Answered

Overall, there doesn't seem to be one concrete answer on this that everyone agrees on, but the following references might shed some light on it for you...

Freyd, J. & Johnson J.Q. (1998). Commentary: Domestic Violence, Folk Etymologies, & "Rule of Thumb". Retrieved May 8, 2008, from http://dynamic.uoregon.edu/~jjf/essays/ruleofthumb.html

• This essay discusses the differences in opinion on the legal history of the term "rule of thumb".

According to:
Service, N. N. (1994, July 26). Word experts overrule; feminists on 'rule of thumb'. Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), pp. 9E.

• "But the phrase 'rule of thumb,' as it turns out, has more to do with carpentry and beer-making than domestic violence.
  Those who attributed the phrase to an old rule of law that supposedly condoned wife-beating are having second thoughts. The latest capitulation came a few days ago, when Rep. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who often invoked the phrase when talking about domestic violence, started to use it again during a news conference outside the Capitol, then stopped midsentence. He explained that Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., had told him the background of the phrase was 'apocryphal.' Which is a politician's way of saying something is not true."

From:
Feminists' facts challenge questionable, amount to a backlash.(1994, June 20). The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), pp. B06.

• "The 1874 case State vs. Oliver states: ``We assume that the old doctrine that a husband had the right to whip his wife provided that he used a switch no larger than his thumb is not the law in North Carolina.'' This common-law rule was derived from the 177th New Constitution of Roman Emperor Justinian I. See Chapter 14. Thus The Oregonian, Seebach and Sommers are off by 1,447 years."

Rhodes, E. (1991, May 5). Brutality at home has long history. The Seattle Times, pp. A11.

• This source describes the history of wife-beating a bit with a very brief mention of what you're looking for.

Here's the gist of what someone from Rad Ref wrote to this questioner:
If you are in "severe pain" you should seek medical attention from an expert in that field, possibly even at an emergency room of a hospital.
While librarians will gladly help you research many topics, including finding medical or legal background information, we are neither qualified nor ethically allowed to give medical or legal advice in an immediate situation such as you describe.

This question appears to call for the use of some academic databases and journals, most of which will need to be used on-site at a major academic or research library unless you have remote access via student or staff login. The search: indigenous liberation gets 1 article in Academic Search Premier. Ebsco searches phrases by default, so you don’t need to use quotes. Indigenous AND liberation gets 143 hits, 84 if you then click the "Academic Journals" link. You can use the "Refine Search" tab in Advanced Search to limit to full text, but that means just the full text available via Ebsco. Many large libraries have SFX or other "Link resolvers" to get you to other full text providers that they also subscribe to.

Note also that Academic Search includes cited references in some of its articles. The one article found by the phrase "indigenous liberation" has 27 cited references, which help you find other potentially useful articles. Also, if you change the "select a field" to TX all Text, indigenous liberation gets 22 hits, and indigenous ideolog* gets 61. These are all fairly small lists, and I would be tempted not to add more search terms. If you choose a word that means the same thing, but is different from what is in the database, you risk missing useful articles. But it’s often a judgment call: TX indigenous ideolog* AND socialism gets 13 hits, for example.

Many other databases can help with this topic. JSTOR, a full text e-journal archive available at most large academic libraries, gets 11 articles for: "indigenous ideology" AND socialism, 6 for "indigenous liberation" AND marx*, and 6 for "indigenous liberation" AND "liberation theology". Note that the * does NOT work in phrases in JSTOR – "indigenous ideolog*" gets zero hits. Truncation does work in Project Muse, a full-text database of about 240 scholarly journals. The full-text search: "indigenous ideolog*" gets 13 articles.
If your research is at all advanced – even a major upper level undergraduate paper – it’s worth checking Proquest Dissertations (Dissertation Abstracts). If you are looking ahead to masters or PhD research, this database is essential. It gets 26 dissertations with the search: indigenous and ideolog* and socialis*, and 9 for indigenous and ideolog* and animal*.

If you are not near a large research library, you can get some very good information free on the web. Google Scholar tends to be frustrating for this, however, because it links to very many commercial journals that will ask for a password unless you are on a subscribing campus or are using a restricted VPN or proxy connection. You can use site:edu or site:ac.uk, etc. in a regular Google web search, to limit to mainly college and university research sites. The search: "indigenous liberation" socialis* site:edu gets 4 sites; "indigenous ideology" socialis* site:edu gets 9.

