Tag: Suffrage

Of white blouses, bread and ballots

Greetings, fellow humans! This message will also be posted on the website of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Castine (Maine) in due course, but without gaseous history-wonk effusions and additional snarky commentary. Lucky you! By the time you see this it may be August 18, which is the actual hundred year anniversary of the 19th amendment being ratified. Wondering why the heck that should still matter to you when you’ve got cats to feed and bills to pay (and bills to pay due to feeding the cats)? Keep reading.

When we think about the white dresses and festive banners of suffrage, we know how the story turns out. So far, at least. We may tend to skip ahead toward the end. “Those ladies” went out and held some parades, fundraisers and meetings. Some of them went to jail. We’ve no doubt heard a few of them refused to eat when they were incarcerated.

That sounds rough, we may think. But they won in the end (or in 1920 in the US). Well, white women won. Native American women and many immigrant women remained disenfranchised. Native people got the vote in 1925, but states would use little loopholes and technicalities (and overt violence) to keep them from the polls. We’re familiar with hearing this type of experience for African Americans. Even after women allegedly got the franchise in 1920, black women and men risked their lives and those of their families if they tried to exercise their rights to vote. We’ll talk more about that momentarily.

The pageantry possible when the women organizing it are badasses at sewing!

Skipping ahead through the lessons of history is understandable in our world of blazing-speed and multi-tasking, where we are not only tempted but encouraged to drop any habits or curiosities that do not clearly serve our immediate ends. Yet, as Congressman John Lewis recently reminded us in his powerful memorial op-ed in the New York Times, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. When it comes to disenfranchisement and voter suppression, this may never have been truer than it is in the fall of 2020. As he said:

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time.

When Woodrow Wilson was elected to office in 1913, women and other minorities who were inclined to activism were ready to hit the street. This president was known to be a racist. He supported and helped to disseminate overtly racist propaganda, like the white nationalist film “Birth of a Nation,” which was based on a novel called, “The Clansman.” Among other things, this film passed on the old tropes that black men would sexually assault white women if they were not rigorously controlled by morally superior (civically franchised) white males. Wilson screened this film at the White House. It was, in fact, the first film ever screened at the White House. One example of a president taking advantage of a new and exciting technology to endorse certain opinions more personal than civic.

Some NOT very fine people having a KKK style celebration of the first film ever screened in the White House by President Woodrow Wilson

Women engaged in activism for their own franchise at that time. Then called suffragettes, hundreds held a protest parade against Wilson in March of 1913. It was held the day before his inauguration and widely compared to the 2016 women’s marches. In 1913, the women on the march were assaulted in the streets to the extent that over a hundred of them had to be hospitalized. The secretary of defense had to deploy federal troops to help quell the violence that rose up against them and allow ambulances to get through the violent crowds to even help them. Later and after a congressional hearing on the matter, the police commissioner of Washington DC was forced out over his decisions not to send sufficient police support for the women’s march.

crowds pressing in on the parade, 1913, stopping the lead float from progressing

When women were jailed for protests back at that time, it was not a low impact experience. Lady Constance Bulwer Lytton recorded in her memoirs what it was like to come up against hostile police. On her first march to Parliament, this was her experience:

The crowd pushed me up against a policeman and I said to him, “I know you are only doing your duty and I am doing mine.” His only answer was to seize me with both his hands round the ribs, squeeze the remaining breath out of my body and, lifting me completely into the air, throw me with all his strength. Thanks to the crowd I did not reach the ground; several of my companions in more isolated parts of the square were thrown repeatedly onto the pavement…. A German lady who was tall, well-built and of considerable strength managed to keep near me. Three times, after each of the “throws,” she came to my hep and warded off the crowd while I leant up against some railings, or against her shoulder to recover my breath. Several times I said to her, “I can’t go on; I simply can’t go on.” She answered, “Wait for a little, you will be all right presently.” At the time and ever since I have felt most inexpressibly grateful to this stranger-friend.

