Suchergebnisse

Salvadoran women were directly involved in political action leading up to the civil war which plagued El Salvador from 1979 until 1992. Grassroots women's movements claimed the streets of El Salvador as their battleground; women hosted marches, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and public speeches to condemn the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran government. The dawn of civil war and high numbers of male fatalities forced the opposition guerrilla movement, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front to enlist women into various roles. The FMLN promised liberty and equality for women within the movement and in the aftermath of war. However, postwar statistics indicate feminicide and domestic violence are rising yearly in El Salvador. This research project reveals the nuance and complexity of the lives of Salvadoran women in the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods and the failure of the Salvadoran government to protect its female citizens. The high level of violence and murder of women in the postwar years leads to the core question of this research: what did the Salvadoran civil war achieve for women?

Jean Vermette, born in 1954, is a transgender woman from Skowhegan, Maine. At the age of three, Jean knew that her biological sex did not match her gender identity. When Jean came out as transgender to her wife in the 1980s, her marriage soon dissolved. After Jean filed for divorce, she spent five years transitioning. In addition to working as a self-employed electrician, Jean has dedicated her adult life to advocating for Maine's transgender community. She created the Maine Gender Resource and Support Service and spent over fifteen years speaking publicly to Maine college students and medical professionals about the transgender community. Jean recognized the need for more support from doctors and therapists, so she took it upon herself to educate members of Maine's medical community. In 2000, Jean received the Pioneer Award from the Maine Lesbian Gay Political Alliance – an organization known today as Equality Maine. More recently, Jean has taken a step back from public speaking and is glad to see a younger generation of trans people making a difference in Maine's LGBTQ community. Citation Please cite as: Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, University of Southern Maine Libraries. For more information about the Querying the Past: Maine LGBTQ Oral History Project, please contact Dr. Wendy Chapkis. ; https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/querying_ohproject/1010/thumbnail.jpg