U. S. Women's History is Awesome

A blog celebrating all of the amazing accomplishments of American women, from all historical periods.

[todaysdocument]

Demonstration of Protest and Mourning for Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 4/5/1911

Suggested by National Archives staff member Shannon Kerner–thank you!

Series: Photographic Prints of Occupations, Labor Activities, and Personalities, 1940 - 1970

Record Group 174: General Records of the Department of Labor, 1907 - 2001

Image description: A crowd of men and women stand in a street, holding union banners, including “Ladies Waist and Dressmakers Union Local 25 / We Mourn Our Loss,” and “We Mourn Our Loss / United Hebrew Trades of New York.” A nearby store has signage in English and Hebrew.

[link1n]

That signage is in English and Yiddish, not Hebrew.

[todaysdocument]

Yiddish, thank you! Our apologies.

[klaineharmony]

Episode 173: The Bowery Boys and the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909

We turn the show over to The Bowery Boys who talk about the tragic event and the women's protests surrounding it. With Valerie Paley, Co-Cur

It is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire today, and it is hard to overstate the importance of this tragedy to the workplace safety and workers' rights movements.

From the podcast page: "We have been talking with our friends Greg Young and Tom Meyers, The Bowery Boys, for years about doing a project together. This isn’t that, but it is a subject that a lot (A LOT) of people have requested of us. Because it’s a bit out of our focus, we thought there’s no one better than Greg and Tom, experts in New York City history, to tell you about the city’s early 1900s women’s protest movements and how they are tragically tied to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

And, bonus! They interviewed Valery Paley, co-curator and director of New York’s Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History!"

The Bowery Boys also have their own page on this tragedy, just put up yesterday, one that includes a map of where the 146 victims lived (mostly young, Jewish and Italian women immigrants). Two of their podcasts are also included, one on the Triangle Fire itself and one on the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike.

[oberlincollegelibraries]

58 Years Later or Sole Survivor

“We could always brag on Antoinette, because she was beautiful and the rest of us were not, and she had a sweet voice and many of us didn’t, and she was orthodox and some of us were not."¹ This is how Susan B. Anthony introduced  Antoinette Brown Blackwell at an 1898 event honoring the life of Lucy Stone, who had died a few years earlier.

Born in Henrietta, New York on May 20, 1825, Antoinette Brown would become one of the pioneers of the woman suffrage movement and as she says in her own words, "I began to speak for equal rights in 1846 at Rochester, Mich., and spoke again at Henrietta, N. Y., in 1847, so I was before the organized movement.” ²  Antoinette not only began speaking of suffrage early on, she also became the first woman in the United States who dared to venture in to a career that was exclusively the domain of the male gender.

58 Years Later or Sole Survivor refers to two significant events that define the life of Antoinette Brown Blackwell and her story in the suffrage and equal rights movement. It took 58 years for her to finally receive acknowledgement of the labor and learning she devoted to the study of theology as a student at Oberlin College. A classmate and confidant of Lucy Stone, Antoinette earned a literary degree in 1847 from the College and continued there, taking classes in the Divinity School where in 1850 upon completion of the course she was denied the degree. On Sunday, June 21, 1908, fifty-eight years later, Oberlin made a point to ameliorate this former injustice by conferring on Antoinette Brown Blackwell the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity when she was eighty-four years old.

As the sole survivor of the pioneering group of women which advocated for equal rights and suffrage in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, it was Antoinette who was destined to witness the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment. Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony all died much earlier without seeing the prized fruit of their labor. Today, we celebrate the life and legacy of the Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, preacher, teacher, philosopher, champion of equal justice and Oberlin College alumna.

To learn more about this remarkable woman and her time at Oberlin, visit the Oberlin College Archives. Also see our digital exhibit, Oberlin’s Women: a Legacy of Leadership and Activism .