Lady Constance and pal (I’ve noted before that Constance was a dedicated vegetarian also)

This type of treatment was recorded by many women on both sides of the pond. Of course, once Constance and her peers made it to the parliament, many were arrested and incarcerated. The treatment didn’t get any better there. Two of the most notorious prisons where these women activists ended up were the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, U.S. and the Holloway Women’s Prison in London, U.K. (where Constance wound up many times). Once in jail they were deliberately (not surprisingly) treated with optimal lack of dignity. At the worst prisons some were stripped, chained naked to cell doors, and sometimes sexually assaulted. This happened in November of 1917 at Occoquan in VA with such brutality that historians still term it a “night of terror,” with women being stripped and chained to the cells, and one being beaten to the point of a heart attack.

They didn’t do their activism, as the media at the time tried to portray, because they were narcissistic attention-seekers or bored housewives who’d been “allowed” too much time on their hands. They did it because they knew they, their children and grandchildren would never have full rights to safety and freedom (or at least a chance at them) without the massive privileges that came with a ballot.

one of the ambulances at the 1913 parade, completely unable to move until Feds sent the literal cavalry to help

This is not to say that our activist ancestors always got things right. At the same 1913 march where the police let Wilson supporters in town for the inauguration wreak havoc on the women activists, internal strife was doing damage of its own. Black women activists from groups like the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) were being turned away from the march by white organizers. The NACW was formed in 1896 to advocate for the franchise as a way that black women and men could work against inequalities of all kinds (especially lynching, which was rampant at the time the group was founded and was more of a threat than ever with Wilson screening that horrible film and endorsing the clan). The women’s club motto was “lifting as we climb,” and they sought the women’s vote to improve the lives of women as well as men in their communities.

Due to pressures put to bear by white women from the segregated south, the women’s march organizers colluded with oppression. Now a’days we call that “horizontal hostility,” where minorities put in the position of scrapping for crumbs end up in conflict with each other rather than the ones pulling the strings. Anyway, noted African American suffragist Ida B Wells did manage to march with the white delegation from Illinois as a form of protest, but she was the exception that proved the rule. Similar things were happening in the UK as British women tried to sell ladies from Australia, India, and other “colonies” on sitting in the back seat and waiting for a turn.

NACW CLUB OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

None of these women’s activism was not easy or safe. Mostly, as the activists pointed out, because women couldn’t vote. Without full citizenship, they lacked basic protections. They pointed out what we all too often forget in this day and age, where voting is so much of a privilege that it has become little more than a hassle. They pointed out that those with the franchise make all social decisions about rights and burdens around issues of healthcare, child care, education, abuse, indigency, reproductive choices (or lack thereof), and literal freedom (whether people may be enslaved or held in poor house prisons, or made to work off debts as indentured servants, for example). The first time any women were registered to vote in Massachusetts, for example, was in order to vote on school board committees. After several failed attempts they won this limited franchise in 1879. At this same time in the American South, openly violent white nationalist groups like the KKK and “red shirts” were terrorizing black citizens who dared to take advantage of the waning opportunities that came after the Civil War.

Particularly, white southerners used violence and intimidation to keep black citizens away from voter registration and the polls. It was official in 1896 when the Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson gave Southern states room to modify their constitutions and create fully legal segregation. Hence came the era of Jim Crow, with stunts like “guess the number of jellybeans in this jar” in order to register to vote (but only if you’re African American). Activists like young John Lewis were beaten and humiliated for their peaceful sit-ins and marches, culminating in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” where police gassed and beat Lewis and other participants in a march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. Particularly infamous was the beating of female activist Amelia Boynton, due to the abject brutality the police unleashed on her. Reminiscent of the personal accounts of Lady Lytton, Amelia later recounted her experiences on Bloody Sunday:

Then they charged. They came from the right. They came from the left. One [of the troopers] shouted: ‘Run!’ I thought, ‘Why should I be running?’ Then an officer on horseback hit me across the back of the shoulders and, for a second time, on the back of the neck. I lost consciousness.

Amelia Boynton about Bloody Sunday in Selma, 1965
Lewis and Boynton holding President Obama’s hands at the 2013 Pettus Bridge commemoration (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson) This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Lewis, Boynton, and their brave peers won a major victory in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. This outlawed discriminatory voting practices like those of the Jim Crow south. Unfortunately, in 2013, the teeth were pulled out of this law. A key formula in the language was removed by a slight Supreme Court majority (5 to 4) that meant states no longer need to seek federal permission to tinker with their voting anti-discrimination laws (a guardrail known as “preclearance”). As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg warned in her typically accurate and acerbic dissent,

“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”  

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg 2013

Okay, she’s awesome.

