Women's History Month begins

In honor of Women's History Month, we will bring profiles of courageous and skilled women from around the world and present their herstories, so that they may not be forgotten.

These women are taken from the 2008 Sheroes Womyn Warriors Wall Calendar, published by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights and Big Red Media, Inc.

Many if not most of the women on the calendar are not well-known, because most women's individual or collective stories are lost to history. Perhaps because they were, as described in the calendar,

women who have been rebels and fighters against patriarchy, who opposed and fought invaders and aggressors to their homelands, and who represent radicals and revolutionaries of their times and societies, who if they were alive today could continue to serve as sheroes, spurring us on to work for an equitable and pluralist society and world.

They sound much like the women we work with at Refugee Women's Network.

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March 3: Petrona Chacon
African female slave who in 1840 was elected "queen" by the African conspirators in the Conspiracy of the Ladder in Cuba. The Conspiracy was a Cuban slave rebellion, scheduled to start in March of 1844, with the goal of immediate seizure of power. Well organized, it spread throughout towns and plantations all over the island and involved thousands of slaves. When it was brutally repressed, of the 4,000 Africans and mulattos tried by military courts, 98 were executed, 600 imprisoned, and over 400 deported.