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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Fran Hurley, Ed. D. on the status of women around the world

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Terry Barclay's presentation on Inforum and building gender-based businesses

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Amy Whitworth on "The Logic of Misogyny"

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Barbara Viniar with her overview of the “Magnificent Disrupter” and “The Feminine Mystique"

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Alexander Herrmann, nickname Sascz, transgender man

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Rachel Occhiogrosso-Schwartz, owner of The Doll Haus, B'n'B for drag queens

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Professor Carrie Baker on Reproductive Rights

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Steve Horn's experiences as a gay man "back in the day" at IBM

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Larry Moore's presentation on women in baseball

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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At our April 2025 meeting, Susan Birns, Board member, gave a talk on the 50th Anniversary of the Elizabeth Freeman Center

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At our April 2025 meeting, Susan Birns, Board member, gave a talk on the 50th Anniversary of the Elizabeth Freeman Center

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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At our March meeting, Nancy McIntire and Susan Hodgson spoke about the beginnings of co-education at Williams College and beyond....

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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At our February 2025 meeting, SIG members spoke about women in Israel, England, the US, Ireland, Afghanistan and Iceland. Definitely worth a listen!

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At our February 2025 meeting, SIG members spoke about women in Israel, England, the US, Ireland, Afghanistan and Iceland. Definitely worth a listen!

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Molly Guidette on gender as a social construct from January 15, 2025

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Molly Guidette on gender as a social construct from January 15, 2025

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Medical science has a problem with sexism. Excluding female biology creates public health risks from incomplete data and biased methods.

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Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Tennessee’s Ban on Transgender Care

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On Wednesday, the justices will hear the marquee case of the term, a challenge to a Tennessee law banning several forms of medical care for transgender youths.

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Farah Cherif D’Ouezzan on women in Morocco, recorded on November 20, 2024.

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Do You Remember the First Time You Voted?

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The first year I could vote, the choices for president were Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater or the incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ won—the largest landslide in U.S. history. Voting for him

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Rep. Jasmine Crockett on Politics, Patriarchy, Profits and the Presidency

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U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, representing Texas’ 30th Congressional District, has become a breakout star in the Democratic Party, effectively keeping politicians and pundits three times her age in check using

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Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation: Advice to Our Younger Selves on International Day of the Girl; Restlessness Until Freedom

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Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation. This week: The RepresentWomen staff shares advice with their younger selves, reflections on the meaning of girlhood,

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"Jessica Valenti has been the chronicler, the microphone, the billboard, and the warrior ... of the bottom-feeder morality of those who would take our freedoms and our lives and abuse the legal system-and democracy itself-to do it."

Editor's note: Karen Thompson originally delivered this essay as remarks at an event at The Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at NYU Law on Monday, Oct. 7. The event was co-hosted by Pregnancy Justice and the NYU Law chapter of If/When/How Lawyering for Reproductive Justice.
Jessica Valenti came to speak to the staff at Pregnancy Justice this summer, and one of the first questions I asked her is: "How do you keep doing this?" Her answer echoed the one she wrote in the introduction to Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies and The Truths We Use to Win: You just do, albeit with fury and rage.

At that talk, I called Valenti "a Cassandra." For those of you who aren't Greek myth nerds, Cassandra was a priestess fated by Apollo to utter true prophecies and never be believed. What is less discussed-recognizing that these are myths, not life ... but when things resonate, they resonate-is that Apollo wanted Cassandra, and so, to "entice" her to hook up, he gave her the gift of prophecy. It was only when she had the audacity to say no to his advances that he cursed his gift to her of foresight with the failure to be believed for her foresight. But today, publicly, I want to take that back.

Valenti is no Cassandra.

While she details the future, her gift is not prophecy, but clarity of facts.

She is clear that the question of abortion access is a question of personal autonomy.

She is clear that conservatives are carefully crafting a world where women who have the audacity to want sex on their own terms must be punished by a pregnancy.

She is clear that conservatives want to take personhood from a person with a uterus and assign it to the embryo or fetus within it.

Putting it all together; meticulously, scrupulously unearthing these foundations, allows her to know what is coming-because those who would end abortion and criminalize pregnancy in these United States in this year of our lord 2024 aren't leaving crumbs about what future they would like to make real. They are paving the road to that future with baguettes.

While she details the future, her gift is not prophecy, but clarity of facts.

In 1963, in an interview with public radio, James Baldwin said:

"There are days ... when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How, precisely, are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I'm terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don't think I'm human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters."

While Baldwin's words describe the American racial dynamics in which we all swim, his observations extend our particular racial history and reality into other spaces; to wars and systems of apartheid beyond our borders. To the criminal legal system that murdered Marcellus Khalifah Williams in the name of legal finality. To the battle for reproductive justice and freedom at this moment.

Valenti's work has been to make the actions of moral monsters spoken and visible, to point out and inform us of where the moral high ground does, in fact, lie and how bottomless the moral low ground is of those who fight to undermine abortion as healthcare and as a choice across this country. As Valenti writes, it is those who would "force children to give birth... make devastated women carry dead and dying fetuses, and make women raped by men prove their attacks really happened before receiving health care" that are the problem.

No, Valenti is not a Cassandra.

Let's be clear: This conduct, of moral monsters blithely leading a marching band of hideous reproductive horrors through our courts, through police and prosecutors, and through incel-informed ex-husbands and boyfriends, is violence. And Valenti's work arms us to face that violencewith, as she writes "both the facts and the fury." And in so doing, she forces us to remember ourselves. She reminds us that feminism is not a kumbaya around the campfire imploring people to be nice, but a rising sun of liberation theology for the people of women that frees everyone else as it rises.

This conduct, of moral monsters blithely leading a marching band of hideous reproductive horrors through our courts, through police and prosecutors, and through incel-informed ex-husbands and boyfriends, is violence. And Valenti's work arms us to face that violence.

Valenti understands why a woman was charged for murder for having the audacity to survive a nearly life-ending labor resulting in a stillbirth.

Valenti called it that a woman would be tortured to death as her organs slowly failed because doctors were too afraid to provide her with the abortion that would have saved her life.

Valenti knew for a long time that a state would argue that it wasn't enough for a pregnant woman smoking weed to have a medical marijuana license to do so, but that her fetus should have one too.

