Newsletter of the MSU-Bozeman Women’s Center September/October 2005
The Women's Center, the MSU Department of
Sociology, the College of Letters and Science, and
Jane and Denys Slater present the nineteenth annual
Shannon Weatherly Memorial Lecture. Join us on
Tuesday, October 11 th , 2005 at 7:30 p.m. in SUB
Ballrooms B&C on the Montana State University
Campus for what is sure to be an educational lecture. This program brings scholar and author
Juliet Schor who will present "The
Commercialization of Childhood: How Marketers
Are Targeting Kids and What Parents Can Do."
Schor's research over the past ten years has focused on issues pertaining to trends in work and leisure, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic justice. Her latest book is Born to Buy: The Commercialized
Child and the New Consumer Culture. Other books include: The Overspent American: Why We Want
What We Don’t Need, Do Americans Shop Too
Much?, and The Overworked American: The
Unexpected Decline of Leisure. The Overworked
American appeared on the best-seller lists of The
New York Times and Business Week and is widely credited for influencing the national debate on work and family.
Dr. Schor was a Professor of Economics at
Harvard for seventeen years and is presently a
Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Her scholarly articles have appeared in The Nation , The
New York Times , The Magazine of Economic
Justice , Iris: A Journal About Women , The Review of Economics and Statistics , The Journal of
Economic Psychology , Contemporary Issues in
Business Ethics , and numerous other journals, magazines and newspapers. There is no doubt that
Dr. Schor’s work has greatly influenced the study of consumerism, leisure, work, and gender equality.
She has appeared on 60 Minutes , The Today Show , and Good Morning America , has been featured and profiled in scores of magazines, newspapers and international media, and has lectured widely throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
This annual lecture series honors the memory of Shannon Weatherly who was tragically killed by a hunter as she lay sleeping in her tent in
Gardiner, MT in 1982. Shannon's friends and family funded an endowment with the purpose of bringing in feminist scholars or activists who, through their strong and purposeful lives, reflect the life of Shannon Weatherly.
Do not miss the opportunity to learn from this prolific and brilliant scholar. A reception will follow the lecture in SUB Ballroom D, and this event is free and open to the public. If you have any questions, please call the Women's Center @
994-3836.

By Aimee Kissel
Adoption consultant and adoptive parent
Betty Strook began her well-attended Sack Lunch
Seminar presentation September 14 th
with a stark picture of life in Guatemala. A beautiful Latin
American country, about half the size of Montana,
Guatemala has seen its fair share of political upheaval and unrest. Of its 14 million residents, only five percent own eighty percent of the wealth, leaving most to live in horrible conditions with no government safety nets. Over 300,000 children under the age of five die each year from common preventable childhood diseases, and very few people ever see a medical professional. The birth rate is extremely high, and family planning has only recently begun to be practiced. Though educating girls around the world has proven to be an effective way to lower birth rates, only 40% of the population attends school, and of these, less than one third proceed past the third grade.
Betty decided that she wanted to become a mother, and as a single woman in her mid-forties, adoption was the best choice for her. Betty’s mother was born and raised in Cuba, so it seemed logical to adopt a child of Latin American heritage.
After reviewing the requirements of several different Latin American countries, she discovered she qualified to adopt in Guatemala. The long, complicated process began. Betty’s prior travels to
Guatemala and fluency in the native language facilitated the adoption of her daughter. Even so, it was a difficult challenge. Over the past several years, she and her five-year-old child have spent half of their time in Guatemala - staying for two to four months at a time.
Betty’s personal adoption story has inspired her to help other families interested in Guatemalan adoptions. She has become quite adept at navigating the intricacies involved, and has formed a small business, One Life at a Time , which utilizes her first hand knowledge of the Guatemalan adoption process and key contacts in that country to offer specialized consultation services. Betty is also knowledgeable in research and advocacy regarding international adoptions. In a recent interview I conducted, she said, “It feels really good to be involved in saving children’s lives, and helping to create families for people who want these children.
For helping, in some small way, solve the world’s over-population problem by saving children who have already been born…Having met my daughter’s birth mother and seeing the conditions she lived in,
I just don’t see how she (my daughter) could have lived past one year.”
Betty’s love for the children and people of
Guatemala does not stop with adoption advocacy and consultation. She has also started the One Life at a Time Foundation to raise money and awareness for the plight of the poor majority in Guatemala.
The foundation strives to empower girls and offer them the finances needed to attend school so they can improve not only their own lives, but also the lives of their future families. Betty has been actively raising money through her foundation for individuals’ medical care. These funds, for example, helped one Guatemalan woman receive treatment for stomach cancer that would have otherwise been fatal.
Betty is indeed a brave and inspirational woman who proves that someone can, in fact, make a difference by helping others, one at a time.
All Sack Lunch Seminars are held from 12:00 to 1:00 on Wednesday’s in the Student Union building on campus in room 106E. They are free, fun, informal and open to everyone! Please feel free to bring your lunch. For more information look for our flyers around the community, give us a call at the MSU Women’s Center at 994-3836 or check out our website at www.montana.edu/wwwwomen . Hope to see you there!
October 5 th :
October 12 th :
October 26 th :
November 2 nd :
November 9 th :
November 30 th :
Coming Out: Going Deeper, Reverend Lois Van Leer
How The System Responds to Domestic Violence, the VOICE Center
Keeping Abreast of Your Health, Arlene Wylie, RN & Darlene Falk, RN, BSN
Kids, Families, and the Wilderness
– A Healing Combination, Three Rivers MT
“It Takes a Village to Raise a Child”: Manaia Youth Programs, Wayne Mortimer
A Brief History of the AIDS Epidemic, Laura Mentch

