I’ve tried everywhere to find audio or video of this wonderful song. I know it exists because I used to play it with my kids*. Even without the music though, it’s great. So on this anniversary, with honor, admiration — and awe:
The Ballad of Momma Rosa Parks
(Nick Venet and Buddy Mize, 1963)
In nineteen hundred and fifty-five,
In a southern American town,
A tired colored lady got on a city bus
And immediately sat down,
With a closed mind and an opened mouth
The big bus driver got rough
And told his only passenger
To move to the back of the bus.
cho: When Momma Parks sat down,
The whole world stood up,
What's good for one is good for all,
It's good for all of us.
The lady's name was Momma Rosa Parks,
A hard workin' woman indeed,
She was goin' home, 'twas her goin' time,
She had little hungry mouths to feed,
She wasn't botherin' nobody
And doin' nothin' wrong,
By the Lord's rules of love
When Momma Parks sat down
The whole world stood up.
printed in "Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest" by Tom Glazer
(1970, David McKay Company)
*If you know where I can find it please let me know!
Interesting how the media is characterizing this premeditated act of terror against Planned Parenthood as committed by a “calm and crazy” person whereas the attacks in Paris, including Charlie Hebdo (another workplace targeted for political reasons), were carried out by terrorists who were only characterized as “calm”. The media’s attempt to make the string of fatal attacks against clinics isolated attacks by insane individuals, whereas the string of fatal vigilante attacks by Muslim extremists are considered political acts of terror, is because the media fears being seen as taking sides in the abortion debate.
Then read this:
Here’s the first post I read about this topic – also from Christina Page. Thank you Christina for reminding us all of the importance of words!
The media needs to change this language immediately. They are referring to him as a shooter. He is a terrorist. This language needs to be corrected from the inception (I think behind the scenes so as to not make that the issue). If they start naturally referring to him that way, that’s what we want and that’s what it will be. All of the messengers should just not sway from this language. Terror was understood right from the start in Paris, this is the very same. One officer killed, four officers shot and 4 civilians.
It’s gratifying to hear so many establishment pundits, right and left, advocating the conscious use of the word “terrorist” but if it weren’t for the advocacy from women like Christina and others, who knows how much longer it would have taken to get them to do it?
The sun has set upon Shabbat; now we need a Saturday post. Today is the 28th; Monday is the last day of November and also of NABLPOMO. I’ve managed every day except one Shabbat that I forgot to set up in advance, and have been glad, each day, of the commitment.
It’s so easy to let things go; just look at my very embarrassing WordPress chart: gaping holes all over the place. June is a little better than the rest because we were traveling and my blog is always lively when we’re on the road, but basically it’s a portrait of an undisciplined writer.
Then November rolled around, and with it the opportunity to accept an external structure. I made a promise; it wasn’t a case of writing when I felt like it. I would write every single day.
I love the process, once the idea comes. Of course with most posts I am certain what I’m posting sucks, no matter how often I edit it. Usually, when I read it later, it’s better than I’d thought. Always there’s room to improve, sometimes there’s also real potential. My favorite posts for the month:
Author Ta-Nahesi Coates, whose amazing Between the World and Me has informed (and transformed) much of my perspective on our country today, described his own labors toward writing, and writing “breakthroughs,” here. It has been very helpful to me this month and, I suspect, will continue to be.
The only way to write something is to face down that blank page. Whatever comes out can be altered and edited and re-thought or even rejected. But if it isn’t there, it isn’t there. Every day there’s a decision: shall I make myself sit down here or not? It’s awesome and scary and frustrating which is why the opportunity to pledge a steady month of writing is so valuable. Now I have to figure out how to keep going.
This is Julia. She’s a stylist at Anthropologie, the wonderful, whimsical store frequented mostly by younger women, although lucky are the older among us who show up for bargains and get so much more.
I was there today, my husband safely on the boyfriend couch as I poked around, found a ton of stuff and made my way to the fitting room. Among the crowd and line of shoppers waiting their turn was this woman, headset on, jaunty scarf around her neck. I must have looked as overwhelmed by my choices as I felt because she just plain took charge. Showed me why my sleeves couldn’t be full length, which things should be tucked in and which should be left out. My favorite lesson: “Don’t hide your hips. They’re good.” Miraculous advice for someone who, for at least a decade, wore size 14 jeans. (Not anymore….) I so wish I’d met her years ago; she taught me how to make simple choices that looked great in ways I would loved to have mastered long ago.
