title: History of feminism

text: In 1906, the "Daily Mail" first labeled these women "suffragettes" as a form of ridicule, but the term was embraced by the women to describe the more militant form of suffragism visible in public marches, distinctive green, purple, and white emblems, and the Artists' Suffrage League's dramatic graphics. The feminists learned to exploit photography and the media, and left a vivid visual record including images such as the 1914 photograph of Emmeline.


title: History of feminism

text: The protests slowly became more violent, and included heckling, banging on doors, smashing shop windows, and arson. Emily Davison, a WSPU member, unexpectedly ran onto the track during the 1913 Epsom Derby and died under the King's horse. These tactics produced mixed results of sympathy and alienation. As many protesters were imprisoned and went on hunger-strike, the British government was left with an embarrassing situation. From these political actions, the suffragists successfully created publicity around their institutional discrimination and sexism.


title: History of feminism

text: At the beginning of the 20th century, feminist science fiction emerged as a subgenre of science fiction that deals with women's roles in society. Female writers of the utopian literature movement at the time of first-wave feminism often addressed sexism. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland" (1915) did so. "Sultana's Dream" (1905) by Bengali Muslim feminist Roquia Sakhawat Hussain depicts a gender-reversed purdah in a futuristic world.


title: History of feminism

text: During the 1920s, writers such as Clare Winger Harris and Gertrude Barrows Bennett published science fiction stories written from female perspectives and occasionally dealt with gender- and sexuality-based topics while popular 1920s and 30s pulp science fiction exaggerated masculinity alongside sexist portrayals of women. By the 1960s, science fiction combined sensationalism with political and technological critiques of society. With the advent of feminism, women's roles were questioned in this "subversive, mind expanding genre".


title: History of feminism

text: Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs gender roles, how reproduction defines gender, and how the political power of men and women are unequal. Some of the most notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore societies where gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, and dystopias to explore worlds where gender inequalities are escalated, asserting a need for feminist work to continue.


title: History of feminism

text: Women entered the labor market during the First World War in unprecedented numbers, often in new sectors, and discovered the value of their work. The war also left large numbers of women bereaved and with a net loss of household income. The scores of men killed and wounded shifted the demographic composition. War also split the feminist groups, with many women opposed to the war and others involved in the white feather campaign.


title: History of feminism

text: Feminist scholars like Francoise Thebaud and Nancy F. Cott note a conservative reaction to World War I in some countries, citing a reinforcement of traditional imagery and literature that promotes motherhood. The appearance of these traits in wartime has been called the "nationalization of women".


title: History of feminism

text: In the years between the wars, feminists fought discrimination and establishment opposition. In Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own", Woolf describes the extent of the backlash and her frustration. By now, the word "feminism" was in use, but with a negative connotation from mass media, which discouraged women from self-identifying as such. When Rebecca West, another prominent writer, had been attacked as "a feminist", Woolf defended her. West has been remembered for her comment "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute."


title: History of feminism

text: In the 1920s, the nontraditional styles and attitudes of flappers were popular among American and British women.


title: History of feminism

text: The United Kingdom's Representation of the People Act 1918 gave near-universal suffrage to men, and suffrage to women over 30. The Representation of the People Act 1928 extended equal suffrage to both men and women. It also shifted the socioeconomic makeup of the electorate towards the working class, favouring the Labour Party, who were more sympathetic to women's issues.


title: History of feminism

text: The granting of the vote did not automatically give women the right to stand for Parliament and the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act was rushed through just before the following election. Seventeen women were among the 1700 candidates nominated. Christabel Pankhurst narrowly failed to win a seat, and Constance Markievicz (Sinn Féin) was the first woman elected in Ireland in 1918, but as an Irish nationalist, refused to take her seat.


title: History of feminism

text: In 1919 and 1920, both Lady Astor and Margaret Wintringham won seats for the Conservatives and Liberals respectively by succeeding their husband's seats. Labour swept to power in 1924. Astor's proposal to form a women's party in 1929 was unsuccessful. Women gained considerable electoral experience over the next few years as a series of minority governments ensured almost annual elections. Close affiliation with Labour also proved to be a problem for the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), which had little support in the Conservative party. However, their persistence with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was rewarded with the passage of the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928.


title: History of feminism

text: European women received the vote in Finland (that time still an autonomous state under Czar Russia) in 1906, in Denmark and Iceland in 1915 (full in 1919), the Russian Republic in 1917, Austria, Germany and Canada in 1918, many countries including the Netherlands in 1919, Czechoslovakia (today Czech Republic and Slovakia) in 1920, and Turkey and South Africa in 1930. French women did not receive the vote until 1945. Liechtenstein was one of the last countries, in 1984.


title: History of feminism

text: After French women were given the right to vote in 1945, two women's organizations were founded in the French colony of Martinique. "Le Rassemblement féminin" and "l'Union des femmes de la Martinique" both had the goal of encouraging women to vote in the upcoming elections. While "l'Union des femmes de la Martinique," founded by Jeanne Lero was influenced by beliefs, "Le Rassemblement féminin," founded by Paulette Nardal, claimed to not support any particular political party and only encouraged women to take political action in order to create social change.


title: History of feminism

text: The political change did not immediately change social circumstances. With the economic recession, women were the most vulnerable sector of the workforce. Some women who held jobs prior to the war were obliged to forfeit them to returning soldiers, and others were excessed. With limited franchise, the UK National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) pivoted into a new organization, the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), which still advocated for equality in franchise, but extended its scope to examine equality in social and economic areas. Legislative reform was sought for discriminatory laws (e.g., family law and prostitution) and over the differences between "equality" and "equity", the accommodations that would allow women to overcome barriers to fulfillment (known in later years as the "equality vs. difference conundrum"). Eleanor Rathbone, who became a British Member of Parliament in 1929, succeeded Millicent Garrett as president of NUSEC in 1919. She expressed the critical need for consideration of "difference" in gender relationships as "what women need to fulfill the potentialities of their own natures". The 1924 Labour government's social reforms created a formal split, as a splinter group of strict egalitarians formed the Open Door Council in May 1926. This eventually became an international movement, and continued until 1965. Other important social legislation of this period included the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 (which opened professions to women), and the Matrimonial Causes Act 1923. In 1932, NUSEC separated advocacy from education, and continued the former activities as the National Council for Equal Citizenship and the latter as the Townswomen's Guild. The council continued until the end of the Second World War.


title: History of feminism

text: British laws prevented feminists from discussing and addressing reproductive rights. Annie Besant was tried under the Obscene Publications Act 1857 in 1877 for publishing Charles Knowlton's "Fruits of Philosophy", a work on family planning. Knowlton had previously been convicted in the United States. She and her colleague Charles Bradlaugh were convicted but acquitted on appeal. The subsequent publicity resulted in a decline in the UK's birth rate. Besant later wrote "The Law of Population".


title: History of feminism

text: In America, Margaret Sanger was prosecuted for her book "Family Limitation" under the Comstock Act in 1914, and fled to Britain until it was safe to return. Sanger's work was prosecuted in Britain. She met Marie Stopes in Britain, who was never prosecuted but regularly denounced for her promotion of birth control. In 1917, Sanger started the "Birth Control Review". In 1926, Sanger gave a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, which she referred to as a "weird experience". The establishment of the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1936 was even more controversial. The British penalty for abortion had been reduced from execution to life imprisonment by the Offences against the Person Act 1861, although some exceptions were allowed in the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929. Following Aleck Bourne's prosecution in 1938, the 1939 Birkett Committee made recommendations for reform that were set aside at the Second World War's outbreak, along with many other women's issues.


title: History of feminism

text: In the Netherlands, Aletta H. Jacobs, the first Dutch female doctor, and Wilhelmina Drucker led discussion and action for reproductive rights. Jacobs imported diaphragms from Germany and distributed them to poor women for free.


title: History of feminism

text: In most front line countries, women volunteered or were conscripted for various duties in support of the national war effort. In Britain, women were drafted and assigned to industrial jobs or to non-combat military service. The British services enrolled 460,000 women. The largest service, Auxiliary Territorial Service, had a maximum of 213,000 women enrolled, many of whom served in anti-aircraft gun combat roles. In many countries, including Germany and the Soviet Union, women volunteered or were conscripted. In Germany, women volunteered in the League of German Girls and assisted the Luftwaffe as anti-aircraft gunners, or as guerrilla fighters in Werwolf units behind Allied lines. In the Soviet Union, about 820,000 women served in the military as medics, radio operators, truck drivers, snipers, combat pilots, and junior commanding officers.


title: History of feminism

text: Many American women retained their domestic chores and often added a paid job, especially one related to a war industry. Much more so than in the previous war, large numbers of women were hired for unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in munitions, and barriers against married women taking jobs were eased. The popular Rosie the Riveter icon became a symbol for a generation of American working women. In addition, some 300,000 women served in U.S. military uniform with organizations such as Women's Army Corps and WAVES. With many young men gone, sports organizers tried to set up professional women's teams, such as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which closed after the war. After the war, most munitions plants closed, and civilian plants replaced their temporary female workers with returning veterans, who had priority.


