Unholy HER

03/18/2026

Today is the Relief Society's birthday.

183 years ago, women gathered to sew shirts for temple workers. They walked in with a constitution. They walked out with a promise: organized "after the pattern of the priesthood." Real power in their own house.

Emma Smith named it "Relief Society" because they were going to do something extraordinary.

They did. For a minute. Then the men took it back.

But that impulse—the one Emma named, the one those women felt in their bodies—never died. It went underground. Into sewing circles. Into quilts. Into pants worn to church when everyone knew better.

That's what we're gathering to honor today. A spirit that believed in women gathering, women organizing, women holding power together.

That spirit was always bigger than any single definition. So this circle is for women. And for trans women, nonbinary siblings, gender-adjacent souls. Anyone who's found home in women's spaces. Anyone who recognizes that original impulse in their own body.

We carry their legacy forward by making the circle wider.

After all: charity never faileth.

Tuesday Morning Story Bee Society
Tuesdays, 11am Eastern. Free. Today and every Tuesday.

Waitlist for the full hive below. 🐝

03/01/2026

March is the cruelest month, not April. T.S. Eliot got that wrong. March is the month that can't make up its mind because it's genuinely two things at once. It's the hinge with one foot still in winter, one foot in the mud. The light is changing faster than anything else. You can actually feel the days lengthening in a way you couldn't in February. The angle of the sun shifts and suddenly afternoons at my desk are flooded with light. But the shadows fall differently too and everything looks slightly unfamiliar.

March ground is not clean. It's not the pretty snowdrop version of spring, yet. I wonder if that's where in like a lion out like a lamb phrase comes from?

Spring is saturated in dark smells like rot and iron - like December compost breaking the surface. All that decomposition that happened in the wintering months is now visible and it's not always picturesque. It's wet leaves and deer bones and last year's garden flattened to black mush. It's the evidence of everything winter digested.

The rivers are loud in March because snowmelt is violent. Creeks that were a whisper in July become something with force. They're carrying everything winter held - sediment, debris, cold - and they are loud about it. LOUD.

March is when what survived the winter announces itself. Crocuses come up through gravel. Redbuds don't bloom so much as insist on being seen. The birds that stayed all winter suddenly have something to say.

It's a month about what endures coming back into its voice.

"In March the earth remembers its own name. Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking. The rivers begin to sing." - Mary Oliver

01/29/2026

01/29/2026

Congratulations to Sarah Mullally on being confirmed as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury! In 1,429 years since St. Augustine established the role in 597 AD, no woman has led the Church of England. That changed today when Dame Sarah was confirmed as the 106th person to take up the post in a ceremony at St. Paul's Cathedral, as bells rang out and bishops declared in unison: "We welcome you."

The moment was historic enough that Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin called it the Church's "Habemus Mamam" --- a play on the Catholic declaration "Habemus Papam" when a new Pope is elected. George Gross, an expert on theology and the monarchy at King’s College London, said her confirmation highlighted the church’s continuing divergence from the Catholic Church. “It is a big contrast,” he explained. “And in terms of the position of women in society, this is a big statement.”

In an interview, Mullally shared her gratitude for the "support of a whole range of people, including men, in my ministry." She also pledged to use her new platform to confront misogyny. "It is fair to say that I have, both in my secular role as well as in the Church, experienced misogyny at times," she said. Over the years, she has learned it must be spoken about "so that you bring it out into the open."

"I'm conscious that being in this role," she continued, "it's important for me to speak of it, because there are some that don't necessarily have the status or the power of this role, and feel more hesitant to do it. But certainly as a Church of England we have seen many changes over the years and I commit myself to making an environment where all people can flourish and which is safer for all."

A former cancer nurse who became England's chief nursing officer before entering the clergy, Mullally's path to this moment was unlikely. She served as Bishop of London for nearly a decade before being nominated by a 17-member commission and confirmed by King Charles III.

Her appointment has not been without controversy with many conservative Anglican leaders opposing her election. Archbishop Henry Ndukuba of the Church of Nigeria branded it "devastating" and "insensitive" to Anglicans "who are unable to embrace female headship in the episcopate."

Mullally's response was characteristically measured: "I have always understood that people may find my appointment as a woman difficult in the Church, and what I hope to do is to be able to provide a space where I can offer hospitality to people, where I can listen to what their concerns are."

Shortly after the ceremony, stonemasons began carving her name on the plaque at Canterbury Cathedral listing every archbishop back to St. Augustine. She will be formally installed there on March 25, after which her public ministry begins.

Mullally invoked an African proverb to describe her approach to the challenges ahead: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. My desire is to go far and together."

Kudos to Archbishop Mullally for her commitment to making the church a welcoming place for all!

