Awesome Woman: Ursula Sladek

The incredible Awesome Woman of the Day is Ursula Sladek, who started a successful cooperatively-owned  green energy company.

After the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant it was revealed that radioactive isotopes had landed in the Black Forest region in western Germany where she lives. Children could not play outside for two weeks (and even 25 years later mushrooms from the forest are not considered safe to eat). Sladek and her husband Michael formed "Parents for a Nuclear Free Future"and began researching alternative forms of energy. When the local power company's lease was coming up for renewal Sladek launched a nationwide campaign and raised 6 million DM (about 3 million Euros) and bought the power grid so that she could break the monopoly of the energy companies.

Her company, Schönau Power Supply, uses decentralized power that is produced by local people's wind turbines, streams, solar panels, and other sources that feed the grid. Sladek pioneered a pattern of green, decentralized energy production. She enables citizens to become private green energy producers and to sell their electricity surplus back into the grid, and to share in the profits. Most of the revenues, which reached 67 million Euros in 2009, are reinvested in renewable energy sources. Sladek also has become a speaker and educator, and has a share-alike ethic when it comes to spreading information about how others can embark on the same type of initiative in their locale.

In 2011, Sladek won the notable Goldman Environmental Prize (the world's largest prize for honoring grassroots environmentalists) for Sustainable Energy in Europe, and is a fellow of the Ashoka "Innovators for the Public" institute that brings together social entrepreneurs, experts, and policy makers to inspire and support a new generation of local changemakers.

Awesome Woman: Elizabeth Cochran, a.k.a. Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly c. 1890

Nellie Bly (1864 - 1922) was the pen name of pioneer female journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who was first noticed and hired by a newspaper editor after she wrote a strong letter to the editor in response to a sexist article. According to Wikipedia, "The editor was so impressed with Cochran's earnestness and spirit that he asked the man who wrote the letter to join the paper. When he learned the man was Cochran he refused to give her the job, but she was a good talker and persuaded him. Female newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and for Cochran the editor chose 'Nellie Bly', adopted from the title character in the popular song 'Nelly Bly' by Stephen Foster."

Bly, who lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the time, was naturally inclined to cover stories of working women and the labor conditions of female factory workers. In rebellion against the pressure from her employer to cover home-and-garden sort of topics, she quit her job and moved to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent to the newspaper. Never one to hold back, she wrote critically of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, and then had to move back to the U.S. after being threatened with arrest. She was once again assigned typical women's stories and in frustration left the newspaper and moved to New York City.

After a few months barely scraping by in New York, Bly found work doing an undercover investigative assignment for the New York World. As a groundbreaker in the field of investigative reporting, she was to feign insanity in order to be committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island). The asylum had a reputation on the street for brutality and neglect, and Bly was to observe conditions first hand in the role of an inmate, and then write an exposé. The year was 1884, and she was now a mere 20 years old. Her work was first published in the World, and then she republished it as a book to satisfy the demand of a public who were asking for copies.

In order to ensure that she would gain entrance to the asylum, Bly practiced the behavior and mannerisms of insane persons. She then, continuing her strategy, checked into a working-class women's boarding house on lower Second Avenue (see footnote). There she conducted herself in such a way that the home's matron called the police, and Bly appeared before a judge and convinced him she was insane.

In her own words:

I took upon myself to enact the part of a poor, unfortunate crazy girl, and felt it my duty not to shirk any of the disagreeable results that should follow. I became one of the city's insane wards for that length of time, experienced much, and saw and heard more of the treatment accorded to this helpless class of our population, and when I had seen and heard enough, my release was promptly secured. I left the insane ward with pleasure and regret–pleasure that I was once more able to enjoy the free breath of heaven; regret that I could not have brought with me some of the unfortunate women who lived and suffered with me, and who, I am convinced, are just as sane as I was and am now myself. 

But here let me say one thing: From the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be by all except one physician, whose kindness and gentle ways I shall not soon forget.

Her first stop was Bellevue Hospital where she was to be evaluated, and then was transported on a boat -- under awful conditions -- to the asylum on Blackwell's Island.  Both hospital and asylum were freezing cold, food for the patients was scant and atrocious, and nurses kept inmates awake all night by talking and clomping around in loud shoes. But most egregious of all was what seemed to be a common practice by doctors of declaring women insane who likely were only down on their luck, based upon only the most cursory verbal examinations. Bly was deemed "hopelessly insane," a diagnosis arrived at after a simple conversation a doctor held with her during which she did nothing in particular to "act insane." She reported that she overheard other patients being asked similar questions, answering as any normal person would, and also being deemed insane. Bly wrote, "After this, I began to have a smaller regard for the ability of doctors than I ever had before, and a greater one for myself."


Bly wrote up many details of the treatment and incidents she witnessed at the asylum, and her work "Ten Days in a Mad-House" can be read at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html. With no special journalistic training, she had taken on a distasteful and even dangerous assignment and aced the tricky job of simultaneously pretending to be a real inmate while also staying aware and observant of others at all times. Her write-up makes an engrossing read and gives us tremendous insight to the status of women, particularly those in the working class, in the latter part of the 19th century.

