Mother's Day (and Semi-Random Thoughts)

If you're in the Madison area, don't miss our annual Mother's Day event this Saturday, May 7, from 10 am to 1 pm at the top of State Street (near Capitol Square, outside the Children's Museum).

We'll have information and fun activities for the whole peace-loving family, including:

• Postcards to Condoleezza Rice, linking the increase in U.S. military spending to decreasing support for child survival programs worldwide
  
• An informational, all-ages coloring activity: How would you divvy up the U.S. federal budget?
  
• Face painting, courtesy of the Madison Children's Museum, from 11 am to 12 noon.

Join us and reclaim the proud tradition of Julia Ward Howe, who famously urged in her Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870:

Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

And Now, the Semi-Random Part

I attended two excellent lectures on campus this past week. On Wednesday night, Brazilian academic, activist and policymaker Mary Helena Allegretti spoke. A truly amazing woman, Allegretti studied social movements in the Amazon region for her graduate work - and then joined them - a tremendous act of bravery during Brazil's military dictatorship.

Allegretti succeeded in developing novel policies that created Amazonian reserves for sustainable natural resource harvesting. Her work is credited with ending Brazil's repressive debt peonage system, as well as resolving conflicting claims to natural resources in the Amazon - a serious problem before her system of "extractive reserves" was established. As I left the talk, I wondered how different U.S. policies would be if intelligent, committed and truly compassionate people like Mary Allegretti were well represented in our federal government.

The following evening, Mother Jones magazine founder Adam Hochschild presented a slide show on his most recent book, Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. In explaining the contemporary relevance of British activists' fight to end slavery, Hochschild pointed out that the abolitionists were fighting the world's most powerful empire - a government with much blood on its hands - at a time when "war fever" made progressive social change very difficult.

Of special interest to women and feminist activists was British housewives' role in establishing and supporting boycotts of slave-produced sugar. (That made me think of Laura Schenone's research on women's importance to the social, political and economic dimensions of food.) I also didn't realize that the slaves working in the West Indies sugar fields were mostly women - the men did what was considered to be more highly skilled work in the sugar refineries.

There is no shortage of inspiring historical and contemporary activist successes. Get active and add to the noble tradition!