References 1. “The Washington Convention.” Woman’s Journal, 12 Mar. 1898, p. [81]+. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/TYGXSH498107553/NCCO?u=ohlnk20&sid=NCCO&xid=f7a18248. Accessed 20 May 2020.

2. Ibid.

[scretladyspider]

[scretladyspider]

Via my twitter. Mary Mallon and those around her might not have known asymptomatic carriers existed, but we do. Wash your hands, practice social distancing, and stay safe and responsible.

[uwmarchives]

On this Date: February 11, 1916

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was arrested in New York City for violating a law banning transportation of “obscene” matter through the mail or across state lines. The obscene matter in this instance was information about birth control. Goldman was scheduled to give a public lecture on family planning when she arrested.

Goldman was an anarchist, feminist, and founder of the anarchist journal Mother Earth. This was not the only time she would be arrested. In 1917 she and Alexander Berkman were arrested for speaking against the selective draft law. After spending two years in prison in Missouri they were deported to Russia. Goldman left Russia and spent time traveling through Europe settling for a while in St. Tropez, France.

The image of Emma Goldman shown here is inscribed with the following note:

To my own tender Fitzi, In fond recollection of our painful yet fascinating life & work in years gone by. Lovingly Emma. St. Tropez, July 24/28

“Fitzi” is M. Eleanor Fitzgerald who corresponded with Goldman as well as Alexander Berkman during the time of their imprisonment, deportation and well after.

M. Eleanor Fitzgerald Papers, 1915-1974 (UMW MSS 13, box 6, folder 9)

[bai-xue-lives]

So I just now learned about Stagecoach Mary and how have I never heard of this absolute LEGEND of a woman before

She was born a slave and freed when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued (she was about 30)

She was about six feet tall and 200 pounds and once she was free she decided she’d never take shit from anyone ever again

When one of her close friends, a nun by the name of Mother Amadeus, became ill with pneumonia at her convent in Montana, Mary headed alone into the frontier to nurse Mother Amadeus back to health

After Mother Amadeus recovered, she gave Mary a job as the foreman of the convent. She repaired buildings, took care of chickens, made the long and dangerous journeys into town for supplies, and did other odd jobs.

She could drink most men under the table, and one saloon offered five bucks and a free shot of whiskey to any man who could take a punch to the face from Mary and remain standing. 

She was once said by a local paper to have broken more noses than anyone else in Montana

She was outspokenly Republican, which at this time was the liberal party in America, and would get into political debates with the more conservative townsfolk

One time a man insulted her outside the saloon so hit him in the face with a rock, and only stopped when other cowboys held her back.

On one supply run into town, her wagon overturned and the horses fled. Mary spent all night single-handedly fending off a pack of wolves with her guns before she righted the heavy wagon by herself and tracked down the spooked horses. The only thing lost in the accident was a jar of molasses.

She lost her job at the convent when she got into a gunfight with a male employee who did not want to take orders from a black woman. She reportedly shot him in the ass, which angered the local bishop.

After losing her convent job, Mary spent a brief time running a restaurant, where she welcomed and served all comers

When a job for a mail carrier opened at the local US Post Office, Mary got the job because she managed to hitch six horses to a wagon faster than any of the male candidates

She was sixty at the time

This made her the first black woman mail carrier, and the second woman mail carrier in US history

When the snows were too deep for the horses to manage the long and dangerous delivery routes, Mary would strap on snowshoes, put the bags of mail on her shoulders, and do it herself

At one point she apparently had a pet eagle????

She only retired from the mail route when she was about 70 years old, and instead made a quieter living by babysitting and running a laundry business in the town of Cascade

She was a huge baseball fan and often gave the local team a big bouquet of flowers from her garden

The people of Cascade loved Mary so much that they closed the schools annually on her birthday

When a law was passed in Montana that forbade women from drinking in saloons, the mayor of Cascade granted Mary an exemption. 

