We are desperately searching for a new web site home for Catt's Claws and Women of Achievement and Herstory ... there has been a marriage and the new groom doesn't have the time to do the web site anymore. We need a volunteer to do the web site and frankly, I can't pay you. I'm a volunteer. I do all this for free. I get some financial support from your donations but not enough to even begin to pay and keep a large web site going. So we need a web site, we need volunteers to operate the web site, and we need money to pay for it. I'm not asking for ANY money for myself. I never have and I never will. We should be incorporated and a non-profit corp set up to operate the Women of Achievement archives forever and ever. I don't have time. I don't have the money. I live on Social Security after my business was caught in an arson fire and I couldn't collect insurance. (The fire started two stores down. ) So here I am and the question is: "Do you want CC and/or WOA to continue?" If you do, HELP ... or there won't be any archives. It is simple economics and time. -- Irene Stuber, sole writer and proprietor of Catt's Claws and Women of Achievement and Herstory. <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> ........Catt's Claws # 159 ... July 06, 1997......... ........ A Feminist Newsletter by Irene Stuber......... istuber@direclynx.net is solely responsible for its content Archives are found at http://www.imageworld.com/istuber.html <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> <^> It would be a great thing if the women's movement (oxymoron) would object to the way women in the Army sex/rape/harassment scandals are being questioned about their sex histories. Such questions have NOTHING to do with the acts in question. Wasn't NOW and other feminists groups all over the place objecting when President Clinton's lawyer said something about questioning Paula Jones' morals? Or was that National NOW demonstration ONLY because it had the possibility of giving Clinton a black eye, not because a woman's right of privacy was in jeopardy? NOW members had best question why their esteemed leader, Patsy Ireland has such a hard on for Clinton. My sources say she's miffed to the bone because HE didn't give HER the homage SHE thought SHE deserved. But enough of that pitiful, spiteful soul. NOTICE TO NOW MEMBERS AND CHAPTERS - get on the phone, send out letters, faxes - and make phone calls to Congress. Complain that the military is crucifying the complaining women in the sexual harassment cases - grilling them about their personal lives in direct violations to the way that civilian trials are held. The women are being put on trial, not the cheating men. This AIN'T FAIR ... Just the way the pundits are saying that poor General Ralston was treated unfairly because his adultery was all those years ago, but Lt. Flinn got off lucky. Did anyone EVERY say to Ralston, "Stop! You're disgracing your uniform?" No, hell no. They did to Flinn. Ralston got peer support AND TACIT APPROVAL of HIS ADULTERY. Flinn did not. Women's movement - an oxymoron. Women's leaders - a joke. Contact a group that is ACTUALLY doing something: STAMP (Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel) 500 Greene Tree Place, Fairborn, OH 45324, 937-879-9304 http://userpages.ccnet.com/~maryz/stamp.html Chris Lombardi, chrisl@sirius.com, cccowr@peacenet.org, puts out their news releases. "The lives of our members testify to the truth that's come clear: that the system is rotten, and that `command discretion' too often means they can ignore us, retaliate against us, and create scapegoats to avoid full accountability. Recent public attention to the double standard on adultery has highlighted the injustice of the system. I look forward to joining the NAACP, Congresswoman Maloney, and our other colleagues in letting Congress and the public know more - and I'll be offering a proposal for serious, permanent oversight." -- Dorothy Mackey, Director, Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel before she testified before Congress (and the news media virtually ignored). Notice NOW, Feminist Majority, etc., are not shown to be supporting the issue. Strange? . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . I wish I had the time or the health to start a new women's group that would represent and take action on the women's issues of today without having leaders grabbing for the big bucks salaries, expenses, and fringe benefits while ignoring women's lives and problems. But I don't ... Thank GAWD for men like Lawrence Lader who founded NARAL in his living room way back when. He is again LEADING the way. As president of Abortions Rights Mobilization, this 76-year-old MAN announced his group will offer the drug mifepristone to as many as 10,000 women to end their abortions - FREE. FREE! It is under the cover of FDA-approved-research-trials that Lader had requested to get approval of his group's own version of the abortion drug - a research and approval that the WOMEN's MOVEMENT has so badly fucked up - raped. There's just no nice face to be put on the way the RU486 trials/approval/manufacturing has been handled. In 1992 Clinton handed them approval of RU486 on a golden platter ... and "women leaders" screwed it up. Lader's drug will be available for testing in Bellevue, Neb.; Burlington, Vt.; Kalispell, Mont.; New York City; San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, Westchester County, Texas, Maryland and Florida - and other sites with new financing Lader has obtained. The patient must pay nominal doctors fees. May we quote a newspaper article: "We have the money, and this will provide coverage for women in all different parts of the country," said Lader, a longtime abortion-rights advocate whose group, with NOT A SINGLE SALARIED EMPLOYEE, has worked for many years to bring mifepristone to American women." (emphasis mine) The Population