THE EQUALITY STANDARD The newsletter on women's issues, local and global, published independently by Pauline Field FEBRUARY 12, 2006 Subscribe to the Newsletter

***SPECIAL EDITION***

Coretta Scott King	Betty Friedan	Wendy Wasserstein	Willie Grace Campbell

This mid-month edition of the Equality Standard, rather than being just an Events edition, is about the loss of four valuable women

Coretta Scott King and Willie Grace Campbell's lives were about civil rights. For Ms. King it was for all Americans' civil rights. For Willie Grace Campbell it was about women's rights here and around the world. For Wendy Wasserstein it was about documenting our times, particularly her concern for the politicization of higher education, and for Betty Friedan it was about women's rights to a life that is satisfying and fulfilling.

Although you will find information below on all of these amazing women and the contributions they have made to our world, I want to focus on the work of Betty Friedan because it goes right to the heart of why I spend so much of my time working on bringing equality, in every sense of the word, to our world.

Susan Jacoby pointed out in the Los Angeles Times some of the gains we, as women in the U.S. made because of the movement that Ms. Friedan lit the fire of back in the '60s when she wrote her most famous book, The Feminine Mystique: equal pay for equal work (although there is more work to be done on that front!), sex-blind help-wanted ads, the right of pregnant women to keep their jobs, nondiscriminatory admission standards for professional schools. to name a few.

There is still so much to be done - not only to continue to make gains in the area of equal pay and equal leadership, but also to ensure that the gains we have made are not taken away from us while we are not looking, while we are silent and complacent.

If you are unclear of the history of the women's movement since the '60's, you will be able to fill in some gaps with all that Ms. Friedan started and of which she was a part.

If there is something about the way your district, your city, your county, your state, your country or any other country that makes you uncomfortable - or even mad, then perhaps it is time to carve out some time from your busy schedule to do something about it. As Willie Grace Campbell said: "No one else is going to help us. It's that simple."

CORETTA SCOTT KING
With the death of Coretta Scott King, we have lost a strong and dignified voice for a better America. Despite great personal loss, she remained committed to the belief that our common values of liberty and equality leave no room for discrimination of any kind. We can all honor her legacy by continuing to fight for freedom, equal justice and tolerance.

Throughout her life, Mrs. King worked tirelessly for the struggle of non-violent activism, social justice and peace, carrying the message to almost every corner of our nation and around the world.

Before her marriage to Dr. Martin Luther King, Mrs. King was a champion of civil rights and the non-violent movement in her own right. During Dr. King's life and after his death, Mrs. King was integral to the struggle for equality and justice. A woman of wisdom and vision, she helped to preserve her husband's legacy and played a key role in making Dr. Martin Luther King Day a national holiday and the King Center a reality. As the work of the King Center continues, local, national and international programs have trained tens of thousands of people in Dr. King's philosophy and methodology of social change.

Coretta Scott was studying voice at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music and planning on a singing career when she met her future husband. They married in 1953 and had four children: Yolanda Denise, Martin III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice Albertine.

In 1969, she founded the multimillion-dollar Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. King saw to it that the center became deeply involved with the issues that she said breed violence -- hunger, unemployment, voting rights and racism.

She became increasingly critical of businesses such as film and television companies, video arcades, gun manufacturers and toy makers she accused of promoting violence. She called for regulation of their advertising.

"In this country, we vigorously regulate the sale of medicine and severely limit the advertising of cigarettes because of their effect on human health," she said Jan. 15, 1994, the 65th anniversary of her husband's birth. "But we allow virtually anyone in America to buy a gun and virtually everyone in the nation to see graphic violence."

'I want to challenge you to make a courageous commitment, not only to achieve personal success, but to use your success to help create this beautiful symphony of brotherhood and sisterhood, and if you embrace this challenge with prayer and faith and determination, you will surely succeed, and the 21st Century will become a glorious new age of peace and progress for all humankind.' -- Coretta Scott King

BETTY FRIEDAN
Friedan was cursed, told to seek psychiatric help and accused of posing "more of a threat to the United States than the Russians."

Excerpted from an article by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2006
Betty Friedan, the visionary feminist who launched a social revolution with her provocative 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique," died Saturday, her 85th birthday.

