Beyond Multiple Choice by Rebecca Whisnant

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...

The B Word by Shanelle Matthews

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...

Globalized Female Slavery by Onnie Wilson

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...

Global Terrorism of Sex Trafficking

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...

A History with No Name by Adriene Sere

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...

Madonna Denied the Right to Rage by Sue Scharff

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...

The Untold Story of Six Billion by Adriene Sere

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...

Moms and Guns by Adriene Sere

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...

The Missing Liberal Mind by Adriene Sere

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...

Men and the History of Rape by Adriene Sere

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...

Every 9 Seconds by Sistah Pace

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,...

Resisting the Machinery of Violence

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...

Since Time Immemorial by Loolwa Khazzoom

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...

The Dance of Deception by Adriene Sere

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...

My Passion for Women by Adriene Sere

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...

Presidential Rape: The Making of a Non-Scandal

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...

The Perfect Woman by Adriene Sere

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...

Pushing Pills by Adriene Sere

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...

The 70’s

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...

Prostitution

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...

Violence in Intimacy

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....

U. S. History

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...

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...

Israel and the Middle East

“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...

The Roma

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...

Amazons of an Ancient World

  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...

Amazons of an Ancient World

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...

The Ancient Secret Language of Chinese Women

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...

The Birth of Women’s Sports

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...

The Underground Railroad that Wasn’t

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...

International Women’s Day by Melissa Cole

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...

From Property to Almost Human

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...

The New Struggle for Abortion Rights

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...

Artemisia Gentileschi: On Her Own Terms

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...

Seattle Suffrage

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....

She should have been President by Melissa Cole

“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...

Where We Came From

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...

The Movement for a Guaranteed Safety Net

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,...

Hadassah

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...