Council holds the U.S. patent on the RU486 that Clinton called to be approved five years ago. They have so badly managed the trials and the production problems that it sill isn't approved in the U.S. Remember all those fund-raising letters from Ellie Smeal and the Feminist Majority crying for funds to get RU486 approved? You sent money. And what have you gotten for it? Air. Excuses. Women movement leaders ... another oxymoron and we're morons for believing them. "Obviously, the long-term answer to getting mifepristone to American women will have to come from the Population Council," Lader said in a newspaper article. "We'll get out of the business as soon as they're ready. But who knows when that will be?" Even last September in a valiant attempt to get things going, the FDA said mifepristone was "approvable" as a safe and effective way to end pregnancies of up to seven weeks. The ONLY hitch for approval in the U.S. is for the Population Council getting off its fat salaried butts and doing something. Sandra Waldman, a spokeswoman for the council. "We have no timetable anymore, but we're exploring every possibility." Including turning the whole project over to 76-year-old Lader ... What does this say about women running their own lives? Or the quality of our feminist leadership? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of women in Europe, South America and THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES have used RU486 for years, and years and years ... and here we are in the land of the free without the RU486. ARE WOMEN GETTING SABOTAGED BY THEIR OWN LEADERS? I think so. In fact, I'm positive of it. I say again, keep your checkbooks closed when these constant appeals come through from NOW, The Feminist Majority, NARAL, etc., and concentrate your energies working DIRECTLY WITH the political process. Get involved in party politics: Democrats preferred but there are a LOT of pro-choice Republicans who have had the party reins wrestled from them., Don't stand around waving signs OUTSIDE. Get inside and KICK BUTT. Be a LEADER. VOTE yourself into power and make your views the law. Stop being a professional victim as being sold by the feminist movement. Lader admits to making arrangements for more than 2,000 women to get illegal abortions BEFORE Roe v Wade. How many of our "women leaders" would do anything like that today? No, they vacation in Bangkok, the home of oppressive child-prostitution. . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . WoW! All hell has broken out because a couple of students in a New York City girl's school announced to their parents that they are lesbians. Dr. Gilbert Herdt, a professor of human development at the University of Chicago, said American girls were becoming "agents of their own desires, not acting on the desires of males." He went on to enlighten us on why all-girls schools are getting really bad patriarchal press: If girls are together in single-sex schools, "that enhances the possibilities for getting together." Now do you understand why the nuns and the priests were so strict with you GIRLS in school? How girls aren't supposed to know anything about their bodies. That the clergy actually ENFORCED ignorance on the girls? ... Remember how you weren't supposed to touch yourself "down there" except after going to the toilet or bathing - and then it was to be done QUICKLY! Boys handle their bare-skinned genitalia all the time ... the clergy could have required some sort of cozy over the penis except for the area of the urine stream or require some other sort of way to prevent "inadvertent" sexual arousal through touching - but they never have. Anyone have a lightbulb going off out there? . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . I know it's just coincidence but the news media (far-right controlled with the BIG money) are really propagandizing against everything Chinese. Maybe one of the reasons is that there is a Chinese version of the RU486 pill and they MAY export it to the U.S. of A. Lader has pointed out the Catholic hospitals control about a third of the private bed in this country and would probably boycott any drug company that produced an abortion pill. China couldn't care less. The Chinese pill, developed WITH the help of Roussel-Uclaf, the originators of the RU486, is so close to the original RU486 that patent problems may result. But Roussel is being asked to get cracking with RU486 or get out of the way. Everyone says it's just a matter of time before the RU486 is actually approved ... but time is what a PREGNANT women doesn't have. The news media/pundits - male - don't seem to think time's important in the issue. Let's put their balls in a nutcracker and ask them about time... BTW, wonder why few of the leaders of today's women's movement are mothers? Some as ex-nuns... how ex? . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . Genetic scientists analyzing fragments of the Y chromosome (that's the one that makes a person a male, no matter in what combination it is - drag queens opinions be damned) think they've found evidence that 188,000 years ago there was ONE single "Adam" who started the human race. Eight years ago by using a different method say "they" discovered an ancestral "Eve/Lilith" who lived some 200,000 years ago. Duh ... what happened for 12,000 years? Girls same sex schools???? ;-^ . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . The right-wing religists are such a stupid bunch of hypocrites. They refuse to allow women sex education so they don't know how to protect themselves from the savagery of unrestrained adolescent hormones but INSIST on educating women AFTER impregnation about the fetus (see below in Florida). But NEVER, never, especially on Sunday, will they allow her to be educated about her rights as a human being. Fascinating. Almost as fascinating as the religious hypocrites calling out for people to accept JESUS and then never quoting Jesus but instead preaching the Old Testament (which Jesus supposedly replaced) and Paul - himself a homosexual (according to many biblical scholars). Ironical, ain't it. The Southern Baptists who wave Paul's hatred of women around as a revelation from god wouldn't allow him into Disneyworld. . