28 August 2011

Awesome Woman: Anne Hutchinson

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), a Puritan living in New England who defied the male church and secular authorities by evolving a belief system according to her own conscience and by leading a Bible discussion group for women. Hutchinson stood by her beliefs, and represented herself bravely at two trials by men who considered her a Jezebel and heretic. In addition to holding and spreading theological beliefs contrary to what men were preaching, Hutchinson and her husband were also deeply opposed to the slavery and brutality being practiced against the Native Americans, for whom they expressed love and appreciation.

Anne also challenged notions that women were intellectually or spiritually inferior, that they ought not think for themselves, and that they were in a childlike relationship to their husbands, governors and religious leaders. Banished from the Massachusetts colony where she had sought religious freedom, and then banished again from the Rhode Island colony where she and like-minded friends had fled, she and all but one of her children were massacred by the very Natives she loved -- who did not know who she was and were in violent rebellion against the cruelty and greed of the white people who lived in the area.

In southern New York, the Hutchinson River is her namesake. It was while driving up the Hutchinson River Parkway with my young daughter years back that I noticed a bronze plaque on a stone bridge that mentioned the origin of the river's name. We looked up Anne Hutchinson when we got home and my daughter wrote a paper about her for an elementary school project. Anne Hutchinson not only served as an early role model for my daughter, her story has ever since inspired me immensely and her belief in the primacy of one's conscience in the search for truth and for a connection to a God sparked my first interest in learning more about Christian philosophy.


"As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway." --Anne Hutchinson


Anne Marbury was born in England and lived there until she was 43 years old, almost all her life. In her early years she was influenced by her father, a clergyman who did time in jail for protesting what he considered to be a nepotistic system of selecting church clergy, most of whom he considered to be unqualified. Anne was home-schooled and read from her father's libary. She clearly admired her father's assertiveness and ideals, learning to question church authority, to defend the right to live according to one's conscience and to speak out against corruption. She married William Hutchinson at the age of 21 and took on the role of wife and mother, but remained deeply interested in questions of theology. She and her family began attending the services of the Reformationist Reverend Joseph Cotton, a minister in the new Puritan movement that decried the corruption of the Catholic church.

In the year 1634, the Hutchinsons, and the 15 children Anne had borne, followed Joseph Cotton to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the new Puritan stronghold in the New World. While the notion is commonly held that New England colonies were established according to the principle of religious freedom, the only "freedom" was for colony founders to establish and enforce their own preferred flavor of Christianity. Alternate beliefs were not tolerated. The stifling rules and religious interpretations laid down by colonial governors and their clerical cohorts were imposed on the entire colony. Further, the only acceptable role for women was to serve as child-bearers and submissive subjects of their husbands. Given the stultifying atmosphere vis-à-vis Anne's independent mind, she was destined to be in the role of agitator, dissenter, and branded woman throughout the tumultuous nine years that she lived in America.

When Hutchinson arrived in Massachusetts, there were religious discussion groups for men at which women were not welcome. So she started a discussion group of her own, for women. Rather than repeating the theology as preached and written down by men, she relied on her own deep study of the Bible and the resulting revelations to her own heart and mind, and brought those revelations into the discussion.

Some of her religious tenets were revolutionary for the times, going beyond the reforms the Puritans had built into their new religion. Whereas the leaders of the Massachusetts colony preached a "covenant of works," which laid out very specific actions and behaviors a person must adhere to in order to find salvation, Hutchinson believed in a "covenant of grace," in which humans are saved merely through their faith.  These were beliefs she had learned from Rev. Cotton. But she was even more radical, and believed that faith was not about accepting Christ but rather was about recognizing that Christ had been in one's heart all along. And she stepped even further outside of accepted teachings, in that she believed in a personal closeness to God that did not require interpretation by, and was not a legitimate subject of judgement by, self-appointed church authorities. In her way of seeing it, God revealed himself to individuals without the aid of clergy.

Hutchinson's discussion groups were very popular. Soon men began to attend, too, and as many as 80 people were showing up to study with her. Her fearless independence of mind was a major challenge to the status-quo of the colony's leaders, as was her breaking of the strict Puritan mores that prohibited men and women meeting together, and the fact that so many women were stepping away from their families briefly in order to attend her meetings. This led to her being brought up on charges of heresy and she stood trial twice, while in an advanced pregnancy once again, 50 years before the Puritan misogyny reached its peak with the Salem witch trials.

