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Crushed by Design: Structural Crises and Inequitable Policies Push Female-Headed Households to the Edge, part 2 by NCRI

Part 1 was posted yesterday

The Impact of War

War has led to an increase in the number of female-headed households, as many men are killed, go missing, or are forced to migrate. This situation has, more than ever, resulted in a surge in poverty, economic instability, and severe psychological pressure among these women.

In wartime conditions, female heads of household face multifaceted crises. Given that the majority of them are engaged in informal and home-based occupations (such as knitting, tailoring, and food production), the war has dealt a direct blow to their family income by closing marketplaces, disrupting supply chains for raw materials, and reducing the purchasing power of customers.

According to a report by one of the state websites, passengers in a Tehran metro carriage, in response to the street vendors’ advertisements, say they have no money. According to this report, the faces of the female vendors are exhausted. Some of them are over sixty years old and plead with people to buy their goods. (Shafaqna, October 6, 2025)

Crushed by Design: Structural Crises and Inequitable Policies Push Female-Headed Households to the Edge, part 1 by NCRI

Moderator’s Note: This post has been posted in cooperation with the NCRI women’s committee. NCRI stands for the National Council of Resistance of Iran. This was first posted on their website on May 18, 2026. You can learn more information as well as see this original article by clicking by link below. A description of their Council can be found at the end of this post. We feel it is especially important to hear women’s voices from Iran esp here in the United States where a lot of misinformation is being disseminated along with the guns and bombs of war.

Introduction

Life for the Iranian people under the religious dictatorship is fraught with hardship and peril from every perspective. Whether through the lens of economic deprivation, poverty, and unemployment; the degradation of the environment and infrastructure; crises involving water, electricity, and air pollution; or devastating floods and earthquakes—the current generations of Iranians are experiencing a living hell. This suffering is further compounded by the comprehensive violation of human rights, characterized by suppression, torture, and executions, as well as the squandering of national wealth on nuclear and missile projects and terrorism, which has effectively led to foreign conflict.

Witchcraft as Spiritual Activism by Freia Serafina and Amie Ritchie

“Spiritual activism is spirituality for social change, spirituality that posits a relational worldview and uses this holistic worldview to transform one’s self and one’s worlds.” – AnaLouise Keating

Spiritual activism offers vital pathways for community care, resistance, and personal transformation and can take many forms. The same is true of witchcraft practices, which can follow a specific lineage, synthesize traditions, be practiced solo, be co-created in a coven of witches, and more. In this article, we’re reflecting on witchcraft as a form of spiritual activism, and approaching both in the most general terms as a starting point. We hold the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Rachel Ricketts, Starhawk, and many others, including our fellow witches, as influential and present in our thinking. Furthermore, we view witchcraft as an act of cultural, spiritual, and feminist reclamation, enabling us to carry our ancestors into the future.

*Amie’s ocean ritual for the people of Palestine*.

We arrive to the conversation as scholar practitioners, feminists, and co-facilitators of Witch Workshops. Amie is a European-descendant woman of Irish and Scottish ancestry whose work lives at the intersections of decolonizing human-water relationships, spiritual ecology, and healing-centered education. Freia is a European-descendant woman of Norwegian, Irish, and Sámi ancestry whose work seeks to heal colonial ruptures around Indigenous and matrilineal ways of knowing and being through ritual, art, and storytelling. We share these personal details as a way of sharing the standpoints that inform our views, which will of course be different from others. Hopefully our small offering can spark a conversation and ignite more witches into considering themselves spiritual activists, or vice versa.

Brave Girls, Bad Witches: Age, Agency, and Anxiety in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia by Elanur Williams

Lewis, C. S. *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes, 1950

In the landscape of mid-twentieth-century children’s literature, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia initially appears remarkably progressive. Long before modern fantasy embraced the trope of the fiercely independent heroine, Lewis gives us the Pevensie sisters, Jill Pole, Aravis, and Polly Plummer. These are active, clear-eyed adventurers. Lucy is the spiritual compass of the entire saga, possessing a theological clarity that routinely eludes her brothers. Jill braves subterranean terrors to rescue a captive prince, while Aravis flees an arranged marriage with the sharp wit of a seasoned survivalist. In Narnia, childhood is a meritocracy of spirit, and Lewis grants his young girls immense pluck, agency, and divine grace.

However, from a feminist and theological perspective, this grace comes with a strict expiration date, and a jarring ideological fracture occurs the moment a female character crosses the threshold into adult womanhood. I find that although Lewis champions the plucky girl, he displays narrative anxiety toward the grown woman. Could it be that in the Narnian universe, female maturity is treated as a spiritual fall from grace, an intersection where Christian purity is compromised by adult desire and bodily autonomy?