Julia herself was fabulous. Her mother was stylist for Lucille Ball, beloved star of the long-running 50’s sitcom I Love Lucy. Avoiding her shadow, Julia became an engineer, rising high in the executive suites of Hughes Electronics. When she retired, she surrendered to the natural gifts and love of style that she had indeed inherited from her mom and went to work as a stylist herself. “I’m having a blast.” she told me.
This, one of my last NABLOPOMO posts, is a thank you note to her for the fun I had and the things I learned through her generous guidance. I have some great new stuff, too.
Sunday night both boys, their wives and kids came for dinner. We won’t all be together for Thanksgiving; one son and his two kids will be with his wife and her family; we’ll be with our other daughter-in-law’s family. So Sunday was special, and it was a lovely evening.
Afterward, for some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Thanksgivings when we were kids. It was always at our house: my parents, my mom’s sisters and their husbands, my grandmother and “the cousins.” There were 9 of us, six girls (I was the oldest) and three boys. My Aunt Bettie, her husband, two sons and a daughter lived in Cleveland; the rest of us were all local, so when the Cleveland Cousins showed up, it was a big deal.
There was a kids table of course. Nobody, not even bossy me, was in a hurry to move to the old folks’ territory. We were having too much fun. In addition to everything else (including games of “Murder” and “Sardines” and lots of running around outside) we planned and performed little dramas every year. I doubt they were very good, but everyone clapped and we had fun.
I wonder about so much now, though: the covert sisterly conversations in my parents’ bedroom, my grandmother (that’s her in the picture), whom I thought had gotten mean but was apparently losing her sight and trying to hide it, the lovely uncle and the wild one, and the impact of the Depression on the sisters and their men. There’s so much of that time that I’d love to see with my grown up eyes: about raising kids and being a grandparent of course, but even more, about what WWII and the Depression had done to them. After all, as I watch events unfold, it’s scary to think how close we are to leaving our kids and theirs to face similar harshness.
I wrote this about them back in 2007, when the last sister died:
In some ways, they were the lucky ones; all three sisters and my father and uncles — were able, on scholarships, to go to college. All three marriages, despite tensions and tough times, survived with a real friendship between spouses for most of their lives. Each had three children who were smart, interesting, and self-sufficient. Even so, the bounty of choices they gave to us was so much more than they had had themselves. The young women in this photograph, and their husbands, never had the luxury of dropping out of school to campaign for Eugene McCarthy or majoring in music or theater or spending years doing trauma medicine a couple of months a year to pay for a life of mountain climbing and exploration. There was no give, no leeway, in the lives of those whom the Depression and the war that ended it – had stamped forever.
I’d give anything to hear it all now. All of it.
I hope we, and our kids, have the guts to be as courageous — and tenacious, as they were.
It’s all horrible, of course; morning news junkies that we are, we dread waking up each day – always sure there will be yet another terrible story to contend with. Anger, fear and grief are only a few of the emotions riding roughshod through all of us, yet Sunday, one story about three young women once again crystalized the hideousness we face.
Labor unions often call their members “brothers and sisters;” and women do it a lot. I can’t count the number of times the words “my sister” or “our sisters” appear in women’s rights pieces and posts and books like Robin Morgan’s classic “Sisterhood is Powerful “— and it is.
Sunday the 22nd of November, a trio of “sisters” appeared on the front page of the New York Times — three friends who fled Raqqa, their home town in Syria and now ISIS Central, and found shelter in Turkey; girls who grew up in houses, not tents, who went out in their summer dresses, and west swimming with the guys — and went to college — girls who are now prisoners of their gender.
Their stories emerge almost bloodlessly: tales of forced marriages, of severed heads, of complete loss of freedom and of the deeply troubling work they did as members of the religious police, taken on to help insulate their families from the terror of ISIS’ fierce punishments, all described in the simplest of terms.
