Last year, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications published the magazine, Native Daughters. With a grant from the Carnegie Foundation and under the guidance of five university professors, students spent 18 months reporting and writing about American Indian women who are artists, activists, lawyers, cops, warriors, healers, storytellers and leaders.

Now the Nebraska Department of Education has also released a companion curriculum for the magazine. You can download it for free here.

Can’t wait even one minute more to learn about Native women? Here’s a teaser of what you can learn more about in Native Daughters—and what you can share with your students via the new curriculum.

1. “A lot of people think that us women are not leaders, but we are the heart of the nation, we are the center of our home, and it is us who decide how it will be.”–Philomine Lakota, Lakota language teacher, Red Cloud High School, Pine Ridge, S.D.

2. The art forms Native women practice stand as reminders of cultural endurance. “Their crafts survived the Greasy Grass (Battle of Little Big Horn), Wounded Knee One (1890) and Two (1973),” writes Christina DeVries in Native Daughters. “Their spirits survived the Trail of Tears, the Relocation and Termination program and continued struggles against cultural annihilation.”

3. In 1997, Ms. magazine named Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabeg) Woman of the Year. That same year, the activist also debuted her first novel, Last Standing Woman.

4. Of nearly 2 million women enlisted in the U.S. armed forces, 18,000 are American Indian women.  Their representation in the military is disproportionately high—and Native women are more likely to be sexually harassed, which increases their chances of developing post-traumatic stress disorder.

5. The number of Native women applying to medical school has increased since 2003, peaking in 2007 when 77 Native women applied nationwide.

6. In 2007, when Cassandra Manuelito-Kerkvliet (Diné) was named president of Antioch University, she became the first American Indian woman president of a mainstream university. Not only that, but about half of the nation’s tribal colleges are led by Native women presidents.

7. Cecelia Fire Thunder (Lakota) became the Oglala Lakota Tribe’s first woman president. She has fought against domestic abuse, saying it’s not a part of traditional culture, and been a leader for women’s reproductive rights. In 2006, when the South Dakota state legislature prohibited abortion, Fire Thunder announced plans to build a women’s clinic on the reservation, and therefore beyond state jurisdiction. She was impeached by the tribal council, who said she was acting outside her duties as president.

8. Women lead nearly one-quarter of the nation’s 562 federally recognized tribes.

9. “Through the late 1700s, Cherokee women were civically engaged. They owned land and had a say during wartime,” writes Astrid Munn in Native Daughters. “But this changed after the tribe ceded large tracts of land to the U.S. government in 1795.”  Since the mid-1980s, though, a generation of Native women activists, lawmakers and attorneys have been changing that history and working to empower women again.

10. Indian Country could never survive without Native women.

Photo of  magazine cover. To order copies of the magazine, contact Joe Starita. You can also visit nativedaughters.org to watch video clips and extended raw footage of the interviews.

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Komen’s story that the decision wasn’t a political one was a hard sell, especially after it was reported that Karen Handel, the senior vice president of public policy, retweeted (and later deleted), “Just like pro-abortion group to turn a cancer orgs decision into a political bomb to throw. Cry me a freaking river.” Sure, it’s not political.

Anti-choice zealots have been gunning for Planned Parenthood and reproductive health care providers for years now. They’ve created obstacles to women’s reproductive health care by misconstruing, misinterpreting, misrepresenting and misusing facts to try to convince women that they don’t know what’s good for them.

Some of their favorite “facts” are that abortions threaten women’s physical and mental health–despite years of peer-reviewed studies overwhelmingly showing abortions to be safe.

Now, an unbiased scientific study once again shows definitively that abortion is much safer than childbirth. It is 14 times less likely to lead to death.

I don’t expect anti-choice zealots to suddenly change their tune about the supposed dangers of abortion. I’ve been reading studies demonstrating that legal abortion is safer than childbirth since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Over that time, legal abortion has only become safer. The authors of this study, Dr. Elizabeth G. Raymond and Dr. David A. Grimes, found that:

The relative safety of abortion has increased substantially since the first decade after nationwide legalization, when child birth-related mortality was approximately seven times the mortality related to abortion.

