Antigone Launches Feminist Social Networking Site on International Women’s Day!

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Blog for IWD, canadian, change., feminist, movement, social networking, women

This post is part of Blog for International Women’s Day

Hi Friends!

Happy International Women’s Day!
My name is Amanda Reaume and I am the Executive Director of The Antigone Foundation. We believe it’s time for Canada’s feminists and women’s organizations to work together to leverage the power of social networking to connect around common causes and concerns across the country, both online and in person.

That is why we are launching Antigone Connect , an online site working to engage women’s organizations and feminists across the country to work collaboratively for women’s rights and equality in Canada and around the world.

Our Goal:

We are hoping to create a powerful online network that will be able to help lead the Canadian women’s movement forward in the coming years. As we approach Canada’s 150th Anniversary, we are all aware that there is a great deal more to be done in Canada to ensure women’s equality. More women in politics and managerial positions, accessible child care, changes to the Indian Act, equal pay, and equal pensions are just a few of the things that the Royal Commission on the Status of Women identified as necessary for equality nearly fifty years ago. They have still not been fully realized and this is going to take cooperation and coordination to accomplish.

Canadian Women’s History

This past fall, Antigone Magazine put together an issue about Canadian Women’s History and we spoke to Marilou McPhedran. She talked about how women organized around constitutional issues in the 1980s to ensure that women were included within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As McPhedran mentions, they did this without even a fax machine. With phone trees, letters to MPs and a lot of conviction, these women changed our country. We can too. Many of us now have access to e-mail, the internet, social networking, maybe even Blackberries and Smartphones. Some also have well paying jobs and contacts with women and men in power who support work for women’s equality. We owe it to our foremothers to leverage all the technologies and privileges that we have to connect and make sure that their legacies are not forgotten.

Your Help

But this network is not going to happen overnight. We need your help in the days and weeks ahead to expand it and bring to the table the voices of women from all backgrounds, from groups that might not readily identify as feminists, or those who might have difficulties accessing the internet, and the voices of women and men that are allies to the work that we do. We need you to tell people about it. To e-mail your contacts about it. To post it on Facebook or Twitter. To contact your friends who might have worked for feminist causes in the past but who have gone off in other directions. To help the technically unsavvy negotiate the technology! We need to come together to create this network across Canada.

Canadian Women’s Future!

Inspired by the next issue of our magazine (to be released in March 2010) entitled The Future of Feminism, we will be offering individuals and organizations opportunities to write about their visions for Canadian feminism. In blog entries, on Antigone Connect forums, on Dreams for Women postcards, and by leading online chats, we invite people to contribute to imagining the future of feminism. Email us at antigonemagazine at hotmail.com if you are interested in helping out.

Join Us

We launched this campaign this week and we are moved and excited by the response so far. It would be great to see you at Antigone Connect.

Thanks in advance for giving this a few minutes of your time, and for sharing this message with anyone you know who would like the women of Canada to unite together to transform our country.

Thank you!

Amanda Reaume and the Antigone Team

Executive Director, The Antigone Foundation
www.antigonefoundation.wordpress.com
Author and blogger, Some Leaders Are Born Women
www.someleadersarebornwomen.wordpress.com

photo credit: wikimedia commons

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Ottawa Senators (and their wives) Support Pro-Life Charity…

I have a huge problem with so-called ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centres’. It’s less what they’re promoting than the fact that they’re terribly deceptive. Young women who are experiencing a ‘crisis’ pregnancy need real counselling regarding their options and that’s what many of them expect from a place that says it deals with ‘Crisis pregnancies’… but in fact these organizations are pro-life and often very manipulative.

So, it also bothers me when an organization like the Ottawa Senator’s wives organization, called Better Halves, raises money from unsuspecting hockey fans and then gives that money to a crisis pregnancy centre. Given the fact that the money donated is being matched by the Ottawa Senator’s foundation as well, I find this even more problematic. Heather Mallick explains on Rabble.ca

The Better Halves are giving a third of the proceeds of this year’s $50,000 Christmas Tree raffle to First Place Pregnancy Centre, an Ottawa anti-abortion group run by Pentecostal Christians.

