Category: feminism

My Silver Linings Playbook

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

I should have canceled the hiking trip to Morocco and Portugal after falling on my deck. The X‑ray showed my ankle wasn’t broken — just a small fragment of displaced bone — and I convinced myself the pain would subside. They fitted me with a walking boot, and I left the hospital with cautious hope.

The trip was filled with mishaps, and so I have begun to frame it as a succession of silver linings. First thing: I forgot my passport and missed my flight. Unable to get on another, I took BART back to San Francisco, had a lovely dinner with old Bernal Heights buddies Judy and Diane, and slept on Judy’s blow‑up bed. 

Judy K and I, Diane in her garden with Bernal Hill in the background, dog walking the next day at Holly Park with Judy K and Judy S

The next day, back at the airport with time to kill, I explored SFO’s International Terminal and found its quirkiest attractions: a low-rider bicycle exhibit, a roast‑your‑own coffee machine and a tiny theater showing shorts that felt like art‑school therapy. At a bar near the Lufthansa gates, the bartender poured a consolatory 20‑ounce IPA and chatted with me — mostly because I was the only customer. Lufthansa pilots were on strike and so their flights were canceled and the bar empty.

At SFO: part of a low rider bike exhibit, roast your own coffee

Standby meant more waiting, more near‑misses. I missed another flight because it was full, then met Lynn, a retired flight attendant of 35 years, who’d also left her passport at home. We were directed to the swanky Air France lounge, an oasis of free food and booze. Sometimes fortune favors the passport‑less. 

At the Air France lounge in my boot, new best friend Lynn, 3 kinds of water

My injured leg earned me VIP wheelchair treatment at airports. But the boot was not a fun accessory on the 12‑hour flight. 

Stopover in Paris: arriving, rated highly, Charles de Gaulle had the coolest toilets

Midnight in Marrakesh: I swapped currency at the airport, shared a taxi to the old town medina with an amiable French couple and met Ali, the hotel night man, who navigated the medina’s narrow alleys like a supernatural GPS. I could never have found my riad (hotel) without him. Ali seemed never to sleep. He served us breakfast in the morning.

In the old walled city medina: cats and motorbikes, donkeys. No cars will fit

This all-women trip, sponsored by Lewis and Clark College, introduced us to Moroccan culture in ways that didn’t require hiking. I was delighted to chat with English language students whose cosmopolitan takes deepened my cultural understanding.

In the medina: door and interior, the only graffiti I saw

We met Nora Fitzgerald Belahcen, founder of the Amal Women’s Training Center, whose mission is to train indigent women to earn a living. Highlights included a tagine cooking class and a delicate tea ritual using herbs plucked from the garden. Dinner was cooked and served by a crew of deaf women in the Sign Language Café, one of many projects inspired by the Amal culinary school for women*. 

The tagine cooking class

On a seven‑hour drive to the Atlas Mountains, motion sickness upgraded me to front‑seat conversationalist; the female Moroccan guide and I talked about Islamophobia, women’s roles in Morocco and architecture. I was amazed at the earthen buildings and walls. “We call this adobe,” I said. “What do you call the building material?” She replied, “Mud.”

Poppies proliferated
At a rest stop. The plant is woad, used as a blue dye and medicinal.

On the way to the Atlas Mountains

Limited mobility changed the trip but didn’t ruin it. I discovered lounging is an underrated travel activity. As my cohort hiked, a van whisked me to scenic spots so I could sit and be part of the (stunning) landscape.

Exploring the old kasbah. These mud buildings last hundreds of years.
We greeted these women and they sang back to us

Indigenous guides introduced us to Amazigh (Berber) culture, inviting us for meals and entertainment in women’s homes. The women dressed us up for a mock wedding, drew us in to the song and dance, and in those moments we ten Americans weren’t tourists, we were favored guests. 

Our guide Fatimazahra dressed up for the mock wedding
Malika serves nomad bread she made over a fire and hot rocks

Three of us traveled on to Portugal, visiting Lisbon, Sintra and mountain schist villages. A highlight for me in Lisbon was the Resistance Museum where I could sit and take in the history of the Portuguese 1974 revolution and the concurrent freeing of their African colonies. 

