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this soulmate bit is so HL 

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Sir Edward Poynter, The Israelites in Egypt: Water Carriers, n.d.

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From New York Magazine, 92 years of women voting… Check out the slideshow here!

The ones I chose are 1922, 1948, 1955, 1966, 1972, 1982 (Bill and Hillary Clinton!), 2004, and 2012. But check out the full slideshow! And check out the women who will be joining the 113th Congress (we’re breaking the all time record for representation in the federal legislative branch!).

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TAMMY BALDWIN, the Senator-Elect from Wisconsin, will become the first openly gay person ever elected to Senate. MAZIE HIRONO, the Senator-Elect from Hawaii, will become the first Asian-American woman in Senate. TAMMY DUCKWORTH, the Representative-Elect for Illinois, will become the first disabled female veteran elected to the House of Reps. (she lost both her legs in the Iraq War).

Tonight is one for the history books.

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Ella Cara Deloria “ Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ”: Why she kicks ass

She was an educator,anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and novelist of Yankton Sioux background. She recorded Sioux oral history and legends, and in the 1940s wrote a novel, Waterlily, finally published in 1988.

Her linguistic abilities and her intimate knowledge of traditional and Christianised Sioux culture, together with her deep commitment both to Native American culture and to scholarship, allowed Deloria to carry out important, often ground-breaking work in anthropology and ethnology, as well as to produce translations in to English of historical and scholarly texts in Sioux. She was compiling a Sioux dictionary at the time of her death.

In 1938-39, she was part of a small group of researchers hired to construct a socioeconomic study on the Navajo Reservation for the Bureau of Indian Affairs that was funded by the Phelps Strokes Fund. This study resulted in a report, The Navajo Indian Problem, that was published. This well received project opened the door for her to receive more speaking engagements and funding to continue her important work on native languages. 

In 1940, she and a sister went to Pembroke, North Carolina to conduct some research among the Lumbee tribe, who were in the process of pursuing federal recognition. Deloria believed she could make an important contribution to their effort by studying their distinctive culture and language. In her study, she diligently conducted interviews with Lumbee women about plants, food, medicine, and animal names. She also conducted a comparative study between some of the native languages and Lumee slang words. She came very close to completing a dictionary of their original language before the addition of English and various other language phrases. 

She also assembled two successful pageants for and about the Lumbee people in 1940 and 1941 that depicted their origin account that allegedly connects the Lumbee to the Lost Colony of the Outer Banks region.

Deloria won the Indian Achievement Award in 1943, and was the recipient of grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (1948) and the National Science Foundation (1960s).

In 2010, the Department of Anthropology of Columbia University, her alma mater, established the Ella C. Deloria Undergraduate Research Fellowship in her honor.

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November is Native American Heritage Month

All photos by Edward S. Curtis via the Library of Congress, original captions:

Top: O Che Che, Mohave Indian woman, Qahatika girl, Selawik Woman

Middle: Chaiwa—Tewa, Klamath woman, Cayuse woman

Bottom: Wisham female, Tsawatenok girl, Yaqui girl

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You're a woman, embrace that shit.

As women, I don’t understand how you can even look at Romney and Ryan and remotely want to vote for them. 

I understand that Women’s rights shouldn’t be the only thing you base your vote off of.. But it is a really big factor you should consider. 

I don’t understand how men think they have any say in what a woman can and can not do with her body. 

I don’t understand how they need to shut down planned parenthood because they allow abortions when abortions make up only 3% of what they actually do. 

I don’t get how my rights as a woman can even be debated by a bunch of men who don’t live their life as women, so why the hell should they get to put rules on mine? 

If these were their bodies, you better sure as hell believe that debates that involve womans rights wouldn’t even be considered. 

We get to live our lives, and get picked our choices, by pricks who believe that my rights as a woman intrude on their religious beliefs.

You’re a woman, You have a choice in who you vote for this election and you better make sure you are damn educated. 

92 years ago we were granted the right to vote. Use that shit. 

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Maria Sibylla Merian was a fine painter and superb naturalist, one of the first woman scientists we know of. Her observations of insects and their relationships with plants revolutionized botany and zoology. Maria Sibylla revealed, for the first time in print, the mystery of metamorphosis. Before her work, the prevailing opinion was that flies and worms came to life by spontaneous generation. Maria was one of the very first scientists who observed living animals and plants rather than dead specimens preserved in alcohol.

Maria Sibylla was a painter of great power at a time when in Germany, women were not permitted to earn a living as painters. But they could publish “models” for embroidery, which she did in her first book, Flowerbook, in her twenties.

