Hedy Epstein, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor was arrested on Monday during unrest in Ferguson Epstein, who aided Allied forces in the Nuremberg trials, was placed under arrest “for failing to disperse.” 8 others were also arrested.
“I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager. I didn’t think I would have to do it when I was ninety," Epstein told The Nation during her arrest. “We need to stand up today so that people won’t have to do this when they’re ninety.” Epstein is currently an activist and a vocal supporter of the Free Gaza Movement.
Tag: feminist icons
The original is good, the comment is STUNNING. Love it!
So, basically, this is a symbolic representation of internalized misogyny:
fucking slam
FUCKIN MEGA SLAM
HOT DAMN
Meet Jedidah Isler
She is the first black woman to earn a PhD in astronomy from Yale University.
As much as she loves astrophysics, Isler is very aware of the barriers that still remain for young women of color going into science. “It’s unfortunately an as-yet-unresolved part of the experience,” she says. She works to lower those barriers, and also to improve the atmosphere for women of color once they become scientists, noting that “they often face unique barriers as a result of their position at the intersection of race and gender, not to mention class, socioeconomic status and potentially a number of other identities.”
While Isler recounts instances of overt racial and gender discrimination that are jaw-dropping, she says more subtle things happen more often. Isler works with the American Astronomical Society’s commission on the status of minorities in astronomy.
She also believes that while things will improve as more women of color enter the sciences, institutions must lead the way toward creating positive environments for diverse student populations. That is why she is active in directly engaging young women of color: for example participating in a career exploration panel on behalf of the Women’s Commission out of the City of Syracuse Mayor’s Office, meeting with high-achieving middle-school girls. She is also on the board of trustees at the Museum of Science and Technology (MOST).
“Whether I like it or not, I’m one of only a few women of color in this position,” she says. “Addressing these larger issues of access to education and career exploration are just as important as the astrophysical work that I do.”
Learn more:
So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a ‘modern miracle.’ But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.
Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)
funny how the most popular narrative about helen keller is a harmless little girl who learns to communicate and then the story ends for some reason gee i wonder why that is
(via callmeoutis)
Gee. Why does the popular narrative end before she became a communist? So strange! And the Martin Luther King Jr. narrative does the same thing! What a coincidence!
(via malachite-in-corvidae)
Also, that the narrative is generally about the abled teacher helping her and how amazing she was to be able to do it. As the wikipedia article frames it: “The story of how Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.” So even the story about Helen Keller is often not really about her.
(via ami-angelwings)
Helen Keller is a glaring example of it, but history’s dominant narratives are full of women whose stories are depoliticised and infantilised in order to make them more “inspirational”.
A current example: when Malala Yousafzai is the brave little girl who just wanted to learn, she’s the world’s darling, but when she tells Obama that drone strikes are driving terrorism the cameras all turn off.
(via sharpestrose)
I believe that this BS would fall under “inspiration porn”, too.
I got her first book at a thrift store for 95 cents and figured “Hey, it’s short. I can read that.” because I read a few books about her in school, you know? Seemed sensible to read her own words.
Then I find out she was a communist!? 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 She got more awesome by an order of magnitude.
(via jabberwockypie)
Helen Keller is AMAZING. She was one of the first people who really campaigned for sexual health, because one of the leading causes of blindness in her era was caused by infant exposure to an STI during vaginal birth. The blindness was easily and cheaply preventable by putting a solution in the newborn’s eyes, but this was rarely done because the stigma around sex and STIs was so pronounced. Helen started publicly pushing for every infant to get this treatment when she was still a child, fundraising and educating people and saving the sight of many, many people.
I think everyone who has an interest in Helen and her teacher Annie Sullivan should read Helen and Teacher. It’s an absolute brick of a book, but it’s incredibly interesting and an intricately detailed biography of Helen from birth to death, not just during the childhood years publicised and sanitised for the public’s palette. Read my review on GoodReads here.
Every little girl flies.
The thing gets me is their hair, that is just gorgeous, those forties curls and waves.
Evening Post: August 12, 1899.
“She immediately alighted, caught hold of the astonished youth, and gave him a sound thrashing, using her fists in a scientific fashion…”I would love to know what this means.
I think that might be code for “punched him in the balls with devastating accuracy”.
Peggielene Bartels, A.K.A. King Peggy, is currently the King of Otuam, Ghana. She was chosen to be one of only three female kings in Ghana, and when she discovered that male chauvinists wanted her to only be a figurehead, she said: “They were treating me like I am a second-class citizen because I am a woman. I said, ‘Hell no, you’re not going to do this to a woman!’” When she encountered corruption and the threat of embezzlement to the royal funds, she declared “I’m going to squeeze their balls so hard their eyes pop!”
King Peggy has maintained her work in Ghana’s embassy in Washington, D.C. while making education affordable in Otuam, installing borehead wells to produce clean drinking water, enforcing incarceration laws to deal with domestic violence, replenishing the royal coffers by taxing Otuam’s fishing industry to improve life in the village, and appointing three women to her council.
“Nobody should tell you, ‘You’re a woman, you can’t do it,’” she insists. “You can do it. Be ready to accept it when the calling comes.”
Quoted from the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Ms. Magazine.
What a beautiful badass woman.
King Peggy has been on my blog before but this is my goddamn blog and I will have King Peggy on here twice if I want.
MORE FEMALE KINGS.
Always reblog King Peggy, who is on my dash far less than she should be. Did you know she has written a book about her life? It is great, and you should all get right on that if you haven’t already.
Bitches get shit done.
I was thinking about this lady the other day.
“I also thank Angelina for dressing in hijab while she visited not just Iraqi refugees but refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not only did she look good in it, she showed respect and appreciation for their culture and religion and made sure that the focus was not on her looks but rather her mission.”
This photo carries so much emotion
On Sep 13, 1944, a princess from India lay dead at Dachau concentration camp. She had been tortured by the Nazis, then shot in the head. Her name was Noor Inayat Khan. The Germans knew her only as Nora Baker, a British spy who had gone into occupied France using the code name Madeline. She carried her transmitter from safe house to safe house with the Gestapo trailing her, providing communications for her Resistance unit.
Oh my God, yes. Let’s talk about Noor Inayat Khan.
- Wireless operators in France had a life expectancy of six weeks. Noor was actively transmitting for over three times as long.
- While she was in France, every other wireless operator in her network was slowly picked off until she was the last radio link between London and Paris. It was “the most dangerous and important post in France”.
- She was offered a way back to Britain and refused.
- In fact, in her transmissions to London, she once said that she was having the time of her life, and thanked them for giving her the opportunity to do this.
- She was captured by the Gestapo, but never gave up: she made three attempt escapes. One involved asking to take a bath, insisting on being allowed to close the door to preserve her modesty, and then clambering onto the roof of the Gestapo HQ in Paris.
- Her last word before being shot was, “Liberté!”
The term BAMF was coined for such persons.
Her entire life, and her mother’s life as well, are FASCINATING. A Royal, Muslim, Anglo-Indian woman in WWII… Could we have a sweeping FACTUAL movie please. Like now?
Yet another story I would like to read.
You guys! There IS A MOVIE!
Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story
knitting in the dark 