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

Hail and Farewell, Joanna Russ. I learned a long time ago not to start one of her books in bed, as that meant that I'd always greet the dawn bleary-eyed and tired. She was an amazing writer. I hope the pens are sharp and well-dipped in the Summerlands. Slip gently away, Lady, just now when the veils are thin.

Picture found here.

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

Thank you, Hazel Dickens. I miss those mountains, too.

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.

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.

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

Carla F. Cohen

1936-2010

With deep sorrow, I am writing to inform our friends and neighbors that my beloved store co-owner Carla Cohen died this morning. For all of us here at Politics & Prose, it is difficult to believe that someone larger than life has died, and I will badly miss my friend and partner.

A funeral will be held at Tifereth Israel, 7701 16th Street, N.W., at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 13th.

The store will be closed from 12-4 p.m. on that day. We will have a memorial service in the store at a date to follow in November. (Apart from this closing, all other events will proceed as scheduled.)

Even in today's world of Borders and Amazon.com, there are still wonderful, local bookstores. The kind of places that a bookish person can wander for hours, sampling this, discovering that, guiltily buying more than one "should." Living in DC, I have two such redoubts: Kramer's Books and Afterwords and Politics and Prose. I am touched more than I would have expected to be by Ms. Cohen's death.

The veils between the worlds seem to me to be thinning almost hourly as the wheel turns towards Samhein, and it seems to me that there are often a number of notable deaths at this time of year. I hope Ms. Cohen slipped easily between the veils and finds Summerland on the other side.

Picture found here.

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

AP reports that: In a statement Monday, Obama called Horne a most cherished entertainer who warmed hearts with her beautiful voice and dramatic on-screen performances. The president also hailed her efforts to promote justice and equality.

Horne was the first black performer to tour with an all-white band, and she refused to perform for segregated audiences while entertaining soldiers during World War II.

Obama said he and the first lady join all Americans in appreciating the joy Horne brought to their lives and the progress she forged for the country.

Horne died Sunday in New York at age 92.

Horne was an important voice for civil rights for African Americans:

In 1945, during World War II, Horne was scheduled to perform at an Army base in Fort Reilly, Kansas. Horne, unyielding in her stance against racism, refused to perform for the segregated military audience in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen at a USO sponsored show. Horne immediately left the stage headed to the local NAACP office to file a complaint. MGM yanked Horne from the tour, forcing her to use her own money to travel and entertain the troops.

Horne, an outspoken advocate during the Civil Rights Movement and an active member of the NAACP once worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws and [was present] at the March on Washington, and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP. She marched alongside Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss. at an NAACP rally the weekend before he was assassinated, joined 250,000 Americans in 1963 on the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech and met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before his assassination.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities affiliated with the civil rights movement. It was reported that the feisty diva once thr[ew] a lamp at a customer in a Beverly Hills restaurant after the customer spouted a racial epithet.

Horne's dedication to the Civil Rights Movement and tenacious fight against racism came as no surprise to many who knew Horne, the granddaughter of a freed slave and a descendent of the John C. Calhoun family. Calhoun, the seventh Vice President of the United States, was a writer, orator and nationalist who began his political career as a politician from South Carolina during the first half of 19th century who made his name with his redefinition of republicanism to include the approval of slavery and minority rights.

Calhoun's concept of concurrent majority, that a minority had the right to object to and even veto hostile legislation directed against it, secured his name within American history when it was later incorporated into the American value system.

More here.

Lena Horne had that almost indefinable quality: real class. It's what makes her rendition of "That's Why the Lady is a Tramp" so deliciously ironic.

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

Alice Miller died earlier this month. As the NYT reports:

“Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away,” she writes in an explanatory essay on childhood mistreatment and abuse on her Web site, alice-miller.com. “Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents, in believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love.”

She took child abuse seriously and, for that, she deserves our thanks.

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

Dorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98.


More here.

What is remembered does not die.

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.

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

When I was a girl, stories such as hers meant the world to me. Women could, it turned out, do more than sleep in a glass casket and wait for the kiss of a Handsome Prince.

A French resistance heroine who saved more than 100 lives and survived a Nazi death squad has died at the age of 105.

Known as Agent Rose, Andree Peel helped dozens of British and US pilots escape from occupied Europe. She lived near Bristol after marrying an Englishman.

Mrs Peel, who lived at Long Ashton, was awarded a second Legion d'Honneur in 2009 to mark her bravery.

. . .

She also received the Croix de Guerre and the American Medal of Freedom.

She was being lined up to be shot by a firing squad at the Buchenwald concentration camp when the US Army arrived to liberate the prisoners.

A former hairdresser from Brittany, Mrs Peel began her involvement with the resistance modestly, by handing out underground newspapers.

Later she tracked troop movements and went on to head an under-section of the movement. Her network allowed Allied pilots to escape German captivity, hiding them and - where possible - smuggling them away from France in submarines and on small boats.

She recounted her wartime experiences in her autobiography Miracles Do Happen, which was published in 1999.

After the war she moved to Paris and met her future husband John Peel.

Mr Peel, an academic, died some years ago and in recent years she formed a partnership with Brian Westaway, a fellow resident at Lambton House retirement home.

Commenting on her death, Dr Liam Fox, Conservative MP for Woodspring, said: "Mrs Peel was an iconic figure who showed phenomenal courage in the most difficult circumstances.

"Her selfless bravery saved many lives and she stands as a monument to the triumph of the human spirit, which will set an example for many generations to come."

