Images from the “Look To the Women for Courage: Stories From the Seneca Encampment for Peace a

Images from the “Look To the Women for Courage: Stories From the Seneca Encampment for Peace and Justice” slideshow presentation, photographed and narrated by Joan E. Biren (1984). Smith College Libraries.“It is clear to me, of course, that you feel that in joining the women-only actions I have, as it were, lost my way. For you feel that these actions contain at their core the element of violence, of hatefulness. You say that those of us who take them ‘manifest, to a greater or lesser degree, an anti-male attitude’ … You adhere, you say, ‘to a perspective that holds that the bond between male and female is biological … fundamental and inescapable.’ … When we come together in women-only circles it is not to try to deny our bond with men; it is to affirm our bond with one another … The bond that has been under threat — for centuries and centuries, for all the centuries of the patriarchy — is the bond between women and women. This bond, too, is fundamental. And biological. (Isn’t it?) But we have been forbidden to affirm it. Our gathering together as we do now amounts in effect to civil disobedience — whether or not we decide, while together, to climb some military fence, block some entrance, commit some act for which we can be sent to jail. For the First Commandment patriarchy expects women to obey is: Thou shalt bond with men — and men only. Thou shalt bond with no other. (We are allowed to bond with ‘their’ children, of course, but — to bond with them only as ‘their’ children.) It’s not irrelevant, I think, that you should have used the word ‘inescapable’ to describe our relation to men. For they have tried to make a natural bond into something more than that — or rather, less than that: tried to make it bondage.”— From “A New Spirit Moves Among Us,” a letter by Barbara Deming about the Seneca Women’s Encampment, printed in Prisons That Could Not Hold (1985). -- source link

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