Her bestselling book identified "the problem that has no name," the unhappiness of post-World War II American women unfulfilled by traditional notions of female domesticity. The book became the cornerstone of one of the 20th century's most profound movements, unleashing the first full flowering of American feminism since the mid-1800s.

She founded the National Organization for Women in 1966, making it the first new major feminist organization in half a century. She also was among the founders of the National Women's Political Caucus and the group that became the National Abortion Rights Action League.

"I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history," said Friedan, who always kept a sense of wonder about her place in history as the mother of the contemporary women's movement.

"It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women.. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman."

Friedan's affinity with mainstream values was the foundation of her authority. Her emphatic belief that women should have equal rights - but not at the expense of alienating men - distinguished her from many feminist leaders who emerged later.

"She found that love between unequals can never succeed," writer Gloria Steinem once said, "and she has undertaken the immense job of bringing up the status of women so love can succeed."

Her more moderate brand of feminism, combined with her often irascible nature, led to ruptures with other movement leaders, such as Steinem and Bella Abzug, the late New York congresswoman. Some feminists eventually denounced Friedan as a reactionary.

By the 1980s, feminism had ceased being her primary focus, and she spent her last decades focused on issues of aging, families, work and public policy. She wrote six books and held teaching posts at many institutions, including UCLA and USC.

Friedan did not conform to conventional notions of feminine beauty or decorum. She was short - 5 feet 2 - and stocky, with a hawklike nose, large, deep-set eyes and a gravelly voice that no one could call timid. She was fast-talking, impatient and abrasive.

Friedan was born Bettye Goldstein on Feb. 4, 1921, the year after American women won the right to vote. She was the oldest of three children of jewelry store owner Harry Goldstein, a Russian Jew, and the former Miriam Horwitz.

In high school she was valedictorian, but her braininess, she said, made her feel "like a freak."

Her mother was an unhappy housewife whose disposition and health dramatically improved when her husband's health faltered and she took over management of the jewelry business. In her 1976 book "It Changed My Life," Friedan said her mother's discontent gave her an early glimpse of the perils of the malaise she would later call the "feminine mystique."

A contemporary of Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, who attended Smith about the same time, she became editor of the campus newspaper and quickly established a reputation for brilliance. Friedan finished summa cum laude in psychology in 1942 and entered graduate studies at UC Berkeley.

At Berkeley, she won a prestigious science fellowship that had never been given to any psychologist, much less a woman. But she turned down the award when it became apparent that a physicist she was dating felt threatened by her success. Although she said she had little, if any, awareness of it at the time, she was fearful of being "brighter than the boys" and violating the mystique she would later so studiously dissect. Against the advice of her professors, who included the eminent theorist Erik Erikson, she gave up psychology all together.

Having discovered Marxism in college, Friedan decided that she would work for the "revolution." By 1943, she was immersed in popular-front journalism, first at the Federated Press in New York and later at UE News, the official newspaper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, then one of the nation's most radical unions.

She married theatrical producer Carl Friedman, who later dropped the m in his last name to create the more distinctive "Friedan." They had three children. When she became pregnant with her second child and requested maternity leave, she was fired from her job at the union paper, an event she later would call a "formative experience" in her evolution as a feminist.

Urged not to waste her education and training, Friedan began to write for women's magazines. What commenced for the unwitting Friedan was an education in the feminine mystique.

She had wanted to write a profile of a woman who had given up a successful career as an advertising executive, married and become a serious sculptor, but editors were doubtful that their housewife-readers would be interested in such a woman. They accepted the article but only after deleting references to the woman's career. Within a few years, Friedan said, "I began to lose my zest" for writing the rigidly formulaic articles that women's magazines seemed to want.

In 1957, she was asked to conduct a survey of her Smith classmates for their 15th reunion and found that the women who did not conform exactly to traditional notions of womanhood were happier than those who did. A light bulb went on for Friedan: "Maybe it wasn't education that was the problem, keeping American women from 'adjusting to their role as women,' " she wrote, "but that narrow definition of 'the role of women.' "

She wrote a magazine article based on that argument, but it was repeatedly rejected. Realizing that her thesis "threatened the firmament" of women's magazines, she decided to bypass that venue and put her ideas into a book instead.

