While my life has had its challenging moments and I have traversed many a dark woods in my quest for knowledge, I am fulfilled by the wondrous journeys I have made to the realms of the Marvelous, the Magical, the Great Goddess and the Shamanic Mysteries, and I will be forever grateful to the teachers who inspired me and to the feminist activists on whose strong shoulders we now stand as we welcome new generations of visionaries expanding our feminist legacy into the new millennium.
-Gloria Feman Orenstein
It was my pleasure to meet Gloria Feman Orenstein when I was pursuing a book on spiritual art and the Goddess in 1989. She very generously agreed to meet with me, and I remember sitting in a cafe in Venice California, not far from the beach, utterly enthralled by the power of her personality, and the stories she told me about her journeys into Samiland, shamanism, and ecofeminism, as well as her scholarly insights into surrealism, magic, and feminism in contemporary art. Much later, she kindly let me post an important article of hers about Shamanism on this Blog.
Gloria F. Orenstein is Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Her areas of research have ranged from Surrealism, contemporary feminist literature and the arts to Ecofeminism and Shamanism.
Her first book The Theater Of The Marvelous: Surrealism And The Contemporary Stage paved the way for her pioneering work on The Women of Surrealism. Leonora Carrington had been a friend and remained a major source of her inspiration in research and scholarship since 1971. Her book The Reflowering Of The Goddess offers a feminist analysis of the movement in the contemporary arts that reclaimed the Goddess as the symbol of a paradigm shift toward a more gynocentric mythos and ethos as women artists forged a link to the pre-patriarchal civilization of the ancient Goddess cultures, referencing them as their source of spiritual inspiration.
Gloria's Call is an award winning 2019 film by Cheri Gaulke and Colleagues. Director Cheri Gaulke was presented, among other awards, with the "Women Transforming Media" Award for her film.
"Blending animation, interviews and a trippy soundscape, this is a fitting look at the life of radical academic and writer Gloria Feman Orenstein’s serendipitous life. She vividly conjures an alternative history of art, surrealism and eco-feminism in the 20th century, with lively anecdotes about Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim and Jane Graverol, to name a few."
~Eileen Arandiga, Canadian International Documentary Festival
In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein received a call from Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparked a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism and shamanism. The short film, Gloria’s Call, uses art, animation and storytelling to celebrate this wild adventure. Now more than 40 years later, award-winning Dr. Gloria Feman Orenstein is a feminist art critic and pioneer scholar of women in Surrealism and ecofeminism in the arts. Her delightful tale brings alive an often unseen history of women in the arts.
Runtime: 17 minutes
Copyright 2018 ACCCA Productions
CREW
Directed, written and edited by Cheri Gaulke
Produced by Cheryl Bookout, Anne Gauldin, Cheri Gaulke, Sue Maberry and Christine Papalexis
Writer Anne Gauldin
Music by Miriam Cutler
FESTIVALS & AWARDS
Gloria's Call has screened in 40+ film festivals internationally and won awards including Best Documentary at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Audience Award at Nevada City Film Festival, Audience Award runner-up at HotDocs in Toronto, and the Women Transforming Media Award from MY HERO International Film Festival.
I recently saw a great documentary, on Netflix, about the second wave of feminism in the 60's and 70's that occurred with the advent of Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, the formation of the National Organization of Women (N.O.W.) and led into the struggle for equal pay and equal rights, the right to birth control and abortion, and openly addressing the universal violence toward women. I remember it well, because I was there! I met some of these women, they were my heroines. I marched in San Francisco, I attended consciousness raising groups.
I've seen so very much change in my lifetime because of that time, and those leaders, and there is still so much farther to go. An important film, beautifully made.
This is what the return of the Goddess means to me, just as much as the beautiful, nurturing, and contemplative. The Return of the Goddesss is also, and profoundly, the arising of women, who say, like the brilliant author Barbara Solnit, "Look at this. Take a good look at what it really is, how it's everywhere, and what it does. And it has to stop."
