National Women’s History Month-Race For The Cure

this month is National Women’s History Month, and a friend, Maria K. also asked me for our help in The Race For The Cure. So follow the links Maria Provides below and Save the boobs! You know you want to.

 

Breast Cancer. Isn’t It Time To Stop
This Disease in Its Tracks?

Maria K. Accepted the Challenge

Walk for the Cure:
The Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure® is an amazing 60-mile walk that helps mothers, sisters, spouses and friends get one step closer to a world without breast cancer. Join us for three inspirational days where together we’ll walk so long, so far and with so much hope, the world will hear our footsteps.
What YOU can do:
There are many different opportunities to be a part of the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure®.
1. Register as a walker or as a crew member
2. Volunteer
3. Support a participant with a donation or come out and cheer them on
4. Sign up for updates and newsletters to learn more
Follow Maria’s journey as she trains for the 3-day 60 mile walk:
A Mind Lively and at Ease

March is also National Women’s History Month which may sound strange after reading what the Republicans have planned for women with their defunding of Planned Parenthood. “Big money has co-opted conservative activists for its agenda, but scratch the surface and it’s the religious right that rears it’s head. The Republicans who seem to have been co-opted by the Tea Party tell us they are not interested in social issues but just economic ones. It must have been quite a surprise, then, to have the new Republican-dominated House of Representatives, which rode in on a sea of Tea Party energy and funding, to immediately put most of their efforts into controlling the uteruses of America, through a series of bills that  defund Planned Parenthood, end all private insurance funding for abortion, and even allow doctors to refuse to save the lives of pregnant women if doing so would require performing an abortion.” There are two great articles that were recently published that lay this out, one by Amanda Marcotte in The Guardian which I have quoted from above. The other was in this mornings Alternet News. Both point out how the Tea Part/Republicans/Religious Right intend to marginalize women and there by marginalize the Democratic Party. This seems a tragedy when women in America have fought so long and hard for equal footing in the U.S.

As Black History Month comes to a close, Women’s History Month begins.
Women’s History Month is a relatively new invention, dating back to the 1970s, when women were fighting for greater recognition of female accomplishments. (Also at that time, the Equal Rights Amendment debate was in full swing.)
According to the National Women’s History Project, the idea for a month dedicated to women’s history sprouted in 1978.
That year, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County (California) Commission on the Status of Women declared the week of March 8 “Women’s History Week,” selecting March 8 because it isInternational Women’s Day. The event was a success, with schoolchildren learning about women’s contributions to history, and a parade bringing the week to a close.
The following year a member of the Sonoma County commission told colleagues at the Women’s History Institute at Sarah Lawrence College about the Women’s History Week experiment. Excited by the idea, the Sarah Lawrence group decided to replicate the efforts in schools across the country and to begin pushing for National Women’s History Week.
Their efforts paid off quickly: In 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued a message asking people to recognize National Women’s History Week from March 2-8. He said, “[T]he achievements, leadership, courage, strength and love of the women who built America was as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well.”
But National Women’s History Week was still not yet formally recognized. So then Rep. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Sen Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, co-sponsored legislation to ask that the president make National Women’s History Week official in 1981. It passed, and in 1982, President Ronald Reagan issued the first official proclamation naming the week including March 8 as National Women’s History Week.

For the next five years, Congress continued to pass the legislation, and the president continued to issue his proclamation. Then, in 1987, organizers decided to be expansive and changed the week to National Women’s History Month.
Since 1987, the president has proclaimed March to be Women’s History Month; for the first few years, Congress was involved, but since 1995, our presidents have done so without congressional prodding.
This year, the National Women’s History Project has declared Women’s History Month’s theme to be “Our History Is Our Strength.”

I’d like to suggest to all the guys out there, they take sometime this month to acknowledge the contribution of women in this country. if you’d like to take a moment to contribute to a cause by contributing to  Maria K.’s Race for the Cure, please do so, if you’d like to read some good books, Amazon has a great selection here: http://www.amazon.com/American-Womens-History-Doris-Weatherford/dp/0671850288 and almost more importantly, don’t let the Tea Party, The Republicans and the Religious Right get away with killing these important services for women.

 

The Dirty Lowdown