And her work had tremendous impact. The public soaked it up and politicians were put in the hot seat. When she republished her work in book format she noted in an introduction:

SINCE my experiences in Blackwell's Island Insane Asylum were published in the World I have received hundreds of letters in regard to it. The edition containing my story long since ran out, and I have been prevailed upon to allow it to be published in book form, to satisfy the hundreds who are yet asking for copies.

I am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.

...

In another major adventure, in 1890, Nellie Bly took on a challenge to compete against another female author to beat, for real, the fictional record set by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days -- and on the 73rd day after her departure she won the challenge by arriving back at her Hoboken, New Jersey starting-point after making her way around the planet almost completely unchaperoned.

In 1895 she married a man 40 years her senior, a wealthy industrialist, and after his death she became an industrialist and inventor (of the 55-gallon oil drum still in use) in her own right. But after being bankrupted by employee embezzlement, she returned to reporting, covering the women's suffrage movement, and the action on the Eastern front in World War I. She also had a continuing interest in the plight of the downtrodden in society, and adopted or looked after a number of orphaned children.

In 1922, at the age of 57, Nellie Bly died of pneumonia, but her spirit lives on and she set in motion a huge legacy of exposing greed and incompetence in order to better the circumstances of those "at the bottom" of society. In 1998 she was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame, and in 2002 she was one of four female journalists honored with a U.S. postage stamp. A New York Press Club award bears her name, an amusement park is named after her, and a "4-D" film has been shown in the Annenberg Theater in Washington, D.C. dramatizing her experience in the asylum.

FOOTNOTE: The Temporary Home for Females was located at 84 Second Avenue. It was actually a web search for "84 Second Avenue" out of my interest in that building itself that led me to the story of Nellie Bly. The building at that address is only a few doors away from where I live and has been an object of my interest since I moved to my current location in 1977. Several people have written articles or blog posts about the place, and I do have more to add to what folks have thus far recorded, being one of very few people who have actually  been inside the building and talked to its present-day occupant. Another day I will take up that topic (and will try to remember to come back and add a link here).

Awesome Woman: Edra Mbatha

The AWOD for this Sunday March 4 is EDRA MBATHA of Nairobi, Kenya, who has dreamed up an innovative way to protect children from widespread sexual abuse and neglect. After she completed her O levels, Mbatha moved from her rural hometown -- as do so many young adults with no resources in Kenya -- to a slum in Nairobi in hopes of finding employment and making a life for herself.

But soon after arriving and seeing the terrible conditions in which people were living, and noticing how so many women had "given up" and just stood around all day gossiping, Mbathe began working as a volunteer with a grassroots women's group. Close to two decades later, Mbatha is still working within the Mathare community.

In 2008 during preelection violence she noticed that children were at high risk. "It was a chaotic time for children," she remembers. "In the slums, the myth that having sex with minors could cure people living with HIV was rife and children were defiled in large numbers." While the women's organization was providing some services to the children, Mbatha saw the clear need for early intervention to prevent victimization from happening at all.

She realized that sexual predators would strike during those hours when working parents left their children alone. So she started Mathare Early Childhood Development Centre, which began as a daytime "safe house" collectively funded by parents of the children, and has become a school that also provides nutrition and counseling for 30 children.

Beyond the powerful support and direct aid being provided to the students and their parents, Mbatha has a broad vision in which the Centre will produce politically aware adults and long-term changes in Kenyan society. "It’s lack of education that sees Kenyans manipulated by politicians to take arms against their neighbours."


(source: http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/sports/InsidePage.php?id=2000048503&cid=620)

Awesome Woman: Linda in Las Vegas

The Awesome Woman of the Day is "Linda in Las Vegas" who, in response to the Susan G. Komen Foundation's now-reversed decision to cut funding to cancer screenings provided by Planned Parenthood, made this video and posted it to YouTube. I can't even imagine how pissed off she must have been, to have done this. Power to you, Linda. All good things and many more years of life to you. Thank you for your courage.

(Contains visually graphic content.)

Awesome Woman: Christine Jorgensen

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Christine Jorgensen (1926 - 1989), the first person whose male-to-female sex reassignment surgery became, in 1952, a mainstream news item. She grew up as George William Jorgensen, Jr., in a blue-collar family in Bronx, New York, living as an uncomfortable child inside a boy's body that, according to some sources, never fully developed into male adulthood.

After Jorgensen did a tour of duty in the Army, she studied and worked in the fields of photography and dentistry. With access to doctors and information when working as a dental assistant, she began taking a form of estrogen. She then made her surgery arrangements through her medical connections and traveled to Denmark where, under the direction of Dr. Christian Hamburger,  the removal of her male genitals was done. (Several years later she had a vaginoplasty when the procedure became available in the U.S.) She chose the name Christine in honor of Dr. Hamburger.

Jorgensen's return the the United States after her first surgery was a major media event in 1953. She stepped off the airplane into an excited sea of cameras and news reporters. Given the tightly defined gender roles of that time, and the prevalence of violent homophobia in our culture, her decision to "go public" -- very public -- was immensely courageous. A common joke going around was that, "She went abroad, and came back a broad." She conducted herself in that press event with incredible grace:




Apparently, Jorgensen's carpenter-contractor father from the Bronx was quite supportive of her and did not withdraw his paternal love -- after her surgery he built a house for her in Long Island. There she met Howard T. Knox, a typist, and in 1959 the two announced their engagement to be married. Sadly, because Jorgensen's birth certificate still said she was male the marriage license was not granted.

