International Women’s Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, International Women’s Day is a national holiday.
Dorothea Dix
by Judith Hollowood
I speak this morning to celebrate the relentless work of Dorothea Lynde Dix, a Unitarian reformer-heroine of pre-civil war America.
For many years, Miss Dix, a lifelong Unitarian Christian, did not have a purpose in life large enough for her conscience. By her early 20s, she was caught in cycles of depression and illness that so often dragged down unconventional women of her time – women who could not or would not find their whole purpose in marriage, family, and friendship.
But when more than half her life was passed – at the age of 43 – she found a purpose – improving the care of the mentally ill, who were for the most part housed with prison populations, uncared for and unable to care for themselves.
She was not, as simple accounts suggest, the first or only person concerned with better care for the insane. Massachusetts had built a model public mental institution, and several progressive private institutions existed. Many people, including some in her own circle, were already invested in this issue. Two well-placed social reformers, Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe, had shown that overwhelming evidence could move cautious legislatures to action. But the movement for the insane lacked someone who could invest him or herself in it wholeheartedly.
Tireless investigation was the strength Miss Dix brought to the movement. She traveled to every jail and poorhouse in Massachusetts and documented the sad conditions in which the mentally ill were kept, often in cages or chains. Howe, a state legislator, brought her written findings to the Massachusetts General Court (that’s their House of Representatives). Because of the compelling detail in her reports, the deep respect with which her supporters were held, and the readiness of her audience to support reform, her demand for further funding was supported.
Often Miss Dix is credited with launching the notion that the mentally ill should be humanely cared for. Her work was perhaps more difficult. Miss Dix’s gift was to persuade people that the work was only begun, that it had been picked up, then dropped too soon. Her travels from town to town established beyond a doubt that the state’s model hospital was too small and underfunded. Miss Dix’s report persuaded the legislature to vote the funds to enlarge and support it.
Miss Dix repeated her pattern of investigation in Rhode Island, New York, then New Jersey. Her biographers write “Her memorials marshaled sufficient evidence of neglect and abuse to shame most legislatures into action.†In the years before the war, she traveled to most of the states in the union, and in many of these it is fair to say that her work kicked off reform movements that continued after she moved on. Keep in mind that she rarely spoke in public; and it was not a well accepted thing to do. She achieved her ends through her written “memorials;†she was shy and rarely spoke in public. Today perhaps she would have a blog.
Miss Dix did not build or run institutions. She did not build coalitions but rather lent the strength of her writing to those who could rally political support. She had a talent for expressing the outrage that many people shared and for awakening consciences with her appeals. When she strayed from her strengths she floundered, just as anyone might. For example, during the civil war she was for a time the superintendent of Army nurses. In this work she was a disaster.
She was often tired and sick; she was often lonely and unhappy. But to the extent she could, she submerged her personal despair in work for those whose despair was deeper. She was convinced that her purpose in life was to be their voice. This was her heroism.
International Women’s Day
By Joni Grady
Does a woman wake up one morning, hit like a bolt from the blue, suddenly energized and directed to become an irresistible force or an immovable object? There are many answers to that conundrum just as there were many agents of change acting in Montgomery, Alabama in the mid-fifties when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the Dexter Avenue bus and set in motion the perfect storm now called the Civil Rights Movement.
First there was the new judicial climate of the country. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the Supreme Court’s recent decision banning “separate but equal” schools.
Then there was the climate in Montgomery’s black community itself. This was influenced greatly by the existence of Alabama State College (which Rosa Parks attended for a short time) and which was started in 1867 in Marion by nine ex-slaves as Lincoln Normal school for freedmen, state-supported since 1874 and located in Montgomery since 1887. The Women’s Political Council, organized by educators from the college and the local black public schools in 1946, was to play a large role, mostly behind the scenes, in organizing the boycott.
There was also a strong and active chapter of the NAACP which had decided a bus boycott could work to bring change to Montgomery and was just waiting for the right moment—and the right catalyst. Rosa Parks at 42 had been a member of the NAACP for over a decade–along with A. Philip Randolph, longtime labor leader and organizer. And last but not least were the black ministers and churches of Montgomery: among them Parks’s minister, the Reverend E.B. Nixon, president of the local NAACP, and the Dexter Avenue Baptist church with its young minister, Martin Luther King.
On the other hand were all the humiliating Jim Crow laws, including the abusive policies of the city-owned bus company, one of which was the movable dividing line between the black and white sections that forced black riders to keep moving to the back of the bus as more white riders got on. These abuses affected at least 70% of the company’s riders, students and adults, which was why it became the target of protest. In fact, in the months before Rosa set off the storm, two other women had already dared to refuse the order to move and been arrested.
One was teenager Claudette Colvin, who had refused to move nine months before Rosa Parks took her stand. In Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Philip Hoose,  “The bus driver ordered her to get up and she refused, saying she’d paid her fare and it was her constitutional right. Two police officers put her in handcuffs and arrested her. Her school books went flying off her lap.
“All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily,” Colvin says.
