Want to Affirm *All* Our Lives?

All Our Lives is a group and a movement that Nonviolent Choice heartily endorses. Not hard to understand why:

"Nobody is defending women's right to make all non-violent choices about their sexual and reproductive lives without advocating for abortion as well. All Our Lives will change that. Our mission is to model a woman-centric, non-violent and inclusive approach to issues of health, sexuality, and reproduction."

Please take part. A good place to start: the All Our Lives Facebook Group .

Moving Beyond Words

My vision for a broad prochoice/prolife movement to reduce abortion:

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/commonground/2010/02/03/moving-beyond-words

Action Alert: Pregnant Women & Unborn Babies in Haiti

Pregnant women and their babies are highly vulnerable to death and injury in disaster situations. Please give to Americans for UNFPA in its work to aid the pregnant women and babies of Haiti.

Foster Human-Friendly Prenatal & Childbirth Care Options

The Big Push for Midwives seeks to increase mother- and baby-friendly prenatal care and childbirth choices in the United States, where these choices remain scarce, especially for poor people & people of color.

The Big Push encourages good citizens to:
--Ask your Congresspeople to co-sponsor H.R. 2358/S. 1423, the Medicaid Birth Center Reimbursement Act.
--Ask then to include Certified Professional Midwives in Medicaid and any health care reform proposals.

You can contact your US Representatives and senators here.

Take a Stand for Pregnant Women & Their Children

Pesticides *still* endanger pregnant farmworkers and their unborn babies. Please read the personal testimonies and take action here, with the United Farmworkers union:

http://www.ufwaction.org/campaign/drift709/7isxgn4r73e3xej

Maternity Care in the Czech Republic

The organization Normalni Porod, Normal Birth, is sponosoring a petition to improve the largely substandard maternity care in the Czech Republic, including the dishonoring of the midwife profession.

Anyone from any country can sign. All you need to be is concerned that Czech women and babies have the most life-affirming pregnancy birthing alternatives they can have, like women and babies everywhere.

The petition appears in both English and Czech versions. Please click here.

Ending the Catholic Ban on Contraception

Catholic groups ask pope to end contraception ban

The Nonviolent Choice Directory is a nonsectarian service for people of all faiths and none. And so we defend the personal liberties of people who wish not to be sexually active or use contraceptives like we defend the liberties of those who do choose to engage in these practices. We also recognize that on many other fronts, the Catholic Church has been a real and welcome advocate for the oppressed.

That much said, we welcome the above news. The anticontraception stance of one of humanity's largest faiths has had profoundly negative consequences upon the human rights of life and bodily integrity. For one, how many abortions has it lead to?

Educate Others--or Maybe Yourself!-- About LGBT Justice

Soulforce is an interfaith, US-based group whose mission is "to cut off homophobia at its source -- religious bigotry. Soulforce uses a dynamic 'take it to the streets' style of activism to connect the dots between anti-gay religious dogma and the resulting attacks on the lives and civil liberties of LGBT Americans. We apply the creative direct action principles taught by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to peacefully resist injustice and demand full equality for LGBT citizens and same-gender families."

Soulforce publishes two great booklets to help anyone who wishes to educate others about the rights of LGBT people. They can be ordered in print, or read and downloaded from the following links:

What the Bible Says, and Doesn't Say, about Homosexuality by Reverend Mel White, Soulforce cofounder (in English and Spanish)

What the Science Says - And Doesn't Say - About Homosexuality by Jeff Lutes, Soulforce executive director

We are proud to say that the Nonviolent Choice Directory is listed in the acknowledgments of the science booklet!

So much prejudice against LGBT people results from a lack of knowledge. These booklets directly address the stereotypes in a spirit of love.

Tokophobia: It's Dreadful, But Treatable

Tokophobia (sometimes spelled tocophobia) is a phobia of pregnancy and childbirth that may affect as many as six to ten percent of women. It is a dread far, far more intense and disabling than the anxiety that non-tokophobic women routinely feel about pregnancy and labor. And because pregnancy and childbirth are everywhere, women with tokophobia find it very difficult to avoid the triggers of their fear and panic.

Tokophobia afflicts women across lines of race, class, culture, religion, sexual orientation, and marital status. It saps the psyches of women who have never been pregnant or given birth and those who have. It happens to women who wish to be or are biological mothers and those who wish to be childfree. It befalls the prochoice and the prolife alike.

