by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Radical feminism is not pretty. Although it’s not reducible to “atrocity feminism” (to borrow Robin Morgan’s phrase), radical feminist analysis and action do require us to face down the really ugly stuff on a regular basis—and in our current...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Feminists have always recognized the role of language in shaping human thought and perception and, consequently, our social and political landscape. We have worked to end biases that exalt or universalize maleness and negate femaleness. We have objected with some...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
I hated my American Fiction class. The professor, who always came to class fifteen minutes late, was blatantly sexist. He liked to let all the women in the class know that women were still viewed as substandard in the elite world of literature. He would even make...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
What a world we live in, a male-framed world, where global economics sets in concrete a system of winners and losers–with poverty, disadvantage, and minimal choices for many as the consequence. The climate is ripe for men’s sexual exploitation of women...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Editor’s note: Sex trafficking is the third largest underground economy in the world. More than two million women and children are sold, tricked, or forced by poverty into sexual slavery or indentured servitude every year. Of these, more than 50,000 are brought...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Women’s history, as most understand it, is a relatively insignificant history. It is a polite history that must dress up nicely, and smile often in order to be heard. Next to the daunting history of Jews, of African Americans, of the working class, women’s...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan is a non-violent organization at the forefront of the international campaign for women’s rights and democracy in Afghanistan. RAWA operates primarily underground as a network composed of about 2,000...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
There is, then, an extremely rich, complex Diversity among women and within each individual. But there is also above, beyond, beneath all this a Cosmic Commonality, a tapestry of connectedness…” 1 —Mary Daly “This universal religion of phallocracy is the...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Leftist publications have a problem with radical feminism. They have long maintained an informal ban against publishing radical feminist writers. They refuse to grapple with radical feminism’s critique of male supremacist sexuality as a system of oppression of...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Men of my baby boomer generation, particularly those on the left, have criticized feminism for lacking an economic vision, analysis and program. The possibility that they undervalued women and women’s work totally escaped them. The unpaid and unrecognized and...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
As a rape crisis worker and collective member of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, I participated in the “Women’s Resistance: From Victimization to Criminalization” conference, a national feminist gathering involving frontline anti-violence...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Say what you want about Madonna, at least she’s consistent. She is always pushing the envelope, always striving to keep herself in the news. Where consistency does not exist is in the way the media handles her and her work. MTV and VH-1 have censored...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Has anyone noticed the sudden glut of articles, columns, and letters to editors in local papers about how hard it is for a nice guy to find a girl? So many guys whining about how they are such nice people, and girls just won’t look at them. And you...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
There’s nothing new about the age-old propaganda that aims to scare women out of our bodies. Everywhere, we are bombarded with messages insisting that our bodies are too frail, too unreliable, and too prone to too many illnesses for us to indulge in the risk of...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
The cover of the August 3 issue of Rolling Stone promises to tell readers all about how “Furor erupts over gay-bashing songs: Eminem’s Hate Rhymes.” Further down, we are offered the inside scoop on “The Twisted Tale of the Net’s...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
One of the most popular and profitable sitcoms in recent television history was “Friends,” broadcast for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004. The show, co-created by Marta Kauffman and David Crane, was wildly uneven in quality over the years. But it had some very appealing...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Koko the gorilla, who lived in a cage, refused for a long time to have a baby. She longed to have babies. And she loved the males with whom she shared her cage. Still, Koko refused to reproduce. Koko’s caretaker, Dr. Francine Patterson, who became famous for...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
The demands of the Million Mom March were modest. The participants–750,000 who marched in Washington D.C. on Mother’s Day, and tens of thousands of others in cities across the country–are calling for all handguns to be registered and for all gun owners to...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
