More than a dozen women in Central Maine are putting their sewing skills to good use by making face masks, which are currently in short supply due to the coronavirus pandemic.

June Cauldwell has been sewing since the seventh grade. She makes dresses, costumes and quilts from her Mount Vernon home, and as of this week, face masks.

“It just gives me a purpose in this time of being isolated from one another,” Cauldwell said.

Cauldwell heard about the short supply and growing need across the country.

What started as a simple idea just a few days ago, is now an organized effort with nearly 20 women at work.

“It’s very exciting because it kind of reminds me of women way back in World War I and World War II, when the soldiers needed socks and washcloths and they just started knitting and sending these things out,” Cauldwell said.

The masks have three layers of fabric, and are evolving to include a pocket that can hold a carbon or HEPA filter.

They’re bright, fun and reusable.

“They’re going to go to the rescue in town, maybe the fire department if they run out of masks,” Cauldwell said. “And this morning I had a request from midwives.”

Pat Rawson, the local rescue director, tells CBS 13 the department has a very limited supply of N-95 masks, so these are a huge help. Rawson said some of their members can use them, and they can also put them on sick patients.

Cauldwell is turning out about a dozen a day.

“We’re just going to be here making them and whoever wants them can have them,” Cauldwell said.

She said they won’t quit until the coronavirus does.

Brunswick residents ordered to shelter-in-place

“It may expand because other people want to make gowns, and they can,” Cauldwell said. “They can do anything. Just go to YouTube.”

If you can’t sew, you can still help by donating materials, like vacuum bags, or money so the women can purchase more.

To request masks, or lend a hand, contact Cauldwell at 207-931-8012 or jrcauldwell@gmail.com

Source: WGME

Former Vice President Joe Biden committed to picking a woman as his vice president during a one-on-one debate with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during Sunday’s presidential debate.

“If I’m elected president, my Cabinet, my administration, will look like the country and I commit that I will in fact pick a woman to be my vice president,” Biden said. “There are a number of women qualified to be president tomorrow and I would pick a woman to be my vice president.”

It’s the first time Biden has said that he would pick a woman to be his vice president during the campaign as the veteran Democrat is on a major surge in the race, taking the lead over Sanders

The Vermont senator wouldn’t go as far as Biden in saying he would choose a woman to be his vice president, but said “in all likelihood, I will.”

“I want to tell everyone today you are either for children or against children when it comes to educational freedom and choice in education.”

So said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, who spoke Thursday with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at the Conservative Political Action Conference about the need to bring more education opportunities to America’s children.

Conway said support for school choice is broad among the general public, yet a deep partisan divide exists on the issue, as the Trump administration has found.

“There is no ‘but,’ there is no excuse, there is no talk of ‘But the teacher unions …,’” she told the CPAC crowd. “You are either helping these brown and black and rural children get more opportunities, or you’re not.”

Choice in public education often is blocked by liberals at the state level who protect unions whose members work for badly run public schools, Conway noted.

Many children, DeVos said, are being “failed by schools that aren’t working for them, that aren’t the right fit.”

Trump is committed to ensuring that every child has access to a quality education, DeVos said, no matter where they come from.

She also warned about the problem of federal interference in education and touted the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the government’s role.

“President Trump campaigned on getting rid of Common Core, which was a massive overreach on the part of the federal government,” DeVos said. “We’ve done that.”

Keeping power over education in the hands of states, local communities, and families is essential, she said.

“There’s too many people in this city [who think] that the federal government has the answers for everything,” DeVos said, referring to the nation’s capital a few miles away from the conference in Maryland. “And we know that’s not the case.”

DeVos promoted legislation, the Education Freedom Scholarship, that she said “would dramatically improve opportunities for more than a million kids nationwide.” She added:

This proposal is one that would create a federal tax credit in the form of scholarships to give rocket fuel to what states are already doing to advance choices and freedom in education.