Ever since activists around universal franchise (making sure everyone can vote with equal ease of access) have warned us that states have been up to mischief. Purging the voter rolls of people who haven’t voted recently, moving polling places without notifying citizens, throwing out ballots due to many subtle technicalities, and so on have snowballed over the past seven years. One of the high-profile activists fighting for universal franchise in the news of recent months has been Stacy Abrams. Abrams ran to be Governor of Georgia in 2018. She lost to her opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who happened to be the one setting a lot of rules about voter accessibility and the validity of ballots. Accusations of corruption by Kemp were rife, and not for the first time in his career. Yet whether we agree with those allegations or not, Stacy Abrams’ campaign had a wonderful speech in it that can be applied to the importance of the universal franchise. This speech wasn’t done by Kemp herself. It was done by Oprah!

Oprah harkened back to the times experienced by young John Lewis (and generations of both their ancestors before), when she urged us all to the polls. At a televised “town hall” event in November 2018, she said:

I didn`t take voters voting seriously until around my mid-twenties. Around my mid-twenties, I had the privilege of hearing Reverend Otis Moss Jr. who`s a preacher. You all know him, preacher, preacher in Cleveland, Ohio. And I heard him tell the story of his father, of Otis Moss Sr. who right here in Georgia`s True County got up in the morning and put on his only suit and his best tie and he walked six miles to the voting poll location he was told to go to in LaGrange. And when he got there after walking six miles in his good suit and tie, they said boy, you`re at the wrong place. You need to go over to Mountville. So he walked another six miles to Mountville. And when he got there they said, boy you`re at the wrong place. You need to go to the Rosemont School. And I picture him walking from dawn to dusk in his suit, his feet tired getting to the Rosemont School and they say boy you`re too late. The polls are closed, and he never had a chance to vote. By the time the next election came around, he had died. So when I go to the polls and I cast my ballot, I cast it for a man I never knew. I cast it for Otis Moss Sr. who walked 18 miles one day just for the chance to vote. And when I go into the polls, I cast the vote for my grandmother Hattie Mae Lee who died in 1963 before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and never had a chance to vote. I vote for her. And when I stand in the polls, I do what Maya Angelou says I come as one, but I stand as 10,000, all those who paved the way that we might have the right to vote. And for anybody here who has an ancestor who didn`t have the right to vote and you are choosing not to vote wherever you are in this state in this country, you are dishonoring your family. We are disrespecting and disregarding their legacy, their suffering, and their dreams when you don`t vote. So honor your legacy. Honor your right to citizenship in this which is the greatest country in the world, the greatest country in the world. And the right to vote is like the crown we all get to wear.

I would lovingly urge all of us to honor an ancestor when we take the time and make the effort to make sure we cast a ballot. Base line, all of us who have female ancestors, and I think that’s pretty common, have such ones to honor. Many never saw their own chance, but they endured great suffering and hardship to win that chance for us. They knew what we have all too often forgotten.

A ballot is bread. A ballot is a roof over your head. A ballot is laws to protect you when the police are called, either by you or on you. A ballot is an education for your children and grandchildren (an education equal to those with greater opportunity). A ballot is dignified care for our elders and for yourself in times of illness, disability, and later years. A ballot is your freedom of speech, and freedom of reproductive choice. The rights that our forebears fought for so hard are not cast in iron and impervious to harm. As the Voter Rights Act shows, they can be eroded in a heartbeat and eventually perhaps destroyed completely.

A ballot cast by you is also all of those things cast by you on behalf of your friends and neighbors. Those who fought for the ballot knew all too well what it is worth. Would they ever have dreamed how quickly many of us forgot? What else can we do? Even if we don’t have the time or proclivity toward “activism,” there are things. Now is the time to urge friends and neighbors to apply for absentee ballots. Simple letting your own community know you plan to vote and talking about the positive reasons for this civic decision, makes an impact. If you go to the ballot in person, perhaps take one person in your circle who needs a ride.

