Pam’s Comments (group member since Dec 29, 2016)

Pam’s comments from the Our Shared Shelf group.

This seemed to have turned a bit away from the spirit of OSS.

Camilla: thank you for bringing up the idea of merch. Looks like Jo will review.

Florian: thank you for bringing in the eco-feminisnt argument to the topic. I had inklings about the problems with plastic; but didn't even take into consideration all transportation logistics that add up something so small.

It's almost like the discussion about banning straws. They at not be the number 1 plastic pollutant (thank you fish nets) but they are still one time use items that add.up.quickly.

Valentina Tereshkova: for being written off as being expendable only to end up becoming such a powerhouse. I love that her "rags" to "riches" story wasn't because of an education or a specific unique talent that only the very rich could afford but because she was an adrenaline jock which landed her in a club only a handful of humans- ever to live/breathe - are in. And that she was able to move from that once in a lifetime encounter to creating this enduring legacy and political clout.

Zainah Anwar. In my previous career I worked at a interreligious non-profit. I had the privilege of working and talking with Nuns, Rabbis, Bishops, and Friends from many faith communities on a regular basis. To me, there is something very beautiful in a reflective, spiritual life dedicated to helping us silly monkeys be less silly. So once I discovered this marriage of both feminism with spirituality, I knew I was hooked.

Whina Cooper: New Zealand Activist: In her 80th year when, crippled with arthritis, she led 5,000 people on a 700-mile march from her Northland home to Parliament in Wellington, to highlight the fact that Europeans had seized all but 2.5 million acres of New Zealand's 66 million acres of land in 135 years of British colonization.

And our very own MeerderWorter. A tireless champion for the marginalized and unheard. She is made up of this amazing dichotomy of fierce advocacy and boundless compassion that belies the strength of her spirit. I stand in awe of what she has accomplished, what she knows, what she continues to push for even though she has no blood ties. She is simply incredible.

Hmmm let's see if we can break empowerment into a few categories

- representation: help them to understand diversity and the whole spectrum of people and occupations. Try to stay away from children's books that reinforce stereotypes.

i.e. books that show handicapable kids, ones with different sounding names, ones with female presidents or male nurses, etc etc.

- Exploration: a lot of empowerment comes in experiential learning. If YOU show the child how they can do it, ALLOW them to do it, and then get out of the way for them to do it, then the kids begin to build mental models of what they are capable of achieving

Check out this video:https://www.fatherly.com/news/dad-hil...

It shows a father helping to teach his child how to blow out a candle. We mimic the action once or twice, but then instincts/ patience/ etc kick in and we end up blowing out the candle ourselves. Where as if you watch the video you can see the father coming up with a couple of ways to help the child be the one who actually does it. The moment may drag, but the victory is the child's.

to that extent:
sensory play:


picture books are really great to help start this process. There are no words, only beautiful images. So you ask your child to tell you the story. Each time you read it it could potentially be a new story based on their imagination and mood. helps with verbalizing and emotionally feeling ok to share with you their own ways of looking at the world.




Montessori style books:



Other misc. books:

Sarah Kay's "If I should have a daughter"

This came across my feed recently and I wanted to share it: https://www.obama.org/fellowship/2019...

"In the United States, 25 million children are growing up without a father figure. In situations where father absenteeism is impacted by incarceration, homelessness, depression, or joblessness, being an engaged father comes with more challenges. Fathers’ UpLift believes that everyone has the potential to be a good parent but that systemic oppression diminishes that potential. In many cases, fathers are left without access to the community, peer support, or mental health interventions that would help them overcome obstacles and fully engage in their children’s lives.

Strategy:
Fathers’ UpLift is the country’s first mental health and substance abuse treatment facility for fathers and families, helping fathers become and remain emotionally stable for their children. Fathers’ UpLift uses peer coaching, father-child therapy, trainings, youth programs, and support for incarcerated and recently released fathers to honor and rehabilitate the relationship between thousands of fathers and families in the Boston area. In their outpatient clinic, over 800 fathers and families receive mental health services from clinicians trained in trauma who reflect the population being served. Outside of the clinic, Fathers’ UpLift partners with community centers, substance abuse programs, and other agencies to build a holistic approach to helping fathers rebuild their lives and their relationships with their families."

This is not the first nor hopefully the last initiative to bring fatherhood into a spotlight.

As a feminist, this is near and dear to my heart. By eroding the 1950's ideal of a father, removed from child rearing except in times of punishment, we can work to help remove stigmas associates with being caregivers. We can remove antiquated ideals that a man cannot be nurturing, compassionate or able to express more emotions beyond anger or lust.

