In Hicks Hollow, an impoverished enclave in Kansas City, former slave, Emma Ray, turned a ramshackle, two-story wooden building into a rescue mission for African American children, while at a nondescript crossroad along the foothills of the Appalachians, Mattie Perry founded Elhanan Training School, even before the first public school opened in Marion, North Carolina. When institution building reached the craggy creek beds of western North Carolina through an ordinary woman like Perry, with no financial reserves, no church standing, and no higher education, the movement can be said to have thoroughly pervaded the entire nation.
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
‘What does a woman want money for?
Almost all the research into the gender pay gap has looked at its causes, but I want to look at its consequences. The correlation between low pay and unequal pay is unclear – I believe deliberately so: policy makers quite simply don’t want to face up to the fact that poverty is a women’s issue; easier by far to blame the education system, or the way in which benefits are distributed, than to redress the imbalance of power that impoverishes women.
Violating Human Rights by Criminalising Trafficking Victims/Survivors
UN CONDEMNS CRIMINALIZATION OF TRAFFICKING VICTIMS AS A HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION March 27, 2014 | CUNY School of Law Today, the U.N. Human Rights Committee urged that the U.S. end the prosecution of human trafficking victims for crimes that they…
Electronic Gadgets Cost More than Money …
Self-confessed electronics fan Adam Turner [The Age, March 22], deemed wearable gadgets as yet to meet his desires. Such technology fails to tick his boxes relating to simplicity, elegance, and value for money. Others would agree, though for some the…
Human Rights & Development – An Essential Duo!
The current level of inequalities is insulting and, as global citizens, we do not agree with investing human and financial resources for governments at the UN to merely reaffirm what was agreed on 20 years ago, or in the Rio+20 outcome document. We demand that you go beyond these commitments and establish a well articulated and interlinked human rights and development agenda, with all stakeholders held responsible for coherent and transparent policies, programs and services. This means naming rights holders and duty bearers, identifying obligations of all parties, focusing on implementation and accountability through legal, policy and institutional measures to fully realize all human rights for everyone. It means preventing cultural, religious, ethnic, gender or other forms of bias, the possible non-recognition of the rights of certain categories of persons and categories of rights when shaping the future.
CSW 58 – Voices Call for Peace
WE CALL FOR the United Nations, to agree that all States will reform their domestic laws and judicial procedures so that they provide effective and meaningful protections for the rights of indigenous women within their jurisdictions, and to take steps, immediately, to ensure the elimination of the direct and indirect impacts that militarization and the development and utilization of nuclear processes/byproducts have on indigenous people, particularly indigenous women and girls*(using the transfer or capital money no longer being used to fund war) *note., who are the most severely impacted, as a result of various States intentionally identifying and locating industries related to militarization, nuclear facilities and related waste disposal on their legally protected homelands.
Politics & Women’s Voices – Anna Howard Shaw
Shaw embodied women’s expanding opportunities in the 19th and early 20th centuries for education, work and politics, as well as the challenges they faced. An immigrant raised in poverty on a Michigan farm, from an early age Shaw worked to financially support her family, teaching school in addition to her unpaid hard physical farm labor. When she was called to the ministry, her family didn’t approve. She went it alone. She worked her way through college and seminary in the 1870s, fought for ordination, headed two parishes, and earned a medical degree, before giving all of it up to become a freelance lecturer, activist and organizer.
Molly Hadfield – A Radical Warrior Woman Remembered
… when Molly Hadfield was 10, she was told that nursing was not for her – ‘you can’t do the exams’ – but she would be welcome to work in the nurses’ dining room. She took the job. Under the rules lunches were set out on tables for nurses, but sisters and matrons’ meals were kept in the oven. Sisters and matrons sat down to piping hot fare. Cold and cooling meals waited until nurses finished their shifts. The unfairness of the hierarchical system struck Molly Hadfield then and stuck with her, as did the distinction made between kitchen and nursing staff which prevented her from meeting on the premises with cousins and friends who were nurses.
Raging for Wages – An Extract
‘Even at the early age of three, I had some instincts as to the relations of cause and effect, and the basic need to remove the cause of the trouble.’[1] Her words become an epitaph in Kay Keasey’s spirited Australian…