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . Right-wing religions have their way in Florida, temporarily, we hope. A new law has just gone into effect that REQUIRES a woman seeking an abortion get detailed, religiously affected descriptions of the development of a human fetus. The doctor is supposed to give the dangers of abortion and pregnancy but you'd better believe he will downgrade the terrible rate of maiming that occurs with women in childbirth. (See our regular feature in Catt's Claws about how a million women a year are badly injured.) Those opposing a women's rights are also bitching about the brochure saying it isn't graphic enough. They want actual photographs (?the fake ones dripping blood, etc., that they parade around with in front of women's clinics?). And they sure don't want medical facts such as the size and ability of the fetus to have a developed brain. For example, at 16 weeks - slightly less than 4 months and into the second trimester - the fetus is about 4.5 inches long. Hardly the billboard size the abortion opponents claim. By the way, the woman must be offered the brochure but she does not have to look at it. . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . I thought the shit they were writing about Bill Clinton was bad but have you read about the new piece of toilet paper out about - of all people - Martha Stewart? It's on the best seller list! The author has taken every rumor, etc., to smear the lady who outdid Heloise. My question is - who the hell cares who and what Martha Stewart is. I'm not into the sort of thing she does, but no one is inviting her to dinner and sharing her life when you follow her directions for cooking or decorating. What difference does it make what kind of a person she is privately? The libel laws are such that anyone can write anything about anyone in the public eye and get away with it. The author MR. Jerry Oppenheimer belongs in the trash heap. What did Martha do to him? He's obviously got a problem with women who have ambition. By the way, Oppenheimer was the author of that filth that passed as a biog of Ethel Kennedy. STRANGE isn't it that he attacks women? Wonder who HE sleeps with. . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . Can you imagine? The Boston Red Sox are trying to trade Wilfredo Cordero after "finding out the extent of his domestic violence." Yeah, pass him off to anther city that might not be up in arms about his cowardness of beating a smaller and helpless womEn WHILE THEY WERE PREGNANT. The Red Sox management are still acting surprised although one of their top brass was fully aware of his violence against his wife while in Canada. Now Cordero's first wife, albeit common law who has his child, says that he beat her. She is also asking for a raise in child support to $500 a month since his "second" wife and child are getting $1,350. He earns in excess of $100,000 a month in salary PLUS endorsements, etc. Cordero also beat his first wife while pregnant... she was 15. There's only one way to fight this macho loving violent men that mark the sports scene: don't attend the games. Remember when Shoeless Joe Jackson was barred from baseball for only gambling ... and Pete Rose? This Cordero piece of shit tries to KILL WOMEN - and they won't bar him? . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . What do you know. A woman navy jet pilot who was grounded has now been reinstated to fly land-based Navy aircraft. While the news boyz are asking the silly question about preferential treatment for women (remember that hot dog MAN jet pilot who was cleared of bad flying and then cleared a second time just so he could hot dog again resulting in his crashing his plane into a major American city) they failed to read the report clearing Lt. Corey Lohrenz: She was grounded only one month after getting an outstanding fitness report in May 1995. Some officer - nameless of course - was worried about her landing technique. She charged discrimination. A Navy Inspector General's investigation report released last week said her problems with carrier landings were in a large measure due to stress and that it found a "lack of documentation demonstrating poor performance" on her part. She took the land-based job. I would have too after what happened to Lt. Hultgreen whose carrier jet plane crashed under very questionable circumstances. After all sorts of wild charges - including filthy faxes to Hultgreen's mother - it turned out to be engine failure. Pilots don't maintain their aircraft. One must have complete trust in those maintenance MEN just as you have to have faith in parachute packers. . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . I just love the way tax payer money is being spent. This is part of the daily CDC release on AIDS/HIV: "Surgery Likely for Holyfield "Washington Post (06/30/97) P. D7; Squires, Sally "Boxer Evander Holyfield required 15 stitches in his right ear after being bitten twice Saturday night during a professional bout with heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson Saturday in Las Vegas. The bite has Julio Garcia, the doctor who repaired Holyfield's severed ear, worried about possible infection. THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION SAYS THAT THE CHANCES OF CONTRACTING HIV FROM A HUMAN BITE IS VIRTUALLY INFINITESIMAL, BUT DOCTORS RECOMMEND AN HIV TEST NONETHELESS. Because Nevada's boxing commission requires pre-bout mandatory HIV testing, both fighters were tested before the fight. There is no indication that Tyson