Yet many women do not feel free to be open about this phobia because it is so often met with trivializing or shaming responses. The cultural demand for women to become mothers, whether they wish to or not, only compounds the suffering of those with tokophobia, often generating feelings of severe guilt, inadequacy, helplessness, or rage. This demand is one important reason why tokophobia is so often driven into crippling secrecy.

Despite the pressures to keep tokophobia invisible and inaudible, it often has longlasting, profound, and negative consequences for women’s lives and wellbeing. These include but are not limited to:

• Aversion to sex, especially sexual practices that have any risk of conception.
• Loss of sexual pleasure.
• Conflicts within and breakups of relationships, even relationships with loved and cherished partners.
• Risktaking with contraception...
• ..Or its opposite—hyperanxious use of contraceptives with fixation on their failure rates, no matter how small, beyond the usual caretaking involved in successful family planning.
• Avoidance of pregnancy even though one would prefer to have biological children.
• Difficulty healing from past pregnancy traumas.
• Abortions, self-induced or performed by health care workers.
• Pregnancies which are carried to term and birthed at overwhelming, excruciating psychological cost to the mothers.
• Preventable Caesarian sections.

Any phobia can cause a profound sense of helplessness. No matter how much one would rather be rid of it, it can feel inevitable and impossible to change. Yet the good news is that phobias, tokophobia included, are very highly treatable kinds of mental distress.

There are well-established, quite effective treatments for phobia, including certain kinds of talk therapy, in combination with anti-anxiety medications or without them (an important consideration, for instance, for women who are currently pregnant and may hesitate to take drugs).

Any responsible mental health worker will work with you to create a treatment plan that fits you and your unique needs and circumstances. It is very important to your healing that you are comfortable with your therapist and can trust him or her. If you are concerned about the costs of treatment, there are many ways to bring them down (see below).

Any kind of phobia, including tokophobia, can deter the sufferer from even thinking about treatment, let alone looking for it or going through with it. But the ultimate rewards of freedom from overwhelming fear may make it worth the effort and help you achieve the life you want, whether or not it includes motherhood.

To learn more about tokophobia:

• Extreme Fear of Birth Pain Forces Women to Miscarry (from The Guardian)



• Help for Women Suffering Years of Childbirth Trauma (from the Telegraph)
  
  
• Hard Labour (from the Telegraph)
  
  
  
• Pregnancy: “My Torment and Fear” (from the Belfast Telegraph)



• Mother's Natural Birth Phobia (from BBC News)



• PubMed.gov (put the terms “tokophobia” or “fear of childbirth” into the search box to find medical literature on the subject)

To help you find relief from tokophobia:

• Anxiety Disorders Association of America. Learn more about phobias and treatment options.




• How Do You Choose a Good Psychotherapist? (from Davis Mintun Professional Services)



• Mental Health Services Locator From the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; see the FAQs for such topics as insurance and other ways to pay for your treatment; homelessness; and protection and advocacy for people with severe psychiatric problems. Not in the US? Maybe your country's chapter of the World Psychiatric Association or the Nonviolent Choice Directory's page on Access to Maternal Child Health Care (by Country, Territory, Etc.) (includes national Minstries of Health) can help you find the help you need.



• How Can I Get Help Paying for My Prescriptions? From Mental Health America.



• Birth Trauma Association
  

Ensure Access to Voluntary Sterilization (US)

Sterilization abuse--involuntary sterilization--of the poor, people of color, and people with disabilities is a dirty open secret of US and global history that still hasn't gone away.

It is also a form of reproductive coercion to deny sterilization procedures to people who want them. I wonder how many undesired pregnancies and abortions arise from this. In the US, there are (at least) two, sometimes overlapping groups of women who face considerable barriers to voluntary sterilization:

• Women under 30, no matter how durable, carefully considered, and thoughtful their decisions to become sterilized. Physicians may refuse them the services they need, claiming that they are too young to make such permanent decisions--especially if they are white, healthy, and/or not poor. The same physicians may still be all too eager to sterilize younger women from the traditionally coerced groups instead of exploring with them the full range of contraceptive options...eugenics is still with us...

• Women who cannot afford sterilization, which out of pocket can cost thousands of dollars--and who has that sort of cash lying around? A majority of private health plans cover sterilization procedures, but what about women covered by the minority of plans that don't? What about uninsured women? What about poor women who rely on Title X and other public programs, who are constantly threatened by funding cuts and anti-contraceptive politics?
  
