More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: The RepresentWomen staff shares advice with their younger selves, reflections on the meaning of girlhood, and their visions for a more gender-balanced world; today’s girls are tomorrow’s women leaders; honoring Fannie Lou Hamer’s legacy as a civil rights pioneer; and more.
It is only fitting that Netflix chose Juneteenth to debut the Shondaland-produced documentary film, Black Barbie. The film tells the story of Black women who worked at Mattel and gave us the titular doll, showcasing the joy of freedom through play. And yet, while the film shows that today’s Black children may no longer have feelings of being “ugly” or “bad,” as demonstrated during Clark’s doll experiment, they clearly understood Black Barbie wasn’t the “real Barbie,” wasn’t the “hero” of her own story.
To that end, are we needing to ask a similar question about other fantasies: “Ain’t I a princess?”
It is not enough for Black women and girls to enter fantasy and play as “corrective” heroes. While we are as indebted to the Black women imagineers who worked on the new Disney ride, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, as we are to the Black women at Mattel for giving us Black Barbie, we are equally in need of imaginations that transcend our limited realities and revel in our most whimsical dreams.
The Alice Hector–Robert Young divorce case epitomizes the impact of gendered parenting stereotypes held in custody cases. Is there a side feminists should take?
(For more ground-breaking stories like this, order 50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION, Alfred A. Knopf—a collection of the most audacious, norm-breaking coverage Ms. has published.)
If the pandemic has made you worry about consumerism and ethical buying practices, or if you’re just looking to support a small, female-owned business this holiday season, we’ve got you covered! This list offers a variety of small businesses, with products ranging from skincare to home decor, and everything in between.
When I became a mom, I wondered how my own child might form his own ideas of what the world should look like. The answer to my question? Books, always books.
Here are some of my favorite books, some old, some new, to build your own first library of feminist books for any child.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol; the impact of Justice Ginsburg’s death on the 2020 election; best practices to getting more women into judicial offices; the Solomon Islands’s systemic strategies to advance gender balance in government; appallingly few women have speaking roles at the UN this month; a staggering number of Black women running for office; tracking investments of leading foundations in minority and women-owned firms; building a gender-sensitive workplace culture; in support of the Yes On 2 ranked-choice voting campaign in Massachusetts; and this week’s suggested feminist reading.
An excerpt from “Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different” (August 2020), by Linda Selin Davis:
“When each tomboy heyday ended, childhood became gendered as never before.”
I sat in the Cinemark with a very wet face while the two women behind me began dissecting what they’d seen. “That Amy. She is irredeemable! Who would act that way?” I did, and sometimes still do.
I wrote this paper originally in 1996—for a magazine called Sojourner: The Women’s Forum—because the issue of abortion clinic violence screamed to me: As a clinic defender, I witnessed people (mostly men and very few women) yelling violently and acting aggressively towards women going into clinics in Boston and Brookline, Mass. to get abortions. I wanted people to […]