Hutchinson represented herself at both her civil and church trials, never wavering, never showing fear, and responding to charges with rejoinders that showed shrewd understanding of the law, astute insight into the hypocrisy of the patriarchal control of women's lives, and incredible allegiance to her own truth. The key charge against her in the civil trial was that she had violated the Fifth Commandment, in an argument that cast the "fathers of the colony" as parents. Thus, in a classic use of church doctrine as a means for the powerful to maintain the status quo, she was branded as a heretical dissenter and banished from the colony -- but not before she also had to stand a religious trial in which she was accused of "lewd and lascivious conduct" for holding meetings whose attendees were both men and women. The result of this trial was excommunication.

Anne, William and their children fled to the colony of Rhode Island which at first was a haven for people who had stepped outside of Puritanical rule, yet quickly became yet another example of a powerful man instituting harsh theocratic policies. By this time Anne was led by her experience, logic and meditations on Scripture to a philosophy of individualist anarchism, in which individuals are free to evolve their own morality, ideology, and religious beliefs. (Note that William Gibson, born more than a hundred years later, is credited with being one of the early influences on the school of individualist anarchism, whereas Anne Hutchinson had arrived at a similar set of socio-religious-political beliefs on her own under the most contrary circumstances possible.)

William died in 1642 and Anne decided to move once again, this time to the Dutch-held colony of Eastchester Bay (now in the Bronx). Some of her friends and family moved with her, which attests to her strength as a thought-leader. In 1643 she, her servants, and all but one of the five children who had moved with her were massacred by Mahican Indians who were in rebellion against the local Dutch colonists.

In 1987, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis pardoned Anne Hutchinson, revoking the order of banishment by Governor Winthrop 350 years earlier.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hutchinson
http://www.annehutchinson.com (this site includes partial transcript of her trial, worth a look!)
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Anne_Hutchinson.aspx

21 August 2011

Awesome Women: Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen

The Awesome Women for today are Hege Dalen and her spouse, Toril Hansen, two Norwegian women who risked gunfire to save 40 children from the madman who murdered so many innocents recently at a camp on Utoya Island.

The two women were dining nearby when they heard gunfire and saw people running desperately. They started up their boat's engine and rushed across the water to rescue people from the shore. Even after they noticed bullet holes in the side of their boat they returned again, going in four times in all.

This story did not surface for at least a week after the whole incident, and one has to wonder why. For their selfless and courageous actions, apparently ignored by the mainstream media, they are Very Awesome indeed!

for more info:
www.ibtimes.com/articles/190990/20110802/norway-massacre-oslo-shooting-utoya-anders-breivik-lesbian-couple-rescue-youth-camp.htm

14 August 2011

If you don't follow Betty Fokker, you're an asshat

From "When does self-delusion cross into mental illness?"
Something horrible happened in Mississippi. A couple of white teens, John A. Rice, 18, and Deryl Dedmon, also 18, went hunting for a black person to “mess with” and found a 49-year-old auto worker named James Craig Anderson – who just happened to be black. Because he was black, and for no other reason, the goat fuckers John A. Rice and Deryl Dedmon murdered him. Mr. Anderson was beaten savagely by both of the festering anuses, and then Deryl Dedmon ran him over with a truck, deliberately and with vile malice. It was murder. Pure and simple a racially motivated hate-crime and murder. They caught it on TAPE. It is beyond contestation.

But, of course, the motivation for the killing is being contested. Deryl Dedmon’s lawyer, Lee Agnew, “said in an early hearing that he had not seen evidence to support the accusations that the episode was racially motivated.” Yes, I am sure the racist scum Deryl Dedmon and John A. Rice, who announced they were looking for someone black to attack, mistook James Craig Anderson for a Swede and were just boisterously roughhousing! It wasn’t racially motivated at all!
The full post and everything Betty pumps out are always worth reading.