  If you are from the US, please contact your elected officials and urge that they remove these barriers to voluntary, fully informed sterilization. You can point out both that (1) voluntary sterilization is a human right and (2) it is an effective way to reduce abortions.

Abortion No, Contraception Yes: Speak Up May 31

Are you one of the majority of prolifers (80 plus percent in the US) who advocate voluntary contraception and freedom of conscience in pregnancy prevention?

Turn the Clock Forward is instigating a prolife, pro-contraception blogswarm.

Please participate!

A CPC Director In Her Own Words

Prolife CPCs (Crisis Pregnancy Centers) often face sharp, unmitigated criticism from prochoicers that they have no public chance to answer or explain who they are and what they do on their own terms.

Nonviolent Choice does not necessarily agree with every aspect of every CPC. Among other differences, we are a secular/nonsectarian/interfaith initiative, and many CPCs are run by Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant concerns. But we do recognize that many CPCs actually do make positive differences in the lives of women and children.

Nonviolent Choice talked with Angie Weszely, president of Chicago's Caris Pregnancy Clinics since May 2006. She joined Caris as development director in 2005. She has 11 years experience working with nonprofits, including a year outside the US, as well as a background in corporate training and sales.

As a mother in the paid workforce, Angie empathizes with women who struggle to both rear children and work their jobs, especially if they are single mothers. She brings this consciousnsess into her work with women facing difficult pregnancies.

MARYSIA: Please explain what Caris does.

ANGIE: Caris is a faith-based, nonprofit organization providing hope and support to womenf acing unplanned pregnancies. We have three program areas: Prevention, Intervention, and Connection.

Prevention involves reducing unplanned pregnancies through abstinence education and support groups. Intervention involves providing abortion alternatives to women through free services at our three clinics. Connection involves networking women to support and resources in the community – through social agencies, churches and individuals.

MARYSIA: Just to clarify, the particular faith basis of Caris is evangelical Christian. And today as well as historically, many evangelical Christians support women's rights. Although as with most groups of humans, there are others who still have a lot to learn and a long way to go, to say the least!

Now, CPC workers are widely stereotyped as hostile to the interests and wellbeing of women. Yet you not only object to that stereotype--you define yourself as a feminist. How did you arrive at your feminism?

ANGIE: Because “feminism” can be so controversial and is defined differently by many people, I define myself as a feminist only when I can clarify the definition.

I believe that women should be respected and accepted as women, and I believe in equality and nonviolence for all people. I don’t align with any strain of feminism that endorses the marginalization of any groups of people (unborn children, for example), legitimizes tasteless expression of sexuality, or would ask women to act like men.

For me, it was a gradual journey to feminism. I think it came from being shut out of opportunities because I was a woman, and realizing that all isn’t as equal as we would like to think it is.

I also became increasingly aware of and sensitive to the exploitation of women through pornography, sexual abuse, and abortion. Then when I had a daughter, I had an increasing desire to fight for a world where she would be protected, not asked to grow up too soon, and able to achieve her potential and dreams as a woman.

MARYSIA: How do your values and concerns as a feminist motivate and relate to your work as a CPC director?

ANGIE: At Caris, we hear women all the time say things like: “I don’t want to have an abortion, but I have to. I have no resources or support – I have no other choice.” How is that congruent with feminism?

If we aren’t offering women with unplanned pregnancies the emotional support and practical resources they need but instead offer them abortion as their only option, they really don’t have much of a choice. I believe that women don’t like abortion and don’t want to be in a place where they feel they have to make that choice.

So why settle for it? Why not work to build a society where women have access to everything they need to continue their pregnancy? To me, that is a feminist vision for the world.

MARYSIA: What do you feel feminism has to offer the CPC movement as a whole?

ANGIE: I think CPCs are doing a work that is very empowering to women, and that should continue to be our focus. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to be associated with other prolife efforts that can sometimes be insensitive to the pressures a pregnant woman can face.

At Caris, we advocate a “third voice” in the abortion debate – one that takes into account the best interest of the woman and the child.

MARYSIA: What stereotypes about CPCs concern you the most? If you had a chance to sit down and actually talk with prochoicers who level these criticisms, what would you say to them?

ANGIE: I’m concerned when I read articles describing CPCs as “fake clinics” out to deceive and manipulate women. It is my passion for women that drives me to provide them with real options other than abortion.

