Faith Bandler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Sources:

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

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

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

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

AWU post & comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2290805229853&set=oa.10150302820643055&type=1

Cher

Today’s Awesome Woman is Cher - the Goddess of Pop! Cher once said when the apocalypse came – the only thing left would be her and cockroaches. In a career spanning over 45 years, she has had more ups and downs than a kid on a trampoline, and always managed to rise like a phoenix from the ashes each time she was down and counted out, somehow reinventing herself with every changing decade and finding herself on top all over again. Most recently after her “Farewell Tour” followed by a three-year hiatus and retirement from touring, Cher returned to the stage in February 2008 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas where she performed her show Cher at the Colosseum until February 2011.& during the same period filmed & starred in “Burlesque” with Christina Aguilera.

She has won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globes and a Cannes Film Festival Award among others for her work in film, music and television. She is the only person in history to have received all of these awards. As a singer Cher is the only performer to have earned "top 10" hit singles in four consecutive decades.

Cher’s father deserted her family when Cher was young. Cher's mother, who had aspirations of being an actress and model herself, paid for Cher to take acting classes. However, Cher had undiagnosed dyslexia & quit high school at the age of 16 in search of her dream.

Meeting the quite older (by 11 years) Sonny Bono in 1962 changed the 16-year-old's life forever. They became friends & Sonny began helping Cher with her career. Through Sonny, Cher started as a session singer in 1963, and sang backup on several of Spector’s classic recordings, including The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and The Ronettes’ "Be My Baby", among others. Sonny & Cher married in 1964 and they started an act together.

They first recorded under the names of Caesar and Cleo with no success. In 1965, they officially took on the music world as Sonny & Cher and earned instant rewards. The now 19-year-old Cher and 30-year-old Sonny became huge hits following the release of their first album, "Look at Us" (summer, 1965), which contained the hit single "I Got You Babe". The song catapulting to #1. Between 1965 and 1972 Sonny & Cher charted a total of six "Top 10" hits.

They became icons of the late '60s "flower power" scene, wearing garish garb and outlandish hairdos and makeup. However, they found a way to make it trendy and were embraced around the world. TV musical variety and teen pop showcases relished their contrasting styles -- the short, excitable, mustachioed, nasal-toned simp and the taller, exotic, unflappable fashionista. They found a successful formula with their repartee, which became a central factor in their live concert shows, even more than their singing. With all this going on, Sonny still endeavored to promote Cher as a solo success. Other than such hits with "All I Really Want to Do" and "Bang, Bang", she struggled to find a separate identity.

During their stage act, Sonny on stage played the ineffectual object of Cher's stinging barbs on stage, in fact he was actually the highly motivated mastermind off stage. Due to his and his foresight and chutzpah, “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” began on tv. Their child, Chaz Bono was born during this period & often appeared on the show. It was also during this time that Cher’s solo recording career took flight with three #1 hits ("Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves," "Half-Breed" and "Dark Lady"). A now-confident Cher yearned to be free of husband Sonny's Svengali-like control over her life and career. The marriage split at the seams in 1974 and they publicly announced their separation. Their show went downhill quickly.

In late June of 1975, only three days after the couple's divorce, Cher married rock musician Gregg Allman of The Allman Brothers Band. That marriage imploded rather quickly amid reports of out-of-control drug use on his part. They were divorced by 1977 with only one bright outcome -- son Elijah Allman.

After an unsuccessful second attempt at the “Sonny & Cher Show” and a somewhat successful Top 10 disco hit, the ever resourceful singer decided to lay back and focus on acting instead. At age 36, Cher made her Broadway debut in 1992 in what was essentially her first live acting role with "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean". Her performance was critically lauded. She then appeared in the film version & earned critical raves in her first film role since 1969.

With film #2 came a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win for her portrayal of a lesbian toiling in a nuclear parts factory in Silkwood (1983). This in turn was followed by her star turn in Mask (1985) as the blunt, footloose mother of a son afflicted with a rare disease (played beautifully by Eric Stoltz). Once again Cher received high praise and copped a win from the Cannes Film Festival for her poignant performance.

Fully accepted by this time as an actress of high-caliber, she integrated well into the Hollywood community. Proving that she could hold up a film outright, she was handed three hit vehicles to star in: The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Suspect (1987), and Moonstruck (1987), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Along with all this newfound Hollywood celebrity came interest in her as a singer and recording artist again. "If I Could Turn Back Time (#3) and the Peter Cetera duet "After All" (#6) placed her back on the Billboard charts.

During the 1990s Cher continued to veer back and forth among films, TV specials and expensively mounted concerts. In January of 1998, tragedy struck when Cher's ex-husband Sonny Bono was killed in a freak skiing accident. That same year the duo received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for their contribution to television. In the meantime an astounding career adrenaline rush came in the form of a monstrous, disco-flavored hit single ("Believe"). The song became a #1 hit and the same-titled album the biggest hit of her career. "Believe" reached #1 in 23 different countries.

In other facets of her life, Cher has been involved with many humanitarian groups and charity efforts over the years, particularly her work as National Chairperson and Honorary Spokesperson of the Children's Craniofacial Association, which was inspired by her work in Mask. She created the Cher Foundation and most recently Cher stepped in to prevent a Kenyan school from being forced to close its doors.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wi​ki/Cher

http://www.imdb.com/name/n​m0000333/bio

http://www.nytimes.com/201​0/11/21/movies/21cher.html

http://cher.com/about-cher​/love-cher/cher-helps-save​-kenyan-school/

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054/?view=permalink&id=10150328834233055

Barbara Jordan

Barbara Jordan (1936 – 1996) was an American politician who was the first African-American elected to the Texas Senate after reconstruction and the first Southern black woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous other honors. On her death she became the first African-American woman to be interred in the Texas State Cemetery. The main terminal of Austin-Bergstrom Airport is named for her.

 
In 1972, she was elected to the United States House of Representatives, She was also the first woman to represent Texas in the House in her own. In 1974, she made an influential, televised speech before the House Judiciary Committee supporting the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

Jordan was mentioned as a possible running mate to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and that year she became the first African-American woman to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. That speech was ranked 5th in "Top 100 American Speeches of the 20th century" list and was considered by many historians to have been the best convention keynote speech in modern history. Despite not being a candidate Jordan received one delegate vote for president at the convention.

