Making the best of the Southwest

Great news bestie, I have the perfect replacement holiday for you:

James “Colonizer Bitch” Cook was murdered in Hawai’i by my ancestors on Feb 14th, 1779, on Kealakekua Bay. This iconic move ended his reign of terror across the Pacific, where he ruined everything and was overall a massive dick. Buy yourself some chocolate and fondly remember how Kānaka Maoli stabbed James to death and burned his corpse. It’s the perfect holiday for all ages ❤️

Imagine being bounced on your mother's knee and her cooing, "what a strong girl you are! You are going to grow so big! You are so brave, your grip is so strong, and your voice so loud!"

Imagine being dressed up for practical, comfortable clothes and having your hair out of the way, and then told to run wild. Imagine being given complex toys, a tool kit, toy swords and shields, mechanical toys, building blocks, kids' science and story books. Imagine being told, "she's so creative and innovative! She knows what she wants. She's always so curious and inventive."

Imagine all your family, relatives, babysitters and teachers describing you as a leader type, a moral guardian, a responsible and promising young girl, creative, strong, opinionated, intelligent. A future leader, an organizer, someone whose voice is loud and clear as it should be.

Imagine your maturing being a source of joy. You are getting taller, bigger, stronger and sturdier. You have a healthy appetite of a growing young woman. Your body is a powerhouse of survival. You get your period and it's celebrated, you are entering womanhood and showing the power of a lifegiver. Period is a sign that you are strong and healthy, your body is amazing. You get to decide what's for dinner at home because your growing body is a priority for all and you need to care for it.

Imagine respect of your peers and security among you. Imagine relying on other women like you without insecurity. Imagine being fearless, proud, content and limitless, full of promise and possibilities.

Now, I know that none of us got to live like that. But for a moment, imagine that you did, and then try to imagine the woman you would be today. What kind of a person is she? What does she want? What are her dreams, her possibilities? What limits and fears have been completely banished from her life?

How does she see herself?

Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it

even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?

So I’m at a library in a town I don’t live in to spend time with my nieces and I go to the bathroom and see this sign.

They turned their old card catalog into free supplies people can discretely take on their own.

And yet I am in awe because this person makes *biscuits*.

These are BISCUITS.

Ancient greek pottery shard biscuits:

Tiffany biscuits:

You have to go see the rest of the thread, her illuminated manuscript and mudlarker artifact and Jane Austen and William Morris biscuits.

liberals:

pretty much every other religion until very recently: yeah women aren’t allowed to be in leadership positions, can’t come to certain services or parts of our temples, etc.

liberals:

women: men can’t be witches

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.

Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf  when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage. 

The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have. 

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Ad Astra Per Aspera

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Tony - Steve

Bucky - Sam

· prints available here!·

To quote Angela Davis, "'radical' simply means to grab something by the roots". In this case the 'something' is patriarchy. The goal of Radical Feminism is to grab patriarchy by the roots and liberate (rather than empower) women, and all people, from it.

To further respond to the notes: Radical Feminism was founded from the peace movements of the 1960s and predominately lead by Jewesses, former Catholics and women of colour, as compared to first wave feminism which was lead by white Western Quakers (who obviously made massive strides for women's rights and should not be dismissed, but who were also predominately focussed on the concerns of other white women).

The concept of intersectionality was first described in 1989 by a radfem, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who is a woman of colour. So when you talk about intersectional feminism, you're talking about a radfem theory.

Dismissing past and present day Radical Feminism and radfem theory as nothing more than transphobic because of some adherents to the ideology is like throwing out the baby with the bath water.