Meet Lillian Wald (1867 – 1940). After growing up in Ohio and New York, Wald became a nurse. She briefly attended medical school and began to teach community health classes while attending classes. One day in 1892, she was approached by a young girl who kept repeating “mommy … baby … blood”. Wald gathered some sheets from her bed-making lesson and followed the child to her home, a cramped two-room tenement apartment. Inside, she found the child’s mother who had recently given birth and needed medical treatment. The doctor tending to her had left because she could not afford to pay him. This was Wald’s first experience with poverty; she called the episode her “baptism by fire” and dedicated herself to bringing nursing care, and eventually education and access to the arts, to the immigrant poor on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Lillian D. Wald started the Visiting Nurse Service in 1893, and two years later she opened the Henry Street Settlement. The Henry Street Settlement was initially named the Nurses’ Settlement. It was (and remains) not-for-profit social service agency in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It provided both medical care to those who could otherwise not afford it, and a social center with a gymnasium added in 1895. Wald also worked on behalf of women’s rights and the welfare of children, establishing the Women’s Trade Union League and spearheaded a federal organization to help children. After years lobbying for this idea, the Children’s Bureau was established in 1912.
“So I’m in the gym today (getting my life to Truffle Butter on this elliptical ofc) when the girl next to me asks her friend if she has an extra tampon. Realizing that I overheard, she looked up and literally apologized to me, clearly embarrassed af.
Me being me, I hit ha with the “girl, u gucci” before reaching down into my fanny pack and giving her one of the tampons I keep in there. By the look on her face you would have thought I did a magic trick and pulled 36 titty-tasseled bunny rabbits out that damn bag.
This is so sad. Why don’t y’all love y’all friends that menstruate? Like men will make whole guest rooms in their house just in case someone needs to stay. But god forbid that person menstruate, because I bet you won’t be no extra pads or tampons under that guest bathroom sink.
Like why? Y’all know literally like half this world goes through this?
Ugh anyway to all my menstruating friends, if y’all need it, know I got it. I keep some in my fanny pack when I go to the gym, and some in my backpack all the time. Never feel embarrassed for asking for one. Never feel embarrassed for being human.
@everyone who doesn’t menstruate: keep your menstruating friends in mind and stop being so shitty.”
Just a few of the stories my great aunt told me about women in the 60s:
1) A woman she worked with at the hospital who had a baby with one of the ambulance drivers. When work found out they fired her (he kept his job). She tried to self-abort with a knitting needle.
2) The sister of one of her neighbours who wasn’t able to rent a room because she was a ‘fallen woman’.
3) A girl who got sent to a convent house and scrubbed floors until the day she gave birth. Her baby was given up for adoption without her consent.
4) Girls who had babies with priests.
5) Women who were on their fifth, sixth, seventh child, who had been pregnant for the best part of a decade, begging for sterilisation because their husbands wouldn’t wear a condom.
Banning abortion has never ever stopped it from happening. It’s just meant more stigma, more prejudice, more risks and more deaths.
In 1962, my mother was going thru a divorce, got pregnant and knew this fact would be used to deny her divorce (they used to do that, in case you didn’t know).
My mother was given a “shot”; she lived 3 blocks from the doctor. He never told her what it was, likely an “overdose” of progesterone, which is how they used to “induce menstruation” in a hurry (i.e. abortion off the books). She was about 7-8 weeks by her estimation. He said, GO STRAIGHT HOME, go to bed and stay there. She walked fast, but nearly collapsed at the curb and my grandmother went out to guide her into the house. She went to bed, stayed there and bled steadily and heavily for 3-4 days. She said it was like being very very sick, headaches, nausea, vomiting… and then, gone.
She never let me forget this and took me to my first NARAL meeting when I was 15 yrs old. And here I am today, in my 50s–and I still remember my grandmother’s scary account; my mother swaying, literally, at the curb, and nearly falling, under the strength of that one shot.
How did she get the doctor to do it? She told him, “If you don’t, I will do it myself”–and if you knew my mother, you knew she meant it. She would have. After all, lots of women she knew had.
This is what they want to take us all back to, the fucking middle ages. Please remember.
Extremely important. This is not ancient history – it happened to our mothers and it could easily happen to us. Never give up the fight for safe, legal, affordable abortion on demand!
THERE NEEDS TO BE A MOVIE ABOUT THE NIGHT WITCHES DAMNIT.
BADASS LADIES BOMBING THE SHIT OUTA NAZI’S. WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE??
OKAY WE”RE GONNA DO HISTORY KIDs, GET READY FOR THE MOST FACE-MELTINGLY AWESOME WAR STORY YOU’VE EVER HEARD about Irina Sebrova and the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, or Night Witches as the Nazi’s called them because they hated them so much. The Night Witches were a group of Russian Aviatrixes during WW2,
THESE ARE THEM, AND
THIS IS THEIR BADASS LEADER IRINA SEBROVA.
now Russia had absolute shit equipment during WW2, and since the Night Witches were all women they were given the shittest of the shit equipment, and by shit, I mean World War One era biplanes that would hardly fly.
Yeah, ^THIS^ is what they had to fly, their job was to fly stealth missions. STEALTH. MISSIONS. In a super loud bi-plane that was originally meant to be fucking crop-duster. Now, in this plane, the navigator sat in front and the pilot sat in back (fairly common for bi-planes). Now, since these planes were so deafeningly loud and they were supposed to be flying stealthy night missions, the Night Witches solved that problem, BY TURNING OFF THE GODDAMN PLANE AND GLIDING ON AIR CURRENTS OVER THEIR BOMBING SITE. That is hardcore as fuck. Now, in addition to basically being flying death-traps, these planes had a slight problem, and by slight problem, I mean sometimes the bombs wouldn’t release. Now how do you solve that problem? How can you complete your mission if the bombs don’t drop? Well, if you’re a Night Witch you do what the navigators would do, AND CLIMB ONTO THE FUCKING WING AND DETACH THE BOMB BY HAND! You thought turning off the plane was badass? The plane was off while they were climbing onto the wing of a plane made of cloth and wood! Now to make things more badass, the Night Witches weren’t given supplies that were deemed ‘extraneous’ like, oh, a goddamn PARACHUTE. Seriously, no parachutes, and Irina Sebrova survived being shot down, TWICE, each time having to dodge German patrols while surviving the Russian winter. Now, for an American bomber in World War 2, if he survived 25 missions he was given an honorable discharge and it was considered he had done his duty to the Allies. Want to know how many missions Irina Sebrova flew? It’s more than 25. Irina Sebrova, Wing Commander of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew 92, that’s almost four tours of duty for an American, and those were just day missions!! Guess how many night missions Sebrova flew? ONE THOUSAND EIGHT. That’s right, she flew 1,008 night missions and 92 day missions, if she was American this would have meant she completed forty-four tours of duty. The Night Witches weren’t just badasses, they were heroes with such incredible amounts of courage that they carried out the most insane acts of braveryto protect their homeland and their people.
It’s so weird that Daisy Ridley is eyeballing that Lara Croft role in the Tomb Raider reboot, like, sure Star Wars was really big but you can’t just be a beloved space hero in one franchise and also be a big name as some kind of combat archeologist. Who’s ever doubled up like that?
Being the first African American woman to travel to space is one of Mae Jemison’s many accomplishments. A dancer, Peace Corps doctor, public speaker and astronaut, Mae went to college at age 16, holds 9 honorary doctorates and has founded many STEM-related programs for students.
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