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antlerology:

animoslty:

daisydeadhead:

antlerology:

Just a few of the stories my great aunt told me about women in the 60s:

1) A woman she worked with at the hospital who had a baby with one of the ambulance drivers. When work found out they fired her (he kept his job). She tried to self-abort with a knitting needle.

2) The sister of one of her neighbours who wasn’t able to rent a room because she was a ‘fallen woman’.

3) A girl who got sent to a convent house and scrubbed floors until the day she gave birth. Her baby was given up for adoption without her consent.

4) Girls who had babies with priests.

5) Women who were on their fifth, sixth, seventh child, who had been pregnant for the best part of a decade, begging for sterilisation because their husbands wouldn’t wear a condom.

Banning abortion has never ever stopped it from happening. It’s just meant more stigma, more prejudice, more risks and more deaths.

In 1962, my mother was going thru a divorce, got pregnant and knew this fact would be used to deny her divorce (they used to do that, in case you didn’t know).  

My mother was given a “shot”; she lived 3 blocks from the doctor.   He never told her what it was, likely an “overdose” of progesterone, which is how they used to “induce menstruation” in a hurry (i.e. abortion off the books).  She was about 7-8 weeks by her estimation.  He said, GO STRAIGHT HOME, go to bed and stay there.  She walked fast, but nearly collapsed at the curb and my grandmother went out to guide her into the house.  She went to bed, stayed there and bled steadily and heavily for 3-4 days.  She said it was like being very very sick, headaches, nausea, vomiting… and then, gone.  

She never let me forget this and took me to my first NARAL meeting when I was 15 yrs old.  And here I am today, in my 50s–and I still remember my grandmother’s scary account; my mother swaying, literally, at the curb, and nearly falling, under the strength of that one shot.  

How did she get the doctor to do it? She told him, “If you don’t, I will do it myself”–and if you knew my mother, you knew she meant it.  She would have.  After all, lots of women she knew had.  

This is what they want to take us all back to, the fucking middle ages.  Please remember.  

I really don’t think we will go back the middle ages just because abortion is illegalized. Society is different now and abortion is not some HUGE factor in this. Those were the 1960s and it is no longer the 1960s.

The reason this isn’t the 1960s is because women can access contraception and abortion – thus enabling them to have careers, to have bodily autonomy, to actually have sex without bearing the entire burden of social stigma and physical danger, to equalise sexual autonomy.

Without abortion we very well will go back to the 60s. And it wasn’t the bohemian dream everyone acts like it was, as shown by the original point.

rahksin:

Hey, ignore me if you’ve answered this already, but where did your interest in plant life and gardening come from? I am forever marveling at all this practical knowledge that I was never introduced to as a kid.

shadesofmauve:

tkingfisher:

Oh wow, that’s a good question! My mother was a gardener, and I think it was from her that I got the desire to grow things, but I didn’t get much practical knowledge. (Not her fault, I was just young and dumb and also things that grow in Oregon are not always things that grow in Minnesota or North Carolina. I did learn how to build a drystone wall from my stepfather, though, which is surprisingly useful knowledge, because it teaches you that stacking a bunch of rocks can fix all kinds of things.)

No, I got all the actual knowledge from books and sticking my hands into dirt. Mostly books. I knew nothing when I started. I kept ordering mulch from one place and they gave me Black Kow compost instead, because the clerk didn’t know anything either. So I spread like three hundred pounds of cow manure on my flower beds and then wondered why the weeds grew, but oh my god, the plants exploded.

And I also did a lot of things that were stupid, some of which worked great. For example, nobody told me you couldn’t build a garden bed by marking out a chunk of lawn and dumping dirt over it, until after the fact, when they said the grass would grow through. Those beds did awesome. Still do. Mind you, I used a LOT of dirt. (If I were doing it again, I might try flipping the sod, but at the time, I just got in and dumped dirt and smothered everything.) 

I had no idea how big anything got, so I’d plant it and find out. In some cases, that means that I’m still dealing with having Rattlesnake Master at the front of a bed and having to stake it, and I’ve moved (and slain) plants that got out of hand.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that gardening is often a blood-borne pathogen, but practical knowledge can be gleaned by reading and doing and failing and trying again.

How so many gardeners learn, really. Nothing like actually going out and playing in the dirt!

Also: MUCH easier than turning the sod is to just throw a few layers (4 ish) of cardboard under the pile of dirt. Insta bed, grass won’t go through, you don’t have to turn sod (which is a HUGE pain in the backside).

‘s how we did almost all of our last garden…

Worked a treat.

daisydeadhead:

antlerology:

Just a few of the stories my great aunt told me about women in the 60s:

1) A woman she worked with at the hospital who had a baby with one of the ambulance drivers. When work found out they fired her (he kept his job). She tried to self-abort with a knitting needle.

2) The sister of one of her neighbours who wasn’t able to rent a room because she was a ‘fallen woman’.

3) A girl who got sent to a convent house and scrubbed floors until the day she gave birth. Her baby was given up for adoption without her consent.

4) Girls who had babies with priests.

5) Women who were on their fifth, sixth, seventh child, who had been pregnant for the best part of a decade, begging for sterilisation because their husbands wouldn’t wear a condom.

Banning abortion has never ever stopped it from happening. It’s just meant more stigma, more prejudice, more risks and more deaths.

In 1962, my mother was going thru a divorce, got pregnant and knew this fact would be used to deny her divorce (they used to do that, in case you didn’t know).  

My mother was given a “shot”; she lived 3 blocks from the doctor.   He never told her what it was, likely an “overdose” of progesterone, which is how they used to “induce menstruation” in a hurry (i.e. abortion off the books).  She was about 7-8 weeks by her estimation.  He said, GO STRAIGHT HOME, go to bed and stay there.  She walked fast, but nearly collapsed at the curb and my grandmother went out to guide her into the house.  She went to bed, stayed there and bled steadily and heavily for 3-4 days.  She said it was like being very very sick, headaches, nausea, vomiting… and then, gone.  

She never let me forget this and took me to my first NARAL meeting when I was 15 yrs old.  And here I am today, in my 50s–and I still remember my grandmother’s scary account; my mother swaying, literally, at the curb, and nearly falling, under the strength of that one shot.  

How did she get the doctor to do it? She told him, “If you don’t, I will do it myself”–and if you knew my mother, you knew she meant it.  She would have.  After all, lots of women she knew had.  

This is what they want to take us all back to, the fucking middle ages.  Please remember.  

shadesofmauve:

jopolniaczek:

that golden moment when your “useless knowledge” comes up in conversation and you sound like the smartest person in the room but really you just spend too much time on wikipedia

I’m fairly certain that people think I’m smart because I spend so much time getting distracted by things like wikipedia that these moments come up rather often.