Jordan's companion of close to 30 years was Nancy Earl. Jordan never publicly acknowledged her sexual orientation, but in her obituary, the Houston Chronicle mentioned her long relationship with Earl.
Jordan retired from politics in 1979 and became an adjunct professor teaching ethics at the University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. She again was a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1992.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054/doc/?id=10150327896078055

Simone Weil

Today’s Awesome Woman is Simone Weil (3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943), a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. I just discovered her yesterday as I was looking for a quote on compassion & empathy.

"The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it."

And I wanted to learn more about the woman who wrote it. Weil had a fascination with affliction, which went beyond simple suffering. Only some souls are capable of truly experiencing affliction; these are precisely those souls which are least deserving of it—that are most prone or open to spiritual realization. Affliction is a sort of suffering plus, which transcends both body and mind; such physical and mental anguish scourges the very soul.

War and oppression were the most intense cases of affliction within her reach. At the age of six years old, she refused sugar in solidarity with the troops entrenched along the Western Front. In 1919, at 10 years of age, she declared herself a Bolshevik. In her late teens, she became involved in the workers' movement. She wrote political tracts, marched in demonstrations, and advocated workers' rights.

She was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. She grew up in comfortable circumstances, as her father was a doctor. Her only sibling was André Weil, who would go on to become one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. She suffered throughout her life from severe headaches, sinusitis, and poor physical coordination, and spared no scrutiny to these in her philosophical writings. n 1928, Weil finished first in the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure; Simone de Beauvoir, her more long-lived and famous peer, finished second.

Weil's fellow student, the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, wrote of Weil in her book Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter:

She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up; A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don't know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: 'It's easy to see you've never been hungry,' she snapped.

After receiving her degree, Weil taught philosophy at a secondary school for girls in Le Puy and teaching was her primary employment during her short life. During this time she also taught free classes to workers on the railroads, in the mines and in the fields, and she donated large portions of her small salary and her time to aid them in their struggles for economic justice. At one point, she took a 12-month leave of absence from her teaching position to live for a year at the lowest level of the French factory system -- as an unskilled women worker, believing that this experience would allow her to connect with the working class. She did piece-rate factory work. Because she had poor manual dexterity and an over-active mind she could not work efficiently enough to pay rent and buy sufficient food.

In 1936, despite her professed pacifism, she fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. She identified herself as an anarchist and joined the Sébastien Faure Century, the French-speaking section of the anarchist militia. However, her clumsiness repeatedly put her comrades at risk. After burning herself over a cooking fire, she left Spain to recuperate in Assisi. She continued to write essays on labor and management, and war and peace.

Weil was born into a secular household & raised as an agnostic. Attracted to Christianity, in 1937 she experienced a religious ecstasy in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli. However she declined to be baptized; preferring to remain outside due to "the love of those things that are outside Christianity" She was keenly interested in other religious traditions — especially the Greek and Egyptian mysteries, Hinduism (especially the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita), and Mahayana Buddhism. She believed that all these and other traditions contained elements of genuine revelation, writing that:
“Greece, Egypt, ancient India, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflection of this beauty in art and science..these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive. I think I might even say more.” She was, nevertheless, opposed to religious syncretism, claiming that it effaced the particularity of the individual traditions:
“Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else...A "synthesis" of religion implies a lower quality of attention”

In 1942, she traveled to the USA with her family. Weil spent this time living briefly in New York City, in Harlem, amongst the poor. After New York, she went to London, where she joined the French Resistance. The punishing work regime she assumed soon took a heavy toll; in 1943 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and eat well. However, she refused special treatment because of her long-standing political idealism and activism and her detachment from material things. Instead, she limited her food intake to what she believed residents of the parts of France occupied by the Germans ate. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, England.

After a lifetime of battling illness and frailty, Weil died in August 1943 from cardiac failure at the age of 34. The coroner's report said that "the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed." To this day, the cause of her death remains a subject of debate for many.

Most of the writing for which she is known was published posthumously.

"In the decades since her death, her writings have been assembled, annotated, criticized, discussed, disputed, and praised. Along with some twenty volumes of her works, publishers have issued more than thirty biographies, including Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage by Robert Coles, Harvard's Pulitzer-winning professor, who calls Weil 'a giant of reflection.' " ~ Alonzo L. McDonald, from the forward to Wrestling with God, An Introduction to Simone Weil

“The principal value of the collection is simply that anything from Simone Weil’s pen is worth reading.” ~ Susan Sontag, The New York Review of Books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil

http://rivertext.com/weil2.html

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives​/1963/feb/01/simone-weil/

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054/?view=permalink&id=10150327048583055 and http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1947537927172&set=oa.10150302820643055&type=1

Louisa May Alcott

Today's Woman of the Day ♥ ♥ is Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832-March 6, 1888) she was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (which is now a part of Philadelphia) on November 29, 1832, her fathers 33rd Birthday. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and May, were educated by their father, philosopher/ teacher Bronson Alcott, and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May.

Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at "Hillside" (now Hawthorne’s "Wayside").

Like her character, "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy. "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences ..."

For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays --"the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens."
At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"

Confronting a society that offered little opportunity to women seeking employment, Louisa determined, "... I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world." Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, for many years Louisa did any work she could find.

Louisa’s career as an author began with poetry and short stories that appeared in popular magazines. In 1854, when she was 22, her first book Flower Fables was published. A milestone along her literary path was Hospital Sketches (1863), based on the letters she had written home from her post as a nurse in Washington, DC during the Civil War.

As an adult, Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week. In 1848, Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights. Alcott, along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, were part of a group of female authors during the Gilded Age who addressed women’s issues in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper columnist of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of the times'"

When Louisa was 35 years old, her publisher in Boston, Thomas Niles, asked her to write "a book for girls." Little Women was written at Orchard House from May to July 1868. The novel is based on Louisa and her sisters’ coming of age and is set in Civil War New England. "Jo March" was the first American juvenile heroine to act from her own individuality --a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype then prevalent in children’s fiction.

In her later life, Alcott became an advocate for women's suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts, in a school board election.

In all, Louisa published over 30 books and collections of stories. During her stint as a Civil War nurse in 1862, Alcott had contracted typhoid fever. The popular treatment for fever at the time was quinine and calomel, or mercury chloride, a mineral that cured the disease but eventually killed the patient. She died on March 6, 1888 at age 55, only two days after her father, Her last words were "Is it not meningitis? She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.