Jorgensen used her publicity for more than personal fame, making appearances on talk shows and speaking on college campuses throughout the 1970s and 80s about her experience. In 1970, she sent a telegram to Spiro T. Agnew asking him to apologize for calling one of his adversaries "the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican party." (No apology was forthcoming.) In addition to assuming the role of a public figure on the speaking circuit, Jorgensen worked for years as a stage actress and nightclub entertainer. (A recording of her performance at The Frog Pond restaurant in Hollywood is available in the iTunes Music Store.)

Christine Jorgensen embraced a course of action that was so radical for her time, and by thrusting her story into the public arena she opened a pathway for other queer and gender-queer individuals, and for straight women whose societal role in the 1950s had been reverted from Rosie the Riveter to the demurring housewife and whose place in the scheme of things was as much a prison for many women as sexual mis-assignment was for Jorgensen (and countless others). And perhaps even straight men saw their gender role become more malleable from that point forward -- with the realm of acceptable possibilities for a man's character broadening from the iconic square-jawed image of a dominance and controlled emotions in 1950 into today's stay-at-home dads and Burning Men.

Of course gender and gender roles have never been set in concrete, but it was Christine Jorgensen who had the courage to help us reexamine our belief that they are, and to step out into new territory that allows us to become who we are rather than force ourselves miserably into a mold.

Awesome Women: Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia

The Awesome Women of the Day are the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, a shareholder-activist order of Catholic nuns that deliberately invests its pension funds in corporations that need a good talking to. Thus entrance is gained for team members of the order's Corporate Responsibility committee to shareholder meetings and executive offices to protest unfair and greedy practices.

The New York Times recently featured the sisters in a Business section article:

Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.

The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety.

... The Sisters of St. Francis are an unusual example of the shareholder activism that has ripped through corporate America since the 1980s. Public pension funds led the way, flexing their financial muscles on issues from investment returns to workplace violence. Then, mutual fund managers charged in, followed by rabble-rousing hedge fund managers who tried to shame companies into replacing their C.E.O.’s, shaking up their boards — anything to bolster the value of their investments.

The nuns have something else in mind: using the investments in their retirement fund to become Wall Street’s moral minority.

The order is comprised of about 540 women who engage in a variety of ministries -- including education, health care, shelter and foreign aid in Africa and Haiti. They own a community farm on one of the last undeveloped tracts of land in Delaware County, PA, on which they grow food for 130 CSA members and the sisters themselves, in keeping with their dedication to sustainability. They have published reports on the SEC's recently issued requirements that energy companies seeking investment for fracking operations disclose all the risks involved, and another two reports on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the need for BP to be held responsible.

A page on the order's website answers, for those who might be contemplating joining the order, "Who Will I Be?"

As a Sister of St. Francis of Philadelphia, you possess a heartfelt determination to make a difference in the world. You are prepared to live as Jesus did, with a clear vision of God’s care for all creation, loving every man, woman, child, and creature as brother, sister, mother, father, and friend.

 To paraphrase my friend Betty Fokker -- Mammon wept. Jesus smiled.

Awesome Woman: Nina Smith

The Awesome Woman for Today is Nina Smith, founder and executive director of Goodweave (http://goodweave.org/). Goodweave encourages handmade rug-weaving shops in South Asia to refrain from using child labor. Goodweave obtains a contractual agreement from shop owners to:
- Adhere to the no-child-labor standard and not employ any person under age 14
- Allow unannounced random inspections by local inspectors
- Endeavor to pay fair wages to adult workers, and
- Pay a licensing fee that helps support GoodWeave’s monitoring, inspections and education programs.

Exported Goodweave-certified rugs then carry the Goodweave label so that you know your rug purchase does not support exploitation of children. Non-Goodweave certified rugs might be made by children who kept locked inside dark shops, are not educated nor fed well, and some of whom are slaves who are not even paid. x

Goodweave also rescues children who have been sold into rug-making slavery, out of desperation, by their parents for amounts as small as $2.50. The rescued children are given refuge in a rehabilitation center where they also receive education, training and love.

A fair trade advocate and marketing professional for over 15 years, Nina won the 2005 Skoll award for Social Entrepreneurship, acknowledging her work to employ market strategies for social change. Nina was formerly the executive director of The Crafts Center (1995–1999), a nonprofit organization providing marketing and technical assistance to indigenous artisans around the world and publisher of Crafts News. As president of the Fair Trade Federation (FTF) from 1996 to 1998, Nina raised funds for and launched FTF’s first consumer education campaign. Nina’s overseas experience includes a crafts export consultancy to the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in Dharamsala, India from 1994 to 1996, where she oversaw the development of new market-driven product lines, quality control mechanisms, and artisan training programs. Nina’s broad expertise includes nonprofit management, writing and publishing, marketing, public relations and small business development.

The Goodweave program has won The Best in America Seal, that is awarded to less than 1 percent of U.S. charities, and only after rigorous independent review has determined that the highest standards of public accountability, program effectiveness and cost effectiveness are met.

Full disclosure: Nina Smith also happens to be my super awesome first cousin.

