaps.... an attractive individual with long hair (it could be either gender) making a protest ride in long thermal underwear, on a horse, or possibly on a cow, or a snowmobile, or better yet  - a Wisconsin made Harley Davidson - past the capital and news cameras.  Because, if you have ever watched Packer football fans, it IS possible to get people in Wisconsin naked, or near naked,  in cold weather, with the right motivation.  They're crazy that way.  The protesters have certainly tried a variety of other means of attracting the attention of the nation; this would certainly attract their cause a wider (pardon the pun) coverage.

How is this appropriate to the Wisconsin issues?

The Politics of Science versus Christianity, Hypatia of Alexandria: Women's History, March 6th

In Minnesota we have conservative politicians like State Representative Mike Beard, who was the assistant minority whip dating back to 2007, who believes in making government policy based on his Christian faith, not on facts and certainly not on the basis of a solid understanding of science.  Beard wants to bring back coal mining in Minnesota, and more coal-powered electrical plants:

"A lot of what Beard knows he learned in church. One Congressman, talking about global warming, recently said that God wouldn't allow man to do anything to destroy the planet. Beard told me, "It is the height of hubris to think we could."

Beard epitomizes the politician who gets his information from religion, and from partisan sources, some of them funded by the producers of fossil fuels that are the subject of regulation - hardly reliable, or objective, honest sources. As the same article notes:

Mike Beard is a free-market conservative and pro-business. No one who calls himself those things can afford global warming to be true. There is a political belief that solving global warming will destroy American business. American business deplores government interference. Global warming regulation and legislation requires governments to act. But Professor Abraham says he would love to see free-market solutions arise. The problem is, he says, nobody on the conservative side is coming up with ideas. [my emphasis - DG]

Beard, and other conservatives in our state legislature are a microcosm of conservative science deniers in government nationwide most of whom believe they are operating on faith, and therefore don't need to be scientifically accurate or to have a scientific education.  Who are the people who oppose these anti-science positions?  From the same article:

Rep. Kate Knuth is in the party out of power. She is one of the people he [Beard] lectured the other day on the science of global warming. Knuth has degrees from the University of Oslo, the University of Chicago and Oxford. She is a Fulbright Scholar and teaches at Hamline's Center for Global Environmental Education. She voted against lifting the moratorium on coal. She is in the minority.

The anti-science crowd on the right doesn't believe in the dangers of climate change, and doesn't believe in evolution.  They are willing and even eager to make government policy in all areas, from energy to education, based on those beliefs rather than knowledge and facts.  Who funds this pseudo-science they follow?

Some of the most determined opponents of action on climate change in the U.S. are so-called libertarians, motivated by an ideological commitment to minimal government and "free market" laissez-faire capitalism. Their efforts on behalf of unregulated corporate wealth and power have been funded heavily by patrons in the fossil fuel industry. While ExxonMobil has drawn much attention for its patronage of global warming denialist activity by such groups, much less public attention has been paid to the activities of the multibillionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries.

The WI Conflict, Lysistrata, and Women's History Month, March 5th

I read this past week that Lisa Fitzgerald, the wife of the Republican majority leader in the Wisconsin Senate is among those facing layoffs.  Mrs. Fitzgerald works as a counselor in the Hustisford, Wisconsin school district.

Rather than the heavy handed and authoritarian methods being used to bully state Senate Democrats into returning to resolve the budget issues for Wisconsin, it occurred to me that Mrs. Fitzgerald is in a perfect position to follow an old - and also a very modern - tactic to end the standoff in Wisconsin.

The ancient play by Aristophanes is well known; performed in 411 B.C., it involves a woman, Lysistrata, organizing other Greek women to end the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta.  Should Women's History month address only actual women, and not fictional heroines?  Possibly, but this tactic is not unique to an ancient work of fiction.

But it has also been used in multiple modern conflicts as a very real tactic, quite successfully. That is where the Women's History Month comes in.  There are real women who have been making current history, recent history, by withholding sex.

Women like Daily Beast columnist for African issues, Leymah Gbowee

Women in Combat: the January Pentagon Report and Women Revolutionary Soldiers - Real Molly Pitchers, for Women's History Month, March 4th

A January 2011 Pentagon report recommended allowing women in combat.  Allowing women to serve in combat positions in our military is one alternative to privatizing the army through the use of private contractors for a variety of military services, or alternatively if we discontinue private contractors, to a return to the draft to meet the needed numbers of personnel doing these jobs.  Knowing this history has a very real impact on our modern military and policy decisions, including our international policy.

Molly Pitcher is the legendary wife who replaced her fallen husband at the battle of Monmouth, sometimes thought to be the real woman, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley.

According to historians like Dr. Linda Grant DePaw, President of the Minerva Center:

"The MINERVA Center, Inc. is a nonprofit 501(c)3 educational foundation. Since 1983 it has provided information and inspiration to military women and women veterans and supported scholars, journalists, filmmakers, public policy activists and others engaged in the study of women and war."

quoted here:

"Molly Pitcher is the name of a legendary figure of the American Revolution. She is associated with the Battle of Monmouth and since 1876 has been identified with a woman veteran of the war, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, who lived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As part of the centenary events of that year, an unmarked grave believed to be hers was opened and the remains were reburied with honors under a plaque declaring her to have been the real embodiment of the famous Molly Pitcher.

Margaret Sanger, Not the Coat Hanger (Abortion, that is) - Women's History Month, March 3rd



Margaret Sanger
photo courtesy of the
Margaret Sanger Papers Project,
property of the Sophia Smith
Collection,  Smith College

 In view of the preceding editorial cartoon, it is worth a brief history of reproductive rights heroine Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and a pioneer of modern birth control methods, to celebrate women and their control of their own bodies, their sexuality and reproduction.  We need to remind the conservative 'clock stoppers' why we don't want to go back to the bad old days of the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

Margaret Sanger, the sixth child of eleven siblings, was born in 1879.  Her devoutly Roman Catholic mother had 18 pregnancies and died of cervical cancer and tuberculosis at the age of 50.  Her father was a stone mason; the family was 'working class'.  She was an active supporter during the early 20th century labor struggles, including the 'Wobblies' as the Industrial Workers of the World were colloquially known.

With the assistance of her older sisters, she attended Claverack College and the Hudson River Institute in the late 1890s, and then the White Plains Hospital nursing program in 1900 in New York.  Just before she graduated from the nursing program, she married architect William Sanger, and became a suburban housewife and mother of three.

She worked as a visiting nurse, which in addition to her family background, focused her interest on women's health and sex education, including subjects like contraception and sexually transmitted disease which were largely taboo (not unlike the limitations on abstinence only sex education now) and at the time illegal.  Sanger wrote a column in the New York City paper, the New York Call, on sex education, where she encountered censorship in writing about venereal disease because the medical information was deemed obscene.  Her nursing career focused on attending poor women; she recognized as a result the importance of being able to solve the critical health issues of too-frequent and unwanted pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion, as a causal factor in poverty, disease, and too early deaths for women.

A Wisconsin Teacher and Unionist - Golda Meir, Women's History Month, March 2nd



Golda Meir as a young girl

 I have no particular organized outline for these posts on Women's History Month; each one is prompted by some daily encounter with the news or current events.  Meir was a logical choice, given the events taking place in Madison, Wisconsin and also in the middle east.  Meir grew up in Milwaukee, and became a teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; she was an active supporter of labor causes.

Women's History Month is celebrated world wide, an extension of International Women's Day on March 8th, going back to 1911, which then grew into a celebration of Women's History Week, and now we're up to a whole month.