Author Mary Cronk Farrell

Did you know the Trump Administration is escalating our war in Somalia?
 
I must admit, I didn't know we had a war in Somalia.
 
It's part of the War on Terrorism, and it shakes out to at least 500 troops on the ground in Somalia, and increasing numbers of air strikes over the the last two months.
 
The attacks killed 225 people in January and February, according to the New York Times, compared to 326 in all of 2018. 

Of course, these air strikes are targeting bad guys, al Qaeda Shabaab insurgents, and supporting good guys, the U.N.-backed Somalian government troops. 
 
Shortly after President Trump took office, he declared Somalia an “area of active hostilities” subject to war-zone rules. This designation allows the U.S. military to readily attack Shabab militants, including foot soldiers with no special skills or role, and it permits the killing of civilian bystanders.

Four people died in a U.S. assault March 10th, 2019, according to a relative of one of the victims. The relative told Reuters one of those killed was an employee of the firm Hormuud Telecom.
 
The U.S. Africa Command acknowledged it carried out the air strike on Sunday, saying that three militants had died in the attack, as well as three separate attacks in a five-day stretch of February killing 35, 20 and 26 people. More on the war in Somalia here.
 
The Shabab have proved resilient against the American airstrikes, and continue to carry out regular bombings in East Africa, and the stepped-up attacks are exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Somalia.

Why all this bad news? Just setting the stage for this feature story.
 
In the midst of decades of violence, drought and famine in Somalia, there's one woman who's been making enemies peaceful, feeding the hungry and standing up to al Qaeda like a one woman army.

​Her name is Dr. Hawa Abdi, the saint Rambo comparison came from Glamour Magazine, when it named Dr. Abdi Woman of the Year in 2010, along with her two daughters, also doctors in Somalia.

In the refugee camp where Dr. Abdi convinced enemies to lay down their grudges, she called simply "Mama Hawa".
 
"They are very angry and mentally not [there] when they are coming to you," Abdi she told NPR. "Their parents or their brothers, their wives, their fathers were killed in front of them. They're coming to me. There is no government. The whole society became violent."

Dr. Abdi became one of Somalia's first female gynecologists in 1971, after medical school in the Soviet Ukraine.  
 
She worked in Mogadishu’s largest 
hospital until 1983, when she left, deciding she wanted to provide free medical care to dirt-poor women who would never be able to afford having a baby in a hospital.
 
"I decided to open my own clinic next to our family’s home in a rural area, 15 miles from the capital. Within a few months, I was seeing 100 patients a day."

When the country exploded in civil war in 1991 and the Somalian government collapsed, Dr. Abdi's clinic and her home turned into a triage center. Hundreds, than thousands of people, mostly women and children, settled in temporary shelter in the doctor's family's ancestral lands surrounding the clinic.
 
Dr. Abdi sold her family’s gold to buy food to keep the children alive and give adults the strength to dig graves. We clung to one another and we survived, but the fighting continued," said Dr. Abdi.

For the following two decades, destruction, violence, drought and famine ravaged her homeland and Dr. Abdi raised her own children while providing a safe haven for refugees. Her one-room clinic became a 400 bed hospital, and her thousand-acre farm
a displaced person camp.
 
She worked 12-hour days, 7 days a week, delivering babies, treating gunshot wounds, and providing IV lines of nourishment to starving children.

By 2010, With help from the U.N. "Hawa's Camp" was providing food, clean water, and shelter to 90,000 refugees. Dr. Abdi had two strict rules to preserve the peace. First, no one is allowed to talk about clan or family, the most divisive issue in Somalia. Second, men are not allowed to beat their wives.  

Though conditions have improved in the camp, Somalia remains wracked by war and over the years local warlords tried to shut her operation down at gunpoint They've blocked aid, raided her camp with machine guns, and threatened her life several times.
 
In May 2010 Islamist militants arrived at the gate, demanding Dr. Abdi turn over management of the hospital and camp to them, as women are not allowed to hold positions of power under their brand of Islam. She invited them to sit down to dinner.
 
After eating, "Six Hizbul Islam soldiers, jittery, aggressive young men with -henna-dyed beards, wearing red-and-white checkered scarves, their index fingers forever on the triggers of their guns," ordered her to leave.
 
Elders in the camp warned her she'd be shot, but Dr. Abdi stood up to the militants.

"At least I will die with dignity," she said. "They did not shoot me; they pushed back their chairs and left." 

A week later they were back, 750-strong. This time they fired on the hospital and camp.
 
"A BBC producer called me during some of the heaviest shelling," said Dr. Abdi. "I told him that the militiamen’s targets were the maternity and surgical wards, and the pediatric malnutrition section. One woman recovering from a C-section I’d performed earlier that day had stood up to run.
 
