WOMEN UNSILENCED: Our Refusal to Let Torturer-Traffickers Win

by Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald

354 pages, Hardcover, Paperback,& Kindle.    Publication Date:  August 31,  2021

                        

A review by Judith Ainsworth, Zonta Club of Ottawa

WOMEN UNSILENCED explores the impact of unthinkable violence committed against women and girls through many perspectives—women’s recall of life-threatening ordeals of torture, human trafficking, organized crime, society’s failure to recognize and address such crimes, and close examinations of how justice, health, political and social systems perpetuate re-victimizing trauma. At times raw, painful and shocking, this book is an important resource for those who have survived such crimes; professionals who support those victimized by torturers and traffickers; police, legal professionals, criminologists, human rights activists, and educators alike. It reveals how healing and claiming one’s relationship with/to/for Self is possible.

 

Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald are retired public health nurses whose own experiences helped give voice and understanding to women who have been silenced. The book uses women’s storytelling to educate readers on the unimaginable layers of perpetrators’ modus operandi of violence, manipulation and deceit. They heard from other women who suffered torture when exploited in prostitution or pornographic violence. They defied social willingness to ignore that such violence existed by calling for non-State torture to be criminalised and they use their website www.nonstatetorture.org to promote global awareness.

 

Their ground-breaking work began in 1993, fifteen years before the United Nations Committee against Torture ventured to write, in 2008, that acts of torture committed by private individuals or groups are specific human rights violations. Back in 1993 they could find no literature on how to offer recovery care to women who survived such torture. They made it a goal to break this silence by detailing the intimacies of their recovery work journey offering care, hope and belief to women in WOMEN UNSILENCED.

 

They are often asked how two women—two nurses—who live in a little Canadian Nova Scotia town managed to achieve what they have. Their answer is simple: “We cared!”

Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years that Changed American Women's Lives at Work

 by Gillian Thomas, 2016, 295 pages, paperback, e-book, audiobook

An illuminating study of landmark sex-discrimination cases waged in the wake of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which added three crucial words, "because of sex," to the employment discrimination section. This landmark piece of legislation for working women came at a time when job opportunities were few, career advancement was unheard of, and pregnancy and even marriage could bring about instantaneous unemployment.

 

Thomas, an employment discrimination lawyer, presents 10 cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court to illustrate the early efforts by working women to find some equality and justice in the workplace. These efforts included being able to be hired in jobs once the exclusive domain of men, being protected from sexual harassment, and protected from discrimination for pregnancy

 

In the years since, women have gone on to comprise almost half the country's work force while rising to the highest ranks in every profession. Yet those achievements weren't attained with the mere stroke of a pen. There were real women behind these accomplishments, women who had to sue for the freedoms that Title VII purported to have granted.

 

The author merges the personal stories with the legal intricacies of the litigation and crafts a moving and informative account of a struggle for equality that remains incomplete.

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

By Judith Heumann, with Kristen Joiner, 2020

218 pages, paperback, e-book, and audiobook.

In this moving memoir, Judith Heumann shares the story of her life and her lifelong career as a disability advocate. One of the nearly 43,000 U.S. children affected by the 1949 polio epidemic, she is a paraplegic who has used a wheelchair since childhood. She had remarkable parents, German Jews orphaned by the Holocaust. They refused to institutionalize her as a toddler after her bout with polio and fought for her to get an education in the New York City public schools. They raised her to believe that she could do anything, despite being in a wheelchair. 

Until the 1980, disabled people were largely made invisible, with no easy means of access to the systems of education, transportation, employment, and other things that most people took for granted.

 

Starting with a successful lawsuit in 1970 to gain a New York City teaching license; then leading the 1977 24-day sit-in of the office of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco demanding the enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibited exclusion of anyone from a program that received federal funds; and finally achieving the passage of the American with Disabilities Act in 1990, Judith Heumann played a major role in the struggle to ensure that people with disabilities are treated like everyone else.

She ends her memoir with this inspiring message: ” Change never happens at the pace we think it should. It happens over years of people joining together, strategizing, sharing, and pulling all the levers they possible can. Gradually, excruciatingly slowly, things start to happen, and then suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, something will tip.”

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, by Nadia Hashimi

452 pages, Kindle, paperback or hard cover,

Published 2014

A Review,  by Siobhan O’Hora

This book was recommended to me by my former boss.  She knows how passionate I am about women’s issues and she thought that I would appreciate the nature of this story.  Although this is fiction, it is not hard to imagine the many truths that unfold in the telling of this story.

Rahima and her sisters live in Afghanistan.  Their mother is condemned by her in-laws for only bearing female children and her father is an opium-addicted fighter for a wealthy man who is involved in both the drug trade and politics. Rahima and her sisters only sporadically attend school at the whim of her father and they are very limited in their freedoms because they were born girls.  At 9 years old, Rahima’s mother decides that they are going to invoke the ancient custom of bacha posh.  They cut Rahima’s hair short, dress her in male clothing, and start calling her Rahim.  In essence, making her a boy.  In this transformation, Rahim can then attend school, run and play football with the other boys in the village, freely leave the house to run errands for “his” mother, and even get a small job to help support the family.  In this custom, families with only girls can alter the looks of one of their daughters to be that of a male until they transform back into a girl when she is of marriageable age.