These statistics and scientific facts don’t jibe with what the anti-choice forces want to believe. So they manufactured some “facts” of their own and proceeded to get legislators and policymakers to believe them–or at least pretend to believe them–and enact laws to protect women from themselves.

Anti-choicers have succeeded in getting laws passed in 22 states that require women seeking abortions to receive information about the procedure’s “risks.” Such information is often misleading, inaccurate and designed to frighten women away from terminating their pregnancies. A pamphlet mandated in Texas, “A Woman’s Right to Know,”  lists over 30 potential complications of medical abortion–but only six potential complications of vaginal delivery and eight of cesarean delivery.

The pamphlet also raises the specter of breast cancer. The anti-choice crowd has been trying to sell the idea that abortions raises breast-cancer risk for a long time, although any link between the two has been refuted in study after study. The American Cancer Society states that, “At this time, the scientific evidence does not support the notion that abortion of any kind raises the risk of breast cancer or any other type of cancer.” (Perhaps the Komen organization could focus its efforts on debunking this mythology instead of undermining Planned Parenthood.)

Raymond and Grimes’ report concludes:

Laws that compel exposure of women to such biased material thwart informed choice and contravene the ethical principle of autonomy. Moreover, they put clinicians in the untenable position of having to be complicit in misleading their patients. Since the early 1970s, the public health evidence has been clear and incontrovertible: induced abortion is safer than childbirth.

It is unconscionable that our health care providers should have to misrepresent medical facts to women seeking abortions because of a vocal anti-choice minority. When will Americans acknowledge that, in the words of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts”?

Photo from Flickr user CarlB104 under Creative Commons 3.0.

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1.) He is the President. She is being disrespectful. As hell. Period. Point Blank. End of Discussion.

2.) White privilege conditions white people not to see white rage. However, it makes them hyper-aware of Black threat. When we do think of white rage, usually we think of it in masculine terms. Gender stereotypes condition us not to see white women as being capable of this kind of dangerous emotional output. We reserve our notions of female anger for Black women. Such hidden race-gender logics allow Brewer to assert that she “felt threatened,” even though she was trying to handle the situation “with grace.” Now look back at the picture: who is threatening whom? Couple white rage with white women’s access to the protections that have been afforded to their gender, and you have something that looks ironically like white female privilege. Yes (yes, yes), the discourse of protection is based upon problematic and sexist stereotypes of white women as dainty and unable to care for themselves, and yes, these stereotypes have caused white women to be oppressed by white men. But remember, gender does not exist in a racial vacuum. It is performed in highly racialized contexts, and history proves that what constitutes oppression for white women in relation to white men, dually constitutes privilege for white women in relation to Black men. (I’m not spoiling for a fight today, so anybody who feels uncomfortable with such assertions should probably go read some Patricia Hill Collins–Black Sexual Politics–and then try again.) What I know is this: 100 years ago (less than, actually) a Black man even standing that close to a white woman would’ve gotten him lynched. (Seriously, I just discovered that even accommodationist Booker T. Washington was beaten in New York in 1911 for talking to a white woman.) And I know that if a Black woman had wagged her finger at Bush II or even Bill Clinton, we would have seen her faced down, handcuffed, with Secret Service swarming. When your race and gender grant you opportunities to be treated with dignities that others don’t have or conversely, to heap indignities on those people, that is what we call privilege. Deal with it.

3.) Unchecked white rage has always been dangerous for Brown and Black folk in America. Jan Brewer’s Arizona is not safe for Brown people and by implication, not safe for Black people (presidents included). Not only has she terrorized and racially profiled immigrant communities, but she has gutted one of the model Ethnic Studies programs for high school students in this country. If there were ever a time for Black and Brown solidarity, it is now. And hell, lest we forget, Arizona is not even safe for white women. It is the vitriolic racial climate that Brewer’s anti-immigrant, anti-Latino policies have helped to foment that led to the violence against Gabby Giffords. (It’s amazing what a different story this picture of Gabby Giffords hugging Barack Obama tells.)