To me, not only does that help the next generation of men, but it also helps the mothers. Shared work / shared investment in the child's success and well being.

So how about everyone here? How is the distribution of labor at your homes? Have you found your husband's or partners more receptive to fatherhood or is it still hard to get them to do things?

And men what do you think of these initiatives?

I cannot imagine all that you are dealing with. But I know that you are fighting.

I think depression eats away at people for years. And that what you just said above was "I'm still here and I'm still fighting this."

And that is so powerful.

I am not a trained therapist, but I know of a few resources can act as your reinforcements:
https://www.7cups.com/
7 Cups connects you to caring listeners for free emotional support.

or https://www.betterhelp.com/
Better Help connects you with trained therapists who can work with your specific needs.

"In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." Karl Popper

I do not stand by for when entire communities are dragged through the mud nor when falsehoods are displayed like polished turds. And if that brands me as intolerant by some people, then I suppose I do not care much for their opinions.

That would be great! Please make this happen!

Charles-Henri wrote: "Cendaquenta wrote: "Charles-Henri wrote: "Plus abortion, can provoke, deep psychological problems (Autism for example) to your further children,"

Charles,
Everything about your earlier comment is vile. Either you are extremely misinformed or you have a lot of things to read up on.

1) Autism is not a deep psychological problem. You owe the entire autism community an apology.
2) Abortion is not something that haunts future children nor previous children. Nor effects their future career path.
3) And your entire comment about a victim of rape is crass and unbecoming of this forum.

Your excuse that you are playing devil's advocate is not accepted, especially as most of these opinions are made up lies and half truths that have no basis in reality. And if you were trying to bring a smile to this discussion, you are incorrect. You bring nothing of merit to this thread.

Gray cover:
Sense of mystery, shows off a journey... But I find it too Western.. 4 out of 5

The green baige cover
There is something to be said about primacy, and when I think of Pachinko, I think this cover. It's fun, mysterious as i do not know the symbolism at play here, and it stands out. 4.5/5

The red cover:
Happy cover. But almost makes it look 70's with some of the older designs. 4/5

Ramaadan Mubarak!

Florian wrote: "Hey Pam! 😊
I'm just thinking that if we don't pay attention to our resources right now it will be difficult to sustain efforts to reach equality or to preserve the hard work that has been done. ."

You and me both.

Agreed, something has got to change if we expect those born today to have the same or a better world to live in.

Hi Florian!

Third World vs Developing: Great article on it below
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsand...

"This 1-2-3 classification is now out of date, insulting and confusing" ... "And it's not like the First World is the best world in every way. It has pockets of deep urban and rural poverty, says Paul Farmer, co-founder of the nonprofit Partners in Health and a professor at Harvard Medical School, referring to parts of the United States and other wealthy nations where health problems loom large."

""Developing countries" sounds like it might be a better choice. On the surface, it seems accurate" In an email exchange, she took aim and fired: "I dislike the term 'developing world' because it assumes a hierarchy between countries. It paints a picture of Western societies as ideal but there are many social problems in these societies as well. It also perpetuates stereotypes about people who come from the so-called developing world as backward, lazy, ignorant, irresponsible."

I'm open if we want a standard term in this discussion

Rudeness aside from you Yuvraj; we should also note that different editions are published in different countries. So my version of the book my not be your edition.

I would also appreciate that while we are on the forum, perhaps you can cater to the forum. And not to a different medium. By doing so, you can also make sure that you embed the image into the forum topic. This would help prevent more misunderstanding and help keep interested parties who may not have the time to swipe back and forth between the home page.

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(Thanks Emma, I didn't even know about the redder version until you mentioned it!)

And if there are more than one edition, it adds to the discussion about why these exist. Was it the author's choice, the publishers? Is one cover more appealing to the East than the West? Etc.

Not sure that this is intersectional feminism, Florian, or if this is more suited for the branch of ecofeminism.

Ecofeminism is "a philosophical and political movement that combines ecological concerns with feminist ones, regarding both as resulting from male domination of society."

The idea that the Earth is our mother, giving the 3rd rock from the sun a female gender, etc.

But I believe a large push now a days is on global climate change, habitat destruction, resource scarcity (water mostly), etc.

From Bustle: "The United Nations Environment Program puts it pretty succinctly, saying: "Around the world, environmental conditions impact the lives of women and men in different ways as a result of existing inequalities. Gender roles often create differences in the ways men and women act in relation to the environment, and in the ways men and women are enabled or prevented from acting as agents of environmental change." https://www.bustle.com/articles/15551...