It was Negro history month, and at her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws. .. “We couldn’t try on clothes,” Colvin says. “You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot … and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.”
After Colvin’s arrest, she joined the youth section of the NAACP and through that got to know Parks.
The other woman was Aurelia Browder. Though she worked as a seamstress, like Parks, she had received a bachelor’s degree in science with honors from Alabama State College and she belonged to the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In April 1955, Browder refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white rider and was taken to jail.
That was seven months before Rosa Parks historic arrest.
But though their actions didn’t spark the boycott itself, this was not the end of their stories. They became two of 4 Montgomery women to take part in the 1956 class action suit Browder v. Gayle against the city of Montgomery. In fact it was the ruling by the U.S. District Court, upheld later that year by the Supreme Court, not the bus boycott alone, that ended segregation on Montgomery public buses.
There were many, many other women involved in the civil rights movement though only Rosa Parks attained mythic stature.
To quote from Paul Rogat Loeb’s book, Soul of a Citizen
“… Parks’s decision  didn’t come out of nowhere. Nor did she single-handedly give  birth to the civil rights movement. Rather, she was part of a longstanding effort to create change, when success was far from certain and setbacks were routine. That in no way diminishes the  personal courage, moral force, and historical importance of her refusal to surrender her seat. But the full story of Rosa Parks reminds us that her tremendously consequential act, along with  everything that followed, depended on all the humble, frustrating  work that she and others had undertaken earlier, and on the  vibrant, engaged community they had developed in the face of continual hardship and opposition. Her actions that day also weren’t accidental-the product of her feet being tired, as we’ve so  often heard-but rather a deliberate effort to challenge injustice.  What’s more, the full story underscores the value of persistence;  had she given up in year three or seven or ten we’d never have heard of her. Finally, it reminds us that Parks’s first step toward  involvement- attending a local NAACP meeting-was as critical to altering history as her famed stand on the bus.â€
Hoose, Philip, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as referenced in http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101719889
Loeb, Paul Rogat, Soul of a Citizen: living with conviction in challenging times, published 2010 by St. Martin’s Press.
McGrew, Jannelle, “Aurelia Shines Browder Coleman†in The Montgomery Advertiser, http://www.montgomeryboycott.com/profile_browder.htm
Cecile Richards
by Mary Hahn
Cecile Richards is a modern activist and has a long history of civil rights. She is the daughter of the late Ann Richards, governor of Texas. She is the current president of Planned Parenthood of America.
Cecile began her career organizing low wage garment workers. Her years as union organizer included successfully running the nationally recognized “Justice for Janitors†a campaign in Los Angeles to increase access to health care and better wages for immigrant janitors. She created and directed the pro-choice ID project for the Turner Foundation. During the rise of the religious right, Ms. Richards formed the Texas Freedom Network to combat anti-choice agenda of the extreme right in Texas. Before becoming president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile served as deputy chief of staff for Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and played a key role in Nancy’s election as leader in the House of Representatives.
Since 2006 Ms. Richards has led Planned Parenthood. PPH trusts that every woman has the right to make all her important medical decisions without government inference. Planned Parenthood is the leading health care organization for women in the United States with 820 clinics nationwide. 90% of clients visits deal with preventative care. 75% of patients are below the poverty line. According to Richards “Women’s care is economic issue.†Planned Parenthood began in 1871 in Brooklyn, New York. Margaret Senger handed out condoms and birth control advice. For this she was hauled off to jail.
Cecile Richards continues to work for the reproductive rights of women stating “With health care decisions made by women, their families not by lawmakers and politicians playing politics with their lives.â€
Women Activists Among Us
by Beryl Lawson
Most people who are called heroes will tell you they are just doing what they see as necessary at the time. And perhaps more importantly they persevere in their effort when everyone else has given up.
We’re concentrating on women this morning. Women who raise children to be considerate, independent adults, who feed and clothe and help with homework, clean houses, go to work and do innumerable other tasks. We might say that it’s the little heroes, the ones who perform the tasks over and over again that make it possible for the big heroes to come forward.
One of our key tasks here at HUU is to leave this community and the world a better place for us having been here. We acknowledge that we are all a part of the web of life which partakes of the life of this planet and aids or hinders that web of life. The things that are visibly done to maintain this community are most important but perhaps even more important are the thoughts and feelings which lead to our actions. In this we are all involved and responsible for the results of our inner efforts.
Here at HUU we try hard to be aware of the heroes in our midst. Those who open and close the doors, those who answer the phone and wash the dishes, lead the services and take such good care of our children. We are not saying that men are not contributing to HUU’s welfare and growth but since we are acknowledging the women among us today that is where we will put our emphasis.
In our small way we wish to acknowledge the female heroes within our HUU community.
I’ll start it off. I’ll mention a few of our local heroes, those who help our HUU family and our larger Harrisonburg community and by extention the whole of humanity..Then it will be your turn to mention others here at HUU. If those mentioned will please stand I do believe that by the time we are through all the women here will be standing