Those who fought for the vote knew its value and wouldn’t want us to forget. I’ll let one of them say that in her own words. This is from Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900-1904 and 1915-1920.

“The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guarantee of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Money to carry on this work has been given usually as a sacrifice, and thousands of women have gone without things they wanted and could have had in order that they might help get the vote for you. Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Understand what it means and what it can do for your country. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully.”

Carrie Chapman Catt

Non-partisan voting resources:

League of Women Voters: https://www.lwvme.org/

When we all vote: https://www.whenweallvote.org/

Suffrage, agency, and diet: Knowing when we’ve had our fill

Cooking on Sunday is kind of a thing for me. It makes me feel nourished in more ways than one. It’s when I take the time to try tricky recipes and break out (sometimes break) the decent dishes. Sometimes, about halfway through this ritual, I realize I might have bitten off more than I can chew. Yes, a food pun. Deal with it. Anyhow, that’s today.

As I build my Sunday dinner of tofurky divan (why did I try something so fussy?!) I am contemplating how I want to write about the hundredth anniversary the women’s vote (“women’s suffrage”) in the United States. Yep. I contemplate stuff like that.

Maybe it’s the bubbling sauce of tahini, cashew and white wine talking but I’m going at it through food. More than food, really. Our agency over our bodies. Bear in mind I am documenting my own cerebral and experiential meanderings. I’m not trying to deliver an ultimate truth. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of one of those little beauties. In other words, bear with me. Okay, here we go.

Women got the franchise in 1920 in the U.S. and in 1928 in the U.K. In both countries, suffrage activists were pushed, hit, thrown, spit on, and jailed. They held the 1913 women’s march to protest the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson (an event that was heavily compared with the women’s marches in the U.S. after Trump was elected). At this event over a hundred women were injured badly enough to wind up in the hospital when Wilson supporters were unleashed on the marchers by unfriendly police.

The Secretary of War had to dispatch federal cavalry to help quell the violence and allow ambulances to help the women.  The D.C Police Commissioner was forced out in the subsequent scandal which even included special congressional hearings into the matter.

Two of the most notorious prisons where these women activists ended up were the Occoquan Workhouse in Virgina, U.S. and the Holloway Women’s Prison in London, U.K. Once in jail they were deliberately (not surprisingly) treated with optimal lack of dignity.

They were often charged in ways that put them on an equivalency with prostitutes when, as activists, they demanded instead to be treated as political prisoners. As women were moved in and out of these prisons for repeat sentences, they developed collective action strategies. They first tried to refuse wearing prison uniforms (a marker of a person with special political prisoner status) but male guards were perfectly happy to be called in to undress them. At the worst prisons some were stripped, chained naked to cell doors, and sometimes raped.  

The most successful action the women developed across the continents (though certainly very unhealthy for them) was the infamous hunger strike. This was a collective action known to be practiced by political prisoners. In Europe, people who were allowed to hold that designation were protected from force-feeding. The women, of course, were not offered that protection.

Women would take turns hunger striking. They were so effective at this tactic in England that, also in 1913, Parlaiment enacted the “Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act” that was more commonly known as “The Cat and Mouse Act.”

Basically they would turn hunger-striking women out of prison when they were close to death and then round them back up after they’d gone home to recuperate on their own dime. The other intervention used by corrections staff against the women prisoners was force-feeding.

This was a violent process virtually the same as a sexual rape in which women’s agency over their bodies was violated with food. It wasn’t a “here comes the airplane into the hanger” scenario. Women were held down by several corrections officers, sometimes also trussed in heavy restraints, after which fairly large and unhygienic rubber hoses were shoved down their throats through the mouth or nose. Many got pneumonia from food and liquid reaching their lungs. Permanent damage was common. Some of the Holloway survivors gave testimonials that the BBC has available here.

What does all of this have to do with my tofurky divan? Of course, there is the obvious. I’m grateful for my privilege to choose my own food and to eat it. I’m grateful for the right to cast a vote. I’m grateful that I have the safety to make choices about what goes in and out of any part of my body. We’re used to thinking about this in terms of sexual agency, including reproductive rights. It occurs to me that we’re more used to thinking about our agency in terms of our sexuality. That’s certainly important and appropriate. Yet, it’s at least as important to think about our agency over food. Like with our sexuality and (I’m pondering this) perhaps even more, it’s an agency we are taught to very easily give away.

