Articles and links to
articles on gardening, farming, homesteading,
self-sufficiency, home life, home arts,
homeschooling, pregnancy, birth and parenting
| Gardening,
Farming, Homesteading, Self Sufficiency |
|
 Rural Womyn Zone
This is a nicely done website for
rural womyn which includes articles, a
forum and links. There is a special
emphasis on violence against rural womyn
and how little attention the problem has
received.
www.ruralwomyn.net
You Grow Girl
Great
gardening website.
http://www.yougrowgirl.com/index.php
Living
Simply--Rethinking the Good Life
Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, The Margins
I believe it’s time to rethink
what we mean when we say we want to
"live simply," to redefine it
for ourselves, to explore new options,
that will help us to achieve some of the
joys or benefits of simplicity and
homesteading in ways we might not have
considered before. When things don't
work, it is time to move on and try
something different.
http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/articles/vol5iss2/livingsimply1_v5i2.html
Monocultures, Monopolies, Myths And The
Masculinisation Of Agriculture
by Vandana
Shiva, Director Research Foundation for
Science, Technology and Ecology - India
http://gos.sbc.edu/s/shiva2.html
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Quiltart Quiltart, the Internet's
largest mailing list for contemporary art
quilters, was established in 1995 as a means for
those interested in innovative, contemporary art
quilting to share, learn and grow.
http://www.quiltart.com
QuiltEthnic.com
Quilting and/or fiber related art, craft and
textile traditions of diverse ethnic groups from
contemporary, traditional and/or historical
perspectives
http://www.quiltethnic.com/intro.html
The
Underground Railroad and the Use of Quilts as
Messengers for Fleeing Slaves
http://www.antiquequiltdating.com/ugrr.html
Alternative Nature Online Herbal
http://www.altnature.com/index.html
Protective
Sachets by Danielle Aditi Lindsey
"My latest project is making protective
and healing sachets…some would call them
gris gris, asafoedita bags, amulets, charm bags
or protection spells….I'd been studying
herbal lore the last couple of years and decided
at last to do something with that
knowledge."
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs7n05/ada/Dani.pdf
Dutch Oven
Dinners
by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs6n07/v6n07e.htm
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"It
seems to me that mothering is the
business of making the world amenable to
children, seeing to it, for example, that
every child born is immenselyvalued for
being exactly who they are...I want a
world in which women can mother, not just
bear children and keep them alive the
best we can in a world that hates them
and wants to kill them because they are
ours. That is patriarchy's definition of
motherhood, not mine. Patriarchy
continues to define for women what we
want, continues to control the discussion
of mothering. Which of us...would ever
have thought of such a hideous idea as
child care centers, for instance? It
simply would not have occurred to mothers
to solve the problem of child care in a
way so profoundly unsatisfactory for both
children and adults, and ultimately all
of society. |
Women,
if we had felt powerful and had been setting the
terms of our own debate...would have understood
that the reason parents cannot care for children
is that men's world is organized insanely, from
its basic life-negating values out through every
aspect of life. ...We would have begun, as we
have, to ask the world-changing questions: what
do we value? How do we want to live? What kinds
of work really need to be done...How could we
organize society so that everyone's needs could
be met, only useful and healthful work would be
done, and everyone would have time to live?"
--Sonia Johnson, 'Wildfire:
Igniting the She/Volution"
Midwifery Today.com -- The Heart and Science of
Birth
Has a great, active forum!
www.Midwiferytoday.com
Midwives Association of North America
The mission of MANA is to provide a nurturing
forum for support and cooperation among midwives.
http://www.mana.org/
American College
of Domiciliary Midwives
http://www.goodnewsnet.org/index.html
Tribute to
Granny Midwives
http://www.mainewomen.net/granny.html
Birth Alliance
http://www.birthalliance.com/personalarticles.html
Born Free: The
Unassisted Childbirth Page
http://unassistedchildbirth.com/
Sheilakitzinger.com
Sheila Kitzinger lectures
to midwives in many different countries. She is
honorary professor at Thames Valley University
and teaches the MA in midwifery in the Wolfson
School of Health Sciences there. She also teaches
workshops on the social anthropology of birth and
breastfeeding and on unhappiness after childbirth
for birth educators and postnatal counsellors,
too. Sheila Kitzinger combines birth activism
with research, writing, lecturing and appearing
on radio and TV. Her research includes work on
women's experiences of antenatal care, birth
plans, induction of labour, epidurals,
episiotomy, hospital care in childbirth,
children's experiences of being present at birth,
post traumatic stress following childbirth and
the many different messages that touch can give
during childbirth.
http://www.sheilakitzinger.com/
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Alternamoms.com
"An AlternaMom is any woman who,
above all else, QUESTIONS and THINKS FOR
HERSELF. AlternaMoms usually know more
about pregnancy and childbirth than the
average woman. These things are a passion
to her. She may be a doula, midwife, or
harbor secret desires to become one of
these. AlternaMoms are "birth
junkies" and will usually admit this
readily! She probably started out with
her first pregnancy wanting the best for
her baby (like all moms do) and decided
that having a drug free birth was the
best way to go for her. Some go farther
and decide that having her baby at home
is better than at a hospital. Some |
even go so far as to
want to birth their babies without any medical
professionals at all. Before they know it, they
are questioning everything - vaccinations,
circumcision, public schools. It can be very
lonely, especially since these things are so
"mainstream." This can make the
AlternaMom very defensive of her choices, to the
point of being labeled "militant." What
is seen as militant by the rest of society,
however, is only the AlternaMom's love for babies
and children, all of them, and the desire to see
all children brought up in a manner that is best
for them."
http://www.alternamoms.com/welcome.html
HipMama Magazine
For feminist mothers: supportive,
intelligent, quirky, irreverent.
http://www.hipmama.com/
Mamanirvana.net
"We are building a site that
has like-minded mamas, all with the same core
beliefs. ..We hope to make the proverbial village
in which to raise our children. What are those
core beliefs? Children are entitled to respect,
to their mother's milk, to an intact body. They
are entitled to an intact spirit as well, and
have the right to be guided gently as they grow,
to grow without punishment or shame. MamaNirvana
welcomes all who share those principles.
http://www.mamanirvana.net/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.pl
Mothering
Magazine
A trusted source of information for
alternative and progressive mothers for decades.
There are great boards on this website, too, with
threads on homeschooling, alterntaive education,
circumcision, vaccination.
http://www.mothering.com
The Centre for
Research on Mothering
The Centre for Research on Mothering, at York
University, Toronto, houses the Association for
Research on Mothering, and the Journal of the
Association for Research on Mothering. The
Centre's mandate is to promote feminist maternal
scholarship by building and sustaining a
community of researchers -- academics and
grassroots -- interested in the topic of
mothering-motherhood.
http://www.yorku.ca/crm/index.htm
The Compleat
Mother
Women gaining empowerment through homebirth
and breastfeeding, women creating circles of
love, family beds, loving homes and supportive
communities
http://www.compleatmother.com/
The Natural Child
Project
http://www.naturalchild.org/home/
Nonviolent
Parenting
http://www.neverhitachild.org/
Family Bed
http://www.wearsthebaby.com/articles/familybed.htm
http://www.breastfeeding.com/reading_room/family_bed.html
www.girlmom.com
A great feminist website for teenage
moms.
http://www.girlmom.com
HipMama Magazine
For feminist mothers: supportive,
intelligent, quirky, irreverent.
http://www.hipmama.com
Mamatron
Mamatron.org was created in response to the
HipMama board coming to its end. According to
their mission statement, HM was a place for
"mamas of color, bi/lesbian/poly mamas, very
young mamas, mamas on public assistance, sex
worker mamas, single mamas, artist mamas,
socialist mamas, green mamas, anarchist mamas,
and pro-choice mamas." Mamatron.org will
strive to be the same sort of place.
http://www.mamatron.org/viewtopic.php?t=22
Rebel Mama's
Cooperative
Interesting boards.
http://www.rebelmamascoop.com/bb/index.php
Noncoercive
Parenting
by Janet Reiland
Nonheirarchical,
noncoercive, respectful parenting
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs7n05/ada/gs7n05.htm
Welfare Mom
Homepage
This site is by and about a welfare-mom, but it
is for everybody -- policy makers, single
parents, low-income families of all make-ups,
feminists, activists, and anyone who cares about
policy and economics as they affect the little
guy. I hope to convey that the employed,
underemployed, and unemployed populations are
simply many sides of the same coin. We should not
allow ourselves to be pited against one another
as a distraction. We need to work together for
the good of our nation and our nation's children.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1064/
A
prematurely-born baby receives breast
milk of a very different composition -- in terms
of fat content and trace nutrients -- than a
full-term baby, and the milk a mother produces
when her baby is two weeks old is different from
the milk she creates when it is six months old.
..We
are meant to thrive by breastfeeding...If a woman
chooses not to breast-feed her baby, that
decision sends a message to doctors, nurses,
midwives and health educators that breastfeeding
is something modern women do not want to be
bothered with. If a poor woman on government
assistance elects not to breast feed, the message
she unconsciously sends to her government and
social service agencies is that money that could
be spent on crucial needs, such as housing,
education and job training, should be spent
instead on buying vast quantities of artificial
milk. That money lines the pockets of those
companies that manufacture formula, bottles and
plastic nipples. It does not help poor women. By
choosing not to breast feed a woman sends a
message that her physical presence is not
required by her child. This allows the government
and employers to assume that it is not necessary
to provide women with either paid maternity leave
or day care
at
the job site."
Suzanne Arms, "Immaculate
Deception II -- Myth, Magic & Birth"
World Alliance for Breastfeeding
Action (WABA)
http://www.waba.org.br/
Breastfeeding.com
Great boards!
http://www.breastfeeding.com/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi
African American
Breastfeeding Alliance
http://www.blackwomenshealth.com/BreastFeeding.htm
Thoughts on
Breastfeeding
Dr. Katherine A. Dettwyler's site. Dettwyler
is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology and
Nutrition at Texas A&M University. She is the
author of Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in
West Africa, which recounts tales of her
fieldwork on child health in Mali. Dancing
Skeletons was awarded the 1995 Margaret Mead
Award from the American Anthropological
Association and the Society for Applied
Anthropology. She is also the co-editor of
Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, which
includes her own two chapters "Beauty and
the Breast: The Cultural Context of Breastfeeding
in the United States," and "A Time to
Wean: The Hominid Blueprint for a Natural Age of
Weaning in Modern Human Populations." She is
the author of many other scholarly articles and
is currently writing a book on research
methodology in the study of infant/child feeding.
This collection of web pages features some of
Prof. Dettwyler's past thoughts on breastfeeding,
gleaned from posts to email lists, her books, and
other writings.
http://www.prairienet.org/laleche/dettwyler.html#comments
"At
first glance some critics see... full-time
mothers in what appear to be traditional
household roles--and assume that home schooling
is a reactionary, antifeminist cause. In fact
home schooling bears clear imprints of the ...
feminism that was blossoming when many of today's
homeschooling mothers came of age. Like most
women, home-schooling mothers take for granted
that the idealized domesticity of the 1950s
housewife is a thing of the past. Like their more
conventional neighbors, homeschooling women face
hard choices between paid work and parenting.
Where they differ is in how they decide to
navigate those choices."
--Mitchell
L. Stevens, from "The Kingdom of Children-
Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling
Movement"
Homeschool
History
A Homeschoolers'
History of Homeschooling, Parts I-VI
by
Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, The Margins
A history of the homeschooling movement which I
wrote for my own publication from the perspective
of having lived through the early days of the
movement in the United States. I have been
homeschooling my children for 20 years.
Part 1: A Homeschoolers'
History of Homeschooling
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs6n09/HSH1.pdf
Part
II: Influences
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs6n10/HSH2.pdf
Part
III: 1990-1992
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs6n11/hsh3b.pdf
Part
IV: H.R. 6
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs7n01/hsh4.pdf
Part
V: The Gentle Spirit Controversy
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs7n02/hsh5.pdf
Part
VI: 1995-1997
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs7n04/hsh6.pdf
Who
Stole Homeschooling?
by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, The Margins
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs6n03/v6n03b.htm
Battling
for the Heart and Soul of Homeschoolers
by Helen Cordes
This is an interesting article about the
politics of homeschooling; I am quoted in this
article.
http://dir.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/10/02/homeschooling_battle/index.html
Special
Report: Seelhoff vs. Welch
This is a special report about
homeschooling politics in general and my battle
with the Religious Homeschooling Right in
particular.
http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/HEM/HEM165.99_clmn.html
Homeschool Practice
Creating
an Unschooling Environment
by Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, The Margins
What makes for a nourishing learning environment?
What should we have in our homes and how should
we organize our homes so that children will
learn, will flourish, just by virtue of the
environment we have created for them? What does
an unschooling household look like?
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs6n07/v6n07b.htm
What
the Research on Learning and the Brain May Mean
to Homeschooling Families
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs6n07/v6n07c.htm
Backyard
Wildlife Habitat
by Kathy Ward
Creating creature-friendly space in your
backyard
http://www.gentlespirit.com/gs7n05/ada/Kathy.pdf
A
Magical Childhood
I'm including this website mostly for the way
Alicia Bayer has captured the spirit of committed
homeschooling parents.
Of her childhood, Alicia Bayer, creator of A
Magical Childhood, writes, "My mother
divorced my father when I was two, and hid me
from him for the rest of his life. We were very
poor. I've lived in a car. There were times we
had no money for shoes. I've gone without food.
We moved from town to town as she put herself
through graduate school, covering a half a dozen
states. I was small, shy, poor, funny looking and
new at every school. It was less than magical.
...I am also a survivor of extensive sexual
abuse. It took a lot of work to rebuild my soul
after what I survived, and my adult life has been
spent in part by trying to help protect children
and educate adults about this crippling
epidemic....Fast forward to present, and I'm a
poet with just under a hundred poems published.
I'm working on a book telling the stories of
women and kids killed by domestic violence in
Minnesota. Some of those poems are now touring
the country in a play about domestic violence.
Until two years ago, I was the program director
and sole advocate for our rural county's domestic
violence program. A Magical Childhood Newsletter
is just something I throw together because I love
children and those who love them. To subscribe,
send a message to abayer@magicalchildhood.com. We
do not use ads. It's not about money. :) Feel
free to pass this on. Don't steal it, that would
be rude.
http://www.magicalchildhood.com
Home
Education Magazine
The oldest and most respected of all
homeschooling publications and the only one I
recommend without qualification. Great boards,
too.
http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/wlcm_HEM.html
margins home
©2001-2010
Gentle Spirit, Inc.
Photo
of baby is of Sita, one of Rick's godchildren,
when she was a baby.
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