When her house burned down, the whole town got together to help her build a new one

She continued drinking, fighting, and going to baseball games until she died of liver failure at 82 in 1914

Mary (far right) and the local baseball team

Anyway sorry for gushing I just now heard about her and I’m in love

[augustdementhe]

I’ve heard of her, but godDAMN, if her story doesn’t bear repeating. ^w^

[historyisntboring]

She has her own wikipedia page. Enjoy.

[profeminist]

“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It’s a girl.”

“Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.”

“I want history to remember me, not that I was the first black woman to be elected to the Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who DARED TO BE HERSELF.

I want to be remembered as a CATALYST FOR CHANGE IN AMERICA.”

- Shirley Chisholm, American politician, educator, and author.

More posts on the amazing Shirley Chisholm

[bespangeled]

In the 1960′s Legally a woman couldn’t

Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.

Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.

Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.

Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.

Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.

Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.

Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.

Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.

Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.

Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.

Play college sports Title IX of the  Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination  based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial  assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports

Apply for men’s Jobs   The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal.  This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.

This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works

[galacticdrift]

I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.

Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.

Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.

This shit was within living memory.  I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.

When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.

[gehayi]

I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like: When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders. People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all. In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.) Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above. A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974. The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure. (Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.) The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman. My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…” The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor. Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try? I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.” When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small. (He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.) When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!! …No, they WEREN’T kidding. On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch. I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable. I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”

[drst]

Know your history.

[hedwig-dordt]

So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.

[shatterpath]

REBLOG FOREVER.

[toooldforthissh--stuff]

I am 70. I remember all those things. I was a student nurse from 64 to 67 and we were not permitted to “finish” a bed bath on a male or insert a catheter in a male. Seeing male genitals might cause us “harm” or upset our delicate sensibilities. Imagine when we graduated and were “thrown” to the wolves. Imagine if you were a male patient who had to be the first to be “practiced” on by a graduate nurse. (Ha!) At the school I attended no student nurse could be married. Only one school in my city (Atlanta) would even admit married women and Male Nurses weren’t even thought of. What man would want to be a nurse when he could be a Doctor. In all my training I only remember 3 or 4 Women who were Doctor’s and a very few, (less than 5 or 6) female interns or residents (and this was a teaching hospital) and most of those were OB/Gyns and one was a pediatrician.

When I graduated and was going to get married I wanted to go on birth control pills. You needed to be on them for a least one cycle before they were effective. I won’t go into what hoops I had to jump through to get a prescription from my Dr. (a man, natch) but when i went to the drug store to get the prescription filled I ended up having to get my future husband to “accompany” me so the pharmacist “interview” him and see if it was okay with him for me to be on the pill.

Even when we went to get a marriage license I had to get my Father’s signature and we had to go before a Judge because I was not yet 21 (I was 20 and 9 months).

I could go on and on, getting a credit card in MY name, etc., but I will tell you that WE MUST RESIST.

[casper-the-friendly-being-blog]

The number of people I know who romanticize gender inequality is frankly terrifying. A world never existed in which the lives of women were simplified by benevolent men who saw to her every want and need. That was not a thing. A world never existed in which women were all ladies, men were all gentlemen, & everything was some great big cishet fairytale. Feminists aren’t a bunch of upstarts who want to destroy a perfectly wholesome and non-harmful system. Just…look at history. Look at the posts above. We. Must. Resist..

[rivergst-deactivated20191102]

About 8: The State of New York only added No-Fault Divorce as an option in 2010 (!!!)

[systlin]

I want to repeat here. 

This is what they mean, when they say “Old-fashioned values”

When conservatives start waxing lyrical about the ‘good old days’, this is what they mean. They are fully aware how much things blew for women, and they would like to return to that. 