There are many ways to understand our agency around food. Can we afford the food we want? Do we feel safe and able to follow diets according to our religion or ethics? Do we feel emotionally and physically in control over our food choices? Do we see our diet as a battle with food waged over our self-image or the opinions of others? In what ways has our dietary agency been taken by others? In what ways are we giving it away?

According to stats compiled for the 2020 eating disorder awareness week, the Eating Recovery Center shares that 2.8 percent of American adults deal with a binge eating disorder in their lifetime. While we think of this as a women’s issue, about a third of adults with reported eating disorders are men. It’s pretty hard not to worry about our size and appearance given all the media messages out there. And those are far from new. The diet and image industries have been churning away in our lives and inside our heads through the generations.

In my own life story I had a sort of split-screen reality of a childhood. I lived two very different ways in my parents’ two households. My mother was a battered woman. My father was a rural minister. In both of those realities, I was low-hanging fruit to fall prey to eating disorders. In my mother’s household there was abusive misogyny that left all of us as our batterer’s victims feeling like objects (and not very valuable objects). In my dad’s house was the middle class pressure to be the minister’s kid who is polite, polished, and always able to make a good impression.

Both of my parents loved me and parented the best that they could. These issues around self-image and food are cultural more than individual, though individual resources and resilience can help. In fact, I understand as an adult that my father had self-image and dietary issues to rival my own. I wish we could have supported each other in a productive manner while he was alive, rather than suffering on our own. Though, adopting animals to fund at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary was a special experience and I am so grateful we did it. It was a process where we teamed up to take dietary choices beyond the plate and into the ethics, and I think we both felt more empowered. I highly recommend it.

I remember learning about the force-feeding of suffragettes while I was in college. I happened to be in active treatment for my eating disorders at the time. I recall having a kind of epiphany about my agency in my diet at that point. It helped me in my recovery. For me the awareness dawned that I had arrived at the safety and the privilege to decide what I ate. Why was I wasting my time and energy torturing myself? I can’t say my battle was totally over at that moment, but it was a meaningful step forward. I eventually settled into a rather uneasy peace with myself. I committed to allowing my body to be as it was, as long as I was eating healthfully and in accordance with my ethics. That brings me to the veganism.

Back in college I was also learning to be a vegetarian. This was another piece of my puzzle. The ethics of diet that I learned by reading books like Carol J Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat gave me another reason to see my food as more than a malicious list of calories, fats and carbs. Like sex, food is power. And even the most rapacious of paramours probably don’t have sex nearly as often as they eat. As Will Tuttle points out in The World Peace Diet, dietary ethics are the core of our ethics. They are a big factor in our impact upon our worlds both personal and global. As I grew into that material I gradually became totally vegan. In terms of my self-image and my relationship to food it’s worked really well for me.

During this period of discovery, material in Carol Adams’ work (The Pornography of Meat as well as Sexual Politics of Meat) brought me right back around to the suffragettes. Alice Paul, the subject of my previous blog, was a dedicated vegetarian. She picked this up from the London ladies along with her propensities for other radical collective actions. So many of the British suffragettes of the Women’s Social & Political Union were vegetarian that they ran their own veggie hostels so they’d have places to rest and to dine the way they wanted when they were on a lecture tour or recovering between stints in prison.

Vegetarianism wasn’t just a frivolous fad for these women. It was part of the beliefs that informed all their actions. A great and very detailed research project on this topic is, at the time I write this, available in full online. This is, “The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women’s suffrage movement in Britain” by Leah Leneman.

As documented by Leneman, the suffrage activists advocated for vegetarian food when they weren’t hunger-striking. They even did this when they were in jail. Maude Joachim, after doing a stint in Holloway in 1907, recorded this fact in her memoirs, saying:

“Dinner is supplied in two tins. In the deeper one lurks two potatoes in their skins; in the shallower, are an egg, and some cauliflower or other vegetable. Many of us are always vegetarians, and acting on expert advice, others are so [for a time], for the meat supplied is so generally disliked.”

