General – Page 32 – Feminism and Religion

Hecate’s Moon by Sara Wright

I spent hours
writing
you snaked by
underground roots
entering my story
with your
forked stick
‘witches’ are a
lie that christians
made up
to legitimize
harm done
to our kind
Artists, Writers,
Healers,
Visionaries,
Trees,
(men too)
Women whose
Difference
others defined.
Nature defiled.

Harris Could Not Outrun 2000 Years of Patriarchy by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I made this poster 8 years ago and am devastated to have to dust it off again. The safety pins came from a British idea when Brexit was passed. People would wear the safety pins on their clothes to let anyone feeling vulnerable know that they would be “safe” with them.

The political finger pointing for Harris’ loss is beyond noxious. I have heard all manner of scapegoats; Biden, the Obamas, VP candidate Walz, Harris for saying too much of one thing, not enough of another, the progressives, Liz Cheney and even George Clooney. . . .blah blah blah

How can we make sense of a world where women voted for a misogynistic abuser. Black and brown people voted for a white supremist. Latinos voted for a policy of mass deportations targeting their brethren. Youth voted for a climate denier affecting their future. And so on. Think of all the women who voted for a world where they, their daughters and their granddaughters can be denied basic healthcare. It’s a true-to-life Cinderella scenario whose stepmother cut the toes off her own daughters to please a prince. Or Chinese mothers who would bind their own’s daughter’s feet, thereby crippling them in the service of marriage.

What Happens When Hate Wins? by Sara Wright

Do the sandhill cranes stop singing?
Do the junipers cease to release their scent?
Do the stars fall into the sea?
Does the white moon weep??

I want to keep writing stories…

The wind still ruffles fine sand in the wash.
Cottontails leap, jumping through twilight.
Scaled quail still peep as they scurry over red ground.
The thrasher gobbles his suet without restraint.
A woodpecker taps at my window.

I want to keep writing stories…

Unknown History Is My Sweet Spot by Michelle Cameron

“I never knew that,” is a comment I often hear from my readers. “Why don’t I know that?”

Finding what I call my “sweet spot” in historical fiction – writing stories of Jewish history that are relatively unknown to my Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike – was a total fluke.

I had completed my first published book – a verse novel about William Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre, called In the Shadow of the Globe – and was considering my next project. I thought perhaps I could write about the woman I was named for – my great-aunt Masha, who, with her red hair and fiery personality, seemed like a promising subject to base a novel around. My mother had told me stories of how her family had become wealthy with huge forests in an estate on the Russia-Poland border. Mom spoke wistfully about her, recounting the second-hand tale of the diamonds that used to flash in Masha’s hair and how my grandmother had adored her.

But Mom had passed on and I had only one source to call upon – a genealogy that a distant cousin of mine had compiled of the various branches of my extensive maternal family.

And as I opened the genealogy, I stopped short at the first passage.

The Future of Sorjuanista Studies in the Americas: Challenges and Possibilities by Theresa A. Yugar

I had nearly resolved to leave the matter in silence;
yet although silence explains much by the emphasis of leaving all unexplained, because it is a negative thing, one must name the silence,
so that what it signifies may be understood.
Failing that, silence will say nothing,
for that is its proper function, to say nothing.[i]
La Respuesta/The Answer (al Soldado, or The Soldier)
Sor (Sr.) Juana Inés de la Cruz
(November 12, 1651 – April 18, 1695)

Today, I honor the legacy of mid-17th century Mexican Catholic nun, scholar, and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She was born in the central valley of Mexico in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, now in modern-day Mexico. She was the daughter of Doña Isabel Ramírez de Santillana and Don Pedro Manuel de Asbaje. They had three daughters: María, Juana, and Josefa. Doña Isabel also had three other children – Antonia, Inés, and Diego – with Diego Ruiz Lozano. Sor Juana Inés was raised with her siblings on their family’s hacienda of Nepantla which was managed by their strong-willed mother Doña Isabel.