My book came out; and people began to think that topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all ...
-Louisa May Alcott, 1855

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2296514338331&set=o.343338393054&type=1

Jane Pratt

Today's Awesome Woman is Jane Pratt. Why is Pratt so friggin’ awesome? She’s the founder of Sassy magazine, the sort of prototype for all subsequent ballsy, political, gay-friendly, chick mags. “Alternative” is the word we used back in the day. Writes Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon:

Yet while Pratt's name may not be immediately recognizable, her influence is everywhere, in the lively, unapologetically feminism-powered prose of Jezebel and a slew of imitators. What made Sassy, and later, its grown-up sequel, the inevitably named Jane, unique in their days was their intimate, conversational tone. Sassy and Jane didn't dole out authoritative tips on how to make a guy like you or why that skirt makes you look fat. They didn't sound like magazines whose contents were entirely dreamed up by Vassar girls bunkered in the Conde Nast building with no idea of what real girls were wearing and listening to and talking about on the street right below. They spoke to females in the voice of friends. They were infectiously enthusiastic and unabashedly snarky. They said that stuff sucked, right on the coverlines. It was goddamn revolutionary.

It WAS goddamn revolutionary. Magazine stands are still full of “women's’” magazines filled with drivel geared toward the diet-obsessed, dimwitted, creatively stunted, sexually immature creatures they consider grown women to be. F that, man. Viva, Jane!

Pratt’s just started a new online mag xojane and I’ll be curious to see where she takes it. You can check it out at www.xojane.com.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054?view=permalink&id=10150324292498055

Nadia Al-Sakkaf

Today's Awesome Woman is Nadia Al-Sakkaf, a Yemeni woman who, in 2005 after her father was murdered, took over as editor and publisher of the Yemen Times, the country's  first and most widely read independent English-language newspaper. As painfully demonstrated by her father's fate, this position in the ongoing political protest in Yemen -- protest that was first started by a woman -- entails extreme risk. But Al-Sakkaf does not stop at publishing a newspaper that dares to report on government oppression and violence, she also actively initiates and supports efforts aimed at improving the lives of Yemeni women. And she uses her newspaper as a platform for activism.

Al-Sakkaf travels out of country on the conference and speaker circuit and, while she could easily obtain residency in any number of Western countries, she returns to her homeland to continue upholding the principles of free speech and to advocate for women and others. While she was in Washington, D.C. in March, 2011 she was interviewed by Judy Woodruff of PBS.

Yemen today is in a very unique situation. The process was started by a woman and a number of women. And, alongside with men, they managed to lobby the students in the streets.

And the women are also part of the support group of these protesters. They bring them food and blankets. And they -- I have seen a woman throwing hot water on soldiers when they were trying to attack the protesters from her window.

So, we need not forget the role of women in this magnificent time of Yemen.

Al-Sakkaf was the very first recipient of the Gibran Tueni award bestowed annually by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) for, "attachment to freedom of the press, courage, leadership, ambition, and high managerial and professional standards."   Indeed, she has become a strong voice in the call for the Arab media to mind its own store rather than merely complain about the international press, to balance its coverage, to play the critical role that no one but the press can play in a fair-minded society, and to improve its pitiful record at reporting on the many human rights abuses -- both political oppression and the traditional practices that victimize women.

From the WAN page where Al-Sakkaf's 2006 award is documented:

She considers the Yemen Times to be a newspaper with a mission: it should not only criticise the government but also furnish solutions. Editorially, she focuses on raising the newspaper's general standards, with a strong focus on human rights, gender issues and women's rights....

Ms Al-Saqqaf has made it a priority to raise the professional standards of the journalists working at the newspaper and to improve the competence of female journalists in Yemen. Legal education is among upcoming projects for the staff, as well as training in how to report on scientific developments.

In her biting article, "Arab media: To lead or to follow?" posted on the Arab Media Community web site in 2008, Al-Sakkaf wonders why her newspaper was the only one in Yemen to take up the case of Nujood Ali, the 10-year-old girl who fought her way out of a marriage to a man more than three times her age, until it became a huge story in the Western media. And she never misses a chance to encourage women to become full partners in Yemeni public life, and to exercise their voices via the media. When she received the Tueni award she said, "This is recognition of Yemeni journalists generally and especially Yemeni women working in the media. This should encourage them to grow and not give up."

This month, Al-Sakkaf spoke at TEDGlobal. "How did you, then, make the decision and assume the responsibility of running a newspaper -- especially in such times of conflict?" asks the interviewer.

"Well, let me first warn you that I am not the traditional Yemeni girl."

Nadia, you can say that again. You are not the "traditional girl" anywhere!




AWU post & comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2274170734001&set=o.343338393054&type=1

Patricia Cornwell

Todays Awesome Woman is crime novelist Patricia Cornwell (born June 9, 1956). She is the biggest-selling crime writer in the world (and the second biggest-selling female writer in any genre, after J K Rowling). I’ve long been a fan of her work and as I was recently rereading her Kay Scarpetta series, it struck me what a great job she has done creating strong, complex female characters set in a man’s world. As a Medical Examiner who also has a law degree, the heroine is a woman coping with a difficult job, with the politics involved in her job and difficult relationships. I chose her as our AWOD because writing in the crime fiction genre & in a prose style that appeals to both genders, I think her portraits of women working in a men’s world & their inner emotional life can sublty change the viewpoints of men.

Cornwell herself is a woman of dichotomies. In her twenties she married her professor (male) who was 17 years older than her. Now, as of three years ago, she is married to a professor (female) who is 10 years younger. Her name is Staci Gruber and she is associate director of Harvard’s McLean psychiatric hospital. They met when Cornwell was researching sociopaths for a novel. Cornwell says with a laugh that Gruber’s first impression of her was that she was a narcissist.

Whatever the truth of that, she cannot be accused of being boring. She flies her own helicopter, rides a Harley-Davidson and drives a Ferrari. She also collects guns. And when the press outed her as gay it was because she had had an affair with a married FBI agent whose husband became so angry there was a shoot out.

Cornwell stirs up controversy in the same casual manner other people stir their tea. She is also highly litigious, not long ago taking a cyberstalker to court. The liberal left in America, meanwhile, suspect she is the devil wearing Prada – not least because she donated huge sums to the Republican party and was so chummy with the Bushes, especially Bush senior, she would be invited to their family retreat in Kennebunkport.

A descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida. Her father was one of the leading appellate lawyers in the United States and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. 

She was five when her father walked out on the family, on Christmas morning. Soon after this she was molested by a security guard, a case that ended with her giving evidence in court.

Her mother by now was spiralling into chronic depression. This meant that Cornwell had to be sent to live with foster parents. Sadistic foster parents. She became anorexic in her teens and recovered only to succumb to depression herself, in her twenties. This has come and gone over the years.