4.) The picture of Giffords embracing the president demonstrates something important. The logic of racial supremacy dictates that white people are most comfortable when people of color do the affective labor involved in maintaining white supremacy. (No disrespect to Gabby Giffords: Of course, I don’t think this hug shared between colleagues supports white supremacy. But this kind of bodily connection is important for humanizing Black public figures, and it is the logic of that which I’m getting at.) Historically, it was not enough to be placed in positions of servitude; affecting an attitude of subservience was also critically important. Failure to be deferential could get you killed, even if you were doing the tasks at hand. The term “uppity Negro” hasn’t always been a slogan to rock proudly on a t-shirt. Something happens when Black and Brown folks decide that we do not exist in the world to make white people comfortable. And white folks feel it. This is why a movie like The Help so powerfully resonates with White America, and with countless facets of Black America as well. The affective labor of white supremacy prefers Black people in certain postures, like for instance dishing out hugs and words of affirmation to little white girls who will become white women that they, indeed, “is smart, is kind, is important.”

As if the world would ever teach anything different. The effect of such labor is powerful: white America feels more comfortable with the disturbing realities of racism, and Black people can convince ourselves that our humanity, and indeed, our struggle is being acknowledged. Even her well-deserved Oscar nomination has not convinced Viola Davis of such ridiculousness. (And um, would someone help Charlize Theron get a clue?)

5.) Finally, I just have to say it: If Jan Brewer and any other bad-ass wants to leave here with the fingers and toes they came here with, I would suggest they keep their hands to themselves. Because frankly, I wish a*&%$# would wag a finger in my face… Kudos to the President for keeping his cool.

Reprinted with permission from the Crunk Feminist Collective.

 Photo of Elizabeth Eckford attempting to enter Little Rock School on September 4th, 1957. The girl shouting is Hazel Massery. MSNBC commentator and Tulane University professor Melissa Harris-Perry has likened the two photos. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

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In America, state governments set up eugenics boards that determined the reproductive future of thousands. I grew up listening to my maternal Grandmother, a Mississippi native, warn against trusting doctors and passing along lessons she learned from other poor women of color who went into a hospital to give birth only to later find out that they were given a Mississippi Appendectomy without their consent. The horrific legacy of these state eugenics boards is one of the reasons why I embrace the reproductive justice framework advocating for the right to have children, not have children, and to parent children in safe and healthy environments.

From the early 1900s up until the 1970’s, over 30 states had formal eugenics programs. These programs enforced compulsory sterilization of individuals deemed to be “unfit” and “promiscuous.” States sterilized people that were disabled, poor, people of color, and immigrants. North Carolina had a particularly aggressive program that was alone in allowing social workers to select people for sterilization based on IQ tests. To date, only seven states have formally apologized for eugenics programs and no state has paid money to survivors. Although a task force appointed by the governor in North Carolina ruled in favor of payment to survivors, their recommendations are now in the hands of state legislators.

Too often eugenics is looked on as a shameful part of German history and many Americans are unaware of the history of eugenics in this country. I’m reminded of the warning that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. No, I’m not about to repeat black genocide claims that modern health care centers use contraception as a weapon or the (easily debunked if folks just used Google Maps) conspiracy theory about abortion clinics being located in predominately black neighborhoods. I’m referring to the history of government taking control over people’s reproductive future and how that component of the history of eugenics and is very present today. While those opposed to reproductive justice appropriate the language of Civil Rights to perpetuate bizarre anti-knowledge theories about dangerous black women and how we are the greatest threat to the newly identified species of “black child,” states that actually ran eugenics programs and sterilized thousands of people get little to no attention and all too often as not held accountable for those actions.

As for the doomed to repeat it part, many of those same states continue to seek dominion over women through everything from state mandated vaginal penetration of women seeking abortion services to a record number of restrictions hindering access to reproductive health care. States are gaining more control over people’s reproductive health care decisions and some organizations have even tried to get states to seize total control.

On the most basic level, the history of state eugenics boards is about the survivors. Their stories tell the tale of the damage wrought when government policy is used as a weapon to control the masses. Clearly that’s not a tale anti-choice folks opposed to reproductive justice are interested in making a flashy YouTube video about, because the sound of their silence on the news out of North Carolina has been deafening. With the exception of a few articles that chose to launch into another rant about Planned Parenthood rather than demand support for North Carolina’s survivors and a call for justice for victims of the other 30+ state eugenics programs, those who are usually eager to toss the accusation of eugenics out appear to be uninspired by cases of actual eugenics in America.