The HeraldSun website notes, additionally, that: Peel once said her wartime rescue efforts were driven by a belief she was doing the right thing and all thoughts of her own safety were put aside.

"You don't know what freedom is if you have never lost it," she told the Bristol Evening Post newspaper.

"Everybody was ready to contribute to the fight and to risk their lives.

"The only fear we had was of being tortured and of speaking under torture - I rarely thought of my personal safety, I just acted and did what I believed was the right thing."

British wartime leader Winston Churchill wrote her a personal letter of congratulation - which had to be destroyed once she had read it for security reasons.

And her achievements were honoured with a string of awards. She received a second Legion d'Honneur last year in recognition of her bravery.

She owned a beauty salon in Brest, northwest France, when the Nazis invaded. She joined the resistance movement and as Agent Rose she guided Allied planes to secret landing strips by torchlight.

Thank you, Andree Peel. I will call your name at Samhein. What is remembered, we Witches say, does not die.

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

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What is remembered does not die.

More here.

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

Miep Gies, who helped to hide Anne Frank and who saved her diary, passed away at 100.

Born in Vienna to Christian parents on February 15, 1909 with the name of Hermine Santruschitz, she moved to Leiden in 1920 to escape food shortages and was raised by a Dutch family who moved to Amsterdam two years later and nicknamed her Miep.

She started work as an office assistant at a textile factory but lost her job in 1933 as the economic crisis deepened. She then came under the employment of Anne's father, Otto Frank, who was director of a pectin producing company.

Gies avoided deportation to Austria by marrying her Dutch boyfriend, Jan, in 1941. Their son Paul was born in 1950 and they lived in Amsterdam until 1993, when Jan died at age 87. Paul has now opened a condolences register on his website.

Gies and her husband became family friends with the Franks and when Otto asked for help, they agreed to hide him and his family at the secret annex, bringing them daily groceries and providing a link to the outside world.

In August 1944, after 25 months in hiding, the Frank family were arrested but an Austrian SS officer spared Gies from captivity out of sympathy on condition she promised not to flee.

Gies found Anne's diaries in the debris left by the raid and kept them in her desk drawer without ever reading them. After the war ended, when it became clear that Anne was not coming back, she handed them over to Anne's father.

She received honors from several governments and institutions, and last year had an asteroid named after her by the International Astronomical Union.

May we all be as brave when life demands it.

More here.

Picture found here.

May The Goddess Guard Him. May He Find His Way To The Summerlands. May His Friends And Family Know Peace.

Merce Cunningham has slipped between the veils. If they can say this of you:

He also developed an elegant and rigorous dance technique based on ballet's pulled-up stretchiness, the weightedness he absorbed from Martha Graham,

then you've done well.

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

Rosella Hightower, a wonderful ballerina, has left us. We are poorer for her absence.

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

The LAT reports that:

Barbara Seaman, a writer and health activist whose groundbreaking 1969 book that warned against the dangers of the birth control pill is widely credited with launching the modern women's health movement, has died. She was 72.

Seaman died of lung cancer Wednesday at her New York City home, said her son, Noah Seaman.

In her first book, "The Doctors' Case Against the Pill," Seaman exposed the serious and little-known side effects of the high-estrogen pill prescribed at the time. Women weren't warned that the pill could cause heart attacks, strokes, depression and a host of other ills.

Her investigative work prompted Senate hearings in 1970 that led to a warning label on the drug and the mandatory inclusion of patient-information inserts.

When women who had been harmed by the pill were barred from testifying at the hearings, they fought back by constantly interrupting, calling out questions such as "Why isn't there a pill for men?" and "Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs?" Seaman wrote 30 years later in the New York Times.

Those acts of "feminist disobedience," as Seaman called them, are often portrayed as ground zero of the women's health movement.

Judy Norsigian, an author of the pioneering women's health book "Our Bodies, Ourselves" (1973), told the Los Angeles Times last week that the protests were "the beginning of women's voices being heard in women's health."

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

Civil rights activist, Johnnie Carr who joined childhood friend Rosa Parks in the historic Montgomery bus boycott and kept a busy schedule of civil rights activism up to her final days, has died. She was 97

"When we first started, we weren't thinking about history," Carr told The Associated Press in an interview in 2003. "We were thinking about the conditions and the discrimination."

Goddess' Speed

May the Goddess guard her. May she find her way to the Summerlands. May her friends and family know peace.

Shekina Mountainwater

May the Goddess guard her. May she find her way to the Summerlands. May her friends and family know peace. Shekina Mountainwater inspired me when I desperately needed inspiration. Goddess guard you on your passing, Lady, Goddess guard you. There's incense burning on my altar tonight for you.

Sia adds: The sisters who are with her today have dressed Shekhinah in her ritual robes and surrounded her with rose petals from her garden. It was exactly the way she'd always said she wanted her final moments to be.

Those same sisters are now singing over her body, and soon they will conduct the ritual washing of the body as they prepare her to go back into the arms of the Mother.

Oh, when I die, dress me in the black gown with the hecate trim. Surround me with herbs from my garden. Tell some jokes. You don't need to wash me; my Mother will take me dirty. Drink all my good wine. Scritch my good, grey cat. Turn on all the lights.

Shekina, thank you for being there to light the way. Cross gently over, Lady; here's a coin for the ferryman and here's dry shoes for the marshy soil. Well met, to die at the dark of the moon. Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again.