I would like the pro-choice community to acknowledge that not every choice for abortion is made from a place of also having access to other options. We exist for the women who don’t really want to have an abortion, but feel pressured to make that choice because of outside factors.

Many women tell us the father of the baby or their parents don’t support them continuing the pregnancy, or they don’t feel they have the practical resources for a child. Women in these situations aren’t really able to exercise a free choice without centers like Caris informing them and connecting them to all the support and resources that are available to them. What pro-choice advocate wouldn’t want women having real choices?

MARYSIA: Thank you, Angie.

Tell Bottle Manufacturers: Stop Poisoning Babies

Leading manufacturers put the compound BPA (bisphenol A) into plastic baby bottles. Never mind that BPA is an artificial sex hormone which, loosed into the environment, disrupts normal human development, particularly of unborn children and already-born infants.

Please sign this petition from the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice and tell these companies what you think!

You're Invited to Sign Our Manifesto

Nonviolent Choice and Turn the Clock Forward have teamed up to sponsor the following on Care2's The Petition Site. Please join us, and thank you! It is vital that all of us who take such an approach to abortion, women's rights, and reproductive justice stand up and be counted, and (we hope!) to get organized for cooperative action.

Pro Every Life, Pro Woman, Pro Reproductive Justice for All: A Manifesto

Petition powered by ThePetitionSite.com

Single Mothers in China

From the New York Times via UN Wire:

Single Mothers in China Forge a Difficult Path.

The pressures on Chinese single mothers to abort and the discrimination they face with their children if they do not illustrate precisely how much ultraconservative values concerning family formation and women's roles can depend on abortion for their enforcement.

Not what anyone wants to hear--I know, I know...

Preventing Harm from Polyvinyl Chloride

Polyvinyl chloride, also known as PVC or vinyl, is a compound present throughout the environment, including everyday household products such as baby bottles. It is disproportionately present in communities of color. Yet it is complicit in such harms as various cancers, respiratory disorders, and fetal/newborn disabilities.**

The Center for Health and Environmental Justice runs a campaign against PVC.

PVC (polyvinyl chloride) products are everywhere and are dangerous to our health and environment from start to finish - in the factory, at home, and in the trash... The good news is that safe, cost-effective, alternatives to PVC are readily available and responsible companies are phasing it out.

The fight is by no means over, despite these most welcome developments. Please visit the campaign's site to find out how you can support socially responsible companies by purchasing alternative, safe products--and how you can challenge the firms still guilty of monumental disrespect for life.



**Why did I say "fetal and newborn disabilities" instead of the more common "birth defects"?

A disability rights consciousness calls this term into question, because it implies that people with disabilities are "defective" as human beings.

(Just as a feminist and/or prolife consciousness calls into question the term "illegitimate children"--because how can human beings be somehow invalid?)

In fact, the branch of medicine that studies disabilities in the earliest stages of human life is still called "teratology"--literally the study of monsters. A characterization that I and (I'd venture to assume) most people with disabilities find objectionable.

Adoption as an Alternative to Abortion

Cory Richards at RHRealityCheck.org insists: "Facilitating adoptions, especially of hard-to-place children, deserves our strong support. But it does nothing to affect the abortion rate. To assert that it does is either ill-informed or simply cynical, and it should stop." He concludes that "the only way to meaningfully achieve fewer abortions is to do better in helping women and their partners prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place."

Now, I fully agree on the importance of prevention in reducing abortions. But is it "the only way [italics mine] to meaningfully achieve this goal"? Might adoption actually play a part, too--in the real lives of women and babies in crisis pregnancies, not merely in the crowd-playing, manipulative rhetoric of politicians?

A new study from the prochoice Guttmacher Institute on women's motivations to abort raises that possibility. "Without being asked directly, several of the women indicated that adoption is not a realistic option for them. They reported that the thought of one’s child being out in the world without knowing if it was being taken care of or by whom would induce more guilt than having an abortion."

The story of Robin Ringleka-Kottke, one of the prochoice activists featured in the 2005 documentary "Speak Out: I Had an Abortion" also suggests the power of women's perceptions about and experiences of adoption to affect their pregnancy outcomes. As a young woman who wished to complete her education, she seriously considered adoption. That is, until the dubious "prolife" agency she had turned to for help found out that while she was white, her baby's father was black. At a Chicago Foundation for Women screening of the documentary, Ringleka-Kottke described the impact of this racist rebuff. “It was a huge blow. What occurred to me was there isn’t a shortage of children at all...I remember having a tremendous amount of hate for this thing growing inside me. I didn’t think racism extended anywhere outside the South.” She then had an abortion.


