Jean Eberhardt

I arrived in Olympia with Becca Todd on January 1, 1977. We landed in the Honey House on Cushing Street with Carol Elwood and Marilyn Stern. How fortunate we were to land in a group house that was connected to one of the local food buying clubs. Becca began her studies at Evergreen while I got a job pruning xmas trees for a local grower. We both enthusiastically joined Feminist Karate Union and met a LOT of awesome dykes! I moved into the Raging Women 1894 farmhouse on the westside, where I still live decades later. After my own short stint at Evergreen, I began working in the building trades with other women and kept NOZAMA (read this backwards) Construction going for 17 years. It became the medium for funding my activism in Central America solidarity during heinous times. I learned a lot about privilege and oppression in Olympia and embraced the ongoing responsibility for me as a white US citizen from a middle-class background.

• Women in the Trades: A Multi-Generational Tale – By Jean Eberhardt
  Women were recruited via persuasive media campaigns to join the war effort as “Rosie the Riveters” to work in the factories that were emptied by the men who were drafted to fight overseas. My grandmother became a machinist in her late 30s and developed a steady hand for guiding hair-thin bits chucked into the drill press through metals. She fabricated specialized tiny parts for war planes and then later for commercial jets.
• Construction Brigades in Nicaragua During Reagan’s War – By Jean Eberhardt
  During the contra war—a right-wing terror campaign waged by ex-national guard mercenaries of Nicaragua’s ousted dictator and funded by the U.S.—over a hundred thousand people from the U.S. visited Nicaragua. Many of us traveled and volunteered with purpose. For example, delegations of elected officials mobilized by progressive organizations, ecumenical study tour groups, long-term volunteers with Witness for Peace, caravans carrying material aid with Pastors for Peace, medical teams, coffee and cotton harvest brigades, and journalists.