Google Books will serve as an index to even "restricted view" (under copyright) books, which you can then search for in Open Worldcat, to see what libraries nearest you have them. Google Books gets 44 hits for "indigenous ideology" socialis*, 12 of them limited preview and the rest restricted by copyright. The Internet Public Library gets about 30 hits for the search: indigenous. Its search engine is not nearly as flexible, so you might want to stay with that very broad search.

The Australian Government's Office for Women provides policy information for the Executive branch. Among the research resources on their site can be found a report from WESNET (Women's Services Network) (also accessible from WESNET's research page) that includes a history of Australian women's shelters.
On page 50 of WESNET: Women’s Refuges, Shelters, Outreach and
Support Services in Australia we find:

They have come a long way from Elsie, the Sydney squat which claims its place as Australia’s first ‘official’ contemporary white women’s women’s refuge, or Women’s Liberation Halfway House which opened later in 1974 in Melbourne.

So the Halfway House shouldn't have been in existence when Elsie opened.

(Thanks to Astra for the comment that supplies the research for this answer)

According to your location zipcode, you live in Florida, so this answer will provide information for Florida unemployment benefits.

First of all, the State of Florida's Agency for Workforce Innovation site says,"Unemployment insurance provides temporary wage replacement benefits to qualified individuals who are out of work through no fault of their own."

The FAQ (in a Word Doc) provides a great deal of information. I would go to the link for more, but to more briefly answer your questions:

Who qualifies?: "Any individual who has been employed in Florida in the last 18 months and is currently unemployed or partially unemployed can file a claim." There are more requirements, however, which you can check out on the FAQ page.

Fastest way to apply?: This would probably be through Internet or via phone - "A claim for unemployment compensation benefits can be filed using the Internet at www.fluidnow.com. The Internet is available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. A claim may also be filed by telephone by calling toll free 1-800-204-2418. The telephone center is open to process claims Monday through Friday, 8:00am to 5:00pm" All of this and more information is also located on the FAQ page.

There are several libraries in Australia that hold copies of the Sydney Women's Liberation Newsletter. If you contact the Jessie Street National Women's Library with your query, they may be able to provide further assistance and perhaps even copies of relevant newsletter (or other) material.

Anne Summers recalled her role in the setting up of the Elsie Refuge in a newspaper article published in 1999. You may be able to access the content of the article via a full-text database of newspaper articles at your local library if you cannot access it via any other means. [(Anne Summers (1999, November 1). Memorable Summers; FEATURES :[Late Edition]. Sydney Morning Herald, p 15)]

Both Anne Summers and Marilyn Lake have written books that would contain material relevant to your question:

Lake, Marilyn, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, New South Wales, 1999, 316 pp

Summers, Anne; Park Ruth (foreword by), Ducks on the Pond: An Autobiography 1945-1976, Viking, Ringwood, Vic., 1999, 438 pp.

The Australian Women's History Forum may be a good place to visit both to find additional online resources that may be helpful and also to possibly make contact with Women who were directly involved with the refuge and Women's Liberation in Sydney.

We'll look into it -- thanks for letting us know! Just so you know, this sort of message is better directed to the info AT radicalreference DOT info email address.

I removed the Yahoo! search I'd set up. I thought it would be cool to see what turned up, but if they keep sending us the same stuff, the feed is NFG.

Anyway, I think that should solve the problem. Please let us know if it doesn't info@the URL of this site.

You should take a look at the Radical Reference Reference Shelf page on History, Resistance for some good alternative sources/collections.

For books, one place to start would be Philip S. Foner's masterful History of the Labor Movement in the United States, especially volumes 3-10, and other works by this labor historian. His nephew, Eric Foner, is also an historian worth reading - though his area is mostly 19th century, a list of his books reveals some good titles for the 20th which you can find in your local library. While we're at it, Nancy Foner (I'm not sure of the relation, if there is one) is a sociologist who has written extensively on immigration.

I would certainly recommend a look through some works by Howard Zinn, especially (for an overview) A People's History of the United States, which though written for a popular audience would provide you with further citations to follow up on.

For the South, check out Defying Dixie : the radical roots of civil rights, 1919-1950.

This is just a starting point; I hope we will continue to add to the list. Also, once you have any of these books, especially more recent ones, check out the bibliography/reference list for further reading.

In addition to the above, you might want to take a look at Eric Hobsbawm's book on the 20^th century, The Age of Extremes, which is not primarily about the US but will help place US history in a broader context. This will also be a great source of further references.

Some additional bibliographies (book and other resource lists) for US history can be found at these links:
The Internet Public Library has a page of 20^th Century History Resources in their general US History Resources section.

The DMOZ Open Directory Project has a page for US Society and Culture, which has sublinks for history and politics, among other topics.

The World Wide Web Virtual Library History Central Catalog (description), now hosted by the European University Institute, has resources on US History by decade for the 20^th century.

The Kingwood College Library has a site devoted to American Cultural History - the Twentieth Century that has both overviews by decade and recommended readings ("prepared by the Reference Librarians"!).

We sent a request for clarification whether this means (1) How the practice of clitoridectomy affects those women or girls' attitudes toward the practice itself; or (2) How it affects their views on "pro choice" regarding abortion. As of 5/10/08, we have not heard back.

In either case, this topic will be tricky to research, because simply "ANDing" the words together in a search will get huge numbers of articles and reports on families', husbands', and societies' views - not just those views or feelings of the women who have undergone genital cutting. This research probably calls for a very broad search in medical, psychological, and sociological databases. For example, in Pubmed.gov, if you click the "Limits" tab just to lower left of the search box, click the choice "female" and search: clitoridectomy and attitudes, you get 117 hits. Many of these, even with that "Female" limit, still are talking about family and society attitudes. The search: clitoridectomy and abortion gets 7 hits. "Genital cutting" and abortion gets only one, which just seems to mention the prevalence of both practices and not the relationship of one to the other, let alone the attitudes.

The search: clitoridectomy and "women's attitudes" gets 3 hits, even when you remove the limit to Female". It's probably best to stay with very broad searches, because of the difficulty of pinning down with search terms precisely what you are after. Try synonyms or related terms: "female circumcision" and attitudes gets 135 hits; 115 if you limit to "Female".

It would be very wise to try this search at a major research or academic library, where you will have only on-site access to databases unless you are a current student. In Proquest Dissertations (Dissertation Abstracts), the search: (clitoridectomy or genital cutting or female circumcision) and attitude* gets 12 hits. There would be no point in trying to narrow this to only women's views, even if the apostrophe in "women's" didn't pose a problem for the search engine. It seems much wiser to have a quick look at all 12 of the abstracts - or even full text if the university that you use has access to any in full text. You can sometimes borrow dissertations on Interlibrary loan, even using your public library. But we recommend checking the libraries of the universities where they were published, to be sure there really is a copy on the shelf, and that it is available to be loaned. A quick way to do this is to search by title and author in Open Worldcat, which lists holding libraries and often will link to their catalogs. Dissertations are usually fairly expensive if you have to buy them; see Proquest's prices for academic customers.

The scholarly and technical database Psycinfo gets no results for the search: (clitoridectomy or "genital cutting" or "female circumcision") and attitude*. This may be largely because Psycinfo searches NO full text - only titles, subjects and journal titles. But the more general database Academic Search Premier also gets zero hits, even searching its very extensive full-text. ScienceDirect (also highly scholarly and technical) gets 212 hits for it if you search its full text back to 1980. But that is for the complete collection of Elsevier's journals, which not many libraries will have access to. In Science Direct you can choose "Subscribed Journals" to limit to just the ones the library subscribes to. JSTOR is more likely to be available, since it is a non-profit electronic journal archive used by many more libraries and publishers. It gets 28 hits for the same search: (clitoridectomy or "genital cutting" or "female circumcision") and attitude*.

There is a case study of literacy and prison libraries, including information on demographics with a discussion of "empowerment" published in 1993; here is the citation:

Shethar, A. (1993). Literacy and "Empowerment"? A Case Study of Literacy behind Bars. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 24(4):357-372.

From the abstract:

"A Chicano prison inmate's progress in a year-long literacy tutorial course demonstrates ways in which writing can negotiate and reorganize race, class, gender, and power identities for both tutor and student, and legitimize the student's voice, native language, and discourse stance. Through dialogue, the student progresses from the passive-learner role to a presentation of self as knowledgeable expert; from denial of his prison group-membership, he progresses to a critical analysis of the power structure it represents."

Literacy Behind Bars: Results From the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Prison Survey, from the IES National Center for Education Statistics might also help you:

"The findings in this report—Literacy Behind Bars—indicate the changes in literacy among incarcerated adults between 1992 and 2003. The report also compares the literacy of adults in the prison and household populations and across groups of prison inmates with different characteristics, including race/ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, age, language spoken before starting school, and parents’ educational attainment. The report looks at the relationship between literacy, education, and job training, including traditional academic education, vocational education, and skill certification. Additionally, the report examines the relationship between literacy and experiences in prison other than education, including prison work assignments, library use, computer use, and reading frequency. Finally, the report looks at the relationship between literacy, criminal history, and current offense. The results show how the relationship between literacy, type of offense, expected length of incarceration, expected date of release, and previous criminal history has changed since 1992."