Welcome to Our Word, a feminist community space where women's voices are valued and respected. Our mission is to provide a welcoming forum where we can share the truth of women's lives and coordinate our ongoing struggle for true equality.

Our community standards are simple: Speak your truth and treat others with respect. We all have many varied experiences and ideas. What is true for one person isn't necessarily true for another. None of us speaks for all women, or all feminists, or all members of a particular political party. Our Word is the aggregate of all of our words, all of our ideas, all of our experiences. It is owned by all of the members who post here.

You don't have to be female to post here. You don't have to have any particular political affilliation. You don't even have to self identify as a feminist. All you need to do is honor that this site is about telling the truth of women's lives and working together to improve them.

NO SPAM. NO TROLLING. Determinations as to what constitutes spam or trolling will be made by the members. Any behavior that threatens the site's integrity, security or stability, as determined by the site administrators, will be addressed appropriately and without warning or apology.

Our Word is a woman-positive site. "Men's Rights Activism" (MRA) blogs, comments or posts are not welcome here. We define an MRA post as one that argues one or more of the following:

1. that feminism in general victimizes men;
2. that feminism is a root cause of negative social breakdown and/or moral decay;
3. that violence/abuse/harrassment against women does not exist.

While we respect everyone's right to free speech, it is our editorial position that MRA posts at Our Word would create an atmosphere that discourages women from speaking the truth about their lives. Editorial policy at Our Word does not impinge on anyone's right to free speech. The 1st Amendment protects individuals from government restrictions on speech; it does not limit publications from setting editorial policy regarding topic content. There are many places on the internet where MRA posts are welcome and encouraged. This is not one of them.

There is an editorial framework for this site than that is different than you will find on other major blog sites, so please read this carefully: We are pro-religious equality and pro-separation of church and state. We are pro-choice, and we support gay and lesbian civil rights -- including marriage equality. Therefore, debates about the validity of abortion and gay rights are considered off-topic. Violating this rule shall be deemed cause for banning.

CROSS-POSTING is permitted, but please try to be considerate and direct your post to the audience here. Please don't treat Our Word as a place to boost your own site rank.

LIABILITY. You are responsible for all content you post on Our Word. By participating on Our Word, you hereby indeminify the other site members, site registrant, site administrators and site hosting parties of any and all liability resulting from content you post on Our Word. This includes, but is not limited to, posting of copyrighted material, indecent material, or engaging in or helping to facilitate illegal behavior. With freedom comes responsibility. You are responsible for what you do here.

We may change these Terms and Conditions from time to time. In fact, you can probably expect it. You'll be able to see the latest terms by going to "my account" and selecting "edit."

Now that we got that out of the way... Welcome!