May the Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way to the Summerlands. May Her Friends and Family Know Peace.

Geraldine Ferraro, who in 1984 became the first woman named to a major-party presidential ticket, has died.

The former three-term House member from Queens, New York, was 75 years old. She had long been suffering from multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. A statement from her family said she died at Massachusetts General Hospital. More from the statement:

"Geraldine Anne Ferraro Zaccaro was widely known as a leader, a fighter for justice, and a tireless advocate for those without a voice. To us, she was a wife, mother, grandmother and aunt, a woman devoted to and deeply loved by her family. Her courage and generosity of spirit throughout her life waging battles big and small, public and personal, will never be forgotten and will be sorely missed."

Ferraro was an assistant district attorney in the borough of Queens when she decided to run for an open congressional seat in 1978.

When I was a young woman, struggling to make it in a world where being a woman was even more of a handicap than it is today, Ms. Ferraro's run for VP gave me hope. I thought of her when I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. I still hope that I'll live to see a woman become President.

Picture found here.

Happy Women's Day

One percent -- ONE PERCENT -- of the world's property.

/hat tip to watertiger.

May the Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way to the Summerlands. May Her Friends and Family Know Peace.

Melin Stone passed away this week. Her book, When God Was a Woman, was one of the first 4 or 5 books that I read on Goddess religion, and it had a huge impact on me and, I believe, many other Dianic Witches.

Go well.

hat tip/Star Foster.

Picture found here.

For Wisconsin: In the Beauty of the Day

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

My New Name for a Blog

What Medusa Coils Said.

Medusa does a fantastic job of covering topics important to Dianic Witches. If you don't check her out regularly, you should.

First (Week) of the Month Bazooms Blogging

Ladies! Listen up! Detecting breast cancer early is the key to surviving it! Breast Self Exams (BSEs) can help you to detect breast cancer in its earlier stages. So, on the first of every month, give yourself a breast self-exam. It's easy to do. Here's how. If you prefer to do your BSE at a particular time in your cycle, calendar it now. But, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

And, once a year, get yourself a mammogram. Mammograms cost between $150 and $300. If you have to take a temp job one weekend a year, if you have to sell something on e-Bay, if you have to go cash in all the change in various jars all over the house, if you have to work the holiday season wrapping gifts at Macy's, for the love of the Goddess, please go get a mammogram once a year.

Or: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pays all or some of the cost of breast cancer screening services through its National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program. This program provides mammograms and breast exams by a health professional to low-income, underinsured, and underserved women in all 50 states, six U.S. territories, the District of Columbia, and 14 American Indian/Alaska Native organizations. For more information, contact your state health department or call the Cancer Information Service at 1-800-4-CANCER.

I know that a recent study indicated that early detection via breast self exams might not be "cost effective." I'm not a scientist, but when I read those studies, they appear to be saying that sometimes women find a lump during the BSE that turns out not to be cancer. Those women have caused some expense and have gone through some discomfort in order to find out that the lump wasn't cancer. I don't know about you, but when that happens to me, as it has a few times since my first mammogram found a small, curable, cancerous lump, I go out and buy a new scarf, take myself out for a decadent lunch, call everyone I know, and declare it a good day.

Send me an email after you get your mammogram and I will do an annual free tarot reading for you. Just, please, examine your own breasts once a month and get your sweet, round ass to a mammogram once a year. If you have a deck, pick three cards and e-mail me at hecatedemetersdatter@hotmail.com. I'll email you back your reading. If you don't have a deck, go to Lunea's tarot listed on the right-hand side in my blog links. Pick three cards from her free, on-line tarot and email me at hecatedemetersdatter@hotmail.com. I'll email you back your reading.

Finally a Feminist Historian's Take on Whitmore's Critique of Hutton

I'm still working my way through Trials of the Moon: Reopening the Case for Historical Witchcraft. A Critique of Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, a recent book by New Zealand Pagan Ben Whitmore. And I may have more to say about it when I've finished it and gone back and re-read Hutton.

