Diane DeBella and I Am Subject: Women sharing their stories to become “subjects” in the 21st century
My fondest memories of the winter solstice were when my kids were young, and the cartoon Little Bear was popular. There was a winter solstice episode, and it was filled with love, family, food, joy, community, warmth, and the uplifting refrain, “Happy Winter Solstice!” It still makes me smile to think of it today. Yet..
19-year-old Ruth George was killed in the early hours of November 23rd when she was attempting to get to her car in a parking garage on the University of Illinois campus. She is just one of the countless victims of violence in the US this week. She was murdered two days before the UN’s International..
I was baptized Catholic. I had no choice in the matter. In 1956, when my mother, who was Methodist, married my father, who was Catholic, she had to agree to raise her children Catholic. She actually had to sign a piece of paper. I left the church as a young woman when I could no..
~24 people per minute are victims of intimate violence—more than 12 million people per year~ The fact that the Violence Against Women Act expired when the government shut down isn’t widely known. While it also isn’t cause for immediate panic (unauthorized programs can receive appropriations), what is alarming is the fact that violence against..
Did you know that women couldn’t vote in Switzerland until 1971? And even then, not all women were included. It wasn’t until 1990 that the conservative region of Appenzell Innerrhoden gave women the right to vote at cantonal level, and it did so only because the federal supreme court forced the issue. While Switzerland wasn’t..
The events of last Thursday and Friday ripped open countless women’s wounds, revictimizing them and forcing them to relive their own trauma. I was one of those women. I found myself shaking, wrapping my arms around myself as I rocked back and forth, trying to control my breath as I watched both Dr. Blasey..
The biggest predictor of change is misery. The biggest reason people will change is because they are suffering to a degree that they can’t continue to live the same way. ~ Dr. Cortney S. Warren, Clinical Psychologist Denial is a film about climate change. That was the original intention of both the director, Derek..
Love is at the root of everything, all learning, all parenting, all relationships. Love or the lack of it. ~ Fred Rogers I wish that as a child I had paid closer attention to Mr. Rogers. If I had, I might have saved myself decades of pain. His core message, from the time the..
I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. ~ RBG What surprised me most about Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s documentary RBG was how much I didn’t know about the iconic Supreme Court Justice—and what I didn’t know made me..
“You raise your consciousness to a level where you feel that you must do the right thing, because it is the only right thing to do.” ~ Wangari Maathai As I left the theater after the screening of the documentary Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, her words kept running through my..