Women, we are the ones...we must seize the moment

Needed right now:  more women like Rosa Parks.  The Detroit News on the centennial of her [The link is to a new biography that begins with her activist life before her famous bus ride.]  The Detroit News on the centennial of her birth (1913) marked by a new Forever postage stamp and Obama unvieling of her statue in the Capitol.

Charming and satisfying for us old ladies from the Second Wave to travel down memory lane as our moment in 20th century feminist history rolled by on"Makers:  Women Who Make America." Surprised that public television would offer something with the "F word so prominent.

Most satisfying for me was that two younger women I suggested it to--one in college, the other in her forties--watched and responded with enthusiasm.  In another time we would all have been in the same room, the same movement, working on gun control, violence against women.  So many issues, so little time.  That was the theme in early meetings of the Women's Political Causcus in 1972 in my Baltimore living room.

Needed right now:  women to move gun control into the direction that only women have the courage to do, i.e., take on the biggest challenges.  Think Elizabeth Warren and banking.  Now Robin Kelly, Illinois legislator now running for Jesse Jackson's Congressional seat with a total focus on gun control.  While looking for a photo of her, I encountered a vicious site, "Legal Insurrection," a window into her crazed Republican opposition.  [photo: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP] 

 The Griot, an NBC blog, reported on her win and her commitment to "fight to ban assault weapons. To close the gun show loophole.  And to ban high capacity magazine clips...We will do whatever it takes to end this epidemic of gun violence, once and for all."

Women's History Month was marked on March 1, at  Folkways Notebook with a post on  Women and Inequality.  Barbara linked to the L.A. Times on the reauthorization of VAWA, the Violence against Women Act.  The Times used a group photo of Native American Women at a meeting on the Tulalip Reservation (Washington state).  They have gathered to promote passage of the Act which has special meaning for them.

Needed right now:  women of all colors to move voting rights into the center of public discourse.  The League of Women Voters' blog  keeps its eye on what the Supreme Court is up to in Shelby County v. Holder.  That's how I found the February 27 rally outside the court on February 27.  Speaking on the Voting Rights Act to is Francine Lawrence, president of the American Federation of Teachers. 

 

Often I miss being back East.  And then I found in the Oregonian, our conservative, clueless local newspaper, a photo [Bilal Hussein/AP] from Beirut.  "The Uprising of Women in the Arab World"  commenorating March 8, International Women's Day. 

Translation:  I want society to see me as a woman first before they see me as a mother, wife or daughter.  

Women's, the people's action, continues in many places.  

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