She has been the chronicler, the microphone, the billboard, and the warrior around these things and of the bottom-feeder morality of those who would take our freedoms and our lives and abuse the legal system-and democracy itself-to do it.

As Toni Morrison famously noted:

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

What Jessica Valenti is, is undistracted. Put another way? She is the one more thing for the moral monsters. She stands, focused behind and in front of her, looking side to side, turning ignorance into stone. Valenti stands, with a sword of truth, engraved with, " They will never believe us " to beg us to believe in ourselves, and to follow her refusal to surrender. Valenti's superpower is her no.

May her no live on our own lips.

Up next:

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'The Chronicler, the Microphone, the Billboard': Jessica Valenti's 'Abortion' Book Arms Us to Face the Violence of Abortion Bans - Ms. Magazine

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In her recently released book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies and The Truths We Use to Win, Jessica Valenti details the future. But, her gift is not prophecy, but clarity

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Ending Child Marriage—For Good: The Ms. Q&A With Clay Dunn, CEO at VOW for Girls

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Oct. 11 is International Day of the Girl, an annual celebration that promotes advocacy for the rights, education and empowerment of girls across the globe. This year’s theme is “Girls’

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Updated Monday, Oct. 7, 2024: The Supreme Court of Georgia will reinstate the state's six-week abortion ban starting 5 p.m. Monday, just a week after a trial court struck down the law.

Some abortion providers in the state had resumed offering abortions past six weeks of pregnancy since the state's lower court struck down the ban. The lower court ruling had temporarily allowed legal abortion up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. Monday's decision means the ban will remain in effect while the case challenging Georgia's law makes its way through the state court system.

This article was originally published by The 19th.
A Georgia court struck down the state's six-week abortion ban Monday, allowing abortions to resume up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.

The decision will radiate across the South, where the procedure has been largely outlawed.

Georgia, home to about a dozen abortion-providing clinics, is now one of the two most permissive states in the region. In Virginia, the procedure is legal up through the second trimester of pregnancy, which ends at 26 weeks.

The six-week ban, which has been in effect since 2022, cut abortions performed in Georgia in half. Georgians who did not discover they were pregnant by the deadline-early enough that many people do not know they are pregnant-had to either travel out of state or order pills online if they wanted to get an abortion.

In the first 21 months since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Georgia had the second largest decline in abortions performed, according to an analysis by the Society for Family Planning, with abortions falling by almost 40,000.

"There was a significant cut to our volume because of the six-week ban," said Calla Halle, who runs A Preferred Women's Health Center, which has two clinics in North Carolina and two in Georgia. "Given the surge of need, I think we'll go right back to being as busy."

Halle said she hopes they'll be able to resume providing abortions up to 22 weeks promptly-and she anticipates seeing patients travel from other states with heavy restrictions, including Florida and South Carolina, where abortion is banned after six weeks of pregnancy.

Other Southern states-including Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee-all outlaw abortion almost entirely. North Carolina, two states to the north, allows the procedure up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, but requires patients make two visits in person to a clinic, separated by 72 hours, a stipulation that can be prohibitive for those traveling from far away.

That makes the Georgia decision one that is "obviously big," according to Laurie Sobel, associate director for women's health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research, polling and journalism organization.

"[Georgia is] going to be the closest place for people [to access abortions] in a lot of states," Sobel said, adding that she believes the state will appeal the decision.

But as long as the decision is in effect, it could have substantial implications, alleviating any strains on clinics further north that have become destinations for abortion-seekers in the South.

"Georgia's six-week ban left millions of people across a wide swath of the South facing drives of hundreds of miles to North Carolina and Virginia," said Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College who studies abortion travel patterns. "Now, as long as the ban isn't enforced, Georgia residents as well as people from Florida, Alabama and parts of Tennessee are going to be much closer to services."

In the 26-page opinion, Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney said that abortions in Georgia needed to be regulated like they were prior to the six-week ban-known as the Life Act-being passed in 2019. McBurney noted that many people do not know they are pregnant at six weeks.

In his opinion, McBurney also noted that abortion bans have a disproportionate impact on women of color.

"It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the LIFE Act, the effect of which is to require only women-and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women-to engage in compulsory labor, i.e., the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government's behest," he wrote.

Prior to Roe's overturn, 69 percent of people who got abortions in Georgia were Black, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 30 percent of Georgians are Black. Abortion bans have disproportionately affected Black women, who are more likely to live in the Southern states that have embraced restrictions.

Georgia still requires patients who get an abortion make two appointments separated by 24 hours. But the first visit can be done over the phone, meaning patients-including those potentially traveling from out of state-only have to do one physical visit.

The change comes as Georgia's abortion bans have become a critical issue in the presidential election, especially after ProPublica reported the cases of two women who died in the state after they couldn't access legal abortions. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is hoping to turn the state blue, has vocally criticized its six-week ban, which Republicans and abortion opponents have defended.

Up next:

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Supreme Court of Georgia Rules to Reinstate the State's Six-Week Abortion Ban - Ms. Magazine

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The Supreme Court of Georgia will reinstate the state's six-week abortion ban starting 5 p.m. Monday, just a week after a trial court struck down the law. Some abortion providers

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California Becomes First State to Enshrine Intersectionality in Law, Recognizing the Amplified Harms of Overlapping Discrimination

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Thirty-five years ago, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to explain how multiple forms of discrimination interact to exacerbate each other, resulting in amplified forms of prejudice and harm. Last week, California

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Project 2025, ‘Tampon Tim,’ and the GOP’s Commitment to Cervical Mucus

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Project 2025’s endorsement of fertility awareness-based methods—which are less effective than other birth control methods—would require nothing short of a national campaign in menstrual and cervical mucus literacy.

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Rest in Power: Lilly Ledbetter, Trailblazing Icon for Women’s Equal Pay

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Lilly Ledbetter, an equal pay activist whose legal fight against her employer led to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, died this weekend. She was 86. ’One of the next

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"If progressive feminists want to build a robust multiracial democracy in the United States, we have to understand how Evangelical power has been built," says Talia Lavin, author of Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.

Journalist Talia Lavin's second book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, reports that a huge swath of the U.S. body politic-at least 10 million people-subscribe to the Evangelical notion that spiritual warfare is necessary to create God's kingdom on earth.