title: History of feminism

text: "Second-wave feminism" identifies a period of feminist activity from the early 1960s through the late 1980s that saw cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked. The movement encouraged women to understand aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicized and reflective of a sexist power structure. As first-wave feminists focused on absolute rights such as suffrage, second-wave feminists focused on other cultural equality issues, such as ending discrimination.


title: History of feminism

text: A landmark feminist work appeared in 1949 called "The Second Sex", a book written by Simone de Beauvoir. The critical text pertained to every facet of what would later be defined as gender discourse. Beauvoir goes into detail on the treatment of women throughout entire history of the world and analyses the modes of oppression enforced by patriarchy and then critiques it. In 1963, Betty Friedan's exposé "The Feminine Mystique" became the voice for the discontent and disorientation women felt in being shunted into homemaking positions after their college graduations. In the book, Friedan explored the roots of the change in women's roles from essential workforce during World War II to homebound housewife and mother after the war, and assessed the forces that drove this change in perception of women's roles.


title: History of feminism

text: The expression "Women's Liberation" has been used to refer to feminism throughout history. "Liberation" has been associated with feminist aspirations since 1895, and appears in the context of "women's liberation" in Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 "The Second Sex", which appeared in English translation in 1953. The phrase "women's liberation" was first used in 1964, in print in 1966, though the French equivalent, "libération des femmes", occurred as far back as 1911. "Women's liberation" was in use at the 1967 American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) convention, which held a panel discussion on the topic. In 1968, the term "Women's Liberation Front" appeared in "Ramparts" magazine, and began to refer to the whole women's movement. In Chicago, women disillusioned with the New Left met separately in 1967, and published "Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement" in March 1968. When the Miss America pageant took place in Atlantic City in September 1968, the media referred to the resulting demonstrations as "Women's Liberation". The Chicago Women's Liberation Union was formed in 1969. Similar groups with similar titles appeared in many parts of the United States. Bra-burning, although fictional, became associated with the movement, and the media coined other terms such as "libber". "Women's Liberation" persisted over the other rival terms for the new feminism, captured the popular imagination, and has endured alongside the older term "Women's Movement".


title: History of feminism

text: This time was marked by increased female enrolment in higher education, the establishment of academic women's studies courses and departments, and feminist ideology in other related fields, such as politics, sociology, history, and literature. This academic shift in interests questioned the status quo, and its standards and authority.


title: History of feminism

text: The rise of the Women's Liberation movement revealed "multiple feminisms", or different underlying feminist lenses, due to the diverse origins from which groups had coalesced and intersected, and the complexity and contentiousness of the issues involved. bell hooks is noted as a prominent critic of the movement for its lack of voice given to the most oppressed women, its lack of emphasis on the inequalities of race and class, and its distance from the issues that divide women. Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman", John Lennon's "Woman is the Nigger of the World" and Yoko Ono's "Josei Joui Banzai" were 70s feminist songs. Feminist's wrong protest against rock music movement was started in Los Angeles, where Women Against Violence Against Women was founded in 1976; they campaigned against the Rolling Stones' 1976 album "Black and Blue".


title: History of feminism

text: Empowered by "The Feminine Mystique", new feminist activists of the 1970s addressed more political and sexual issues in their writing, including Gloria Steinem's "Ms." magazine and Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics". Millett's bleak survey of male writers, their attitudes and biases, to demonstrate that sex is politics, and politics is power imbalance in relationships. Shulamith Firestone's "The Dialectic of Sex" described a revolution based in Marxism, referenced as the "sex war". Considering the debates over patriarchy, she claimed that male domination dated to "back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself".


title: History of feminism

text: Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch", Sheila Rowbotham's "Women's Liberation and the New Politics", and Juliet Mitchell's "Woman's Estate" represent the English perspective. Mitchell argued that the movement should be seen as an international phenomenon with different manifestations based on local culture. British women drew on left-wing politics and organized small local discussion groups, partly through the London Women's Liberation Workshop and its publications, "Shrew" and the LWLW Newsletter. Although there were marches, the focus was on consciousness-raising, or political activism intended to bring a cause or condition to a wider audience. Kathie Sarachild of Redstockings described its function as such that women would "find what they thought was an individual dilemma is social predicament".


title: History of feminism

text: Meanwhile, in the U.S., women's frustrations crystallized around the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s. Susan Brownmiller's 1975 "Against Our Will" introduced an explicit agenda against male violence, specifically male sexual violence, in a treatise on rape. Her assertion that "pornography is the theory and rape the practice" created deep fault lines around the concepts of objectification and commodification. Brownmiller's other major book, "In our Time" (2000), is a history of women's liberation.


title: History of feminism

text: In Academic circles, feminist theology was a growing interest. Phyllis Trible wrote extensively throughout the 1970s to critique biblical interpretation of the time, using a type of critique known as Rhetorical criticism. Trible's analysis of biblical text seeks to explain that the bible itself is not sexist, but that it is centuries of sexism in societies that have produced this narrative.


title: History of feminism

text: Susan Griffin was one of the first feminists to write on pornography's implications in her 1981 "Pornography and Silence". Beyond Brownmiller and Griffin's positions, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin influenced debates and activism around pornography and prostitution, particularly at the Supreme Court of Canada. MacKinnon, a lawyer, has stated, "To be about to be raped is to be gender female in the process of going about life as usual." She explained sexual harassment by saying that it "doesn't mean that they [harassers] all want to fuck us, they just want to hurt us, dominate us, and control us, and that is fucking us." According to Pauline B. Bart, some people see radical feminism as the only movement that truly expresses the pain of being a woman in an unequal society, as it portrays that reality with the experiences of the battered and violated, which they claim to be the norm. Critics, including some feminists, civil libertarians, and jurists, have found this position uncomfortable and alienating.


title: History of feminism

text: This approach has evolved to transform the research and perspective on rape from an individual experience into a social problem.


title: History of feminism

text: Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s in response to what young women perceived as failures of the second-wave. It also responds to the backlash against the second-wave's initiatives and movements. Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid second-wave "essentialist" definitions of femininity, which over-emphasized the experiences of white, upper-middle-class women. A post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality, or an understanding of gender as outside binary maleness and femaleness, is central to much of the third wave's ideology. Third-wave feminists often describe "micropolitics", and challenge second-wave paradigms about whether actions are unilaterally good for females.


title: History of feminism

text: These aspects of third-wave feminism arose in the mid-1980s. Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave like Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Luisa Accati, Maxine Hong Kingston, and many other feminists of color, called for a new subjectivity in feminist voice. They wanted prominent feminist thought to consider race-related subjectivities. This focus on the intersection between race and gender remained prominent through the 1991 Hill–Thomas hearings, but began to shift with the Freedom Ride 1992, a drive to register voters in poor minority communities whose rhetoric intended to rally young feminists. For many, the rallying of the young is the common link within third-wave feminism.


title: History of feminism

text: Lesbianism during the second wave was visible within and without feminism. Lesbians felt sidelined by both gay liberation and women's liberation, where they were referred to as the "Lavender Menace", provoking "The Woman-Identified Woman", a 1970 manifesto that put lesbian women at the forefront of the liberation movement. Jill Johnston's 1973 "" argued for lesbian separatism. In its extreme form, this was expressed as the only appropriate choice for a woman. Eventually the lesbian movement was welcomed into the mainstream women's movement. This union's threat to male normativity was substantiated by the male backlash that followed.


title: History of feminism

text: In reproductive rights, feminists sought the right to contraception and birth control, which were almost universally restricted until the 1960s. Feminists hoped to use the first birth control pill to free women to decide the terms under which they will bear children. They felt that reproductive self-control was essential for full economic independence from men. Access to abortion was also widely demanded for these reasons, but was more difficult to secure due to existing, deep societal divisions over the issue. Although Shulamith Firestone was active during the second wave of feminism, her views on reproductive technology have connections to reproductive rights. Firestone believed in the enhancement of technologically concerning reproduction, in order to eliminate the obligation for women to reproduce and end oppression and inequality against them. Enhancing technology to empower women and abolish the gender hierarchy are the main focuses of a newer developing philosophy in feminism, known as cyberfeminism. Cyberfeminism has strong ties to reproductive rights and technology.


title: History of feminism

text: Third-wave feminists also fought to hasten social acceptance of female sexual freedom. As societal norms allowed men to have multiple sexual partners without rebuke, feminists sought sexual equality for that freedom and encouraged "sexual liberation" for women, including sex for pleasure with multiple partners, if desired.


title: History of feminism

text: In 1946, the United Nations established a Commission on the Status of Women, which later joined the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). In 1948, the UN issued its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects "the equal rights of men and women", and addressed both equality and equity. Starting with the 1975 World Conference of the International Women's Year in Mexico City as part of their Decade for Women (1975–1985), the UN has held a series of world conferences on women's issues. These conferences have worldwide female representation and provide considerable opportunity to advance women's rights. They also illustrate deep cultural divisions and disagreement on universal principles, as evidenced by the successive Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985) conferences. Examples of such intrafeminism divisions have included disparities between economic development, attitudes towards forms of oppression, the definition of feminism, and stances on homosexuality, female circumcision, and population control. The Nairobi convention revealed a less monolithic feminism that "constitutes the political expression of the concerns and interests of women from different regions, classes, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds. There is and must be a diversity of feminisms, responsive to the different needs and concerns of women, and defined by them for themselves. This diversity builds on a common opposition to gender oppression and hierarchy which, however, is only the first step in articulating and acting upon a political agenda." The fourth conference was held in Beijing in 1995, where the Beijing Platform for Action was signed. This included a commitment to achieve "gender equality and the empowerment of women" through "gender mainstreaming", or letting women and men "experience equal conditions for realising their full human rights, and have the opportunity to contribute and benefit from national, political, economic, social and cultural development".


