In her introduction to Poems from the Women’s Movement, Honor Moore recollects a friend saying, “The women’s movement was poetry.” The women’s movement was–and is–many things, and poetry was–and is–a necessary part of it. During the 1970s, poetry provided a way for women to find their voices and validate their experiences. Poetry enabled feminists to […]
Search Results for: vagina
Whose Vagina Is It, Anyway?
Q: I’m a 32-year-old woman being driven up the wall by my fiancé always saying that he can tell I’m playing with my toys when he’s at work because I’m loose that day. I swear to him up and down that I haven’t, and even tell him the last time that I have done something […]
No Comment: Summer’s Eve Gives Your Vagina A New Monologue
Summer’s Eve has launched its “Hail to the V” campaign, a new series of print, online and television ads telling women to spend more time taking care of their “wunder down under.” According to Summer’s Eve marketing director Angela Bryant, the campaign is “all about empowerment.” You be the judge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RosLrkIwZA Let me admit that […]
The Vagina Dialogues, Circa 1970
Before there was The Vagina Monologues, there were the pelvic instructors. These women, from Boston’s Women’s Community Health Center, were radical in not only instructing medical students in female sexual anatomy but in also using their own bodies as models. Their short-lived yet highly symbolic program took place from 1975 to 1976 at Harvard Medical […]
Guerilla Vulvas Take on Vaginal Rejuvenators
Vulva-activism is alive and well–and on its way to Las Vegas. The latest protests stem from concern about the growing number of practitioners performing female genital cosmetic surgery. The surgeries take many forms. A labiaplasty reduces the size of the labia (while often performed to correct damage to the labia during childbirth or to alleviate […]
It Wasn’t Your Resume, It Was Your Vagina
The laundry list of interview do’s and don’t’s for women job-seekers is lengthy and often contradictory. Forbes tells women to be personable on the interview–but not too chatty. Cosmo warns against looking “hot,” but features images of gorgeous women sporting leopard-print stilettos and full lips. The “pantsuit vs. skirt” question remains unanswered. The Internet and […]
Trump Administration’s Executive Order Threatens a Historic Settlement That Could Improve Black Maternal Healthcare
President Trump’s executive order banning decades of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices erodes the federal government’s ability to hold hospitals accountable for their treatment of Black birthing people and role in improving Black maternal health. This is especially troubling as it comes a few weeks after the Biden Administration reached a historic settlement agreement between the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (HHS OCR) and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Cedars-Sinai) in the Kira Johnson case.
In 2016, Kira Johnson tragically lost her life after giving birth to her second child through a routine C-section at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. Despite concerns voiced by Kira and her family about her condition, Kira was allowed to bleed internally for more than 10 hours before the medical staff took action.
The Fight for Midlife and Menopausal Health Is Essential to Reproductive Rights—and Democracy
Less than one into the Trump presidency, attacks on reproductive health and rights have begun. Against this backdrop, it may sound surprising to hold out hope for the immediate future of any women’s health issue. But I think menopause may be an outlier.
Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines: Menopause is having a moment, from new tell-all books by Brooke Shields and Naomi Watts, to viral clips of Halle Berry shouting from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, “I’m in menopause, OK?!” Commitment goes well beyond celebrity moments and includes notable support from public policy leaders across the spectrum—Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and in blue and red states. These prominent voices are part of a new wave of recognition that menopausal women deserve to make informed choices about our bodies.
Just as the fight for reproductive rights is an essential tenet of any free and fair democracy, so too is autonomy and health at this life stage.
Feminist Musicals ‘Teeth’ and ‘Suffs’ Steel Us for the Next Four Years
As feminist resistance faces a critical crossroads, Suffs and Teeth present two diverging paths: marching forward or tearing it all down.
It is the feminist movement’s challenge moving into a time that will most certainly require vigilance and resistance to consider how to reconcile these two paths forward. Will we keep marching? Or will we lick our teeth?
A Texas Woman Died After the Hospital Said It Would Be a ‘Crime’ to Intervene in Her Miscarriage
Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy. The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria. Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.