More Than A Magazine, A Movement
“There’s no crying in baseball,” says Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. But the film’s more subtle theme is that there are no lesbians in baseball. The 1992 film made no mention of the fact that many of the athletes in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) were gay.
But last Friday, Amazon Prime Video unveiled an eight-episode series, also called A League of Their Own, that includes openly lesbian AAGPBL players.
There has never been a queer leader like Urvashi Vaid. Until her death of metastatic breast cancer on May 14 at age 63, she spent the better part of five decades fighting injustice. Principle drove Urvashi in almost everything she did. She exploded onto the scene with a dynamism that has never been equaled since.
“The lesbian agenda is the reconstruction of families … the reimagining of power … the reorganization of the economic system … the reinforcement of civil rights and dignity for all people … the end of the oppression of women, the end of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia … the reestablishment of a proper relationship to our environment. … When I list this laundry list of oppression, it does not overwhelm me; it tells me how far I have to go in my struggle; it tells me who my allies are.”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law that opened all educational programs, including sports, to girls in the United States.
Tennis legend Billie Jean King has done more than any other athlete to make the promise of Title IX a reality. She also won a record 20 Wimbledon titles, 13 US titles, four French titles, and two in Australia between 1961 and 1979.
Brenda VanLengen is a TV sports analyst and play-by-play announcer for college women’s sports. “I’m so fortunate that [Title IX] happened when it did,” she told Ms. Without it, she explained, “I wouldn’t have the life that I do or the career that I do.”
This year, she’s embarked on a new venture to produce a docuseries about the women who grew the sport of women’s basketball before Title IX, If Not for Them.
In the early ’80s, Martha Albertson Fineman launched the Feminism and Legal Theory Project at University of Wisconsin Law School. For decades, the project has brought together scholars and activists from the U.S. and abroad to explore the most pressing contemporary legal issues affecting women. In multiple-day sessions, organized around specific, evolving sets of issues, feminists presented working papers and debated women’s legal rights.
Fineman recorded and preserved these groundbreaking conversations, as well as the working papers and other written material prepared for these sessions. But she is now struggling to find a home for this invaluable archive of the first generation of feminist legal thinkers.
After realizing that gender equality wasn’t a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, Rosie Couture and her friend Belan Yeshigeta founded Generation Ratify, an organization dedicated to adding the ERA to the Constitution. Other women-led organizations, such as The Feminist Front and The Ruth Project, joined the fight.
“Advocating for the ERA means advocating for a fight that began with many of our grandmothers.”
With the endorsement of the party whose legislators provided the votes needed to successfully put the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments into the Constitution now assured, the battle will soon move to the Democratic Convention next month. Then it’s back to Congress to get the approval of 2/3 of the House and Senate, followed by a nationwide campaign to get 36 of the 48 State legislatures to ratify.
I was forced to give my son up for adoption, moments after giving birth. Boom. Gone. Just like that. I had no hope of ever seeing him again.
This shameful secret—my pregnancy and loss of my child—festered inside for more than 50 years. Decades later, my middle-aged son reached out by email and we met, a longed-for experience that soon turned into a nightmare. I had no idea that reunion in adoption is often shattering. The pain and anguish I wasn’t allowed to feel when I gave him away exploded inside me.
Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson eviscerates Roe’s privacy anchoring of the right to abortion, and also trashes the Court’s subsequent recognition in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that control over one’s reproduction is inextricably linked to gender equality.
History upends Alito’s claim that “the goal of preventing abortion” does not evince a “discriminatory ‘animus’ against women.” It also makes a mockery of his assertion that the Roe Court was guilty of a “plainly incorrect” reading of history.
After researching princesses for five years and reading what feels like every book on the market about western women and royalty, Barbara Bourland could share what she discovered in one sentence: Princess stories are narratives of state control over women’s bodies.
It’s time we all stopped seeing them any differently.