As reproductive justice activists we must organize in support of survivors of state eugenics programs. We must demand that states act as North Carolina has to move toward justice. But we must also continue to resist and organize against the current anti-choice legislative power grab seeking control once more over our bodies while claiming they do so for the benefit of society. The recommendations from North Carolina’s eugenics task force serve to remind us that our cause is rooted firmly in the history oppression and that justice remains the right to have children, not have children, and to parent children in safe and healthy environments.

ABOVE: Exhibit depicting compulsory sterilization legislation in the United States in 1921. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Reprinted with permission from RH Reality Check.

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The 90-minute documentary opens with vintage military recruitment ads aimed at women from as early as the 1940s. They’re followed by clips of women military members talking about what drew them to a career in the military.

Quickly, the interviews turn serious, and we learn that each woman is a survivor of rape at the hands of another military member. Even though all love the military, each says she would not recommend the military as a career to any other woman until significant structural changes are made to prevent sexual violence.

The Department of Defense estimates that during 2010, as many as 19,000 [PDF] women were raped in the military. Overall, more than twenty percent of women veterans report being raped by their coworkers either as recruits or as active duty members. And about one in 100 men screen positive for “military sexual trauma.”

Every survivor in the film—including one man—describes feelings of betrayal because their assailant was a “brother” in arms. Those who reported it talked about how traumatizing it was to then face retaliation from the military. Their frustrations over inadequate health care, therapy and support are another common theme.

The film’s main subject is Coast Guard recruit Kori Cioca, the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense. Her rapist dislocated her jaw, she says, and Veterans Affairs has yet to provide medical coverage to fix it. In the meantime, she is in pain every day, can eat only soft foods and has to avoid going outside in the winter because her jaw locks up in the cold. Instead of approving surgery to repair her jaw, she says, the military doctors prescribed an alarming amount of drugs, which she displays.

During a survivor speak-out that followed the screening, Cioca went into more detail about the inadequate care she’s received. I was shocked when she described how one insensitive doctor questioned why she was there, claiming her jaw looked fine, then tried to pry her mouth open with his hands. Next he jammed a mirror in her mouth and despite her protests, only stopped when she got up and left. The other survivors shared similar horror stories of the treatment they received.

Not everything was sad, however. The film highlights several dedicated members of Congress, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) and Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), who are working to pass legislation to fix some of the structural problems in the military. Cicoca and other brave survivors have banded together with lawyer Susan Burke to file the class-action suit. The love the survivors’ families show them was also a positive force throughout the film: The tears of some of the women’s husbands moved members of the Sundance audience to tears.

The screening was followed by a survivor speak-out, during which more hope emerged. Survivor after survivor said that working with film producer Amy Ziering was better than any official therapy they’d been through because she actually listened to their stories without cutting them off or dismissing them. It was also heartening, they said, to learn they weren’t alone, and they hope that seeing the film will be a turning point for other survivors.

Spouses of survivors spoke at the session as well. One husband said that the film showed him and his wife how they can make their difference in the world: by speaking out for cultural and structural changes in the military.

You don’t have to be a survivor or the loved one of a survivor to advocate for change. If you want to help, you can:

1. Sign and share a petition asking for structural changes in the military.
2. Contact your Congressional Representative and ask her or him to co-sponsor the Support the Sexual Assault Training Oversight and Prevention (STOP) Act.
3. Watch the film when it is available, tell your friends about it, or host a screening party.
4. Look for updates on the film’s Take Action page and the @Invisible_War twitter feed.

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A 37-year-old organizer based in New York City, Poo is founder of Domestic Workers United (DWU), a group that waged a successful campaign for landmark legislation in New York state recognizing the labor rights of nannies and housekeepers. Now, as director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), she is spearheading an even more ambitious effort, a Caring Across Generations campaign designed to address the crisis in how we care for our children, our elders, and the disabled in this country.