Awesome Women: Queen Soraya Tarzi

Today's Awesome Woman is Soraya Tarzi (1899-1968), who after being born in exile and returning with her family to Afghanistan in the early 20th century, married Prince Amanullah. She became Queen when her husband gained his ascendancy in 1926, but their reign lasted only three years before she found herself living out the rest of her life the way she began, as a woman without a country. But she made a mark during those three short years as the first Afghan queen to promote women's rightful place in public life, and she took significant personal risk in acting as the first public role model of a modern Muslim woman.

During the three years that Soraya was Queen of Afghanistan, she took bold steps to modernize the position of Mulsim women in general, and Afghan women in particular. Her husband was receptive to the egalitarian philosophy Soraya had received from her liberal, intellectual family (the reason they had been exiled to begin with). Soraya set many "firsts" -- the first woman to be the only wife of an Afghan King, the first Afghan Queen to accompany her husband as an equal at public events, the first queen to wear Western style clothing, and the first to openly champion the right of women to education and employment. She was present at Military Parades with the king. During the war of Independence, she visited the tents of wounded soldiers, talked to them, offered them presents and comfort. She accompanied the king even in some rebellious provinces of the country, which was a very dangerous thing to do at that time.

Influenced by Soraya and her father, King Amanullah campaigned  against the veil, against polygamy, and for the education of girls. At a public function, after her husband said that Islam did not require women to hide behind veils, she tore hers off right at the table. Other women at the event followed suit. While her husband was in the process of having the nation's first Constitution drafted and passed, Soraya publicly exhorted women to take their part in the nation's political life and future.

In 1926, Soraya delivered the following message in a speech commemorating the seventh anniversary of independence from England:

It (Independence) belongs to all of us and that is why we celebrate it. Do you think, however, that our nation from the outset needs only men to serve it? Women should also take their part as women did in the early years of our nation and Islam. From their examples we must learn that we must all contribute toward the development of our nation and that this cannot be done without being equipped with knowledge. So we should all attempt to acquire as much knowledge as possible, in order that we may render our services to society in the manner of the women of early Islam.

In 1928 honorary degrees were conferred upon both Amanullah and Soraya by Oxford University, and Soraya spoke to a large audience of students and leaders.  However, the British government had an interest in destabilizing Afghanistan, and distributed in the Afghan countryside photos of Soraya having dinner with men other than her husband, having her hand kissed by a Frenchman, and the like.

The British goal of destabilizing the Afghan monarchy was achieved. When the royal family returned from their trip to Oxford, a violent uprising broke out among religious sects and Amanullah was compelled to abdicate to avoid a civil war. After three short years on the throne, he and Soraya left their country for good. Their first stop was India, where they were applauded by thousands. Indians were still under the colonial thumb of Great Britain, and they gained and lost hope for their own cause as the watched Amanullah gain and then lose power to truly make changes happen in Afghanistan. It is said that Indian women gave Soraya a special ovation, calling out "Soraya! Soraya!" without mentioning "Queen."

Soraya Tarzi lived out the last 40 years of her life in Italy, with her family who were living there in exile once again. She only returned to Afghanistan in a coffin in 1968, where she was given a state funeral and buried next to Amanullah.

Awesome Woman: Marlene Dietrich

Today's Awesome Woman is Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) a German-born actress and singer who defied social mores, and who succeeded in reinventing her public self several times over during the course of her long career. She defied the conventional image of how a woman is supposed to dress, becoming one of the talkies' first femme fatales and was a fashion icon. She defied how a woman is supposed to act both in her movie roles and in her personal life (which she managed to keep relatively private). She defied the label "box office poison" after a flop and went on to star in several more successful movies. She defied the public's conception of her as a haughty movie star and rolled up her sleeves to do heavy wartime work during World War II. Then she stepped into a new era of being mostly a highly paid cabaret star from the 1950s through the end of her active career in the 1970s. And after retiring from the public view, Dietrich remained politically active. Marlene Dietrich defied everything except being herself.

Dietrich's first stage appearances were as a chorus girl in vaudeville-style revues in the 1920s. She was bisexual,  and enjoyed the thriving gay scene of the time and drag balls of 1920s Berlin. She married her only husband, Rudolf Sieber, in 1923 and gave birth to her only child, Maria Elisabeth Sieber, in 1924. After some smaller parts on stage musicals and in silent films, her breakout as a star came when she was cast as Lola Lola, a magnetic cabaret singer who brought down a respectable professor, in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930).

The film saw international success and Dietrich moved to Hollywood under a 6-contract deal with Paramount. Her first American film was Morocco. She knew very little English and learned her lines phonetically, but earned the only Oscar nomination of her career. In Morocco she wore a tuxedo and white tie, and kissed a woman. Dietrich was known for cross-dressing and her image had (oddly, considering the times) unquestioned appeal to men and women alike. She once said, "I dress for myself. Not for the image, not for the public, not for the fashion, not for men."

Five more highly successful films were made with Paramount (also under von Sternberg's direction): Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil is a Woman. After the contract was up, under a different director Dietrich starred in a 1937 film that bombed, resulting in her and many other major stars being labeled as "box office poison." But she revived her stardom and went on to make many more films.