She interviewed scores of suburban women, repeating many of the questions she had asked her Smith sisters. Another part of her research entailed long days in the New York Public Library, looking for shifts in the types of heroines depicted in women's magazine fiction. The results of her study were stark: Friedan found that the avid career woman who dominated the magazines in the 1930s had given way by the 1950s to a less adventuresome model: the contented homemaker.

Was the 1950s image reality, or was it a self-fulfilling fantasy cooked up by magazine editors and advertisers? Suspecting the latter, Friedan plowed on with her interviews. She was staggered by the dissatisfactions aired by wives and mothers, by their vague laments about feeling empty, anxious and incomplete. A mother of four who had shirked college for marriage and family told Friedan: "There's no problem you can even put a name to. But I'm desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I'm a server of food and putter-on of pants and a bed maker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?"

"I came to realize," Friedan would later write, "that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.. For the startling pattern that began to emerge as one clue led me to another in far-flung fields of modern thought and life, defied not only the conventional image but basic psychological assumptions about women."

She found that books on the psychology of women, such as those by Freudian analyst Helene Deutsch, generally adhered to traditional ideas of women's fulfillment in hearth and home. Seeking a theoretical basis for her views of women's plight, Friedan turned to the work on identity and self-realization by psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and her old Berkeley advisor, Erikson. Their ideas informed what became her central tenet: "that the core of the problem for women today is . a problem of identity - a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique."

Lacking faith in the book, Friedan's publisher, W.W. Norton, printed only a few thousand hardcover copies in 1963. Friedan did not experience the full force of fame until Dell issued the paperback in 1964. That year, "The Feminine Mystique" became the top-selling nonfiction book in the country.

Much of the initial reaction was hostile. Friedan was cursed, told to seek psychiatric help and accused of posing "more of a threat to the United States than the Russians." She was shunned by neighborhood women who had once been friendly, her children were kicked out of car pools, and her marriage began to crack under the weight of her growing celebrity.

The book's focus on the struggles of educated, middle-class white women was faulted by critics as a major shortcoming. To many black women, more concerned with survival than self-fulfillment, Friedan's emphasis on finding meaningful careers "seemed to come from another planet," according to historian Paula Giddings.

Friedan's radical past explains "how she came as a housewife to politicize so deftly the 'problems that have no name,' " said historian Ruth Rosen. "People in the old left got experience in naming things. That's not unimportant. It explains the power of 'The Feminine Mystique.' "

The book received many positive reviews and was excerpted by some of the leading women's magazines Friedan had attacked as messengers of the mystique.

Thousands of women wrote to her and stopped her in the street to pour out the details of their lives, beg for advice or just tell her, "You changed my life."

"I had no idea," Friedan said, "that my book would start a revolution." Or, as futurist Alvin Toffler put it, Friedan "pulled the trigger on history," launching a tumultuous decade for American women with Friedan at the epicenter.

In June 1966, Friedan joined members of state commissions on the status of women for a national conference in Washington. Frustrated by their powerlessness, some of the members decided that a new, nongovernmental organization was needed to make women's rights a top national concern.

Huddled with Friedan at the closing banquet, the women whispered their ideas for a feminist NAACP. Friedan scribbled these words on a napkin: "National Organization for Women."

In one of its first campaigns, N.O.W. pressured the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to prohibit sex-segregated help wanted ads. Soon after, it forced airlines to change a long-standing policy requiring stewardesses to resign once they married or turned 32. Later it successfully lobbied President Johnson to sign an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination by federal contractors.

Today, the group is anchored in Washington and has 500,000 members and branches in all 50 states. But in its early years, NOW's headquarters was Friedan's New York City apartment, and Friedan was indisputably in charge.

On Valentine's Day in 1968, she led a platoon of angry women into the exclusively male Oak Room at New York's Plaza Hotel to draw attention to sex discrimination in public places. After a series of similar dramatic demonstrations, individual states began to outlaw such exclusionary practices.