It’s hard to imagine a more horrific end to a life than the one Natalee Holloway most likely suffered. She has been missing since May 30, 2005, and no one has been charged with violence against her. The deluge of media coverage given to the individual case did...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Most men don’t rape. This is what the studies tell us. Why, then, does male culture romanticize rape? Why are images of violence against women in the media intriguing to so many men? Why are woman-bashing radio hosts, such as Tom Leykis and Howard Stern, so...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
My mind boggles at America’s tolerance of domestic violence and domestic abuse. What will it take to end the atrocities behind the statistics that tell us that every 9 seconds a woman is attacked by her partner? Every 9 seconds a woman in America is slapped,...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
The phrase “What’s in a name?” has been uttered by many, most often cynically. The truth is, there’s a lot in a name. It is, at its most basic level, one’s identity. Changing one’s name in marriage can be, for many women, a daunting thing. Name changing...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
The first time I visited Dr. Cynthia’s clinic, an old man sitting on the front step pinned a bougainvillea flower to my shirt. It was a sign of welcome, permission to cross the threshold into an entirely different world of health care. This cluster of...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
When my eighth grade teacher asked his class, “What are you going to do when you grow up?”, I told him, “I’m going to be a diplomat and work for the United Nations.” I was a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks in a tiny town of less than 1,000 people in...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
The Battle of Seattle was an historic show of opposition to corporate globalization and its devastating consequences. Protesters made clear, even if in the simplest terms, what we are fighting against. What we are fighting for has been more elusive. Of...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Anuradha Mittal is the co-director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, popularly known as Food First. For years, she has studied the effects of corporate globalization and the imposition of structural adjustment abroad. In this interview, she examines...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Will there ever be an end to it? I read the headlines of the morning paper: “Attack on Colorado School, Up to 25 Killed in the Rampage.” I realize instantly that it is this the news that will push the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia to lesser headlines for the...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
When much of the world thinks about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, it sees Jews of European origin confronting indigenous people of color who have been banished from their homeland. This enables Arab leaders to portray Israel as a white colonizing...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Noam Chomsky admits in the documentary about him, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, that the information in his books comes from the mainstream news media. “The information is there [in the mainstream media] … If somebody wants to...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
I tend to be a bit of a romantic, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that women sustain me. My relationships with women are not simple. Women also enrage me, piss me off, betray me. But the bottom line is, women are the ones I can’t live...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
The President of the United States very likely committed rape. Repeat: He very likely committed rape. According to businesswoman Juanita Broaddrick, Bill Clinton raped her 21 years ago when he was the attorney general of Arkansas. Her story: She and Clinton met...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
In the beginning, man created God. Man created God in his own self-image, and when he saw what he had made, he said, this is good. Encouraged, man attempted to create woman–as his own counter-image. Man wanted a woman who was different from himself, but not so...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Dr. Laura finally got in trouble. For eight years now, the extraordinarily popular talk radio host Laura Schlessinger has bashed women and fanned the flames of anti-feminism as the heart and soul of her program. For four hours a day, five days a week, Schlessinger...
by Adriene | Feb 15, 2022 | featured article
Planned Parenthood is so concerned about teen pregnancy that it has taken to pushing pills. Recently, a local Washington chapter put together ads for cable, network television, and radio, aired through September and October, which featured a young African American...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | one way to look at it
In 1970, the United Auto Workers became the first major national union to endorse the ERA. The Department of Justice filed the first Title VII suit of sex discrimination in employment. Women from 43 tribes and 23 states organized the North American Indian...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | one way to look at it
The average age of entry into prostitution in the US is 14. Between 75 to over 90% of prostituted girls and women are victims of childhood sexual abuse, often with multiple perpetrators. In a 1998 study of prostitution in five countries including the US, 73% of...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | one way to look at it
Between 1 and 4 million women experience serious assault by an intimate partner each year. Forty seven percent of men who beat their wives do so at least 3 times a year. Nearly 1 in 3 adult women experience at least 1 physical assault by a partner during adulthood....