This very unexceptional tone insures that their stories will haunt me for a long time – this tale of three of our sisters, suffering like so many of theirs.
We watched Olivia Pope have an abortion right in front of us, with Silent Night playing in the background; it was unsettling, right? Not just for the irony of the Christmas soundtrack, but also because the song’s “mother and child” were themselves unwelcome. There’s more to these sorts of moments than pretty, sort of symbolic, Christmas music. As usual with Olivia, the truth is complicated.
“Family is the only thing that has kept you alive here.” Huck tells his captive, Olivia’s father Eli. But Eli argues that family doesn’t save us, it’s an “antidote to greatness.” “Family doesn’t complete you, it destroys you” he says.
For Olivia though, destruction is the inevitable outcome of the the stolid White House life, the outfits entombed in the Presidential bedroom, the so-called fairytale life of a First Lady, her very real prison. We see she manages her performance well; we need to know that for her choice to make sense. No she wasn’t leaving because she wasn’t good at First Lady-ing. A bird (even a successful one) in a gilded cage is still locked up.
We always knew (and some of us hoped) that she’d go. Fitz’s questionable worthiness, not withstanding, she had to get out o there! Her life, however twisted, said so much to all of us and taught us this – that this is possible: Olivia Pope doesn’t do shotgun, she drives the car!
Even so, a woman of such stature who had surrendered so much, couldn’t walk away without an amputation – metaphorical – but real too. Alone, telling no one, she chooses to end a pregnancy that no one knows exists. It’s hers. Hers to keep, or not. Hers to speak about, or not. And so as she leaves her pregnancy behind her, so too she leaves a life that has been confining almost to the point of trauma.
As fiercely pro-choice but also a baby addict, I find I surprise myself as I write this. I feel, I see, I know that sometimes choices I’d fight not to have to make myself are life and soul-saving for another.
Eli’s meditation on family is either a counterpoint or a validation of his daughter’s decision. Like the decision itself, it depends on who’s watching. From over here where I am, she made the right choice (because, after all, she had a choice) the right way. Would that every women had the power, and the money, and the access, to do the same.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an enormously compelling figure. How do I know this? Authors Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik have given us the gift of this book, that’s how. Described by the New York Times as “a cheery curio, as if a scrapbook and the Talmud decided to have a baby,” it is a lively, engrossing, humanizing introduction to a revered figure.
Born in 1933, six years before World War II, she remains, at 82, very much a part of our present, and our future. Hers are the shoulders so many of us stand upon, proud of what we’ve fought for for today’s young women and men, parents and professionals, teachers, truckers and temps — all of it so much less than she faced down and conquered. For all of us.
Beyond the exploration of her remarkable intellect and judicial virtuosity, Carmon reveals the warmth, spirit and personal moments that transform an icon into a person. Her unlikely close friendship not only with Justice Scalia but also with his family, is intriguing, of course. The genuine partnership she shared with her husband Mary for 56 years is a unifying thread through much of the book; the story of his last days one of the most moving.
Of course, threaded through the narrative are the legal and policy changes she championed and often brought from idea to reality — and, in recent years, fought, not always successfully, against the reversal of some of them. From her days at Harvard Law School to those on the O’Connor Court, the impact of her passion and intellect is clear.
So. If you want to have fun and be inspired at the same time, or need a gift for anyone who cares about women, or law and policy, or just loves a great story, this is it. (Full disclosure: I DO know Irin but I never expected to write about the book until I read it. Couldn’t help myself….)
Meet the Forward 50 – fifty Jewish Americans designated worthy of special attention as 2015 draws to a close. That “Forward” in “The Forward 50?” It’s The Jewish Daily Forward. A newspaper founded in 1897 as a Yiddish language publication, it has also published in English for the past 25 years, won a ton of awards, and at one time in the 1920’s had a larger circulation than the New York Times!
Every year, most likely as circulation-building clickbait, the paper publishes a list of fifty Jews who are “deeply, loudly and passionately embedded in some of the most pressing political and social issues in the nation.”
Not so unusual, but I was pleased to see that nearly half (21) were women so I decided see who they are, and they’re pretty interesting and modern.