With the ascendancy of the Nazi part in Germany, which Dietrich vehemently opposed, she became an American citizen in 1939. When the United States entered World War II she became the first celebrity to raise war bonds. She toured the U.S. for a year and a half, and it is said she sold more war bonds than any other star. During 1944 and 1945 she made USO tours of Europe, even performing for troops on the front lines, even inside Germany. She sang songs, performed on her musical saw (a skill picked up during her early cabaret years), and entertained the troops with a "mind reading act" that was rife with sexual innuendo and had church groups complaining. She recorded songs for OSS use, recording at least one in German, and actually became a favorite of soldiers on both sides of the war. She also toured the military hospitals to pay personal visits to bring cheer to wounded soldiers.

Dietrich was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the United States in 1947, which she said was her proudest achievement, and the Légion d'honneur by France as well. She had been raised as a Protestant but lost her faith during her wartime experiences, once saying, "If God exists, he needs to review his plan."

From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s, Dietrich worked almost exclusively as a highly-paid cabaret artist, performing live in large theaters in major cities worldwide, working with Burt Bacharach as her arranger and recording albums with him as well.

As for her rich private life through all these decades, as summarized in Wikipedia (be careful, this may make you dizzy):

Throughout her career Dietrich had an unending string of affairs, some short-lived, some lasting decades; they often overlapped and were almost all known to her husband, to whom she was in the habit of passing the love letters of her men, sometimes with biting comments. During the filming of Destry Rides Again, Dietrich started a love affair with co-star Jimmy Stewart, which ended after filming. In 1938, Dietrich met and began a relationship with the writer Erich Maria Remarque, and in 1941, the French actor and military hero Jean Gabin. Their relationship ended in the mid-1940s. She also had an affair with the Cuban-American writer Mercedes de Acosta, who was Greta Garbo's lover. Her last great passion, when she was in her 50s, appears to have been for the actor Yul Brynner, but her love life continued well into her 70s. She counted John Wayne, George Bernard Shaw and John F. Kennedy among her conquests. Dietrich maintained her husband and his mistress first in Europe and later on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, California.

In her 60s and 70s, Dietrich's health declined, after a bout with cervical cancer and several stage accidents. She was known to be an alcoholic and became dependent on painkillers. But even after retreating to the privacy of her Paris apartment for the final, mostly bedridden, 11 years of her life, she stayed active politically via telephone, including having had conversations with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. She also stayed in constant contact with her daughter (her husband had died in the 70s), and with biographer David Bret, with whom she had developed a close relationship and who was one of the only people allowed into her apartment. It is believed that Bret was the last person that Dietrich spoke to, two days prior to her death: "I have called to say that I love you, and now I may die."

Awesome Woman: Mahsatī

The awesome woman of the day is Mahsatī Ganjavi (b. circa 1086), a poet philosopher who lived in 12th century Ganja, a city in modern-day Azerbaijan. She was an eminent Persian poet, said to have associated with famous contemporaneous poets Omar Khayyam and Nizami Ganjavi. She was also, it is believed, a consort of Sultan Sanjar, and lived a free lifestyle that included many love affairs.

She is often described as writing poems about love, sexuality and freedom. English translations of her poetry seem to be locked inside the copyrighted, for-sale domain of academia and I was able to find only two examples (translated by Edward G. Brown) on the Web that go beyond the genre of love poems; they are transcendent and highly evolved philosophy:

The Pathway Finally Opened

When my heart came to rule
in the world of love,
it was freed
from both belief
and from disbelief.

On this journey,
I found the problem
to be myself.

When I went beyond myself,
the pathway finally opened.

English version by
David and Sabrineh Fideler

A world there is for those in love with mines of precious stones

 A world there is for those in love with mines of precious stones,
But bards select a different world as setting for their thrones.
The bird who eats love's magic grain lives on another plane -
His nest beyond both worlds, ignoring riches, scorning fame.

English version by
Edward G. Brown

According to the site where these poems were found and echoed on other sites on the Web, "Her poetry was a strong voice against prejudice and hypocrisy and patriarchy, while upholding love -- both human and divine. She was celebrated at the court of Sultan Sanjar for her rubaiyat (quatrains), but later persecuted for her courageous stand against overly dogmatic religion and arbitrary male dominance."

Awesome Women: Janet Siddall

The awesome woman for today is Janet Siddall. After a long career in various diplomatic positions in the Canadian foreign service, including a final stint as High Commissioner (ambassador) to Tanzania, Siddall retired from her career but not from life, nor from her love for service and her connection to Africa. She now serves as an organizer for a branch of the Grandmothers to Grandmothers ("G2G") campaign, in which grandmothers from the West help grandmothers in Africa.

Due to the ravages of AIDS and other diseases, older women across Africa, after having already worked so hard to raise and support their families for decades, find themselves in the position of raising their children's orphans. About 15 million orphans now live in sub-Saharan Africa. Not only do the African grandmothers face caring for themselves in old age, after a lifetime of hardship and poverty and without a national retirement pension of any kind, but now they also must provide the love, nurturing, schooling and material support for their grandchildren.

Siddall's knowledge of Africa, gained during her days as a diplomat, helps inform her local branch of G2G. But in spite of her elite career she sounds like just a down-home grandma engaging in grassroots actions to raise money for the cause. She organized a potluck dinner that raised $2,500 Canadian, and a "Stride to Turn the Tide" walk that raised $6,000.

Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/2011/0808/Janet-Siddall-helps-African-families-through-Grandmothers-to-Grandmothers.

