Activists Unite

To tackle the emergency facing people and planet- Education, Mindfulness, Power of Mind, Healthy Living

At Malta's National Animal Rights Day inspirational

Speech by Nataša Pantović

Last Sunday, Malta held its National Animal Rights' Day. In Mosta's most amazing garden with an amphitheater directly facing a sun-set + some most beautiful people from Malta, Macedonia, Japan, Greece, Libya, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, England, and many more countries gathered to celebrate this worldwide event.

The National Animals Rights Day Malta 2021 Main Banner

The Event was organized by the Maltese NGO Animal Liberation Malta.  

ALM's mission is to raise awareness and take action against all forms of animal abuse. 

Activists Unite in Conscious Living!

I am so glad that I read this after seeing the movie. I loved the movie, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the lifetime of achievement of the women featured in the movie plus there are more women mentioned in the book whose accomplishments aren't evident in the film. It's an amazing story and Shetterly relays it beautifully.

I loved every minute of reading this book and it needs to be in all school libraries. I get that schools don't have the time to devote to each historical topic, but having something like this (there is a Young Readers version available here) for them to read would be great. I wish I had spent more time in the non-fiction section back when I was in school but I'm trying to make up for it now. I love the stories of women throughout history, seeing that we've been contributing to the world in more than 2 ways, and promoting those stories when I see them. Fortunately, this one doesn't exactly need my help. It's been great to see all the notoriety this story has gotten, it's well deserved.

Shetterly goes a long way to giving the reader an understanding of not only the important nature of these women's work, but the sacrifices they made to do the work and the pressures they were under from several sources. The difference in the way they were treated at work and at home, by coworkers and by passersby on the sidewalk, is well delineated and it paints a good picture of what it must have meant to be there, to be breaking down barriers and to be given credit for their incredible intelligence. I appreciate that they all say they were just doing their jobs, which I'm sure is true, but there's always more to it than that. I've known people who "just" do their jobs and there's a difference between them and people who love the work. It's this difference that breaks down the barriers that these women took on, purposefully or not.

I appreciated Shetterly's inclusion of the timeline with the Civil Rights movement. I am familiar with the events from school and other reading, but it helped me out to have it overlaid on the timeline of the events at NACA and NASA, to understand the shifting sands the women found themselves on. She did a great job too of delineating the cultural and workplaces differences with being African American, a woman, or an African American and a woman. The African American men got to come in as engineers and the women had to fight for that too. White women were also given advantages over African American women, which caused the women featured here to deal with twice the problems the others had.

This is a book that everyone should read, but especially if you watched the movie, which really only covers half. The book carries the story of the three central women all the way to the moon landing, while the movie stops at John Glenn's orbit. Shetterly's writing style is impeccable and the story itself is astounding.

 I knew this would be an informative book, but I didn't expect to enjoy it this much. It's the kind of book that should be read and analyzed and discussed in classes and prevention training sessions everywhere. 

 It's been on my TBR since about the time it was published but I just now got it together to read it. I usually hate talking about rape, particularly when I'm already talking about feminism. For years, I had viewed rape and abortion as the only two things feminists talked about and I hated that. That was when I was still in the primary target age and it terrified me to be reminded that often. As I've embraced the label of feminist in recent years, it's taken me a while to be okay with talking about rape. It took a while to find my voice in it, but this book would have helped me do that sooner.

See, I'm only slightly younger than the author, so I remember those times in the '90s when it almost seemed like people cared. I remember ingesting all the messages from television and schools that almost made it seem like it wouldn't have been my fault, except that everyone knew it really would have been because it's always actually about how not-cautious and unprepared the victim was. No one was saying yet that we should just teach people not to rape. No one was using the word consent, not around me.

Just as Harding contends, the landscape is changing now and it's changing in a beautiful way. The generation that is coming up now is amazing in its embrace of that the victim didn't invite it, couldn't have invited it. Harding writes beautifully about the problems we've seen in recent decades and the amazing things that were happening around the writing of the book and the things that look like they are on our horizon.

