Madison WI Branch WILPF Spring 2014 NEWS Women`s

Madison WI Branch WILPF
Spring 2014 NEWS
Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom
MARK YOUR CALENDARS: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY DINNER
3rd annual free community
International Women’s Day dinner
FRIDAY March 7, 2014 4:30—8:00
St. Mark’s Church
605 Spruce St Madison WI
March is WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH
Celebrating Women of Character, Courage, and
Commitment is the 2014 National Women’s History
Project theme. So let’s talk, sing, talk, eat, talk
some more and share what’s happening now in
our own lives. And let’s honor and remember the
world’s extraordinary women.
Everyone Welcome! Donations appreciated.
Please use the dinner poster page to keep as
a reminder, to duplicate, or to share!
How WILPF got started celebrating IWD
March 8 is a national holiday in many countries.
It's often celebrated like our Mother's Day but
extends to honoring all women. It is a day to pay
homage to women for "holding up half the sky."
About four years ago, I saw a film at the Goodman South Library
"A Powerful Noise."
It documented the grassroots efforts of
three women from Viet Nam, Mali,
and Bosnia to address critical women's
issues in their societies: from AIDS to
abuse of uneducated country girls living in the slums of Bamako, Mali to
rebuilding a war-devastated community: "three very different lives, three
vastly different worlds, but ... [they all are]
overcoming barriers to rise up and claim a
voice in their societies." This movie made a
powerful noise in my heart.
Contents
In that same time period, I heard Sister Josephe Marie Flynn of Milwaukee speak on
U.S. immigration policy and its effects on
people she personally knew. In her book
Rescuing Regina, Flynn documented her
church's efforts to help one of its members,
a young mother from Congo who was
threatened with deportation. Sister Josephe's neighborhood held a free International Women's Day dinner that drew 475
people! Plenty of food for thought here, I
thought! Six months later I approached
WILPF with the idea of collaborating on an
International Women's Day event, and here
we are, getting ready for the third annual
free event!
See you there!
WILPF Madison comes of age @
www.WILPF-Madison.org
2
WILPF/JAPA news
Chicago in April
Drones
2
Regional, National 3
news
WI Book Fest
JAPA session
Calendar; important upcoming
events
4
Insert: IWD 2014
dinner poster
Pamela Gates [pml.gts@gmail.com ]
It is exciting to present the new WILPFMadison Website, with the hope that members and partners can keep better informed
about local, regional, national, and international events, actions, and programs. Please
take a look and provide input to help make
it more useful. As part of this project, we
plan to create an archive of WILPFMadison's activity to compliment other
Women's History work happening in Wisconsin right now. Send suggestions, memoirs, photos, and/or ephemera to
dacezeps@gmail.com or Dace Zeps, 3013
Worthington Ave, Madison, WI 53714.
President’s
column
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2014 Jane Addams
Children’s Book Awards
Page 2
This spring The 2014 JA Awards will be announced in
a live feed from James Madison University in Virginia
on Saturday, April 26. James Madison is the home university of the selection committee
chair,
Marianne
Baker who will
announce the winning and honor
titles. You can participate on line!
Or you can join us
at Jane Addams'
Settlement House
in Chicago. The Madison WILPF Branch is in the
midst of making plans along with the Education Coordinator and School Director of Hull House Museum for
a concurrent announcement event in Chicago. For more
information contact Susan Freiss 608 609-7961.
President’s Column
As you probably know, WILPF becomes a 100year-old organization next year, April 2015. Many celebrants will gather where it all began at the Hague, the
Netherlands, for a WILPF World Forum and to mark the
occasion. Most of us will celebrate a bit more modestly
and throw a local party of some sort. The Madison
branch is just beginning to think what we might do. In
spite of some recent disagreements suffered by the U.S.
Section, Jane Addams’ legacy will continue to remain
vital, and indeed necessary, to the whole world.
We have long made a practice of sending this
newsletter to anyone who has expressed an interest in
WILPF’s work. I used to get it as a non-member until I
was arrested for protesting the impending attack on Iraq
(in 1991) along with then-branch president, Ardelle
Hough. She told me if I wanted to stand trial alongside
her (with three others, we were the ‘Federal Building
Five’) I would certainly have to become a local WILPF
member. I did, of course. $35, the recommended annual fee, seemed a lot of money at the time; but dues now
are payable on a sliding scale from $15 to $150 as you
are able. To help keep the oldest women’s peace group
in the world true to its beginnings and be part of its
struggle to stop and prevent all war, we need you – your
efforts, your interest, your membership.
