BDSM And Feminism: Intertwined? How So?

[thir]

The problem with English language, what is lost in the translation is....having equal rights - to live, make your own choices and be respected as a human being - doesnt mean the sexes are the same. ]

Quite right.


[In my country women never had to go through the struggle for vote like they did in the US, they had a right to work and equality before the law.]

May ask which one?

[ I dont think men are smarter or better than girls, I refuse to be put to my place because only I know what my place is.

And frankly I am so sick and tired of this threads where its discussed whats real -


Its one thing to choose to be a kajira, to feel that you are one and that that feels right to you, but cant you understand not all women feel that way? ]

My thoughts too - why this insistence on the one true way?

[And such stance and insistance on who is a true lady has caused a madness on opposite end where refusing to dress like a man and having a standing appointment at the hair spa means one is not feminist. So I get to fight two sides of nutty extremists. Thanks.

LOL - no, you are just in a rather bit group of people who do not appreciate Anyone telling them what to think.

[damyanti]

LOL - no, you are just in a rather bit group of people who do not appreciate Anyone telling them what to think.

True...I don't believe that any one doctrine holds all the answers...I like to read both sides, all sides...and form my own opinion, based on my conscience and what feels right....I don't think anyone else is better qualified or has the right to do that for me, nor do I possess arrogance to think I am qualified to judge anyone else for their choice.

Two things bothered me about this thread:

1: It is factually incorrect to claim that (most) Feminists subscribe to some militant, male hating philosophy....or that only women like that are Feminists...I provided evidence after evidence that that is not true, I doubt it mattered...those who blind themselves, will never see....it is fascinating though how they can completely ignore women like Beverly LaHaye (personally I find her a bit nuts, but more power to her) leading a “feminist organization” or Feminists for Life....how they fit into that stereotype is beyond me.

2: Ungratefulness and Ignorance

Feminism is just a modern name for struggle of women, (for each of us) to be able to make unrestricted choices for ourselves, that has been going on throughout history . ...to be judged by our individual abilities and desires, not by what someone deemed are confined standards of our sex...from Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Elisabeth of Bavaria, Catherine the Great, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Greta Garbo to Elfriede Jelinek, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Ségolène Royal, Rania, Queen of Jordan.... to my niece.

If you remove the name...would the meaning and the facts of the movement change? They enjoy liberties, but have no (or only a vague) idea how it came about.


Susan B. Anthony


Her name is synonymous with Feminist movement.

What you should say to outsiders is that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it.

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

Much as I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder, earnestly as I desire its suppression, I cannot believe ... that such a law would have the desired effect. It seems to me to be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains. We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil, and destroy it.

She believed, as did many of the feminists of her era, that only the achievement of women's equality and freedom would end the need for abortion.


Elizabeth Cady Stanton

While Stanton is best known for her long contribution to the woman suffrage struggle, she was also active and effective in winning property rights for married women, equal guardianship of children, and liberalized divorce laws so that women could leave marriages that were often abusive of the wife, the children, and the economic health of the family.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in New York on October 26, 1902, with nearly 20 years to go before the United States granted women the right to vote.


Lucretia Mott

She considered slavery an evil to be opposed. She refused to use cotton cloth, cane sugar, and other slavery-produced goods. With her skills in ministry she began to make public speeches for abolition. From her home in Philadelphia, she began to travel, usually accompanied by her husband who supported her activism. They often sheltered runaway slaves in their home.

Elected as the first president of the American Equal Rights Convention after the end of the Civil War, Lucretia Mott strove a few years later to reconcile the two factions that split over the priorities between woman suffrage and black male suffrage.


Jane Addams

Addams helped organize the Women's Peace Party and the International Congress of Women in an effort to avert the first World War.
In 1920 she was elected first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the successor organization to the Women's Peace Party. She continued in the presidency until her death.
Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her work.


Pearl S. Buck

She was a prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning author. In 1938, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces."

Buck was an extremely passionate activist for human rights. In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, Inc., the first international, interracial adoption agency.


Dorothy Day

She was an American journalist turned anarchist, social activist and ultimately a devout Catholic. She became known for her social justice campaigns in defense of the poor, forsaken, hungry and homeless. Day, with Peter Maurin, founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933, espousing nonviolence, and hospitality for the impoverished and downtrodden.


Matilda Joslyn Gage

She was a suffragist, a Native American activist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author, who was "born with a hatred of oppression".

She faced prison for her actions under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 which criminalized assistance to escaped slaves. Even though she was beset by both financial and physical (cardiac) problems throughout her life, her work for women's rights was extensive, practical, and often brilliantly executed.

Gage ensured that every woman in her area (Fayetteville, New York) had the opportunity to vote by writing letters making them aware of their rights, and sitting at the polls making sure nobody was turned away.
In 1871, Gage was part of a group of 10 women who attempted to vote. Reportedly, she stood by and argued with the polling officials on behalf of each individual woman. In 1873 she defended Susan B. Anthony when Anthony was placed on trial for having voted in that election, making compelling legal and moral arguments.


Fannie Lou Hamer

Nobody's free until everybody's free.

She was African American, the youngest of 20 children and the granddaughter of slaves.

Her plain-spoken manner and fervent belief in the Biblical righteousness of her cause gained her a reputation as an electrifying speaker and constant champion of civil rights.