In her 1914 memoir “Prisons and Prisoners,” staunch vegetarian Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton recalled watching stockmen abuse a sheep on its way to slaughter. In that moment, watching an innocent creature being brutalized by those with power for no reason other than cruelty, she made a connection we would now label as one of “intersectionality.” She wrote:

“[The incident] seemed to reveal to me for the first time the position of women

throughout the world. I realised how often women are held in contempt

as beings outside the pale of human dignity, excluded or confined,

laughed at and insulted because of conditions in themselves for which

they are not responsible, but which are due to fundamental injustices

with regard to them, and to the mistakes of a civilisation in the shaping

of which they have had no free share.”

Those who were ethics-motivated vegetarians experienced even more horror from force-feeding because the food being forced was invariably derived from animals. Lady Lytton recounted that she was force-fed violently, at least eight times. Besides giving vivid details about the pain of the tools they used to shove tubes in her nose or sometimes mouth (past her bridgework, which cut into her gums), she “had the strongest objection to it of a vegetarian kind, and I begged [the doctor] not to give it to me again. . . It was only when I was sick that I knew what were the ingredients put down my body.” (Cited by Leneman and derived from Lytton’s Prisons and Prisoners).

A tough lady by any standard, Lytton was more upset by the use of animal products in her feeding than the permanently debilitating pain. This, even though she knew at the time that she had a heart condition and could easily have died. She did rather casually recount having “double pneumonia and pleurisy” due to the feedings, but she recovered to write her memoirs and eat many more vegetarian meals.

Lytton’s experiences showcase two of the core elements of food agency. In prison she lost her choice over whether she ate and she lost her choice over what she ate and why (for her ethical beliefs). Sometimes seeing the absence of choice helps us to see its importance.

How does all of this (as I forewarned) cerebral and experiential meandering tie together, if it does?

For one thing, I hope we can all embrace our own food agency in an empowering and perhaps even joyous way. It occurs to me that:

If we are able to purchase foods we prefer, that’s a win. If we are free to make our own ethical choices about diet, that’s a win. If we can find peace with our bodies and eat to care for ourselves instead of make war with our forms, that’s a win. If we have the added bonus of having supporting community to back up any or all of those choices, we are very blessed.

I hope you find that at least some of these blessings apply to you.

I suppose, as I watch the world shift and change around the animal-agriculture implicated pandemic of COVID-19 and the fires of unrest due to police racism in my own country, I am also looking to all my power-sources past and present for the lessons of agency.

As we put our society back together (micro and macro), we will surely have opportunities as well as barriers. When putting our food infrastructure back together post-pandemic, we could take the opportunity to look at what types of large-scale farming we do with an eye toward food equality and environmental sustainability. A well-fed world is a great resource site for this work.

When addressing the terrible pain beneath civil unrest, we could use the intersectionality of social justice movements to try and heal inequities related to gender, race, and even species. Speaking of intersectionality, VINE animal sanctuary in Vermont has a great resource page on the topic. Focusing in on race in particuar, Dr. A. Breeze Harper does the work on her website and with her book, Sistah Vegan. The resources are there for us if we decide to take them up.

Beyond that, I don’t have an easy answer. I can’t even tell you whether I’d bother with the tofurky divan. Not bad but lots of work. What I do think we should all do is nourish ourselves and try to nourish each other. That’s always worth the effort. Right?

Oh, happy hundredth anniversary, girls. Vote.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Writer and Activist (for Women’s History Month)

It’s important to remember that women haven’t always been encouraged to write. Or read. Or leave the house. As evidenced by this patronizing pencil ad. This kind of copy could only be authored by A.B. Dick.

March is Women’s History Month, and it’s a good time to remember this very important point. Use it or lose it, ladies. In this case “it” would be your creative potential, as well as your right to determine how it is used (dare I say, reproductive rights?!)

For Women’s History Month, I wanted to honor at least one literary lady. I therefore chose one of my favorites. As a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe (the famed author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”), Charlotte was well aware that the written word could be a catalyst for social change. Her own mother didn’t believe in such frivolities. As a hard working single mom, she forbade her kids to write fiction. But Charlotte struck out on her own.