At the Resistance museum
A wall of tiles commemorating the 1974 revolution
The Moorish castle at Sintra
In a Schist village

Driving out of the city, we were surprised to see the mountains planted in eucalyptus (for paper production), which burned in a terrible fire in 2025. Then, early this year, a huge storm knocked down trees and power lines and flooded villages, damaging the hiking trails. We Californians recognized this familiar pattern of climate’s cruelty and poor land use decisions.

The fire barely missed this village
Navigating a ruined trail and bridge
Burned signs in the Portuguese mountains

We persisted; my ankle felt a bit better and I was able to hike among the old schist villages with the help of an ankle wrap and hiking poles.

On the way home and back in the boot, at the Madrid airport (I can now say I’ve been to Spain), planes were delayed and gates shuffled, yet an army of orange‑vested attendants formed a conveyor belt of compassion for the disabled. We were a support group on wheels. On packed planes I miraculously avoided catching anything despite the coughing babies.

Lisbon’s bridge looks like the Golden Gate
Schist village cottage

The grand finale: midnight in Santa Rosa, about to be dropped off at the airporter bus stop, I strategized how to get home. Plan A: Lyft—no reply. Plan B: taxi—too late. Plan C: a heroic 2.5‑mile pilgrimage, halted when the bus driver passed me a phone number and I met Eric, the night driver‑cum‑savior who rescued me from walking‑home doom.

National Palace of Pena, Sintra
Paget, Mary and I at a national park

Silver linings: reunions that felt like coming home, friends new and ancient, strangers who became angels, tiny airport luxuries, lessons in culture, and real, workable tweaks for travel with an injury. But perhaps the best was bonding with my sister travelers and our knowledgeable guides. 

No regrets. If anything, I’m grateful I muddled through—because the mess made room for unexpected warmth. I’m glad I didn’t cancel. 

*If you’d like to support the Amal Women’s Training Center, consider donating: https://www.amalnonprofit.org

Sonoma County Gay Pride

June 6, 2026 Santa Rosa

Holly and I watched the parade and hung out with friends at Beer Baron on 4th Street. We perused the many booths at the square but didn’t stay for the stage entertainment. I went on to a party at the Sitting Room, the feminist library, to chat with women writers and readers. A very good day all around.

Sebastopol Senior Center has lots of programs for queer seniors
Tina Dungan and Magi Fedorka woman the gay history timeline booth
Thanks for the warning
I swing both ways. Violently with an axe
Furries were popular
Becky M my favorite ally
Adam Richmond, part of the gay history group
John B rockin the gown
Bo Laurent, founderof the Intersex. Society of North America. Her T shirt reads “Building a world free of shame, secrecy and unwanted genital surgery
Ice cream and grandpa
The awesome SF Cheer practicing acrobatics.

How Can Women Make a Living Wage Without a College Degree?

Opening Up the Building and Construction Trades to Women

Indigenous women in Ironworkers Local 725, Canada. Photo: Lightframe

The Club for the Deaf’s attic on Valencia Street reeked of scorched timber. Char and blackened beams swallowed the light; soot clung to everything. We crawled, backs bent low, balancing on sheets of plywood stretched across the ceiling joists. As electricians rewiring the place after a fire, we worked while thunderous punk music rattled below — the deaf crowd savoring the music through their feet.

It was just one of many electrical jobs Cheryl Parker and I did together.

Cheryl on a Wonder Woman Electric job

Cheryl belonged to Sonoma County and the San Francisco Bay Area in a way that was both rooted and radical. She came from land and labor, and she spent her life insisting that women — especially lesbians — had a right to both. I knew her as a close friend, a sister tradeswoman, and a fellow building inspector. Our lives overlapped on jobsites, in lesbian bars, and in the long conversations that happen when you are trying to make a life where none has been laid out for you.

I first met Cheryl when she was working at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. She was already doing skilled electrical work there, and she was also helping to raise two daughters with her lover. That combination — determination on the job and deep commitment to chosen family — was classic Cheryl. She was grounded, political without posturing, and absolutely unwilling to shrink herself.

