women

In a climate of debate over “health care reform,” can we start with this one? Don’t shoot down courageous women’s doctors or harass women seeking to control their own lives. The jury took only 37 minutes to convict Scott Roeder of the first-degree murder of Dr. George Tiller - one of the few doctors to perform late-term abortions. Roeder imagined he was delivering justice when he gunned down Dr. Tiller. He testified at the trial that he had considered cutting Tiller’s hands off with a sword so he couldn’t operate.

By Hans Bennett

"When I was 15, my friends started going to jail," says Victoria Law, a native New Yorker. "Chinatown's gangs were recruiting in the high schools in Queens and, faced with the choice of stultifying days learning nothing in overcrowded classrooms or easy money, many of my friends had dropped out to join a gang."

"One by one," Law recalls, "they landed in Rikers Island, an entire island in New York City devoted to pretrial detainment for those who can not afford bail."

Law shares this and other recollections in her new book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press). At 16, she herself decided to join a gang, but was arrested for the armed robbery that she committed for her initiation into the gang. "Because it was my first arrest -- and probably because 16-year-old Chinese girls who get straight As in school did not seem particularly menacing -- I was eventually let off with probation," she writes.

By Amy Dalton

On Friday March 6, several dozen mothers, grandmothers, children, and their supporters gathered in front of the Department of Human Services (DHS) office in downtown Philadelphia to challenge the agency's priorities and practices. The women say the DHS has a pattern of mistaking poverty for neglect, and trauma caused by domestic violence as evidence of poor mothering. Several spoke at length about their experience trying to get their children back from the state foster care system, or encountering abuse, neglect and racism within what are supposed to be solutions. The group then marched down the street to the Arch Street United Methodist Church, where a teach-in was held.

by Bronwyn

On entering Louise Bourgeois’s Guggenheim Retrospective (the museum, a spiraling stroll of four floors – like walking inside of a large conch shell is a perfect space for her work) one is greeted by a 30-foot, steel spider: “Maman” (1999). Typical of the ambiguous and contradictory emotions found in and elicited by her work, the spider (or mother) is simultaneously frightening, larger than life and devouring – representative of…well, mothers, and of the sustenance of life… the spider is also a weaver – of stories, social threads, interconnectedness; a spider’s web is both practical and beautiful to behold. To kill a spider is bad luck. Bourgeois, named by her feminist mother, after Louise Michel, an anarchist involved in the Paris Commune, has said “my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider.” A tapestry-repairer and a strong role model in many ways, her mother nevertheless tolerated a visible affair between Louise’s father and her governess, a self-described childhood ‘trauma’ that Bourgeois has revisited in her artwork through out her life.

by Silvia Federici

[Precarious work is a central concept in movement discussions of the capitalist reorganization of work and class relations in today’s global economy. Silvia Federici analyzes the potential and limits of this concept as an analytic and organizational tool. She claims reproductive labor is a hidden continent of work and struggle the movement must recognize in its political work, if it is to address the key questions we face in organizing for an alternative to capitalist society. How do we struggle over reproductive labor without destroying ourselves, and our communities? How do we create a self-reproducing movement? How do we overcome the sexual, racial, and generational hierarchies built upon the wage?

Angela Davis at U of Ps Women’s Week – 2/15/08 the 21st Century

by Bronwyn Lepore

Angela Davis, of the beautiful gap-toothed smile and uncompromising spirit – and she smiles often, in the face of (or in solidarity with) the struggles she speaks to, and readily – shakes her shaggy fro as she warms to the audience of students, academics and activists tightly packed into College Hall for her Women’s Week keynote address on “Social Change in the 21st Century.” Despite the crowd – even after moving the talk to a larger venue to accommodate demand, many had to wait patiently outside the hall for a promised short after chat – she manages to create a sense of warmth and familiarity, as if we were all crowded into someone’s living room and she’d just popped in for a brief, but intense, chat. “Who’s here?” she asked. Recognizing the privileged status of many in the predominately Penn associated crowd, Davis challenged the audience to put such formally acquired knowledge to good use, as she herself has done, “so that it might make a difference, not for ourselves, but for others,” and to recognize and respect the intellect of those less privileged outside the academy who typically form the core of grassroots movements.