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | one way to look at it
1500s Iroquois women own the land and control the economy of the Iroquois nation. The women supervise the distribution of food, and clan mothers appoint tribal chiefs and can demand their removal. Cherokee clan mothers select male leaders, and have a strong voice in...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | one way to look at it
The fresh water supplies that the human population depends on are less than .05 percent of all the water on Earth. Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. Most of this water is being used in...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | one way to look at it
“Yet it is precisely this historic dismissal of the Other and the legitimacy of its national cause that stands at the root of Palestinian statelessness and dispersal.” — Efraim Karsh Jews have lived in the Middle East continuously for thousands of years. After...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | one way to look at it
The Roma people, otherwise known as Gypsies, originally came from India, but the reason the people left, and subsequently lived in a diaspora, is unknown. They migrated through Persia, Armenia and Byzantium, and reached Europe around the late 13th or early 14th...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
The Amazons, the moon-women of ancient times, were not peaceful like other matriarchies, and they were not a detached, destructive patriarchy. They lived, some feminists theorize, at the cusp of a widespread changeover from egalitarian matriarchal societies to...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this, Uncategorized
The Amazons, the moon-women of ancient times, were not peaceful like other matriarchies, and they were not a detached, destructive patriarchy. They lived, some feminists theorize, at the cusp of a widespread changeover from the preeminence of egalitarian matriarchal...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
In the ancient villages of southern China, women had developed a secret language with its own unique script called Nu Shu. The women developed this language over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, when women were forbidden formal education. Men could not understand...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
Accompanying the explosion in feminism in the late 19th century was an explosion, or really a birth, of women’s sports. Middle and upper class women seized onto the bicycle, which gave them a freedom to travel and escape chaperones. Since long dresses were...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
One wintry night of December, 1860, Phoebe Harris Phelps, her face was disguised with heavy veils, showed up at the door of Susan B. Anthony looking for help. Anthony listened to her story with horror: Phoebe had been beaten, coerced, and separated from her children...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated on March 8 in countries around the world, was originally chosen to commemorate a strike by women textile workers that took place on that day in New York in 1857. These women were protesting extremely poor working...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
Since the 1940’s, the inverted pink triangle has been widely recognized as a reclaimed symbol of gay pride. While many are familiar with the history of the pink triangle, the history of the black triangle is much less known. In the years before World War Two, Section...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
When abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s 1830 homage to Lydia Maria Child named her “the first woman in the republic,” it was a tribute to genius “as versatile as it is brilliant,” and praised the remarkable contributions of her...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
Until several decades ago, the U.S. treated women as men’s property, and regulated violence against women accordingly. Violence against women was considered illegal only when men transgressed the “property rights” of other men. Transplanted from...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
We often think of abortion rights as a significant advancement in the feminist movement for equality. And it is — but only if you start measuring progress from the late 1800s, when women lost their assumed right to abort. Women healers in many parts of Western Europe...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
You can read about a painter, but none of it makes any real sense until you see her paintings. I read a little bit about Artemisia Gentileschi in Uppity Women of Medieval Times by Vicki Leon (buy it! read it!), and then I read some more. But none of it made...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
Seattle women formed their first suffrage association after hearing Susan B. Anthony speak at Brown Church in 1871. During their struggle for the vote, they were subjected to the usual criticisms of being inappropriate, unnatural, and threats to the establishment....
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
“Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.” – Shirley Chisolm In 1968, Shirley Chisolm became the first woman of color elected to the U.S. Congress, after a court-ordered reapportionment of New...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
Alice Paul, born in 1885 in Moorestown, New Jersey, was a militant and creative leader in her lifelong fight for women’s rights. While in her early 20s, she committed herself to the movement for the women’s right to vote. She was in London earning degrees...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
Six million years ago, scientists propose, human beings diverged from our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Nobody knows much about our common ancestor. We can, however, look to our two closest relatives, as well as other primates, to help us...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
In 1935, the Social Security Act became law, though its proponents faced great political opposition. In adopting this act, the U.S. government for the first time accepted responsibility for meeting the basic needs of at least some of its people – primarily white men,...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
Hadassah, the largest women’s organization in the U.S., was founded in 1912 by Henrietta Szold. A noted scholar, teacher, journalist, and social worker, Szold convinced her Daughters of Zion study circle at Temple Emanu-El in New York City to expand its purpose into a...
by Adriene | Mar 3, 2022 | remember this
The Roma are a distinctive ethnic group scattered throughout the world. A lack of reliable data makes it very difficult to estimate the global Roma population. In Europe where Roma are present in all countries – with the exception of Malta – there are approximately 12...
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