[thewightknight]

The Sneaky History Of Why Women Started Shaving

Imagine straightening your skirt at a swanky bar and, glancing down, you take in the thick, month-long stubble on your legs. A kind of dark fuzz that doesn't trigger any panic or make you want to shift your yeti shins away from the light. That kind of reality would be shocking, right? The history of shaving made sure it would be, where your body hair weirds out the people around you and makes you feel uncomfortable for no understood reason. After all, it is just hair. Why would hairy patches around your knees be any different than your eyelashes or the fuzz on your arms?

In 1915 Gillette created the Milady Décolleté razor, and to put it on women’s radars he advertised it as an accessory that was as necessary to buy with a modern dress as a hat or pair of gloves. “Small and curved to better fit the armpit, the razor was designed to supplement the sleeveless and sheer sleeved fashions of the period,” Hertzig confirms. To convince women that buying a razor came part and parcel with buying the latest fashion, catalogs began to cleverly market the two products together. For example, anti-underarm hair ads were appearing “in McCall’s magazine by 1917, and women’s razors and depilatories showed up in the Sears, Roebuck catalog in 1922, the same year that company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves,” Anita Renfroe, author of Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You, explained in her book.

The first advert that ran for the women’s razor was a one-inch square in  Harpers Bazaar , and with that small bit of ad real estate new rules for femininity were drafted. Shaving wasn’t going to be a passing trend but a new part of what it meant to be a proper woman in polite society.

After all, the goal of advertisers and magazine editors wasn’t to meet women’s needs — it was to create new ones. That was the only way to keep products moving off of shelves. And with more problems women had to worry over, the more magazine issues an editor was able to sell. For example, Cyrus Curtis — the owner of Ladies’ Home Journal — shared in a speech to advertisers, “Do you know why we publish the Ladies’ Home Journal? The editor thinks it is for the benefit of American women. That is an illusion…the real reason, the publisher’s reason, is to give you people who manufacture things that American women want and buy a chance to tell them about your products,” Joan Jacobs Brumberg shared in her book, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Magazines were just ads gift wrapped in advice to get women to buy them and their products. And buy them they did.

[uwmarchives]

Women’s Equality Day

On August 26th we celebrate Women’s Equality Day to commemorate the 1920 adoption of the 19th amendment to the constitution which prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens on the basis of sex.

After the amendment’s adoption, many activist organizations like the Milwaukee County Woman Suffrage Association were disbanded. Below is the organization’s resolution to disband and extend gratitude to all of their members at their final executive meeting on February 20th, 1920.

However, many suffrage activists refocused their efforts to promote voter awareness and participation in government among the newly enfranchised women voters, which is how the League of Women Voters of Greater Milwaukee officially formed at their first mass meeting nearly a year later.

The League of Women Voters of Greater Milwaukee continued to educate women voters on local and national issues and support their participation in government long after the passage of the 19th amendment. The 1940 newspaper clipping below from one of the League’s scrapbooks highlights some of the specific issues the League sought to educate women voters about in the 20 years following the amendment’s passage.

The meeting minutes and newspaper clipping featured here can be found in Box 6 and Volume 1 of the League of Women Voters of Greater Milwaukee, 1920-1981 collection at the UWM Archives.

Additionally, this article from the New York Times’ Archive details the signing of the proclamation announcing the adoption of the 19th Amendment and the reactions of prominent suffragists.

-Lizzie, Archives Graduate Intern

[jstor]

Co-Living, the Hot New Trend of 1898 | JSTOR Daily

Chicago's "Eleanor Clubs" were designed to give young, working women affordable and congenial places to live.

Let’s all move in together. 

[refinery29]

One Haunting Video Shows “Beauty Through The Decades” In New Light

Karolina Żebrowska’s “Beauty Through The Ages” video shows not only on the glamorized versions of women but also the real, middle and lower class women as they lived in the past century.

READ MORE

GIFS VIA.

[silvermarmoset]

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES THANK YOU.

[silvermarmoset]

Reblogging again because this is the ONLY “fashion through time” video that does it right. All the others glamorize/modernize the eras WAY too much, esp. considering they’re claiming historical accuracy. This is the only one that truly nails it.