Into Me I See: The Sacred Torch of Feminine Heat by Jsabél Bilqís

There’s that throbbing again! In the slit center of me. Spreading vehemently, devouring, insatiable, red like blood and warm like body. They say I’m Jezebel because I like it when she purrs.

𖦹

‘Now you can get pregnant.’

I became a woman but all my mother saw was a dirty girl. Like the wombs before and around me, scorched by estranged origins, I got in bed with shame and became disembodied, found myself in hell.

‘Virgin or Harlot?’, they asked me at the gates.

Sensing my fullness, I looked Illusion in the eyes.

‘Both.’

Engulfed in the flames, I chose all of me and it purified every thing that was not free.

The Golden Book of Wisdom: Ancient Spirituality and Shamanism for Modern Times by Fotoula Adrimi

There comes a moment on the spiritual path, often arriving quietly and unexpectedly, when a woman begins to sense that the life she has been living does not fully belong to her. The roles, expectations, and inherited beliefs that once seemed natural begin to feel like garments that no longer fit. Beneath them, something older and deeper stirs. It is not new knowledge, but an ancient calling.

This call to return to an inner truth has been suppressed in us through centuries of patriarchy, yet it has been carried within us across time. This is a deep exploration that I share throughout The Golden Book of Wisdom – ancient spirituality and shamanism for modern times. In my own journey, this path did not arise as a rejection of the modern world, but as a remembering of something that had always been present. As I share in the book, my early life was marked by intuitive awareness and spiritual connection, which I later suppressed in order to conform to societal expectations. It was only when I returned to spiritual practice through meditation, healing work, and shamanic training, that these gifts reawakened, guiding me back to a path of service and teaching.

At its essence, shamanism is not a belief system but a lived, experiential relationship with spirit, nature, and the unseen worlds. It echoes an ancient role: the healer, the seer, the priestess, the one who walks between the worlds.

In the twenty years I have been practising shamanism professionally, I have come to realise that this movement from disconnection to remembrance, is one that many women recognise. Since 2012 I have been sharing The Priestess of the Moon™ training: a two-year apprenticeship exclusively for women to hold ceremony, rites of passage, and work with the wheel of the year and the moon cycle, reclaiming their inherent mystical power.

Nature as a Regulating Intelligence by Paul Robear

Moderator’s Note: This appeared recently on the site the Cuyumungue Institute, now called the Cuyu Institute (see below for more information). You can see the original here.

Have you ever noticed that in certain natural environments your body begins to change before your thoughts do?

For me, my breathing deepens and something in my system settles – often before I’ve even fully registered where I am.

It’s not something I’m doing consciously. In fact, it seems to happen more fully when I’m not trying at all.

I’ve come to feel that it goes beyond the idea that nature helps us relax. It’s that our bodies are responding to something – something deeply organized, consistent, and connected to a quiet intelligence.

It’s easy to say that nature is calming, but that doesn’t quite capture what is happening. What I’ve come to feel is that nature is not simply soothing… it is regulating. It carries a kind of inherent intelligence, a living order that the body recognizes and responds to without needing instruction.

Maryam Rajavi by Yalda Roshan

My name is Yalda. I am a woman from the Iranian resistance who, for many years, has fought for women’s equality and worked to amplify the voices of Iranian women around the world. Today, I want to share with you the source of inspiration and motivation that has guided my path.

Covering every aspect of Maryam Rajavi’s life and thought in one article is a challenge, so today I will focus only on what has personally influenced me: her perspective on women.

She herself is a woman who has spent decades fighting against two dictatorships—the Shah’s and the misogynistic clerical regime—and believes that women can change the world. A brief overview of her biography: she was born on December 4, 1953, in Tehran and is a metallurgical engineer from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. From her teenage years, she embarked on the path of struggle, learning from action rather than words.

In Defense of the Queen by Arianne MacBean

I read FAR’s repost of Carol Christ’s 2016 essay, Maiden, Mother, Crone: Ancient Tradition or New Creative Synthesis, with great interest and was struck by this sentence, “It has been suggested that we need a fourth stage, Queen, to celebrate the years between menopause and old age. Since I reject hierarchy of every kind, I don’t want to be a Queen.” Christ rejected the Queen archetype while acknowledging that in her fifties, she felt no connection to Mother or Crone. I believe, the Queen archetype offers middle-aged women who live after the veil of estrogen has lifted, a realm that no longer prioritizes the relational over self – a vital sacred space.

In my work as a somatic psychotherapist, I often encounter women grappling with the time between motherhood (or choosing not to mother) and cronehood. While the Mother archetype symbolizes a universal pattern of nurturing, protection, and sustaining growth and regeneration, the Crone embodies wisdom, intuition, and spiritual power. Many women between the age of 50 – 65 simply do not connect with either of these personifications and I am one of them.