title: History of feminism

text: "The definitional moment of third-wave feminism has been theorized as proceeding from critiques of the white women’s movement that were initiated by women of color, as well as from the many instances of coalition work undertaken by U.S. third world feminists" Third world feminists since the 1980s have been critics of class-bias, racism, and Eurocentrism among women and feminists, and theories of multiplicity and difference given by these feminists such as Sandoval, Minh-ha, and Mohanty have enabled young feminists to dismantle the idea of monolithic feminism. They have empowered them to recognize the differences and declare multiple identities of being female, despite constantly feeling caught between modernity and tradition. Even though Asian women found it difficult to relate completely with the western women's white problems, they related much with the women of color, and thus remolded it and built a bridge between both halves of feminism, the eastern and western, via interconnectedness among women around the world. They adapted and borrowed the 'western' ideas of feminism and women in the west incorporated the effects of women's movements in other parts of the world, while reinventing itself. Asian feminists acknowledged the need of recognizing multiple sources of domination in women’s lives all across the world, refused to universalize women’s experience as one, and instead recognized the differences among them due to different social locations. They claimed that although academic feminism introduced them to the idea of feminism, it failed to bring them closer to the sisters and mothers in their lives, and rather took them further away. Some have also argued that many goals of western feminism are not enough to assess women’s progress in Asia because they are not necessarily relevant or exportable across the boundaries. Thus, they redefined it as one that drew upon their heritage, history, and experiences. As Grewal puts it, "These transnational feminist scholars enable us to rethink the way we construct and write the history of feminists in national and transnational contexts. Seeking to articulate transnational connections among women, they have suggested ways to move beyond constructed oppositions without ignoring the histories that informed these conflicts or the valid concerns about power relations that have represented or structured the conflicts up to this point."


title: History of feminism

text: Fourth-wave feminism is a recent development within the feminist movement. Jennifer Baumgardner identifies fourth-wave feminism as starting in 2008 and continuing into the present day. Kira Cochrane, author of " All the Rebel Women: The Rise of the Fourth Wave of Feminism", defines fourth-wave feminism as a movement that is connected through technology. Researcher Diana Diamond defines fourth-wave feminism as a movement that "combines politics, psychology, and spirituality in an overarching vision of change."


title: History of feminism

text: In 2005, Pythia Peay first argued for the existence of a fourth wave of feminism, combining justice with religious spirituality. According to Jennifer Baumgardner in 2011, a fourth wave, incorporating online resources such as social media, may have begun in 2008, inspired partly by Take Our Daughters to Work Days. This fourth wave in turn has inspired or been associated with: the Doula Project for children's services; post-abortion talk lines; pursuit of reproductive justice; plus-size fashion support; support for transgender rights; male feminism; sex work acceptance; and developing media including Feministing, Racialicious, blogs, and Twitter campaigns.


title: History of feminism

text: According to Kira Cochrane, a fourth wave had appeared in the U.K. and several other nations by 2012–13. It focused on: sexual inequality as manifested in "street harassment, sexual harassment, workplace discrimination[,] ... body-shaming"; media images, "online misogyny", "assault[s] on public transport"; on intersectionality; on social media technology for communication and online petitioning for organizing; and on the perception, inherited from prior waves, that individual experiences are shared and thus can have political solutions. Cochrane identified as fourth wave such organizations and websites as the Everyday Sexism Project and UK Feminista; and events such as Reclaim the Night, One Billion Rising, and "a Lose the Lads' mags protest", where "many of [the leaders] ... are in their teens and 20s".


title: History of feminism

text: In 2014, Betty Dodson, who is also acknowledged as one of the leaders of the early 1980s pro-sex feminist movement, expressed that she considers herself a fourth wave feminist. Dodson expressed that the previous waves of feminist were banal and anti-sexual, which is why she has chosen to look at a new stance of feminism, fourth wave feminism. In 2014, Dodson worked with women to discover their sexual desires through masturbation. Dodson says her work has gained a fresh lease of life with a new audience of young, successful women who have never had an orgasm. This includes fourth-wave feminists - those rejecting the anti-pleasure stance they believe third-wave feminists stand for.


title: History of feminism

text: In 2014, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter released their book, "The Vagenda." The authors of the book both consider themselves fourth wave feminists. Like their website "The Vagenda", their book aims to flag and debunk the stereotypes of femininity promoted by the mainstream women's press. One reviewer of the book has expressed disappointment with "The Vagenda", saying that instead of being the "call to arms for young women" that it purports to be, it reads like a joyless dissertation detailing "everything bad the media has ever done to women."


title: History of feminism

text: The Everyday Sexism Project began as a social media campaign on 16 April 2012 by Laura Bates, a British feminist writer. The aim of the site was to document everyday examples of sexism as reported by contributors around the world. Bates established the Everyday Sexism Project as an open forum where women could post their experiences of harassment. Bates explains the Everyday Sexism Project's goal, ""The project was never about solving sexism. It was about getting people to take the first step of just realising there is a problem that needs to be fixed."


title: History of feminism

text: The website was such a success that Bates decided to write and publish a book, "Everyday Sexism", which further emphasizes the importance of having this type of online forum for women. The book provides unique insight into the vibrant movement of the upcoming fourth wave and the untold stories that women shared through the Everyday Sexism Project.


title: History of feminism

text: In November 2015, a group of historians working with Clio Visualizing History launched "Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution." This digital history exhibit examines the history of American feminism from the era of World War Two to the present. The exhibit has three major sections: Politics and Social Movements; Body and Health; and Workplace and Family. There are also interactive timelines linking to a vast array of sources documenting the history of American feminism and providing information about current feminist activism.


title: History of feminism

text: In the 1960s, feminists described their movements as the "second wave" of feminism. As the second wave emerges, the importance of this new wave was to revisit that the current women's right had a venerable past. This wave focused on the idea that these movements were a long tradition of activism and during the second wave, feminists began to rewrite U.S. history through recognizing that the suffrage movement was part of the nineteenth century movement around women's issues. Presently, many contributions about the Second Wave Feminism was correlated with "hegemonic feminism". This feminism views sexism as the main oppression and it was mainly led by white individuals who "marginalized the activism and world views of women of color". Women of color and white antiracist women clarify the rise of multiracial feminism through telling the history of the Second Wave feminism. One of the earlier feminist organizations of the Second Wave was a Chicana group named Hijas de Cuauntemoc (1971) which was named after a underground newspaper written by women during the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Multiple other feminist organizations that were created in the early 1970s with Black, Asian, Latina, and Native American women have created a nationalist tradition of sending out a message that there is a need for people of color-led, independent organizations.


title: History of feminism

text: During the 1990s, the United States feminist activity that was present in the 1960s through the 1980s was no longer expressed. The wave metaphor for the Second Wave showed the 1960s movement as anything other than a historical situation, and showed that the nineteenth century movement was a bigger deal and had more impact on history than what was taught. As many pondered on what state was feminism presently in, one idea emerged in the early 1990s as the "third wave". As emerging from the Second Wave and onto the Third Wave, the wave metaphor has reached its usefulness. Individuals are more aware of the significance the nineteenth century had on women's movement and are more aware of the emergence the 1960s had from their long struggle regarding women's issues.


title: History of feminism

text: The 18th century French Revolution's focus on "égalité" (equality) extended to the inequities faced by French women. The writer Olympe de Gouges amended the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen into the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, where she argued that women accountable to the law must also bear equal responsibility under the law. She also addressed marriage as a social contract between equals and attacked women's reliance on beauty and charm as a form of slavery. Two years later, she was executed by guillotine.


title: History of feminism

text: The 19th century, conservative, post-Revolution France was inhospitable for feminist ideas, as expressed in the counter-revolutionary writings on the role of women by Joseph de Maistre and Viscount Louis de Bonald. Advancement came mid-century under the 1848 revolution and the proclamation of the Second Republic, which introduced male suffrage amid hopes that similar benefits would apply to women. Although the Utopian Charles Fourier is considered a feminist writer of this period, his influence was minimal at the time. With the fall of the conservative Louis-Philippe in 1848, feminist hopes were raised, as in 1790. Movement newspapers and organizations appeared, such as Eugénie Niboyet's "La Voix des Femmes" ("The Women's Voice"), the first feminist daily newspaper in France. Niboyet was a Protestant who had adopted Saint-Simonianism, and "La Voix" attracted other women from that movement, including the seamstress Jeanne Deroin and the primary schoolteacher Pauline Roland. Unsuccessful attempts were also made to recruit George Sand. Feminism was treated as a threat due to its ties with socialism, which was scrutinized since the Revolution. Deroin and Roland were both arrested, tried, and imprisoned in 1849. With the emergence of a new, more conservative government in 1852, feminism would have to wait until the Third French Republic.


