In honor of the women of the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp

For Armistice Day every year, I try to post something in honor of the peacemakers in our world. This year, I'm posting a link to the final edition of the Peace Camp News of the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp.

For background information about the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp, you can read their Unity Statement, as reprinted in the July/August 1983 issue of Women's Press, a feminist newspaper in Eugene, Oregon.

Hot Wire

Hotwire: A Journal of Feminist Music and Culture is no longer publishing, but they have a website now.

Feminist Library in danger of closing

While doing some advance research for an upcoming project in a library school class, I happened to do a Web search on "feminist library." This is how I discovered The Feminist Library in London, which

is a large archive collection of Women’s Liberation Movement literature, particularly second-wave materials dating from the late 1960s to the 1990s. We support research, activist and community projects in this field.

That's the good news. The bad news is, due to local government cutbacks and a privatization effort, it's in danger of closing.

Activist efforts are underway to save the library. You can read about these on the Save the Women's Library blog and on the library's Facebook page.

Do Afghan women have free speech?

Thanks to Spinfex Press for posting a link to this intriguing account a the struggles of a feminist newspaper in Afghanistan:

Its masthead claims that it is the first “feminist weekly” paper in Afghanistan. In a highly male dominated society where violence against women is rampant, the word “feminism” sets off alarm bells for some officials. And ringing this bell is a determined 22-year-old woman – Heleena Kakar.

Responding to the inbuilt biases Afghan society has against women, Kakar, the founder and brains behind the paper, is determined to shake up the system.

“One of the major challenges that we are facing is that the government agency responsible doesn’t offer approval for the paper to be registered because of the word ‘feminism.’ We are trying to convince them the word ‘feminism’ doesn’t go against any legislation and law,” says Kakar, who adds that she hopes to lay the foundations for a feminist movement in Afghanistan.

The rest of the post is well worth reading.

Trivia

The other day, Feminist Peace Network on Facebook posted a link to Issue 9 of the online journal TRIVIA - Voices of Feminism. This is the issue on goddesses from March 2009. It looks really interesting. I've read the editors' introduction and an article by Carolyn Gage on how the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by US forces in 1898 might have been stopped if Queen Liliuokalani has listened to her native shamans instead of  following Episcopalian teachings.

This is how I discovered that the feminist journal Trivia still survives after all these years. Or, more accurately, it was revived in 2004 as an online publication. Their dedication to their most recent issue, Are Lesbians Going Extinct? tells the story:

This issue of Trivia is dedicated to Mary Daly, without whom this online journal simply would not be. Trivia, a Journal of Ideas, its predecessor, published in print from 1982 to 1995, grew out of a study group that spun off from Mary's classes at Boston College. It was named after the Triple Goddess TRIVIA—whom we first encountered in the pages of Daly's Gyn/Ecology. While the journal developed its own identity over the years, it remained, and in this online version remains, rooted in her steadfast vision of female power and possibility. The word "lesbian" did not go far enough for Mary. She preferred to talk of "Terrible Women"—women who break the "Terrible Taboo: the universal, unnatural patriarchal taboo against Women Intimately/Ultimately Touching each Other."

Not only do they have an archive of all of their online issues, but you can order copies of most of the old print issues as well.

As I've said before, the existence of small independent feminist periodicals played a crucial role in creating radical feminist and lesbian movements that challenged patriarchy and all forms of oppression. Each time I discover another surviving feminist or lesbian periodical, I gain new hope that those movements can continue to move forward.

A tempest in a teapot?

The publicity and influence granted to right-wing political groups often outweighs their real popularity. I was reminded of this today by this item on the Right Wing Watch site of  People for the American Way. It was a critique of the speech given by right-wing activist Tom Tancredo at the opening session of the Tea Party Convention in Nashville this weekend.

Rep. Tom Tancredo’s deeply offensive remarks embodied the worst of today’s Republican Party, calling President Obama a ‘socialist ideologue,’ raving about the threat of immigration and multiculturalism, and longing for those good old days when literacy tests and other obstacles to the ballot were used to keep the ‘wrong’ people from voting. He would be nothing more than a bad joke if he did not represent a corrosive spirit that is far too prevalent in our politics today.

Too many conservative and Republican politicians, pundits, and political strategists have been eager to inflame racial and ethnic resentments for short-term political gain. And far too many have followed Tancredo’s path of demonizing immigrants in ways that dishonor our nation’s history and heritage.

Tancredo and the spirit of the ‘tea party’ groups that shouted down discussion of health care reform are destructive to civility and democracy. As President Obama said this week, it is possible to disagree strongly on policies and still engage in civil, respectful debate. But that’s not the path that GOP leaders, right-wing pundits, and behind-the-scenes backers of the tea party crowd have chosen.

PFAW's press release ended with a confident statement that ultimately the people of the United States will "reject this kind of ugly scapegoating and the political leaders who embrace it." I think they're right. But I was left to wonder why news of this convention was so prominent on public radio and on the web.