“I believe that love is the most powerful force for change in the world,” Poo says. “I often compare great campaigns to great love affairs because they’re an incredible container for transformation. You can change policy, but you also change relationships and people in the process.”

How does this view square with the fact that campaigns often involve a lot of conflict and acrimony?

“I think that you can love someone and be in conflict with them,” she says. “And I think that it’s the same thing when we’re trying to transform a fundamentally unequal society. There’s a level of discomfort and conflict that has to happen in order for us to achieve a more loving fate.”

This focus on love has had a profound effect on many of Poo’s colleagues. “So many of us wouldn’t be the leaders we are without her,” says Danielle Feris, Director of Hand in Hand, an organization for employers of domestic workers.

Prior to creating Hand in Hand, Feris recounts, “I had dinner with Ai-jen and told her my idea. And she said, ‘Do it. This is needed in the world.’”

“If that dinner hadn’t happened I don’t know whether I would have had the courage to found an organization. She has that effect on people, to make us believe in ourselves and believe that we can do what’s needed.”

Through the Eyes of Women

Willowy and soft-spoken, Poo has emerged over the past decade as one of the country’s most visionary organizers. She says that she never could have predicted her current career path, but she had strong role models early on. Her parents were immigrants from China, her father a scientist who had been a pro-democracy activist in Taiwan. She was even more influenced by her mother, a doctor, and her grandmother. “They were both really strong women with a lot of wisdom,” she says. “I always knew that if we could just see the world through the eyes of women we’d have a much clearer picture of both what the problems are and what the solutions are.”

Poo first experienced the power of organizing as a student activist. In the spring of 1996, while majoring in women’s studies at Columbia University, she was one of more than 100 students who occupied the rotunda of the university’s Low Library. They demanded that the university hire more faculty members in the field of ethnic studies and broaden its curriculum to acknowledge the diversity of the student body. The students stayed overnight in the library despite threats from the administration, and the next morning 22 of them were arrested. Subsequently, the activists staged a five-day takeover of one of the college’s main administrative buildings, highlighting their demands by teaching their own courses in the occupied space.

The pressure led to gains including the creation of the university’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Poo says, “Working with a really diverse group of students around our shared goals gave me a sense of how powerful campaigns can be if they’re strategic—how it is possible to really make change.

The Work That Makes All Other Work Possible

After graduation, Poo took up organizing that highlighted the experience of women in the low-wage workforce. At the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, she participated in outreach efforts that targeted women workers who were among the most underpaid and vulnerable to exploitation in New York City. Domestic employees emerged as a key group. Along with farmworkers, domestic employees were explicitly excluded from New Deal labor rights protections. They at once provide essential support for their employers’ families—“doing the work that makes all other work possible,” as Poo has put it—while also raising their own children and often sending money to family members abroad.

Traditionally, domestic workers have been considered impossible to organize. “We call it ‘the Wild West,’” Poo says. Nannies and housekeepers have no centralized employer and no employee breakroom where they might commiserate with others. Workers must negotiate their employment relationships individually, with no clear standards or public oversight. Absent any effective labor protections, domestic employees calling in sick or taking time to deal with a family emergency risk losing their jobs. Even though they are among the lowest-paid workers in the country, some caregivers are expected to be on-call around the clock. Those who are undocumented immigrants fear that speaking up could jeopardize their ability to stay in the country.

By the late 2000s, DWU was pushing for legislation in New York state that would recognize the rights of these caregivers for the first time. Poo traveled repeatedly to the state capitol alongside DWU members to lobby lawmakers. She says, “I remember asking Angelica Hernandez [a DWU leader] how many times she’s been to Albany. She said 27 times, to tell her story.”

Hernandez and others at times spoke of finding families who treated them with dignity, and of their affection for the children and elders they cared for. But they also described abuses, such as working 12 to 15 hours per day and being paid only $135 per week.

“In 2007, I began working for a family in Manhattan, cleaning their apartment; I would later also begin to take care of their child,” Hernandez said. “I had to clean, do laundry, iron, take clothes to the dry cleaner, go food shopping, and prepare food for the entire family. I used to work constantly, day and night, taking care of the child and then cleaning while he slept.”