A noted writer and women’s rights activist from the period around the 1900s, Gilman is best known for her women’s studies classic short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, which fictionalizes her experience of post partum depression. But her interest in justice was multi-faceted.

To me, this story is basically a suspenseful horror tale. It is a slow simmer and a very enjoyable read. But as my knowledge of Gilman’s work deepened over time, I started to admire her mostly as an activist. She was an independent publisher as well as a writer. She was a controversial yet respected lecturer on women’s rights.

It is a little known fact that, like many feminists of her time, she was concerned with the rights of non-human females as well. Perhaps this is because women in this country were still much closer to the times when they were legally and socially considered chattel, and more like non-humans in status than human men, in many ways.

 

The feminists of the time who were also vegetarian tended to focus on three or four major arguments:

  1. Slaughtering animals and messing with their bits was a violent pursuit, and increased violent tendencies in individuals as well as societies.
  2. Processing animal carcasses and cooking them took women much more time in the kitchen, which they argued could otherwise be spent on their activism.
  3. Plant foods are more affordable and more sustainable, which was actually an economics and environmental based argument for vegetarianism that went back to Plato, and beyond.
  4. Perhaps the least common argument, but one that did exist, was that elevating the condition of all animal life is connected to the elevation of all human life (ethics).

As with many other prominent thinkers from history, Charlotte’s animal rights work has been largely scrubbed from history by our conflicted, defensive culture. But her feminism remains.

Her Suffrage newspaper, the Forerunner, published all sorts of fiction and non-fiction in support of social reforms. She first ran Herland as a serial in that paper. The story gave humorous catharsis to both sexism and speciesism as she told the tale of bumbling white male explorers who found themselves in the realm of a tribe of females who reproduced through parthenogenesis. The women had to evolve in this way after all the men of their community went off to war and disappeared.

A Utopian and satirical work, Gilman’s land of women kept no animals for agriculture because agricultural animals took up land that was needed for plant crops. When asked what they did for milk, one of the women basically said, “we have plenty of milk…our own.”

Gilman was an activist at a time when many feminists recognized the overlapping oppression that also faces animals of other species. In 1903 the American Suffrage women had a conference where animal rights were a special topic of discussion. Yet again, this heritage has been “disappeared” from mainstream feminist consciousness. To read about vegetarianism (also called “food reform”) amongst early feminists, check out the article, “The Awakened Instinct,” by Leah Leneman. This is a British article, but plenty of American women were also food reformers, including Alice Paul.

In the modern era we have the luxury to contemplate our choices in behavior toward other animals, and the impact these have on our own ecosystem as well as personal health. Hopefully we can resurrect some of this history (or should we say, herstory).

Though they were actively denigrated by both men and other women for doing so, we have written records because of brave women writers like Charlotte, from a time when civil rights were very far from a foregone conclusion. Vigilance is always required for these rights to be maintained. That’s what Women’s History Month is all about.

Here is one of many poems that Charlotte wrote about her observations on human treatment of other animals. I also recommend Herland and this brilliant ancestor’s other works.

I should mention that I have an essay going into more depth about Charlotte’s vegetarian writing coming up in the Ashland Creek Press title, “Writing for Animals: a Nonfiction Anthology.” My piece is called, Between the Worlds: Writing Strategies that Bridge the Gap between Self and Other. Keep an eye on this site and my social media for release dates.

Keep on reading and writing, ladies and ghouls!

THE CATTLE TRAIN

Below my window goes the cattle train,
And stands for hours along the river park,
Fear, Cold, Exhaustion, Hunger, Thirst and
Pain;
Dumb brutes we call them – Hark!
The bleat of frightened mother -calling young,
Deep-throated agony, shrill frantic cries,
Hoarse murmur of the thirst-distended tongue
Up to my window rise.
Bleak lies the shore to northern wind and sleet,
In open-slatted cars they stand and freeeze
Beside the broad blue river in the heat
All waterless go these.
Hot, fevered, frightened, trampled, bruised
and torn;
Frozen to death before the ax descends;
We kill these weary creatures; sore and worn,
And eat them– with our friends.

-Charlotte Perkins Gilman-