Resisting the Patriarchal Economy
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As I wrote this, my hometown, Montpelier VT, remained under yet another flash flood warning as I write. You may have heard about our state being declared a major disaster. I’m surprised by floods of emotion and how a lurking real danger affected me.
Our home is high enough to remain dry and safe, but one block away our neighbors have piles of toxic ruins in their yards, awaiting pickup. Three blocks away, our capital city’s downtown faces more muddy, lethal piles, and so do many of our small towns in valleys where rivers run through them, no longer picturesque. Farms are devastated.
(Left) This is a building near my home, a scene multiplied throughout Montpelier and large parts of Vermont. Cost for removing Montpelier’s debris safely is estimated at $1 million. This will add “growth” to the GDP, as only money counts in GDP’s misguided measure of the economy. (Right) Here is Main Street, converted to a widened river, the Winooski, overflowing at the opposite end of town.
Personal danger has deepened my empathy for these, and for those farther away, facing a killing heat that just won’t quit. The up-close dangers of this climate crisis demand my wider attention and make the usual daily denial impossible. When our local paper could finally be delivered, I noticed our editor was similarly affected. Vermont dams upstream had nearly been breached, but he widened a concern affecting all of us: 91,000 dam in all 50 states. By 2030, 70 percent of these built in a kinder climate will be 50 years old. Civil Engineers have given US dams a “D” grade, 2300 of them “high hazard potential” dams. Is there one near you?
Texts and phone calls enabled friends and family to check in on us. One bright spot for me was a friend’s suggestion that I read the sci-fi novel, Ministry for the Future, which paints a scientific picture of what will happen as the Earth continues to heat up — yet she found it surprisingly hopeful. It was hope I was after. How do we address this danger?
I tried to order Ministry from our downtown bookstore — but they’re not taking orders, too busy throwing out wet books, clearing mud. So instead, Google found me the book’s author, Kim Stanley Robinson. He gave an April 2023 talk titled “What I’ve learned since publishing Ministry….” Realistic, Robinson found our growing sense of danger a good thing.
Several surprising alliances are happening now that he wouldn’t have predicted — many of them led by young women lawyers, activists, and officials, negotiating behind the scenes. He called this “the real work” to audience cheers. He also talked about “regenerative agriculture,” which I’d first learned about from AEOO’s Didi Pershouse, who teaches how healthy soil is like a sponge, holding water, preventing floods, surviving drought. Women, Food and Agriculture Network also supports regen farmers, many of them women.
Green finance for re-gen is crucial, says author Robinson. I’d just heard from Abe Collins, another champion of soil restoration, as well as new finance. Abe just presented at Harvard’s conference, “Money as a Democratic Medium” — in itself, a surprisingly hopeful event. He wrote, “I managed to bridge the gap between mutual credit networks, public banking, and federal money creation to finance ‘the largest physical project in history.’” He meant the worldwide restorative soil project to sequester carbon, prevent flooding, and withstand droughts. Green finance can make this happen — but only by prioritizing “real work” people over Wall Street profits.
We can demand it and create this — or else face even greater threatening dangers.
In solidarity,
Rickey Gard Diamond,
AEOO Founder
AEOO Updates
Support a Community Economist! This September, Praxis Peace Institute — founded by AEOO Advisory Board Member Georgia Kelly! — is planning an in-depth study of the Mondragon Cooperative businesses, the Basque culture that supports this enlightened economic model, and the Basque government and NGOs that teach and practice the ethics that are the basis of this society. And we’re pooling resources with Praxis to help get Adrionna Fike there!
(Fabián Aguirre and Maya Pisciotto, The Understory )
Adrionna is the Marketing Strategist with Black Farmers in the East Bay and has been a worker-owner at the Mandela Grocery Cooperative in Oakland. She is a Board Member of the Bay Area Worker Cooperative Network and the Agroecology Commons. She has a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College and an MA in Public Administration from USF — and is exactly the type of candidate that will be able to make good use of what she learns at Mondragon.
Donate here to support a scholarship for Adrionna.
Women Unscrewing Screwnomics. Rickey Gard Diamond’s column at Ms. Magazine highlights this month the important work of feminist economists like Nancy Folbre, Caroline Shenaz Hossein, and the International Association of Feminist Economists (IAFFE), which met this month in South Africa. You’ll also learn about the economists who are part of the Diverse Solidarity Economies Collective (DISE), which includes Jessica Gordon Nembhard and Hossein, among others.
The Australian writing team of Julie Graham and Katherine Gilbert, known as JK Gibson, created an iceberg illustration that shows how huge the so-called “informal” economy is and how its weight supports what traditionalists call “the economy,” the part above water, as if only capital or money matter.
Take a look at what’s currently left out of economic accountability — which can and should be included, In Traditional Economics, A Few Men Get Rich Quick and Easy — It’s Past Time for *Feminist* Economics.
“People don’t realize they can choose differently. We all believe in democracy. So why not democracy for the economic system?” asks Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein, associate professor of global development at the University of Toronto Scarborough — and AEOO Advisory Board member!
Resisting a Patriarchal Economy with Joy
AEOO presented a workshop at the National NOW Conference on July 2 on “Resisting a Patriarchal Economy with Joy.”
Joy was hard to come by in Washington DC, where skies were hot and colored orange from Canadian forest fires. One of our presenters, Andria Barrett, co-founder of Canada’s Banker Ladies Council, an alliance of Black women’s mutual credit organizations, had flights from Toronto repeatedly canceled and finally had to return home. Farah Tanis, of Black Women’s Blueprint and their exciting new Restore Forward Center on indigenous land, and Katonya Hart, a board member of NOW and AEOO, carried the day. We noted people taking photos of our book and brochure display from AEOO alliance members. Our workshop was attended by about 50 people, and we plan to post highlights.
Sadly, NOW had arranged for buses and a permit for a big ERA demonstration — but it had to be canceled because of poor outdoor air quality, and instead was organized indoors without press attention. But partnerships with ERA Project and Generation Ratify and NOW enthusiasm still carried it off well!
What Do We Want? ERA! When Do We Want It? NOW!
The ERA, From Then to Now
This July 22. 2023, marked the 100th anniversary of the National Women’s Party’s unveiling of the Equal Rights Amendment in Seneca Falls, New York. There, a Women’s Rights National Historical Park also marks the first Women’s Rights Convention held in 1848. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.); Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.); board chair of the ERA Coalition and former Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) participated, as did Feminist Majority’s Eleanor Smeal, NOW’s Christian Nunes, and Generation Ratify’s Rosie Couture and Belan Yeshigeta, along with Kate Kelly of Equal Rights Action and author of Ordinary Equality: The Fearless Women and Queer People Who Shaped the US Constitution and the ERA.
A curriculum, Reimagining Gender Justice was prepared in collaboration with Columbia Law School’s ERA project. Find more of women’s story of the fight for voluntary motherhood and equal pay in this resource-rich story by Carrie N. Baker in Ms. Magazine.
Democrats argue that the ERA has met the legal threshold in Article V of the U.S. Constitution to become the 28th Amendment. On March 22, 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment with more than the 2/3rds required, and in 2020, Virginia became the required 38th state needed to ratify it. At question is a deadline imposed by Congress for ERA and no other amendment. Dems have twice put forward measures to repeal the deadline and most recently to declare the ERA already legally the 28th Amendment.
Republican Senators have pushed back, claiming the ERA would have “very serious effects…on abortion, religious liberty, protections for women and more.” Yes, exactly. Christian nationalists would not then be able to impose their beliefs on the 75 percent of Americans polled by the Associated Press, who support the ERA.
From the AEOO Resource Library
Much has been said about “the new normal.” The last few years (and the centuries before them!) have revealed that we must dream beyond “reform” — and envision and design real feminist futures that look entirely different from our lopsided reality that discounts our value.
That’s why we convened experts for a Zoom of Our Own conversation on how we can truly “build back better” — by addressing the she-cession caused by COVID-19 and the underlying racism, sexism, and economic inequality that it highlighted.
Farah Tanis, Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, Karen Bassarab, and our own Carmen Rios shared actions we can take to to begin building an economy of our own. Together, we grappled with the politics of now and the urgency of expanding our feminist imaginations.
Tune in to the replay on our website — and access our reader for further learning.
