Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: Reading my way towards IWD 2024.

On 8 March 2024, the world will be celebrating International Women’s Day.

In the lead-up, I’ve been reading this fantastic book by Mikki Kendall and A. D’Amaco - Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fights for their Rights.

I wanted to share just five of the many stories from this top-notch book that I’ve found compelling and inspiring. I couldn’t recommend this book highly enough, especially as we move towards IWD this year. This graphic novel captures a wide and inspiring range of stories, lives and impacts of women throughout history – all while managing to weave through a meta-narrative of the collective history of the fight for women’s rights. The illustrations throughout are 10/10 as well - they add so much life and connection to each woman’s story.

I hope you can get a hold of this book. I got my copy from the wonderfully currated Brunswick Bound - yay for independent bookshops!

Queen Nanny (1686 - 1773)

Born in Ghana and sold as a slave in Jamaica, Queen Nanny became leader of the Maroons in the Blue Mountain region after she and her siblings escaped the sugar cane plantation they had been held on. The Maroons, active for over 150 years, helped to free slaves from plantations through their organised resistance. Nanny herself is said to have freed over 800 slaves, as well as having implemented a system of bartering food, clothing and weapons and cattle breeding, agriculture and hunting that supported the Maroon community.

Shizue Kato (1897 - 2001)

Kato was the first woman in Japan to advocate for women to have access to birth control options. She began a birth control movement in 1921, up against an aggressive, militaristic Japanese government that strongly opposed any acts related to family planning, which they saw as limiting the country’s population growth. Kato’s advocacy included being imprisoned for her ‘promotion of dangerous thoughts,’ that being the thought of women having the right to access contraception and increase their role in public life. Kato was one of thirty-nine women elected to office in the 1946 General Election, the first-time females could both run and vote in Japan.

Sophie Scholl (1921 – 1943)

Sophie was a member of the White Rose, a non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany. Sophie and her brother Hans were executed by guillotine in 1943. They had been caught by a janitor at the University of Munich after Sophie knocked a stack of the anti-Nazi fliers they had been distributing off a gallery and down into the auditorium below. Sophie and Hans had managed to distribute 1,700 of them before this happened and they were arrested.

Sophie’s last words before her execution?

“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

Anita Hill (1956 – now)

Professor Anita Hill, Attorney and Professor of Social Policy, Law and Women’s Studies, testified in 1991 that then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. This was many years before the #MeToo movement swept across the US and the globe, and her choice to speak out not only led to President George H. W. Bush changing his opposition to a Bill on the rights of victims of sexual harassment, but also opened a public conversation on sexual harassment that hadn’t been had yet. The year following her testimony, complaints to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission regarding sexual harassment rose by 73%.

While her testimony didn’t prevent Justice Thomas from being confirmed, it did spur on what was known as ‘the year of the women’. From being a place in 1991 where there was no women’s restroom to be found nearby, the Senate saw an influx of newly elected women and gains in legislation on equal pay, women’s health research and the protection of families and children.

bell hooks (1952 – 2021)

Author, feminist, activist and expert on explaining how race, class and gender intersect to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression, hooks’ written works, of which there are over 30, include: Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism / Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre / All About Love: New Visions.

hook’s name was always used in lowercase because she strongly believed that what was important was the “substance of books, not who I am.” She took the pen name bell hooks in honour of her grandmother: “Many of us took the names of our female ancestors—bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother—to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who’d gone before us.”

So many more - a collective movement.

There are so many more women’s stories captured in this book, a few more of them that stood out to me are:

• Queen Zenobia Palmyra

• Queen Anna Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba

• Clara Lemlich

• Sylvia Rivera

• Janet McCloud

• Maxine Wolfe

• Angel Decora

What this book does well, is to build an understanding that it is the collective effort, activism, and power of these women, over thousands of years, which has turned the dial on women’s rights.

That means that anyone else, you and I included, can contribute and make a difference as a part of this collective movement towards gender equality.