To your point on equality:
- The problem that the consumers tend to be the more active 1st world communities, but it's the third world nations that often pay the largest price in terms of climate upheaval and super storms damage, etc. etc.

Which cover? Or which edition of the cover?

Excellent! This has been on my to-read list for a year now. Glad to have a wonderful group of people to read it with.

Thank you OSS!

Great! So happy you enjoyed these!

Day 31: Women's History Month

Martine Rothblatt American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur, ceo

Only about 5 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 are run by women; double the sample size, and the proportion is the same. Compensation levels for female CEOs appear to lag as well, though it’s hard to tell because there are so few of them. On a recent list of America’s 200 highest-paid CEOs, only 11 were women, and their median pay was $1.6 million less than their male peers.But what’s really extraordinary about Rothblatt’s ascent is not that she has leaned in, or out, or had any particular thoughts about having it all. What sets Rothblatt apart from the other women on the list is that she—who earned $38 million last year—was born male.

In the late 1980s, Rothblatt conceived of and created a crazy company devoted to the idea of worldwide satellite radio. Her college thesis became the first private satellite phone company.

By the early 1990s, Rothblatt had founded CD Satellite Radio, a forerunner of satellite worldwide radio, then changed the name to Sirius, for the brightest star in the sky.

She is a person for whom gender matters enough to have undergone radical surgery, but not enough to care whether she’s called he or she by people, like her 83-year-old mother, who occasionally lose track of which pronoun to use.

What she prefers to be called is “Martine.” To her four young grandchildren she is “Grand Martine.” Bina Aspen, the woman who married Martine 33 years ago, when Martine was a man, and remains her devoted wife, calls herself not straight or gay but “Martine-sexual”—as in the only person she wants to have sex with is Martine. Together Martine and Bina have four children, and they refer to Martine as “Martine” in conversations with strangers. At home, they call her “Dad.” Martine was always going to be their dad, Bina was always going to be their mom, and stupid people were always going to be stupid.

The gender switch in the 90's led to Martine’s first manifesto-type book, “The Apartheid of Sex.” It argued that people come in vast ranges of sexualities and that two genders simply could not describe the reality. The book got a $100,000 publishing contract.

Sirius went to its IPO. Rothblatt earned millions

Rothblatt dropped out of the satellite orbit because her daughter was diagnosed at 5 with what is now called pulmonary arterial hypertension, an incurable lung disease. It progressively narrows the lung’s arteries to the point of death. So Rothblatt sold out of Sirius, set to studying biology — the last such course she had taken was in 10th grade — and formed United Therapeutics U.T. in 1996.

UT now sells five FDA-approved pills to help people with the disease. Now publicly traded, the company is experimenting with pig cloning and genetic modification to create lung transplants the body doesn't reject.

Rothblatt had earlier linked her salary to the company stock price, a sort of self-incentivization that explains her $38 million payday. There is still no cure for pulmonary hypertension, but with combinations of drugs from UT and other companies, patients can live longer than before. Jenesis turns 30 this year and works for her dad. The company's pig 'pharm' in Blacksburg,Virginia, is the world's largest cloner of pigs.

What's next for this lawyer-turned biotech wizard?

Martine prefers not to limit herself both in industries and in available words: She’s suggested using “Pn.,” for “person,” in place of “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and “spice” to mean husband or wife. But “trans” is a prefix she likes a lot, for it contains her self-image as an explorer who crosses barriers into strange new lands. (When she feels a connection to a new acquaintance, she says that she “transcends.”)

And these days Martine sees herself less as transgender and more as what is known as transhumanist, a particular kind of futurist who believes that technology can liberate humans from the limits of their biology—including infertility, disease, and decay, but also, incredibly, death. She just published “Virtually Human,” a big-think manifesto on the rights of yet-to-be-created cyber-humans, who might one day be uploaded with all of your thoughts, dreams, memories and online activity and live for eternity as a sort-of you.

She founded a religion, the Terasem Movement, which puts together her cultural Judaism (she puts on a mean seder), Zen-like yoga and a deep belief in technology. One of the four founding beliefs: “Death is optional.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifest...
https://www.forbes.com/profile/martin...
http://nymag.com/nymag/rss/business/m...

Day 30: Women's History Month:

Serena Williams American athelte, activist, and mother

Serena Williams experienced serious complications after giving birth to her daughter, Alexis Olympia—a situation that a disproportionate number of women of color face with pregnancy. Instead of keeping quite about it, Serena used her platform to explain the issue and call out the problem.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black women in the United States are over three times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes.