The MSU Women’s Center is celebrating its 23 rd year as an office on campus. This is your
Women's Center. We are here to serve all students, faculty, staff and community members.
The Women's Center is a welcoming space with room to study and explore. We house a special treasure: the Geraldine Fenn Memorial Library. This cozy little lending library houses over 1900 books primarily by or about women and a wall of fantastic newsletters and magazines. Anyone can check out books for free. Donations of books and magazine subscriptions appropriate to our library are always welcomed. Come and check it out.
When you find our office at 15 Hamilton Hall, our staff will greet you and gladly help you find answers to your questions, tell you about our programs and services, steer you to groups or other organizations that may be helpful, show you a big book full of scholarships for women, invite you to volunteer, or try to meet any other need you might have.
The Women's Center is open Monday - Friday, 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Be sure to check out our website to find out about upcoming events @ www.montana.edu/~wwwwomen or you can call us at 994-3836 to get your name added to our mailing list.
Local Women's Resources:
The Network Against Sexual and Domestic Abuse (24-hour Shelter & Crisis Line), 586-4111
Bridger Clinic, Inc . (Reproductive Health Care), 587-0681
Career Transitions, Inc. 388-6701, careertransition.com
Child Care Connections , 587-7786
HELP Center (24-Hour crisis line), 586-3333
MSU Police (24-hour emergency), 994-2121
MSU Counseling and Psychological Services , 994-4531
MSU Student Health Services , 994-2311
MSU VOICE Center (Victim Options In the Campus Environment), 994-7069 (24-hour line)
MSU Women's Center , www.montana.edu/wwwwomen , 994-3836
Montana Women Vote! Project, (406) 543-3550 (Missoula), montanawomenvote.org
Parents, Family & Friends of Lesbians & Gays (PFLAG), 723-7251 (Butte), 252-5440 (Billings)
PRIDE, www.gaymontana.com/pride , 1-800-610-9322
QSA (Formerly Q-MSU) : Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Questioning, 994-4551
Women's Voices for the Earth , 585-5549
th
Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE) will be bringing noted ecologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, PhD, to Bozeman on October 9 th. She will speak at the
Museum of the Rockies at 7:00 pm and will also be available for a book signing and reception.
Dr Steingraber’s book,
Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the
Environment, brings together the connection between human rights, health, and environmental pollution. Her latest work, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, reviews her investigation on fetal toxicology and the effects of environmental hazards on infant development; and gives a personal glimpse of her own pregnancy. Steingraber has been heralded as the “new Rachel Carson” and is an enthusiastic and sought-after public speaker.
Tickets are $10.00 for WVE members, $15.00 for non-members, or $25.00 for a sponsorship.
We recommend that you reserve your tickets ASAP by calling WVE @ (406) 585-5549 as seating will be limited.

