“ But the fact is, men always get a much easier time about their problems than women do. Just look at Keith Richards. That guy has done more drugs in his life than I could ever imagine. But he gets celebrated as this cool survivor, while I’m branded as some shameless skank. ”
Courtney Love (via seeyouinhellfinechina)
This is why I can never discuss my love of Courtney with dudes. They always fall over themselves to shame her for being “slutty” or a “junkie”. I had a guy do that once while wearing a JIM MORRISON t-shirt. Shit head.
(via the-madame-hatter)(via face-down-asgard-up)
Sandra Lovelace Nicholas, a Maliseet woman from New Brunswick’s Tobique Nation, has been a driving force in securing rights for Aboriginal women in Canada, and is also a wonderful example of the impact one woman can have when she sets out to correct an injustice.
Sandra lost her status when she married a white man, and even once divorced, she and her children didn’t recover her status. At the time, the Tobique band council refused to allocate her a subsidized house. The law made no similar provision for Native men who married non-aboriginals. Women who lost status were effectively barred from having their children educated on the reserve and taking part in band decisions. In 1977, Ms. Lovelace Nicholas took her case to the United Nations human-rights committee, charging that the discriminatory measures in Canada’s Indian Act violated an international covenant on civil and political rights – a case she won in 1981. The law was not reversed until 1985; it took her nearly ten years to recover her status.
Challenging discriminatory provisions of the Indian Act, which deprived Aboriginal women of their status when they married non-Aboriginals, she was instrumental in bringing the case before the United Nations Human Rights Commission and lobbying for the 1985 legislation which reinstated the rights of Aboriginal women and their children in Canada. In 1990, she was awarded the Order of Canada, and in 1992, she received the Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case. Sandra Lovelace Nicholas’ efforts have helped advance the cause of civil rights in this country, and her pride, strength and determination have made her a role model for many Aboriginal women. A proud mother of 4, she studied at St. Thomas University for 3 years and has a degree in residential construction from the Maine Northern Technical College. She continues to make her home on the Tobique First Nation.
- Day 99 of Racism Free Ontario’s100 People of Colour Spotlight.
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(via fuckyeahethnicwomen)
The History of Mother’s Day (source)
The history of Mother’s Day is centuries old and the earliest Mother’s Day celebrations can be traced back to the spring celebrations of ancient Greece in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. During the 1600’s, the early Christians in England celebrated a day to honor Mary, the mother of Christ. By a religious order the holiday was later expanded in its scope to include all mothers, and named as the Mothering Sunday. Celebrated on the 4th Sunday of Lent (the 40 day period leading up to Easter), “Mothering Sunday” honored the mothers of England.
During this time many of the England’s poor worked as servants for the wealthy. As most jobs were located far from their homes, the servants would live at the houses of their employers. On Mothering Sunday, the servants would have the day off and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their mothers. A special cake, called the mothering cake, was often brought along to provide a festive touch.
As Christianity spread throughout Europe the celebration changed to honor the “Mother Church” - the spiritual power that gave them life and protected them from harm. Over time the church festival blended with the Mothering Sunday celebration . People began honoring their mothers as well as the church.
With the passage of time, the practice of this fantastic tradition ceased slowly. The English colonists settled in America discontinued the tradition of Mothering Sunday because of lack of time.
In the United States, Mother’s Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was first suggested after the American Civil War by social activist Julia Ward Howe. Howe (who wrote the words to the Battle hymn of the Republic) was horrified by the carnage of the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War and so, in 1870, she tried to issue a manifesto for peace at international peace conferences in London and Paris (it was much like the later Mother’s Day Peace Proclamation). During the Franco-Prussian war in the 1870s, Julia began a one-woman peace crusade and made an impassioned “appeal to womanhood” to rise against war. She composed in Boston a powerful plea that same year (generally considered to be the original Mothers’ Day proclamation*) translated it into several languages and distributed it widely. In 1872, she went to London to promote an international Woman’s Peace Congress. She began promoting the idea of a “Mother’s Day for Peace” to be celebrated on June 2, honoring peace, motherhood and womanhood. In the Boston Mass, she initiated a Mothers’ Peace Day observance on the second Sunday in June, a practice that was to be established as an annual event and practiced for at least 10 years. The day was, however, mainly intended as a call to unite women against war. It was due to her efforts that in 1873, women in 18 cities in America held a Mother’s Day for Pace gathering. Howe rigorously championed the cause of official celebration of Mothers Day and declaration of official holiday on the day. She held meetings every year at Boston on Mother’s Peace Day and took care that the day was well-observed. The celebrations died out when she turned her efforts to working for peace and women’s rights in other ways. Howe failed in her attempt to get the formal recognition of a Mother’s Day for Peace. Her remarkable contribution in the establishment of Mother’s Day, however, remains in the fact that she organized a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace. It is a landmark in the history of Mother’s Day in the sense that this was to be the precursor to the modern Mother’s Day celebrations. To acknowledge Howe’s achievements a stamp was issued in her honor in 1988.
