Women and Community – Feminism and Religion

Mabel McKay (1907-1993): “Dreamer” and Master Basket Weaver of the Northern California Pomo Indians, part 2 by Theresa Dintino

part 1 was posted yesterday

The last sucking doctor of the Pomo

Mabel healed people with songs that spirit sang through her. Eventually, she was taught to suck. Into a sucking basket she had woven, she spat out what she had sucked out of her client. People came from all over for her healing and she traveled far to heal others. She needed singers and translators to help her when she worked. Many people came to witness.

When Mabel was raised, traditional healing was beginning to go out of fashion and even be suspect. But Mabel’s work was widely sought after by the local indigenous population from all the various tribes who worked on the farms and lived on the reservations in the area of Northern California.

Sarris describes her extracting a salamander-like creature from a woman’s eye, gallons and gallons of water from a man’s chest and an evil spirit from another.

Mabel McKay (1907-1993): “Dreamer” and Master Basket Weaver of the Northern California Pomo Indians, part 1 by Theresa 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 23rd, 2024. You can see more of their posts here.

It’s hard to know what might have happened to Mabel McKay if her grandmother Sarah had not made it a point to care for and protect her. Sarah recognized her as a Dreamer, one who is owned by spirit.

Mabel’s great-grandfather, Sarah’s father, had been a medicine man descended from those before him. Sarah’s brother, Richard, had started the Dream religion “after the white people had taken everything but their souls to Dream”(Sarris 8). Sarah recognized the signs in her granddaughter but worried there was no one left to teach her.

One of the signs Mabel was a Dreamer is how she talked in her sleep at night as a girl, out loud speaking her Dreams. Spirit talked to her in her waking hours as well. She was a strange child and there was a lot of worry around her.

Lips Sealed Unsealed by Claire Taylor

My Grandmother, Bernadette Mary Claire at her first communion.

My name is Claire Taylor. I’m seventeen, and I was named after my maternal grandmother’s confirmation name, the Catholic tradition of giving someone a saint’s name at first communion. Her full name was Bernadette Mary Claire Szafranski, so you can tell religion was a big deal in her life. I was raised in an agnostic family with basically no spiritual life, but for the last six years I’ve gone to Immaculate Heart, an all-girls Catholic school in Los Angeles. And I love Catholicism.

I love the singing and the psalms, the traditions, the Bible stories, and how my teachers push me to actually think and argue about things. But something bothers me: my grandmother grew up Catholic and then left it, raising my mom with no religion at all, and my own school was founded by sisters who, in 1968, had to choose between staying under the archdiocese or keeping their values: social activism, feminism, progressive theology.

Gloria Steinem: A Personal Remembrance by Beth Bartlett

Wikimedia Commons, Jewish Women’s Archive, Share Alike 2.0.

I was only in my 20s, a kid really, when I first heard Gloria Steinem speak to a small gathering in a church in Little Falls, Minnesota. I don’t remember a word she said. I only know that that day she changed my life forever. I left that meeting knowing that that was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to become like her — an activist, a mover and shaker for the feminist movement. I was already writing my PhD thesis on 19^th century feminism – the First Wave of feminism in the US, but here was the Second Wave right in front of me and I wanted to dive in. I’d found my passion.

A month or two later, I left Little Falls for Duluth, Minnesota. Little did I know that I was moving to one of the most significant hubs of feminist activism in the country at just the right time.[i] Within my first week here I connected with a group of women at the university who were in the process of trying to start a Women’s Studies minor and was quickly recruited to join them in their efforts. I spent the next year very involved in what would be a successful effort and was lucky enough to teach the first Intro to Women’s Studies ever offered at UMD a year later.

Soul-Fully Scripting Flesh: Poetic Justice & Joy by Margot Van Sluytman

Ours is a city of abundant tattoo shops. Places, I was to learn, where art and heart are rife. Places in which rich conversations occur. Conversations that linger long after the ink has begun to settle.

Wending my way to find the place to begin the process of scripting my skin, I spoke with a young man. His back was bent as he focussed on his animal friend and for a short while, before approaching him with my questions, I read the ink that covered his arms and legs. So many designs, descriptors, expressive strokes of thought and meaning known only to him. Hieroglyphs wherein his voice, his many selves, were revealed, yet hidden unless conversation were struck and desire to speak forthcoming. Wherefrom grew his choices?

I decided to cross the street and to ask him the meaning of some of his tattoos, the ones that spoke most vocally to me. As I moved closer, I spotted the script on his wrist. Script among an array of the colours and images. That script struck me. A fragment from The Tempest. Caliban’s words.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of
noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give
delight and hurt not.

