Solidarity

a) Women's solidarity for me means that women are there for each other. It is a connective-ness that goes beyond cultures, ages, and family ties. It means that every woman, even those in denial, knows what it means to be discounted, marginalized, and held back. You can be someone big like Hillary Clinton or just a single mom getting by and share the pain of misogyny and exploitation. Women's solidarity in my life means that you support women in their birth pains, their growing pains, and in their death pains. It means singing songs and reading poetry to a dying mother, bringing ice chips to a vomiting friend, and fighting like a wild cat against those who hurt your daughters. Women's solidarity means that you don't always know what to say or how to help a sister in pain, but you try. It can be as simple as a hug or as complicated as giving day after day to someone who rarely responds or acknowledges your presence, but then one day they will do the same for another woman. It means that there is an unspoken language and code that I have shared with women of different races, ages, and status that flows back and forth like life blood.

b)Women's solidarity is important because it is the life blood of my closest relationships. It ties me to my small group of friends that meet yearly for over 20 years for a long great drunken weekend of gossip, food, and tears. It makes this motherless child know that she has the unity of sisterhood in her daughters and friends. It is Grandma Iola's archetype in my 29 year-old daughter when she recalls the smallest of details in a long ago vacation and the hauntingly familiar face of a woman in County Clare in Ireland that I know I am related to. It is the link to my past and future and it sustains me.

c)I have come to this consciousness by living all my 55 some years. I have been remiss in often not being as supportive or intuitive to the women in my life. I have not been there for the daughter who needed me so much when I was trying to run from the fact that my own mother was dying by throwing myself into college. I have learned horribly too late the signs of abuse and dysfunction in our family and failed to protect my own daughter from my father-in-law and other abusive men. My biggest failure is that I wasn't able to protect my own child from these attacks by not being there for her and not giving her the radar that tells us when the enemy is near. Sadly I have learned so much about connective-ness of women by my failure to be connected. The times that I have gossiped and been petty haunt me because they have most often hurt my sisters. Because of this ancient connective-ness women can hurt each other in exquisite ways. We know the pulse points and underbelly of our selves and others. It is the divine struggle of women to not allow this capitalistic, materialistic society and media to turn us on each other. From the exploitative pictures of Jennifer Hewitt to the caricatures of Helen Thomas, the media baits the trap. I think that I started to understand how destructive this was personally when my daughters open their lives with me. I learned so much from the wise words of my daughter as she shared from her Women's Studies at UNM and quoted philosophers, poets, and Nom Chomsky. My foster daughter, as a midwife and mother of four, has immeasurable women's wisdom
and has traveled in a circle of privilege with laboring women.

d)I think that I started really evolving sadly after I became motherless and realized how lonely it is to never be my mother's child any more on this earth. I know that I still have a spiritual connective-ness to her and all women before me though...when I hear Mozart, read Emily D, look at paintings as diverse as Mary Cassatt's beautiful children to Frieda's surreal self-portraits. There in our art and literature is the joys, grief, and anger of all women.

e)I have alluded to my personal struggles in c), but recently I have taken on working for social justice in my ultra conservative community. With the recent raids in the Magic Valley where the ICE and Border Patrol have been racially profiling and literally rounding up undocumented workers, the women and children left behind are suffering. The racism and xenophobia that surrounds this hot button issue is despicable. I watch the rantings of Glenn Beck, the Limbaugh crowd, and compassionate conservatives and want to scream, but it is the quiet racism that scares me. The good Christian people that spout their "I'm not racist, but... stuff." Recently like those defending their tirades against a local Hispanic woman whose husband was dragged away in front of Target by ICE agents, as patriotic and pragmatic. This woman knows the pain of all women who wait...for the political prisoners, the soldiers, and the incarcerated. I vow to do all I can to speak out against this and show that there are Anglos, especially Anglo women in the Magic Valley that care. I am working with a group of citizens and more importantly with other Hispanic women to help spread the word about civil rights, how to get help, and to lessen the racial tension between us.

~ Dixie Siegel