She writes with an entertaining style that was both friendly and firm. She does not let us delude ourselves about the world we live in but she does provide hope and paths to new understandings. Rape has been talked about and taught about one way for so long that changing the conversation isn't going to happen immediately, but her book is another in a line of books that are changing the conversation from "why was she there" "what was she wearing" to "why did he do that". But she doesn't miss the opportunity to stand up for men and that they can be victims too, of each other and of women. She doesn't miss the opportunity to talk about the fact that there are lots of men out there who are perfectly great and respectful partners that don't rape. But there are those who do and we aren't calling them out near enough.

There's lots of information in this book that I had before but there is lots that I didn't. Everyone should read the book, talk about it with others, and analyze it along with the world around them. It's important to talk about rape and consent.

Something not mentioned in the book, but that I would like to add to the conversation is that it is never too early to talk about consent because it is a part of everything at every age. We've been using that word in situations with my son since he was about 3 years old (he's six now). It came up when he expressed that he didn't like being squeezed when we hug him. Instead of using the kind of language that is usually reserved for children of this age, we made the conscientious decision to use the word consent. Hugs must be consented to each time and the appropriate level of squeeze is negotiated throughout. There must be enthusiastic consent to hug any one at any time and that is reinforced with visitors to our home. Or tickle. Or wrestle with. Or touch. Or smooch. Or help him in the bathroom. Or call him by any nickname. Or label him in any way.

I feel like part of the problem with talking about what affirmative consent is and looks like is that we reserve it for discussing sex. That may be too sensitive a topic to start with and it's definitely too old for them to just be learning the concept. By then, we have waited until they've gotten used to being able to touch without asking for it and being touched without giving it. We have waited until they have determined that we can't be that serious about it because they've already done so many things they weren't allowed to do. So we started using consent early.

Pick up this book. Read it. Talk about it. Talk about consent. Use it in everyday situations. Don't miss an opportunity to increase your knowledge of rape culture and your ability to be a part of changing the conversation and helping the next generation improve things.

I've been looking forward to reading this book for quite some time, but I'm glad that I hadn't done so until I left Mississippi. There's a part of me that wishes I would have known to see some of the places mentioned in this book, but I'm also glad that I didn't have to live with the full truth. It's hard to miss the racism, even now that persists in some places down there, but it's apparently not what it was. I grew up learning about slavery and civil rights campaign, but never in this kind of detail and never concentrating on the experiences of the women. Growing up in a community of Hispanics who were either first generation American or not born in the US, we didn't relate to it as our history so it didn't resonate at the time. Even our parents couldn't take it that way because many of them were dealing with Castro during this timeframe.

Since then, I've gotten more into learning US history, lived in more of the country, and known people with a greater variety of backgrounds. I can better appreciate the struggles of others and how they shaped US. This book does an amazing job of relating to the reader how the struggle of black women during this time was unique to them and not necessarily the same as black men or white women. It also ties it into the rest of the civil rights movement and where their struggle finally connected to second wave feminism. There were some parts that were covered that I knew about and many new things, such as Rosa Parks involvement prior to that infamous day on the bus that we're all taught.

This was an enlightening book about the civil rights movement and the role of black women within it. I especially enjoyed the way it didn't veer off into the familiar things that everyone in the US learns in elementary school. Those things were mentioned and given their due, but they didn't overtake the story of the women here, which I thought was great. This was about black women specifically and that there's more to feminism and being a woman than the experience of white women and more to civil rights than the experiences of black men. It also gave me a greater appreciation for this TED talk that I had seen quite some time ago and has been feature on 60 Minutes:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2tOp7OxyQ8&w=560&h=315]

I knew who Rosa Parks was but only from her refusal to move seats and I didn't know any of the other women he mentioned in his talk. I couldn't help but think about it as I read through the story of her full involvement in the whole of the civil rights movement and NAACP. I had loved the reaction of E.D. Nixon when Parks was arrested that's given in the book (around page 102).