Nancy Graham [ ncg_53704@yahoo.com ]
Jane Addams Partnership with
Educators in New Mexico
This summer while participating in the Literacies for
All Institute at Hofstra University, I had the pleasure of
meeting Drs. Anita Hernandez and Jose Montelongo
from New Mexico State University. And they had the
pleasure of learning about the Jane Addams Children's
Book Awards!
As editors of The New Mexico Journal of Reading,
Anita and Jose invited me to write an article which we
entitled The Jane A ddams Children's Book A wards:
Toward a Peace and Justice Curriculum and which
was published this fall. Check it out at:
http://www.janeaddamspeace.org/jacba/links.shtml
In the months following our meeting, Jose was very
busy creating a database of Spanish-English cognates
for seventy of the Jane Addams winning and honor
books for young children. This database is ready to go
for English speaking teachers' use as they help their
Spanish speaking and English speaking students build
their vocabulary. What a gift ---the ability to give children access to rich vocabulary while sharing stories of
social justice! Jose's database is available on line at:
http://www.angelfire.com/ill/monte/
janeaddamscognates.html
Susan Freiss [freisss@tds.net ]
Join or renew online:
http://wilpfus.org/
Join or renew locally: contact treasurer
Mary Anne at
elc@charter.net or 608 358-5100
On a frigid January morning,
Madison WILPF members
accompanied Wisconsin Coalition to Ground the Drones to
the offices of both US Rep
Mark Pocan and Sen Tammy
Baldwin to brief their staff on
the criminal aspects of drone
warfare, the cost in dollars and
morale to Wisconsin and to
inform them about WI Coalition's 2 year campaign to resist the
drone training facility being built at Fort Douglas near Tomah.
L e t p ea ce be gi n w i t h u s
WILPF was proud to sponsor a 2013 Wisconsin Book
Festival session
held at Room of Ones Own.
Jenny Peterson, co-teacher with WILPFer Susan Freiss at
Stoner Prairie Elementary, with her students read, discussed
and modeled how they participated
in the selection process for the
winning JAPA young children’s
title EACH KINDNESS. Thank you
to these students and their teacher
for adding to our reading experiences and our festival! Stay
turned for next year’s invited author session!
UN gender equality news feed
Do you sometimes wonder why women’s lives are not
more often featured in mainstream media stories?
A service of WomenWatch, the UN Internet Gateway on
Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women, the UN
gender equality news feed is an in-depth source of information to find out what’s really happening with half the
world’s population.
It “collects gender equality-related news from individual
RSS news feeds in the UN system and displays a combined
up-to-date news list on a single web page and in a single
news feed.” Access the main news page or subscribe to the
RSS feed at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/
WILPF National Board news & update
Late last summer, several WILPF members (most of them
long-term “old-timers”) became aware that the national
board of directors (WILPF-US) had severed the 58-year relationship with their fiscal sponsor, the Jane Addams Peace
Association (JAPA), and had contracted a new fiscal sponsor, the Peace Development Fund. Considering this a final
straw on a number of other seeming failures, a group calling
themselves Concerned Members began a petition seeking
the recall of the whole board. This was a legal and legitimate move according to our by-laws. Ten percent of our
national membership (given as being nearly 1,500 at that
time) would be 150 or so. When that number of signatures
had been collected, the petition was formally submitted to
the board with a request that a special membership meeting
be set to vote for the recall. The meeting was duly established by the board for January 25, 2014.
Although the board reversed itself later and told the members this was not a legal meeting, about 140 members did
indeed call into the phone conference on Jan. 25, and the
final vote was 129 for recall, plus 20 or so ‘nays’ and abstentions. An interim board of four officers was established
in the same phone meeting. They will be in office until
sometime in April, if the election is not held up in court.
One Member’s Perspective ~ Fall 2013
Minneapolis Regional WILPF meeting
My friend Rajah Farah and I were among several Madison WILPF members who drove to the regional meeting.
Friday evening, we met and had dinner with other
WILPF women from MN, IA and MI branches. It was
there that I met Corin Kagan, one of the women who participated in the Helsinki to Beijing WILPF Peace Train in
1995. This was the first time that I learned about the
Peace Train, which took 223 women and 9 men of International WILPF to the Beijing Conference on Women.
