Free Republic

The state's California Hall of Fame got its first 13 members Monday. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and first lady Maria Shriver jointly unveiled names of the honorees, who formally will be inducted Dec. 6. Honorees are: Ronald Reagan, the former California governor and U.S. president. Cesar Chavez, former leader of the United Farm Workers. Walt Disney... Amelia Earhart... Clint Eastwood... Frank O. Gehry... Dr. David Ho, a trailblazer in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Billie Jean King... John Muir, a conservationist and environmentalist whose image appears on the California state quarter. Sally K. Ride... Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel...

She's revered as a trail-blazing feminist and author Alice Walker touched the lives of a generation of women. A champion of women's rights, she has always argued that motherhood is a form of servitude. But one woman didn't buy in to Alice's beliefs - her daughter, Rebecca, 38. Here the writer describes what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a cultural icon, and why she feels so blessed to be the sort of woman 64-year-old Alice despises - a mother.

Alice Walker, best known as the author of the novel The Color Purple, is one of the most renowned feminist authors and activists of her generation. She is also a mother, and that fact brought her public and private lives into direct conflict. --snip-- That is because Alice Walker’s brand of feminism was the kind that taught that “motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.” So says her daughter, Rebecca, who suffered the consequences of that thinking. In a recent London Daily Mail article, Rebecca Walker reflected on the neglect she experienced with her divorced...

She's revered as a trail-blazing feminist and author Alice Walker touched the lives of a generation of women. A champion of women's rights, she has always argued that motherhood is a form of servitude. But one woman didn't buy in to Alice's beliefs - her daughter, Rebecca, 38. Here the writer describes what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a cultural icon, and why she feels so blessed to be the sort of woman 64-year-old Alice despises - a mother.

The other day I was vacuuming when my son came bounding into the room. 'Mummy, Mummy, let me help,' he cried. His little hands were grabbing me around the knees and his huge brown eyes were looking up at me. I was overwhelmed by a huge surge of happiness. I love the way his head nestles in the crook of my neck. I love the way his face falls into a mask of eager concentration when I help him learn the alphabet. But most of all, I simply love hearing his little voice calling: 'Mummy, Mummy.' It reminds me of...

In the mid-1980s, The New York Times ran a profile of the American writer and activist Alice Walker. Her novel, The Color Purple, had won the Pulitzer prize and was being turned into a film by Steven Spielberg. The article was illustrated by a photograph of Walker sitting on her teenaged daughter’s knee. It was meant to be a “fun” picture; but, in retrospect, according to Rebecca Walker, the photographer unwittingly portrayed the true nature of her relationship with her mother. Alice Walker was, and remains, an icon of the American civil rights movement. “People adore her. I can’t tell...

-snip- When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that white women have copied all too often the behaviour of their fathers and their brothers. In...

HAVANA -- About 200 intellectuals, activists and artists from Latin America and elsewhere issued a letter Monday urging the top United Nations human rights watchdog to side with Cuba in an expected battle over the communist country's rights record. A U.S.-backed resolution to condemn the island's record is usually presented at every spring meeting in Geneva of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which this year was to open Monday and run through April 22. No resolution targeting the island has emerged this year, but Cuba expects such a proposal will be presented and considered in mid-April. Last year's resolution passed...

Photo credit: Noah Berger/Random House Alice Walker, Author BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'NOW IS THE TIME TO OPEN YOUR HEART' If the River Is Dry, Can You Be All Wet? By MICHIKO KAKUTANI If this novel did not boast the name of Alice Walker, who won acclaim some two decades ago with "The Color Purple," it's hard to imagine how it could have been published. "Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart" is a remarkably awful compendium of inanities. There are New Age inanities: "She had an instinctive understanding, perhaps from birth, that people and plants were relatives."...

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) --Alice Walker, author of the novel "The Color Purple," and 26 others were arrested Saturday after marching to the White House to protest a possible war with Iraq.</p> <p>Walker joined thousands of others who protested war, mostly peacefully, in dozens of cities around the world, as the United States continued its diplomatic push toward invading Iraq.</p>

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Alice Walker, author of the novel "The Color Purple," and 26 others were arrested Saturday after marching to the White House to protest a possible war with Iraq.</p> <p>Walker joined thousands of others who protested war, mostly peacefully, in dozens of cities around the world, as the United States continued its diplomatic push toward invading Iraq.</p>

US anti-war groups flex their muscle Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles Tuesday October 22, 2002 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk Medea Benjamin has been close to both President Bush and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, over the past few weeks. So close, in fact, that she was arrested. Most memorably, Ms Benjamin was one of two women seen directly behind Mr Rumsfeld at last month's congressional hearings on Iraq holding an anti-war placard and later charged with "disruption of Congress". This Saturday, she will help lead what organisers hope will echo in scale the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era three decades...