Whatever the inmost truths of her motives, or the motives of the women in the Guttmacher study, which only they can tell...am I wrong and misplaced to surmise that if they had seen and/or experienced adoption differently, they might have gone that route instead?

The women in the Guttmacher study expressed that they resorted to abortion out of concern that they could not properly mother these babies. Were they affected by the pernicious stereotype that birthmothers are uncaring and so adoption is an act of not caring? By the stuck-in-the-past but still unfortunately widespread view that adoption means the birthmother has no say over who raises her child and no contact ever after...when in fact a birthmother in the US generally chooses the adoptive family and the kinds and amounts of contact she has with them?

(In saying this I do not wish to minimize the considerable "leap of faith" involved in permanently relinquishing one's own flesh and blood over to others, even people one has chosen for the task. I only wish to point out that birthmothers today, especially when they are working through ethical, humane organizations, have far more say over their children's fates and far more opportunity to heal than they did under the horrific old shame-ridden practice of closed adoption.)

What was/is the disconnect here between these women and so many others like them, struggling with crisis pregnancies, and the positive realities within adoption today? (Assuming there was/is one. Having been a maternity services counselor...I would venture to speculate there was/is one.) How can it be bridged, and would bridging it not have a profound affect on their pregnancy outcomes? I for one think it would.

As for Robin Ringleka-Kottke's story--yes, there are many involved today in arranging adoptions who are only interested in placing white babies with upper-crusty Chreeshtain white families. And sometimes this is done in the unmerited name of "prolife," when prolife indeed means anything but racial discrimination! On the other hand, there are actually many ethical, nondiscriminatory agencies--some of them operating under the rubric of prolife--that readily find loving homes for babies of color, despite the fact (known to Americans of color but not so much to whites) that racism is omnipresent and brutally so throughout the United States.

But what was/is the disconnect between such agencies and women like Robin Ringleka-Kottke, facing the fear that no one will love and care for their racially "unwanted," deemed-inferior babies? How can it be bridged? And again, I feel fairly sure that bridging it will make for more adoptions, fewer abortions.

I also feel fairly sure that there are no easy answers for women's pregnancy dilemmas--having been through one of my own, and having borne witness to the dilemmas of so many other women, as a counselor, and also as a friend. There is no "only answer"--whether it is the "only answer" of prochoicers like Cory Richards or the "only answer" of prolifers who blithely intone "Adoption not Abortion." There are as many answers as there are women and babies and other humans affected by problem pregnancy.

And if abortion, an act of lifetaking, is not to be part of the vast repertoire of possible answers....that just makes it all the more vital to advocate voluntary pregnancy prevention, challenge white supremacy in the adoption field, and connect women in crisis with the positive realities that do exist today in that field--the rampant racism, misogyny, greed, and exploitation notwithstanding.

Worldwide Declines in Unborn & Already-Born Child Mortality

Some recent news:

--Global rates of birth-to-five child mortality are declining. (Press release on the forthcoming UNICEF State of the World's Child Report 2008)

--In the US, unborn child mortality from induced abortion in the US has dropped to its lowest rate since 1974. (Guttmacher Institute press release, January 17, 2008)

--This drop is apparently part of a bigger picture. According to an earlier Guttmacher report, "the number of induced abortions worldwide declined from nearly 46 million to under 42 million between 1995 and 2003." Hopefully there were fewer deaths and injuries of pregnant women, too.

It would be most unfortunate if these welcome stories became cause for complacency. The reasons for each of these declines need to be more fully understood and documented. They need to be made into amply funded action plans that refine or replace the ones in place now (if indeed they are in place now).

Better access to free or affordable reproductive health services, including but not limited to family planning, is one vital reason. The world's largest advocate and provider of reproductive health services is UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

Smear campaigns from contraception opponents have persistently depicted UNFPA as a ruthless promoter of abortions, including coerced abortions. The truth is markedly different.

UNFPA is not perfect, nor does it have a perfect history. But now its abundant work saves and improves born and unborn lives throughout the globe.

Please express gratitude to UNFPA by visiting its How You Can Help page. For example, USD $9 will supply one couple with contraceptives for two years; $20 will cover the costs of safe birthing kits for women in war or disaster situations.

