From a CNN posting titled “Seven Civil War Stories Your Teacher Never Told You” :

Hundreds of women on both sides pulled a Mulan, assuming male identities and appearances so that they might fight for their respective nations.

Some of them did it for adventure, but many did it for monetary reasons: the pay for a male soldier was about $13 month, which was close to double what a woman could make in any profession at the time.

Also, being a man gave someone a lot more freedoms than just being able to wear pants. Remember, this was still more than half a century away from women’s suffrage and being a man meant that you could manage your monthly $13 wages independently.

So it should come as no surprise that many of these women kept up their aliases long after the war had ended, some even to the grave.

Their presence in soldiers’ ranks wasn’t the best-kept secret. Some servicewomen kept up correspondence with the home front after they changed their identities, and for decades after the war newspapers ran article after article chronicling the stories of woman soldiers, and speculating on why they might break from the accepted gender norms.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in 1909 the U.S. Army denied that “any woman was ever enlisted in the military service of the United States as a member of any organization of the Regular or Volunteer Army at any time during the period of the civil war.”

To read more Civil War stories, visit CNN

Please join us for an afternoon of Consciousness Raising! A new women’s group is forming to meet up for fun gatherings, such as casual conversations on topics of interest to women, yoga, book discussions, creative projects, or an idea of your choosing.
Sunday, June 14th at 2 P.M.

Amanda’s House in Berkley, Michigan

**Women Only**

Consciousness raising groups aim to achieve a better understanding of women’s issues by bringing diverse women together to discuss and analyze their lives. The focus of our discussion will be decided at the gathering based on any suggestions or topics voiced by our attendees. Topics for this or future events could include holistic health, grassroots activism, bridging communities, and work/life balance.

Please feel free to bring a snack to share as well! Please e-mail Amanda at women.gatherings@gmail.com before 6/12 to RSVP and for directions. Please also let her know what you will be bringing if you are planning to bring a snack.

California’s highest court upheld a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriages Tuesday but allowed about 18,000 unions performed before the ban to remain valid.

Supporters of the November ballot initiative Proposition 8 hailed the ruling, but about 1,000 advocates of same-sex marriages who gathered outside the court building in San Francisco met the 6-1 decision with chants of “Shame on you.”

“It’s nice that my marriage is still intact, but that’s not the point,” said Kathleen White, who married her partner in 2008. “The point is that everybody should have the same civil rights across the board.”

Proposition 8’s supporters argued that Californians have long had the right to change their state constitution through ballot initiatives. But opponents of the ban argued it improperly altered the state constitution to restrict a fundamental right guaranteed in the state’s charter.

More at CNN

The Women’s Airforce Service Pilots was born in 1942 to create a corps of female pilots able to fill all types of flying jobs at home to free male military pilots to travel to the front.

Some 65 years after their service, the WASPs are being honored with the Congressional Gold Medal — one of the national’s highest civilian honors.

Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Barbara Mikulski, D-Maryland, shepherded a bill through the Senate, and it now awaits a vote by the House of Representatives.

With fewer than 300 living former WASPs, all in their late 80s or older, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida, a sponsor of the bill, told CNN it’s important for the House to act quickly.

From CNN

Decades before they had the right to vote and a foothold in the workplace, women were forging professional associations in the art world. One was the National Association of Women Artists, which began as a meeting of five friends in a Greenwich Village studio. This “carefully selected group of women painters,” as an official history described them, did much to dispel the prevailing image of creative women as hobbyists or dilettantes.

The group is now celebrating its 120th anniversary, with the show “A Parallel Presence: National Association of Women Artists, 1889-2009,” at the UBS Art Gallery in Midtown. The exhibition of artworks and ephemera highlights a small portion of the association’s 500-piece collection, now based at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum on the Rutgers University campus.

The 56 works on view cover a lot of territory, from American Impressionism to contemporary video art. The first half of the show, which details the early history of the association, is the strongest. The stakes during this period were high: American art was coming into its own, and women didn’t want to be left behind.

from the New York Times

ISTANBUL — Turkan Saylan, a champion of women’s rights and education for poor children in Turkey and a leader in the fight against leprosy, died here on Monday. She was 73.

One of the first women to work as a dermatologist in Turkey, Dr. Saylan became active in the fight against leprosy in the 1970s, founding the Turkish Leprosy Relief Association. Later, she was a consultant to the World Health Organization on leprosy and a founding member of the International Leprosy Union.

She worked for years in rural Turkey with limited resources, an experience that inspired her to organize an effort to provide education for poor children. In 1989 she helped found the Association to Support Contemporary Life, which focused primarily on the education of young girls.

A staunch secularist, she was put on a watch list compiled by public prosecutors looking into allegations that conspirators were planning a military coup against the Islamic-inspired Justice and Development government. A police raid on her home and office last month outraged many critics of the government, who say that the investigation is part of a power struggle between the secular establishment and the religiously conservative governing party.

After the raid, in which both private and professional documents were confiscated, Dr. Saylan appeared on television, looking weak but insisting that her association favored neither an Islamic state nor a military coup. “We want democracy and contemporary values to rule,” she said. “Therefore, we are ready to fight for this cause as long as it takes.”

from the New York Times

Victims of domestic violence struggle with maintaining a stable job for up to two years after the abuse has ended, shows a study released in early 2009 by the National Institute of Justice, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. The data was based on a three-year study of 1,311 women on welfare in Illinois.

The Allstate Foundation’s Economics Against Abuse Program–which provides grants and aid to local programs that assist in education and job training for abuse victims–reported in June 2006 that 6 out of 10 Americans strongly agree that a lack of money and a steady income are often challenges faced by a survivor of domestic violence when leaving his or her abuser.

