You can say goodbye to the weird blog URL, and hello to a whole new look, added features and more regular and interesting updates on what is happening with the Violets and our city!
If you are a young woman blogger in Spokane (or are a young man that writes about feminism and modern gender and/or community issues of interest) and would like to be featured in our new blogroll, simply send your blog’s name, URL, and a short description to:
shrinkingvioletsociety [at] gmail [dot] com
Remember, with the Violets age is nothing more than a state of mind, so don’t exclude yourself from the fun! We look forward to hearing your comments on our new website. In a few more days/weeks Diamond in the Basalt will be set to forward to our new address. Please take a moment to subscribe to us, book mark us, and otherwise share our new link!
In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America.
Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington. Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each. As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders, they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb.
Their treacherous and inspirational journey to New York challenged contemporary notions of femininity and captured the public imagination. But their trip had such devastating consequences that the Estby women’s achievement was blanketed in silence until, nearly a century later, Linda Lawrence Hunt encountered their extraordinary story.
You can find the book in the Local Interest section at Auntie’s Bookstore. Make sure you let them know it’s for the book club so you can get a discount.
Our book group meetings usually take place on the third Sunday of every month. However, this meeting will be on the fourth Sunday, April 25th, at the Linda Lawrence Hunt’s retreat house on the north side of Spokane!
To commemorate our first year of revelry, we proudly present the VIOLET TEE! This fine item can be yours for one one low payment of $15 dollars. Please note that these styles run small.
VIOLETS IN CINDER: COLOR: Cinder
BRAND: American apparel
MATERIAL: Organic Cotton Jersey
STYLE: Womens Fitted Tee
SIZES: S, M, L, XL
VIOLETS IN EGGPLANT: COLOR: Eggplant
BRAND: Continental
MATERIAL: Bamboo / Organic Cotton Jersey
STYLE: Womens Raglan (scoop neck*)
SIZES: S, M, L, XL *women’s only available in scoop neck, not regular fitted tee.
True to our values, these designer threads are organic, local, and printed using water-based inks and soy-based cleaners. Mega-thanks to the killer staff at Blue Button Apparel.
(Click image to visit their website.)
T-shirt pre-order is now closed. We’ve sold half already! The remaining shirts (in both colors) will be available for purchase at the event. All proceeds benefit the Shrinking Violet Society.Let’s color this town VIOLET—
Our favorite non-profit restaurant is hosting a very special Valentine’s Day dinner. One World is offering this white table cloth dinner for just $60 per couple and you get your choice of a seafood, vegetarian or vegan menu. Lone Canary wine will also be served. Seating is limited, so make your reservation now and support this great community kitchen.
6-7pm doors open, folks mingle, view art and peruse vendor tables to Spokane’s own lady DJ Deseure
7-7:30pm Violets & Special Keynote Speaker announce Saucy Social Co-op and new SVS Mission and Vision statements. Champagne and Cupcakes by Sante Pastry Chef (& Violet!) will be available to toast to the Violets’ First Birthday.
7:30-7:45pm Violet, Singer, Guitarist: Kristen Marlo
7:45-8:30pm Violets Variety Show:
Film 48-hr FilmFest Winner: Amanda Vilbrandt
Poetry reading: Brooke Matson
Pole Aerialist: Chastitie
Hula Hoop Troup: Stefani Sellars & Crew including live accompaniment
Before you head on over to the Valentine Card Making Party at Liz’s house next Thursday to make cards for our February Ladies Who Lunch, consider stopping in and lending your talent to a team of local leaders who are looking to leverage community support for an exhibit about the 100th anniversary of women voting in Washington State.
2010 is a special year for Washington women…who won the right to vote on November 8th a century ago. To commemorate this momentous anniversary, a statewide traveling exhibition, Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices, will open at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture on October 30 and serve our regional audiences through June 26, 2011.
In advance of the exhibit’s opening at the MAC, we need community advisors with ideas, connections, and strategies for:
Exhibition opening events, October 30 – November 8
Programs and events throughout the exhibit’s run in Spokane
Networking, marketing, and underwriting strategies
Ongoing projects that document and collect the histories of Eastern Washington women
and women’s organizations, past and present.
Please join us at an informational meeting on Thursday, February 11, 3:30—5 pm in the Gilkey Room at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, 2316 West First Avenue. Your organization is important to this effort; if you are unable to attend, we hope that you’ll send another representative.
Please RSVP. We look forward to your valuable input during this project.
Join us Wednesday February 10th from 7 – 9pm for a Violets craft night. We’ll make valentines and share ideas, card making techniques and good company. Bring supplies to share or use yourself. (Snacks are welcome too!)
Back in December a group of Violets met up for our first ever retreat to have some fun and take care of some business. After an evening of fun and silliness and a morning breakfast buffet we settled in to create our Mission Statement and brainstorm for the celebration of our first birthday.
Well, it is at our Shrinking Violet’s First Birthday Bash that we would like to share our mission statement and offer it up for a vote to make it official.