A deep distrust of secular authority, she writes, coupled with rigid ideas about gender, sexuality, and power has led many Evangelicals into conservative political activism. Alongside the homeschooling of children, the acceptance of corporal punishment as necessary for successful parenting, and the submission of wives to husbands, patriarchy is writ large in the communities Lavin describes.

Moreover, thanks to in-depth interviews with more than 100 Evangelicals who've left the fold, Wild Faith gives readers an important window into an often-underestimated population whose worldview includes belief in a literal Devil, support for strengthening the state of Israel, and opposition to abortion, birth control and sexual agency.

Lavin spoke with Ms.'s Eleanor J. Bader several weeks before the book's October 15 release.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Eleanor J. Bader: What prompted you to explore Evangelical Christianity as a social and political movement?

Talia Lavin: My first book, Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, was about racist fringe movements. Since it came out in 2020 I've noticed that a lot of neo-Nazi ideas-extreme hostility to immigrants, vile comments about trans people and an obsession with controlling women's bodies, for example-have been incorporated into mainstream political speech. These ideas are articulated everywhere and things that were once not spoken aloud are now part of everyday discourse.

I wanted to explore this, study how we got here and interrogate how brutal rhetoric and ruthless policies became normalized.

Bader: How did you handle being immersed in such a racist and misogynist world?

Lavin: I finished researching and writing Culture Warlords in nine months during a global pandemic and being isolated had a damaging psychological impact on me. I was writing about hardcore Nazis and, as a Jewish feminist, I took what they said and wrote personally. These were people who explicitly said that they wanted folks like me dead. It was traumatizing.

This book was different. First of all, we're no longer in a lockdown, and by the time I started Wild Faith, I'd learned a lot about pacing. I took two years to write and research this book and my hard-won wisdom is something I call guarding my heart. With this book, I knew I needed to make space for things that give me joy so I did not get stuck in an airless bell jar or find myself caught in despair.

Bader: Were you successful?

Lavin: Sort of. The most impactful research I did involved reading a large number of marriage and parenting manuals that discussed wifely submission and the paddling of children to ensure obedience. Talking at length to many people who survived violent childhoods gave me insight into their trauma and I view these conversations as a sacred trust. That said, as a journalist, I absorbed some of their pain. I wanted the facts I was reporting to be perfect, of course, but what also helped wasn't shying away from my own opinions under the name of "faux objectivity."

Bader: The promotion of women as male "help meets" and obedient wives and mothers has deep historical roots. Why do you think so many women and girls go along with oppressive gender "rules" and abuse their children?

Lavin: Wild Faith is unapologetically feminist, but I don't subscribe to the idea that women are inherently more compassionate than men. Time and again we've seen women work to restrict reproductive rights; women are also authors of some of the marriage manuals that prescribe wifely submission.

Female involvement in right-wing movements and Evangelism are nothing new. There have always been women in Evangelical and right-wing circles-public speakers and leaders-who use their talents to push other women into roles that they, themselves, do not adhere to. But I think hypocrisy is a weak charge to level against people. It's petty.

'Wild Faith ' is unapologetically feminist, but I don't subscribe to the idea that women are inherently more compassionate than men. Time and again we've seen women work to restrict reproductive rights; women are also authors of some of the marriage manuals that prescribe wifely submission.
Talia Lavin, author of Wild Faith

You have to understand that for the religious right-wing, a multitude of sins can be forgiven if what's done is done in service to God. Those women who write, speak out, or go to law school see themselves on a holy mission. After all, if you are fighting the Devil, if you believe your words and actions are in direct service to a divine plan, then taking a public role as a woman is a small transgression, if it's a transgression at all.

A big portion of Wild Faith makes the argument that people who say they believe in a political or theological doctrine are doing so from a position of sincerity. Yes, for women this means they're collaborating with patriarchy, but they believe they are making the world a more sacred place.

Spiritual warfare is the fundamental framework of the Christian right. They are working to save and preserve the soul of America.

Bader: But isn't this also about power?

Lavin: The desire for power and the sincerity of belief are not mutually exclusive. Many Christian texts specifically argue for taking the reins of temporal power. There is no reason to doubt that people who say they want to turn the U.S. into a Christian nation are genuine in their desire.

The history of religion shows us that it is possible to advocate for terrible things as a zealous believer in a vengeful God. Sincere faith is not a shield against things that are harmful to some members of society. Truly awful things have been done in the name of faith.

Bader: One of the book's most intense sections focuses on the Satanic Panic, which you describe as "a culture war campaign rooted in demon-tinged hysteria, waged by Christian parents and law enforcement officers who were convinced that the most banal interactions were influenced by Lucifer himself." Teachers at several preschools were accused of sexually molesting children. While the charges against the McMartin Preschool were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence, several educators were convicted of specific charges. How did the panic take hold and spread?

Lavin: Let me clarify.Although the panic has waxed and waned, it never ended. Within Evangelical communities, demonology is a vibrant political force and there are people who believe that demons are cavorting in American schools. QAnon has sucked up these ideas. But it's worth stating that it was not just conservative Evangelical Christians who got caught up in the Satanic Panic. Janet Reno at the Department of Justice, law enforcers across the country and victim's rights advocates, including some feminists, got on board. As I see it, periodic moral panics don't ever completely die, but they do hibernate.

The desire for power and the sincerity of belief are not mutually exclusive. Many Christian texts specifically argue for taking the reins of temporal power. There is no reason to doubt that people who say they want to turn the U.S. into a Christian nation are genuine in their desire.
Talia Lavin, author of Wild Faith
Bader: You write that many Evangelicals are uncritical supporters of Israel and see the Palestinian people as an "obstacle to the coming return of Christ." Can you explain this?

Lavin: The founding of modern-day Israel is thought to be the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy. Some end times theology requires the entire Jewish population to be gathered back to Israel before Christ can return. These folks are cheering the war in Gaza because they see it as the violence that the Bible predicts will provoke the Apocalypse. Palestinians do not figure into this; they are extraneous.

Bader: What's behind Evangelical opposition to vaccines?