On August 23, 1962, Rev. James Bevel, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and an associate of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon in Ruleville, Mississippi and followed it with an appeal to those assembled to register to vote. Black people who registered to vote in the South faced serious hardships at that time due to institutionalized racism, including harassment, the loss of their jobs, physical beatings, and lynchings; nonetheless, Hamer was the first volunteer. She later said, "I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been scared - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they [white people] could do was kill me, and it seemed they'd been trying to do that a little at a time since I could remember."

On August 31, she traveled on a rented bus with other attendees of Rev. Bevel's sermon to Indianola, Mississippi to register. In what would become a signature trait of Hamer's activist career, she began singing Christian hymns, such as "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "This Little Light of Mine," to the group in order to bolster their resolve. The hymns also reflected Hamer's belief that the civil rights struggle was a deeply spiritual one. By the next day, she had been harassed by police, fired from her job, lost her dog, and received a death threat from the Ku Klux Klan.

Hamer's courage and leadership in Indianola came to the attention of SNCC organizer Bob Moses, who dispatched Charles McLaurin from the organization with instructions to find "the lady who sings the hymns". McLaurin found and recruited Hamer, and though she remained based in Mississippi, she began traveling around the South doing activist work for the organization.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer was on her way back from Charleston, South Carolina with other activists from a literacy workshop. Stopping in Winona, Mississippi, the group was arrested on a false charge and jailed by white policemen. Once in jail, Hamer and her colleagues were beaten savagely by the police, almost to the point of death.

Released on June 12, she needed more than a month to recover. Though the incident had profound physical and psychological effects, Hamer returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives, including the "Freedom Ballot Campaign", a mock election, in 1963, and the "Freedom Summer" initiative in 1964. She was known to the volunteers of Freedom Summer - most of whom were young, white, and from northern states - as a motherly figure who believed that the civil rights effort should be multi-racial in nature.


Dr. Charlotte Denman Lozier

The prevailing "wisdom" of her day decreed that females were weak, incompetent, incapable of making valuable contributions to the common good. But Charlotte Denman Lozier never believed it. When she was very young, her family left their hometown of Milburn, N.J., for the then frontier area of Winona, Minn. After losing her mother in her early teens, she supported her younger siblings by teaching. At age 20 she returned East not for a softer life, but to earn a degree at the New York City Medical College for Women, an institution deemed outrageous not only because the students were female, but because they were taught about hygiene and patient self-help.

In her short life she campaigned for women's right and for the right to live of the unborn.

Lozier's passions came together in her defense of Hester Vaughan, an immigrant servant impregnated and then abandoned by her Philadelphia-area employer. The child died soon after birth. While no legal charges were brought against the baby's father, Vaughan was accused on shaky ground of infanticide and sentenced to death. Feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton rallied to her aid. Lozier gave Vaughan free medical care and presented exonerating medical and psychological evidence at a large public meeting organized on Vaughan's behalf. Eventually Vaughan was pardoned and returned to her home in England.


Graciela Olivarez

She was a lawyer who advocated for civil rights, rights of the poor and the physically disadvantaged.

In 1970, Olivarez became the first woman and the first Latina to graduate from the Notre Dame Law School. She was offered a scholarship to the school while she was serving as director of the Arizona branch of the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, despite the fact that she lacked a high school diploma. The Notre Dame Hispanic Law Students Association presents an award in her name annually.


Alice Paul

In 1912, Alice Paul joined the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and was appointed Chairman of their Congressional Committee in Washington, DC. After months of fundraising and raising awareness for the cause, membership numbers went up and, in 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns formed the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage. Their focus was lobbying for a constitutional amendment to secure the right to vote for women. Such an amendment had originally been sought by suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1878. However, by the early 20th century, attempts to secure a federal amendment had ceased. The focus of the suffrage movement had turned to securing the vote on a state-by-state basis.

When their lobbying efforts proved fruitless, Paul and her colleagues formed the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916 and began introducing some of the methods used by the suffrage movement in Britain. Tactics included demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, suffrage watch, fires, and hunger strikes. These actions were accompanied by press coverage and the publication of the weekly Suffragist.

In the election of 1916, Paul and the NWP campaigned against the continuing refusal of President Woodrow Wilson and other incumbent Democrats to support the Suffrage Amendment actively.

In January 1917, the NWP staged the first political protest to picket the White House. The picketers, known as "Silent Sentinels," held banners demanding the right to vote. This was an example of a non-violent civil disobedience campaign.

In July 1917, picketers were arrested on charges of "obstructing traffic." Many, including Paul, were convicted, incarcerated and tortured at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia (later the Lorton Correctional Complex) and the District of Columbia Jail.

In protest of the conditions in Occoquan, Paul commenced a hunger strike. This led to her being moved to the prison’s psychiatric ward and force-fed raw eggs through a plastic tube. Other women joined the strike which, combined with the continuing demonstrations and attendant press coverage, kept the pressure on the Wilson administration. In January, 1918, the president announced that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure." Wilson strongly urged Congress to pass the legislation. In 1920, after coming down to one vote in the state of Tennessee, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution secured the vote for women.



And these are just Americans, and only a handful of them. Most of them are dead, each of them was a lady in the truest sense of that word,,...I bet... - when they see today's women who are preparing to vote, who take the value that their opinion matters for granted, women who work and choose their own spouses, women who have been through a divorce...women who take for granted the right to say “no” to anyone...claiming that they are not feminists and scoffing their noses and devaluing their struggle...- I think they are turning in their graves.