This past weekend, I joined a group of 15 feminists with the organization Sovereign Women Speak to travel around Washington State on a party bus, getting off at several locations to have speakers’ corners, offer our non-commerical literature to interested passers-by, and at one point, march in a parade chanting, “We are adult human females. We want our sex-based rights.”
After this parade, we went to a public park where there were by-permit private commercial booths set up offering services and goods for sale. We split up to approach passers-by to request conversations (always take no for an answer!) and offer literature to people who had said yes to a short conversation. When doing this sort of work, the most critically important messages you can send to a stranger are social-pragmatic. That is the domain where you will be communicating to them that you understand society and that your vision of the future will consider their needs and preferences, too. You are not seeking to get in a fight with anyone when leafleting (save that for tabling when they can approach you to debate with you - then they started it and you can have at it). After they agree to a short conversation, I just stated very simply that this is our organization, we support women’s rights, that means XYZ (keep it short and to the point), would you like a flyer with more information, and thank you for your time.
While we were engaged in this Constitutionally protected activity of expressing political and religious beliefs freely in a traditional public forum in a non-harassing, non-disruptive manner, we were approached by the mayor of that city and told that we had to stop distributing literature because it somehow was unfair to the local businesses who were paying the city to use this public forum as a marketplace with a structure. We did not have a booth, so we were not being allowed to engage in the activities which required a permit. I would have stood my ground had I been alone, but I was not, so the group elected to simply leave the park so we could continue to distribute our literature.
However, in my view, this was a clear violation by the government of our right to use a tax-funded traditional public forum to peaceably assemble and freely speak. We should not have had to pay $50 in advance for that privilege. By limiting civil liberties of private citizens in a public park, the mayor sent the message that the commons had been split into plots and privately leased to businesses, who now felt they had a greater right to be in the space than the general public. They felt, and the government of that city apparently agreed, that having “paid to play” meant they had a reasonable expectation that the government would suppress unpopular speech that might discourage customers from purchasing from them. Therefore, I followed up with an email regarding what had occurred that led to our early departure from the public forum, and requested an apology, due to the fact that our rights were unreasonably limited by a civic official acting in an official capacity on behalf of private commercial interests.
We were not simply distributing literature, either. We were also enjoying the event as private citizens and spending money at the various booths. However, I have a civil right to peaceably assemble, protest, and petition the government for a redress of grievances. The woman who had organized the event is now concerned about the possibility of retaliation for the fact that we contacted the city government after we had our rights violated. Nothing about that is fair or reasonable. In fact, the mayor was clearly in the wrong, which is why she appealed to the organizer’s enlarged fairness/justice lobe instead of pointing to some written policy that actually reasonably prohibited all private conversations that might involve deliberate sharing of political or religious content, or which restricted our right to coordinate these deliberate message-sendings nor outfits.
Also, a lot of people thought our sashes were nonbinary colors, but in fact they are the American suffragist colors:
There is a long history of collaboration between Iroquois women and the women’s suffrage movement, which had its first major conference in Iroquois country, called the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), for a reason. Seneca are one of the original five nations of the now-6 nation Iroquois confederacy, and Iroquois is a matriarchal culture.
If Iroquois women could be equal partners with men, then so could white women, asserted suffragists in the mid-1800s looking to Native Americans for inspiration in seeking women's rights.
To tell this little known story, an exhibit called "Sisters in Spirit: Celebrating the Iroquois Influence on the Early Women's Rights Movement" is on display at the Urban Cultural Park/Heritage Area Visitor Center in Seneca Falls, N.Y.
"There's no doubt that the white women were extremely aware of the differences in women's roles between the Iroquois and Americans and were strongly influenced by the political power and social status of the Iroquois women," says Robert Venables, a consultant on the exhibit, an expert on the Iroquois and a lecturer in the American Indian Program at Cornell University. "Iroquois women, for example, selected the chiefs and were integral to Iroquois spirituality because the Iroquois creation myth revolves around Skywoman."
For more information on Iroquois matriarchy, whose system was used as a justification by the colonizers for labeling us as uncivilized savages, please read or listen to the post, “Proud to Be a Remix, Part 1: Assimilation was no Simulation,” which is a reading of Dr. Saliha Belmessous discussing the French colonial assimilation project, from which I am descended. Rather than being obliterated and wiped from cultural and historical memory, Iroquois matriarchs have long supported and inspired non-Iroquois White and Black women (as Iroquois, Black and White have never been mutually exclusive categories, due to tribal adoption and intermarriage) in the collective struggle for women’s rights and civil liberties in the United States. We had the recent cultural memory of why it is so vital that women have authority, resources, and control. We showed that sovereign women were not only possible, but better.
We hit up the YMCA to demand they let Julie swim:
We let the women incarcerated with males know they are not alone, they are not bigots, and that we are outraged at the cruel and unusual punishment they are being asked to endure in the name of “accommodating” male people with psychological and developmental disabilities:
And after every protest, we got back on the party bus to let our hair down:
The organization is called Sovereign Women Speak and it is based in Washington. I was at their conference in June as well and learned so much from all the incredible speakers. I really encourage you to check out this organization because they are doing some great work. I was very happy to be able to participate in this day of direct action.
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