UNITED IN BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT TO PROTEST LOST JUSTICE FOR WOMEN: A LAMENT WALK ON NOVEMBER 23, 2025

"Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to fight for justice for women. The Walk was a great, great privilege." ----Kimi

"I like being able to do something that seems to have a positive effect on the viewers and the participants. Not just complaining. Something very active"  ---Ellen

"This was the most affecting, most emotional, the most honest expression of how our predicament feels, of many protests I have attended." --Jessica

"Thank you! Abrazos" --Steve-

--ABC-TV Channel 7 "Mornings on 7" ---November 24, 2025, viewed above.

--SingTao Daily published an article the same day (reporter Jessica Su)

Lament Walk for Lost Justice for Women starts with Kathleen in lead, on Diamond Street in Glen Park, San Francisco

If it doesn't have sassy included -- it's not a Walk or march for justice for women!

In 2025 we are as serious as ever about autocratic president No. 47's roll-back of our rights to safety, reproductive health, and choice in how we wish to live life. We are especially concerned about the recent news of an international cabal of privileged men who have been trafficking teenaged girls for decades, and how health insurance, repeal of 50-year old abortion rights, and food have been used as political cudgels to punish and repress women.

But the sisters know how to tweak society's nose now and then -- AND we suit up and show up to support women, along with pro-feminist supporting men, in a campaign focused on clear issues specified in our flyer above. It all boils down to:

WOMEN'S FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO SAFETY,

REASONABLE HAPPINESS, AND CHOICE!

On Nov. 23, thirteen people did just that: suit up in somber black to hold calligraphed signs for a Lament Walk for Lost Justice for Women. It occurred in my small San Francisco neighborhood. Pictures and Walkers' comments from that inspiring Walk are included on this page.

At the top pictured is our mascot, representing the suffragists of the middle 1800s and 1900s. Over long years many of these women - and some key men such as Frederick Douglas (spoke at the first women's conference in Seneca Falls, July 19-20,1848) and Unitarian minister and poet William Henry Channing (was on the Board of Directors for the second women's conference held two weeks later in Rochester, NY) - spoke out and organized courageously in homes, churches, and finally in the streets seeking to gain the vote for women. Quaker women were particularly prominent in the first wave of the suffragists, especially the Sisters Grimke and Lucrecia Mott who is reported to have been an excellent public speaker.

It is noteworthy that it took more than 70 years of effort by many, including Sarah Grimke (1836-38, speaker and activist), Margaret Fuller* (1843, principally a thinker and writer); Susan B. Anthony (speaker and activist) cited Fuller as an inspiration**, and Lucretia Mott (1849, speaker and activist) to result in the 19th Amendment to the Constitution adding the vote for women upon ratification of the necessary states in 1920 -- 50 years after all US men got the vote! **

Most people don't know those facts. Most also don't know that in 1913 and after, the suffragists were brutally as well as disrespectfully treated by the police, jailers, and President Woodrow Wilson via his callousness to their suffering, and his lies to the public.

Playing "Miss Nice Lady" got Carrie Chapman Catt nowhere but to have tea with Wilson from time to time. It took young blood Alice Paul to make it happen.

Paul, pictured here, rounded up like-minded radical young feminists and led women onto the streets in1913. They chained themselves to the White House fence to tell President Wilson that it was beyond time to support the vote for women.

Wilson deigned to release one woman early from jail and used her example to lie that all the women were being treated nicely, like ladies -- when they were not. Paul's health was partly ruined for the rest of her life after going on a serious hunger strike for weeks, and being force-fed along with other jailed women. On one three-week strike, she almost died before another woman convinced her to eat and survive to fight another day. And on the lighter side...

Perhaps my favorite suffragist is Inez Milholland, pictured here in 1913. She was amazing for her time: a Vassar graduate, labor lawyer, and libertine to boot! In the fabulous touring Broadway play "Suffs" recently in San Francisco through Nov. 9, Inez was featured as the third singer (at 56 sec. in) in a song called "I'm a Great American Bitch", a hilarious piece included in our inspirational Nov. 23 Walk Playlist which you may hear at the link:

https://app.box.com/s/6jolb9xwpfb3yv3bzidsp8l6fcdtwc60 Also included twice was the show's inspirational theme song, "Keep Marching On".

Paul and others got the brilliant idea to find a white horse and rider to lead a march of about a thousand women and men to the White House, and Inez volunteered.  In the picture you can see men also marching behind her! To her credit, for a number of years Milholland lectured and spoke out about the vote, but sadly, passed away from pernicious anemia in the middle of one such lecture.

Ann being interviewed by ABC-TV reporter

However, discrimination and repression of women's voices will not pass away. Patriarchy is well established, as is vengeance against women -- women perceived by arch-conservative, theocratic men to be diminishing their rights and status- -- as if rights are limited in quantity when justice and equality prevail!

It was to not turn away, but to focus public attention on this fact and on key issues that critically harm women's bodies, minds and spirits, that we 13 walked, united in somber procession on Sunday.

I was gratified to see that women have not been overlooked by our local media, who also care about our concerns. Reporters covered the event from ABC-TV channel 7 on the morning news Nov. 24, and Sing Tao published an article the same day, by reporter Jessica Su. Sing Tao is the City's best known Chinese newspaper. KRON Channel 4 TV texted that they could not send a reporter but requested photos after the event, which have been sent.

But approved of or not, our work is not done in order to achieve parity with men and to restore WOMEN'S FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO SAFETY, REASONABLE HAPPINESS, AND CHOICE!

Kathleen leads to a second stationary position on Bosworth Street

We hope you will join our next Lament Walk, and also join Planned Parenthood Patient Volunteers and Walkers Abby, Kim, and me at a huge rally for reproductive health rights including abortion. It will be held on the City Public Library steps in San Francisco on January 24, 2026. We want to counter a nationwide protest by the evangelical anti-abortion movement. Mark your calendar, and see you there!

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*One of our Walkers pictured and quoted above, Jessica, edits the Fuller Society journal, "Conversations."

**Before the Civil War, the Suffragists expected that they would get the vote at the same time or shortly after abolitionist efforts led to the end of slavery. That was not to be the case. One man, Wendell Phillips said it was "The Negro's hour." Of course, he meant Negro MEN, and women were ignored once more. Sadly, some suffragists agreed with that viewpoint, not seeing the intersectionality of discrimination or once again putting women second when it came to justice and equality. See Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America by Margaret Hope Bacon. To her dying day Lucretia Mott tried to heal the breach and achieve the vote for women.

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