In 1970, the largest feminist demonstration since the suffrage movement took over 5th Avenue as Friedan called for a national Women's Strike for Equality. Held on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the women's suffrage amendment, it drew 500,000 women and heightened awareness of the women's movement across the nation.

Feminism was blooming: in universities, where women's studies courses began cropping up; in politics, where the House of Representatives passed the Equal Rights Amendment and Shirley Chisholm ran for president; and in popular culture, where books such as Robin Morgan's anthology "Sisterhood Is Powerful" and Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" and a new magazine named Ms. were fomenting debate and adding phrases to the American lexicon.

In 1970, Friedan stepped down as NOW president amid growing dissatisfaction with her vision of the movement. But not even her critics could deny the power of the changes she had unleashed.

By the end of the 1970s, Friedan was relegated to the sidelines of the movement she had inspired. She was dismayed not only by its direction but what she saw as its mounting toll and the growing political backlash. In her view, the movement had burdened rather than liberated women, burning out those who were trying to juggle motherhood and career or penetrate the corporate glass ceiling. Moreover, she observed, women in lower-level jobs were still earning only 59 cents to every dollar earned by men - this after almost two decades of renewed feminist activism.

Friedan's response was "The Second Stage," published in 1981. The movement's senior theorist had always insisted that men were not the enemy. In her new book, she startled many by insisting that the enemy was the victim herself.

"I believe we have to break through our own feminist mystique," Friedan wrote, arguing that "the equality we fought for isn't livable, isn't workable, isn't comfortable in the terms that structured our battle." Feminists, she charged, had fallen into a new trap "which denied that core of women's personhood that is fulfilled through love, nurture, home..

"We have to free ourselves from male power traps, understand the limits of women's power as a separate interest group . and put a new value on qualities once considered - and denigrated as - special to women."

The reaction to Friedan's book was swift and unforgiving. Calling the feminist foremother "hopelessly confused about whose side she's on," theorist Ellen Willis wrote that Friedan "would destroy feminism in order to save it, and beat the Moral Majority by joining it." Journalist Susan Faludi, writing in her 1991 book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women," said Friedan was "yanking out the stitches in her own handiwork."

Amid this controversy, Friedan began to turn her focus to other issues. She received a call from the head of the National Institute on Aging, asking her to become an advocate for older Americans. She at first fought the idea, "locked in denial" about the fact that she was approaching 60 and hating it. What changed her mind was remembering conversations she'd had with older women while researching "The Feminine Mystique." The healthiest and most vital women she interviewed had been older women - in their 50s and 60s - who had careers.

She plunged into several years of research, producing in 1993 "The Fountain of Age," a book in which she again challenged the prevailing stereotypes, arguing that an active, engaged life was the secret to a rewarding old age.

Friedan never remarried nor shied from including men in her view of the perfect social equation.

"I thought once," she said, "about what should be put on my gravestone: 'She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.' "

SUSAN JACOBY on BETTY FRIEDAN
Excerpted from an article By Susan Jacoby in the Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2006

History is a terrible thing to waste. The recent obituaries for Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book, "The Feminine Mystique," revived an American feminism then thought to be extinct and unnecessary, were striking in their recognition of how much explanation is now required about the world before the women's movement.

Newspapers had to remind their readers that equal pay for equal work, sex-blind help-wanted ads, the right of pregnant women to keep their jobs, nondiscriminatory admission standards for professional schools and many other matters of simple justice were considered not only controversial but radical proposals in the 1960s.

Younger readers were doubtless as incredulous at this news as when I recently told them about the essay I was required to write by the Washington Post's personnel department as part of my application for a reporting job in 1965. The topic, singularly inappropriate for a childless 19-year-old, was, "How I Plan to Combine Motherhood with a Career."

On one level, the ignorance of the young and the not-so-young - many people in their 40s also know little about what life was like when most forms of discrimination against women were perfectly legal - is a measure of how much has been accomplished. But on a deeper level, this ignorance endangers many feminist gains because it raises the real possibility that future generations will have to reinvent the wheel.

It has happened before. The first wave of American feminism, which began in 1848 with the Seneca Falls convention under the leadership of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was concerned with much more than obtaining the vote for women. Economic equality, educational equality and - most controversial of all - equality in religious institutions that had long preached the divinely ordained inferiority of women were part of the first feminist platform. As the century wore on, though, the more radical voices were stilled and the movement concentrated solely on suffrage.