I came of age as a political activist in the years after Ronald Reagan won the US presidency in 1980. The mainstream news media described this as a huge change in the nation's political direction, but I remember it as a moment that set off a large wave of demonstrations by left-wing activists, against nuclear weapons and nuclear power, against US support for right-wing dictatorships in Central America, against US support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. Feminist women's peace camps sprang up in the US and other nations. As I remember it, the mainstream news media ignored this movement. Unless you had other sources of information -- such as the small feminist newspapers that were still widespread in the 1980s -- you would have thought that the entire nation accepted Reagan's right-wing politics.

Although Barack Obama is not the ideologue that Reagan was, his presidency has also been presented as a major change in course for US politics. Now, at every possible moment, malestream news outlets are telling us that there is a significant part of the electorate that opposes Obama, and any political policy that deviates from the hard-right politics of  his predecessor. The publicity given to the so-called Tea Party Movement is merely one example of this. Not that we should ignore Obama's opponents, but it seems to me that this onslaught of publicity has given them much more influence than they deserve.

The reason for this is not too hard to find. Rachel Maddow pointed it out last summer. This "tea party" isn't a grassroots movement, it's astroturf, orchestrated and financed by long-established right-wing Republican organizations with lots of money. This is not a reason for despair. But it is a reason to look for ways to minimize the influence of money in politics. For instance, even here in Oklahoma, efforts are mounting to promote a US constitutional amendment for campaign finance reform.

We can create an egalitarian society in the United States. But we're going to have to fight for it.

off our backs alive, kicking

Or at least that's what they say on their web site.

The link above is not a permanent link, but here is what the oob site is reporting as of this writing:

Our newly reorganized, re-energized gathering of enthusiastic, talented and committed radical feminist women is dedicated to oob's continuation as the beacon and source of feminist journalism and activism it has been since 1970. We plan to survive and thrive! Look for our next issue to hit your libraries, bookstores and mailboxes in mid June 2009!

This is very good news. Founded in 1970, off our backs is the oldest surviving feminist periodical in the US. You may remember that last fall, oob was in such difficult financial shape that they suspended their print edition and took time to re-group. But now the print edition of off our backs is back, and they've also started a blog as well.

Congratulations, sisters.

In praise of feminist periodicals, especially _off our backs_

Just the other day, I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Feminist Peace Network, where I saw an announcement of the publication of the latest--and possibly the last--print edition of the feminist news journal off our backs. This special Women's Visions for Peace Issue looks as if it will be very good. And it's encouraging to learn that oob will survive on the World Wide Web--and possibly in print as well.

I bet that oob could still use some more donations, which is why I started writing this post.

But then I started thinking fondly about off our backs, and all of the years it's been around, and the different forms it's taken. If my memory serves me correctly, oob was founded in February 1970 as a monthly newspaper. It served as a place where many fine feminist disagreements were argued out in great detail, and a source of women's news from all around the globe. Sometime in the current decade, facing budget dfficulties, oob transformed itself into a semi-monthly magazine style publication.

In whatever form off our backs survives, I am completely in awe that they've managed to keep themselves going for more than 38 years.

Back during the 1970s and 1980s the United States had dozens, even hundreds, of small independent feminist periodicals. Most were produced without the benefit of computer equipment. They were hand-made by overworked and mostly unpaid women armed with typewriters, light tables, exacto knives and hand waxers.

I bet many people have no idea what a hand waxer is. I bet many people think it is something used by a cosmetologist to remove unsightly hair from the back of your hand. No, no, no. Back in the seventies and eighties we were all about loving our bodies the way they were instead of molding and torturing them into some different patriarchally approved shape or texture.

But I digress. A hand waxer was this little contraption that you used to apply hot wax to the back of your copy so that you could apply it to the layout sheet. (It was a mess. I don't have very good near vision, and I could never get anything straight.) Once you and your sister collective members had laboriously applied all of the copy and all of the graphics to your layout sheets, you would deliver it to the printer. In a day or two, you would go back and .pick up a bundle of newspapers. Some of these you would mail to subscribers, and some you would deliver to your local distribution points. Add in all of the writing and researching articles, trying to sell advertisements, and so forth, it was all a freaking lot of work.

Besides the feminist and lesbian-feminist newspapers and magazines, there was also a vibrant network of independent feminist bookstores. All of this was undermined and done in by a range of cultural and economic forces. There has been an ongoing right-wing backlash over the past 30 years. Large corporations have concentrated control over publishing and bookselling. The mainstreaming of gay culture undermined independent, radical lesbian, feminist, and gay voices.

And then, of course, there has been the rise of the Internet--which may give independent radical voices a chance of re-emerging..

Besides off our backs, I don't know how many survivors are left. Sojourner, once published in Boston, seems to have gone under in 2002. Sinister Wisdom is still with us. On the Issues survives, at least as a web site. There is also a website called feminist reprise that maintains an archive of second-wave feminist writings. And then, of course, we now have feminist blogs.

Here's to all of you, sisters, and to any of you out there that I don't know about or neglected to mention. Here's to all of us. And a very special thank you to oob for keeping on keeping on for all those years.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that not only did I myself once take part in a feminist newspaper collective, it is also true that back in a different lifetime I was also an occasional contributor to off our backs.