Using the Website

Body

Choose your own route through the site: you may like to review the commentators' reactions first or explore the profiles according to province or kind of activism, or at random.

Consider the quotations. Read the narratives of action. Compare how the women were prompted to activism in their communities. Take as a gift the profile section entitled, “Creating change: lessons, skills and advice,” for it is not every day that busy women can stop their work to dig deeply into their experience for an unknown audience. Discover common principles in the lessons learned that may be portable to your own activism; figure out how you react to their advice. Think up ideas for workshops where you live by considering how transferable the wisdom here would be to your community or field of activism.

Here are two questions for my own ongoing reflection: How could I do a better job of analyzing the complex political, social and economic tensions and competing value systems that lurk in my own activism contexts? What advice do I resist, and why?

However you move through the website, try to engage with each elder woman at a personal level, understanding how her knowledge has been forged through her own legacy and via principled action and a rigorously renewed faith in social action.