Maria kept a journal of nature observations for 53 years, from age 16 to age 69. Her journal was rediscovered and published in German in 1976.

At 13, she wrote,

“I collected all the caterpillars I could find in order to study their metamorphosis. I therefore withdrew from society and devoted myself to these investigations.”

Understanding animals and their plant connections became the focus of her life, and from 1660 on she collected insects, recording and painting everything she could observe about their life cycles and behavior.

In 1699, at the age of 52 years, Maria and her daughter Dorothea set sail for the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America. In those days such a voyage took three months. It was shocking for women, especially an old woman of 52, to undertake such a voyage.

For two years the two women explored Surinam, painting insects and plants as they traveled. When Maria became ill with malaria she returned to Amsterdam, but her daughter stayed five years, continuing her mother’s insect studies. 

In 1705, Maria Sibylla published Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam (Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium), lavishly illustrated with colored plates. The book earned wide acclaim and some financial success. However, her work was derided as fantasy by some naturalists for describing bird-eating spiders, (later confirmed) and found offensive by colonial officials who did not like her comments on the treatment of the indigenous Indians and African slaves. This book brought her work to the attention of the great scientist Carl Linneaus, and established her reputation.

Maria Sibyyla died from stroke in 1717. Just weeks before her death, Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, purchased all of her original works. When Peter died, they were displayed in a museum, the first in Russia, where they remain.

Text & Flower image via Morning Earth.

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Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of the kids. They out-number kids. They vote. They wield resources. That’s why my public focus is primarily adults.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson when asked “Can we inspire more kids to pursue space-related science and research? If so, how?” (via ikenbot)

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when i was 12 i babysat this girl for a few years and she would come to me and show me her art, drag me by my wrists and point at the pieces she’d made during the week. and she’d be like “do the voice” and i’d put on a sports-announcer olympics-style voice and be like “such form! this level of coloring! why i haven’t seen such perfection in crayola in a long time. and what is this? why jeff, now this is a true risk… it seems she’s made … a monochrome pink canvas…. i haven’t seen this attempted since winter 1932… and i gotta say, jeff, it’s absolutely splendid”  and she’d fall back giggling. at the end of every night she’d check with me: “did you really like it?” and i’d say yes and talk about something i noticed and tucked her in.

she was just accepted into 3 major art schools. she wrote me a letter. inside was a picture from when she was younger. monochrome pink. 

“thank you,” it said, “to somebody who saw the best in me.”

#babies #sobbing

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I don’t just want love, I want to obsess over every inch of your skin on those dreadful Monday mornings before we both awaken.

A.L Nash  (via wordsnquotes)

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Undeveloped luna moth because its cocoon fell from a tree

source

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Photo by Yann Libessart

From Margaret Barclay, MSF midwife: “In the Philippines, the (Typhoon Haiyan) disaster destroyed everything and people did not know whether health care was accessible or not. The first woman who delivered with us in Tacloban would have died if she had not received care. …She was very sick, had been displaced by the typhoon and was living in a tent. Her labor was obstructed and she had also developed pre-eclampsia, a hypertensive disorder, which is a severe complication of pregnancy.” Saturday is International Women’s Day. On that day, and every day, thousands of women worldwide will leave their homes to flee war or persecution. The fact that they are women makes their ordeal even more harrowing. Read this and other stories: http://bit.ly/1fLR5fE

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I’ve said this before and I’ll point it out again - Menstruation is caused by change in hormonal levels to stop the creation of a uterine lining and encourage the body to flush the lining out. The body does this by lowering estrogen levels and raising testosterone. Or, to put it more plainly “That time of the month” is when female hormones most closely resemble male hormones. So if (cis) women aren’t suited to office at “That time of the month” then (cis) men are NEVER suited to office. If you are a dude and don’t dig the ladies around you at their time of the month, just think! That is you all of the time. And, on a final note, post-menopausal (cis) women are the most hormonally stable of all human demographics. They have fewer hormonal fluctuations of anyone, meaning older women like Hilary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren would theoretically be among the least likely candidates to make an irrational decision due to hormonal fluctuations, and if we were basing our leadership decisions on hormone levels, then only women over fifty should ever be allowed to hold office.

timemachineyeah  (via arnericasinger)

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#BreakingStereotypes

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Queen Hatshepsut of Ancient Egypt. She has a lovely smile for someone who’s been dead for thousands of years.

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ART: Scarily Realistic Oil Paintings by Yigal Ozeri 

What kind of fucking sorcery?! Today we’re delighted to bring you some of the most hyperreal artwork our eyes have ever seen.

Yigal Ozeri is a New York-based artist, originally from Israel.

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