As her father was dying, she experienced what so many of us have experienced:
“He was on his deathbed. We knew it was the last time we’d see each other; he grabbed my brother's hand and mouthed 'I love you,' but he never touched me. All he did was write on a legal pad 'How's work?'”

Following graduation from Davidson College in 1979, she began working at the Charlotte Observer, rapidly advancing from listing television programs to writing feature articles to covering the police beat. She won an investigative reporting award from the North Carolina Press Association for a series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte.

In 1984, she took a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia. She worked there for six years, first as a technical writer and then as a computer analyst. She also volunteered to work with the Richmond Police Department. Cornwell wrote three novels that she says were rejected before the publication, in 1990, of the first installment of her Scarpetta series, Postmortem. Her first crime novel, Postmortem, was published by Scribner’s in 1990. Initially rejected by seven major publishing houses, it became the first novel to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure in a single year. In Postmortem, Cornwell introduced Dr. Kay Scarpetta as the intrepid Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 1999, Dr. Scarpetta herself won the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author.

Often interviewed on national television as a forensic consultant, Cornwell is a founder of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine; a founding member of the National Forensic Academy; a member of the Advisory Board for the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, NYC; and a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital’s National Council, where she is an advocate for psychiatric research. She is also well known for her philanthropic contributions to animal rescue and criminal justice as well as endowing college scholarships and promoting the cause of literacy on the national scene. Some of her projects include the establishment of an ICU at Cornell’s Animal Hospital, the archaeological excavation of Jamestown, and the scientific study of the Confederacy’s submarine H.L. Hunley. Most recently she donated a million dollars to Harvard’s Fogg Museum to establish a chair in inorganic science.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk​/culture/books/6560751/Kil​ler-Queen-Patricia-Cornwel​l-Interview.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wi​ki/Patricia_Cornwell

http://www.patriciacornwel​l.com/about


AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1937281270762&set=oa.10150302820643055&type=1

Audrey Hepburn

Today’s Awesome Woman is Audrey Hepburn.  (1929-1993) She was most famous for her long and celebrated movie career, and her elegant beauty, but she was also a great humanitarian.

She was born of a Belgian mother and English Father, And spent her early years between the two countries.  Her father was a Nazi sympathizer and deserted the family when the war broke out. She was devastated by this and said it traumatized her for life.

 Her mother then moved the family to the Netherlands, thinking they would be safer there.  In fact the Nazis did invade, and Belgium was under German control for the remainder of the war.

Audrey’s family endured poverty and near starvation, sometimes eating dog food and tulip bulbs.  She remembers staying in bed reading to  from feeling hungry.  Several members of her family were taken to concentration camps and two were killed.  She credits memories of their privation and suffering under the Nazis for her later humanitarian work.

In the late sixties she began making fewer movies and spent more time with family (she had two sons).  This was when she became actively involved with UNICEF, the United Nation’s children’s branch.  She visited South America and Africa bringing notice to the plight of children in those areas.  She didn’t just give money, she gave her voice and star power to bring attention to these.

In 1988 she visited Ethiopia at a camp for children on seeing the poverty and starvation she remarked:

"I have a broken heart. I feel desperate. I can't stand the idea that two million people are in imminent danger of starving to death, many of them children, not because there isn't tons of food sitting in the northern port of Shoa. “

She also visited street children in South America and was appalled to see children living in such conditions. She later reported to Congress how UNICEF had been able to make a difference

"I saw tiny mountain communities, slums, and shantytowns receive water systems for the first time by some miracle-and the miracle is UNICEF. "I watched boys build their own schoolhouse with bricks and cement provided by UNICEF."

She worked actively until her death to give what help she could to children in poverty and war zones all over the world.  It is rare, I think for someone famous for external beauty to be even more so internally.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054?view=doc&id=10150321676638055

Elizabeth Yates

Today's Awesome Woman of the Day is Elizabeth Yates (1845 - 1918) She was the mayor of Onehunga borough in New Zealand for most of 1894. Gaining the position after her husband stepped down from the post and she accepted nominations for the office. A few months later she defeated her opponent at the polls in a close race decided by only 13 votes, becoming the first female politican elected in the Brittish Empire, the day after New Zealand women had led the world by voting in a general election for the first time. The election made international news and brought her congratulations from Premier Richard Seddon and Queen Victoria.

Decades ahead of her time (the country did not get its second woman mayor for another 63 years), Elizabeth disavowed feminist banners and claimed she simply wanted to be a good manager. She met strong opposition from a hard core of local councillors, town clerks and members of the public (four councillors and the town clerk resigned in response to her election) and they often disrupted meetings and orchestrated opposition to her every proposal. Only a year later, she was defeated roundly at the polls. Even her opponents had to concede however, that she had been very effective during her short tenure, having liquidated the borough debt, established a sinking fund, reorganised the fire brigade, upgraded roads, footpaths and sanitation, and having personally lobbied the government to authorise the reopening of the Waikaraka cemetery.

She later returned as a councillor to the Borough Council for two years between 1899 and 1901. She died in 1918, 16 years after her husband, after a long time in a mental hospital. She had remained childless during her marriage to Captain Michael Yates, a master mariner well known in the coastal trade.

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/pe​ople/elizabeth-yates

Elizabeth Yates | NZHistory.net.nz, New Zealand history online

www.nzhistory.net.nz

Elizabeth Yates' election as mayor of Onehunga on 29 November 1893 – the day after New Zealand women had led the world by voting in a general election for the first time – cemented her place as a pioneer of women's political rights.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054?ap=1

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth (Herring) Warren (born June 22, 1949 in Oklahoma City) is an American attorney and law professor. We know her mainly as a fierce consumer advocate. She has been in the press recently in her capacity as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency she designed to protect borrowers from the predatory lending practices that helps to tank the housing market beginning in 2006 and led to the collapse of the credit default swap market. President Obama chose her to chair the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the U.S. banking bailout (formally known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program). Progressives had hoped that she would also be chosen to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but President Obama nominated Richard Cordray instead, apparently because republicans in the Senate, who are notably hostile to any sort of regulation of Banks or Brokers, are extra hostile to Professor Warren.

She got her law degree in 1976 and started doing real estate closings for walk in clients. She taught at University of Pennsylvania School of Law, University of Texas School of Law, University of Houston Law Center, University of Michigan ,and Rutgers Law School.

She started at Harvard Law School in 1992 as the Robert Braucher Visiting Professor of Commercial Law. She is now the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she has taught contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law. In 2009, she became the only woman to twice win Harvard's Sacks-Freund teaching award. She also won awards while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, and University of Houston.

