“We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.”
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible
WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from August 25 through August 31.
The next installment of WOW2 will be on September 3, 2022.
. “We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken.”
— Anna Julia Cooper, Women’s Cause Is One and Universal
“In traditional societies, we have a long legacy of men controlling the body and mind of women. Such societies have valorised motherhood and fabricated concepts like chastity. Women have been the victims of these notions for thousands of years.”
— Dr. Taslima Nasrin, Bangladeshi writer and poet — her books banned, life threatened, forced into exile
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
will post soon, so be sure to go there next, and catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Orcas are highly intelligent marine mammals. Though they are also called killer whales, they are actually a large species of dolphins. The females and their offspring live in matrilineal pods.
When it comes to caring for baby orcas, the males are nowhere to be found. The mothers to raise their young with help from other females. Orcas have very long pregnancies, up to 18 months. Newborn baby orcas depend exclusively on their mothers for milk for one to two years and then for food until they learn how to hunt, and they remain with their mothers and grandmothers their entire lives. Because of this intense parenting, orca moms usually only calf every five years.
Orca females live 60+ years, and raising their young together boosts orca babies’ chances of survival because older females in the family pods help babysit, care for, and feed the young. Sometimes other younger females will also assist mothers in raising their young.
The Southern Resident orcas are a genetically distinct population in the Pacific Northwest, and with only 74 remaining individuals, they are on the verge of extinction.