tested positive for HIV or any other bloodborne illness." Next time you wonder why the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control which is a U. S. government agency (historically run by misogynistic men who opposed any form of birth control for women) isn't doing more about the growing rate of HIV/AIDS among women, you'll know. They're macho men caring about macho men ... But reread that part I have emphasized ... What about oral sex TO a woman? (not a man but TO a woman). Bet you thought it was dangerous .... Strange that a BITE that breaks the skin isn't dangerous, but an act that doesn't, is ... The URBAN LEGEND that oral sex TO a woman will transmit the AIDS/HIV virus was based on the testimoney of ONE man who CLAIMS he did nothing except have oral sex with prostitutes ... Amazing that CDC. And amazing that our "Feminist Leaders" are allowing such misinformation to go on without doing or saying anything about it. . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . Quoting a writer on an email list I subscribe to: "Did any one see the CNN bit on the Israeli military and the adultery issue? One gentleman concluded that if everyone who had committed adultery quit the military all that would be left were religious fanatics." . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . One in eight women in our country will develop breast cancer during her lifetime, compared to one in 20 a generation ago. And 46,000 American women will die of breast cancer this year. More women are dying of breast cancer than the casualties of American wars ... Time for your monthly breast exam - remember, the breast you examine is the one you want to keep. For those who don't read Women of Achievement and Herstory, B. 02-02-1647, Maria Sibylla Merian, German entomologist and botanical illustrator of extraordinary accomplishments... She actually traveled to Surinam to study insects in their natural settings instead of using dead samples collected by others. She added commentaries to her work ... even including the native women's habit of chewing the seed kernels of a plant called Flos Pavonis (plate 45) which prevented conception and resulted in spontaneous abortions. Note the dates of her life. Have you heard anything about Flos Pavonis???? No? How strange...;-^ ....................... * ........................ For some reason (sic!) the ancient methods of human fertility control has been suppressed, in fact so suppressed that women don't even use logic to combat the absence of such knowledge. We know, for example, that the basic break in woman-to-woman information (oral tradition) occurred during the burning of the witches, i.e., the murdering of women who held knowledge and power, the herbalists, and the midwives during the 14th into the 17th centuries. But the information was recorded in manuscripts and books was not destroyed - It has always been there and has recently been unearthed by MEN scholars. What we don't understand is why feminist scholars of today don't attempt to further unearth the old knowledge and disseminate it to modern women. We'll ignore their past inability to find such knowledge, but continuing the errors is sinful. As John Riddle wrote in an article in Archaeology magazine in 1994, "In ancient times, contrary to what historians have been telling us for the past several centuries, many women practiced birth-control with little interference from religious or political authorities. The knowledge of the plants that allowed them to do so and the lapse of that knowledge by the time of the Renaissance is a story that is only now emerging with clarity." For example, Soranus in the 2nd century A.D. suggested avoiding intercourse during a woman's fertile period, inducing sneezing to expel sperm, wiping out the vagina and drinking something cold. He also suggested smearing the cervix with a mixture of olive oil, astringents, and gums of certain trees such as juniper, cedar or balsam, to close the cervix before intercourse. Many of the things suggested by Soranus for use as vaginal suppositories have been found to have spermicidal by modern chemists. To read more about ancient anti-fertility methods, read John M. Riddle's _Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to Renaissance_, and _The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population_ by Josiah C. Russell. We recommend women buying copies of the books to be put away for the just-in-case future. The religious right is aiming at the presidency in the year 2000. We were sent a great "herbal" abortion pamphlet that we really haven't had a chance to examine closely, but - and this seems to be confirmed by some medical sources - a tablespoon of Wild Carrot aka Queen Anne's Lace seeds after sex will keep you regular. Been used for centuries by farm women. Wild Carrot is that plant with the big white, lacy flowers that grows wild all over the place, along roadsides particularly. (Dogs don't pee that high so collect.) . . . . . . . ^c^l^a^w^s^ . . . . . . . Women's rights are young and tender and we must protect them from the plagues of holy hypocrisy and newts. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- >>> Send your ideas, comments, and news to istuber@direclynx.net for inclusion in the Catt's Claws feminist newsletter which will be emailed up to three times a week. This is NOT an interactive discussion net but an exchange of information. Catt's Claws is NOT sponsored by any organization. We are accepting *limited* donations (only what can be spared) to help offset the online costs of posting Catt's Claws and archiving them. Copyright 1997, Irene Stuber. PO Box 6185, Hot Springs, AR 71902, email istuber@direclynx.net<<<< To receive Catt's Claws by email, write and in the body of the note We thank Jennifer Gagliardi for handling the madding subscription list through her listserv. http://www.imageworld.com/istuber.html