Check it out:
The Shrinking Violet Society is a Dynamic Social Co-Op of Fresh-Minded Individuals Sustaining Creative Endeavors. A Saucy Social Co-Op!
We are thrilled to announce the first annual party of the Spokane Shrinking Violet Society where we will share with you some of the accomplishments of our saucy social co-op over the last year. This is the official blog post for the event, so check back soon for updates and developments!
This celebration will feature:
A Local Vendor Fair including artisans, nonprofits and businesses of interest.
Are you, or someone you know interested in tabling at the event?
Email mariah[dot]mckay[at]gmail[dot]com for details. Spots are going fast, so reserve your table today!
Eclectic live music and entertainment.
Interested in strutting your stuff be it music, poetry, dance, comedy or some other kind of performance?
Get in touch with Jane Silver through the Facebook Call for Entertainers.
An art exhibit of local work produced in the past year.
If you made something interesting to look at, let Tiffany Patterson know!
Submission guidelines are on the Facebook Call for Artists.
Refreshments and champagne to toast.
Free on-site child care.
Violet Gaia Borgias Brown is graciously coordinating child care for the night. Contact her on Facebook if you’d like to volunteer.
The fine ladies of the greater Spokane area along with all of their friends and family.
This means YOU!
Tickets are only $5 online and in select stores before Feb. 20th, and are $7 thereafter and at the door. Tickets will first be offered by cash and check only at Atticus Coffee on 222 N. Howard. Release date TBA. The public is welcome to RSVP to the event.
Several Violets have been involved in a local grassroots coalition that is looking to acknowledge community rights in Spokane. In our hyper-individualized culture, the concept of “community rights” is a new one and is understandably not intuitive to people.
The importance of discussing rights for communities has come out of the abuse of certain “corporate rights”. Over time, corporations have fought hard to gain access to constitutional rights that were originally established for living breathing people.
Since corporations are immortal, have incredibly powerful interests backing them, and have a lot of legal tools available to them that common people do not have access to, there have been uncountable numbers of situations in which these corporate rights have been used to trump the rights of individuals, communities and nature, often resulting in irreversible damage that will impact people for generations to come.
As a point of discussion we thought it would interesting to share this recent statement by Mari Margil, a friend and activist.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is the only public interest law firm in the U.S. that has worked with municipalities to question whether corporate “rights” can coexist with the democratic rights of communities to local self-government.
Those communities have recognized that corporate rights and privileges are routinely wielded to override democratic decision making and undermine efforts to protect the environment and public health, local economies and local agriculture. Through the adoption of local, binding laws, these communities are pioneering a new structure of law which does not recognize the rights and privileges of corporations.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Decision
Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – giving corporations the ability to directly give money to candidates for federal office under the Constitution’s First Amendment – was inevitable. It represents a logical expansion of corporate constitutional “rights” – which include the rights of persons which have been judicially conferred upon corporations. “Personhood” rights mean that corporations possess First Amendment rights to free speech, along with a litany of other rights that are secured to persons under the federal Bill of Rights.
Mari (red hair) speaking to the President of the Pachamama Alliance about constitutionally recognizing the Rights of Nature in Ecuador.
In order to reverse decisions like Citizens United, the whole concept of corporate “rights” must be examined, and how corporations possessing “rights” interferes with the exercise of rights by people, communities, and nature. And, it’s not simply that corporations have “personhood” rights. It goes well beyond that.Today’s structure of law gives corporations a spectrum of legal and constitutional rights which they routinely wield against people, communities, and nature. Corporations have more rights, for example, than the communities in which they seek to do business. They have rights which they use to lobby Congress, impact elections, to decide for us what we eat, whether mountaintops are blown off or not, whether there are fish in the oceans, and on and on. Coupling their wealth with constitutional and other legal rights guarantees that they write the laws which determine these things, along with defining the debate that leads to the adoption of the new laws.
Thus the context for understanding today’s decision is that we have a minority set of corporate interests, empowered by government, which wield their rights against a majority. It is the history of this nation. Whether with the Abolitionists, the Suffragists, the Civil Rights Movement – all found it necessary to build movements of people to drive rights into law – rights for slaves, rights for women, rights of African Americans – which necessarily meant eliminating rights for a minority such as the slaveholder. In the end, it is our constitutional structure of law that purposefully placed the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities, and nature.
In some ways, the Citizens United ruling is merely part of a predetermined destiny set by a 1700’s constitutional structure which placed greater priority on the rights of property and commerce than on people and nature. Reversing Citizens United means reversing that constitutional legacy.
And today – those who recognize that we do not have democracy when corporations located thousands of miles away are making decisions about our community instead of us, who recognize that we cannot have sustainability so long as corporations are able to decide how clean our air is and our water is, who recognize that we’ll never have true health care reform so long as corporations have greater access to our elected representatives than the people who voted for them – to those people – today’s decision should be understood as just another brick in the wall, another step in a direction that will only continue unless and until a real movement for the rights of people, communities, and nature is built.
That is the work we are doing. We hope you will join us.
