WMC News & Features
The New Media Message For Women
While the old boys’ network continues to dominate mainstream media, women are tending to look elsewhere for their news and information. This year, the blogosphere has emerged as a powerful venue for women’s political activity as well.
WMC News & Features
How Can 30+ Million Women Be Invisible?
At great consequence to our nation, appallingly high numbers of women of color have not felt compelled to go to the polls in the past. The author set out to find out why and what to do about it.
WMC News & Features
McCain Ridicules Health Exemptions for Abortion
The final presidential debate touched on three important issues for women, while women’s groups continue to press the campaigns for an elusive commitment to a Lifetime TV forum that would allow more extensive discussion and questioning.
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
Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones
Words matter. From caregivers to teenagers to journalists, use of biased language, often unconsciously, can cause measurable harm, new studies show. The Ad Council, with PSAs featuring Hilary Duff among others, addresses one part of the problem in a campaign launched today.
WMC News & Features
Speaking of Change: Women Broadcasters Deliver
Two thirds of the way through the male-moderated presidential debates, history has turned in this election when women broadcasters played a role.
WMC News & Features
October 03, 2008 | Peggy Simpson |
Politics
Pundits and Viewers Give Palin a Pass
Governor Sarah Palin’s strategy of avoiding tough questions and talking into the camera will strengthen her connection with the GOP base. Independent voters are another matter.
WMC News & Features
October 03, 2008 | Avis A. Jones-DeWeever, Ph.D. |
Politics
Where Have Our Standards Gone?
What does it say about a nation, when the true take away message from a vice-presidential debate is that one of its participants actually does have the ability to string together a series of coherent sentences?
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
Speaker Pelosi: Leadership Tested By Fire
The financial meltdown is testing the leadership abilities of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and then some.
WMC News & Features
September 30, 2008 | Patricia DeGennaro |
Politics
Palin Power(less)
No one can argue against the need for a strong foreign policy. As a nation, we face challenges ranging from terrorism and climate change to the enduring wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of these problems can be solved without building a better relationship with the rest of the world. None can be solved without creative and informed leaders.
WMC News & Features
Weathering the Storm, Then Changing Course
An economic storm is descending, and for many, the storm will be bad. While the Bush Administration and Congress wrestle with how to bail out Wall Street, and argue about how softly CEOs of failed financial institutions should be allowed to land, average citizens must leap into the new reality without benefit of 24-karat parachutes.
WMC News & Features
Financial Meltdown Sidelines Politics As Usual
Last week's financial markets crises totally eclipsed the 2008 presidential campaign and changed the ground rules.
Briefings by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Be...
WMC News & Features
Keeping Hold of Your Vision—the Making of Hounddog
One of the dirty secrets of the film business is that it takes women directors a long time to get their films made. The Women, which opened recently, took Diane English 14 years to bring to the screen; other examples include Tamara Jenkins award-winning The Savagesand Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, which took 10 years each. Writer/director Deborah Kampmeier joins this illustrious club with her own decade long trek to see her filmHounddog starring Dakota Fanning finally released in theatres.
WMC News & Features
September 15, 2008 | Peggy Simpson |
Politics
Pollsters Grapple With a Sarah Surge
Tracking the women’s vote in this historic presidential election is proving to be tricky.
WMC News & Features
September 12, 2008 | Ann E.W. Stone |
Politics
Republicans for Choice Seek Common Ground With Sarah Palin
We at Republicans for Choice (RFC) are strongly pro-choice so we should be upset by John McCain’s pick for vice president of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who is ardently anti- choice. Let me tell you why we are not. Being pro-choice does not mean we are against women who disagree with us. Her choice is her choice.
WMC News & Features
September 11, 2008 International
Russian Women Look Outward to Create Change
The Russian conflict with Georgia may as some predict risk a return to Cold War-style relations. But from what I saw in Chuvashia, an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation, 600 kilometers east of Moscow—from the vantage point of an innovative summer camp that was nearing season’s end—changes in the two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union have taken root.
WMC News & Features
September 08, 2008 | Deborah Siegel |
Sports
Sex and the Single Guys, For Real
With all the excitement of the summer games, you may have missed this juicy bit of “news” from Olympic Village: as soon as their competition ended, the athletes apparently got rather busy themselves...
WMC News & Features
September 05, 2008 | Carol Jenkins |
Arts and culture
Firaaq or “The Quest”—A Woman Filmmaker at Telluride
If you have had the exquisite pleasure of seeing the films Earth and Fire ( the last of the trilogy is Water) by the genius Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, then you know the celebrated actress Nandita Das. Now Das has followed in the footsteps of Mehta, described as “Canada's most internationally renowned woman filmmaker," by directing her first feature.
WMC News & Features
September 05, 2008 | Tanya Melich |
Politics
The Republican Wonderland: Down the Rabbit Hole with McCain-Palin
After four days of following the Republican convention, I know what Alice must have felt when she fell down the rabbit hole. The Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota was an unreal place.
WMC News & Features
September 04, 2008 | Gloria Steinem |
Politics
She’s Phyllis Schlafly, Only Younger
Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing—the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party—are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president.
WMC News & Features
September 04, 2008 | Carol Jenkins |
Politics
Battle Looms for Electoral Votes in the Wide-Open Spaces
While engulfed in gusts of doubt and controversy—and as anticipation intensifies about her prime time speech at the Republican convention tonight (will she address the thorniest of the issues?)—Sarah Palin is not shy of supporters.
WMC News & Features
September 02, 2008 | Peggy Simpson |
Politics
As GOP Convention Opens, the Palin Factor
A crusader for abstinence and against abortion now finds herself squarely in the public eye with a teenage daughter who is five months pregnant.
That would be Sarah Palin, the conservative Alaska ...
WMC News & Features
August 29, 2008 | Tanya Melich |
Politics
McCain Tries To Grab the History Flag From Obama
The first time I hear a woman has achieved something special, my automatic reaction is to cheer, to think “good, another of us has won.”
Then reality sets in and the questions start.
That is wha...
WMC News & Features
August 29, 2008 | Carol Jenkins |
Politics
August 28: We Watched History in the Making
In a dramatically staged closing evening of the Democratic Convention in Denver—with fireworks in his speech and in the night air, persuasive endorsements from generals (men, women, white and black) and real people (women and men with compelling stories, well told)— Barack Obama took control of his campaign for the White House by reminding his supporters it’s about their lives, their children’s futures: