Saturday, February 04, 2006
Anna and Rosa
"Ms. magazine's 1984 commentary likened [Solidarity organizer] Anna's situation to that of Rosa Parks, the U.S. civil rights activist, and drew parallels between the two of them from the perspective of the political silencing of women. ...Both Lech Walesa and Martin Luther King Jr. were awarded Nobel Peace Prizes, while the women credited with catalyzing the events that led to that prize faded into semioblivion...
The Rosa Parks who refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white man is envisioned as a lonely old woman who, one day in 1955, was just too darned tired to obey the Jim Crow laws. But the woman the bus driver arrested was actually only forty-two years of age, and she had been energetically organizing antiracism groups for more than a decade. ...After her release, at a celebration at the church where Martin Luther King Jr. presided, Rosa Parks joined the black community's ministers on stage...But she was not invited to speak....
For both Rosa Parks and Anna Walentynowicz, one stereotype was replaced by another when one form of oppression gave way to the next. ...In similar ways, Rosa Parks, Anna, and other Gdansk women were used for their functional and symbolic support of the struggle and then abandoned...."
--from Solidarity's Secret by Shana Penn
The Rosa Parks who refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white man is envisioned as a lonely old woman who, one day in 1955, was just too darned tired to obey the Jim Crow laws. But the woman the bus driver arrested was actually only forty-two years of age, and she had been energetically organizing antiracism groups for more than a decade. ...After her release, at a celebration at the church where Martin Luther King Jr. presided, Rosa Parks joined the black community's ministers on stage...But she was not invited to speak....
For both Rosa Parks and Anna Walentynowicz, one stereotype was replaced by another when one form of oppression gave way to the next. ...In similar ways, Rosa Parks, Anna, and other Gdansk women were used for their functional and symbolic support of the struggle and then abandoned...."
--from Solidarity's Secret by Shana Penn