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To introduce kids to inspiring female leaders from around the world, we recommend the picture book "She Persisted Around The World" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-persisted-around-the-world) and the illustrated biography "HerStory: 50 Women and Girls Who Shook the World" for ages 8 to 13 (https://www.amightygirl.com/herstory)

For children's books about more extraordinary women from around the world, visit our blog post "50 Children's Books About Mighty Girls & Women Around The World" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=33102

For books about both real-life and fictional girls and women who confronted sexism and gender discrimination in a multitude of forms, visit our "S*x Discrimination" section at http://amgrl.co/1jdxKIy

01/29/2026

Imma need some radical leftists to interact with this account. The algorithm has categorized my account as white Christian nationalist and my feed is full of “pastors” claiming ICE is doing a good job.

Unholy HER highlights women who the church ignored, punished, or barely tolerated. Unholy HER is for people pushing boundaries that lead toward liberation from church, state, capitalism, and white supremacy. Colonialism, imperialism, just about every system of power built on oppression.

If that’s you, I’d love a follow.
Welcome to Unholy HER.

01/27/2026

today in silenced stories | Emma Goldman

They called her the Most Dangerous Woman in America.

Not because she threw bombs—though the newspapers accused her of that. Not because she advocated violence—though the government called her a terrorist. Emma Goldman was dangerous because she taught people something far more threatening than any explosion ever could. She taught them to see how power actually works.

For three decades, she stood on platforms across America and named what most people had been trained not to see. That capitalism, the state, organized religion, and compulsory marriage weren’t separate systems that happened to coexist. They were coordinated machinery, each piece reinforcing the others, all of them depending on the same thing: keeping people from recognizing the pattern.

She spoke against economic exploitation and military conscription. Against laws controlling women’s bodies and laws controlling women’s reproduction. She spoke against any institution that required hierarchy to function and violence to maintain. As a Jewish immigrant who had fled the pogroms, she understood how religious, economic, and state violence worked together and she taught others to see that connection. She didn’t just oppose these systems individually—she showed people how recognizing one form of oppression could help you see all the others.

That’s what made her dangerous enough to deport.

On December 21, 1919, the United States government stripped Emma Goldman’s citizenship and forced her onto a ship bound for Soviet Russia. J. Edgar Hoover, a twenty-four-year-old Justice Department bureaucrat, personally orchestrated her deportation. He rode a tugboat out to Ellis Island to watch her leave. He wanted to see her face as America disappeared behind her.

Goldman’s deportation was the headline victory of the Palmer Raids—Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s campaign to eliminate political dissent in America. Between November 1919 and January 1920, federal agents arrested over ten thousand people, most without warrants. They detained them for weeks without charges. The targets were overwhelmingly Jewish and Italian immigrants, socialists and anarchists whose very presence was framed as a threat to American values.

They deported hundreds without due process.

But Goldman’s spectacular deportation was only half the story. The other, less known half was what happened to the thousands of ordinary people the raids terrorized into silence. People whose names never made the papers. People who simply disappeared from their communities, from census records, from the historical record entirely.

People like my great-grandmother Sarah Wormald Blakey, who sat on her porch in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood that winter and watched her world collapse around her.

Emma Goldman is an unholy HER because the state called her unholy for teaching people to see what institutions coordinate to keep hidden. She spent her life documenting her own persecution and the systemic targeting of everyone who dared challenge the narrative.

She knew the machinery needed both the famous martyr and the invisible victims to work. She knew her deportation was theater to terrorize people like my great-grandmother Sarah into silence. She knew that understanding how power operates requires seeing both what makes headlines, and what disappears without a trace.

When I started writing this piece, I wanted to understand where to put ICE in historical context. I quickly learned that to understand modern ICE raids, you have to understand the Palmers Raids. To understand the Palmer Raids, you have to understand how Emma Goldman taught people to see coordination—how capitalism needs state violence needs immigration control needs family separation. How these aren’t separate problems but machinery working together.

This is how spiritual archaeology works. You start with one question (where does ICE fit?) and you pull the thread until the whole system becomes visible. Goldman is that thread. The Palmer Raids are the pattern. And the machinery is still running.

Thanks for reading this week's Unholy HER profile.

Share this post with someone who's starting to see the pattern. Sometimes knowing you're not the only one noticing changes everything.

Want to understand what's happening with ICE raids right now? You have to understand the Palmer Raids and how Emma Goldman's deportation was theater designed to terrorize thousands into silence.

Read the full profile on Hidden Narrative (link in comments) and join the commune-a-tea discussion about the patterns we're watching repeat.

Next Monday: The deep dive into what happened to the anonymous working-class immigrant women on porches like my great-grandmother Sarah's -- and how their silenced communities became the next generation's complicity.

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