[schlesingerlibrary]

Today we celebrate (one day early) the anniversary of the first women’s rights convention.  The Seneca Falls Convention (July 19-20, 1848) featured speeches by Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who presented her Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence.

Caption: Members of the National Woman’s Party (including Alice Paul, lower right) celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Convention, during 1923 National Woman’s Party convention in Seneca Falls. Flyers, pages from Equal Rights, and a photo of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are affixed to the window behind them. A NWP banner hangs above them.

[uwmspeccoll]

Birthday Anniversary: Emma Goldman, born June 27, 1869

Today is the anniversary of the birth of anarchist Emma Goldman. Goldman “was a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist who founded an influential anarchist journal, Mother Earth, gained a reputation for her stirring speeches (delivered on extensive speaking tours to crowds of immigrant workers in German, Yiddish, and English), and wrote many books and essays on the subject. Goldman also wrote copiously on capitalism, labor, marriage, birth control, sexual freedom for people of all sexual orientations, prisons, war, art, and freedom of speech, and wrestled with thorny ideological issues within the ranks of leftist thought. She was proud of her Jewish identity but spurned religion as a tool of oppression. Her body of work (including her epic 1931 autobiography, Living My Life) spans decades, and thanks to her gifted writing ability and overall verve holds up far better than many other seminal anarchists’ texts” (Kim Kelly, Teen Vogue).  

Her staunch opinions and progressive ideals make her an important figure in American labor history and an important voice in many progressive movements. This book, The Place of the Individual in Society is from our Morris Fromkin Memorial Collection, which contains materials related to social justice in the United States including the labor movement, liberal reform movements, Marxism, Leninism, and anarchism, and more. The book argues that society is meant to work for the individual rather than the individual for society, and for the liberation of the individual through anarchism. Goldman’s correspondence with Morris Fromkin is held in the UWM Archives. 

- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager 

[npr]

Democratic Presidential Debate: See The 20 Candidates Who Will Be Onstage

The large field will be split into two groups for Wednesday and Thursday, after a selection process that was a source of controversy. With so many contenders, answers will be limited to 60 seconds.

[ocasio2018]

The 31-year-old leftist public defender is poised to take charge of one of the largest jurisdictions in the country.

i’m calling it now - the AOC effect. a wave of young, women of color from otherized & marginalized communities are emerging to take their rightful place: trailblazing compassionate, game-changing elected officials.  tiffany cabán is the first to be personally inspired by AOC.

“…folks like her [alexandria-ocasio cortez], it moved me in a way to be like, i can do this.” -Democracy Now, June 19, 2019.

she is the first of many to come. i promise you.

congratulations, DA Cabán.

[ocasio2018]

tiffany cabán is a 31 year old queer woman born and raised in Queens to a working class nuyorican (new york puerto rican) family. she is a public defender who was inspired to run after encouragement from friends who felt she would make a major impact on the criminal injustice system in one of the most diverse boroughs in the world. her platform:

-decriminalize sex work

-end cash bail, which punishes the poor only

-decriminalize petty crimes + low-level drug offenses

-end the failed war on drugs

-refuse to cooperate or empower ICE

& more policies to stop the racist disparities of policing + criminal justice.

cabán won by a margin of 1,090 votes on June 26, 2019. no one thought she would win against the queens establishment. she was endorsed by AOC. she is the first latina DA in queens & the youngest elected. she is backed by @DemSocialists and the @NYWFP & is now positioned to serve as the chief law enforcement officer for a jurisdiction with a greater population than 15 states and DC.

“this started with four women around a table saying ‘we are going to change the system’.”

[delightful-fear]

WOW!!

[klaineharmony]

A gay first lady? Yes, we’ve already had one, and here are her love letters.

Rose Cleveland declared her passion for the woman she had a relationship with spanning three decades in letter after letter.