"Terrified mothers detached feeding tubes and IV lines from their dehydrated children’s noses and arms to flee into the woods, away from the indiscriminate shooting. A group of militiamen stormed into my room. 'You’ve spoken to the radio, haven’t you?' shouted one."
 
The armed men demanded her cellphone and and hauled Dr. Abdi and six nurses away, holding them hostage for ten hours. Then the gunmen returned her phone, saying. “You have many supporters,” and ordering her to call people to say she was alive and unharmed.  
 
The following day armed men appear to tell her not to re-open the hospital. She said she would not reopen without a written apology.
 
“Dr. Hawa, you are stubborn,” one told her. 
 
“I do something for my people and my country,” she said. “What have you done for your people and your country?”
 
A week later their second-in-command returned with a written apology.
 
In 2012, Dr. Abdi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

​Today 850 young people attend school in the camp, and Mama Hawa insists that equal numbers of boys and girls go to school.
 
Dr. Adbi now, in her early 70s, runs a foundation to raise money for operations, while the camp and hospital are run by her daughter, Deqo Mohamed, who also became a doctor. It's mission is to secure basic human rights in Somalia through building sustainable institutions in healthcare, education, agriculture, and social entrepreneurship.

Sources:
https://www.dhaf.org/our-story
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/us/politics/us-somalia-airstrikes-shabab.html?module=inline
http://www.asafeworldforwomen.org/womens-rights/wr-africa/wr-somalia/1039-dr-hawa-abdi-under-siege-in-somalia.html

Here's a warm-up to get you excited for my new book. Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Help Change the Course of WWII tells the story of the first African American women to join in the U.S. army.
 
At least I thought it did. Turns out a black woman soldier in the 1860s beat them to it.

Cathey Williams disguised herself as a man and enlisted in Company A of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment in St. Louis, November 1866.
 
She switched her name to William Cathey, and after what must have been a cursory exam, the army surgeon declared her fit for duty.
 
Private Cathay was 22-years-old and had actually been serving as an cook for the army throughout most of the civil war. Cathey told her story to a reporter for the St. Louis Daily Times in 1875.
 
"My Father a was a freeman, but my mother a slave....While I was a small girl my master and family moved to Jefferson City, [Missouri]....When the war broke out and the United States soldiers came to Jefferson City they took me and other colored folks with them to Little Rock. Col. Benton of the 13th army corps was the officer that carried us off. I did not want to go. He wanted me to cook for the officers, but I had always been a house girl and did not know how to cook."  

She had little choice. She learned to cook. At sixteen, swallowed by the union army, Cathey saw the Battle of Pea Ridge, a major battle of the Civil War fought near Leetown, northeast of Fayetteville, Arkansas, after which her unit traveled to Louisiana. "I saw the soldiers burn lots of cotton and was at Shreveport when the rebel gunboats were captured and burned on Red River." As a servant under General Phillip Sheridan, Cathey saw  the soldiers' life on the front lines as his army marched on the Shenandoah Valley. 
​ 
After the war,  African American soldiers were posted to the Western frontier, where they battled Native Americans to protect settlers, stagecoaches, wagon trains and railroad crews. They became known as “Buffalo Soldiers,” apparently so-named by Native Americans, though history's a little thin on when and why.

​After working for the army throughout the war, it's little wonder Cathey came up with the scheme to enlist as the fighting came to a close. With cunning and courage she found a way to survive when opportunities for black women were few to none.
​
As a Buffalo Soldier, Cathey learned to use a musket, stood guard duty and went on scouting missions. After serving at Fort Riley, Kansas for some months, her company marched 563 miles to Fort Union, New Mexico.
 
Official reports show Buffalo Soldiers were often sent to the most bitter posts and suffered racist officers, severe discipline and crummy gear, food and shelter. In two years of service, mostly in New Mexico, Cathey needed hospital care four different times for illnesses ranging from "the itch" to rheumatism, yet maintained her secret.

Cathey enlisted for three years, but after two, she was tired of army life and wanted out.  She told the St. Louis reporter, “I played sick, complained of pains in my side, and rheumatism in my knees. The post surgeon found out I was a woman and I got my discharge." 

All indications are that she was a good soldier. 

​After her honorable discharge, Cathey worked as a civilian cook and washer woman.  Until she could not longer work due to diabetes and nerve pain which required the amputation of her toes. She was unable to walk without a crutch. 
 
In 1891, Cathey petitioned for a veterans pension and benefits. The government rejected her claim, not because she was a woman, that was never argued. The army doctor who examined her found her to be fit, not disabled enough for benefits. There's no record of the life or death of Cathey Williams following that denial of benefits.
 
