International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. I think it must be almost twenty years since I last celebrated it. I recall marches through the streets of downtown Seattle with a few thousand other women and forums and lectures and maybe even a film series or two. I thought of all this the other day when my eye happened to light on a bit of memorabilia that's been hanging on the wall (or, for awhile, the door) of my office for the last twenty years. My old friend and comrade in activism, Therese Spaude, made it for me; and yesterday, when I took it down from the wall, I found written on the back of it "Happy International Women's Day" (plus a few personal words). To make it, she photocopied a photo and inscribed the photocopy with tempera. I've scanned it, and as you can see, it's gotten a bit yellow with age and still, for some reason, retains the creases it acquired during its brief sojourn in an envelope that Therese taped to my back door one March day in the late 1980s.