Awesome Woman: Suraya Pakzad

The AWESOME woman of the day is SURAYA PAKZAD (born ca. 1970), an Afghan woman deeply committed to women's rights to education, safety, and opportunity. Pakzad founded the "Voice of women Organization" (VWO) NGO in 1998 and began to teach girls how to read in groups across Afghanistan. Since 2001, when Afghani women to some extent could operate to pursue their aspirations in a rigid society, VWO began to function openly. Her work to protect women and girls at risk as well as advocacy for women’s right puts her in constant danger in a traditional society in Afghanistan.

In 2009, when she was one  of the first four women to receive a "Power and Peace Award" (one of several high honors she has earned), the Washington Post explained the kind of violence Pakzad witnessed in her youth, that led her to follow her mission of working for women:
Suraya Pakzad was 12 when she saw a gunman kill the headmistress of her Afghan school because the woman taught girls and refused to wear a headscarf. A few weeks later, a rocket smashed into the school and killed a student sitting near her, another warning for girls not to learn.
In addition to her open efforts towards educating women and teaching them skills and trades (she is the only woman in Afghanistan who has ever trained other women to run a restaurant, for example), she also runs a system of secret shelters for child brides and other victims of Taliban-style abuse of women, providing housing and medical, legal and job-training services.

Pakzad was named in 2009 by Time magazine as one of the "Time 100" most influential people in the world. A mother of six children, she lives with unimaginable daily risk. She has been the victim of many death threats and conservative influences within the government have worked against her good efforts. Funding is also a constant challenge. 

The write-up of Pakzad in Time 100 noted:
It is difficult to name a more committed advocate for women's rights in Afghanistan.... Pakzad knows that any future success for Afghanistan depends greatly on the full, unimpeded participation of its women as contributing, productive members of society. In 1926, then Queen Soraya said famously, "Do not think, however, that our nation needs only men to serve it. Women should also take their part, as women did in the early years of Islam. The valuable services rendered by women are recounted throughout history. And from their examples, we learn that we must all contribute toward a development of our nation." This is what Pakzad believes. This is what she fights for. And it is — and this, however unpleasant, must be said — what she may die for.

07 August 2011

Awesome Woman: Kathryn Bolkovac

The Awesome Woman of the Day is KATHRYN BOLKOVAC, a law enforcement professional who blew the whistle on DynCorp, a contractor paid by the U.S. Military to assist in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in the late 1990s, for failing to take action against their own task-force trainees who were patronizing Bosnian establishments that trafficked in very young sex slaves. (A movie called The Whistleblower, based on this true story, was released on Friday, August 5.)


Bolkovac was working as a police officer in her native Nebraska when she saw a recruiting poster for the mission. A mother of three, with two of her children in college, she signed up to be one of 2,000 police officers from 45 countries to work as peacekeepers. During her training session in the States, she learned that at least one man in her group was aware of the use of very young girls for sex in Bosnia, a fact that was borne out once she was deployed. Bolkovac discovered restaurants and night clubs in Bosnia that were fronts for sex-trafficking operations that rented out girls aged 12-15 to international clientele, including her fellow U.N. peacekeepers. The Bosnian police were no help; they apparently were being paid to ignore the awful situation.

The treatment of these young girls was truly atrocious. Bolkovac uncovered evidence of girls who, when they refused to have sex, were beaten and raped in bars by their pimps while peacekeepers stood and watched. She discovered that one UN policeman who was supposed to be investigating the sex trade paid $700 to a bar owner for an underage girl he kept captive in his apartment.

[Madeleine Rees, the head of the UN Human Rights Commission office in Sarajevo, believes trafficking in little girls started with the arrival of the international peacekeepers in 1992.]

Bolkovac reported her findings to her DynCorp, which at the time had a $15 million contract to recruit and train police officers for the Bosnian operation, and she was immediately demoted. Six months later she was fired, and was warned by fellow workers that her life was in danger. After a two-year lawsuit she waged against DynCorp, in 2002,  an employment tribunal ruled that Bolkovac was unfairly dismissed by DynCorp.

In 2002, Salon did a two-part investigation into the participation of DynCorp employees in the Bosnian sex-slave trade, and determined that t least 13 DynCorp employees have been sent home from Bosnia -- and at least seven of them fired -- for purchasing women or participating in other prostitution-related activities. But despite large amounts of evidence in some cases, none of the DynCorp employees sent home have faced criminal prosecution.


In January, a book co-authored by Bolkovac about her experience, The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman's Fight for Justice, was published