"Santa Barbara is grieving after a 22-year-old man killed six college
students just after posting a misogynistic video online vowing to take
his revenge on women for sexually rejecting him. The massacre prompted
an unprecedented reaction online with tens of thousands of women joining
together to tell their stories of sexual violence, harassment and
intimidation. By Sunday, the hashtag #YesAllWomen had gone viral. In
speaking out, women were placing the shooting inside a broader context
of misogynist violence that often goes ignored. In her new book, "Men
Explain Things to Me," author and historian Rebecca Solnit tackles this
issue and many others. "We have an abundance of rape and violence
against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost
never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or
even a pattern," Solnit says. "Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a
religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender."
Violence is often paired with controlling behavior: women whose partners are jealous, controlling, or verbally abusive are significantly more likely to report rape, physical assault, and/or stalking from their partners.
Between 2009 and 2012, 40 percent of mass shootings started with a shooter targeting his girlfriend, wife, or ex-wife. In nearly 60 percent of mass shootings
during the same time period, the gunman killed a current or former
spouse, partner, or other family member. In at least 17 incidents, the
shooter had a prior domestic violence charge.
The leading cause of death for women at the workplace is homicide, most often at the hands of an intimate partner.
While the rate of intimate partner violence declined by 64 percent
between 1994 and 2010, most of that decline came before 2001, and since
then the fall has slowed and stabilized while the overall crime rate has kept dropping.
Domestic violence support services get more than 75,000 requests for assistance on a typical day, but last year they had to turn away more than 9,000 people thanks to tight budgets.
http://www.stoptellingwomentosmile.com/ Here's a wonderful series of posters created by artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that ring true. Remember the song "Give Me The Night" (Give me the silvered streets............)? A young woman's urban experience is a very different experience from that of a young man. For one thing, it's scary to walk the streets at night, full of menacing men, fear of rape. In the daytime, young women are often subject to harassment, and a different kind of predatory attention that, instead of innocent flirtation, often veils a hostile undertone. I remember it well, the fear and the sense of psychic, and sometimes physical, invasion. Being old has it's perks, and one is that I'm invisible to men, which I thoroughly enjoy.
Stop Telling Women to Smile is an art series by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh.
The work attempts to address gender based street harassment by placing
drawn portraits of women, composed with captions that speak directly to
offenders, outside in public spaces. Tatyan Falalizadeh is an illustrator/painter based in Brooklyn, mostly
known for her oil paintings. Having recently branched out into public
art as a muralist, STWTS was born out of the idea that street art can be an impactful tool for tackling street harassment.
STWTS started in Brooklyn in the fall of 2012. It is an on-going,
travelling series and will gradually include many cities and many women
participants.
Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This
project takes women’s voices, and faces, and puts them in the street -
creating a bold presence for women in an environment where they are so
often made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe.
Homicide, battering, and rape statistics overwhelminglhy demonstrate that women and girls suffer great violence in this country, and thoughout the world. But apparently these patriarchs don't think it's worth passing a bill to protect them, or even make a passing comment on the problem. But the good news is that the bill passed. The bad news is that these people are still in Washington.
Sheryl WuDunn, co-author of "Half the Sky", which became a powerful documentary aired on PBS last year, said that gender violence and discrimination is the "Injustice of our century", and I believe she is absolutely right. So deeply embedded in our culture is the oppression of women, that it was some 70 years after freed black male slaves were given the vote that women were allowed to also vote in the U.S. - and only because courageous women made that possible through great sacrifice. We have a Martin Luthor King Day, but there is no day devoted to the Suffragettes, to Susan B. Anthony or Lucy Burns, or Margaret Sanger, who first made birth control available to women, or innumerable others who worked to give to women the same rights over their lives, finances, and bodies that men took for granted. Nor is the work over.
I love TED talks, and was delighted to hear this one by Jackson Katz, Ph.D., who points out that addressing gender based violence is not "just a women's issue", but a profound human issue. I think all boys and men should hear him.
Representations of Gender in Media is a school project that was
created for a Women and Gender Studies class at the University of
Saskatchewan by Sarah Zelinski, Kayla Hatzel and Dylan Lambi-Raine. The group wanted to show how the media portrays gender roles and stereotypes in advertising.
And it’s absolutely hilarious. I love these guys!