We later worked together through Wonder Woman Electric on several jobs. At lesbian bars in San Francisco, while everyone else was dancing, Cheryl and I would be off to the side talking about electrical work — arguing over grounding, circuitry, and the strange logic of systems hidden behind walls. No one wanted to sit with us. We didn’t care.

Cheryl came out of an Italian American family deeply tied to Northern California agriculture. Her grandparents emigrated from northern Italy, homesteading land outside Cloverdale. Her father was a fruit tramp who met her mother, Irene Gianoli, while picking fruit. Cheryl grew up in Cloverdale, one of three children. She had been a high school cheerleader and a member of the riding club, but she was never ornamental. Strength came naturally to her.

In the early 1970s, Cheryl entered the political and cultural ferment of the Bay Area. At City College of San Francisco, she met Joan MacQuarrie in a women’s history class. They became lovers and political partners, asking a question that would shape the rest of their lives:

How could women make a living wage without a college degree?

Cheryl (L) and Joan plotting revolution

That question led them straight into the building trades — places where women were barely tolerated. Cheryl went on to be a leader in the Tradeswomen Movement, organizing to bring more women into the construction trades and jobs that women had not been allowed to do.

In 1972, Cheryl became the first woman cabinetmaker in Local 550, hauling ninety-pound doors. She later became the first woman to enter the electrical apprenticeship at Mare Island, working in confined, dangerous spaces including nuclear submarines.

Cheryl went on to own her own business, teach at the Center for Employment Training in Santa Rosa, and receive Sonoma County’s Tradeswoman of the Year award. But her real legacy was collective. She was a founding member of Women United for Apprenticeship, and she fought — loudly and publicly — for enforceable standards to get women into union trades. When apprenticeship officials claimed women couldn’t do the work, Cheryl, a tall woman, stood over them with the authority of someone who already was.

Her path also led to many firsts in public service. Cheryl became the first female building inspector in Richmond, then the first senior female building inspector in Oakland, and later the first supervising female building inspector in San Leandro. In Richmond she led the city’s comparable worth campaign, bringing feminist labor politics directly into municipal government. In the late-1980s, we founded a network of women inspectors, the FBI — Female Building Inspectors — mentoring others who were just beginning to cross barriers we had already broken.

Female Building Inspectors after Cheryl’s time

Cheryl lived openly as a lesbian, embedded in women’s and lesbian communities, from tradeswomen groups to the Oakland-Berkeley Women’s Union. She argued about everything. Friends said she should have been a lawyer. In 1986, at 38, she gave birth to her son Tyson, and he became another fierce center of her life. I got to be her birth coach, an amazing experience.

We started Tradeswomen Inc. in 1979. The nonprofit is still going strong.

Cheryl Parker died of ovarian cancer on July 9, 1992, at the age of 44.

Visiting my friend as she was dying and sick from chemo, I repeated an old chestnut, that I’d prefer to die quickly of a heart attack rather than suffer. She said something profound: “Don’t be so sure. Just think of all the love I’ve received and all the love I’ve been able to give as I’m dying.” Cheryl lived just nine months from her diagnosis to her death. Much love flowed in all directions and my view of death was transfigured.

Cheryl with her son Tyson

Cheryl understood something early that many still resist: solidarity has to be built and no one breaks barriers alone. I carry her with me — in the work, in the arguments, in the memory of two women at a bar talking about grounding while the music played on.

Cheryl helped make a path where there wasn’t one before. I was lucky to walk part of it with her.

Sign Making Party Santa Rosa

Neighbors Getting Ready for the Big Demonstration Saturday

A Sister’s Murder Sparks Action

Black, Lesbian, or Just a Woman?

Tradeswomen Respond to Workplace Violence

Carpenter apprentice Outi Hicks was working on a job in Fresno, California in 2017 when she encountered continuing harassment from another worker there. She didn’t complain and no one stood up for her. Then her harasser attacked her and beat her to death. 

We don’t know whether Outi (pronounced Ootee) was murdered because she was Black, lesbian or just female. But we do know that being all three put her at greater risk. Outi was 32 and a mother of three. 