But this is not just a challenge in the United States. Around the world, thousands of women struggle to give birth in the poorest countries. When they have complications like hers, there are often no drugs, health facilities or doctors to save them. If they don't want to give birth at home, they have to travel great distances at the height of pregnancy. Before they even bring a new life into this world, the cards are already stacked against them.

When asked in a new Q&A with Glamour about how learning this made her feel, she replied, "It’s devastating because that’s me. If I wasn’t who I am, it could have been me—and that’s not fair. Class shouldn’t separate health, and it’s so frustrating to know that [it does]."

Williams clarified that she uses the word class specifically because she's "able to afford this opportunity to speak up and say, 'No, I need help now!' and people will listen to [her]." But she pointed out that not everyone has the same privilege. "But a lot of African Americans—and people in Africa, India, or Brazil, to name a few—don’t have that opportunity," she went on. "It’s completely devastating."

And then add to the mix the controversy surrounding Serena Williams latest tennis outfit -- a black catsuit --after French Tennis Federation President Bernard Giudicelli had cited it as the primary reason the French Open is introducing a new dress code next season. Even after word spread that the specially designed custom suit Williams wore was designed to protect against blood clots after American doctors revealed they found a hematoma in her body after she gave birth to her daughter Olympia.

Despite this (and tons of other nonesense) Serena keeps being a champion. “I’m living a different life, you know, I’m playing the U.S. Open as a mom, and it’s just new and it’s fresh. If anything, I have more fire in my belly.”

https://www.wired.com/2015/10/serena-...
https://www.self.com/story/serena-wil...
https://graziadaily.co.uk/celebrity/n...
https://www.newsweek.com/serena-willi...

Day 29: Women's History month

Mary Prince Bermudian activist and author

In the introduction to The History of Mary Prince, editor Thomas Pringle asserts that "The idea of writing Mary Prince's history was first suggested by herself." Her purpose, writes Pringle, is to ensure that "good people in England might hear from a slave what a slave had felt and suffered." Prince's History is one of the earliest narratives intended to reveal the ugly truths about slavery in the West Indies to an English reading public, who were largely unaware of its atrocities. While eighteenth-century slave narratives often focused on Christian spiritual journeys and religious redemption, Prince's narrative was part of a growing trend of abolitionist-themed narratives that focused on slavery's injustices, in the same vein as A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper (1838) and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Her narrative is also particularly important, because few early women's slave narratives exist. As scholar William L. Andrews notes, escaped enslaved women rarely asked for or received attention that "encouraged them to dictate or write their life stories"

She became the first woman to present an anti-slavery petition to Parliament and the first black woman to write and publish an autobiography, ‘The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave '. The book was a key part of the anti slavery campaign.

Mary Prince begins her History with a brief description of her childhood, before turning to her adult experiences under slavery in the West Indies. She describes her early childhood in the household of Captain Williams as "the happiest period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave." But after she is sold to a new owner, she depicts her treatment under slavery in stark detail.

As an adult, Prince reveals the appalling work conditions under which slaves are forced to labor. Whether working as a domestic or a field laborer in the Turks Island salt ponds, she is continually pushed past the point of physical exhaustion by owners who abuse her and to whom she "could give no satisfaction."

Prince counterpoints the physical and emotional toll of her daily labor with excruciating details of the beatings she endures at the hands of her masters as well as their wives. She is hopeful at each change of ownership that she might receive better treatment, but she soon finds she is simply "going from one butcher to another." She describes not only the physical details of her abuse—the beatings and whippings, the broken skin, the scarring, and the painful recovery—but also the systematic way in which her owners apply it, both as a psychological method of torment and as an emotional release for themselves. In one instance, she ironically describes her beatings as an education: "she taught me . . . to know the exact difference between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin, when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand"

Her book had an immediate effect on public opinion and was published in three impressions the first year. It generated controversy, and James MacQueen, the editor of The Glasgow Courier, challenged its accuracy by a lengthy letter in Blackwood's Magazine.

MacQueen was a defender of white West Indian interests and vigorous critic of the anti-slavery movement. He depicted Prince as a woman of low morals who had been the "despicable tool" of the anti-slavery clique, who had incited her to malign her "generous and indulgent owners." He attacked the character of the Pringle family, suggesting they were at fault for accepting the slave in their household.

In 1833 Pringle sued MacQueen for libel, receiving damages of £5. Not long afterwards, John Wood, Prince's master, sued Pringle for libel, holding him responsible as the editor of Prince's The History, and claiming the book generally misrepresented his character. Wood won his case and was awarded £25 in damages. Prince was called to testify in both these trials, but little is known of her life after this.