“My body and my mind are mine,” said one T-shirt hanging in the UMC outside the bookstore.
Another T-shirt said, “I am a woman, I am a human and enough is enough! My body is not your toy.”
These T-shirts are part of a project called The Clothesline Project, which has been put on through the Women’s Resource Center for the past week.
“Its purpose is to address violence against women. We invite either survivors of violence, or women who have seen violence, or their friends and family to make a T-shirt that expresses whatever they want to say about how violence has affected them,” said Anna Koclanes, co-program coordinator with the Women’s Resource Center.
The Clothesline Project originated in Cape Cod, Mass. in 1990 by a coalition of women’s rights activists and women’s groups.
According to the Web site, www.clotheslineproject.org, one of the founders, Rachel Carey-Harper, presented the concept of using shirts hanging on a clothesline because “doing the laundry was always considered women’s work, and in the days of close-knit neighborhoods, women often exchanged information over backyard fences while hanging their clothes out to dry.”
Posters describing the event give statistics and definitions of “victim” and “survivor” for participants to read.
The definition given for victim is “a woman who has died at the hands of her abusers,” and the definition given for survivor is “a woman who has survived intimate personal violence such as rape, battering, incest and child sexual abuse.”
These definitions are provided to empower women who have experienced violence.
“(They) put power back in the hands of the woman who had violence done against them,” Koclanes said. “That’s where the word survivor comes from because women who have suffered violence have survived that violence. They made it through the experience and they’re still alive.”
Each T-shirt shows a different aspect of violence against women. Some messages are encouraging and empowering, and some are stories of violence done against the person who created the shirt.
One message said, “Women, know that you are beautiful, know that you are strong, knowledge is power.”
The event has been successful, Koclanes said. “It stops a lot of people. I think it makes a really powerful message. It makes people who normally would not be thinking about this issue stop and think,” she said.
The shirts are displayed in the UMC annually, though some participants choose to pick up their T-shirts after the event is over.
For more information about The Clothesline Project, or how to get involved, visit www.theclotheslineproject.org.
