Wednesday’s woman continued.

Each week after researching, writing and posting for my Weekly Woman I promise myself;that I will find time to add to my knowledge.  Like all good plans these have gone by the wayside. However, while my daughter was with me we looked more closely at some of the books I had  bought over the last year to aid my research but ‘put by the wayside’ Also, she too has added to my collection;  with a book called Quiet rumours : an anarcha-feminist reader. It took her immediate attention because it it is illustrated by Miriam Klein Stahl a print maker I had recently learned of.

Also, it had two essays by Emma Goldman; one of my earlier wise women.  A woman without a country written in the wake of the first world war,  that she says, destroyed countless lives but also the ‘fundamental right to exist in a given place with degree of security.  Every government it seemed had the power to determine which person may or not continue to live within its boundaries as a result hundreds of thousands of people were expatriated.  They were expelled and set adrift in the world; their fate was and remains so at the mercy of some bureaucrat with the authority to decide whether or not they may enter ‘his’ land.  Huge numbers of men, women and children forced by the first world war (and others since) to wander in search of a place where they can make roots and not be afraid of further removal.  

This story still seems familiar almost 100 years later.  

The essay goes on and the story although from the eyes of the self proclaimed Wandering Jew, a ‘victim of the strange perversion of human reason that dares question any person’s right to exist’ and an American citizen it doesn’t have a happy ending yet.