Stanton, whose "The Woman's Bible" created as much of a sensation and a scandal in 1892 as Friedan's book did 71 years later, was written out (literally) of the women's movement because of her unorthodox views on religion. Her name did not return to history until the 1980s, with the research of a new generation of feminist scholars.

Friedan was the first 20th century feminist to restore the historical and cultural context lost for most of the century and to make the essential point that, if an entire group has a problem, the solution can never be purely personal.

I have always been grateful that I read "The Feminine Mystique" shortly before I went to Washington to interview with the Post. Before reading Friedan, I truly believed that barriers to women in journalism would not apply to me because all of those other women must have done something wrong to be stuck in what used to be called the "society section." Without the perspective provided by Friedan, I might have been surprised by the personnel director's insulting demand, lost my temper and lost the chance at a job. As it was, I bit my tongue, wrote the essay and told myself that I would become one of the women who would challenge the prejudices that denigrated all women.

At Freidan's funeral in New York on Monday, her longtime friend, sociologist Amitai Etzioni, noted that his department at Columbia University did not have a single female professor in 1962. The few Barnard female students admitted to Columbia classes, Etzioni acknowledged honestly, knew that they were there on sufferance and "knew that they should not be heard too often."

This entire history is in urgent need of retelling today, at a time when other legacies of the movement - most notably legal abortion - are under assault. Historical amnesia, not the fundamentalist Christian right, is the true villain. Millions of young women and men today simply cannot imagine what life was like before Roe vs. Wade any more than they can imagine what it was like to be told "No Women Need Apply" at the door to graduate-school classrooms.

The obligation to retell the truth belongs to my generation, young enough to have reaped the benefits of the revolution begun by women now in their 70s and 80s. It is our moral duty to ensure that the history of our women's movement, unlike the history of 19th century feminism, does not perish from the consciousness of the next generation.

CAROLYN HOWARD-JOHNSON - A TRIBUTE TO BETTY FRIEDAN
The pen is mightier than the burning bra.
 The world knows that Betty Friedan (1921-2006) is dead--dead but not gone. As a writer who saw the world around her clearly -- differently -- she changed the emotional and political landscapes of America. Whether one ascribes to every detail of her philosophy or not, it turns out that by being true to herself and by using the power of the word to change what she thought needed to be changed, women -- and men -- lead fuller lives today. The one approach that worked best, however, is when she took up the pen when many were taking off their brassieres.

Of course, from time immemorial, the grand gesture has played a part in change. Think of the scene so beautifully depicted in Les Miserables of the turning point in the French Revolution. Though few have the patience and perseverance of Gandhi, it may be that writing is more effective and lasting (witness our Constitution based on many of the French Revolution's ideals).

In her book The Feminine Mystique Friedan did what all good writers do. She observed her surroundings, saw her own truth and wrote about it. By doing so she found that her individual observations were part of a greater whole, that universal truth that we have heard for eons from the mouths of good storytellers. She says, "I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman."

Whether or not you agree may depend on whether you lived through the 40s and 50s. I feel this way for I know I would not have resumed my education at what was then considered a ripe age of 31--and finished. With Friedan paving the way, many women went back to school, began to practice their arts, returned to professions they had given up, got jobs that had called to them for some time.

That Friedan is a generation older than I, that her writer/researchers eye was able to see what others did not (or could not, because prejudices can stalk us on padded, silent feet until someone trips them up) makes her even more amazing. My mother, still alive and a scant two years older than Friedan, still believes that it is the duty of the woman at any amount of sacrifice to do for her family members that which they can and would benefit from doing for themselves.

By the feminist standards of the 60s and 70s, Friedan was a moderate. By the standards of the 50s, she was a radical. That she achieved what she did by writing will assure her a firmer place in history -- regardless of how you see her today. For the pen -- if not longer lasting -- is mightier than the burning bra or the burning flag. ----

The above is a reprint with permission from Carolyn's "Back to Literature" column at www.MyShelf.com. 