She has been named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People (2009), Bostonian of the Year (2009), and one of the 50 Most Influential Female Lawyers (repeatedly). She is now being touted as a potential candidate for the United States Senate, possibly running for Scott Brown's seat.

Here's a little bit of Elizabeth Warren in her own words: http://tpmcafe.talkingpoin​tsmemo.com/talk/blogs/ewar​ren/

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2230690655634&set=o.343338393054&type=1

Aung San Suu Kyi

Today’s WOD ♥ ♥ is Aung San Suu Kyi born June 19 1945.

She is a Burmese opposition politician and the General Secretary of the National League for Democracy. In 1990, the military junta called a general election, in which the National League for Democracy (NLD) received 59% of the votes, guaranteeing NLD 80% of the parliament seats. Some claim that Aung San Suu Kyi would have assumed the office of Prime Minister; in fact, however, she did not stand as a candidate in the elections. Instead, the results were nullified, and the military refused to hand over power. This resulted in an international outcry. She had been detained under house arrest before the elections. She remained under house arrest in Burma for almost 15 of the 21 years from 20 July 1989 until her release on 13 November 2010.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been placed under house arrest on numerous occasions since she began her political career, totalling 15 of the past 21 years. During these periods, she had been prevented from meeting her party supporters and international visitors. In an interview, Suu Kyi said that while under house arrest she spent her time reading philosophy, politics and biographies that her husband had sent her. She would also occupy her time by playing the piano and was occasionally allowed visits from foreign diplomats as well as her personal doctor.

The media have also been prevented from visiting. In 1998, journalist Maurizio Giuliano, after photographing her, was stopped by customs officials, and all his films, tapes and some notes were confiscated. Suu Kyi met the leader of Burma, General Than Shwe, accompanied by General Khin Nyunt on 20 September 1994, while under house arrest. It was the first meeting since she had been placed in detention. On several occasions during Suu Kyi's house arrest, she has had periods of poor health and as a result has been hospitalized.

On 9 November 1996, the motorcade that she was traveling in with other National League for Democracy leaders Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung, was attacked in Rangoon.

About 200 men swooped on the motorcade, wielding metal chains, metal batons, stones and other weapons. The car that Aung San Suu Kyi was in had its rear window smashed, and the car with Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung had its rear window and two backdoor windows shattered. It is believed the offenders were members of the Union Solidarity Development Association (USDA) who were allegedly paid 500 kyats (USD $5) each to participate. The NLD lodged an official complaint with the police, and according to reports the government launched an investigation, but no action was taken. (Amnesty International 120297)

Suu Kyi continued to be imprisoned under the 1975 State Protection Act (Article 10 b), which grants the government the power to imprison people for up to five years without a trial, and the Law to Safeguard the State Against the Dangers of Those Desiring to Cause Subversive Acts (Article 10 a), as Suu Kyi is "likely to undermine the community peace and stability" of the country. She has appealed against her detention. Many nations and figures have continued to call for her release and that of 2,100 other political prisoners in the country. On 12 November 2010, days after the junta-backed party – Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) – won the elections which were conducted after a gap of almost 20 years, the junta finally agreed to sign orders allowing Suu Kyi's release. Her house arrest term came to an end on 13 November 2010.


Periods under detention

• 20 July 1989: Placed under house arrest in Rangoon under martial law that allows for detention without charge or trial for three years.
• 10 July 1995: Released from house arrest.
• 23 September 2000: Placed under house arrest.
• 6 May 2002: Released after 19 months.
• 30 May 2003: Arrested following the Depayin massacre, she was held in secret detention for more than three months before being returned to house arrest.
• 25 May 2007: House arrest extended by one year despite a direct appeal from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to General Than Shwe.
• 24 October 2007: Reached 12 years under house arrest, solidarity protests held at 12 cities around the world.
• 27 May 2008: House arrest extended for another year, which is illegal under both international law and Burma's own law.
• 11 August 2009: House arrest extended for 18 more months because of "violation" arising from the May 2009 trespass incident.
• 13 November 2010: Released from house arrest.

Aung San Suu Kyi received the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992 she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding by the Government of India and the International Simón Bolívar Prize from the government of Venezuela. In 2007, the Government of Canada made her an honorary citizen of that country, one of only five people ever to receive the honor. Aung San Suu Kyi is the third child and only daughter of Aung San, considered to be the father of modern-day Burma.

Aung San Suu Kyi still believes in the ideals of Democracy and believes that her country will live the dream of a free political system, until then she still fights everyday for the release of the over 2,100 other political prisoners who have yet to be released.

Suu Kyi has bravely called on the military regime to free the thousands of monks and peaceful activists still held in horrific prisons, some in cramped dog cages. Unprecedentedly, thousands of Burmese have risked their own safety to join her call for freedom through an online petition:

To World Leaders and the Burmese Regime:
We stand with the people of Burma in their desire for peace and national reconciliation. We urge world leaders to call on the Burmese regime to immediately and unconditionally release all political prisoners and implement an immediate ceasefire between the Burmese Army and armed ethnic groups. We demand the Burmese regime heed that call.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2278656411894&set=o.343338393054&type=1

Anne Boleyn

Today's Awesome Woman: Anne Boleyn

Many people think she was a home-wrecking she-devil who ensnared Henry VIII with her womanly wiles. This is untrue. She actually fled court for over a year to get away from him. Only when it became apparent that he was going to divorce Katherina of Aragon, and that Anne would never get an offer of marriage form anyone else while the king wanted her, did Anne capitulate to a relationship. Even then, she closed the muffin shoppe until he put a ring on her finger. She made the best of an untenable situation, and has been castigated for not bearing up under her fate meekly, like a "proper woman". Although she was, as her death showed, essentially powerless compared to the king, she set her own terms for over a decade and bequeathed her strength and intelligence to her daughter, Elizabeth I of England.

Anne Boleyn: Biography, Portraits, Primary Sources

englishhistory.net

Anne Boleyn is one of the most famous queens in English history, though she ruled for just three years. The daughter of an ambitious knight and niece of the duke of Norfolk, Anne spent her adolescence in France. When she returned to England, her wit and style were her greatest charms.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054?view=permalink&id=10150316679723055

Lisa Shannon and Fartun Abdisalaan

The Awesome Women of the Day are Lisa Shannon and Fartun Abdisalaan, who together are working to improve the lot of women in Mogadishu, Somalia, which was "recently named one of the five worst places to be female" and is a place where few on this earth would choose to visit, never mind work. They are being honored today for risking their lives and giving up Western comfort in order to advocate for the human rights, health, safety, opportunity, education, and well-being of women in one of the hardest hit places on the planet.