We stand for freedom and opportunity, and we trust that parents and families are best to make decisions on behalf of their children, and the other side trusts the federal government to make these decisions.

She said the federal government long ago demonstrated that it can’t fix education from the top down.

Over the last 40 years, since the Department of Education was founded, we’ve spent over $1 trillion at the federal level alone with the express purpose of closing the achievement gap. Not only has it not closed and narrowed one little bit, it has actually gone wider in some measures and some communities.

CPAC, the largest annual national gathering of conservative activists, runs Thursday through Saturday at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside Washington.

Source: The Daily Signal

• Several women ‘close to quitting SNP over gender recognition plans’
• Concerns raised over law change that advocates say will reduce obstacles to trans rights

Senior Scottish National party MPs, MSPs and councillors have expressed concerns about proposed changes to gender recognition laws as they launched a pledge calling for women to have the right to discuss such policies.

Several women at the launch for the SNP women’s pledge said they were close to quitting the party because of what they considered to be a refusal by officials to address concerns that women and girls could fall victim to predatory men or lose access to single-sex services.

Speaking on the panel, the anti-Brexit campaigner Joanna Cherry said she had faced significant abuse online for raising concerns. While she said this came from “a small minority of people”, she said the controversy raised broader questions about how the party did business.

“There are serious questions about how we develop policy in the SNP and how we conduct debate,” she said. “It’s important to disagree – we could do with more disagreement at times – but it has to be respectful.”

Cherry said she saw no conflict between signing the SNP’s official Out for Indy pledge, which supports transgender rights, and the women’s pledge.

At the private meeting, which took place on Sunday night in the city centre of Aberdeen, where the SNP conference is taking place, some attendees spoke about being labelled transphobes for raising concerns, to the extent that they felt “pushed underground”.

The SNP MSP Joan McAlpine, who also spoke on the panel, said: “These women don’t feel welcome currently, but I think it’s really important that we stay in the party and indeed look to work cross-party. We must be able to talk about this and if we could then we might find common ground.”

In June the Scottish government postponed an update of the legal rights of trans men and women, which planned a simpler, quicker process to allow people to get a new gender recognition certificate through self-declaration rather than requiring medical evidence. Additional consultation is under way.

Advocates for a law change say making the process of acquiring a gender recognition certificate less intrusive and bureaucratic, for example by removing the requirement for medical evidence, will benefit transgender individuals without having any impact on services available to women.

Transgender rights groups point out there is already an absolute commitment from the Scottish government to consult more widely on the changes, which has been welcomed by LGBT organisations, and that potential unintended consequences should be discussed openly.

The SNP leader and first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has previously stated she does not see “the greater recognition of transgender rights as a threat to me as a woman or to my feminism”.

The meeting on Sunday, which also heard from Margaret Lynch, the founder of Glasgow Rape Crisis, the SNP councillor Caroline McAllister and Rhona Hotchkiss, a former governor of Cornton Vale women’s prison, was arranged privately.

Hotchkiss said the meeting, attended by about 60 invitees, had made her optimistic. “I think this will have an impact because we’re the first political party to come out saying women have the right to discuss these issues without being threatened or abused. This has stopped me from leaving the party. When you see a group of people together like this it gives me hope.”

The pledge, which has already been signed online by more than 1,800 people, also states that women “have the right to maintain their sex-based protections as set out in the Equality Act 2010”. It adds: “Women have the right to refuse consent to males in single-sex spaces or males delivering intimate services to females such as washing, dressing or counselling.”

Responding to the launch, Fiona Robertson, the SNP’s women’s and equalities convenor, said: “Members are free to set up interest groups on whatever they want. A feminist pledge is a great idea, and certainly one which official equalities representatives have been considering, seeing the success of the Out for Indy pledge in helping show the appetite for inclusion and equality in the SNP. Any pledge would have to be concise, clear, inclusive and in line with law and party policy.”

Source: The Guardian