I'm no historian, but Hutton's approach to the history of Witchcraft always seemed to me to be (1) too based in a privileged, literary, male approach to what is largely women's (and therefore subjugated and more likely to be found hiding in oral traditions, crafts, family customs, etc.) history and (2) too willing to accept monotheism's either/or way of looking at the world, i.e, either Dorothy Clutterbuck or many of the people burned as Witches were Christian or they were Witches, but, obviously not both and, if we can find, for example, evidence that they attended the Christian church (even when not to do so was to invite burning or social ostracism) then they must not have been Witches. (I don't know about Hutton, but most women I know in mainstream religions are pretty used to accepting that a certain amount of it is bollocks (yeah, right, Eve tempted Adam; yeah, right priests have to be men because the Disciples were all men, well, at least once you define the Disciples to exclude Mary Magdalen because she wasn't, you know, a man) and simply adopting the parts they like and ignoring the bollocks.) It seems far more likely to me that lots of people, especially women, simply accepted a mixture of Christianity and their old beliefs, just as many modern, self-professed Christians say that they check their daily horoscope in the newspaper, do yoga, and believe in accept evolution. [Literata makes a good point in comments: "Believe in" is bad framing, as it implies that evolution is a matter of faith.]

Now, thanks to Medusa Coils' monthly round-up, here's a review of Whitmore's book from a real historian, Max Dashu. Dashu takes a chapter-by-chapter approach to Whitmore's book and notes that the footnotes in this book are as important as the text. Dashu's review is well worth reading in its entirety, whether you plan to read Whitmore, or not.

Obligatory statements for those who should know better: Yes, of course, some of the people burned as Witches were not Witches and did not engage in any form of Witchcraft, shamanism, or other Pagan practice. Once membership in a disfavored religion becomes cause for persecution (not to mention property approbation), lots of people get wrongly accused of belonging to that religion. Look at the current attempts to insist that President Obama is a Muslim. Yes, of course, some suggested numbers of those burned at the stake appear now to have been overstated. That doesn't change the fact that thousands of (mostly) women were (and in some parts of the world today, still are) executed as Witches. Yes, of course, some early practitioners of early Wicca made up stories about covens that extended back to mythological times. Yes, of course, modern Paganism has evolved and is in many ways different from the practices, of, say, the ancient Celts or Egyptians or Greeks. You know, so has Christianity evolved. Look at what goes on in modern mega-churches, compare that to the socialist practices of 1st Century Christians gathering in each other's homes, and get back to me about how closely my Dianic magics track those of my many-times-great Swedish grandmothers.

None of those facts mean that modern Witchcraft doesn't have ties to ancient practices, that women who would today be called (and likely self-identify as) Witches weren't burned at the stake, or that Pagans need to consider ourselves a completely modern invention.

Picture found here.

To Die a Free Woman

This.

So when Comstock and his fellow inspectors showed up at her cramped residence on West 23rd Street with a warrant for her arrest, Craddock steeled herself anew. "I wish to fight right through to a finish," she wrote her lawyer shortly afterward. "All I ask is that you use me in the most effective way possible." As an unabashed sex reformer and a mystic founder of her own Church of Yoga, Craddock was to Comstock a twice-damned purveyor of obscenity and blasphemy. He wanted to shut down her whole operation—the distribution of her pamphlets, the delivery of her lectures, even her face-to-face counseling sessions. "I am taking my stand on the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," Craddock countered, "guaranteeing me religious freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of the press."