Rahim was not the first one in her family to go through the process of bacha posh.  Her aunt would visit her family and share bits and pieces of the story of their great, great grandmother Shakiba who had also been a girl-boy due to the circumstances of her young life.  Rahim(a) grows up listening to stories about her great great grandmother and over the course of time takes strength from Shakiba’s life story and struggles.

This is a story set in somewhat current Afghanistan as it shares the story of Rakima and how her life in some ways mirrors the life of Shakiba a century earlier.  It is the story of what the life of a girl in Afghanistan is like…the lack of freedom, the abuse, the poverty, the patriarchal rule, early childhood marriage and enslavement.  

As a member of Zonta I was immediately drawn to the plights of both Shakiba and Rahima.  Not only because of the injustices they and other women faced throughout the novel, but because I know that women living in Afghanistan are still living with these struggles to this day.  This is even more pronounced now that the Taliban is back in control of the country.  I felt this book helped me to understand some of the history and culture of this nation.  It touched on familial rules as well as what it was like to live in a male run village, a country under a Shah and how women’s roles have changed over time, yet have still remained somewhat the same.  

I highly recommend this book as a view into the country and culture of Afghanistan and how women are viewed and treated there.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive, by Stephanie Land

2020 - Paperback, Hardcover, and Audiobook   288 Pages

A Review, by guest contributor Jacqueline Wallace, member of the Zonta Club of Oswego.

Stephanie Land's 2020 New York Times best seller autobiography "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive," provides a voice to many who are trying to find their way while struggling below the poverty line. 

The book showcases Land's first-hand experiences of working hard as a single mom in the service industry for little pay while navigating the system and surviving domestic violence. 

Many domestic violence agencies, such as Oswego's OCO inc. Sevices to Aid Families, have hosted discussions on Land's book as a way to shed light on domestic violence and services available for survivors and their families.

The book even caught the eye of former President Barack Obama, and appeared on his Summer Reading List.  He had this to say about it, "A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work."

Netflix has even launched  seven-part series adapted from Stephanie Land's bestselling memoir.  While Maid is based on Land's experiences, it's reminiscent of many people's stories, which the series acknowledges with other characters Alex meets.  It’s no surprise that Land’s modest, straightforward book, with its nuts-and-bolts account of the housecleaning work she took on to support herself and her daughter, has been radically transformed in the Netflix series— only the broadest outlines of her story, along with the usual smattering of arresting or convenient details, have been retained. 

Members of the Zonta Club of Oswego hosted "Maid Book Club: Impact & Resources in our Local Community" with OCO Inc's Services to Aid Families on December 9 as part of Zonta's 16 Days of Activism. The event was facilitated by professionals from OCO, Inc.'s Services to Aid Families

Walk with me: a Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson

 2021, 322 pages, hardback, e-book.

Kate Clifford Larson explores the life of Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in this outstanding book that takes readers on the journey of a woman who was born into the grinding poverty and racism of the Mississippi Delta, and who rose to become the voice of the unheard and the conscience of a nation.

The 20th child of Mississippi sharecroppers, she had to quit school to work in the fields after sixth grade. When she tried to register to vote she was fired from her plantation job and kicked out of the house where she lived. Despite being arrested, brutally beaten, harassed by lawmen and the KKK, she persisted. Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice!

Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadel―her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party―including itsstandard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson―tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionary change.

She was not well educated or a polished orator like many of her fellow activists, but her ability to empathize with the poorest Black men and women, long denied the ability to vote in the South, resonated profoundly throughout the region and rendered her one of the most effective speakers of all.

Hamer's big moment came as she told her life story on national TV as part of the effort to challenge Mississippi's all-White delegation to participate in the Democratic National Convention in 1964.  Her testimony, given while wearing a borrowed dress, eloquently described the oppressive system that kept Mississippi Blacks powerless, and poverty stricken. The group won the right to seat Black delegates at the 1968 convention, and Hamer even ran for office herself.

This very moving book raises important questions about leadership of social movements—should it be top-down, led by ‘elites’, should it be grassroots bottom-up led by ‘the people’ or a combination. A significant question we have yet to answer.

Girl Waits with Gun, by Amy Stewart

"Girl Waits with Gun makes excellent use of history to put a fresh spin on classic cop-and-crook types. Amy Stewart s true-life protagonist is a rough and tumble version of the early twentieth century s New Woman. She is witty, sharply drawn, and suffers no fools! Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist"  Google Books

Girl Waits With Gun is the 1st book in the Kopp Sisters series by NYT best-selling American author, Amy Stewart.   Fiction - 2015, 448 pages, paperback, audiobook, and e-book.  

Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold. She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding fifteen years ago. One day a belligerent and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy, and a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats as he unleashes his gang on their family farm. When the sheriff enlists her help in convicting the men, Constance is forced to confront her past and defend her family — and she does it in a way that few women of 1914 would have dared. A fun book that touches on serious issues.