Woman who posed as man to become judo champ finally gets gold - 50 years after being stripped of it

"It was very demeaning, painful," she said.

"It was a horrible feeling - like I did something wrong by being a woman."

The event changed Kanokogi's life.

She later mortgaged her home to fund the first female judo world championships in 1980 and almost single-handedly got women's judo into the 1988 Olympics after threatening to sue the International Olympic Committee.

100-year-old activist tells friends she's dying

"Legendary peace activist Muriel Duckworth has told friends she is “going now," accepting what appears to be the imminent end of a long life of striving for social change.

The 100-year-old, whose advocacy earned her honorary degrees and the Order of Canada, had a serious fall recently at her cottage in Magog, Que. She is receiving palliative care and does not expect to recover...

Ms. Duckworth, a practising Quaker and founding member of protest group The Raging Grannies, was born in Quebec and moved to Nova Scotia in 1947. She and her late husband, Jack, raised three children in the province while dedicating themselves to the cause of social justice.

A founding member of the provincial branch of Voice of Women, Ms. Duckworth served as national president for four years. She helped establish the anti-poverty Canadian Council for International Co-operation, and was one of the first women in Nova Scotia to run for provincial office. She was always strongly opposed to war, a stand that went back more than half a century, and did not recognize popular distinctions between “good" and “bad" conflicts.

She was able to hold onto hope of a better future even as fighting continued around the world, Ms. Franklin said, who noted that social attitudes have slowly changed for the better. Citing the less authoritarian ways people relate in the family, the workplace and at school, Ms. Franklin said the challenge is to extend these new approaches to the international sphere.

But that task will soon be left to the next generation."

To the Women of Pennsylvania

An open letter from the Collective of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter

We want to send our condolences to the friends and family of the dead women in Pennsylvania. We send our best wishes to the wounded. Women live with so many normalized threats to our lives that we hardly notice how much we do to avoid sexist violence. What a brutal reawakening that there is no safe place for women.

The numbers of women killed by men continue to rise mostly one at a time but they are not isolated. This year is the 20th Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre and feminists said then as we repeat now "The Motive is Misogyny". This "lone gunman" shares a fear and hatred of women with the men who beat their wives, rape, harass and prostitute women and children. Although he
did not target women as feminists, as was the case with the Montreal Massacre, George Sodini was determined to send a message to all women. But we refuse to listen and we refuse to obey.

The day after the Montreal Massacre on behalf of the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centers, the collective of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter sent a message to the women in Montreal. It is a no coincidence that the same words apply in this Pennsylvania Femicide.

"We will not excuse his acts when we know of the sadness and failure of his life. We will not blame his mother or lover or the women who refused to be his lovers. We will not blame the women he names in his letter from the dead. We will not blame the feminists who fought for women's liberties.

We hold responsible the men who taught him to expect women to fill his every need. We hold responsible the men who failed to teach him to live with moments of disappointment and anger without reprisals."

From our rape crisis line and transition house for battered women and their children in Vancouver, Canada, we brave on. We find reassurance in the other feminists struggling for equality and freedom everywhere in the world. We have to continue to stand together and we must continue.

Tamar Eylon,
On behalf of the Collective of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter
Member center of the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centers

Government of Canada to amend Indian Act in wake of landmark BC ruling

"On April 6, 2009, the British Columbia Court of Appeal ruled that certain registration provisions of the Indian Act are unconstitutional as they violate the equality provision of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms...

The ruling stems from a civil law suit that Sharon McIvor launched in October 1989, in her bid to acquire Indian status for herself and her son. She claimed that section 6 of the Indian Act was discriminatory in that it treated the descendants of Indian women who married non-Indian men differently from the descendants of Indian men who married non-Indian women."

Backgrounder - McIvor: an Overview

"From 1869 to 1985, an Indian woman who married a non-Indian man would lose her status as an Indian under the Indian Act and her children were not entitled to status. However, an Indian man who married a non-Indian woman would retain his status and his wife and children would gain status. Moreover, if a child's mother and paternal grandmother did not have a right to Indian status other than by virtue of having married Indian men, the child had status only up to the age of 21(commonly referred to as the Double Mother Rule)."

Marilyn French, writer, 21 November 1929 - 2 May 2009

Excerpt from Guardian article:

Marilyn French - Feminist writer and academic famed for her groundbreaking novel The Women's Room

"The US writer and academic Marilyn French, who has died aged 79, is best known for her debut novel, The Women's Room. It was published in 1977, when she was almost 50, and captured the mood of the time, selling more than 20m worldwide. French went on to write more novels, including The Bleeding Heart (1980), and substantial non-fiction works on patriarchy and women's history. But none of her later books enjoyed the success of The Women's Room.

The novel's best-known line - "All men are rapists, and that's all they are" - has not been an easy legacy for the next three decades of feminism. Spoken in anger by one of the book's most radical characters, a woman whose daughter has been gang-raped, it entered the popular lexicon and is often cited, wrongly, as one of the tenets of modern feminism."