The US Election Results and Justice: What Will You Do? A Jewish Feminist Perspective by Ivy Helman

I met with a new friend/colleague of mine this past week. We were discussing the election results, and I was discussing the work I do in the field of religion. Living and teaching in Central Europe, I have quite a lot of experience navigating the study of religion in a place that is quite atheist and/or actually anti-religion. In fact, it has been somewhat of a struggle to have the study program, Gender Studies, in which I teach, recognize its importance. Many of my colleagues, I think, are under the impression that religion is personally not important and/or just not that important in general. Yet, as I have mentioned here, and as my new friend brought up as we sat over coffee, religion underpins so many aspects of our patriarchal society.

From the Archives: Humpty Had A Mother by Barbara Ardinger

This was originally posted on June 5, 2016

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

From her mouth to our ears.

You see that kid sitting over there on the wall? The one wearing the Jester’s hand-me-down suit? The Jester also gave him that funny name. That kid is looking for his father. That kid is my son.

My father the King is a tyrant, and he has more bastards than any other king in our nation’s history except for one other King, a long time ago. (Maybe these Kings try to populate the land all by themselves.) I’m one of his bastards. My mama travels with the Players, and after I was born, she traveled on and left me here. Oh, the Players come back every year, and she always tells me about her adventures, like when they went to visit that Prince up north, the one who was pretending to be crazy and got killed in a duel. My father the King lets his sons take the name Fitzroy, but us girls? What do we get? We’re lucky we get to live in the palace. That’s thanks to the Queen, who is kind and protective of all the King’s children, legitimate or not. I’m part of her court. A minuscule part, but she knows who I am and has answered my prayers several times. I’ll never rise in society. But I’m making plans for my son.

The Wisdom of the Beguines: The Forgotten Story of a Medieval Women’s Movement by Laura Swan, part 2 by Theresa C. Dintino

Part 1 was posted yesterday

Praying people out of purgatory

Beguines excelled at this. By the Middle Ages, the belief in many Christian circles was that one did not go directly to heaven but to a sort of “holding place” after death to be cleansed of their sins before being allowed into heaven. Eventually “the medieval church also taught that people could pray for the souls in purgatory and that their prayers would effectively aid those souls in their transition from purgatory to heaven”(108).

It’s important to note that these women were esteemed by the communities they lived in as spiritually gifted, able to intercede with God on their own without permission from the church, clergy or men. This is radical for the time.

“Beguines, as we have seen, were understood to have extraordinary spiritual powers. People believed that having a beguine intercede before God on their behalf was an assurance that their petition was heard by God—and perhaps in no instance more than for “those poor souls in purgatory.” And beguines believed that they did indeed exercise the authority to release countless souls from purgatory. Many of the stories included in the vitae of beguines grapple with the fate of the deceased in purgatory (or hell)”(109).

The Wisdom of the Beguines: The Forgotten Story of a Medieval Women’s Movement by Laura Swan, part 1 by Theresa C. Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This piece is in co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. To quote Theresa, “by doing this work we are expanding our own writer’s web for nourishment and support.” This was originally posted on their site on July 5, 2022. You can see more of their posts here.

Around 1200 AD in Europe, communities of women often called beguines began to form. These women were not nuns, they were devout and devoted to the tenets of Christianity but did not belong to any church. They were independent communities of women who often created their own industry, trade or other means to produce income. They were self-sufficient and generally concerned with helping the poor, especially women. They lived in convents. This was the origin of that word.

“These women were essentially self-defined, in opposition to the many attempts to control and define them. They lived by themselves or together in so-called beguinages, which could be single houses for as few as a handful of beguines or, as in Brugge, walled-in rows of houses enclosing a central court with a chapel where over a thousand beguines might live—a village of women within a medieval town or city”(2).

Witch Power? part 2 by Sara Wright

You can read part 1 here

After being nailed as a witch I separated myself from the word and witch power in general. The word witch had a very dark side and could be used in the same frightening manner as it had been during medieval times to label and to expel any woman who lived on the edge (source of my original sense of unease). Especially one who lived alone in the woods and loved animals like I did.

Why had I been singled out? I was an outsider whose crime was to animate nature. Anything associated with nature was suspect if not ‘evil’.

Feminists beware. If you claim to be a witch – recall that the word is loaded. Personally, I think the label has backfired reducing our overall power as women. Perhaps making us more suspect than we already are.