Lavin: A big element of Evangelical thought involves skepticism about government, sometimes called the "deep state." There have always been people who see vaccines as dangerous but this group grew after COVID vaccines hit the market. Since 2020, overt opposition to vaccine mandates and violent resistance to state-mandated healthcare of any kind has spread. Within Evangelical communities, there's a knee-jerk skepticism toward all top-down government authority.

Bader: Liberation theologians and groups like the Poor People's Campaign have a totally different interpretation of Scripture and ally themselves with the poor and disenfranchised. Do Evangelicals acknowledge these different interpretations of the gospel?

Lavin: It's important not to fall into the trap of seeing Evangelicals as "bad" Christians. Of course, their theology is different from liberal theology. In fact, left-wing Christianity and right-wing Christianity are fundamentally different theological projects.

But calling Evangelicals "fake Christians," as some liberal groups do, is both damaging and unproductive.

For me as a religious outsider, it's clear that Christian is not a synonym for good. The word simply refers to people who believe Jesus is the son of God.

Bader: Let's talk about corporal punishment, which you describe in horrifying detail. Although we know that some people leave Evangelical communities because of physical or emotional abuse, is it all or nothing or is it possible for folks to retain some ties to family and friends if they leave?

Lavin: Every person I spoke to had a different story. Some left because they're queer. Others could not conform in other ways or simply decided that they could no longer stay. For most, separation is a long process because it involves leaving family, community and financial security.

Many people I interviewed told me of constant attempts to draw them back in; those who resist typically become estranged from their parents, siblings and other relatives. I found it interesting to see that many Evangelical ministries offer resources for parents who are estranged from their children. This told me that the phenomenon is more common than is publicly acknowledged.

Bader: Have the many church scandals-especially those that involve extramarital or queer sex-had any impact on loosening the rules governing gender or behavioral norms?

Lavin: Around the time that the #MeToo movement was at its height, there were murmurs about sexual abuse in Evangelical circles, using the hashtag #Churchtoo. The backlash against these accusations-and against feminism more generally-was ferocious. Everything that the church teaches centers on inculcating obedience and anyone who rocks the boat is met with vitriol.

Bader: What message or messages do you want readers to take away from Wild Faith?

Lavin: Knowledge is power. If progressive feminists want to build a robust multiracial democracy in the United States, we have to understand how Evangelical power has been built. I also hope people will see that sincere faith can be a motive for brutal political policies and outcomes and combat it accordingly.

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Evangelical Power, Spiritual Warfare and the Christian Right: The Ms. Q&A With Talia Lavin, Author of 'Wild Faith' - Ms. Magazine

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Journalist Talia Lavin's second book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, reports that a huge swath of the U.S. body politic-at least 10 million people-subscribe to the Evangelical notion that spiritual warfare is necessary to create God's kingdom on earth.

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In the U.S., Marriage Functions More Like a Privilege—Not an Equal Basic Right

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An excerpt from Allison Raskin’s new book, I Do (I Think): Conversations About Marriage. ’This elevation of marriage is a problem for multiple reasons, because as we know well by

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College Students Already Faced Barriers to Voting—And States Are Adding More

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With just weeks until Election Day, young people and college students face potential challenges at the ballot box—both last-minute and as part of laws enacted after 2020 through state legislatures.

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Abortion Bans Can Be Deadly for Victims of Domestic Violence

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In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, abortion bans have made pregnant individuals more vulnerable to abuse and, in some cases, deadly violence. Abortion bans are

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The Life of the Mother, The Grief of Her Child: What Abortion Bans Take From Us

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A 6-year-old boy faces life without his mother, Amber Nicole Thurman, because of an abortion ban. Candi Miller died at home with her 3-year-old daughter beside her, after her teenage

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Kamala Harris and the Political Power of Black Women: The Ms. Q&A with Kimberly Peeler-Allen

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As we stand poised to potentially elect our first female president who is also a woman of color, we know this moment builds on a long history of other women

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Cary Franklin, Melissa Goodman, Amanda Barrow

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A National Abortion Ban Is at Stake in this Election

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Transition documents, the Republican Party platform and policy statements demonstrate that a new Trump administration intends to take actions that would ban or severely restrict abortion access in every state.

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Angela Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester Could Make History as First Two Black Women to Serve Simultaneously in U.S. Senate

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Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation. This week: Indigenous People’s Day, the New York Equal Rights Amendment, fostering trust in a time of

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Republican AGs Want Access to Health Records of Out-of-State Abortion Seekers. Texas’ Ken Paxton Is Leading the Charge.

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Since the fall of Roe, cross-border abortion travel has doubled. To guard against the threat of having—as President Biden put it—the medical records of abortion patients ’used against them, their doctor,

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Feminist Future, or Return of the Strongman? The Young Men’s Vote and the Fate of the Nation

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The political commentariat has paid more attention to gender during this campaign cycle—especially masculinity—than ever before. The roots of this gap preceded Trump’s entrance into presidential politics, but the larger-than-life

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Abusers often use pregnancy as a tool to exert control. When abortion is no longer an option, countless women and children are at even greater risk.

As the 2024 election approaches, voters face a critical decision: whether to protect reproductive rights at the ballot box. In many states, abortion access is on the line, either through direct ballot measures or by electing candidates whose policies will determine the future of these rights. But what is often overlooked in this debate is the dangerous ripple effect abortion bans have on domestic violence.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy, abortion bans have made pregnant individuals more vulnerable to abuse and, in some cases, deadly violence.

State bans on abortion have severely restricted access to reproductive healthcare, but they've also compounded the dangers faced by victims of domestic violence. Abusers often use pregnancy as a tool to exert control, and when abortion is no longer an option, that control becomes even more absolute. This dynamic puts countless women and children at greater risk.

Pregnancy is a known trigger for domestic violence, as abusers see it as a moment to assert dominance. Abortion bans also give abusive partners the power to force women into continuing pregnancies against their will. Abusive partners, already prone to control, may feel trapped by the economic consequences of an unplanned pregnancy, leading to greater conflict. As a result, pregnancy can increase threatening and abusive behaviors that are meant to influence one's decision about whether to carry a pregnancy to term or not.

In my work as an attorney supporting victims of domestic violence in Maine, I have seen firsthand how pregnancy often escalates abusive behaviors such as stalking, threats and control.

