We need a team of TOOTH FAIRIES for Laura X!
Donation protected
Update - we were given a special link by Pilgrim Church (where the archives and Laura live). It is for tax-deductibly donating to our rent fund via PayPal!
Donate here:
___________________________________________
Update from Laura’s friends: We’re very excited about the many donations and the fact that half of them are people Laura does not know, which means all of her friends are sending out our appeal to their friends and beyond. Thanks so much and keep up the great effort!
We have also updated the paragraph about Laura's anti-nuke work in the PS list of accomplishments.
Photo: Laura and Kevin Berry, Vice President of St. Louis Veterans For Peace, at Olympia Taverna, the night before her birthday party anti-nuke sail on the Golden Rule.
Photo credit: Lynn Sableman, President of St. Louis Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
***
We need a team of Tooth Fairies to share this appeal to help our dear friend Laura X (read about Laura X on her institute's website). Unplanned medical expenses have severely impacted her personally and financially.
A maddening medical situation spiraled our activist/archivist into yet another dangerous surgery, and has become a tipping point for already mounting medical costs not covered by Medicare over the past half-year. Such has been the case with Laura's disappearing tooth.
In August, Laura went in to get two teeth extracted as well as gum surgery. During the extraction procedure, one of Laura's extracted teeth disappeared. Assuming she had swallowed it, they told her to do a potty check each time she went. Three weeks later, with nothing found, she went in for a chest x-ray, and lo and behold, there was the tooth, complete with filling, in her lower right lung!
This led to a beginning lung infection and required urgent surgery in order to avoid perforation, abscess, and/or pneumonia. This was done under full general anesthesia which also caused the usual issues, ditto the antibiotic... At the end of half a year, Laura is left with a huge pile of health-related bills and estimates for costs not covered by Medicare!
All this, on top of much of a year filled with unexpected medical issues, including having needles stuck in her eyes in emergency retina surgery, each time with only 4 minutes' notice, has put quite a strain on Laura's body and pocketbook, and now this retinal injection procedure is to be regular going forward !
******
The next steps in the dental surgery, the implants and crowns, were postponed to next year, when Medicare is supposed to start paying for dental. However, even more maddening is that the new Medicare legislation has a fine-print loophole allowing the insurance industry to forgo covering in-process dental procedures that began before the new coverage kicks in (See #12 on page 16: here).
Why We Care & Hope You Will, Too:
Laura’s work has been instrumental in making women’s history and women’s contributions to law, health, and social justice mainstream subjects of attention, activism, and study. The archives are an incredible historical resource detailing the long history of women and their liberation and how women’s liberation entwines with all other forms of liberation, including the movements for racial equality and worker’s rights (among 20 other movements: https://lauraxinstitute.org/).
Laura dedicated her entire life to women’s liberation and the rights and dignity of oppressed and neglected people everywhere. After so many years of helping others raise funds… it is she who now “embarrassingly” must ask for help. Please give back to the advocate who has given us so much.
At almost 82, Laura is still speaking up and organizing for equality and dignity for all. She is not ready to retire fully yet, instead pushing on to finish her archival work in St. Louis on her own participation in the 21 movements listed on her website.
Since Laura has been so important to the causes of women’s rights and human rights and has given so selflessly to all of us, it is time to give back, by helping her in this time of need. We, her friends and colleagues would like to make sure she doesn’t have to worry about her medical costs.
Photo: Francine Case, Laura, and Bob Case at Dance The Vote 2022, produced by Joan Lipkin on the steps of the Missouri History Museum.
Photo credit: Francine Case
Please donate as much as you can to help Laura through this crisis! We would love $20,000 by her birthday next week and hope to reach $40,000 by Thanksgiving.
P.S. As you probably know, Laura’s accomplishments over a career spanning more than half a century are epic, including…
- Co-founder of her college chapter of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1960 — and she continued her antinuclear work with Women Strike for Peace (their Wiki page), inspired by their December 11, 1962 breastfeeding demonstration and testimony at the House Un-American Activities Committee (read more here). She has worked with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF; website link) since 1962, and she’s still working on these issues through WILPF, CODEPINK Women for Peace (website link), and the American Association of University Women (AAUW; website link). Most recently she celebrated her birthday for 8 hours sailing on the Golden Rule down the Mississippi, from Portage de Sioux to Kimmswick, through fabulous locks and past St. Louis. This very sailing ship sailed into harm's way in 1958 in a Quaker demonstration in waters where nuclear bomb tests were being held around the Marshall Islands (read more here). Right now they need crew members. Please sign up!