WENDY WASSERSTEIN
Wendy Wasserstein won both a Pulitzer and a Tony for her play, The Heidi Chronicles. She wrote four books, a screenplay and 9 plays. She died at the age of 55.

Wendy Wasserstein was a gifted artist and a fine person. The two do not always go together and it's almost a relief when you find someone in whom they do. She was warm, brilliant and witty, and her work captured a part, a piece, of our era.

The tragedy was sharpened by a sense of great work unfinished, of a life not ended but interrupted. Her plays were beloved of liberals who lauded her as spokeswoman of a modern feminist point of view.

She was concerned at the increasing politicization of higher education. She had clearly spent a lot of time observing, finding out the facts, and coming to conclusions

Wasserstein's work had no cruelty and little fear. Her last play, "Third," dealt with a left-wing professor who comes to question her own assumptions, and to wonder, even, if deep in her heart she does not harbor bigotries. This was the work of someone who wasn't stuck, wasn't cowed, who was in fact questioning, questing. It is sad to not see what that mind would have done in the future. Rest in peace.

WILLIE GRACE CAMPBELL
Excerpted from an article By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2006

When Willie Grace Campbell was working on her master's degree in sociology at the University of Michigan in the late 1930s, she dreamed of "becoming another Margaret Mead."

But the times and circumstances prevented her from pursuing that dream. She got married a year before receiving her master's degree in 1939. World War II began two years later, and before it ended Campbell had given birth to two of her three children. And in those days, she recalled, "you didn't try to carry both a career and raise children."

Instead, in 1945, she joined the League of Women Voters, which she described as the best place for an intellectual challenge.

Campbell, who became an influential social activist over the last half-century, launching voter education projects in American inner cities in the 1960s and promoting women's rights in Third World countries, died Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 90.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a statement: "Willie Campbell was an inspiration to me and many others in her unflagging engagement, in her respect for all points of view, in her commitment to civil rights and justice, in her grace and wit, and in her great gift for enduring friendships."

As head of the League of Women Voters Education Fund during the civil rights era in the 1960s, Campbell urged board members "to get into the fray" and help inner cities. Despite initial resistance from community leaders, she launched voter education projects in six cities.

Campbell, who had been a member of the Indiana Advisory Committee of the U.S. Conference on Civil Rights in 1958-59, participated in the first White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1965. She urged the League of Women Voters to use litigation, in addition to legislation, to challenge restrictions on voting rights, and she went on to head the league's litigation department.

In the mid-1970s, Campbell became involved with the National Women's Political Caucus and its offshoot, the National Women's Education Fund, which trained women to become campaign managers and candidates for elected office.

Campbell also served as president and board chairwoman of OEF International (formerly the Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters), an international organization working to empower and advance women in Third World countries.

Campbell went on to serve on the board of Women, Law and Development International, an international organization committed to the defense and promotion of women's rights.

In the early 1990s, President Clinton appointed her vice chairwoman of the board of directors of the African Development Foundation. The U.S. government agency provides small grants to African communities and African-owned businesses to stimulate economic growth. She remained vice chairwoman until her death.

"She had opinions and ideas, and she had experience under her belt, so she wasn't just trying to bowl you over with a point but was able to relate it to actual occurrences," said Green, a member of the Little Rock Nine, the group of black students who integrated Little Rock, Ark.'s, Central High in 1957.

"In almost every arena that she touched, she left a group of people who were inspired by her ideas and her energy."

While studying sociology at the University of Cincinnati, Campbell told Los Angeles magazine, "the whole big world opened up. It was my religious experience." That included, she said, discovering that "race has no scientific basis. It's irrelevant."

Campbell graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1937.

"I'll always be action oriented," Campbell told Los Angeles magazine. "One thing I've also come to see is that it's almost fortuitous that I ended up doing volunteer work instead of getting a job. I'm not bound by particular obligations. I can follow my own motivations - which don't rely on God or anyone but are based on my belief that we really have to resolve our problems ourselves.

"No one else is going to help us. It's that simple."

EVENTS
Tuesday, February 14
Brand Library Book and Music Sale
Thanks to Joyce Morrissey, Insurance Consultant and Women's Rights Activist for letting us know about this event and the one following:

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