Two of their “Top 5” are women, one an academic, one a star: Princeton professor and newly minted MacArthur “genius” Marina Rustow – who is also the first Jewish Studies person to receive a MacArthur — and our own beloved Amy Schumer.
Four of the six “Activists” are women: Rachel Sklar and her daughter Ruby, Emma Sulkowitcz who carried a mattress – everywhere – through her last years at Columbia University to protest the school’s inaction in her rape allegations. Ruth Messinger, long-time crusader and organizer, who in the 17 years she spent running the United Jewish Word Service, “created a uniquely Jewish way to promote economic and gender equality in the developed world” and street harassment activist Shoshana Roberts .
In general, this is a varied, original and exciting list. Twenty-one of 50 isn’t perfect but what’s kind of cool is how many of these women are closer to the edge not just of Jewish culture but the culture of the US generally. Which is nice, given the battles going on in some other Jewish institutions.
Three “good girls” at Newsweek talking with brief hire Nora Ephron, who left her researcher role for “someplace I can write.”
It’s hard to believe, watching now. Even more than Mad Men, Amazon’s Good Girls’ Revolt is all too familiar. The story of the women of Newsweek and their battle for equality in the newsroom, it’s a heartbreaker, and it’s not because of the huge moments of oppression or betrayal, although they are present. (Through some creative reporting, a young researcher discovers what really happened at the 1969 Altamont Festival that “killed the 60’s.” But the rewrite assignment – and the credit – goes to a guy who never left the building. “That’s how we do things here. We have a process. Men are the reporters – you girls are the researchers.”) The researcher on this story loves the thrill of reporting so much she surrenders everything she’s learned, even though she’ll never get credit for it in the office, much less in print.
Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.
Implicit, explicit and intractable power all in male hands, all the time, permeates every moment of Good Girls Revolt’s pilot episode. We know where their pending revolution is coming from.
Even more frequent than the “big stuff” were the small assumptions, dismissals, insults and slights that eat away, day by day, at confidence and ambition and hope.
Four women in a hallway conversation greeted by the boss: “Hello, my little coven.”
The Managing Editor sending his best researcher, who keeps her reporter partner (and lover) safe and “his” stories on the cover, for coffee. “Black, two sugars, right?”
“Sweetie,” “honey,” “cutie.”
A husband who “gives his wife a year” to write a novel before moving her to Connecticut to raise babies, but then puts a hole in her diaphragm so she’ll be pregnant before that year ends.
Three guys hungrily ogling a smart, but lovely women as she tries unsuccessfully to make it through the newsroom without incident.
Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.
For me it was a very sweet 60 Minutes producer sitting next to a very pregnant me in the newsroom and urging me not to come back to work – to stay home like his wife did. Or the executive who called with sympathy for my miscarriage and told me that, pregnant woman that I’d been, I shouldn’t have been working so hard – as if I was my fault. (His assistant asked me if I’d even wanted the baby at all.)
In addition to newsroom battles, this introductory episode takes us to a “consciousness raising” meeting, led by a pregnant “Eleanor Holmes Norton” and featuring, like a 12-step program, the telling of individual stories of humiliation, discrimination and sexual harassment.
Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.
In my own community, oppressive sexual relationships between researcher and producer weren’t frequent, but they weren’t rare, either. They almost never ended well. One correspondent told me at a bureau Christmas party “I’d really love to sleep with you. Really. But I never dip my pen in the company inkwell.” He thought I’d be impressed.
We need this show – and so do our daughters and nieces and sons and nephews and husbands and young friends. Here’s how Buzzfeed’s Ann Helen Peterson ends her piece on the show:
Good Girls Revolt may be about a bunch of accidental revolutionaries. Its politics may be embroidered with melodrama, and romance, and fixation on clothes. But, then again, so is life. And that doesn’t make the show, or the work of the women behind the scenes, any less feminist — or necessary.
As [production designer Jeannine] Oppewall says, “Sometimes I look at my nieces, who don’t quite yet see the amount of work it took for us to pull this off, and I’m like, ‘You better have a look at the past, because if you’re not vigilant, the past can always be your future.’ You gotta babysit it and talk about it and push it and make it seem like this is absolutely the way it should be.”