Mona Ledesma, a Filipina immigrant who had worked for eight years as a nanny and housekeeper in the United States, testified about having to resign a full-time job to avoid the sexual advances of a male employer, and about being accused by another employer of stealing a $2 can of Niagara starch for ironing clothes. She told the State Assembly, “I am not a thief. I am not an object for sexual pleasure. I am a human being.”

No Unlikely Allies

Such testimonials, combined with six years of determined effort on the part of DWU and its allies, paid off in September 2010, when New York state passed the nation’s first Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. The legislation gave groundbreaking legal recognition to domestic workers, guaranteeing at least three paid days off per year, at least one day off per week, and overtime pay for workweeks of more than 40 hours.

“It’s been transformative for me to participate in a movement where you actually see a historic breakthrough,” Poo says. “When we first got to Albany we were told, ‘Good luck with that. This legislature will never pass it.’ And we just thought, ‘Why on Earth would people be against such a basic measure that’s about equality and opportunity?’”

Feris, who works with employers of domestic workers, points to Poo’s focus on coalition-building as an important factor in the bill’s success. “One way in which Ai-jen’s leadership has been so critical is that she doesn’t see any group of people as unlikely allies,” she says.

One might expect that those who hire domestic employees—the constituency targeted by Feris’ organization—would oppose the organizing efforts of these workers. But DWU and its allies saw that many families valued the fact that domestic employees are caring for the most precious people in their lives. In 2009 they held a Children and Families March, made up of employers and children cared for by domestic workers, walking alongside DWU members and their own kids—all in support of the bill of rights.

Read the rest at Yes! magazine.

Photo of Ai-jen Poo by Erica Camille for YES! Magazine.

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The cliché tells us that war is hell, but for female enlistees, the war on the domestic front—within their units—trumps that of the battlefield. In fact, a recent Veteran’s Administration survey revealed statistics that should have turned the military on its warmongering head: 30 percent of female vets told the interviewers that they had been assaulted by a male colleague and/or supervisor. Worse, 14 percent reported having been gang-raped and 20 percent reported having been raped more than once.

Shockingly, these figures may be low since underreporting of sexual crimes is known to be endemic.

Part of the blame for the reluctance to report may rest with the military chaplaincy, one of the few places soldiers, sailors, reservists, national guardians and marines can turn for counseling. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “the nation’s corps of chaplains leans heavily toward evangelical Christianity, failing to mirror the military it serves.” And 20 percent of today’s 3000 military chaplains were trained at the ultraconservative Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, Va. Founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1973, the school bills itself as the world’s largest seminary, something it attributes to its “conservative doctrinal position, its sound grounding in Bible teachings, and its reflection of core Christian essentials.” An article found on the school’s website clears up any definitional murkiness: “Liberty is committed to changing the entire world for Jesus Christ, first changing the world with its students, then equipping them to change the world around them.”

Over 1,000 students are currently enrolled in the 72-credit program to become military chaplains. A severe shortage of armed forces clerics—a February 2011 Times Union article blames the deficiency on the military’s rigid age and physical requirements and on the reluctance of pastors/rabbis/imams to exchange the comforts of home for combat—will likely make this dream come true for many of them.

That this bodes badly for women and the LGBTQ community is a given.

Rebecca Turner, Executive Director of Faith Aloud, a St. Louis-based prochoice, pro-LGBTQ group, notes that, “There is a clear pattern within fundamentalist churches to blame the victim. For them Adam and Eve is historical fact and even today the woman is seen as the temptress and the man the fool who can’t resist her feminine wiles.” Fundamentalist chaplains, she continues, will hear a woman say that she was attacked and assume that she did something to provoke or warrant it. “The military is still a predominantly male, macho culture,” she says. “Add chaplains trained in very conservative ideology and you have the perfect storm of victim blaming for women who step forward.”

Read the rest at RH Reality Check

Photo of U.S. Navy chaplain from Wikimedia Commons

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Lonnie’s story is far from unique. She is one of too many victims of gun violence in the United States. In 2008, 7,451 women were treated in emergency rooms across America for gunshot wounds, 66 percent of which were assault-related. In 2007, 1,865 women were murdered with firearms. Firearms are more common in abusive homes, and batterers often threaten their victims with guns, sometimes implicitly, by cleaning, holding or loading guns during arguments.