"The dangers of being alone with men (or walking alone at night where groups of young men are) is never mentioned in sermons on Sunday morning. Or talked about in social studies. We just know to "be careful," that's all. It is tucked away on the underbelly of life. It is a taboo subject."
When I was in Bali I visited the Temple of Hanuman, which had a forest full of grey monkeys. It was not uncommon to see a family unit, the females often with an infant at her breast. Once I bought a bunch of bananas, and began to distribute them. Then a big monkey, clearly the "alpha male", sauntered up, looking every bit like a human bully, bared his impressive fangs, and grabbed the entire bunch from me. I wasn't about to argue, and I stood there watching as he ate all the bananas. All the other monkeys gathered around him, hoping he'd drop one. I remember thinking "I sure hope we can outgrow that one."
In the wake of the tragedy in Colorado, my friend Janie, author and host of a radio show in California based on women's and environmental issues, sent me the article below. Last year my home town of Tucson saw the shooting of Gabrielle Gifford and the deaths that followed that rampage.
Why is it that pointing out gender imbalance, and inequity, is taken as a condemnation of all men? We all know the names of thousands of great men who have brought peace and love to the world. Addressing these issues is addressing human evolutionary issues. No doubt some find it controversial, but Janie is right: No one talks about it, and yet most young women, including the young woman I once was, live with the fear of rape and violent abuse. I felt this article was worth sharing.
The Overwhelming Maleness of Mass Homicide:
Why aren't we talking about the one thing mass murderers have in common?
Accused movie-theater shooter James Holmes makes his first court appearance at the Arapahoe County courthouse on July 23, 2012 in Centennial, Colo.
There’s a predictable cycle of mourning and recrimination that follows a massacre like the shootings last week in Aurora, Colo. First come the calls for unity and flags flown at half-mast. Then the national fissures appear: the gun lobby stiffens its spine as gun-control advocates make their case. Psychologists parse the shooter’s background, looking for signs of mental illness or family disarray. Politicians point fingers about “society run amok” and “cultures of despair.”
We’ve been down this path so many times, yet we keep missing the elephant in the room: How many of the worst mass murderers in American history were women? None. This is not to suggest that women are never violent, and there are even the rare cases of female serial killers. But why aren’t we talking about the glaring reality that acts of mass murder (and, indeed, every single kind of violence) are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men? Pointing out that fact may seem politically incorrect or irrelevant, but our silence about the huge gender disparity of such violence may be costing lives.
Imagine for a moment if a deadly disease disproportionately affected men. Not a disease like prostate cancer that can only affect men, but a condition prevalent in the general population that was vastly more likely to strike men. Violence is such a condition: men are nine to 10 times more likely to commit homicide and more likely to be its victims. The numbers are sobering when we look at young men. In the U.S., for example, young white males (between ages 14 and 24) represent only 6% of the population, yet commit almost 17% of the murders. For young black males, the numbers are even more alarming (1.2% of the population accounting for 27% of all homicides). Together, these two groups of young men make up just 7% of the population and 45% of the homicides. And, overall, 90% of all violent offenders are male, as are nearly 80% of the victims.
We shouldn’t need Steven Pinker, one of the world’s leading psychologists and the author of the book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, to tell us the obvious: “Though the exact ratios vary, in every society, it is the males more than the females who play-fight, bully, fight for real, kill for real, rape, start wars and fight in wars.” The silence around the gendering of violence is as inexplicable as it is indefensible. Sex differences in other medical and social conditions — such as anorexia nervosa, lupus, migraines, depression and learning disabilities — are routinely analyzed along these lines.
For millennia, human society has struggled with what to do with young men’s violent tendencies. Many cultures stage elaborate initiation ceremonies, presided over by older men, which help channel youthful aggression into productive social roles. But in contemporary society, we have trouble talking about the obvious: the transition from boy to man is a risky endeavor, and there can be a lot of collateral damage.
(Skeptics will claim that the perpetrators of horrific acts like the Aurora shootings are such aberrations that we can hardly build public policy around their evil behavior. But it’s a mistake to view mass murderers as incomprehensible freaks of nature. For example, we know that the young men who go on murderous rampages are not always sociopathic monsters but, rather, sometimes more or less “regular” men who suffered from crushing depression and suicidal ideation.
