Sgt. Jasmine Jacobs of the National Guard in Georgia has always plaited her hair into two twists around her head. She has been in the military for six years and has worn her hair natural (meaning no chemical treatments [perms] or hair extensions [weaves]) for four of those years. But according to the new hair-grooming […]
Amy-Louise had her first experience with street harassment at the age of 13 when a boy groped her while she was walking home from school. She, like many women, has been so traumatized by a lifetime of sexual harassment that she struggles with severe anxiety and only feels safe in public when accompanied by her […]
September 25, 1957. The Little Rock Nine—nine black high school students—were escorted by federal troops into Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., thus taking the first steps toward desegregating public schools in America. March 21, 2014: Fifty-seven years later, the Department of Education’s civil rights office released a report showing the staggering percentages of […]
1. She co-founded Ms. magazine 2. She said, “A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.” 3. She used her skill has a journalist to explain and fight for women’s rights. 4. She went undercover as a Playboy Bunny not to write a sexy story but to expose harsh, […]
Nancy Pelosi isn’t the only one who’s been visited by the suffragists. In fact, they came to see me first. While I was writing a paper late one night, they appeared in my dining room. Tell our story. Don’t just do an academic exercise, they insisted. “That’s not what the professor assigned,” I argued, rubbing […]
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc) didn’t major in psychology, so maybe that’s why he turned Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs on its head when he pontificated at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 6 about the U.S. providing food for hungry children: The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a […]
Watching 12 Years a Slave, winner of the best picture Oscar Sunday night, it was almost as if I were there at Edwin Epps’ cotton plantation in the 1840s, walking past the gorgeous white mansion in the lush, green Louisiana landscape. Surrounded by cypress trees, I could hear the cicadas, and very nearly feel the […]
If I had to pick a couple of myths about the women’s movement that are most wrong, I think two might be tied for worst place. One is that this movement—also known as women’s liberation, feminism, womanism, mujerista!, grrrls and more—is only for white middle-class women. The second myth is that women of the ’70s […]
Though black feminists have wielded social media to make willful strides into public consciousness, black feminism is nothing new. The challenge of being doubly oppressed as a black woman has always colored feminist conversations, and minority women rarely have the luxury of fighting solely on behalf of their gender. The question of intersectionality predates hashtags […]
The Virginia Senate has passed a repeal of its law mandating medically unnecessary ultrasounds before abortions, which went into effect last year. The Democrat-controlled Senate was in a 20-20 tie, until Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam voted for the repeal. It will now be considered by the Republican-dominated state House. Virginia’s then-Republican-controlled Senate had originally attempted […]
