Find your passion, find your voice

On this mid-week after Women's Equality Day, here are some gems of wisdom from around the globe, on the rightful equality of women. Which is your favorite?

How can we work toward the goal of equality for women? One thing every one of us can do is advocate. Call, engage on social media, and/or write to your representatives on the local, state, and national level.

What cause calls most to you? Greater educational opportunities for girls worldwide? Women's equality? Breaking the power of human trafficking? Advocating for more comprehensive access to reproductive health care? Advocacy for victims of rape or incest? Wage equality? Stronger protections for victims of domestic violence?

Whatever your passion, whatever your cause, engagement is only an online search away. Become as involved as your time and resources allow, be that a letter every month or so, or something much more intensive. The important thing is to step up, speak up, and bring your values more fully into your community life.

What have some of your advocacy experiences been? Please share, if you're willing, in the comments section below.

IMAGES: Many thanks to the Women's Rights Facebook Page, for the quote-image from Malala Yousafzai; to AZ Quotes for the words and image of Hillary Clinton; and to a different AZ Quotes page for the image and quote from Mahnaz Afkhami. I appreciate them all!

Celebrate Women's Equality Day

The Artdog Image of Interest

es, I know we normally have a Quote of the Week on Mondays, but this is Women's Equality Day, so I thought the infographic was more appropriate. Women have a long history of being considered less-than-equal to men. Here are some points to consider:

From Visually.

IMAGE: many thanks to Elite Research, via Visually, for this infographic.

From unbalanced to balanced

The Artdog Quote(s) of the Week

Why is it so difficult for some people to believe that feminism and gender equality isn't a one-way street that only favors women? But the shift from unbalanced to balanced is proving to be harder to achieve than it should be.

It would be so excellent, if everyone could accept that a balanced society works better. Peace can only come with justice, and even such a cold-edged discipline as economics agrees there's more stability in a more egalitarian system.

Centuries of tradition have brought us to this off-kilter moment. Throughout those centuries we most definitely did not have balanced societies. They almost invariably were, in fact, radically unbalanced.

In the West, we've had a lopsided social structure that oppressed essentially everyone except for certain privileged, white cisgender men. In nearly every society, women have historically been an underclass.

My Quotes of the Week this month are inspired by Women's Equality Day. In each post I have tried to bring up a different angle on the equality equation. Last week I brought you daddies bonding with babies. Unfortunately, this week's post is a lot more grim.

That's the only "joke" you'll get from me in this post.  In any unequal relationship, violence is implied--but that violence all too often becomes explicit and bloody. We can see it in civil unrest, fraught racial tensions, in violent crime, and most definitely in relationships between men and women. We're still a long way from making a shift from unbalanced to balanced.

According to the latest statistics I've been able to find, considerably more than 1 in 3 U.S. women (35.6%) are raped or physically harmed by men they know, in their lifetimes. Women are overwhelmingly the victims in domestic violence cases. 

Just under half of the women murdered in a given year are the victims of men they know (Women kill men they know at a quarter of that rate).

Perhaps most chilling of all, the leading cause of death among pregnant women isn't obstetrical complications--it's murder. Usually at the hands of their husbands, partners or lovers--that is, their babies' fathers.

The likelihood triples when the father doesn't want the pregnancy. Think about that, in the contemporary climate of more and more limits being placed on the availability of abortions. We can't make the shift from unbalanced to balanced soon enough, for all too many women alive today.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Tigress and Butterfly Files, for the aspirational but unattributed quote at the start of this post, to Coolnsmart, for the (again, unattributed) "kitchen" quote, and to AZ Quotes for the image-quote from Margaret Atwood, which all too aptly sums up one of the most unbalanced aspects of our society.

Oppression

The Artdog Quote of the Week

My Quotes of the Week this month are inspired by Women's Equality Day, which this year  happens to fall on a Monday (when I try to make sure my Quotes of the Week go live).

When I went looking for appropriate quotes for the rest of the Mondays, I found this little gem from Letty Cottin Pogrebin. She's the writer and social activist who founded Ms. Magazine (full confession: Ms. was massively influential in my early life).

This is one of those quotes that makes me nod and say, "Oh, she got that right!" So it was a natural for me to include in this women's equality-themed month.

But although the place where I found this quote is full of lots of cool quotes and images, I didn't particularly groove with the way this one had been visually realized. I had a different thought about how it should be presented. I hope you like it.

SHARING IMAGE CREDIT: The visualization of this women's equality quote was all mine, but I couldn't have done what I wanted with it, if I hadn't had a little help. My help in this case came from Wikimedia Commons and a photographer named Andreas F. Borchert, who photographed the perfect pediment for me to make my point. 

Part of this image is an adapted detail from Borchert's Dublin Roman Catholic St. Audoen's Church Pediment. In order to fulfill the creative commons usage requirements, it's important for me to credit this source (though you know me: I would have anyway). And I certainly did take Mr. Borchert's license to "remix" his image pretty far. I cropped the section I needed, then applied the Sketch: Reticulation filter in Photoshop. I finished the work in Adobe Illustrator, where I created the typography and reduced the opacity of the pediment photo. 

Now it's your turn: if you like this women's equality-themed quote-image realization and want to use it, please credit both Jan S. Gephardt and Andreas F. Borchert, with links back to his license page and this blog post. Thanks!