In response, tradeswomen organized Sisters Against Workplace Violence and worked with the Ironworkers Union (IW) to launch a program called Be That One Guy. The program’s aim is to “turn bystanders into upstanders.” Participants learn how to defuse hostile situations and gain the confidence to be able to react when they see harassment. 

“Outi Hicks’ murder hit me hard,” says Vicki O’ Leary, the international IW general organizer for safety and diversity. “Companies and unions need to change the focus of their harassment policies and need to get tougher with harassers.” 

Often the victim of harassment is moved to a different crew or jobsite in an effort to defuse the situation. But such a response actually punishes the victim and not the aggressor, who remains unaffected and may continue to harass other workers. 

O’Leary says one of the most important parts of the program is when participants take the pledge:

“It only takes one guy to talk to the harasser or to file a complaint with the crew boss. It’s even better when the whole crew stands up together to end harassment, and we are now seeing this happen on job sites around the country,” says O’Leary. She tells of an apprentice who was being harassed by a supervisor. Seeing the harassment, everyone on the crew began to treat the supervisor the same way he was treating the apprentice. His behavior changed in a day.

The IW is rolling out the program through their district councils. They want to share it with other unions and, says O’Leary, they’re hoping general contractors will jump on.

Another anti-violence program started by tradeswomen and our allies also is specifically tailored to the construction industry.

ANEW, the pre-apprenticeship training program in Seattle, created its program, RISE Up, to counter the number of people, and especially women, who leave the construction trades because of a hostile work environment. ANEW director, Karen Dove, developed the program after meetings with contractors who would say “women just need tougher skin.”

The program focuses on empowering workers and employers to prevent and respond to workplace violence. It offers a range of services, including training sessions, risk assessments, and support for workers who have experienced violence.

Training sessions are designed to help workers and employers identify the warning signs of workplace violence and take proactive steps to prevent it. The training covers conflict resolution, de-escalation techniques, and the importance of creating a positive work environment.

The program is concerned with psychological well being and is now working with a union to develop mental health services for Black workers. 

RISE Up also offers risk assessments to construction companies, which help them identify areas of their workplace that may be at higher risk of violence.

Marquia Wooten, director of RISE Up, says the program is designed to change the culture of construction. Wooten worked in the trades for ten years as a laborer and an operating engineer. “When I was an apprentice they yelled and screamed at me,” she says. She notes that men suffer from harassment too. “The suicide rate of construction workers is number two after vets and first responders,” she said. “Substance abuse is high in construction.”

ANEW partners with cities, public entities, unions, schools and employers. “They do want change in the industry,” says Wooten. Less workplace violence is good for the bottom line.

But training workers is not enough. Union staff needs training in how to respond to harassment as well. Liz Skidmore recently retired as business representative/organizer at North Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters. They created a training to help union staff members know what to do when a member complains.

“New federal regulations require that every person on the construction job who comes into contact with apprentices go through anti-harassment and discrimination training,” says Skidmore.

“Most of corporate America requires annual training about sexual harassment, but most trainers don’t know the blue collar world,” she says. Trainers can be classist. “To be effective, the trainer has to like these guys.”

While tradeswomen have long been virtually invisible on the front lines of the Feminist and Civil Rights Movements, we still are the ones who daily confront the most aggressive kind of sexism and racism in our traditionally male jobs. For going on five decades now we have been devising strategies to counter isolation and harassment at work and to increase the numbers of women in the union construction trades. Now we are working to educate the construction industry about how to end workplace violence. Women in construction are still isolated and often the only woman on the job. We need our brothers to act as allies. 

As with women in construction, queer and transgender folks must depend on allies to stand up to bullies. We can’t do this by ourselves. The anti-violence programs developed by tradeswomen are programs that we queers can adapt to protect our communities. 

Sometimes you just have to say something.

Postscript 2025: Another sister has been murdered on the job by a coworker. Minneapolis. He killed her with a sledge hammer. Story on 19th: https://19thnews.org/2025/11/amber-czech-welder-murder-tradeswomen-demand-action/