We don’t need stats to understand how much gun violence affects women; we see it on the evening news. Sometimes it’s a girl who’s accidentally shot by her brother, like 10-year-old Emilee Randall who was killed when her 14-year-old brother pointed his dad’s revolver at her; sometimes it’s a stray bullet from a gang shooting that hits a girl playing in her yard, like 8-year-old Katherine Cook; sometimes it’s a park ranger shot in a National Park after Congress passes a law allowing loaded weapons in those parks, like Margaret Anderson, murdered on New Year’s Day near Mount Rainer. And sometimes it’s a Congresswoman, like Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot at point-blank range in the head by a disturbed man (but legal gun owner) as she greeted constituents in a Safeway parking lot.

In 1986, I graduated from Columbine High School, 13 years before it became a painful symbol of gun violence. My former basketball coach Dave Sanders was murdered that day, along with 12 other students. The massacre affected me deeply. I couldn’t believe such madness could happen at my safe, suburban, picture-perfect high school. At Dave’s memorial service, one of the speakers said that we can’t control what happens, but we can control how we react to it.

Ever since, I’ve tried to do what I can to raise awareness of gun violence. I met Lonnie, and several women like her, when I wrote a book called Beyond the Bullet about the impact that gun violence has on regular people. On Jan. 8, the one-year anniversary of Giffords’ shooting outside that Arizona Safeway, as part of the national Too Many Victims remembrance, I’ll light a candle along with hundreds of other women around the country to bring light to the problem of gun violence and the toll it has taken on women. I will light a candle for those women I’ve interviewed, still dealing with unspeakable loss years after the worst day of their lives. I will light a candle for Emilee, Katherine and Gabrielle. I’ll light a candle for Lonnie Feather, whose courage and strength are quite simply inspirational. If you’d like to light a candle for one of the 30,000 people killed each year by gun violence, visit the Brady Campaign and find out how to participate in a vigil in your community.

 Photo from Flickr user Secretly Ironic under Creative Commons 2.0

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My husband also chose a career in teaching. When people ask us what we do, I answer that I am a high school English teacher and they say, “Oh, how nice.” He, too, answers that he is an English teacher, and they say, “Oh, bless your heart!” The difference in those responses is subtle but significant. My choice is seen as unremarkable because the teaching profession is traditionally dominated by women; a 2007-2008 study found that 76 percent of public school teachers were women. My husband’s choice, however, is a noble one.

Perhaps the association between women and teaching is one reason conservative politicians seem to see teachers as easy targets. Last year, Wisconsin’s Governor Walker made headlines by stripping teachers of their collective bargaining rights and cutting their pay and benefits. He wasn’t the only one; governments in Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio and Tennessee tried to pass similar legislation in 2011. Many states are already in the process of crafting reform to reduce the power of teacher tenure, making it easier to terminate teacher contracts.

Perhaps these politicians are emboldened by the belief that women won’t fight back.

If so, they’re sorely mistaken. As evidenced by the protests in Wisconsin’s state capitol, we teachers are indeed fighting back. And after a dogged teachers’ union campaign, in November, Ohio voters defeated a measure that would have limited teachers’ collective bargaining rights on important issues such as class size and health care.

However, more anti-teacher bills are coming down the pipeline in 2012, and none of these actions by politicians accords teachers the respect we deserve. Teachers are often classed with nurturers and caregivers; thus people assume that anyone who is a “natural” caregiver–i.e., women–can and will do the job with little training or incentive. In truth, teachers are rigorously trained professionals, and that was as true when my mother graduated college as it is today. Not only do educators go through as much training as other professionals before they’re allowed to enter the classroom, but they also are required to continue professional development while they are employed. Teachers must gain mastery of the content they teach; they must also learn to reach resistant, troubled, struggling and otherwise “left behind” students.

I have personally seen the challenges of implementing the requirements of No Child Left Behind and, more recently, the Common Core standards. While I believe in the spirit behind these initiatives–I certainly don’t want any of my students to be left behind–it has taken every skill I have learned in all of my teacher training to be able to implement them successfully for every student at every level. Fortunately, I am trained to do so–and it is my training that makes me successful, not an inherent ability to nurture.

