Women and Secession

In my SECEDE AND SURVIVE blog at VermontCommons I just posted an article Women and Secession.
Below are quotes from some right on women who support political decentralization, plus my comments on strategy. Read the whole article at the link. (And in case you don't get it, the graphic represents North America broken up into thousands of independent communities with a big feminist symbol over it!)

* In her book The Chalice and the Blade Riane Eisler writes of the partnership culture she envisions: ”As the consciousness of our linking with one another and our environment firmly takes hold, we can expect to see the old nation-state as a self-absorbed entity wither away. .. Small social units will be linked in matrices or networks for a variety of common ends, ranging all the way from the cooperative cultivation and harvesting of the oceans and space exploration to the sharing of knowledge and the advancement of the arts."

* Starhawk, in her book Dreaming the Dark, writes of similarly decentralized world where that the human ideal is "...the fully human life lived in the world, involved in community.. Historically, the institutions of domination have established themselves by destroying community--from the enclosure movement and the witch burnings in Europe, to the colonization of Africa, Asia, South America, and Polynesia. This pattern continues with the destruction of Native American communities, traditions, and ways of life in the Black Hills and the Southwest."

* Ecofeminist Ynestra King writes that for women to draw on the "Western democratic tradition" is to "work...with a political legacy that is founded on the repudiation of the organic, the female, the tribal, and particular ties between people...I am mindful that the original citizen in that tradition is male, propertied, and xenophobic..Ecofeminism supports utopian visions of harmonious, diverse, decentralized communities...”

* In her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations noted urban analyst Jane Jacobs calls for the breakup of large nation states on pragmatic economic grounds. "The very policies and transactions that are necessary to win, hold and exploit an empire are destructive to an imperial power's own cities and cannot help but lead to their stagnation and decay." She prescribes the "division of the single sovereignty into a family of small sovereignties" or "the expedient multiplication of sovereignties."

* Lesbian separatist author Sonia Johnson in her book The Ship that Sailed into the Living Room writes “living as I was suggesting would mean anarchy. A very different kind of law-and-order than they recognized, but order nevertheless, the order inherent in self-government--total and effortless, fluid, creative, and lusty...The patriarchs do not live in this knowledge and order and haven't for thousands of years. Because they do not have the spiritual and emotional health that is a precondition for freedom and true power, when they do what they want to do, the rest of us suffer.”

* Robin Morgan, former editor of MS magazine, writes in her book The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism: The State of man seems bent on ignoring this [nuclear destruction] as long as possible in its rush to an ultimate, controlled, thanatotic, orgasmic climax. Norwegian feminist theorist Beirt Ås put it succinctly: `A patriarchal state is one which is either rehabilitating from war, is presently at war, or is preparing for war.'...We live in it, this `State of War'. It saturates our lives. The whole vast grotesque State of being in which we are forced to survive is a State of emergency, a State of terror."

What’s our strategy? How do we do it? We’re too busy with paid work and house work and child care and elder care - and, if we have time, relationships!

The Greek Play Lysistrata is about women refusing to have sex with their men until they stop a war. This is the essence of non-cooperation. Considering how much work women have to do in our lives, one of the only successful protests we have time for IS refusing to work! Refusing to vote! Refusing to pay taxes! (I stopped in 1976.) Womens’ Strike for Peace remains a great idea.

The ultimate in noncooperation is Secession!