What a thrilling lifetime experience! That conference
resulted in a declaration of rights for women, with many
goals for change. It’s now been nearly 20 years, and I
am sure many of the goals have not been reached, though
there have been dramatic changes in some countries. On
Saturday, Alice Karakas talked about her years as a
WILPF lobbyist when she was often called to the White
House to give input on issues of concern to women from
her Washington, DC office . Both are the kinds of things
I’d like our current U.S. WILPF to be doing.
Saturday morning was spent on reports from various
branches, and from the national issues committees on the
Middle East and Disarmament. The Minneapolis branch
reported on their major art project Women and Water
Rights, an art exhibit of 55 artists that has now traveled to
8 states. This was valuable and inspiring to hear the
kinds of things other WILPF branches are doing.
Saturday afternoon we discussed issues with the current
National Board - it’s decision to sever the long relationship with Jane Adams Peace Association as fiscal agent,
bylaws changes without member involvement, the declining number of current US WILPF members, the need for
more office staff, etc. were discussed. I only hope that
changes come and we can restore US WILPF to the kind
of unity a peace organization should have.
Eleanor White [whiteea@inxpr ess.net ]
Concurrently, the normal WILPF US election cycle is going on as you read this. A
slate of officers and board members are on
a ballot mailed to all members. Return ballots must be in
by March 1, and those elected will step into office in
April, replacing the interim board.
Meanwhile, US members and local branches are doing
their best to continue their work and projects, aimed at
disarmament, environmental justice, and a host of local to
global issues. Many have chosen to ignore the above legal problems, others are involved at a variety of levels. Mediation has been called for, accountants will pore
over the records, attorneys will check what has been done
for legality. Ultimately we all expect to see an end to it,
come back into the spirit of sisterhood and rejoin the focused struggle for an end to violence and militarism.
Nancy Graham [ ncg_53704@yahoo.com ]
WILPF Calendar & Spring 2014 Event s
Thurs February 27th 6:30pm Women’s History Month free film Susan Burton: A New Way of Life
Tues
UW Madison Sterling Hall 475 N Charter Street Madison
M a r ch
4
8:30am
-
4:00pm
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Info: 358-2940
Z O NT A
D ay
of
A dv o ca c y
in
A c t ion
Wisconsin State Capitol
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . info: http://www.zontamadison.org
Tue Mar 4 6:30-8:00 J.A Book Club: Ines of my Soul
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Novel by Isabel Allende
ALL JA BOOK CLUB meetings held at Goodman So Madison Library, 2222 S Park St . . . . . Info: 358-5100
Fri Mar 7, 4:30 - 8:00 International Women’s Day Free Community Dinner
St Mark’s Lutheran Church, 605 Spruce St, Madison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Info: 244-6595
2nd Wednesdays 6:30 - 8:00 Madison WILPF Planning Meetings (every month 2nd Wednesday)
Goodman So Madison Library, 2222 S Park St .
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Monday Vigil for Peace at Noon
Every Monday Corner of Doty & MLK Jr Dr. Madison
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Info: 244-6595
. . . Info: 846-7924 mbspeace1@charter.net
Wed-Sat March 26-28 White Privilege Conf.
Building Relationships|Strengthening Communities|Seeking Justice!
Various venues, Madison WI
. . . . . . . . .
Info: 719-255-4766 or mjones15@uccs.edu
Tue Apr 1, 6:30-8:00 J.A. Book Club: Blessed Unrest
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Paul Hawken
Sat Apr 26, 2014 JAPA Children’s Book winners announced at Hull House Chicago IL . . . . Info: 243-8092
Tue May 6, 6:30-8:00 J.A. Book Club: The Lace Reader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brunonia Barry
Tue June 3, 6:30-8:00
J.A. Book Club Double Header: The Last Witchfinder AND The Chalice & the Blade
Calendar UPDATES : www.wilpf-madison.org
Subscription & Mailing: Mary Anne & Jim Mayhew,
Editor : K Pope Assistance: M Sanderson, D Zeps
WILPF Combined Midwest Newsletter
PO Box 3392 Madison WI 53704
Address Correction Requested
Friday Mar 7, 4:30 pm at St Mark’s
Int’l Women’s Day Free Dinner