title: History of feminism

text: While the word "féminisme" previously existed to describe the qualities of women, the word "féministe" was coined in 1872 by Alexandre Dumas "fils" to refer to liberated women.


title: History of feminism

text: The Groupe Français d'Etudes Féministes were women intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century who translated part of Bachofen's canon into French and campaigned for the family law reform. In 1905, they founded "L'entente", which published articles on women's history, and became the focus for the intellectual avant-garde. It advocated for women's entry into higher education and the male-dominated professions. Meanwhile, the Parti Socialiste Féminin socialist feminists, adopted a Marxist version of matriarchy. Like the Groupe Français, they toiled for a new age of equality, not for a return to prehistoric models of matriarchy. French feminism of the late 20th century is mainly associated with psychoanalytic feminist theory, particularly the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous.


title: History of feminism

text: Modern feminism in Germany began during the Wilhelmine period (1888–1918) with feminists pressuring a range of traditional institutions, from universities to government, to open their doors to women. The organized German women's movement is widely attributed to writer and feminist Louise Otto-Peters (1819–1895). This movement culminated in women's suffrage in 1919. Later waves of feminists continued to ask for legal and social equality in public and family life. Alice Schwarzer is the most prominent contemporary German feminist.


title: History of feminism

text: The Iranian women's rights movement first emerged some time after the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, in the year in which the first women's journal was published, 1910. The status of women deteriorated after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The movement later grew again under feminist figures such as Bibi Khanoom Astarabadi, Touba Azmoudeh, Sediqeh Dowlatabadi, Mohtaram Eskandari, Roshank No'doost, Afaq Parsa, Fakhr ozma Arghoun, Shahnaz Azad, Noor-ol-Hoda Mangeneh, Zandokht Shirazi, Maryam Amid (Mariam Mozayen-ol Sadat).


title: History of feminism

text: In 1992, Shahla Sherkat founded "Zanan" ("Women") magazine, which covered Iranian women's concerns and tested political boundaries with edgy reportage on reform politics, domestic abuse, and sex. It is the most important Iranian women's journal published after the Iranian revolution. It systematically criticized the Islamic legal code and argued that gender equality is Islamic and religious literature had been misread and misappropriated by misogynists. Mehangiz Kar, Shahla Lahiji, and Shahla Sherkat, the editor of "Zanan", lead the debate on women's rights and demanded reforms. On August 27, 2006, the One Million Signatures Iranian women's rights campaign was started. It aims to end legal discrimination against women in Iranian laws by collecting a million signatures. The campaign supporters include many Iranian women's rights activists, international activists, and Nobel laureates. The most important post-revolution feminist figures are Mehrangiz Kar, Azam Taleghani, Shahla Sherkat, Parvin Ardalan, Noushin Ahmadi khorasani, and Shadi Sadr.


title: History of feminism

text: In 1899, Qasim Amin, considered the "father" of Arab feminism, wrote "The Liberation of Women", which argued for legal and social reforms for women. Hoda Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923 and became its president and a symbol of the Arab women's rights movement. Arab feminism was closely connected with Arab nationalism. In 1956, President Gamal Abdel Nasser's government initiated "state feminism", which outlawed gender-based discrimination and granted women's suffrage. Despite these reforms, "state feminism" blocked feminist political activism and brought an end to the first-wave feminist movement in Egypt. During Anwar Sadat's presidency, his wife, Jehan Sadat, publicly advocated for expansion of women's rights, though Egyptian policy and society was in retreat from women's equality with the new Islamist movement and growing conservatism. However, writers such as Al Ghazali Harb, for example, argued that women's full equality is an important part of Islam. This position formed a new feminist movement, Islamic feminism, which is still active today.


title: History of feminism

text: A new generation of Indian feminists emerged following global feminism. Indian women have greater independence from increased access to higher education and control over their reproductive rights. Medha Patkar, Madhu Kishwar, and Brinda Karat are feminist social workers and politicians who advocate for women's rights in post-independence India. Writers such as Amrita Pritam, Sarojini Sahoo, and Kusum Ansal advocate for feminist ideas in Indian languages. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Leela Kasturi, and Vidyut Bhagat are Indian feminist essayists and critics writing in English.


title: History of feminism

text: Feminism in China began in the late Qing period as Chinese society re-evaluated traditional and Confucian values such as foot binding and gender segregation, and began to reject traditional gender ideas as hindering progress towards modernization. During the 1898 Hundred Days' Reform, reformers called for women's education, gender equality, and the end of foot binding. Female reformers formed the first Chinese women's society, the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge among Chinese Women ("Nüxuehui"). After the Qing Dynasty's collapse, women's liberation became a goal of the May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement. Later, the Chinese Communist Revolution adopted women's liberation as one of its aims and promoted women's equality, especially regarding women's participation in the workforce. After the revolution and progress in integrating women into the workforce, the Chinese Communist Party claimed to have successfully achieved women's liberation, and women's inequality was no longer seen as a problem.


title: History of feminism

text: Second- and third-wave feminism in China was characterized by a re-examination of women's roles during the reform movements of the early 20th century and the ways in which feminism was adopted by those various movements in order to achieve their goals. Later and current feminists have questioned whether gender equality has actually been fully achieved, and discuss current gender problems, such as the large gender disparity in the population.


title: History of feminism

text: Japanese feminism as an organized political movement dates back to the early years of the 20th century when Kato Shidzue pushed for birth control availability as part of a broad spectrum of progressive reforms. Shidzue went on to serve in the National Diet following the defeat of Japan in World War II and the promulgation of the Peace Constitution by US forces. Other figures such as Hayashi Fumiko and Ariyoshi Sawako illustrate the broad socialist ideologies of Japanese feminism that seeks to accomplish broad goals rather than celebrate the individual achievements of powerful women.


title: History of feminism

text: Norwegian feminism's political origins are in the women's suffrage movement. Camilla Collett (1813–1895) is widely considered the first Norwegian feminist. Originating from a literary family, she wrote a novel and several articles on the difficulties facing women of her time, and, in particular, forced marriages. Amalie Skram (1846–1905), a naturalist writer, also served as the women's voice.


title: History of feminism

text: The Norwegian Association for Women's Rights was founded in 1884 by Gina Krog and Hagbart Berner. The organization raised issues related to women's rights to education and economic self-determination, and, above all, universal suffrage. The Norwegian Parliament passed the women's right to vote into law on June 11, 1913. Norway was the second country in Europe (after Finland) to have full suffrage for women.


title: History of feminism

text: The development of feminism in Poland (re-recreated in modern times in 1918) and Polish territories has traditionally been divided into seven successive "waves".


title: History of feminism

text: Radical feminism emerged in 1920s Poland. Its chief representatives, Irena Krzywicka and Maria Morozowicz-Szczepkowska, advocated for women's personal, social, and legal independence from men. Krzywicka and Tadeusz Żeleński both promoted planned parenthood, sexual education, rights to divorce and abortion, and equality of sexes. Krzywicka published a series of articles in "Wiadomości Literackie" in which she protested against interference by the Roman Catholic Church in the intimate lives of Poles.


title: History of feminism

text: After the Second World War, the Polish Communist state (established in 1948) forcefully promoted women's emancipation at home and at work. However, during Communist rule (until 1989), feminism in general and second-wave feminism in particular were practically absent. Although feminist texts were produced in the 1950s and afterwards, they were usually controlled and generated by the Communist state. After the fall of Communism, the Polish government, dominated by Catholic political parties, introduced a "de facto" legal ban on abortions. Since then, some feminists have adopted argumentative strategies from the 1980s American pro-choice movement.


title: History of feminism

text: The sexuality and gender historian Nancy Cott distinguishes between "modern feminism" and its antecedents, particularly the struggle for suffrage. She argues that in the two decades surrounding the Nineteenth Amendment's 1920 passage, the prior "woman movement" primarily concerned women as "universal" entities, whereas over this 20-year period, the movement prioritized social differentiation, attention to "individuality", and diversity. New issues dealt more with gender as a social construct, gender identity, and relationships within and between genders. Politically, this represented a shift from an ideological alignment comfortable with the right, to one more radically associated with the left.


title: History of feminism

text: In the immediate postwar period, Simone de Beauvoir opposed the "woman in the home" norm. She introduced an existentialist dimension to feminism with the publication of "Le Deuxième Sexe" ("The Second Sex") in 1949. While less an activist than a philosopher and novelist, she signed one of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes manifestos.


title: History of feminism

text: The resurgence of feminist activism in the late 1960s was accompanied by an emerging literature of what might be considered female-associated issues, such as concerns for the earth, spirituality, and environmental activism. The atmosphere this created reignited the study of and debate on matricentricity as a rejection of determinism, such as with Adrienne Rich in "Of Woman Born" and Marilyn French in "Beyond Power". For socialist feminists like Evelyn Reed, patriarchy held the properties of capitalism.