- Picket captain in CORE and American Committee on Africa in NYC. 1961
- Head Start teacher in Puerto Rico (she's fluent in Spanish!) and NYC. 1961-2
- Archivist activist in the Free Speech Movement UC Berkeley. 1964
- Early and international archivist of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). 1968
- Founded women’s liberation movement newsletter SPAZM, the only national women's liberation newsletter between April and December 1969 (read more in the Vice.com article, The Legendary Women's Rights Activist Who Mailed Obama A Coat Hanger, here).
- Co-founded the first women's liberation newspaper, It ain't me Babe. 1970
- Author, editor, and publisher of essays, bibliographies, books (The Women's Songbook [1971], Films by and/or about Women Internationally [1972], and Female Artists Past and Present [1973]), and microfilms of the records of the WLM, 1968- 75:Women and Law, Women's Health/Mental Health, and Herstory (serial publications). These microfilms have been purchased by 450 libraries in 14 countries, and now they have been digitized. They are distributed by the fabulous National Women's History Alliance in Santa Rosa, CA ( https://nationalwomenshistoryalliance.org/).
- Campaign leader for a jazz and blues radio station that showcased women in the San Francisco Bay Area. 1976-8
- Campaign coordinator for repealing date and marital rape legal privileges in 45 states, DC, and 20 other countries.
- Participant in and collector and curator of 21 social movements between 1961-2022.
- Supporter and producer for artists and their events... theatrical, historical, musical, etc.
*****
- Laura has been a teacher, educator, and organizer in many different capacities, from teaching in Head Start in Puerto Rico (she is fluent in Spanish) and Headstart in New York, and kindergarten in Berkeley, CA, to educating the American people, as an activist and a speaker, about abused women and children, women’s rights to reproductive freedom, and women’s liberation.
- In the late 60s, Laura founded the first historical archive of what was to become the women’s liberation movement – the Women’s History Research Center, in Berkeley, California. Laura’s amazing archives are now in various academic and other libraries across the country (see the whole list of libraries here). Those are the original documents of 21 social movements over 50 years.
- In 1968, Laura called for the revival of International Women’s Day, which is now celebrated across the world, and named National Women's History Month in 1969 and provided resources for that nascent movement.
- She was an early member in the mid-70s of the Coalition of Labor Union Women CLUW, and still is.. and is a card-carrying union member, and advocate for the rights of all workers in all ways, including the right to be free of sexual harassment in the workplace.
- Through her early organization starting in 1978, the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape (NCMDR) Laura successfully worked alongside lawyers, victims/survivors, and politicians, as an advocate and a resource, in the successful state-by-state campaign to make marriage and date rape illegal. To this day, many people don’t know that marital and date rape were not crimes in a staggering number of states until well into the 1980s, and Laura X challenged that reality to benefit women and victims everywhere.
- Laura published her bibliographical memoirs in the 90s, Accomplishing the Impossible: an Advocate’s Notes from the Successful Campaign to Make Marital and Date Rape a Crime in all 50 U.S. States and other Countries. In June of 1993 North Carolina was the last state to make marital rape a crime in some part of the statutes.
- In 2001 Mary Institute gave Laura their Distinguished Alumna award; for this service and in 2009 the University of Missouri at St. Louis UMSL gave her their Trailblazer award.
- Along with her existing unfinished archives, which are being worked on in a wondrous church space the Laura's Social Movement Archives rents with other nonprofits in St. Louis, Laura dedicates her free moments, seven days a week, to promoting historical events and figures, museums, foundations and charities, voting awareness, writers and artists, important films, and progressive politics.
- She is also active as an advisory board member on the Emma Goldman Public History Papers Project the 4th and final 853-page volume that chronicles the life and work of Emma Goldman (donate ).
Please view/share/like Laura's GoFundMe, which she's posted across her different social media platforms (including Nextdoor). Links below:
Organizer
Paul Sheldon
Organizer
Creve Coeur, MO