Awesome Woman: Roz Savage

 

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Roz Savage (b. 1967), a British woman who at age 34 left behind everything familiar to her and set out to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a row boat. This was followed by an 8,000-mile row across the Pacific that took two years, and last week she completed her row across the Indian Ocean, thus completing a trip that has nearly circled the globe. Along the way, Savage has spread awareness of the perilous condition the ocean, the mother of all life on Earth, is suffering because of the actions and inaction of the human race. She now says she is retiring from rowing across the oceans in order to campaign full-time on behalf of them. She has blogged her journeys at http://rozsavage.com.

A few years back, after 11 years as a London management consultant, Savage sat down and wrote two versions of her own obituary -- one that she was headed for in the life she was leading as a married employed woman living in a big suburban house, and the other for the life of adventure she had always wanted. When she looked at the two hypothetical versions of her life, she quit her job, soon was divorced, and set out on her rowing odyssey.

Savage's first ocean crossing was as a contestant in a 3,000-mile race, a 103-day journey from the Canary Islands across the Atlantic Ocean to Antigua, completely solo. (She rows truly solo, without a chase boat.) This was in 2005, the year of Katrina and a record number of other tropical storms that were generated in the Atlantic. Savage describes the nearly 2,500 hours crossing the Atlantic -- without a roof over her head, working only with the natural forces of weather and sea current, able to rely only on her own muscle power as propulsion, drinking the sea water that had been pumped through a desalinizer, and nobody to talk with but the wind -- as an inward journey, a psychological odyssey.  In the process she also had formed a connection with the ocean that was not over yet.

When Savage decided to row across the Pacific, she leveraged the notoriety she had gained to advocate for protection of our oceans that are under assault, a situation that gets much less media exposure than global warming and other environmental crises, perhaps because so many humans do not live near the ocean and are out of touch with the critical role it plays in the health of our whole planet. From 2008 to 2010, Savage became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific, in three legs, after an abortive troubled start that ended in Coast Guard rescuing her against her will. She was a designated 350.org Athlete and wore their t-shirt. Mid-ocean she encountered the crew of the "Junk Raft," a boat made mostly of plastic water bottles that Savage said was built to call attention to "the North Pacific garbage patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre."

Before the final leg of her Pacific journey, Savage gave a TEDtalk, "Why I'm rowing across the Pacific," to bring awareness to her voyage and to report first-hand on the evidence of plastic poisoning she had encountered in the ocean. Just afterward, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, causing the biggest oil spill in history and at least temporarily calling sharp public awareness to the state of affairs with our pollution of the oceans.

When she completed her Pacific journey, Savage wrote this piece for cnn.com:

In the couple of months since this TEDTalk was recorded, I have rowed 2,000 miles from Kiribati to Papua New Guinea in the third and final stage of my Pacific crossing, becoming the first woman to row solo all the way across the Pacific.

During those two months the ocean has suffered new assaults -- notably the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but also smaller insults, as I have witnessed with my own eyes. On a beautiful calm day, with sunlight glinting off the waves, it is heartbreaking to see a plastic bottle floating on the water. Even thousands of miles from land, the ocean wilderness is no longer pristine.

Mankind's impact is felt everywhere. When I have been alone for a long time at sea -- sometimes over a hundred days without seeing another human -- this evidence of our carelessness is especially jarring. There are times when I feel ashamed to be a human being, and feel obliged to apologize to the small community of fish that congregate beneath my boat for the mess we have made of their home.

And it doesn't impact just the fish. Oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth, and are an integral part of our weather systems, climate control, and food supply. How can we have a healthy planet -- or healthy bodies -- if we don't have healthy oceans?

I row across oceans to inspire people to take action on environmental issues. Something the ocean has taught me is that any challenge, no matter how huge, can be tackled if you break it down into little steps. Crossing the Pacific has taken me about 2.5 million oar strokes. One stroke doesn't get me very far, but you take all those tiny actions and you string them all together and you get across 8,000 miles of ocean. You can achieve almost anything, if you just take it one stroke at a time.

And it's the same with saving the oceans. On a day like Oceans Day, when we feel part of a huge global community, it's easy to believe we can change the world. But there will be other days when maybe we feel alone, and that anything we do as individuals won't really make a difference -- that it's just a drop in the ocean.

But every action counts. We all have it in our power to make a difference. In fact, we're already making a difference -- it's just up to us to decide if it's a good one or a bad one. Every time we say no to a plastic bag or refuse to drink bottled water, it matters.

If I can row 8,000 miles to make a point about the state of our oceans, then you can do your part too. Start by going to http://ecoheroes.me/ and log a single green deed that you are going to do today, Oceans Day, to help save our seas. We have a lot of work to do, but the longest journey starts with a single step -- or oarstroke.

Awesome Women: Alixa and Naima - Climbing PoeTree

The Awesome Women of the Day are Alixa and Naima, a performance duo called Climbing PoeTree. Poets, performers, print-makers, dancers, muralists, and designers, the Colombia- and Massachusetts-born, Brooklyn-based team has toured the world, working the intersections of so many artistic disciplines and presentation modalities that they defy categorization.  They describe themselves on the Climbing PoeTree website as "the Heart Beat Soul Sister Artist Warrior duo." Their work confronts difficult issues of social and environmental justice and offers a perspective shift, an incensed yet loving realignment to everything about today's world that could get you down, a thinking/feeling view that will infiltrate the heart and mind of anyone who has even a small chink left open in their emotionally protective armor.