“We do believe that the economy is causing a rise in domestic violence and an increasing concern over economic abuse,” said Kyle Donash, a communication consultant at the Allstate Foundation, a philanthropic branch of the Allstate Insurance Company based in Northbrook, IL.

from Women’s eNews

To find your local domestic violence help program contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

The Supreme Court keeps finding ways to deny women equal pay and benefits.

In 2007, it denied a woman’s claim for equal pay because it thought she waited too long to file it. On Monday, the court sided against female retirees who get smaller pensions than their male colleagues because they got pregnant and took maternity leaves before Congress got around to outlawing discrimination on that basis.

The case involved four retired employees of AT&T who took maternity leaves between 1968 and 1976 — before the law required employers to offer pregnancy leaves on equal terms with other disability conditions. The women were denied full credit for those leaves.

from the New York Times

BEIJING — On April 30, the cellphones of the 32,630 students at Peking University, a genteel institution widely regarded as one of China’s top universities, buzzed with a text message from the school administration. The note warned students to “pay attention to your speech and behavior” on Youth Day because of a “particularly complex” situation.

Few students had to puzzle over the meaning. Youth Day, on May 4, commemorates a 1919 student protest against foreign imperialism and China’s weakness in resisting it. Seventy years later, in 1989, students from Peking University were again massing in the center of Beijing, demanding democracy. The student movement shook the ruling Communist Party to its core and ended with a military crackdown and hundreds of deaths.

And if a student today proposed a pro-democracy protest?

“People would think he was insane,” said one Peking University history major in a recent interview. “You know where the line is drawn. You can think, maybe talk, think about the events of 1989. You just cannot do something that will have any public influence. Everybody knows that.

from the New York Times

The economic crisis is not only causing a rise in the unemployment rates, it is also causing a rise in domestic violence incidents.

Seventy-five percent of domestic violence shelters in the United States reported an increase in women seeking help since September and 73 percent of these shelters attribute this rise to financial issues. The April report, which surveyed 600 domestic violence shelters across the country, was released by the Mary Kay Ash Charitable Foundation, based in Dallas, Texas. The Foundation is dedicated to ending women’s cancers and domestic violence around the world.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline measured an increase in calls of 21 percent during the third quarter of 2008, as reported in a press release by the organization.

from Women’s eNews

Husbands are allowed to slap their wives if they spend lavishly, a Saudi judge said recently during a seminar on domestic violence, Saudi media reported Sunday.

Arab News, a Saudi English-language daily newspaper based in Riyadh, reported that Judge Hamad Al-Razine said that “if a person gives SR 1,200 [$320] to his wife and she spends 900 riyals [$240] to purchase an abaya [the black cover that women in Saudi Arabia must wear] from a brand shop and if her husband slaps her on the face as a reaction to her action, she deserves that punishment.”

Women in the audience immediately and loudly protested Al-Razine’s statement, and were shocked to learn the remarks came from a judge, the newspaper reported.

From CNN

Comedienne Margaret Cho knows a great deal about Hollywood’s obsession with body image.

The once-zaftig actress is co-starring in a new series for Lifetime titled “Drop Dead Diva” about a brilliant plus-size attorney who finds her body inhabited by the soul of a shallow wannabe model.

Read an interview with Cho here

A combination of forces — our media- and society-driven virginity fetish, an increase in abstinence-only education, and the strategic political rollback of women’s rights among the primary culprits — has created a juggernaut of unrealistic sexual expectations for young women. Unable to live up to the ideal of purity that’s forced upon them in one aspect of their lives, many young women are choosing the hypersexualized alternative that’s offered to them everywhere else as the easier — and more attractive — option.

More than 1,400 purity balls, where young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers at a promlike event, were held in 2006 (the balls are federally funded).1 Facebook is peppered with purity groups that exist to support girls trying to “save it.” Schools hold abstinence rallies and assemblies featuring hip-hop dancers and comedians alongside religious leaders. Virginity and chastity are reemerging as a trend in pop culture, in our schools, in the media, and even in legislation. So while young women are subject to overt sexual messages every day, they’re simultaneously being taught — by the people who are supposed to care for their personal and moral development, no less — that their only real worth is their virginity and ability to remain “pure.”

More at Alternet

The special cellphone, set on vibrate, begins to whir. Throughout North Carolina, anonymous teenagers are texting questions to it about sex.

“If you take a shower before you have sex, are you less likely to get pregnant?” asks one.

Another: “Does a normal penis have wrinkles?”

A young girl types: “If my BF doesn’t like me to be loud during sex but I can’t help it, what am I supposed to do?”

Within 24 hours, each will receive a cautious, nonjudgmental reply, texted directly to their cellphones, from a nameless, faceless adult at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, based in Durham.

More from the NY Times

Please join us for an afternoon of Consciousness Raising!

 Sunday, May 17 at 2 P.M.

Amanda’s House in Berkley, Michigan

**Women Only**

Consciousness raising groups aim to achieve a better understanding of women’s issues by bringing diverse women together to discuss and analyze their lives. The focus of our first discussion will be decided at the gathering based on any suggestions or topics voiced by our attendees. Topics for this or future events could include holistic health, grassroots activism, bridging communities, and work/life balance. 

 Please feel free to bring a snack to share as well! Please e-mail Amanda at women.gatherings@gmail.com before 5/15 to RSVP and for directions.  Please also let her know what you will be bringing if you are planning to bring a snack.