What is a Feminist?
I’m with Her… and Her and Her
Lots of women are online today lecturing the women who marched in one of the Women’s Marches across the country. Apparently, lots of women feel the need to dictate to other women exactly how they should protest… even telling them not to feel happy about a peaceful march, insisting that the peace and joy the marchers experienced was all bogus because the crowd was “too white.” Lots of women are also lecturing other women about the best way to support minority women. Lots of women are judging and guilting and dismissing other women today… Is this really helpful?!
Sorry ladies, but you don’t get to define me. You don’t get to dictate what my protests look like. You don’t get to guilt me simply because I’m a middle class white woman. You don’t get to tell me what kind of sign to carry or hat to wear when I protest. You don’t get to dismiss me because I marched with a smile and didn’t scream in rage and burn shit. You don’t get to poo poo my commitment because I don’t protest the way you do.
I will choose when and how I take political action. I will choose when and how I speak out and act. It is MY choice, NOT YOURS!
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When one group lectures another about how to behave and how to feel, it sounds suspiciously like old patriarchal Bullshit to me – even when women do it to other women.
EVERY woman needs the space to take political action and express herself in the way that’s most appropriate to her WITHOUT being judged and lectured by other women – and that includes white women from the suburbs!
We won’t fix this mess by telling one group of women to shut up and stuff their feelings, their needs, their wisdom in order to serve another group of women who now take precedence.
We want change, right? Real change? That requires creating a space where ALL women can dialogue with each other and be heard with respect and love. That’s true inclusivity.
“The language by which we have been taught
to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect
is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other.”
~Audre Lorde
Signs From the Front Lines
#Women’sMarchonDenver
Speak
“My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.
What are the words you do not yet have?
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day
and attempt to make your own,
until you sicken and die of them,
still in silence?
… And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty
that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth.
And that is not speaking.”
~Audre Lorde
feminist poet
Piglet Wisdom
from Cornell Women’s Resource Center Facebook feed
A Feminine Understanding
Now is the Time — the Fierce Feminine
THIS. This is the antidote to all the bigotry, hatred and fear in America right now. Thank you Chameli. ❤️
The moment you take a stand for what really matters to you,
you step into Sankalpa Shakti, a current of infinite creativity and energy.
By committing to what matters to you and stepping two feet in,
you access the very power needed to live out your Sankalpa.
So what keeps us sitting on the fence?
I have witnessed in myself and in my practice sisters
how we minimize the value of our path and our wisdom
when we cannot find confirmation from the outside;
how we are still waiting for approval,
comparing the fresh kiss of spirit that we are offered
in the intimacy of our own practice with the outdated models of spirit
embodied by men only. We are still moving in circles, repeating the past.
We tend to avoid that one scary step outside the circle of the known,
into the rush of self-arising wisdom expressed through us.
Are we secretly hoping that someone else will do it for us?
~ Chameli Devi Ardagh
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Chameli’s recent TED Talk, The Fierce Face of the Feminine: