📖 Revolutionary books 🔥

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible di C. E. Cobb Jr.

«One of the crucial but mostly ignored aspects of the freedom struggle of the 1950s and ’60s is how near we were in time and collective historical memory to slavery and the post–Civil War Reconstruction era. Each generation of black people carries a memory of the struggles taken on by the generations that preceded it, and that memory settles in the collective soul and becomes the foundation for the struggles of one’s own generation. To borrow words from author and professor Jan Carew, we are haunted by “ghosts in our blood”. […] This book, although analytical and carefully researched, is not “objective” in the strictest sense of that word; rather, it is a fleshing out and contextualizing of the stories I began hearing in childhood, continued to hear as a young Freedom Movement activist in the South, and have been reflecting on all my adult life. Importantly, this book is also more than a collection of stories and personal reminiscences about the southern Freedom Movement of the 1950s and ’60s. It is an effort to think carefully about the past and to understand its lessons, recognizing that, as William Faulkner once put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. My goal has been to help us understand ourselves as a nation, cutting through platitudes and romance about the southern Freedom Movement as well as persistent stereotypes about black people. I have wished to demonstrate in an unexpected way how black people and their responses to white supremacist oppression continue and advance the struggle that was articulated as a constitutional ideal in the formation of the United States: “to form a more perfect union”.
[…] The real story of the southern Freedom Movement lies with this work, and neither what took place in the South nor what the United States is today can be fully comprehended without it»

#anarchy #antiracism #anticapitalism #decoloniality #history

The ALF primer: A guide to direct action and the animal liberation front, third edition, pamphlet anonimo.

«The Animal Liberation Front has its roots in 1960s England. At this time a small group of people began sabotaging hunts there. This group, the Hunt Saboteurs Association, would lay false scents, blow hunting horns to send hounds off in the wrong direction, and chase animals to safety. In 1972, after effectively ending a number of traditional hunting events across England, members of the Hunt Saboteurs decided more militant action was needed, and thus began the Band of Mercy. They moved on to destroying guns and sabotaging hunters vehicles by breaking windows and slashing tires. They also began fighting other forms of animal abuse, burning seal hunting boats as well as pharmaceutical laboratories. After the jailing of two Band of Mercy members in 1975, word spread, support grew, and the Animal Liberation Front was begun in 1976»

#antispeciesism #anarchy #anticapitalism

The Battle for Abortion and Reproductive Autonomy, intervista a B. Ostrach per la radio anarchica The Final Straw Radio.

«This week on the show, we sat down with Bayla Ostrach, an ac-
tivist, anarchist, longtime defender, provider of and researcher around issues of reproductive healthcare. We speak about experiences researching and working on the issue in Catalunya, the battle for abortion and reproductive autonomy in the so-called US, the challenges faced by independent clinics against
the business model of clinic chains like Planned Parenthood,
legal and material pressure and attacks by anti-abortion extremists as well as the cultural and political struggle to defend and expand the ability for people to get safe, affordable, full spectrum and stigma-free abortion and reproductive care more broadly»

#anarchy #feminism #consciousnessrising #history

Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom:
Herbal Abortion Procedure & Practice for Midwives & Herbalists, Eberhardt Press.

Tw: abortion

«This pamphlet is the culmination of many years of research into the historic practice of herbal abortion. It has been my attempt to compile this traditional
knowledge into a comprehensive resource for midwives and herbalists to use in their practice. The use of herbal abortifacients can play a valuable role in herbal and midwifery practice and is a needed skill for many future
midwives. By reclaiming this knowledge midwives will
provide women with more abortion choices, while at the
same time reclaiming the wise woman tradition of the
midwife as pregnancy, birth and abortion provider. There is still a great deal of knowledge yet to be
discovered and reclaimed in the field of herbal abortion. As current information is reevaluated, studied
and scrutinized, historic methods are rediscovered and deciphered. While more studies and research
into herbal abortion are useful, it is also important to critically analyze the role that science and medicine
have played historically in wiping out this information in the first place. I would encourage all midwives who wish to integrate this knowledge into their practice to do further research into this subject. It is through our
own investigations and research that we will keep this knowledge in the hands of women.
It is my hope that this pamphlet will act as a catalyst for further research, study and experimentation. I anticipate that abortifacient herbal practice will be reintegrated with midwifery practice. It is my sincere
wish that herbalists and midwives will once again provide women with the ancient methods of herbal
abortion in new, safe and effective ways»

#history #feminism #ecology #consciousnessrising #spirituality #anarchy

Roses for Rosie, a zine to celebrate Rosie Jimenéz’s life & legacy, zine anonima.

«Rosaura Jiménez, known as Rosie, was a Chicana from McAllen, Texas, who lost her life in 1977 because of abortion restrictions. Rosie grew up as part of a large family. Her parents were migrant farm workers who eventually opened a Mexican restaurant to share her mother’s cooking. At 27 years old, she was a college student and single mom who had plans of building a better future for herself and her daughter Monique—she dreamed of becoming a teacher. She loved classic rock, dancing, and joking around in class. Rosie lived in an apartment next door to her best friend, and they helped each other raise their kids»

«In September of 1977, Rosie found out she was pregnant again. She had previously had an abortion performed by a medical provider, but because a new federal regulation known as the Hyde Amendment had just come into effect which prohibited Medicaid coverage of abortion, she was unable to use her insurance to pay for her abortion care. Rosie could not afford to pay for an abortion from a licensed physician out of pocket, but she was determined to finish school, so she sought another option. On October 3, at only 27, Rosie Jiménez died of an unsafe abortion. The Hyde Amendment cost Rosie her life.
More than 40 years later, we are still fighting abortion restrictions that keep people from accessing abortion care. Rosie’s story is a reminder that abortion care must be part of our collective fight for freedom and economic and reproductive justice»

#history #feminism

What is this thing called ME? A brief history of menstrual extraction, zine anonima.

Tw: abortion

«The first time this anarcha-feminist got pregnant, she also
got a little confused. I knew that I didn’t want to be pregnant. But
I also knew that I didn’t want to
pay a wealthy, white, male doctor to perform an invasive and trau­ matic abortion procedure on me. I wanted to experience my abor­tion as an empowering event in my life rather than a shameful mistake, and I wanted to actually experience my abortion. I wanted a menstrual extraction — the least physically traumatic, least expensive, unfortunately, least legal form of early-term abortion that exists today»

#feminism #consciousnessrising #anarchy

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers di B. Ehrenreich e D. English.

Tw: abortion

«Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of western history. They were abortionists, nurses and counsellors. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, travelling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called "wise women" by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.
Today, however, health care is the property of male professionals. Ninety-three percent of the doctors in the US are men; and almost all the top directors and administrators of health institutions. Women are still in the overall majority—70% of health workers are women—but we have been incorporated as workers into an industry where the bosses are men. We are no longer independent practitioners, known by our own names, for our own work. We are, for the most part, institutional fixtures, filling faceless job slots: clerk, dietary aide, technician, maid. When we are allowed to participate in the healing process, we can do so only [as] nurses. And nurses of every rank from aide up are just "ancillary workers" in relation to the doctors (from the Latin ancilla, maid servant). From the nurses' aide, whose menial tasks are spelled out with industrial precision, to the "professional" nurse, who translates the doctors' orders into the aide's tasks, nurses share the status of a uniformed maid service to the dominant male professionals.
Our subservience is reinforced by our ignorance, and our ignorance is enforced. Nurses are taught not to question, not to challenge. […] Women health workers are alienated from the scientific substance of their work, restricted to the "womanly" business of nurturing and housekeeping—a passive, silent majority»

#history #feminism #consciousnessrising #spirituality #anarchy

Free to choose: A Women's Guide to Reproductive Freedom, Eberhardt Press.

Tw: abortion

«To know our history is to begin to see how to take up the struggle again»
B. Ehreneich e D. English in Witches, Midwives and Nurses (1973)

#feminism #consciousnessrising