No reasonable person can imagine how despair could possibly lead to premeditated mass homicide. However, the fact that depression is so frequently accompanied by violent rage in young men — a rage usually, but not solely, directed at themselves — is something we need to acknowledge and understand.
Our refusal to talk about violence as a public-health problem with known (or knowable) risk factors keeps us from helping the young men who are at most risk and, of course, their potential victims. When we view terrible events as random, we lose the ability to identify and treat potential problems, for example by finding better ways to intervene with young men during their vulnerable years. There is so much more we need to learn about how to prevent violence, but we could start with the sex difference that is staring us in the face.
Erika Christakis, M.P.H., M.Ed., is a Harvard College administrator who blogs at ErikaChristakis.com. The views expressed are solely her own.
"Forty-three Catholic groups, including the University of Notre Dame and Archdioceses of New York and Washington, have sued the Obama administration over a controversial mandate requiring employers to offer insurance plans that include contraception coverage. In a coordinated filing of 12 lawsuits in federal courts across the country, the groups argue that the mandate would unconstitutionally force religiously-affiliated institutions, like Catholic schools and hospitals, to indirectly subsidize contraception for female employees in violation of religious beliefs." **
ABC News website
The picture above, and the recent quote from ABC, may not seem related, but they are. The former is an imprisoned Suffragette, whose crime, in our democracy, was demonstrating for the right to vote, some 50 years after male slaves had been given the right to vote. The institutions attacking Obama reflect the same patriarchal injustice - both then and now, women were not considered capable of controlling their lives, participation in society, or bodies.
I ran across this while surfing the Web, and was unable to find the author of the article, or the author of the blog for that matter. But their generosity and truth should be shared, so I take the liberty of copying this article about the brave women who made it possible for half the population of this country to vote in 1920. That's not so long ago. The "Night of Terror" occurred Nov. 15, 1917, and was a despicable miscarriage of justice.
A True Story Everyone Should Know About
HBO released the movie "Iron Jawed Angels" in 2004. This is the story of our mothers and grandmothers who lived only 90 years ago.
The women were jailed for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote. By the end of the "night of terror" many were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs with their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women convicted of "obstructing sidewalk traffic."
Lucy Burns
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.
Dora Lewis
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, suffered a heart attack and was refused medical assistance. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women. Thus unfolded the "Night of Terror" on November 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to "teach a lesson to the suffragettes" imprisoned there because they had picketed Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote. For weeks during imprisonment, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food was infested with worms.
Alice Paul
When Alice Paul embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled to the press.
Mrs. Pauline Adams in the prison garb she wore while serving a 60-day sentence.
"Iron Jawed Angels" is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say as a citizen of this country. I am ashamed that I needed the reminder.
HBO released the movie on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bingo night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.
Conferring over ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution at National Women's Party headquarters, Jackson Place, Washington, D.C. Left to right: Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Mrs. Abby Scott Baker, Anita Pollitzer, Alice Paul, Florence Boeckel, Mabel Vernon
It was jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul, he said, was "strong and brave. That didn't make her crazy." He admonished the men by adding that "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."
Please, share this with the women you know. We need to vote, and remember the right these courageous women fought for. We need to remember them.
Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk, Conn. Serving a sentence in D.C. prison for carrying a banner that said: "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Read again what these women went through for you! And do not forget why this country was founded, and what the Revolution represented. The right to vote, and to end slavery, was hard fought for.........even if it took many more years to include half the human population in the picture. So, please do not take it for granted. Get out and vote!
(This post was copied from a forwarded email, author unknown.)
**MO Rep. Stacey Newman Proposes Bill to Restrict Vasectomies
Well, well, well. The birth-control debate has finally come to our swimsuit areas, gentlemen. Yesterday Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman (D-St. Louis County) filed HB1853, which would only allow a man to have a vasectomy when doing so would protect him from serious injury or prevent his death. Ah, the legislation's on the other set of genitalia now. Rep. Newman -- whom I'd like to nominate for Hero Squad right here and now -- has been frustrated with the recent political debates over birth control access and reproductive health. The legislation is her pointed way of combating the idea that family planning is something only women have to worry about.