In a review of their 2009 show Hurricane Season, Onome Djere writes:

Climbing Poetree were already touring as a spoken word group, waxing eloquent about the economic greed and racism that fuels the prison industry. Using dance, poetry, tapestry, and storytelling, Alixa and Naima started giving birth to Hurricane Season by connecting the numerous dots of environmental and socio-economic oppression they had observed. One example was the news of mercenaries who were contracted to help patrol New Orleans in the Katrina aftermath - in effect, criminalizing its predominantly black and low-income population. Though Climbing Poetree covered everything from the hurricane to the displacement of Palestinians to the plastic island floating in the Pacific, they managed to avoid information overload and maximize emotional impact with graceful transitions and seamless multimedia layering.

The entire theatrical experience embodied the sacred and tempestuous nature of water: the dimly lit underwater cave-like performance space, the fluid dance movements of the performers, the tidal waves of images, metaphors, poignant quotes and audio collages of survivor stories, ebbing and flowing across a huge screen.

I have only begun to get familiar with their work and am utterly captivated by everything I've seen and heard. Among my favorites so far is this existentialist piece that ponders whether the other elements of nature perhaps experience the same sort of silly angst that we, the human element, put ourselves through over issues of appearance, social role, parenting, mortality. For me, the final line of the poem has already become a touchstone I come back to throughout the day, to regain my center when my mind is spinning out on a trip fueled by worries and fears:



In a historical context, we could call Climbing PoeTree "the wandering minstrels of today," or,  "itinerant philosopher shamans." For me personally, though, I see them as brave, shimmering living goddesses of Heart and Truth. Even in a small box of video on my screen, they take me, wake me, and remake me.

Awesome Woman: Diane Wilson

Today's Awesome Woman is Diane Wilson, a Texas shrimper who has been a long-time, hard-fightin' radical activist against industrial polluters, the war machine, and just about any other Goliath she puts in the sights of her stinging slingshot.

In a July interview on Truthout by Joni Praded, soon after the release of her latest book, "Diary of an Eco-Outlaw: An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth," Wilson explains how her first motivation to action -- which to date has resulted in more than 50 civil-disobedience arrests -- became her nonstop pursuit ever since:

I read an Associated Press story about my county being number one toxic polluter in the nation in l989. That information was too horrendous for me to ignore, so I simply called a meeting, and it snowballed for the next 20 years.

That snowball is made up of some admirably outrageous actions such as sinking her own boat to cover a Formosa Plastics drainpipe in order to block its discharge into her bay. This motivated what she terms "the apathetic fishermen" and the outcome was winning zero-discharge agreements from two industrial giants, Formosa and Alcoa. (In 2002, though, Formosa was still listed in the 90th percentile of the worst environmental polluters by Scorecard, a pollution information site.)

In another incident, Wilson attempted to make a citizen's arrest of Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide which had caused 20,000 deaths in the Bhopal disaster.

Diane Wilson's mission broadened from fighting major polluters and industrial criminality to human rights and peace activisism. In the interview when asked to name her "most surprising" action, she cites her visit to Iraq in 2003 with "an early version of CodePink," where "we were really getting tired of a particular American TV station broadcasting cheerful words for invasion. So, we decided to take over the TV station. And we did. I was amazed that we did the action, and even more amazed that we succeeded." She has also stood outside nude in front of the Houston office of BP after the Deepwater Horizon spill occurred.

Each encounter with unjust and evil systems seems to only strengthen Wilson's resolve and broaden her platform:

... being jailed all those times and for such lengths of time in some of the worst jails in the country, didn't depress me - it gave me ideas on how to fight it and change the way things are done. That's how Texas Jail Project got started. It wouldn't have happened unless I had been jailed. For instance, now, instead of just listening to horrendous stories of women in jail going into labor while shackled and tied to their beds, we try to do something about it. During the last Texas legislative session, Texas Jail Project helped make shackling of all pregnant women inmates, whether in prison or county jail, illegal. So, I believe things happen for a reason.

(Photo by ACMEBoston / Flickr )

Awesome Woman: Laura Moulton

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Laura Moulton, artist, novelist, mother of two young children, and outdoor librarian for the homeless in an effort she founded called Street Books, "a bicycle-powered mobile library for people living outside".

Since June, twice a week Moulton gets on her bike and pedals a wagon full of books to street corners in her city of Portland, Oregon. She loans the books to homeless persons who cannot get a library card for lack of an address. She stores donated paperbacks in her basement and glues the familiar school library due-date pocket inside each one. However, there are no due dates in the outside library -- her customers simply return the book when they are done reading.

A recent Christian Science Monitor article about Moulton reports that "her patrons show a high-level of accountability in returning books, which contradicts some assumptions about homeless people." Also defying stereotypes, she says, is the range of reading material her patrons are interested in. She holds much respect for the "people living outside" and enjoys discussing books and other topics with them:

“If someone can just have a conversation … then I think so much of the other stuff goes away,” Moulton suggests. The “other stuff,” she says, includes perceptions, stereotypes, and judgments.

 Moulton also photographs the people who borrow books and maintains a blog with the images and stories. The blog gives her homeless clientele faces and names, and most often shows them with the books they have selected to read.