title: History of feminism

text: Ann Taylor Allen describes the differences between the collective male pessimism of male intellectuals such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel at the beginning of the 20th century, compared to the optimism of their female counterparts, whose contributions have largely been ignored by social historians of the era.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: The League Championship Series (LCS) is the top level of professional "League of Legends" in the United States and Canada. The esports league is run by Riot Games and has ten franchise teams. Each annual season of competition is divided into two splits, spring and summer, which conclude with a double-elimination tournament between the top eight teams. At the end of the season, the winner, runners-up and third-place team of the summer playoffs qualify for the annual "League of Legends" World Championship.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: With the exception of some touring events, all games of the LCS are played live at Riot Games' studios in Los Angeles, California. In addition to a small studio audience, all games are streamed live in several languages on Twitch and YouTube, with broadcasts regularly attracting over 300,000 viewers. The U.S. government grants athlete visas for foreign LCS competitors. The first LCS player to be awarded a P visa was Danny "Shiphtur" Le.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: The LCS has attracted sponsorships from Acer, Coca-Cola, and American Express. "League of Legends Championship Series" is a Delaware limited liability company.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: Riot Games launched League of Legends in October 2009 and rapidly attracted attention from the competitive gaming community. The first two seasons of competitive play consisted of a series of tournaments mostly organised by third parties, such as Intel Extreme Masters in Europe and Major League Gaming in North America, capped by a world championship tournament hosted by Riot Games.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: Riot Games announced the formation of the LCS on August 6, 2012, creating a fully professional league run by the company with a regular schedule and guaranteed salaries for players, featuring eight teams in both North America and Europe. Since the LCS was only launched in the third year of professional play, it was immediately dubbed "Season 3". The top three finishers in both the Riot Games European and North American regional championships held in August 2012 automatically qualified, with the remaining five teams being decided in qualifier tournaments held in January 2013. Each LCS season is divided into two splits for spring and summer; the first games of the first spring split took place on February 7, 2013, in North America and on February 9, 2013, in Europe. As of 2020 Counter Logic Gaming, Team SoloMid, and Team Liquid (originally founded as Team Curse) are the sole remaining teams from the first split of the NA LCS, having never been relegated. However, another mainstay, Cloud9 joined in the following Summer split.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: Season 3 of the LCS finished with the summer split playoffs, held on August 23 to 25 in Europe at the Gamescom in 2013, which was held in the Koelnmesse in Cologne, North Rine-Westphalia, Germany, and August 30 to September 1, 2013, at PAX Prime 2013 in Seattle, Washington in North America. In Europe, the Fnatic finished first, Lemondogs second, and Gambit Gaming third. In North America, the top three finishers were Cloud9, Team SoloMid, and Team Vulcun. The top three teams from each continent advanced to the Season 3 World Championships.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: Riot Games changed naming conventions in 2014, calling the season the "2014 Season" instead of "Season 4". This year League of Legends Challenger Series was also created as a second tier of competition for promotion and relegation.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: At the end of the 2014 season, an expansion tournament was held in both Europe and North America that added two teams in region, giving the LCS a total of 10 teams per region for the start of the 2015 Season. Additionally, Riot introduced the concept of "Championship points", which teams would earn based on performance across both splits and playoffs in order to qualify for the World Championship.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: A new sale of sponsorship rule was instated for the 2015 season. As a result, several teams were forced to rebrand and leave their respective parent organizations. Europe's Alliance and North America's Evil Geniuses are both owned by GoodGame Inc. CEO Alex Garfield, and thus their "League of Legends" teams left and became Elements and Winterfox, respectively. Curse Inc. could no longer sponsor LCS team Team Curse, thus the entire esports organization merged into Team Liquid. Additionally the number of teams was expanded from 8 to 10.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: In late 2018, the European "League of Legends" Championship Series (EU LCS) was renamed to the "League of Legends" European Championship (LEC) and the North American "League of Legends" Championship Series (NA LCS) dropped "North American" from its name.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: In 2021, the league rebranded into the League Championship Series, featuring a refreshed visual identity. Two new mottos were introduced; "Made by many" and "All for the game."


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: In 2022, the LCS released a celebratory top ten list in which Bjergsen was voted (by current and former LCS players) the best player in LCS history.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: Starting in 2018, the North American LCS became franchised to encourage long-term investments from owners. This allowed the league to implement revenue sharing, leading to a better foundation for both the teams and professional players. Lastly, the professional players were given a larger voice and more protection within the league.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: The buy-in price for the league was $10 million for existing League of Legends teams, who had previously participated in the League Championship Series or Challenger Series. New teams would be subject to an additional $3 million (a total $13 million), which was distributed to the teams that were replaced in the league. Interested parties were given applications in June, due on July 28, 2017. Over 100 existing esports organizations, traditional sports teams, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs reportedly applied. Those applications were then narrowed down to a shortlist, nicknamed "phase two", which saw participants travel to Riot Games' Los Angeles office to interview and review their applications. Riot Games and the North American League Championship Series players' association also decided that league would not expand and instead remain at 10 teams.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: Buyers for the league were decided in mid-October. Several existing teams from the league — including Cloud9, Counter Logic Gaming, Echo Fox, FlyQuest, Team Liquid and Team SoloMid — were accepted back into the league. Other existing teams, such as Immortals, Phoenix1, Team Dignitas and Team EnvyUs, were declined from entry into the restructured league. The team welcomed four new teams — one endemic esports team and three NBA franchises or affiliates. Longtime esports organization OpTic Gaming was reportedly awarded a spot in the league after receiving investment from Texas Rangers co-owner Neil Leibman. The other three new spots went to Golden State Warriors co-owner Joe Lacob and his son Kirk as the Golden Guardians, the Cleveland Cavaliers and affiliated venture capital firms as 100 Thieves, and the Houston Rockets as Clutch Gaming.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: The LCS primarily reaches its viewers through online streaming using its own channels on Twitch and YouTube. On Twitch alone, viewership numbers regularly exceed 200,000 for regular season play, and the games have drawn over 1.7 million unique visitors. However, Riot Games CEO Brandon Beck stated in 2012 that there were no immediate plans to try to bring the LCS to traditional TV, and news coverage of the regular season is generally limited to dedicated electronic sports news sites, such as CBS Interactive's onGamers.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: The scale and popularity of the LCS itself, however, has attracted considerable media attention, particularly around some events that legitimised the LCS as a serious competition.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: In December 2016, Riot announced that it had reached a deal with BAMTech (a spin-off of MLB Advanced Media) to serve as the exclusive distributor of LCS broadcasts through 2023. BAMTech would have paid $50 million per-year under the contract, and split advertising revenue with Riot. However, internal complications arose after The Walt Disney Company acquired BAMTech, and the contract never actually took effect. As a substitute, Riot entered into an agreement to non-exclusively carry its broadcasts on ESPN+ instead, in addition to existing outlets such as Twitch.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: As of 2021, 10 teams from North America compete in the LCS. The LCS begins with the Lock-in kickoff tournament, consisting of a group stage and an eight-team single elimination bracket. The regular season is divided into a double-round robin spring split and a triple-round robin summer split, for a total of 225 games. Teams are ranked by win percentage, with ties split by tiebreaker games if necessary at the end of the regular season. Beginning in 2021, the spring split playoffs were rebranded as the Mid-Season Showdown, retaining the six-team double elimination format.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: The previous playoff format featured the top 6 teams of the regular season playing to determine the final standings. The top 2 teams of the regular season receive a bye into the semi-finals, and the remaining 4 teams play each other in the quarter-finals. Each split's playoffs awarded cash prizes and Championship Points, which are used to determine qualification into the annual "League of Legends" World Championship. The winner of the summer split and the next team with the highest number of Championship Points automatically qualified. The next four teams, as ranked by Championship Point totals, then went on to play the Regional Qualifier tournament to determine the final qualifying team.


title: League Championship Series (esports)

text: The current playoff format introduced in 2020 is a modified double-elimination tournament, with the top six teams seeded into the winners bracket and two additional teams seeded into the losers bracket. The winners bracket is played as a regular knockout tournament, with defeated teams falling to losers bracket. The top teams from the winners and losers brackets play against each other in grand final. The winner of the summer split, along with the runner-up and third-place team, go on to qualify for the annual League of Legends World Championship.


title: Laine Hardy

text: Laine Hardy (born September 12, 2000) is an American singer from Livingston, Louisiana, and the season 17 winner of "American Idol."


title: Laine Hardy

text: Hardy was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and raised in Livingston, Louisiana. His father Barry is a general contractor for a construction company, and his mother Cindy Lou is a real estate agent. He has a brother Kyle, and an older sister, Brittany Banta. His maternal grandmother is a Korean immigrant from Seoul. He attended French Settlement High School and graduated in 2018. He learned to play the guitar when he was eight, and by the time he was 14, he was performing in a band with his brother and cousins called the Band Hardy in local bars and restaurants. Although initially he did not sing, he was encouraged by his brother to sing.


title: Laine Hardy

text: Laine Hardy first auditioned for the 2018 season 16 of "American Idol", but did not go far in that season, making it only to the top 50. He did not intend to audition for the 2019 season 17, but accompanied his friend Ashton Gill to play guitar at her audition, and was encouraged by judges Katy Perry, Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie to audition again. This time he made it all the way to the final and won the competition, making Alejandro Aranda runner-up and Madison VanDenburg second runner-up.