Lisa Shannon, center and in black, and Fartun Abdisalaan Adan, in blue directly behind her,
surrounded by participants in the new organization Sister Somalia,
which helps Somali victims of gender-based violence.

In an article penned by Shannon, "In Mogadishu: A Lifeline For Somali Rape Victims"
in The New York Times this week, she leads off:

“Why did you come here when no one else does?” The African Union communications director asked us over dinner at its compound in Mogadishu. Good question. We were warned against it, especially by war-zone regulars. It’s been called the most dangerous city—or place—on earth. In fact, we had to delay our trip for two weeks due to multiple suicide bombings and riots inside the area controlled by Mogadishu’s transitional government (TFG). So, why go? I gave the short answer, “We’re supporting a local social entrepreneur in launching a sexual violence hotline.”

But the real answer was more complicated. Somalia bothers me. The 1993 Black Hawk Down incident was tragic not only for the loss of United States servicemen, but because many experts credit this loss with a shift in American public sentiment and policy toward mass atrocity in Africa. In effect, we collectively flipped off our empathy switch, approaching African crises like Rwanda, Congo and Darfur as “Operation Not Worth It.” But no country has been more written off than Somalia. And in Somalia, no group has been more written off than women.

Abdisalaan's husband, Elman, was a human rights worker who was murdered in 1996. After escaping to Canada to raise her children there, she returned to Mogadishu in 2007 to continue his work and is the founder of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Center. Counseling and other services are provided to the survivors of gender violence, the nearly universal female genital mutilation practiced in Somalia, and all sorts of struggles the women endure due to the chaos and conflicts in their country.

And then there is Al-Shabab. The radical, militant Islamic group linked to Al-Qaeda rules 90% of central and south Somalia with utter impunity. Not only do they abduct and imprison through forced marriage, terrorize and gang rape. If women complain, they are often accused of adultery and speaking against the brotherhood, punishable by death. The execution methods of choice: Stoning or beheading.

Abdisalaan founded Sister Somalia, a program in collaboration with Shannons' new organization, A Thousand Sisters, which offers the only sexual violence hotline in Mogadishu, provides counseling, business startup advice, and also works to move survivors and their children away from their attackers. "Each woman who walks through the door will also receive a letter from a 'sister' abroad," writes Shannon. "We hope to raise $120,000 per year to make it happen. How is a broke activist like me planning to pull this off? Just like every stage of my journey with Congo, I don’t know exactly. But I’m betting we can find at least 1,000 Americans who would welcome the opportunity to show up for women in Somalia, through writing a letter or giving at least $10 per month."

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2257806124896&set=oa.10150302820643055&type=1

Annie Lenox

The “Awesome Woman of the Day” for today, Saturday, July 16th 2011, is Scottish-born singer, songwriter, activist, and compassionate humanitarian Annie Lennox. Celebrated internationally as an icon, innovator and symbol of enduring excellence, you must know of her internationally acclaimed, award winning musical endeavors with Dave Stewart as the 80‘s duo ‘Eurhythmics’, and more recently as a popular and mega-successful solo artist. But did you know that Annie Lennox is also known, perhaps more importantly, for her numerous philanthropic and humanitarian pursuits?

Ann (Annie) Lennox was born late at night in the Scottish city of Aberdeen on December 25th 1954. An only child, she and her parents lived in a humble two-room tenement house in the industrial area of Aberdeen, where her father worked as a boilermaker in the shipyard. At age four, Annie passed the rigorous entrance exam and gained entrance to the “posh” Aberdeen School for Girls where she was recognized for her talents in poetry, music and drawing. She played the piano and flute in orchestra and military band, sang in the choir, and attended dance classes with Marguerite Feltges who, incidently, introduced her students to a Greek form of dance known as “eurhythmics.” In 1971, at the age of 17, Annie Lennox left Scotland to attend the Royal Academy of Music in London, where, in her words, she felt “somewhat misplaced” and “for three slow years...painfully struggled...perplexed and baffled as to what I was supposed ‘to do’ with my life.” Just weeks before her final exams she left the Royal Academy and “spent the next three years looking for something better to do.”  During that time she met David Stewart, and the rest became pop-cultural music history.

Annie Lennox works tirelessly and has received a variety of awards and recognitions for her charitable and humanitarian work fighting poverty, supporting education, raising awareness of HIV and AIDS, and promoting peace, human rights and social justice. As a long-time public supporter of Amnesty International and Greenpeace, she and Dave Stewart donated all  profits from Eurhythmics’ 1999 Peacetour to these two groups.  After hearing Nelson Mandela in 2003 describe the AIDS pandemic in S. Africa as genocide, with women and children as the “frontline victims,” Lennox experienced a turning point in her life and became an important HIV/AIDS activist. Inspired by Nelson Mandela’s 46664 Campaign and Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), both human rights groups promoting education and healthcare for people affected by HIV in South Africa, Annie Lennox invited 23 of the most internationally acclaimed female vocal artists including Madonna, Celine Dion, Joss Stone, and Pink to join her in recording the song “Sing.”



Later that year, in December 2007, Lennox established the The Sing Campaign, an organization dedicated to raising money and awareness for and giving voice to women and children affected by HIV and AIDS. Since 2007, SING has raised million of dollars world-wide. The money raised by SING specifically helps prevent the spread of HIV in South Africa, but the awareness that SING raises in countries all around the world is just as important. One of SING’s aims is to increase global action to support infected and affected women and children, especially in the UK. See http://www.annielennoxsing.com/about-sing for more info and how you can help this cause.

This Awesome Woman currently holds titles as Oxfam Ambassador, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for AIDS, Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Scotland, Ambassador for HIV/AIDS in London, and UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador. Annie Lennox also receives global recognition for her humanitarian efforts and achievements:  In 2009 she received Save the Children’s  “Amigo do los Ninos” award, given the “Freedom of the City of London” award by the British Red Cross, and was presented with the “Nobel Woman of Peace Award,” each recognizing her services to humanity in the field of HIV and AIDS. In 2010 she was named Barclay’s Woman of the Year, GQ magazine’s Charity Woman of the Year, and received Harper’s Bazaar Lifetime Achievement Award. Most recently, on June 28, 2011, Lennox received the prestigious Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, for her work as an Oxfam Ambassador fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13940772).

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054?view=doc&id=10150315296358055

Joan Baez

Awesome Woman of the Day is Joan Baez, (b 1941) Joan Baez is a singer who possesses one of the most incredibly beautiful voices of our time. She was a full fledged member of the 60s folk movement. She introduced Bob Dylan to audiences (and was romantically involved with him for several years) and and influenced singers such as Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt.