Sources:
 http://blackhistorynow.com/cathay-williams/
 http://www.buffalosoldier.net/CathayWilliamsFemaleBuffaloSoldierWithDocuments.htm

Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says trauma would only help a woman remember an attack more clearly.​

“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” he told the Washington Post. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory ... If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level." It's the reason people never forget details of where they were on 9/11, or the day President John F. Kennedy was shot.
​
​Martha and John Mitchell came to the white house from Arkansas in President Richard Nixon's first term, he as attorney general. She publicly and loudly supported the president for a second term as her husband took over the president's re-election campaign.

One of the leaders, Mary Skubitz, had 
immigrated from Slovenia as a child. 
​According to her son Joe, "Hunger drove most of those women. They just wanted something to eat and a house."
 
Mary spoke German, Italian, and Slovene, which allowed her to rally a broad spectrum of women in the mining camps. Fluent in English as well, she was persuasive with the mine bosses and strikebreakers.
 
Kansas Governor Henry Allen dispatched four companies of the Kansas National Guard, including a machine gun division to get the women back to their kitchens. The women, armed only with their pots, pans and red pepper spray, marched from mine to mine singing hymns and waving American flags. 

You will hear arguments that labor unions are obsolete. Twenty-eight states have passed anti-union legislation.

• But we have as many American workers in poverty as ever  before.
• And we have a new generation of labor activists fighting for workers' rights.​

This Labor Day, let's celebrate those dedicated workers doing important , yet nearly invisible labor, on wages they can barely live on.

Take one minute and watch the video below. Let Nancy inspire you!

Imagine devoting your entire adult life to a cause, living more than 90-years, and dying with unfinished business.

Alice Paul believed that men and women should be equal partners in society, and she was behind most 20th Century efforts for women's rights in the United States, including women's right to vote.

Now, close to 100 years after Alice Paul started the fight for an Equal Rights Amendment, women in the U.S. are still second class citizens under the law.   (See video below)

In October 1917, Alice Paul and three other suffragists were arrested for protesting at the west gate of the White House. She did not go quietly, believing that equal rights for women would not be gained without extreme measures.

Confined behind bars, her only power was refusing to eat. She had resorted to hunger strikes before when arrested in England.

When the forcible feeding was ordered I was taken from my bed, carried to another room and forced into a chair, bound with sheets and sat upon bodily by a fat murderer, whose duty it was to keep me still. Then the prison doctor, assisted by two woman attendants, placed a rubber tube up my nostrils and pumped liquid food through it into the stomach. Twice a day for a month, from November 1 to December 1, this was done. ~Alice Paul Talks, Philadelphia Tribune, January 1910. 

A new biography of Alice Paul brings the story of this less-well-known suffragist to teenagers in ALICE PAUL AND THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS.

Author Deborah Kops agreed to talk with me about Alice's passion and determination.

Deborah Kops: I am awed by Paul’s courage and her willingness to risk her life to help women win the vote. Her health was fragile, and she jeopardized it on a regular basis when she was young.

Paul went on her longest hunger strike, which lasted three weeks, in 1917, when she was in jail in Washington, D.C. (she went on three hunger strikes years before in the UK).

For most of that time, she was force fed, which is very painful. A hunger strike was her only means of fighting her imprisonment and reminding the public that women wanted the ballot.
​​​​​​​
She and the other Woman’s Party members who went without food (more than twenty) got plenty of coverage in newspapers around the country, which embarrassed Woodrow Wilson. Less than two months after Paul’s release, Wilson finally announced his support for the woman suffrage amendment. 

The amendment was ratified August 18, 1920.

Above: Fellow Suffragists protesting Alice Paul's arrest and incarceration for picketing the White House. Photo courtesy of the Historic National Women's Party, Sewell-Belmont House and Museum, Washington D.C.
​

Deborah, this book seems personal to you. (Author pictured below)

​I became a feminist during the women’s movement of the late sixties and early seventies, which historians call the second wave. And I assumed that the Equal Rights Amendment, which we were fighting for, was written in the sixties. I learned that the amendment was Alice Paul’s idea and that she wrote it in 1923!

​​​​​​​A century later, when Hillary Clinton made her acceptance speech as the first woman nominated by a major political party for the presidency, I was very touched to see her wearing white, the color that suffragists often wore beneath their sashes.

When I joined the Women’s March in Boston in January, I was very proud to wear a sash with the National Woman’s Party colors—purple, white, and gold—over my jacket.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Thank you for taking time for this interview, Deborah, and for writing about this courageous woman! 

You can see all of Deborah Kops books at her website here, including The Great Molasses Flood: Boston, 1919 which Kirkus Reviews calls A fascinating account of a truly bizarre disaster.

Back to the Equal Rights Amendment. If you know anyone living in the states colored yellow below...ask them if they know their state has not ratified the ERA.
Then check out the video below (it's less than two minutes long). Feel free to forward this newsletter. Thanks www.equalrightsamendment.org for the map.

Just three weeks ago Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the ERA (45 years to the day after Congress passed it).  This year ERA bills have been introduced in the legislatures of Arizona, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.