One person seeking a protective order, who had endured years of verbal threats, was physically attacked for the first time after becoming pregnant. Another person, after years of dating, began to experience physical and emotional abuse after becoming pregnant.

The reasons for this escalation can vary-some abusers may not want the responsibility of a child, while others may want to prevent their partner from seeking an abortion. In many cases, the financial burden of carrying a pregnancy to term adds fuel to the fire, often with deadly consequences.

In one chilling example, an Ohio man was sentenced to death in 2022 for murdering the mother of his child after facing jail time for unpaid child support, believing he was tricked into having a child.

These anecdotal accounts are supported by research: Intimate partner homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women, accounting for 45.3 percent of maternal deaths. Recent studies show that homicide rates for women and girls aged 10 to 44 increased in states that have enacted abortion restrictions.

Women who once had access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, now find themselves trapped in dangerous situations due to restrictions on abortion. The consequences of abortion bans extend far beyond pregnant individuals. Abused women are more likely to receive inadequate or no medical care, and those who received inadequate care during pregnancy report more unintended pregnancies. As a result, abuse during pregnancy carries additional concerns for the health and well-being of the unborn child, including low birth weight, preterm birth and long-term mental and physical health issues.

Abuse during pregnancy also puts children at risk long after birth. Studies have shown that women who are abused during pregnancy are three times more likely to exhibit behaviors that could lead to child abuse. The stress and isolation they endure make it difficult to care for their children, and the consequences can be fatal. Infanticide, the most extreme form of child abuse among children, is most often perpetrated by younger individuals who are unaware they are even pregnant-highlighting how restricted access to abortion can have deadly outcomes for newborns.

Contrary to claims that abortion bans protect life, they do the opposite by increasing violence against women and children. Research shows that when women in abusive relationships can access comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, they and their children experience less trauma, violence and abuse.

By stripping away the right to abortion, the Dobbs decision has left women-especially those in abusive relationships-without a crucial means of protecting themselves and their families. Abortion bans are not just about reproductive rights: They threaten the safety and well-being of pregnant women and their children. These bans are a direct attack on the right to bodily autonomy, reinforcing the dangerous cycles of abuse, poverty and control.

Up next:

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Abortion Bans Can Be Deadly for Victims of Domestic Violence - Ms. Magazine

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In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision, abortion bans have made pregnant individuals more vulnerable to abuse and, in some cases, deadly violence. Abortion bans are

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State Supreme Court Races Will Determine Abortion Access in Several States

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Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision gave states the authority to decide whether women can access legal abortions, state supreme courts are emerging as vital arenas in the battle over

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Cary Franklin, Melissa Goodman, Amanda Barrow

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A National Abortion Ban Is at Stake in this Election

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Transition documents, the Republican Party platform and policy statements demonstrate that a new Trump administration intends to take actions that would ban or severely restrict abortion access in every state.

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Tennessee Court Says Some Women Denied Abortions Should Have Received Them Under Law

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Late Thursday, a three-judge panel of the Tennessee Chancery Court unanimously agreed that the unclear exception to Tennessee’s abortion ban is preventing women in the state from getting medically necessary

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Renewed Attack on Mifepristone by Republican-Led States: Junk Science, Pro-Natalism and Control of Pregnant Teens

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When it comes to abortion pill availability, the Supreme Court left open a dangerous door that the Republican-controlled states of Missouri, Kansas and Idaho are now seeking to walk through.

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Homelessness has always been a controversial and misunderstood issue. And when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that punishing homeless people for sleeping on public property does not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, reality for those experiencing homelessness got much tougher. In reaction to the decision, California's governor ordered local officials to remove homeless encampments. In August, in an equally cruel move, the Springfield, Ohio City Council abruptly shut down a shelter, throwing 22 families (including 70 children) out on the street over a contract misunderstanding.

In an effort to highlight a significant and unrecognized segment of America's homeless population, a survival guide for mothers raising their children without a home released in September is being distributed to shelters and school district homeless liaisons throughout the country.

Three women-coincidently all named Melissa-worked with author Diane Nilan and co-author Diana Bowman to compile their wisdom from lived experiences raising their children without a home in The Three Melissas: A Practical Guide to Surviving Family Homelessness.

The book, published by the Charles Bruce Foundation, comes at a time when there is a national affordable housing crisis, governments are cracking down on the homeless population, and house-less parents (mostly mothers) desperately struggle to care for their children.

Rarely do parents have input in how shelters work, and they and their children bear the brunt of the dysfunctional policies.
Diane Nilan

Providing housing and services to unhoused people is the key to solving homelessness, but in the meantime, smaller, actionable items can be tackled. The three Melissas want to see the definition of homelessness updated and more family-friendly policies implemented at shelters.

"Overall, our family shelter systems can unintentionally exacerbate the trauma that many families suffer from," said Nilan, who ran shelters for 15 years. "Rarely do parents have input in how shelters work, and they and their children bear the brunt of the dysfunctional policies."

Redefining the Definition of Homelessness

Homelessness is calculated and reported to Congress based on HUD's Point-in-Time (PIT) method, which counts the number of people sleeping in shelters and in the streets on an appointed night each January. It's a controversial method because critics believe it vastly underrepresents the homeless population, especially the mostly invisible families doubled-up or staying in hotels/motels.

The underestimate justifies a relative minuscule amount of federal funding, about $72 billion, to address homelessness.

As of March, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported that 653,104 Americans were homeless, but the number is much higher:

The count included 111,620 children under 18.

In contrast, 1,200,000 children experiencing homelessness were identified in public schools, an undercount that does not include babies, toddlers and young people not enrolled in school.

Families-usually single mothers and their children-staying in cheap motels because they can pay night to night, or doubling-up in other people's homes, aren't considered homeless enough by HUD's standard.

The process of determining who is eligible for services, needs to be broadened to match the federal McKinney-Vento Act, said the three Melissas, so access to emergency and subsidized housing can be extended to those living in other situations.

The McKinney-Vento Act, a federal law requiring schools to help unhoused children, defines "homeless children and youth" as anyone who lacks a "fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence"-meaning the parent or caretaker rents or owns the residence, the child can come home to it every day and it is safe.