Toni Cade Bambara: How to Care for Oneself While Healing The All (American Woman Writer 1939-1995), part 2 by Theresa Dintino

Part 1 was posted yesterday

The mud mothers, ancestors, began to make themselves visible to her when she was a girl, in the movie theater, on one of the walls in a cave like indentation, “with enormous teeth painting themselves with long hair brushes, painting pictures on the walls of the cave”( SE 254), at church, and in her attic. “In the attic they came in the mirror once. Ten or more women with mud hair, storing yams in gourds and pebbles in cracked calabash. And tucking babies in hairy hides. They came like a Polaroid. Stepping out of the mouth of the cave, they tried to climb out of the speckled glass, talk to her, tell her what must be done all over again, all over again, all over again. But she hung an old velvet drape over the mirror and smothered them. They were not going to run her off her own place, Not the attic “(SE 255). In church and at the theater she avoided looking at them.

For Velma and for Bambara, it is the spiritual roots of her ancestors and ancestry from Africa that come calling, the mud mothers. In Velma’s town there are mentors and guides and Aunties and godmothers, all levels of support and care available in claiming her gifts that Velma has left behind, rejected. Yet, when the book ends she will return to this, she has agreed to take up the mantle in order to be well.

For African Americans in particular, Bambara believes reconnecting with the ancestors—the ancestors that their ancestors were taken from— is part of the healing wanting to happen. That this was left out of the civil rights movement. That honoring ancestors is part of this lineage and that the ancestors are there and waiting. That slavery often disrupted this connection but it is there, the ancestors are there, for the reconnection if one is willing.

Ariadne & Me – Mother Magic by Arianne MacBean

The fortune teller stood at a square park table, her hair wrapped in a gold scarf, stacking perfectly formed human fingernails. Across from her, I watched as she methodically piled and unpiled the fingernails according to some obscure but precise calculation known only to her. She measured them against a line carved into the wood marked with tiny incremental notches.

Reading the messages she found there, she spoke.

“Your mother and father are not one, but All.”

My friend Jacqueline, standing between us, immediately blurted out, “What the fuck does that mean? That doesn’t make any sense!”

But I answered with unexpected certainty.

“No. She’s right. They are the archetypal Mother and Father. They are not mine alone.”

The fortune teller waved us closer.

“Come on. I have to finish these visions so I can go to heaven.”

This was the dream I had the night I arrived on the Isle of Mull in western Scotland for a two-week Goddess Pilgrimage. I believed I was traveling to my fatherland, the home of Clan MacBean, to heal old wounds and unbind myself from contracts unknowingly inherited through my patrilineal line.

Zahra Tabari by WNCRI

Women’s National Council of Resistance of Iran (info below)

In a continuation of the escalating crackdown on political dissent in Iran, Zahra Shahbaz Tabari, a 67-year-old political prisoner, was sentenced to death by Branch 1 of the Revolutionary Court of Rasht on October 25, 2025. The regime’s judiciary has accused her of “supporting the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI).”

Who Is Zahra Tabari?

Zahra Tabari, 68, holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and is a graduate of Isfahan University of Technology and the University of Borås in Sweden, specializing in Sustainable Energy.

She suffers from chronic health conditions, and the poor conditions in Lakan Prison, combined with shortages of medication, medical care, and constant psychological pressure, have severely deteriorated her physical condition.

She was arrested on April 17, 2025, after security forces raided her home in Rasht without presenting a judicial warrant. During the raid, agents searched the house and confiscated her and her daughter’s electronic devices. For weeks, her family had no information about her whereabouts or health condition. She is currently being held in Lakan Prison in Rasht.

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.

Heather Pringle: Celebrating Viking Women— Warriors, Weavers and Wise Women, part 2 by Theresa Dintino

part 1 was posted yesterday

Women weavers who made the Viking world possible

Viking Women were also farmers, running their own farms, merchants running their own businesses, and voyagers upon the seas, locating and settling new territories in Iceland, Greenland and even Vinland in Canada.

The chapter on the Viking weavers is truly astounding. Pringle details the importance of and vast amount of weaving the Viking women produced to support the excursions of the ships and to dress their husbands and sons — maybe wives and daughters—safely for battle.

“In 2016, archaeologist Morten Ravn, a curator at the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark, published an estimate of the total time required to construct two medium-size Viking ships, from keel to sail. Ravn based this estimate on projects documented by the museum staff. His calculations showed that spinning and weaving enough cloth for just one sail accounted for as much as 36.9 percent of the total number of hours logged by builders of an average-size Viking ship. This meant that just over a third of all the work that went into constructing such a ship was performed by women. And if the crew carried enough spare cloth to mend the sail—a practice recommended by one Old Norse text, King’s Mirror—that statistic climbed to 53 percent, more than half of all the necessary work.

But the women weren’t done there, they also produced a wealth of other high-quality gear for the raiders themselves, from heavy seafaring blankets to water-resistant clothing. And last but certainly not least, research now suggests that they made a surprisingly effective form of body armor”(NW 114).