Art is resistance
Art is our tool
“It is our duty to fight for freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love and protect each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”-Assata Shakur
(via shellypolitik)
The Startling Plight of China's "Leftover Ladies"
“….In popular parlance, “sheng nü” (leftover women) refers to women above a certain age — some say 27, others 30 — who are unmarried and presumably ‘left over,’ too old to be desirable. Increasingly, sheng nü are a topic of alternating humor and alarm for Chinese newspaper columnists, TV sitcoms, reality dating shows, and studies by government bodies like the All-China Women’s Federation; according to its 2010 survey, more than 90 percentof male respondents agreed that women should marry before age 27 or risk being forever undesired.
“What’s most startling about this national obsession with China’s Bridget Joneses is that sheer numbers would seem to say it couldn’t possibly be so. China has far too few women, not too many. This is a country where 118 boys were born for every 100 girls in 2010, and by 2020 the number of men unable to find partners is expected to reach 24 million. So how could any women possibly be left over?….
“Over the next decade and a half, the newly widespread availability of ultrasound scans led to a dramatic uptick in sex-selective abortions — banned since 1995 but still easy enough to arrange. The upshot is that by the 2020s, an estimated 15 to 20 percent of Chinese men of marriageable age will lack potential brides, according to Jiang Quanbao of Xi’an Jiaotong University. ….
“Thirty years ago, a marriage certificate was a passport into adulthood. Until you married, there were no basic human rights. No right to have sex before marriage. No house allocated by your danwei [government work unit] before marriage.’ Today those barriers have crumbled, with rising sexual freedom and a booming private real estate market. Why marry unless you find someone just right? ‘The future is different,’ Wu predicted, waving her arms for emphasis. China’s big cities will be filled with sheng nu. ‘Those who can bear the shortcomings and sufferings of men will get married,’ she concluded. ‘Those not, single.’ ….
”In 1982, just 5 percent of urban Chinese women ages 25 to 29 were unmarried, according to Wang. By 1995, that percentage had doubled. By 2008, it had nearly tripled. Most of these women will eventually marry, yet the percentage of women in their 30s who are single, though relatively small, is also multiplying quickly: In 1995, just 2 percent of urban Chinese women ages 30 to 34 were unmarried. By 2008, 6 percent were.
“Tellingly, the least likely to marry are the most educated. In 2005 fully 7 percent of 45-year-old Shanghai women with college degrees had never married, according to Wang’s research. ‘That’s a harbinger of what’s going to happen in other places [in China] for more educated women,’ he told me. ‘It’s a sharp departure from before, from near-universal female marriage.’ Indeed, there’s a common joke that there are three genders in China: men, women, and women with Ph.D.s. Men marry women, and women with Ph.D.s don’t marry.
“But it’s not just China. In many East Asian countries, women, especially the best-educated top-earners now thronging the cities, are increasingly rejecting the institution of marriage altogether. TheEconomist reported last year that roughly a third of Japanese women in their early 30s and more than 20 percent of Taiwanese women in their late 30s remained unmarried; not more than half those women will ever tie the knot. In Singapore, 27 percent of college-educated 40- to 44-year-old women were single. There’s little reason to suspect that China, which is still 49 percent rural, won’t evolve in a similar direction.”
Perfect. Reblogging for International Women’s Day.
they missed the best one!
Man, I love this show so much.
(Source: amypoehler)
Puberty [in Girls] Before Age 10: A New ‘Normal’?
This one is already a bit old, forgive me! I’m catching up.
![Rosalind Franklin unwittingly provided much of the foundation for James Watson and Francis Crick’s “discovery” of the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their joint findings. But because the Nobel Prize can be awarded only to the living, Franklin, who died of cancer at the age of 37, could not be honored. It was only during the 1990s that she received due credit for her extraordinary contributions to modern science. Franklin appears here in her Paris laboratory in 1950, at the end of four years spent studying in France. [source]
Photographer:Vittorio Luzzati.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m32lavt0uE1qzs6yjo1_400.jpg)
Rosalind Franklin unwittingly provided much of the foundation for James Watson and Francis Crick’s “discovery” of the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their joint findings. But because the Nobel Prize can be awarded only to the living, Franklin, who died of cancer at the age of 37, could not be honored. It was only during the 1990s that she received due credit for her extraordinary contributions to modern science. Franklin appears here in her Paris laboratory in 1950, at the end of four years spent studying in France. [source]
Photographer:Vittorio Luzzati.
(via remembertheladies)