title: Laine Hardy

text: Hardy released a three-song EP, "In the Bayou", in 2018. Later that year he released the song "Blue Christmas". Following his win on "American Idol", his coronation song "Flame" was released on May 19, 2019. He performed the single on "The View" in May 2019. On September 20, 2019, Hardy announced his first headline tour, a 13-date tour taking place from November 14 through December 7, 2019, across the US. He released two new songs, "Ground I Grew Up On" and "Let There Be Country", in April 2020, and performed a cover of "Life Is A Highway" on "American Idol" in May 2020.


title: Laine Hardy

text: His single "Tiny Town" was released in July 2020, following his recovery from COVID-19. A holiday single, a cover of "Please Come Home For Christmas" followed in September. While "Tiny Town" was sent to radio, Hardy released another single "Other LA" to streaming services.


title: Laine Hardy

text: Following a couple televised performances (including the 2020 National Tree Lighting Ceremony), Hardy released a new single "Memorize You" in May 2021. The song garnered positive reviews and gained popularity after his performance on ABC's "The Bachelor" series. A follow-up single "Authentic" was released in July, leading to the announcement of his debut album "Here's To Anyone" a few weeks later. The album was released on September 17.


title: Laine Hardy

text: On April 29, 2022, Hardy was arrested by the Louisiana State University Police Department and booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison based on allegations that he planted a recording device in the Louisiana State University dormitory room occupied by a woman who described him as her ex-boyfriend. The arrest warrant alleged that the device was found in a futon by the woman and her roommate, and that the woman became suspicious when he told her information about her private life that she had never disclosed to him. The warrant also alleged that Hardy, who was not an LSU student, had confessed to the woman that he bugged the room while falsely claiming that he threw the device into a pond. It was later reported that Hardy was cooperating with investigators following his arrest.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Rachel Aliene Corrie (April 10, 1979 – March 16, 2003) was an American activist and diarist. A member of the pro-Palestinian group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), she was crushed to death by an armored bulldozer of the Israel Defense Forces in a southern Gaza Strip combat zone during the height of the Second Intifada under contested circumstances.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: She had gone to Gaza as part of her college senior-year independent-study proposal to connect her home town and Rafah as sister cities. While there, she had joined other ISM activists in efforts to prevent the Israeli demolition of Palestinian property. According to the Israeli authorities the demolitions were carried out to eliminate weapons-smuggling tunnels. According to human rights groups the demolitions were used as collective punishment.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The exact nature of her death and the culpability of the bulldozer operator are disputed, with fellow ISM protestors saying that the Israeli soldier operating the bulldozer deliberately ran over Corrie, and Israeli eyewitnesses saying that it was an accident since the bulldozer operator could not see her. The Israeli army conducted an investigation, which concluded that the death was an accident, and that the driver of the bulldozer could not see Corrie due to limited visibility from his cab. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as well as B'Tselem and Yesh Din criticized the military investigation.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In 2005, Corrie's parents filed a civil lawsuit against the state of Israel. The lawsuit charged Israel with not conducting a full and credible investigation into the case and with responsibility for her death, contending that she had either been intentionally killed or that the soldiers had acted with reckless neglect. They sued for a symbolic one U.S. dollar in damages. An Israeli court rejected their suit in August 2012 and upheld the results of the 2003 military investigation, ruling that the Israeli government was not responsible for Corrie's death. The ruling was met with criticism by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and by activists. An appeal against this ruling was heard on May 21, 2014. On February 14, 2015, the Supreme Court of Israel rejected the appeal.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Corrie was born on April 10, 1979, and raised in Olympia, Washington, United States. She was the youngest of three children of Craig Corrie, an insurance executive, and Cindy Corrie. Cindy describes their family as "average Americans—politically liberal, economically conservative, middle class".


title: Rachel Corrie

text: After graduating from Capital High School, Corrie went on to attend The Evergreen State College, also in Olympia, where she took a number of arts courses. She took a year off from her studies to work as a volunteer in the Washington State Conservation Corps. According to the ISM, she spent three years making weekly visits to mental patients.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: While at Evergreen State College she became a "committed peace activist" arranging peace events through a local pro-ISM group called "Olympians for Peace and Solidarity". She later joined the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) organisation in order to protest the policies of the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In her senior year, she "proposed an independent-study program in which she would travel to Gaza, join the ISM team, and initiate a 'sister city' project between Olympia and Rafah". Before leaving, she also organized a pen-pal program between children in Olympia and Rafah.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: While in Rafah, Corrie stood in front of armored bulldozers, in an alleged attempt to impede house demolitions which were being carried out. Demolitions were a common tactic employed along the security road near the border between Israel and Egypt at Rafah to uncover explosive devices and destroy tunnels used by terrorists to smuggle weapons from Egypt to Gaza. These military operations were criticized as "collective punishment" by some human rights groups. Israel authorities said that demolitions were necessary because "Palestinian gunmen used the structures as cover to shoot at their troops patrolling in the area, or to conceal arms-smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border." Corrie was a member of a group of about eight activists from outside of the Palestinian territories who tried to prevent the Israeli army's activities by acting as human shields.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: On Corrie's first night there, she and two other ISM members set up camp inside Block J, which the ISM described as "a densely populated neighborhood along the Pink Line and frequent target of gunfire from an Israeli watchtower". By situating themselves visibly between the Palestinians and the Israeli snipers manning the watchtowers they hoped to discourage shooting by displaying banners stating that they were "internationals". When Israeli soldiers fired warning shots, Corrie and her colleagues dismantled their tent and left the area.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Qishta, a Palestinian who worked as an interpreter, noted: "Late January and February was a very crazy time. There were house demolitions taking place all over the border strip and the activists had no time to do anything else." Qishta also stated of the ISM activists: "They were not only brave; they were crazy." The safety of the protestors was frequently jeopardized by these confrontations— a British participant was wounded by shrapnel while retrieving the body of a Palestinian man killed by a sniper, and an Irish ISM activist had a close encounter with an armored bulldozer.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Palestinian militants expressed concern that the "internationals" staying in tents between the Israeli watchtowers and the residential neighborhoods would get caught in crossfire, while other residents were concerned that the activists might be spies. To overcome this suspicion Corrie learned a few words of Arabic and participated in a mock trial denouncing the "crimes of the Bush Administration". While the ISM members were eventually provided with food and housing, a letter was circulated in Rafah that cast suspicion on them. "Who are they? Why are they here? Who asked them to come here?" On the morning of Corrie's death they planned to counteract the letter's effects. According to one of them, "We all had a feeling that our role was too passive. We talked about how to engage the Israeli military."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: According to a January 2003 article by Gordon Murray, a fellow ISM activist, in the last month of her life Corrie "spent a lot of time at the Canada Well helping protect Rafah municipal workers" who were trying to repair damage to the well done by Israeli bulldozers. Canada Well was built in 1999 with CIDA funding. It, along with El Iskan Well, had supplied more than 50% of Rafah's water before the damage. The city had been under "strict rationing (only a few hours of running water on alternate days)" since. Murray writes that ISM activists were maintaining a presence there since "Israeli snipers and tanks routinely shot at civilian workers trying to repair the wells." In one of her reports, Corrie wrote that despite her group's having received permission from the Israeli District Command Office and the fact that they were carrying "banners and megaphones the activists and workers were fired upon several times over a period of about one hour. One of the bullets came within two metres of three internationals and a municipal water worker close enough to spray bits of debris in their faces as it landed at their feet."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: While in Gaza, Corrie took part in a demonstration as part of the February 15, 2003 anti-war protest against the invasion of Iraq. She was photographed burning a makeshift U.S. flag.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: After her death the ISM released a statement quoting Corrie's parents on the widely circulated picture of the incident:


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In the words of Rachel's parents: "The act, while we may disagree with it, must be put into context. Rachel was partaking in a demonstration in Gaza opposing the War on Iraq. She was working with children who drew two pictures, one of the American flag, and one of the Israeli flag, for burning. Rachel said that she could not bring herself to burn the picture of the Israeli flag with the Star of David on it, but under such circumstances, in protest over a drive towards war and her government's foreign policy that was responsible for much of the devastation that she was witness to in Gaza, she felt it OK to burn the picture of her own flag. We have seen photographs of memorials held in Gaza after Rachel's death in which Palestinian children and adults honor our daughter by carrying a mock coffin draped with the American flag. We have been told that our flag has never been treated so respectfully in Gaza in recent years. We believe Rachel brought a different face of the United States to the Palestinian people, a face of compassion. It is this image of Rachel with the American flag that we hope will be remembered most.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Rachel Corrie sent a series of emails to her mother while she was in Gaza, four of which were later published by "The Guardian". In January 2008, Norton published a book titled "Let Me Stand Alone" by Corrie, which included the e-mails along with some of her other writings. Yale Professor David Bromwich said that Corrie left "letters of great interest". The play "My Name is Rachel Corrie" and the cantata "The Skies are Weeping" were based on Corrie's letters.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: On March 16, 2003, the IDF was engaged in an operation involving the demolition of Palestinian houses in Rafah. Corrie was part of a group of three British and four American ISM activists attempting to disrupt the IDF operation. Corrie placed herself in the path of a Caterpillar D9R armored bulldozer in the area and was run over by the bulldozer and fatally injured. After she was injured she was taken by a Red Crescent ambulance to the Palestinian Najar hospital, arriving at the emergency room at 5:05 pm, still alive but in critical condition. At 5:20 pm she was declared dead.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The events surrounding Corrie's death are disputed. Fellow ISM activists said that the soldier operating the bulldozer deliberately ran Corrie over while she was acting as a human shield to prevent the demolition of the home of local pharmacist Samir Nasrallah. They said she was between the bulldozer and a wall near Nasrallah's home, in which ISM activists had spent the night several times. Israeli eyewitnesses maintain that the death was accidental because the bulldozer operator was unable to see Corrie due to the vehicle's obstructed view. Furthermore, Israeli witnesses maintain that Corrie was not defending a house from being demolished and was instead inhibiting a military operation to find contraband weapons and smuggling tunnels in Gaza. An IDF officer testified in court that on that day they were only clearing vegetation and rubble from houses that were previously demolished, and that no new houses were slated for demolition.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The major points of dispute are whether the bulldozer operator saw Corrie and whether her injuries were caused by being crushed under the blade or by the mound of debris the bulldozer was pushing. An IDF spokesman has acknowledged that Israeli army regulations normally require that the operators of the armored personnel carriers (APCs) that accompany bulldozers are responsible for directing the operators towards their targets because the Caterpillar D9 bulldozers have a restricted field of vision with several blind spots.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: ISM activist Richard Purssell testified, "[t]hey began demolishing one house. We gathered around and called out to them and went into the house, so they backed out. During the entire time they knew who we were and what we were doing, because they didn't shoot at us. We stood in their way and shouted. There were about eight of us in an area about 70 square meters. Suddenly, we saw they turned to a house they had started to demolish before, and I saw Rachel standing in the way of the front bulldozer." Human-rights activists and Palestinians say that the demolitions had also been accompanied by gunfire from Israeli snipers. The director of Rafah's hospital, Dr. Ali Moussa said that 240 Palestinians, including 78 children, had been killed since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began in 2001: "Every night there is shooting at houses in which children are sleeping, without any attacks from Palestinians." The United Nations said that 582 Rafah homes were demolished and 721 damaged, with 5,305 people made homeless.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: There's no way he didn't see her, since she was practically looking into the cabin. At one stage, he turned around toward the building. The bulldozer kept moving, and she slipped and fell off the plow. But the bulldozer kept moving, the shovel above her. I guess it was about 10 or 15 meters that it dragged her and for some reason didn't stop. We shouted like crazy to the operator through loudspeakers that he should stop, but he just kept going and didn't lift the shovel. Then it stopped and backed up. We ran to Rachel. She was still breathing.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Eyewitness and ISM member Tom Dale, commenting on the 2012 verdict said: "Whatever one thinks about the visibility from a D9 bulldozer, it is inconceivable that at some point the driver did not see her, given the distance from which he approached, while she stood, unmoving, in front of it. As I told the court, just before she was crushed, Rachel briefly stood on top of the rolling mound of earth which had gathered in front of the bulldozer: her head was above the level of the blade, and just a few meters from the driver."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Joe Carr, an American ISM activist who used the assumed name of Joseph Smith during his time in Gaza, gave the following account in an affidavit recorded and published by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR):


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Still wearing her fluorescent jacket, she knelt down at least 15 meters in front of the bulldozer, and began waving her arms and shouting, just as activists had successfully done dozens of times that day... When it got so close that it was moving the earth beneath her, she climbed onto the pile of rubble being pushed by the bulldozer... Her head and upper torso were above the bulldozer's blade, and the bulldozer operator and co-operator could clearly see her. Despite this, the operator continued forward, which caused her to fall back, out of view of the driver. He continued forward, and she tried to scoot back, but was quickly pulled underneath the bulldozer. We ran towards him, and waved our arms and shouted; one activist with the megaphone. But the bulldozer operator continued forward, until Corrie was all the way underneath the central section of the bulldozer.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: On March 18, 2003, two days after Corrie's death, Joe (Smith) Carr was interviewed by British Channel 4 and "The Observer" reporter Sandra Jordan for a documentary, "The Killing Zone", which aired in June 2003. He stated, "It was either a really gross mistake or a really brutal murder."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: According to "The Seattle Times", "Smith, who witnessed Sunday's incident, said it began when Corrie sat down in front of the bulldozer. He said the operator scooped her up with a pile of earth, dumped her on the ground and ran over her twice."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: However, "Smith" later acknowledged that after Corrie fell down the dirt pile, the bulldozer operator could well have lost sight of Corrie.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The bulldozer operator was interviewed on Israeli TV and insisted he had no idea she was in front of him:


title: Rachel Corrie

text: You can't hear, you can't see well. You can go over something and you'll never know. I scooped up some earth, I couldn't see anything. I pushed the earth, and I didn't see her at all. Maybe she was hiding in there.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The IDF produced a video about Corrie's death that includes footage taken from inside the cockpit of a D9. The video makes a "credible case", wrote Joshua Hammer in "Mother Jones," that "the operators, peering out through narrow, double-glazed, bulletproof windows, their view obscured behind pistons and the giant scooper, might not have seen Corrie kneeling in front of them".


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In April 2011, during the trial of the civil suit brought by Corrie's parents, an IDF officer testified that Corrie and other activists had spent hours trying to block the bulldozers under his command. He went on to say that it was a war zone "where Palestinian militants used abandoned homes as firing positions and exploited foreign activists for cover". He shouted over a megaphone for the activists to leave, tried to use tear gas to disperse them and moved his troops several times. "To my regret, after the eighth time, (Corrie) hid behind an earth embankment. The D9 operator didn't see her. She thought he saw her," he said.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: An infantry major later testified that the activists were endangering troops and had ignored numerous warnings to leave the area. The judge in the Corrie case asserted that between September 2000 and the date of Corrie's death, Israeli forces in the area had been subjected to 1,400 attacks involving gunfire, 150 involving explosive devices, 200 involving anti-tank rockets, and 6,000 involving hand grenades or mortar fire.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon promised President Bush a "thorough, credible, and transparent investigation". Later, Capt. Jacob Dallal, a spokesman for the Israeli army, called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident" and said that she and the other ISM activists were "a group of protesters who were acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger—the Palestinians, themselves and our forces—by intentionally placing themselves in a combat zone".


title: Rachel Corrie

text: An autopsy was conducted on March 24 at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv by Chief Pathologist Yehuda Hiss. The final report was not released publicly, but in their report on the matter Human Rights Watch says a copy was provided to them by Craig Corrie, with a translation supplied by the U.S. Department of State. In the report they quote Hiss as concluding, "Her death was caused by pressure on the chest (mechanical asphyxiation) with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae of the dorsal spinal column and scapulas, and tear wounds in the right lung with hemorrhaging of the pleural cavities."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: On June 26, 2003, "The Jerusalem Post" quoted an Israeli military spokesman as saying that Corrie had not been run over and that the operator had not seen her:


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The driver at no point saw or heard Corrie. She was standing behind debris which obstructed the view of the driver and the driver had a very limited field of vision due to the protective cage he was working in... The driver and his commanders were interrogated extensively over a long period of time with the use of polygraph tests and video evidence. They had no knowledge that she was standing in the path of the tractor. An autopsy of Corrie's body revealed that the cause of death was from falling debris and not from the tractor physically rolling over her. It was a tragic accident that never should have happened.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: [a bulldozer with 2 crews] was engaged in "routine terrain leveling and debris clearing", not building demolition. Quoting from the IDF report, Corrie died "as a result of injuries sustained when earth and debris accidentally fell on her... Ms. Corrie was not run over by the bulldozer," he added, IDF also claimed she was possibly "in a blindspot for the bulldozer operators and "behind an earth mound", so they did not see that she was in harm's way.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In later IDF operations, the house was damaged (a hole was knocked in a wall) and was later destroyed. By that time, the Nasrallah family had moved into a different house. It was reported in 2006 that the house that Corrie was trying to protect was rebuilt with funds raised by The Rebuilding Alliance.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: A spokesman for the IDF told the "Guardian" that, while it did not accept responsibility for Corrie's death, it intended to change its operational procedures to avoid similar incidents in the future. The level of command of similar operations would be raised, said the spokesman, and civilians in the area would be dispersed or arrested before operations began. Observers will be deployed and CCTV cameras will be installed on the bulldozers to compensate for blind spots, which may have contributed to Corrie's death.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The IDF gave copies of the report, titled "The Death of Rachel Corrie", to members of the U.S. Congress in April 2003, and Corrie's family released the document to the media in June 2003, according to the Gannett News Service. In March 2004 the family said that the entire report had not been released, and that only they and two American staffers at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv had been allowed to view it. The family said they were allowed to look at the report in the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest in San Francisco. The ISM rejected the Israeli report, stating that it contradicted their members' eyewitness reports and that the investigation had not been credible and transparent.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Corrie's father, Craig Corrie has said "I know there's stuff you can't see out of the double glass windows." But he has denied that as a valid excuse, saying "you're responsible for knowing what's in front of your blade... It's a no brainer that this was gross negligence". He added that "they had three months to figure out how to deal with the activists that were there."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In March 2003, U.S. Representative Brian Baird introduced a resolution in the U.S. Congress calling on the U.S. government to "undertake a full, fair, and expeditious investigation" into Corrie's death. The House of Representatives took no action on the resolution. The Corrie family joined Representative Baird in calling for a U.S. investigation.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Yasser Arafat, the first President of the Palestinian Authority, offered his condolences and gave the "blessings of the Palestinian people" to Corrie, promising to name a street in Gaza after her. According to Cindy Corrie, Arafat told Craig Corrie that Rachel Corrie "is your daughter but she is also the daughter of all Palestinians. She is ours too now."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: On March 21, 2003, the U.S. Green Party called for an investigation of the "murder of American Peace Activist Rachel Corrie by Israeli Forces".