This very talented woman throughout her career gave unselfishly of her time and resources to causes she believed in.

Her first act of civil disobedience was in high school when she refused to leave her classroom for an air raid drill, believing the bomb scares were government propaganda. She was also active in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley.

In the 1950s after hearing Martin Luther King speak about civil rights and social justice, and the nonviolent movement, was so moved that she marched with Dr. King and demonstrated with him at many civil rights demonstrations including the march from Selma to Montgomery.

She performed “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March On Washington. Her recording of “Birmingham Sunday” was used in spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls”

In 1966 the worked with Cesar Chavez for the migrant farm workers and preformed at a benefit on their behalf.

In the anti-war movement Ms Baez was a vocal and active supporter. She advocated withholding taxes used for war and withheld sixty percent of her own. She founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and encouraged draft resistance. Her husband David Harris went to prison for resisting the draft.

Joan held a free concert at the Washington Monument in 1967 protesting the war. It was attended by 30,000 and opposed by the DAR. She marched and demonstrated in many anti-war protests, ending with the “War Is Over” celebration in 1975. When she visited North Viet Nam in ’72 to deliver Christmas mail to POWs and was distressed at the level of human rights violations. Unlike some on the left at that time, she organized a full page advertisement of those atrocities. Ms Baez has been a staunch critic of human rights violations of countries on both left and right. In Chile, Brazil and Argentina she was prevented from performing and subjected to death threats. She has traveled the world bringing food and medicine to troubled regions.

Joan has been a fierce advocate for Gay and Lesbian rights since the late 70s. As in her other causes, she has appeared and organized benefits for them.

In 2006 Joan received the Distinguished Leadership Award from the Legal Community Against Violence for her lifetime of work against violence.

Joan Baez has been and continues to bring light to dark places, and, by the way, continues singing.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054?view=permalink&id=10150314428918055

Charlotte Badger

♥ ♥ ♥ The Awesome Woman of the Day is Charlotte Badger (1778 - unknown) She is credited with being one of the first two European women to settle in New Zealand..and for being a pirate! Born in Worcestershire, England, she was imprisoned at 18 years old; her crime was housebreaking, her spoils – several guineas and a silk handkerchief. The offence was deemed a felony and as such she was sentenced to seven years transportation. After spending some time incarcerated within her own country, Charlotte boarded the convict vessel ‘Earl of Cornwallis’. The journey ahead lasted a gruelling 206 days before finally arriving at Port Jackson in New South Wales, Australia.

In 1881 she began to serve out her sentence at the Parramatta Female Factory, where she befriended a fellow inmate by the name of Catherine Hagerty. It was also during her time at Parramatta, that Charlotte became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. This swayed authorities to reduce her incarceration and she, along with Catherine Hagerty, was reassigned as house servants to a settler in Hobart.

In April of 1806 she again sailed through Port Jackson, this time aboard the ‘Venus’ along with her child and a small group of male convicts. One account of the ship's captain, Captain Chase, says that he was a sadist who relished beating his female passengers for the entertainment of his crew. At Port Dalrymple, on the north coast of Tasmania, the convicts mutinied and took control of the ship. Accounts vary, but Charlotte and Catherine appear to have been willing participants. One version of events had Badger dressed as a man and flogging the Captain Chase.

The mutineers fled across the Tasman where the women, their partners and Charlotte's child were dropped off at Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands. Thus it is thought that Charlotte; her daughter and Catherine inadvertently became the first ever female white settlers in New Zealand. Haggerty died around April 1807, and it seems that their male companions left. Charlotte lived with a Nga Puhi chief and refused to be brought back to live in European society on at least two occasions before disappearing from the record. One account claims that she went to America with a whaling captain. A report from an Australian vessel that visited Tonga in 1816 tells of a ‘a large 'stout' English woman with a little girl of 'eight or nine' who had landed there some ten years earlier'.

As for the Venus mutineers, they carried on down the coast, kidnapping two Nga Puhi women who were sold to southern chiefs and subsequently eaten. The same fate befell the mutineers when the Venus finally ran out of luck.

http://www.suite101.com/conten​t/charlotte-badger-felon-pirat​e-and-pioneer-a188705

Charlotte Badger Felon, Pirate and Pioneer

www.suite101.com

Follow the twisting tale of the woman who would in turn become Australia's first female pirate and New Zealand's very first female settler.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/groups/343338393054?view=permalink&id=10150312867363055

J.K. Rowling

Today’s WOD is ♥ ♥ J. K. Rowling (Joanne "Jo" Rowling) born 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England. She is the author of the wildly popular Harry Potter Series. The Harry Potter series has won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies but most importantly she got kids to READ. She caused an overnight sensation with her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorceror's Stone in the United States), which rose to the top of the children's best-seller lists in 1998. Even before publication, publishers in the United States were competing for rights to the book, with the top bidder paying one hundred thousand dollars—the most ever for a first novel by a children's book author. Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on benefits to multi-millionaire status within five years.

Joanne K. Rowling grew up with a younger sister and an intense interest in storytelling. Rabbits played a large part in her early tales, for Rowling and her sister badly wanted a rabbit. Her first story, at age five or six, involved a rabbit named, quite logically, Rabbit, who got the measles and visited his friend, a giant bee named Miss Bee. Rowling said in J. K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter , "Ever since Rabbit and Miss Bee, I have wanted to be a writer, though I rarely told anyone so. I was afraid they'd tell me I didn't have a hope."

From Tutshill Primary, Rowling went to Wyedean Comprehensive School. A quiet and unathletic child, English was her favorite subject, and she created stories for her friends at lunchtime, tales involving heroic deeds. Contact lenses soon sorted out any feelings of inferiority in the young Rowling; writing became more impulsive and less of a hobby in her teenage years. Attending Exeter University, Rowling studied French after her parents had advised her that bilingualism (speaking two languages) would lead to a successful career as a secretary.
Working at Amnesty International, Rowling discovered one thing to like about life as a secretary: she could use the computer to type up her own stories during quiet times. At age twenty-six, Rowling gave up her office job to teach English in Portugal. It was there that she began yet another story that might become a book, about a boy who is sent off to wizard school. All during the time she spent in Portugal, Rowling took notes on this story and added bits and pieces to the life of her main character, Harry Potter. In Portugal she also met the man who became her husband, and they had a daughter. They later got divorced.

Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew." Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life”. – J. K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address, 2008.

