Women from around the globe gather in Big Ocean Cottages to strengthen each other, discuss our beliefs, and find ways to effect positive change in their communities. Often the projects they want to undertake, especially in the global south, require more resources than they can access on their own. The intention of our International Cottage…
April Tenet: “We live and promote a life-culture within the womb, the home, and our ecological environment. As women, we have the wonderful inborn capacity to create and therefore protect human life. We have the instinctive understanding that ALL life is unique and intrinsically valuable. This is our maternal power! Our simple yet refined model…
Our capacity to create and sustain human life is a tremendous power from which society can recognize and then begin to organize around.This framework challenges the current predominant social assumption that the sexed female body is less than fully human and therefore an inferior existence. Those words on the Big Ocean Women website stood out…
It was Barbara’s first child, and no one can tell the story better than she. “The pregnancy was a normal one. I was staying with my parents in New York while my husband, Sherm, was stationed in California in the Marine Corps. I woke up in the middle of the night. My parents took me…
The womb is the first environment every human experiences. When we were carried by our mothers, their bodies were our shelter. And when they breathed, they imparted to us the breath of life. During pregnancy mother and child exist together in a liminal space where they are simultaneously one and two. This is an exalting…
Carla Machado is the President of the World Organization of Prenatal Education Association in Brazil. Her organization carries the message throughout the world of the importance of the very beginning of life: conception, gestation, birth, breast feeding and taking care of children in the early period of life. In this video she discusses the gestation or…
The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women had a record number of registrants this year at over 9000. Big Ocean represented a small drop in that number, but I firmly believe that we were able to gather important information at the events we attended, make valuable connections with the women and men we met,…
Big Ocean returned to New York this year to participate in the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). We had 21 delegates including Big Ocean Leadership, women who are new to Big Ocean, and friends from partnering organizations. Everyone of our delegates has stories brimming over her soul. Some of those are already on…
Mmonbeydo Harrell of Monrovia, Liberia is no stranger to difficulty. Growing up as a refugee during civil war, she knows what deprivation means. As a survivor of sexual abuse, she knows how it feels to be broken. She witnessed people being killed because of their ethnicity. She has seen death from malaria and ebola. These…
