WMC News & Features
Quiet Push to Recognize Suffrage Sites
Spearheaded by New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, powerful chair of the House Rules Committee, legislation was signed into law at the end of last month that will help celebrate the not-so-ancient history of how women won the vote in the United States.
WMC News & Features
Communicating with Jane Fonda
Not content merely to speak to her Broadway audience eight times a week through a critically acclaimed performance, Jane Fonda is blogging daily and twittering nightly. She finds herself hooked on the instant feedback.
WMC News & Features
Pondering the Chick Flick
Call it what you like, the genre comes with both good and bad traits. The author suggests that we reward Hollywood at the box office only when it resists its misogynistic tendencies.
WMC News & Features
Obama Comes Through, Reversing Bush Era Repro-rights Restrictions
Monies to expand family planning services for poor women that were cut from the stimulus package are restored in President Obama’s proposed budget, and the administration rescinds a last-minute Bush Administration rule that would have severely weakened women’s access to reproductive health services.
WMC News & Features
Life and Work: A Conversation for International Women’s Day
The authors are appearing in New York City this month (March 18 at the 92nd Street Y-Tribeca) as part of an ongoing national tour to explore feminist issues through a multigenerational panel. The panel’s appearances (which have also included author Kristal Brent Zook) provoke more conversations: in Kansas City, a local panel adopted the format to continue to explore different dimensions of women’s lives. Here, the authors share their perspectives on work and life choices.
WMC News & Features
Can We Talk? Teens Need a Realistic Dialogue About Sex and Contraceptives
While her mother seemed to accept her pregnancy as a normal part of teen life, Bristol Palin, in her recent Fox News interview, acknowledged that abstinence just doesn’t work. Here, the author, a hi...
WMC News & Features
February 11, 2009 | Peggy Simpson |
Feminism
Can Feminist Groups and Bloggers Bridge the Digital Divide?
In Washington, DC, members of feminist organizations of long standing and feminist members of the blogospere met face to face for the first time. Now comes the hard part: to see what each group might offer the other.
WMC News & Features
Turning the Tide against the Taliban: What Works
The Obama Administration must empower the Pakistani people, who have already shown that they’re ready and able to stand up against the forces oppressing women and girls in the valley of Swat and elsewhere. Here, the secretary-general of Parliamentarians for Global Action, tells us how.
WMC News & Features
February 02, 2009 | Marianne Schnall |
Arts and culture,
Feminism,
Health,
International,
Politics,
Violence against women
Turning Pain to Power
Women and girls in eastern Congo suffer sexual atrocities that are tactics of war in the region. Playwright Eve Ensler has joined with Dr. Denis Mukwege to ask us to imagine the unimaginable, to empathize and join together to end the terror.
WMC News & Features
President Obama and Women’s Rights Activists: Celebration and Bumps in the Road
The White House ceremony and reception marking the President’s signature on his first major law honored feminists and the bill’s inspiration, Lilly Ledbetter. But the week was also marked by setbacks for legislation important to women workers and to women who depend on Medicaid.
WMC News & Features
Changing the World, One Blog at a Time
The author, WMC’s media manager, understood the potential of networking. But the true power of the web for advocacy hit home when an injustice threatened her family. Here she describes how anyone can use the process.
WMC News & Features
January 26, 2009 | Susan Brownmiller |
Feminism
The Woman Who Fought Freud—and Won
Feminist theorist and activist Florence Rush died on December 9, 2008. At a New York memorial last weekend, author Susan Brownmiller recalled how Rush’s insights about childhood sexual abuse inspire...
WMC News & Features
Masculine Mystique, Meet Feminine Mistake
Relationships are often tested during times of economic stress. In covering the phenomenon, the author wonders why some in the media seem to latch onto an outmoded model of marriage roles.
WMC News & Features
Looking Forward to 2009
The Women’s Media Center asked feminist authors and commentators Lynn Sherr, Alida Brill, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall to tell us what women might expect from what is widely expected to be a new year of national change. Their words are as cautionary as they are hopeful.
WMC News & Features
A Candle Cursing the Darkness
Despite the gloomy economic reality, women’s wealth proportionately is increasing in the United States. The author tells how she and other women donors are creating a new model to use their funds to make a difference.
WMC News & Features
Mothers Linked World Wide
They met in Toronto and cemented a movement of mothers that now promises a global network, with a website and a wide-ranging set of objectives. The author helped film a documentary tracing their progress.
WMC News & Features
“My Lord What a Morning”
On the anniversary of the trial of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, the author recalls the significance in her own family of that day when tens of thousands read leaflets asking that they “stay off the buses” in protest—and the limits to freedom that still plague us today.
WMC News & Features
A Quiet Revolution in the Developing World
The Gates Foundation has found an experienced adviser who knows as much as anyone about the importance of focusing on women to increase agricultural production in those countries where hungry people need it most. And her gender-sensitive policy does not end with the farmers.
WMC News & Features
Moose, Mousse, and Spalinism
Here, Robin Morgan takes aim at a few “feminists” who have taken to the blogways lately to support John McCain and Sarah Palin. Their reasoning is flawed, says Morgan, to say the least.
WMC News & Features
Voting—Without the Girdle
The journalist and author of a forthcoming play on suffragist Susan B. Anthony explains why not voting should never be an option. A large turnout is as important to the nation, says Lynn Sherr, as any policy choice of the winner.
WMC News & Features
A Motherhood Movement for the 21st Century
“You say you want a revolution?” is the theme of an international gathering in Toronto this month, where a grassrootsmovement to give voice and power to the mothers of the world is poised to come of age. The founder of the “rock ‘n roll” wing of the movement tells us what it’s all about.
WMC News & Features
Robin Morgan: ‘When Sisterhood Is Suicide and Other Late Night Thoughts’
Robin Morgan-whose controversial essay for the Women's Media Center on sexism in the primary race, "Goodbye To All That #2," was reprinted on 3,000 sites around the world-expounds here on women's s...
WMC News & Features
Finally! The UN Gets One Right
Last week, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously confirmed Secretary General BanKi-Moon’s appointment for\the post of UN high commissioner for human rights: the distinguished South African jurist Navanethem (“Navi”) Pillay. Women’s rights activists around the world can celebrate.
WMC News & Features
Making Strides in Politics and Online
Jehmu Greene, a legendary grass roots organizer, plans next to “look laser-like at organizing young women.
WMC News & Features
A Reflective NOW Looks to the Future
Jehmu Greene, a legendary grass roots organizer, plans next to “look laser-like at organizing young women.