Craddock could do little more than watch as Comstock conducted his raid. Scanning the shelves of her private library, he found sixty-one books and 536 circulars worthy of removal, all of which he could use as evidence against her before once again pulping such filth. A heavy-set man with mutton-chop sideburns and creased blue eyes, Comstock had been at this for a while, having led the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice since its incorporation in 1873. For three decades now he had been frustrating the designs of shady booksellers, sketchy impresarios, dime novelists, condom distributors, abortion providers, birth-control advocates, and taboo-breaking artists. Imbued with a strong sense of Christian discipline from his Connecticut youth, he had further honed his self-control through prayerfully resisting the temptations of army life during the Civil War—the whiskey drinking, coarse language, and tobacco chewing that marked the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers. "Boys got very drunk," Comstock noted of his army mates at one point in his diary. "I did not drink a drop. . . . Touch not. Taste not. Handle not."

"She thought her only option at that point was suicide," Schmidt says. "That that was the only way she was going to die a free woman."

That oddly keeps on being the only choice they leave us.

I'll just add that having my carefully-collected and painstakingly-archived books rifled by a fundie would pretty much do me in, as well.

Picture found here.

Obstructing Traffic

Nov. 14, 1917. The Night of Terror. Women were to be "taught a lesson" for wanting to vote.

I suppose that, tomorrow, you can find the time to vote. Don't you owe it to these women?

I do.

I Sincerely Suggest That You Take Yourself to the Polls Tomorrow

No, I don't like all the choices that I've got. But I intend to exercise the choice that my dad preserved for me when, a kid right out of high school in a backwards, beet-farming, hick town in Colorado, he joined the Navy to make sure that Hitler and the Japanese Emperor didn't take away from working people (his one, true passion) the right to vote. I intend to exercise the choice that my foremothers won for me when they were jailed for demonstrating for votes for women outside the White House and were beaten, force fed, hung from their wrists all night, and forced to defend themselves against charges of being insane because they wanted women to have the right to vote. I intend to spend the 15 or 20 minutes that it will take to drive to my local community center, give my name to the registrar, go into the booth, and vote.

I shan't be gone long. You come, too.
Because I'm a woman. Because I'm a Witch. Because I'm a magic-worker. Because I can.

What It Cost

You know what? I hate the current crop of Dems. I hate the Conciliator in Chief who lives in the WH, the cool young guy who took the job away from the experienced older woman who could have actually done the job. And you know what else? My old, tired, disillusioned, broken body is going to show up on November 2nd and vote for the lesser of two evils.

And, if you stay home, if some effete "enthusiasm gap" keeps you away from the polls, well, then, with all due respect, fuck you.

I will never not vote. It cost my foremothers too much to win this right for me.

Now, get your sweet round ass to the polls. Get out there and Vote Like a Girl.

My New Name For A Blog

What Medusa Said

A baby under one arm and a dissertation under the other.

Don't you dare quit listening until you hear the song at the end.

Agora

NYT gives Agora, opening today in NYC, a good review.

It's got to be better than SitC III or Prince of Persia.

Sunday Feminism Blogging

Big Ovaries, Baby.

My brilliant friend, E, introduced me to these great women.

I love "I compete every day and I don't need balls to play." Because, you know, I do and and I don't.

And, speaking of women named Elizabeth and of ovaries of steel, may I just say: Go Elizabeth Warren! Go!

May The Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way To The Summerlands. May Her Friends And Family Know Peace.

Wilman Mankiller passed away earlier today. CNN reports:

CNN) -- Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to lead the Cherokee native American tribe, died Tuesday after a battle with pancreatic cancer, Cherokee leaders announced Tuesday. She was 64.
Mankiller served 10 years as principal chief of the Cherokee, the second-largest U.S. tribe, and became its first freely elected leader in 1987. President Clinton awarded her the Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor, in 1998.

"Our personal and national hearts are heavy with sorrow and sadness with the passing this morning of Wilma Mankiller," said Chad Smith, her successor as chief of the Oklahoma-based tribe. "We feel overwhelmed and lost when we realize she has left us, but we should reflect on what legacy she leaves us. We are better people and a stronger tribal nation because of her example of Cherokee leadership, statesmanship, humility, grace, determination and decisiveness."