When the news came about a potential tropical storm and then the verification that a horrendous hurricane had hit several states early this month, my first thought was “thank goodness I don’t know anyone who lives there.” The selfishness of that thought still haunts me, though I am admittedly greatly relieved that no family or friends of mine were affected by the pure devastation of what we now know as
Hurricane Katrina. Our nation as a whole seemed to have a delayed reaction on many fronts: ineptitude on the part of FEMA, a horrifically lackadaisical response from our President, orders to evacuate that were clearly impossible to follow. The fact that the vast majority of those left to face the terror of the storm itself and suffer the chillingly apocalyptic reality in the weeks that followed were people of color and the area’s poorest citizens should have been no surprise. Our nation has undeniably become more divisive, segregated, individualized, and selfish to the point of alienating many of our fellow citizens.
We are no longer taught to or practiced at jumping in to help one another. In fact, if we all follow the lead of our oblivious and seemingly uncaring President, we really don’t need to respond to anything that does not affect our person directly. It saddens me to think that we have lost the sense of community that helped build this country. Fear, bureaucracy and red tape caused so much stalling in this particular instance that the results were indeed nothing less than deadly for many people.
As the news and media inundate us with images and stories of people dying, suffering, living in extremely dangerous and (to say the least) unsanitary conditions, we slowly become desensitized to the horrors of these people’s daily reality. But, when my partner was reading aloud to me from an article in
Newsweek magazine about one family’s experience in New Orleans, something he read struck me. The mother was describing her attempts to protect her children, and one of the things she mentioned were the screams of a woman being raped.
We’ve all heard the rants about the government’s ineptitude, the horrendous response, the idiotic comments made by our President and his mother, but what I’d like to rant about are these women being raped inside a building with hundreds of thousands of people. We know that in many respects, rape has become such a non-issue in our culture that it is not worth a headline; it is rarely the principal story, or the attention grabber. It seems that no matter what news item we read or hear about, be it a tragedy, a war, or a natural disaster, the side bar is inevitably about a woman or groups of women being raped. Is it ever the main story? The headliner? The attention grabber? NO! The example of Bosnia is the only one that sticks out in my mind as even coming close. Last time I checked, rape is still a crime in this country. When I said to my partner, “why wouldn’t someone, who was probably standing no more than
2 feet away, help a woman being raped?” he replied “”well, this was an unusual circumstance, everyone was probably scared” and I said, “maybe, but the funny thing is, in this one respect, they reacted to rape in exactly the same manner they always do!”
Immediately, the memory of my mother teaching me to always yell FIRE instead of RAPE in case of an attack, came to mind. Why? She told me it was because people don’t want to get involved in a situation that doesn’t necessarily endanger them, if they thought a fire was breaking out, they would be concerned about themselves and their property. She didn’t want to say it, but a sneaking suspicion tells me that she, as a feminist, even back in the 1960’s knew damn well that people don’t care about and wouldn’t bother coming to the aid of, a woman being raped.
I would like to think that no matter how stressful, threatening, complicated, horrendous a situation is, someone would come to the rescue of a woman screaming bloody murder, sobbing quietly, whatever, who was being raped.

TH

QSA is a campus based student organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning students, staff and community members and allies in
Bozeman. Weekly meetings are held on
Monday evenings throughout the academic year. These meetings are an opportunity to get to know one another, discuss current issues, offer support and plan events.
All LGBTQQ students and community members are welcome at our meetings as well as parents, friends and allies. Meetings are confidential. To find out where meetings are, when the next dance or event will be held, or to get more information about QSA, contact us at
994-4551, e-mail us at q-msu@montana.edu
, or visit our website at www.montana.edu/wwwqmsu.