"The McKinney-Vento Act is empowering and provides protection for parents and children alike," said Melissa N. from Florida who credits the act as a saving grace. "My kids were able to stay in school and make friends, which was the only constant in their lives."

When I experienced homelessness, I had two cats. My case manger fostered my cats while I was in the shelter for fear I would not enter if I had to make the choice to give up my pets.
DeBorah Gilbert White

For this to happen, HUD and other federal agencies must declare housing a human right and exhibit a willingness to eliminate policies and practices that serve as barriers to people getting the help needed because their homeless experience does not meet a specific criteria, said DeBorah Gilbert White, Ph.D., who reviewed the book and is the director of education for the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C.

"We believe that housing is essential to the health and well-being of every human being," said Gilbert. "Our motto at the National Coalition for the Homelessness is: 'Everyone deserves a home'-period. Connected closely to how we define homelessness is changing perceptions we hold as a society about people identified as homeless and the treatment of people based on housing status, specifically the criminalization of homelessness."

Gilbert explained that the passage of anti-discriminatory legislation locally, state-wide and nationally such as Homeless Bills of Rights, Source of Income to secure housing and Right to Representation during evictions are helpful.

Melissa N. from Florida, who bought the FEMA trailer she and her three children were placed in after Hurricane Ivan displaced them 2004, could have used eviction representation. The trailer park where she paid rent, developed problems with the sewer system, and the county shut down the park without offering assistance to move the trailers.

"If we didn't find the means and a place to move our trailer by the deadline, our property would've been written off as abandoned and seized, or we would've been trespassing on private property and forcefully removed from our own homes!" she said. "After calling the local news, reaching out to every church and community agency I could find to hear me out, and presenting our story in front of the Board of County Commissioners, we were finally granted resources to relocate the remaining families, secure new lots and have our homes moved."

Loosening Shelter Restrictions and Adding Resources

Shelters are a lifeline for those living without a home, but they often create additional challenges, especially for mothers with small children.

The culture or environment of a shelter is shaped and framed by the people operating it, and those who are hired to maintain it, said Gilbert. There is a need for more low-barrier shelters that provide more flexibility connected to entering them and what residents are allowed to do while there.

"I support low-barrier shelters, specifically those that accept pets," said Gilbert who experienced sheltered homelessness in Wilmington, Del. "When I experienced homelessness, I had two cats. My case manger fostered my cats while I was in the shelter for fear I would not enter if I had to make the choice to give up my pets."

Staying in shelters doesn't happen for lots of reasons. Many communities don't have family shelters. Or they're full. Or they don't accept older children, especially boys. Pets aren't allowed. The shelters may have unreasonable time limits or rules that are easy to break. Most shelters make people leave during the day, which is very difficult for mothers with babies, toddlers or a child with special needs.

Melissa A. from Chicago had a traumatic experience with strict shelter rules about curfew and absence. When her 7-year-old son was hospitalized with extreme constipation, she was faced with leaving her child in the hospital alone or lose the space at the shelter for herself and four other children.

"I told the shelter and they told me I would forfeit my stay if we didn't return that night," explained Melissa. "The hospital told me if I didn't keep my son at the hospital, they would call social services on me. I pleaded and begged them that I had no support and I had nobody to come stay with my child."

She explained that her other children, ranging in age from 2 to 16, could not stay at the shelter without her and the hospital only allowed one visitor. Through multiple desperate conversations with staff, social workers, counselors and shelter personnel, Melissa and her children were allowed to stay at the Ronald McDonald house for two weeks while her son was treated and recovered and then return to the shelter.

Shelters could also offer locked storage to keep items like birth certificates, legal documents and clothes for the off season. A mother with kids cannot remove everything from the shelter every day, even if it's one suitcase per child. Having a place to store valuables items and documents is essential.

Melissa T. from Kansas who found herself without a home after escaping domestic violence explained, "I had a friend who allowed me to keep our belongings in an outdoor shed. I was grateful because I had a lot of pictures of my girls I wanted to keep." Unfortunately, when she couldn't use the shed any longer, she learned a hard lesson.

"Never store irreplaceable items in a storage facility," she said. "If you are unable to pay for the space, you will not get these items back. I lost all my family photos."

Families don't receive "how-to" suggestions when they become homeless, until now. Nilan and Bowman, with combined 75 years of experience working with families experiencing homelessness, and the collaboration of the three Melissas, changed that disparity.

Learn more about The Three Melissas: A Practical Guide to Surviving Family Homelessness by visiting the 3Melissas website.

Up next:

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Mothers Without Homes: Tips on Raising Children While Living on the Streets - Ms. Magazine

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When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that punishing homeless people for sleeping on public property does not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, reality for those experiencing homelessness got much tougher.

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If the architects of Project 2025 get their way, the U.S. government would anoint the unborn with unmatched and never-before-recognized rights over all persons already born.

For years, abortion opponents have attempted to enshrine into state and federal law the Christian fundamentalist belief that fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses are separate persons with full legal rights. So far, ballot measures specifically and explicitly seeking to accomplish this goal have failed because of the deeply unpopular implications of this legal fiction on access to abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization. That such measures could make a wide range of criminal laws applicable to pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes has also discouraged support for these so-called personhood measures.

This may be why the conservative Project 2025 policy agenda avoids "personhood" language. But a closer look at this detailed plan for the next conservative president reveals their goal to give fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses more rights than any born person and to use the protection of the "unborn" as cover for government action denying women and all people with the capacity for pregnancy equal status as full constitutional persons.

In a recent statement, Lawyers Defending American Democracy warned, "The sweeping recommendations throughout Project 2025 would effectively establish fetal personhood through agency rules and regulations, and without congressional legislation or vote.

"Under the doctrine of fetal personhood, any abortion-no matter how early in pregnancy or how endangered the mother's life might be-would constitute murder, with no exceptions for rape, incest or the mother's health. In vitro fertilization (IVF) and other procedures could similarly be crimes. Even automobile accidents resulting in miscarriage could be manslaughter. Other consequences are easy to imagine."

A Longstanding and Unpopular Idea Repackaged in Project 2025

The idea of "fetal personhood" has failed to gain majority support, even in conservative states such as North Dakota. In 2011, Mississippians voted down Proposition 26, a personhood measure that would have changed the state Constitution by redefining the word person to include "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof." Similarly, so-called personhood measures were repeatedly trounced in Colorado.