The CNN report is typical in that it calls Chief Mankiller "the first woman to lead the Cherokee native American tribe". I believe those reports should say, "the first recorded woman to lead the Cherokee nation," but I take their meaning. Wikipedia notes that: Mankiller is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the first woman chief of a Native American tribe. In the 20th century, Alice Brown Davis became Principal Chief of the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma in 1922 and Mildred Cleghorn became the Chairperson of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe in 1976.

In earlier times, a number of women led their tribes.


She once explained that, I've run into more discrimination as a woman than as an Indian.

When I was young and needed some strong female leaders to look up to, Chief Mankiller was one of the women I found to focus on. Back then, the patriarchy made a lot of jokes about her name. She showed a lot of grace under pressure.

Thank you, Chief.

Picture found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Sia Said.

An Orange On The Seder Plate

Last night, on the full Moon, we gathered for the "Ritual Drinking of the Manischewitz, To Show How Our People Have Suffered".

Heschel often mentioned her custom as one of many feminist rituals that have been developed in the last 20 years. She writes, "Somehow, though, the typical patriarchal maneuver occurred: My idea of an orange and my intention of affirming lesbians and gay men were transformed. Now the story circulates that a man said to me that a woman belongs on the bimah [podium of a synagogue] as an orange on the seder plate. A woman's words are attributed to a man, and the affirmation of lesbians and gay men is erased. Isn't that precisely what's happened over the centuries to women's ideas?"

Photo by the author. If you copy, please link back.

My New Name For A Blog

What echidne Said.

Indeed, the majority of church goers in the Catholic church are women, and this is true for other forms of Christianity, too. It may be true for all the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It may be true for all religions.

Most women on this planet stay faithful to religious organizations which will not want to share power with them, which have holy texts full of misogyny and which in their extreme forms support societal structures completely unfair to women.

Yes, I understand the reasons for women's religious fidelity. Spirituality is channeled into the avenues that exist where you are born. Community is built around religion. Religion succors those who have less power.

I even understand how hard (and even dangerous) it is to tear oneself away from shared community values and approval, even when those values are bad and the approval based on a role which slowly suffocates you, and I certainly understand the fear of infinite hell if one believes in that. But it is still true that misogynistic religions would have less power if fewer women supported them, if more women spoke openly against the misogyny and refused to participate in it.

The consequences of such rebellious acts are not the same for all women, and I'm not advocating suicidal acts here. But most women will not be stoned to death for asking questions about their religion or for demanding more access to its corridors of power.


The point that echidne makes reminds me of one of the big reasons why I am a Witch. A religion that honors the Earth, physicality, and the cycle of life -- specifically the Maiden, Mother, Crone cycle -- is one where it's much easier for women to wield power. And, while definitely not perfect, has done a better job of not victimizing women, particularly in terms of dogma.

Ada Lovelace Day

I am a complete Luddite, as the folks who work for my borg's IT department will eagerly tell you. (No, really. They'll even pay for the drinks if you'll just listen to them tell you stories about "that woman." The sobriquet: "The One Who Gets Hysterical" is not lightly awarded.) Luckily, it's not genetic; G/Son, at 4, manipulates my iPhone and MacBook at will. And, I have friends who are not Luddites, and they remind me every year that March 24th is Ada Lovelace Day.

Who was Ada Lovelace?

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron [the poet who was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"] and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented.

Ada had been taught mathematics from a very young age by her mother and met Babbage in 1833. Ten years later she translated Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, appending notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine – the first computer programme. The calculations were never carried out, as the machine was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Understanding that computers could do a lot more than just crunch numbers, Ada suggested that the Analytical Engine “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” She never had the chance to fully explore the possibilities of either Babbage’s inventions or her own understanding of computing. She died, aged only 36, on 27th November 1852, of cancer and bloodletting by her physicians.

Thus, March 24th, Ada Lovelace Day[,] is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

I work in a traditionally "male" field. I can only begin to imagine how difficult it is for women who work in technology. And, yet, they keep making brilliant achievements. Here's a new project ready-made for Max Daschu!

Picture found here.