CUUWA is a UU women’s organization with specific goals: to raise awareness about women’s history, rituals, and perspectives, through training, communication, celebration and many resources.
The Canadian Unitarian and/or Universalist Women’s Association (CU*UWA) invites all congregations across Canada to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, 2020. We have prepared this package of worship and study materials to help you prepare your activities. It is our goal to have IWD services and/or activities in all congregations in Canada every year. Will you help us achieve this goal of promoting awareness of gender equality and women’s issues?
This year, we will also offer an online Worship service starting at 5:30pm Eastern / 2:30 Pacific on March 8. We will meet on Zoom, and an invitation with the link is included in the package.
Our 2020 theme is Wisdom. Our package includes options for your chalice lighting, readings, blessing, and closing words, suggestions for sermons and interactive services, reflection questions for individuals or small groups, comments by CU*UWA Council members, original artwork and poetry, and resources for study.
We hope this material inspires you to reflect on your own sources of wisdom, your ways of knowing and experiencing the world, the Divine Feminine and goddesses, prophetic and authentic voices of women and femmes, and your vision of a world informed by women’s wisdom. We encourage you to share your stories on our Facebook page, in your congregations, in your creative work. We will be sharing prompts related to our package on our Facebook page every day from February 29 to March 8, 2020 and would love to read your responses.
For Spring and Summer 2020, the Canadian U*U Feminist Book Club has transformed itself into a club for exploring poetry, TedTalks, online videos and movies, and other free sources of learning. In particular, we are learning together about intersectionality and the lives of racialized and Indigenous women, Queers, and femmes.
On July 12, 2020, we will be continuing our discussion from June 14 on intersectionality, privilege, and the lives of Indigenous and racialized women through a video by Pam Palmater on MMIW, Ted Talks by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Peggy McIntosh and others, and the movie 13th. The list of links can be found below.
This time we will focus our learning by checking in with one experience during which we were aware of your own privilege and our need to learn more, and then each of us will briefly talk about what we learned from one of the media resources below. We will allow ourselves to be inarticulate. We will acknowledge that we are all learning.
Contact us for the Zoom link.
Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality TEDWomen 2016 • 18:49 • Posted November 2016 https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality
Peggy McIntosh: How to recognize your white privilege — and use it to fight inequality TEDxTimberlaneSchools • 18:27 • Posted June 2020 https://www.ted.com/talks/peggy_mcintosh_how_to_recognize_your_white_privilege_and_use_it_to_fight_inequality
Dolores Huerta: What we can learn from the history of feminism TEDxOakland • 6:31 • Posted December 2019 https://www.ted.com/talks/dolores_huerta_what_we_can_learn_from_the_history_of_feminism
Roxane Gay: Confessions of a bad feminist TEDWomen 2015 • 11:28 • Posted June 2015 https://www.ted.com/talks/roxane_gay_confessions_of_a_bad_feminist
Mwende “FreeQuency” Katwiwa: Black life at the intersection of birth and death TEDWomen 2017 • 7:49 • Posted February 2018 https://www.ted.com/talks/mwende_freequency_katwiwa_black_life_at_the_intersection_of_birth_and_death
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We should all be feminists TEDxEuston • 29:28 • Posted April 2017 https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists
Pat Mitchell: Dangerous times call for dangerous women TEDWomen 2019 • 17:14 • Posted January 2020 https://www.ted.com/talks/pat_mitchell_dangerous_times_call_for_dangerous_women
Alyson McGregor: Why medicine often has dangerous side effects for women TEDxProvidence • 15:29 • Posted October 2015 https://www.ted.com/talks/alyson_mcgregor_why_medicine_often_has_dangerous_side_effects_for_women
Jen Gunter: Why can’t we talk about periods? TEDWomen 2019 • 11:42 • Posted January 2020 https://www.ted.com/talks/jen_gunter_why_can_t_we_talk_about_periods
There’s also a video of Pam Palmater I’d ask you to look at on the Kairos website: https://www.kairoscanada.org/missing-murdered-indigenous-women-girls/videos
or on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dULLnpG9Hg&feature=emb_title
Added last month: Deconstructing White Privilege with Dr. Robin DiAngelo (especially for those, like me, who haven’t read her book) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwIx3KQer54
Angela Davis – “Freedom is a Constant Struggle” hosted by The University of New England https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u1aHpEtWyA
13th, which is available on Netflix or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 There are also some live videos related to it here: https://www.facebook.com/13THNetflix/
March 2020
Please note that our March meeting is cancelled; join us instead for an online Worship service for International Women’s Day.
Earlier meetings
January 12, 2020:
Book: Judy Rebick, Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution
Welcome to our low-stress, low-maintenance, open, intentionally queer-positive and intersectional, feminist-in-its-broadest definition book and chat club. We explore books by feminists and about feminism and, perhaps even more importantly, share our experiences as feminists. You are free to join us whenever you can, whether or not you have read the book selection, whether you want to share or listen… We meet for about an hour most months throughout the year. Check out our selections and topics here.
Day and Time: We meet most months on the second Sunday at 8 pm Atlantic, 7 pm Eastern, 6 pm Central, 5 pm Mountain, and 4 pm Pacific time. Jan 12, Feb 9, April 12, June 14, etc. 2020 Details: Email Jo-Anne, message us on our Facebook page, or join our Google group for confirmation of the date, information about the book, and the Zoom link