Perhaps this is why Project 2025's 887-page policy agenda largely avoids the word "personhood." But not always. According to Project 2025, a Biden-Harris administration rule that protects patient information related to reproductive health care treats "patients in the womb" as " nonpersons contrary to law."

But, mostly without using the term "person," Project 2025 lays out a plan for the next conservative president to use the federal government's executive powers to enact nationwide policies that treat fertilized eggs as persons without needing to rely on courts or legislatures to achieve their goal, overriding the majority of Americans who oppose these measures.

At the same time, Project 2025 makes clear that dismantling women's rights and denying them personhood is central to its policy agenda. Key to accomplishing this is the Project's call to protect the "unborn in every jurisdiction in America." Moreover, Project 2025 proclaims, "From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race or abilities." Missing from this litany is "sex." In other words, one's humanity" does depend on "sex" (assigned at birth).

Project 2025 demands that the next conservative president "work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support." It directs federal agencies, including HHS, to serve "all Americans from conception to natural death."

On the international front, Project 2025 directs the U.S. Agency for International Development to "protect and propel all members of society-women, children and men-from conception to natural death."

It is possible to imagine an administration with a true commitment to life-one that promotes health and well-being, reduces maternal mortality and works to feed, clothe, house and educate all children. But Project 2025 would not promote life. Instead, Project 2025 would undermine public health, destroy and degrade women's lives and inevitably lead to their criminalization.

Project 2025 equates abortion with homicide, using terms that invite comparisons to massive, international war crimes. It describes Roe v. Wade as facilitating "the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children." In a section on abortion pills, Project 2025 describes mifepristone as causing the "death of the unborn child" and misoprostol as inducing a "delivery of the dead child," and later describes these extremely well-studied and safe medications as "fatally unsafe for unborn children."

Project 2025 Vastly Expands State Power Over Women

The growing efforts to reify the fiction of fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as separate constitutional persons have already provided the basis for a marked increase in arrests of pregnant women.

Rather than put into place policies that recognize that we can't protect future life without protecting the lives of those who get pregnant and give birth to that life, Project 2025 and many of its endorsing organizations advocate policies that jeopardize pregnant women's rights to life health.

Project 2025 argues that the federal law EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) protects "unborn children" in a manner that would permit hospitals to deny women emergency abortion care necessary to protect their health and lives.

Project 2025 promotes the use of state power to control pregnant women and use their bodies to gestate the "unborn," all in the name of protecting fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses. Project 2025 would impose involuntary servitude on pregnant women by requiring them to carry every pregnancy to term, cruelly forcing them to experience pain, harm to their health, near death or actual death as well as moral injury and violations of their religious values and beliefs.

Project 2025 would allow states to prevent pregnant women from traveling, working, exercising or engaging in any activity believed to create a risk to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses. This personhood fiction could result in women being forced into cesarean surgery or detained during pregnancy for disagreeing with their healthcare providers' recommendations.

The result? People are already dying. And in states restricting access to reproductive healthcare, both maternal and infant mortality rates have spiked.

A Super, Uber Class of "Persons"

Project 2025 repeatedly refers to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as children. In a section objecting to the COVID-19 vaccine, which they claim was developed using "aborted fetal cell lines," Project 2025 states that "there is never any justification for ending a child's life as part of research." Later, they declare, "Research using human embryonic stem cells also involves the destruction of human life and should not be subsidized with taxpayer dollars."

Project 2025 would demean all people by giving fetal cell lines, fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses more rights than any born person. We know this because no actual person has the right to use the body of another person without the other person's consent.

In other words, even assuming fertilized eggs are separate and independent persons, why would they have the right to take over and use another person's body in such an intimate and invasive way? In no other context can the state force citizens to donate their organs to another human.

No actual child has the right to force a parent or sibling to undergo surgery or any other medical procedure for their benefit or to force any other person to risk their lives and health for their benefit. Yet, according to Project 2025, the U.S. government should anoint the unborn with unmatched and never-before-recognized rights over all persons already born.

This is why we must understand Project 2025 as the culmination of the radical personhood agenda, launched in the 1970s, significantly advanced in 2022 by the Supreme Court decision overturning of Roe v. Wade and now poised to be fully achieved if Donald Trump is elected.

Up next:

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Project 2025 Would Establish an Unborn Uber Class - Ms. Magazine

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Mostly without using the term "person," Project 2025 lays out a plan for the next conservative president to use the federal government's executive powers to enact nationwide policies that treat

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Anna Bernstein, Amy Friedrich-Karnik, Samira Damavandi

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How Project 2025 Seeks to Obliterate Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

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Project 2025 promotes a presidential agenda that rolls back civil and human rights and implements extremist conservative policies across every federal department and agency. Its sweeping far-right policy framework, by the

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Some of the Hardest Questions Kamala Harris Has Been Answering Lately, ICYMI

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Two weeks before the election, with early voting already ongoing in a majority of U.S. states, Vice President Kamala Harris is making her way through interviews, explaining her positions and

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Over 41 million Gen Zers will be eligible to vote in this upcoming general election. That’s huge! It also means the face of our electorate is rapidly changing, and we

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A List of All the Ways Ron DeSantis Has Tried to Meddle in Florida’s Abortion Ballot Measure

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Officials in Republican states have waged legal battles and other efforts to thwart abortion ballot measures or to influence their language. Florida stands out.

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"I never, even for a single second, gave my consent to Mr. Pelicot or those other men."

Halfway through the mass rape trial in France that has been shocking the world and brewing feminist rage since September, survivor Gisèle Pelicot took the stand for the first time on Wednesday to share her nightmarish story.

Pelicot, 72, first spoke publicly about her experience and the aftermath in September at the trial of her former husband, 71-year-old Dominique Pelicot. He admitted to drugging her unconscious so that he and 50 other men he met in online chatrooms could rape her countless times over a period of almost 10 years, from 2011 to 2020.

Some of the accused men -aged between 26 and 74, with jobs ranging from nurse to truck driver to journalist-have admitted that they knew Pelicot was drugging his then-wife with sedatives and anti-anxiety medication to render her unconscious. Most of them, however, have denied rape or said they thought they were participating in the couple's organized game.