Planned Parenthood told me it frequently talks to women who went to these apparently welcoming places for counselling on the three options — abortion, adoption and parenting. The group says women report feeling badly treated.

A Crisis Pregnancy Centre just opened up near where I live and everyday that I drive by it I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. I hate thinking of the young women who get ambushed there. But it is worse that just that. These organizations are often not just anti-abortion, they are anti-birth control…. as Heather Mallick finds out….

I had an initially cheerful phone interview with Sens Foundation president Dave Ready, who said the Better Halves, when asked to choose three charities, chose:
• First Place.• Kids Help Phone.• Harmony House (a women’s shelter).

First Place was “in line with our mandate,” he said. “We did due diligence and checked that it’s a charity.”

“You went to the website?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you check on the links?”

“No.”

We went through the First Place site links together. There’s a standard disclaimer but First Place hopes we’ll find them “helpful.” I told Ready that some of the news headlines appeared to be libellous, particularly the ones linking corporations that make birth control drugs to the Jewish Holocaust and one drug itself to Nazi death camps. Others were grotesque: “One baby in 30 left alive after medical abortion” turns out to be an absurd, unsubstantiated anonymous “news story” in a British entertainment magazine.

You’re also guided to a donation page for the American Life League, a hardline group based outside Washington. There’s a shop, admittedly very funny, that sells “Abortion is mean” T-shirts for two-year-olds.

They offer booklets explaining that abortion is wrong even in the case of incest. They tell members to scare away raped children outside abortion clinics. They call RU-486 “the anti-human pesticide.” They offer sample letters to the editor to send to outlets that employ, I imagine, columnists like me. One begins: “Planned Parenthood is not ‘a good guy.’”

Ready gets more and more quiet as we track this. Soon he is desperate to get off the phone. He will not let me talk to a Better Half, who might well explain that she hadn’t known that First Place is financed by the Bethel Pentecostal Church in Ottawa and its mission — declared on the Bethel website but nowhere on the First Place site — is not just anti-abortion but anti-birth control.

Pro-Choicers Read Antigone!

On April 5th, Antigone showed up to support the protest against pro-life group Genocide Awareness Project or G.A.P and to hand out a couple of copies of our new issue! A coalition of numberous student groups came out to protest:

Pro-choice demonstrator and UBC student Kelsey Patton explained that while freedom of expression is important it must be balanced with other concerns.

“While it’s important that groups have freedom of expression on campus,” said Patton, “If that freedom of expression infringes on other peoples’ rights and it’s degrading and offensive to other people there needs to be measures put in place to address those concerns.”

The problem that most students have is not the pro-life message but the way in which that message is communicated – through large graphic images in the middle of campus throughways and through offensive comparisong to genocides like the Holocaust.

Anyways, we at Antigone want to thank those people who protested against the display and to spotlight them here! Here are some pictures from the protest:

Chris Walsh with unidentified protestor

Sarah Taylor hands out leaflets!

WILLA President Kristen Myres

 

Pro-Choicers Read Antigone!

On April 5th, Antigone showed up to support the protest against pro-life group Genocide Awareness Project or G.A.P and to hand out a couple of copies of our new issue! A coalition of numberous student groups came out to protest:

Pro-choice demonstrator and UBC student Kelsey Patton explained that while freedom of expression is important it must be balanced with other concerns.

“While it’s important that groups have freedom of expression on campus,” said Patton, “If that freedom of expression infringes on other peoples’ rights and it’s degrading and offensive to other people there needs to be measures put in place to address those concerns.”

The problem that most students have is not the pro-life message but the way in which that message is communicated – through large graphic images in the middle of campus throughways and through offensive comparisong to genocides like the Holocaust.

Anyways, we at Antigone want to thank those people who protested against the display and to spotlight them here! Here are some pictures from the protest:

Chris Walsh with unidentified protestor

Sarah Taylor hands out leaflets!

WILLA President Kristen Myres