By Amanda Robb Even though Anika Rahman has lived in the United States more than 20 years, the Bangladeshi native can still be stunned by gender inequities in “the land of the free.” There’s that persistent wage gap, for example, that has U.S. women earning 77 cents to a man’s dollar, with African American women [...]
By Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez On the opening day of Freedom University, located in a community center in Athens, Ga., students start trickling in 20 minutes before classes begin. The 28 eager collegians—three quarters of them women and the majority Latino/as—have come from Atlanta, Ackworth, Athens and other Georgia communities. Some are recent high-school graduates, others are [...]
By J. Goodrich The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children By Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett Columbia University Press Consider this vision of the ideal classrooms: one for girls, one for boys. The first is filled with quiet, focused girls comfortable sitting at their desks for long periods of [...]
Watching the new HBO documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words left us nostalgic for the early days of Ms. and eager to hear about even more of the women who launched the contemporary feminist movement–especially the memorable Flo Kennedy. Just a few moments of footage of Kennedy (who died in 2000 at age 84) at [...]
By Katherine Spillar This is the story of an illicit sexual relationship between a powerful U.S. senator and his female campaign treasurer, and of the equally powerful male political figures who allegedly helped cover it up. It’s a story where so-called family values and religiosity meet abuse of power. And it’s the story of a [...]
Danielle L. McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power offers a vital retelling of the by-now familiar history of the civil rights movement: an often-triumphant tale of heroes who, through acts of bravery, forced [...]
By Suzanne Petroni Chances are, you’ll hear or read soon that the world’s population is about to hit 7 billion. Get ready for cool graphics demonstrating its remarkable escalation over the past century, as modern medicine and agricultural advances helped people live longer and societies flourish, while fertility rates remained higher than “replacement level” in much [...]
By Andrea Grimes Elected officials often talk about “mandates” from their constituents. But what happens when those mandates aren’t coming from voters but corporate representatives who pay top dollar to hobnob with state lawmakers and help draft “model” bills reflecting corporate interests? That’s precisely the modus operandi of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an under-the-radar [...]
In recent months we’ve become well aware of how U.S. House Republicans are trying to decimate services of vital importance to women. Don’t take your eyes off your local statehouse, though: There, legislators have pushed the war on women equally far, cracking down on reproductive rights and cutting funding for education and health programs that [...]
by Martha Burk When former senator Alan Simpson, Republican co-chair of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits” last summer, it was not only a misogynistic insult but a symbolic shot at the benefit program older women depend on most. Started in 1935, [...]