In addition to requiring training, teaching is grueling work. Teachers are expected to be at school before the first bell rings, work for eight hours, and stay after the final bell rings–plus bring any extra grading or planning home. That often adds up to 60+ hours a week. There’s no coming to work late or leaving a few minutes early when 30 pairs of eyes are staring up at you, depending on you for knowledge critical to their success in life.

Of course, teachers nurture and care for students within the walls of their classrooms, but they also have training in how to educate–training that most politicians creating education policy lack. And tespite being trained as extensively as other professionals, teachers only earn a fraction of the respect. When society starts to see teachers as professionals rather than glorified babysitters, education policy may begin to take a different turn. Until then, we’ll fight.

Photo of teachers rallying in the Wisconsin State Capitol from Flickr user Matt Baran under Creative Commons 2.0 

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Under Bush, ab-only had become the norm in most U.S. schools, even though study after study [PDF] had revealed its ineffectiveness in reducing the number of teen pregnancies and reducing the spread of disease. According to the Journal of Adolescent Health, virginity pledges–a staple of abstinence-only programming–not only failed to decrease teen STD rates, but actually resulted in pledge-takers avoiding medical attention once infected, leading to increased chances of transmission. So it appeared science had prevailed when President Obama’s 2010 budget swapped out all federally funded ab-only programs for comprehensive sex ed.

That is, until abstinence-only funding reared its ugly head again when Republicans sneaked it into the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, to the tune of up to $50 million per year through 2014. And just last weekend, conservatives in Congress pushed through an additional $5 million for ab-only funding in the federal 2012 appropriations bill.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin is considering a bill–SB 237–to kill comprehensive sex-ed in the state and reinstitute abstinence-only-until-marriage programming. The bill has already passed the state senate and will certainly pass the majority-Republican assembly come January.

This should worry Americans. In addition to their ineffectiveness, abstinence-only programs have also come under fire for questionable instructional methods and regressive curricula. Periodic in-depth reviews of abstinence-only programs by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) regularly find that the programs often rely on messages of fear and shame–directed almost entirely toward girls–and promote biased views of gender, marriage and pregnancy options.

Take the Denver, Colo.-based WAIT (Why Am I Tempted?) Training, now known as The Center for Relationship Education, an abstinence-only group that has received over $8 million in federal funds since 2005. During an assembly in a Colorado high school, a WAIT/CRE motivational speaker told her audience:

• “This (holding up a waffle) is (like) a high school boy’s brain…we use waffles because waffles have all these little compartments … You guys have very cool brains. You can stick stuff away in your thinking … Guys can tuck stuff away. Girls aren’t like that.”
• “Girls’ brains are like spaghetti noodles. If I pull these noodles up, what do the noodles touch? Everything. So girls, when you have sex with a guy what does it affect? Everything.”
• “As soon as a guy gets an erection you have viable sperm at the end of your penis. You do not have to have intercourse to get her pregnant, you just have to get that viable sperm close to her vagina and she turns on the little Hoover vacuum, because girls are very, very fertile.”

Such messages don’t just reinforce regressive gender stereotypes–they are also extremely heteronormative. According to a study [PDF] by GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian Straight Education Network):

A significantly greater portion of students in schools that used an abstinence-only curriculum reported feeling unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation and gender expression—64.8 percent of these students felt unsafe because of their sexual orientation compared to 57.3 percent of all other students.

WAIT/CRE is but one example of the legion of discriminatory, shaming and worst of all, medically erroneous abstinence-only programs. It is time to end this funding once and for all. We must stop lying to our kids about their sexual health, shaming our young women, stigmatizing our LGBT youth and padding the pockets of ab-only hucksters.

A pending House bill by Representative Barbara Lee pushes to end abstinence funding and reallocate money to comprehensive sex ed. To tell Congress to end abstinence-only funding (as well as require honest signage for crisis pregnancy centers), you can add your voice here.

 Photo from Flickr user romana klee under Creative Commons 2.0

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