More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The U.S. ranks as the 19th most dangerous country for women, 11th in maternal mortality, 30th in closing the gender pay gap, 75th in women’s political representation, and painfully lacks paid family leave and equal access to health care. But Ms. has always understood: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the U.S.’s most intractable problems. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide.
For The Weekly Pulse (a revisit of an old Ms. column!), we’ve scoured the most trusted journalistic sources—and, of course, our Twitter feeds—to bring you this week’s most important news stories related to health and wellness.
In this edition: The U.S. Senate passes a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in rare showing of bipartisanship; in a new U.N. climate report, climate scientists say there are known measures we can take to protect the world, but we must be brave enough to act; Senate subcommittee passes the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act; CDC issues new vaccine guidance for pregnant people; and active-duty service members and teachers may face a vaccine mandate.
In May, U.S. forces and other international troops began to withdraw from Afghanistan. Immediately, feminists and Afghanistan experts who feared a return to Taliban rule warned of the severe and brutal impact that would likely be felt by women and minorities in the vacuum created by the removal of international troops in the country.
The protection of human rights and the achievements of the past two decades is a shared responsibility of the United States, the international community and human rights advocates.
Remarkably, at last month’s Generation Equality Forum, $40 billion was committed to gender equality. Yet as I scrolled through social media, I realized hardly anyone was talking about the extraordinary commitment and what it meant for funding everything from feminist movements and grassroots groups, to government programs on care infrastructure, to the development of feminist technology, and much more.
The Senate has just passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution designed to bring to fruition many of President Biden’s campaign promises to improve the lives of families and children, including a $105 billion allocation of funds to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
The next steps are fraught with difficulty, but still, this is an incredibly important first step towards offering almost 11 million people—47 percent of whom are women—a chance at legal status and ultimately, citizenship.
“Poverty is an injustice that falls most heavily on girls. I know this to be a fact. And I fully believe that the best way to address this injustice is to invest in organizations that support the education of young women.”
“Simone Biles’s plight felt to me like both metaphor and matterphor for Black ascension—a kind of disorientation that attends to Black excellence, the discomfiture that comes in those fleeting moments, where having pulled off something great, you feel like you are on top of the world, and yet, curiously, terrifyingly, you also have no idea where you are in the air.”
At the UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris, stakeholders committed billions of dollars for the advancement of reproductive health and rights around the world. Panelists throughout the event shined light on where the fight for reproductive autonomy needs to go.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Olympic gender parity does not mean equity; women Olympians give support to social and political movements; what it’s like to be a mother and an Olympian; how to shift power to women, people of color, and younger people; and more!
In this edition: Hundreds of Republican lawmakers have signed onto Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health amicus briefs; House spending bill excludes federal abortion restrictions for the first time in years; CDC report suggests the Delta variant is as contagious as chicken pox; and a Kaiser Family Foundation report finds breakthrough cases among the vaccinated are not the cause of America’s COVID surge.