Sisters4Sisters

Crone’s Council

In the month of April 2022, I attended the feminist weekend of sisterhood and solidarity Sisters 4 Sisters. Women from across the US, coast to coast, north, south, and central attended this event. The first women I engaged with were mothers, grappling with relationships with their children who have declared themselves to be “trans”.
Saturday’s schedule included public events. Participants in Sisters4Sisters, a weekend of feminist activism, spoke about what’s on their minds after the Courage Calls to Courage panel discussion ended at the Madison Public Library. Here is a link to WLRN Women’s Liberation Radio News where you can find excellent coverage of Courage Calls to Courage and the Speaker’s Corner speak out, as well as interviews with women who created and participated in this weekend of feminist solidarity: https://www.youtube.com/womensliberationradionews

Sunday’s conference was women only and closed to the public.
I was invited to be a part of a panel discussion, called The Crone’s Council. The Crone’s Council included four women, three long time powerful lesbian activists and me. Being included in this company was truly humbling, and a great honor. Due to time constraints we were unable to address all the superb questions posed by the moderator. I was so inspired by these questions that I have decided to present my full responses here as a CPR Blog post.

When did you first join the feminist movement and why?
I thought I had joined the women’s movement in my teens when my mother gifted me a copy of Our Bodies Our Selves. I thought I had acted on that membership when I made my reproductive choices. I chose to have an abortion then later chose to carry pregnancy to term in my mid and late 20’s when I was ready to parent. I chose home birth and selected a lay midwife before lay midwife-assisted home birth was legal in the State I resided in. I gave to women’s organizations and supported the struggles of my lesbian sisters. I now realize that I was simply benefiting from the hard-won gains of the second and even the first wave of feminism. I didn’t truly join the movement until a stage production based on Derrick Jensen’s Endgame and created by a radical lesbian theatre troupe, Vox Feminista, turned me into a radical environmental and social activist. I didn’t really understand radical feminism until I listened to Lierre Keith’s radical feminist history and analysis as I engaged with DGR, Deep Green Resistance. I practiced the foundational tools of the movement, listening to women and participating in women’s only discussions and circles. I have come so far with my sisters in this way.

What attracted you to the struggle for women’s liberation?
What initially attracted me to the struggle for women’s liberation were the gains made in women’s right to bodily autonomy, reproductive choice, and equal pay goals that would benefit me as an individual woman.

What did you think the goals of the movement were when you first got involved?
I thought the goals of the movement were liberal, about an individual woman’s choice and empowerment as well as fair treatment under the current structure of our culture, by the law, by employers.

What do you think the goals are now?
Now that I am a political radical, I think that the goal of the movement is the complete overthrow of patriarchy and I would go even further to set the goal of replacing it with truly egalitarian life giving cultures in which violence against women, the oppression of women is inconceivable.
What has changed in your lifetime for women for better and for worse?
For the vast majority of women nothing has changed at all. Hauntingly we are on the brink of losing abortion rights, the reproductive choices that attracted me to the movement almost five decades ago. The situation is nightmarishly worse. With the advent of transgenderism, we have gone from the old boss of female enslavement to the new boss of female erasure. The war on women has even more weapons now.

What do you think the movement has done well?
I think that the movement has done a brilliant job of defining the problem, patriarchy, and all the means it uses to destroy women and girls. I think that women have been wildly creative in developing tools, mobilizations, organizational methods, and instruments of resistance to fight back.

Where has it failed?
It has failed to galvanize women into a massive collective, ungovernable under patriarchy and big. strong. and organized enough to create a self-sustaining oppositional society. We need to swear allegiance to each other and to our mother and accept all the risks and responsibilities that this will entail.

The other three women on the Crone’s Council were lesbians and longtime veterans of women’s struggle for emancipation. Their answers were so different from mine and listening to their stories was such a gift.

How would you answer these questions? What can we learn from each other and our experiences? CPR (and women everywhere) would love to hear from you!