Back in England, Rowling decided to settle in Edinburgh and prepared to raise her daughter as a single mother. Accepting a job as a French teacher, she set herself a goal: to finish her novel before her teaching job began. This was no easy task with an active toddler in hand. Rowling confined her writing to her daughter's nap time, much of it spent in coffee-houses where the understanding management allowed her space for her papers. She was able to send off her typed manuscript to two publishers before beginning her teaching post, but it was not until several months later that the happy news arrived: her book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, would be published in England. And then a few months later, the American rights were bought for an amazing price, and Rowling said good-bye to teaching.

In November 2001, Harry Potter gained even more fame when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone graced the big screen as a major motion picture. Rowling's magical creations cast a spell over theatergoers as the movie was both a commercial and critical success. The film was extended to a series of films based on the entire book series, which Rowling had overall approval on the scripts in the series of films as well as maintaining creative control by serving as a producer on the final instalment. Rowling lives in Scotland with her daughter, Jessica, and second husband, Neil Murray, whom she married in December 2000.

In October 2010, J. K. Rowling was named 'Most Influential Woman in Britain' by leading magazine editors. She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and Lumos.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2257955294379&set=o.343338393054&type=1

Christiane Amanpour

The Awesome Woman of the Day is Christiane Amanpour (born January 12, 1958), a broadcast journalist well known around the world for her coverage of major conflicts and world events since 1990, as international correspondent at CNN for years and currently as anchor  of ABC's This Week.  Amanpour has navigated war zones, built an unparalleled network of worldwide connections, excelled in a hugely male-dominated profession, and gone face-to-face with world leaders fearlessly asking the hard questions. And she has also on many occasions taken the risk of breaking the "neutral journalist" mold by reporting from her own point of view and expressing her own conscience, in defiance of the old meme that if a reporter has a personal opinion on a situation they must keep it to themselves. She is brassy, outspoken, and brave.

Amanpour was born in London (or, by some accounts, in Tehran) to an Iranian father and British mother. She spent her early years in Iran, receiving an elite education as her family was among the privileged class under the Shah's regime. Her family emigrated to England on the eve of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In England, Amanpour attended the New Hall School, the country's oldest Catholic school that has educated girls since the year 1642. She then traveled to the United States to study at the University of Rhode Island, and graudated summa cum laude in 1983 with a degree in journalism.

Very soon after graduating, she was hired as an entry-level desk assistant on CNN's foreign desk in Atlanta, Georgia (1983) and gained rapid recognition and major opportunities early on. After an assignment covering the Iran-Iraq war, by 1986 she was transferred to Eastern Europe to cover the fall of Soviet Communism, and she remained in Europe into 1989 reporting on the democratic revolutions on that continent. Her achievements landed her a role as a correspondent for CNN's New York bureau, and very soon afterwards she was shipped out again to serve as CNN's foreign correspondent covering the Gulf War as it commenced in Iraq.

Amanpour quickly gained recognition and notoriety for her gutsy style of journalism, for her bravery in the field (even parachuting into conflicts), for her poise and incisiveness when interviewing officials and leaders, and for allowing herself to occasionally report quite emotionally on difficult events. After the Gulf War she was promoted to the position of being CNN's chief international correspondent (a position she held until she departed CNN in 2010), and she was sent to cover the Bosnian War.

Deftly moving between the field and arranged interview, on worldwide live TV in perhaps her most famous moment she challenged President Clinton (on his own "Global Forum" show) regarding U.S. policy on the Bosnian war. Locking eyes with him across the satellite signal, she asked one of the most ballsy questions in the history of broadcast journalism:

Mr. President, my question is, as leader of the free world, as leader of the only superpower, why has it taken you, the United States, so long to articulate a policy on Bosnia? Why, in the absence of a policy have you allowed the US and the West to be held hostage to those who do have a policy - the Bosnian Serbs - and do you not think that the constant flip-flops of your administration on the issue of Bosnia set a very dangerous precedent and would lead people such as [North Korean president] Kim II Sung or other strong people to take you less seriously than you would like to be taken?"

An angered Clinton responded coldly, "No, but speeches like that may make them take me less seriously than I'd like to be taken. There have been no constant flip-flops, madam." This exchange is worth watching -- Amanpour has it posted to her Facebook page. To cut Clinton a break, he did pretty well at recovering from her unsettling challenge. Also, near the end of the program Clinton returned to what she had said. "That poor woman has seen the horrors of this war, and she has had to report on them... She's been fabulous. She's done a great service to the whole world on that. I do not blame her for being mad at me. But I'm doing the best I can on this problem from my perspective."

Amanpour fell under some pretty strong criticism after this broadcast, and was accused of lack of objectivity -- many felt she was reporting too emotionally and that she had an agenda in favor of the Bosnian Muslims and was biased against the Serbs. Amanpour explained in a 1996 article in The Ouil that the Serbs denied CNN and other Western media better access to the territory they controlled, and she believed the Serbs "did themselves an incredible disservice."

Also in that article, Amanpour answers in response to the charges of bias: "The very notion of objectivity in war becomes immensely important... I have come to believe that objectivity means giving all sides a fair hearing, but not treating all sides equally. Once you treat all sides the same in a case such as Bosnia, you are drawing a moral equivalence between victim and aggressor. And from there it is a short step toward being neutral... So objectivity must go hand in hand with morality."

Since that time, Christiane Amanpour has covered wars, conflicts, genocides, strife, political upheavals, and other heavy aspects of the human story around the globe, before settling in to anchor studio-based work towards the end of her time at CNN and now at ABC. She has scooped some of the hottest political interviews in recent history. But whether working in the field with bombs exploding all around her, or sitting at a desk in the United States, she gets to the heart of the matter, engages people, and does not shy from the most important job in journalism -- holding politicians' feet to the fire while demanding answers to the uncomfortable questions.

---

Personal footnote: I met Christiane Amanpour, who was friends with an Iranian co-worker of mine, for a brief moment in 1990 when she was about to depart to cover the Gulf War. She had come to say goodbye to my co-worker. I was introduced, and was bowled over by the woman's aura without even knowing who she was. Then she and my friend continued a private conversation in hushed tones in the doorway of the office. After she left I learned some private details that I will not share here, but I can say that in order for Amanpour to accept her first war zone assignment, she was braving not only the potential dangers of the gig, but also huge personal changes were also involved. She was truly stepping off a cliff, and doing so with her characteristic (but not callous) moxie, which explained for me the energy that shimmered all around this awesome woman.

AWU post and comments at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2240209604994&set=o.343338393054&type=1