Moulton received a grant for her idea from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Now that the grant period has ended, she plans to continue her effort and to experiment with models of sustainability. For example, recently a patron of Street Books became a guest librarian.

I chose Laura Moulton for today's AWOD not because she is famous. Not because she is a head of state. Not because she has given her life completely over to some cause. I chose her because her project proves that in the microcosm of a community, in the course of a regular workaday life, we can find manageable ways to be agents of cheer, humanity and change. The scope of Moulton's project might be local, but her impact runs deep on the men and women she loans books to, and on the attitudes towards the homeless of the people who hear about her work or follow the Street Books blog.

Do you have books you'd like to unload? Also, any old reading glasses? Put them in your car or bag and open your eyes for someone living on the street who might like them. And maybe stop for a few minutes to say Hello, ask How are you doing today? and maybe even get to hear a bit of the person's story. Don't have books to give? Just give a smile and have a conversation then! It's free and takes 5 minutes!

Here's a really touching video about Street Books, guaranteed to dispel any stereotypes you may be subject to regarding the intelligence and spirit of homeless persons:

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

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

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.

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

Awesome Woman: Faith Bandler

Today's Awesome Woman is FAITH BANDLER, an Australian activist who has lived an iconoclastic life and has been a lifelong civil- and women's-rights leader.

In a review of Marilyn Lake’s biography of Faith Bandler, Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, Lyndall Ryan writes:

...the subject is full of contradictions. She is not Aboriginal, but as a woman of colour she has devoted most of her adult life to removing legal discrimination against Aboriginal people. She is not a white woman, but she has led a middle-class life as the wife of an engineer on Sydney’s North Shore. She is not a member of a political party but she has been a political activist for over fifty years. She is Australian born and bred, but has always felt an outsider in mainstream Australia. She is not a historian but she has published four books about her family’s origins and about the struggle to win a ‘Yes’ vote in 1967. 

Bandler was born on September 27, 1918 on a banana farm in New South Wales, to a father who had been "blackbirded" (kidnapped and forced into slave labor) in 1883 from his native island in what was known as the New Hebrides, and an Australian-born mother of Indian and Scottish descent. During the Depression she left high school and went to work as a milliner. But when World War II brought the opportunity for women to serve in the Women's Land Army, she gained a consciousness of the inequities dealt to the Aboriginal people, particularly Aboriginal women who earned a fraction of what other women were paid.

Ryan continues to list Bandler's very unusual (for a woman of color in Australia) relationships, travels and pursuits:

After the War, she lived a cosmopolitan life in Kings Cross, where she had a long affair with a Finnish sailor, took music lessons to improve her fine singing voice and learn the importance of a public presence on the stage, and studied at WEA classes to overcome her lack of education. Her political involvement with the Left enabled her to travel to Europe in 1951 to attend a major cultural youth festival. In this formative period of adulthood, she gained a very sophisticated understanding of herself sexually and politically. In 1952 she married Hans Bandler, a Jewish refugee engineer from Vienna. It proved an enduring partnership, based on shared political beliefs and a great love of classical music and gardening.

In 1956, when their daughter was two years old, Faith used her middle-class security to become a fulltime political activist, determined to eradicate discriminatory laws and practices against Aboriginal peoples.

 From 1956 to the early 1970s, Bandler was a major influence, spokesperson and figurehead in the fight to gain full citizenship rights for the Aboriginal people. As general secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders , Bandler led the campaign for a constitutional referendum to remove discriminatory provisions from the Constitution of Australia. In 1967, after the federal government had agreed to hold a referendum on the Aboriginal question, Bandler was appointed New South Wales campaign director, a position she fulfilled with energy, skill and enthusiasm. By the time the Referendum was won in May 1967, Faith Bandler had become a major public figure.

As the Black Power movement developed into the early 70s, being black but not Aboriginal was now a disadvantage, and Bandler "retired" from the Aboriginal struggle to begin researching, writing about and campaigning for the rights of South Sea Islander Australians. This was an even more challenging political feat, since she not only was fighting to overturn the false historians who claimed that "blackbirded" Islanders were in fact voluntary indentured servants, but she was also ostracized by the Aboriginal Rights community who had become influenced by a separatist Black Power ideology. Finally, in the year 2000, the Queensland government offered a measure of official recognition to the South Sea Islanders when it conducted a ‘recognition ceremony’ at Parliament House in Brisbane -- largely due to Bandler's research, writing and publicizing of the cause.

Bandler has also written and co-authored many books, including two histories of the 1967 referendum, an account of her brother's life in New South Wales, and a novel about her father's experience of blackbirding in Queensland.


In 1975, she traveled to Ambryn Island, the land of her father's birth from which he had been kidnapped 92 years prior. In 2009, she was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia (a sort of Australian "knighthood").

In interviews about her personal evolution as a political activist, Faith Bandler expresses a deep gratitude and strong consciousness of the influence of other women who served as her mentors and motivators.

Sources:

National Museum of Australia http://www.indigenousrights.net.au/person.asp?pID=954

Australian Humanities Review (Lyndall Ryan's review of Marilyn Lake's book) http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2003/ryan.html

Australian Biography (Australian government site) http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/bandler/

Further links available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_Bandler

[My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.]