This week marks two landmark anniversaries in the history of American voting rights. Ninety-one years ago tomorrow, U.S. women won the legal right to vote. Forty-eight years ago this Sunday, Americans marched on Washington and paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which would ensure voting rights for African American men and […]
Author: Annie Shields
Annie is the Community Editor at The Nation and the former New Media Coordinator at Ms. magazine. She studied sociology and women's studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She's a big fan of birds, plants and things that are funny. Her animal totem is the bat.
Economic Woes, Nefarious PACs and 100 Years of Lucy: Editors’ Picks, July 31-August 6
For anyone who depends on money to fund their existence, getting through this week may have been an emotional roller coaster. The Senate finally approved the so-called “Satan sandwich” debt plan just hours before the deadline on Tuesday. In spite of that agreement, however, the Dow fell 512.76 points on Thursday, marking the first time […]
Rosa Parks Revelations and Fearless Feminist Governors: Editors’ Picks, July 24-30
A new revelation about the life of Rosa Parks surfaced this week: Among thousands of her personal items collected by Guernsey’s Auctioneers was a six-page, handwritten account of an attempted rape by a white neighbor in 1931. Civil-rights historian Danielle McGuire called the discovery astounding, saying she had never before come across a mention of […]
DADT, DOMA and the Truth About Fathers’ Rights Groups: Editors’ Picks: July 17-23
Friday marked the official end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced that openly gay service members will begin to be integrated into the military. Many still bemoan how protracted the repeal process has been, but others are celebrating the fact that a date has […]
Almost 100,000 Have Told the FBI That Rape Is Rape. Have You?
Nearly 100,000 people have signed onto the Ms. and Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) campaign to change the FBI’s definition of “forcible” rape. After a Ms. investigative report found that the FBI’s fundamentally flawed definition excludes hundreds of thousands of rapes from the yearly Uniform Crime Report, Ms. and FMF started a Change.org petition urging the […]
TOMS Joins Forces with Anti-Gay, Anti-Choice Group
UPDATE: In response to public outcry, TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie has posted this mea culpa to his blog, apologizing for his appearance at a Focus on the Family event and insisting that the company is not a “TOMS giving partner.” For socially conscious consumers, TOMS Shoes has always seemed like a no-brainer: The company gives […]
Apparently Richard Dawkins Is a Jerk and Miscarrying Is a Crime: Editors’ Picks, July 3-July 9
World-renowned evolutionary biologist/atheist/smarty-pants Richard Dawkins showed his true colors this week (which, one assumes, are the colors of the official flag of privilege) when he instigated a comment war with feminists after leaving a particularly clueless and vile sarcastic response to a post on activist Rebecca Watson’s blog. The Atlantic Wire has the play-by-play. A […]
Red Tape, Racist Sentencing, Gates of Hell: Editors’ Picks, 6/19-6/25
On “Counter Earth,” the imagined alternate universe of cartoonist Ruben Bolling, women are able to exercise their constitutional right to choose abortion, while seemingly endless red tape makes unilaterally waging war a logistical nightmare, requiring President Obama to endure a series of obstacles designed to discourage him from going through with it, like traveling 500 […]
Imaginary Lesbians, Pro-Choice Christians and Santorum’s Gay Friends: Editors’ Picks, 6/12-6/18
This week the blogosphere was shocked when it was revealed that the popular American-born Syrian lesbian blogger Amina Abdullah Araf, the voice of the widely read blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” who was purportedly abducted last week by three armed men, was actually the fictional online persona of Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old, white U.S.-born […]
No Comment: “Give Us Your Cash, Bitch”
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes “Give Us Your Cash, Bitch,” the frontrunner for the most racism and misogyny ever combined in one political ad. In it, Los Angeles City Council member Janice Hahn, who is running for California’s 36th Congressional seat against Republican Craig Huey, is portrayed as a stripper […]