Whatever you do, you will help to make those thankfully falling death rates fall even faster.

On the 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Today I am simply making routine checks of the links on the Nonviolent Choice Directory, to make sure they still work, and slowly but surely adding in new ones.

I, personally, do not feel moved to protest either for or against Roe today. Although the US abortion rate is falling, the question remains of just why. And it still has a long, long way to go, and it will not get there until both prolife and prochoice citizens work together at utmost speed to give women better reasons not to undergo abortions.

And millions of women globally have abortion every year. It doesn't help them or their children that the "either/or, woman v fetus" terms of the Roe v Wade decision are being rapidly globalized.

ProLife Feminism Yesterday & Today Gets Another Great Book Review!

Kimberly Kelly, a graduate student at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, has published a great book review of ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of International Women's Studies. This, of course, is the book that led to the Nonviolent Choice Directory.

Kelly identifies herself as a prochoice feminist, and she gets and respects that prolife feminists are really, truly, deeply feminists as well, feminists who are eager to cooperate on reducing abortion. What well-timed balm on my very recent smarting from stereotypes and negativity from both "camps" in the abortion debate! It is such a delight to be understood and listened to by someone who evidently knows how to disagree respectfully while recognizing and appreciating common ground.

I will let you all read it for yourselves. But Kelly makes this point about the book's first part, the "yesterday" part, that I feel moved to address. Even though she does not attribute this failing to Part Two, quite the opposite.

It is disappointing that discussions of unique issues facing women of color and economically disadvantaged women written by these women are so infrequently included in the anthology. One can appreciate more privileged women recognizing and using their status to speak out in support of other women, but this is not a substitute for the voices of the groups directly affected.

This is true, that people from marginalized groups should be directly included. And I made a strenuous effort to find and include their voices. In some cases I (I wrote most of the editorial stuff in Part One) succeeded. Examples that come immediately to mind:

--Part One shows the origin of nineteenth century US feminism in the Haudenosaunee Six Nations, and reprints part of the Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca prophet.

--The journalist Eleanor Kirk, author of "What Will Become of the Babies," suffered deep poverty with her children after leaving her abusive husband.

--The discussion of slavery includes the story and the voice of slave narrative author Harriet Jacobs.

--Scholar/activist Matilda Joslyn Gage was disabled, and her perspective on disability rights is reprinted.

--Some of the women represented in Part One were in modern terms lesbians, such as Frances Willard, Jane Addams, and Susan B. Anthony.

--The discussion of eugenics includes the voices of sterilization abuse survivors.

--Part One reprints a passage from a socialist-feminist play about crisis pregnancy by Rose Pastor Stokes, a Jewish birth control and labor activist from a decidedly workingclass background--she was even a child laborer in the cigar-making industry.

--The discussion of Irish Americans includes a passage from a poor mother's letter to the child she placed with the Foundling Hospital in New York.

--Workingclass women from the Women's Cooperative Guild in Great Britain have their say about the reproductive conditions under which they and other women labored.

--Part One concludes with the life and words of Dorothy Day, a Roman Catholic and therefore a member of a religion which, like the religion of Rose Pastor Stokes, at that time encountered signficant discrimination in the Protestant-majority US.

I feel horrible that I could include little more than this in Part One. But I encountered some large impediments in the historical research. The nineteenth and early twentieth century women's movement did include women of diverse religions, socioeconomic statuses, races/ethnicities, and sexual orientations. However, it was dominated by WASP-white, middle-to-upper class, Protestant women.

Not only were they the most visible and numerous feminists, the historical record privileges them over feminists from other groups. The voices of the non-majority feminists are far more scant and harder to find. I had absolutely no funding for the years of assiduous reseach. I had no institution or benefactor or mentor to back me up financially or otherwise, which was a strain because I have multiple disabilities and my family is working-poor. This book was written for love, not money! I slowly but thoroughly dug into the libraries and other resources I could access in my home city for free, and sent off for photocopies of documents I could identify in other institutions elsewhere. But I had no means to do the deep, onsite, in-person archival research in other places, the research indispensible to achieving a rounder picture.

So, Kimberly, sorry to disappoint you. But I tried very hard within these limits to represent the non-"mainstream" voices. I think maybe I achieved this a bit more than you apparently think, and if I didn't, it was not because I had the mindset of "privilege," which is definitely not where I, personally, come from!

Otherwise...a wonderful book review...thanks...

To read other reviews of the book, you can start here.