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In August 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro stated that the Israeli investigation was not satisfactory, and was not as thorough, credible or transparent as it should have been. Shapiro said further that the government of the United States is unsatisfied with the IDF's closure of its official investigation into Corrie's death.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Amnesty International called for an independent inquiry, with Christine Bustany, their advocacy director for the Middle East, saying, "U.S.-made bulldozers have been 'weaponized' and their transfer to Israel must be suspended."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In 2005, Human Rights Watch published a report raising questions about the impartiality and professionalism of the IDF investigation. Some of the problems that the report mentioned were the investigators' lack of preparation, the "hostile," "inappropriate," and "mostly accusatory" questions they asked witnesses, the failure to ask witnesses to draw maps or to identify locations of events on maps, and their lack of interest in reconciling soldiers' testimonies with those of other eyewitnesses.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: NGO Monitor, an Israeli group, strongly criticized other NGOs and said the verdict reflects all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the incident. Its president, Gerald Steinberg said, "Corrie's death was entirely unnecessary, and the leaders of the ISM bear much culpability for her death."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: "The Observer" suggested that because Corrie was American her death attracted more attention than the deaths of Palestinians under similar circumstances: "On the night of Corrie's death, nine Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip, among them a four-year-old girl and a man aged 90. A total of 220 people have died in Rafah since the beginning of the intifada. Palestinians know the death of one American receives more attention than the killing of hundreds of Muslims."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In 2006, "Haaretz" political columnist Bradley Burston said that Corrie's death was accidental but that "incidental killing is no less tragic than intentional killing"; Burston criticized both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sides for their excessive rhetoric:


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Of all of the tragedies and casualties of the intifada, in which more than 4,000 people were killed over five years, the case of Rachel Corrie still stands apart, the subject of intense world interest and fierce debate... Part of it starts with us. ""They had no business being there"" is no excuse for what the Pentagon long ago christened collateral damage. We've learned much. But we're still not there. We should have saved Rachel Corrie's life that day, either by sending out a spotter or delaying the bulldozer's work. Right now, somewhere in the West Bank, there's an eight-year-old whose life could be saved next week, if we've managed to learn the lesson and are resourceful enough to know how to apply it.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: American journalist Charlie Wolf referred to Corrie as "scum" on his show on British radio station talkSPORT. Media regulator Ofcom ruled that this "seriously ill-judged" remark was in breach of the "Generally Accepted Standards" of Broadcasting.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Tom Gross, in an article called "The Forgotten Rachels", discusses six other women named Rachel who were Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their deaths, he wrote, received little if any coverage outside Israel. Gross went on to argue that "partly because of the efforts of Corrie's fellow activists in the ISM, the Israeli army was unable to stop the flow of weapons through the tunnels... Those weapons were later used to kill Israeli children ... in southern Israel". The article prompted a "National Review" editorial arguing "Corrie's death was unfortunate, but more unfortunate is a Western media and cultural establishment that lionizes 'martyrs' for illiberal causes while ignoring the victims those causes create." Explaining the Israeli court's ruling, judge Oded Gershon said Corrie's death was "the result of an accident she brought upon herself." Corrie was in a closed military area, with entry forbidden to civilians. The area was the site of daily gunfire by snipers, missile fire and IED explosions. The United States government had issued a travel warning against American citizens visiting the Gaza Strip. "She did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done," the judge ruled.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: George Rishmawi, director of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples, told the "San Francisco Chronicle" that the ISM's main purpose is to "increase international awareness of Palestinian suffering through the involvement of foreign activists". He stated: "When Palestinians get shot by Israeli soldiers, no one is interested anymore ... [b]ut if some of these foreign volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up and take notice."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Joseph Smith (aka Joseph Carr) stated that "'We knew there was a risk ... but we also knew it never happened in the two years that we (the ISM) have been working here. I knew we take lots of precautions so that it doesn't happen, that if it did happen it would have to be an intentional act by a soldier, in which case it would bring a lot of publicity and significance to the cause.'"


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Since their daughter's death, Corrie's parents, Cindy and Craig, have spent time trying to "promote peace and raise awareness about the plight of Palestinians", and continue what they believe to be her work. The Corries have worked to set up the "Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice" and launched projects in memory of their daughter. They have also advanced investigation into the incident and asked the U.S. Congress and various courts for redress.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Corrie's parents have visited the region several times since their daughter's death and have twice visited Gaza. Following their daughter's death, they visited Gaza and Israel, seeing the place where she died, and meeting ISM members and Palestinians whom she had known. They also visited Ramallah in the West Bank, where Arafat met them and presented them with a plaque in memory of their daughter. On March 28, 2008, they addressed a demonstration in Ramallah at which Craig Corrie said: "This village has become a symbol of nonviolent resistance. I call for solidarity with the people of Palestine in resisting the conditions imposed by the Israeli occupation to prevent the establishment of their state."


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The Nasrallahs, whose home Rachel Corrie allegedly believed she was preventing from destruction, toured with the Corries across the United States in June 2005. The aim of the trip was, with the cooperation of the Rebuilding Alliance, to raise funds to rebuild the Nasrallah home and other homes destroyed in Rafah.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In January 2011, Corrie's parents visited the MV "Mavi Marmara" in Turkey, together with the head of the IHH Bülent Yıldırım. Cindy Corrie called dead "Mavi Marmara" activists "martyrs" and compared them to her daughter.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: Corrie's family and several Palestinians filed a federal lawsuit against Caterpillar Inc. in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington alleging liability for Corrie's death. The suit alleged Caterpillar supplied the bulldozers to the Israelis despite having notice they would be used to further "a policy plaintiffs contend violates international law". The case was dismissed by a Federal judge in November 2005 for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, citing, among other things, the political question doctrine. The judge found, alternatively, that the plaintiffs' claims failed on the merits.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The Corrie family appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In September 2007 the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal on the political question grounds and thus did not rule on the merits of the suit. The Court found that as the bulldozers were paid for by the U.S. Government as part of its aid to Israel, the Judicial Branch could not rule on the merits of the case without ruling on whether or not the government's financing of such bulldozers was appropriate and that this was a matter not entrusted to the Judicial Branch.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: In 2010, Corrie's parents, represented by Attorney Hussein Abu Hussein, filed a lawsuit against the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Defense Ministry in the Haifa District Court, seeking US$324,000 in compensation. The case began in Haifa on March 10, 2010. Judge Oded Gershon presided over the case. On October 21, 2010, the bulldozer driver who had run over Corrie testified for four hours, and was cross-examined by the Corries' attorney. At the request of state prosecutors, who argued that his life could be imperiled if he was publicly identified, the driver was hidden behind a screen and visible to only the judge and attorneys. A request by the Corrie family that they also be allowed to see the driver was turned down by the judge. The driver was identified only by his initials, "YB", and a gag order was imposed on identifying details, although it was disclosed in court that he was a 38-year old Russian immigrant who had arrived in Israel at age 23, and was working for a food processing company at the time. The driver denied having seen her before hitting her. In addition, four experts, including an expert on the behalf of the Corrie family testified during the trial, and concluded that the bulldozer driver could not see Corrie. Four ISM witnesses testified during the case. However, the Palestinian physician from Gaza who had examined Corrie's wounds on the scene was unable to testify after Israel refused him an entry visa and rejected an application for him to testify by video link.


title: Rachel Corrie

text: The court ruled against Corrie's family on August 28, 2012. In a 62-page verdict, Judge Oded Gershon ruled that Corrie's death was an accident for which she was responsible, and absolved the IDF of any wrongdoing. The judge ruled that the bulldozer driver and his commander had a very limited field of vision and could not possibly have seen her. According to the judge "The mission of the IDF force on the day of the incident was solely to clear the ground... The mission did not include, in any way, the demolition of homes." The court invoked the principle of the combatant activities exception, as the IDF was attacked in the same area where Corrie was killed a few hours earlier; that Corrie could have avoided the danger and that defendants were not at fault as there was neither intent nor negligence involved in her death. The judge said that the IDF did not violate Corrie's right to life because Corrie had placed herself in a dangerous situation, that Israel's investigation was appropriate and did not contain mistakes, and also criticized the U.S. government for failing to send a diplomatic representative to observe Corrie's autopsy. Gershon said: "I rule unequivocally that the claim that the deceased was intentionally hit by the bulldozer is totally baseless. This was an extremely unfortunate accident. I reached the conclusion that there was no negligence on the part of the bulldozer driver. I reject the suit. There is no justification to demand the state pay any damages. She [Corrie] did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done. She consciously put herself in harm's way."