In response to the claims that the men thought Gisèle Pelicot was drunk or just pretending to be unconscious, she said, "When they see a woman sleeping on her bed, no one thought to ask themselves a question? Don't they have brains?"

On Wednesday, Oct. 23, Pelicot gave her own testimony and explained why she's choosing to speak publicly about her harrowing experience and raise awareness about rape.

Gisèle Pelicot walking to take the stand today, her strength echoing in every step:

"It's not for us to have shame, it's for them," she told the court.

"I want all women who have been raped to say: Madame Pelicot did it, I can too. I don't want them to be ashamed any longer," pic.twitter.com/Dc4cUYXDFJ
- David Challen (@David_Challen) October 23, 2024

Here's what she had to say on her first day on the stand, in her own words.

Why she's taking a stand:

"I wanted all woman victims of rape-not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels-I want those woman to say: Mrs. Pelicot did it, we can do it too.

When you're raped there is shame, and it's not for us to have shame-it's for them.

It's true that I hear lots of women, and men, who say you're very brave. I say it's not bravery, it's will and determination to change society."

How society needs a better understanding of rape:

"For me they are rapists, they remain rapists. Rape is rape ... Of course today I feel responsible for nothing. Today, above all, I'm a victim ... We have to progress on rape culture in society."

Her experience hearing the accused men speak:

"The profile of a rapist is not someone met in a car park late at night. A rapist can also be in the family, among our friends.

When I saw one of the accused on the stand last week who came into my bedroom and house without consent ... This man, who came to rape an unconscious, 57-year-old woman-I am also a mother and grandmother. I could have been his grandmother.

I am a woman who is totally destroyed, and don't know how I can pick myself up from this."

Her horrifying experience:

"Often when there's a football match on TV, I'd let him watch it alone. He brought my ice cream to bed, where I was, my favorite flavor, raspberry. And I thought, 'How lucky I am, he's a love' ... I never felt my heart flutter, I didn't feel anything, I must have gone under very quickly. I would wake up with my pajamas on. The mornings I must have been more tired than usual, but I walk a lot and thought it was that."

How she feels about her former husband:

"So many times, I said to myself, 'How lucky am I to have you at my side. For me, he was someone I trusted entirely. How can the perfect man have got to this? How could you have betrayed me to this point? How could you have brought these strangers into my bedroom ... ?

I wouldn't have stayed 50 years if he had behaved like a violent brute. Like all couples, we had arguments. We got through lots of challenges, illness, work, money. He wasn't a brute. He never hit me ... This case for me is total incomprehension. I would never have imagined a man could do this."

Up next:

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Gisèle Pelicot, the Woman at the Center of France's Mass Rape Trial, Takes the Stand for the First Time - Ms. Magazine

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"I never, even for a single second, gave my consent to Mr. Pelicot or those other men." Halfway through the mass rape trial in France that has been shocking the world and brewing feminist rage since September, survivor Gisèle Pelicot took the stand for the first time on Wednesday to share her nightmarish story.

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Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation: Complicated Origins of the Electoral College; With Women in Power, Women’s Lives Improve

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Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation. This week’s Weekend Reading covers our 2024 Declaration of Sentiments, the need for bipartisan solutions in state government,

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From Music Fans to Voters: Registering Young People Ahead of the 2024 Elections

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Gen Z and millennials are officially the largest voting bloc in the U.S., making up 48 percent of eligible voters. In 2022, it’s estimated that 27 percent of people aged

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For Three Decades, ‘Remember My Name’ Has Memorialized Those Lost to Domestic Violence

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Created in 1994 in partnership with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) and Ms. magazine, the ‘Remember My Name’ project continues to raise awareness of individuals who have died

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In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can't-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement's many milestones. We're Keeping Score online, too-in this biweekly roundup.

Lest We Forget

"I don't think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble. We have our family by blood and then we have our family by love. And I have both. Family comes in many forms and I think that increasingly all of us understand that this is not the 1950s anymore." -Vice President Harris on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast, responding to Sarah Huckabee Sanders's comments that without biological children, Harris "doesn't have anything keeping her humble."

"We don't want to go back; we want to go forward. I hope that people will see [voting] as a duty, as a right, as a privilege, but also [that they will] connect their lives to their ballot. From clean air to clean drinking water and healthcare. All of those things are connected to your right to vote. "Every year, someone tells you, 'This is the most important election of our lifetimes.' Well, in the words of Congressman Jim Clyburn, this one is the most consequential. [We will feel] the consequences [of this election] for decades-if not generations. Our democracy, our freedoms, our rights are on the ballot. And every race, from the top of the ticket to the bottom, counts." -Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) on the importance of voting and the stakes of the upcoming election.

"Due to the abortion ban, I was being forced to carry the baby from 23 weeks all the way to 30-something weeks, knowing that my son was going to die. The government had no right to do that to my family. This ban is torture." -Deborah Dorbert, sharing her story with her husband Lee in Floridians' Protecting Freedoms' Yes on 4 campaign's new ad. The Florida couple were denied a medically necessary abortion.

"To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it's the First Amendment, stupid." -District Judge Mark E. Walker, preventing Florida's Department of Health from threatening TV stations that air ads in support of the state's abortion rights ballot measure. Despite the ruling against their threatening cease and desist letters, Governor DeSantis's Administration continues to claim that the ad is "dangerous" and "detrimental to public health."

"When asked about abortion access, JD Vance repeated the same sound bite we've heard before-we should leave it to the states. This plan is dangerous. Donald Trump's state abortion bans have created the chaos and confusion that we experience today. We've witnessed the disasters caused when our basic human rights are subject to geography. We've seen lives lost when healthcare access is controlled by the personal beliefs of anti-abortion politicians. We now have a tale of two states, with haves and have-nots on basic healthcare access separated by thin state lines. We need federal protections-beyond Roe-that affirm our human rights no matter what state we live in." -Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at SiX Action.

"You're not pro-life. It's not pro-life to deny women care so long that they can't have children anymore. It's not pro-life to force a victim of rape to carry their rapist's baby. Understand that when Ted Cruz says he's pro-life, he doesn't mean yours." -Democratic challenger Rep. Colin Allred to Senator Ted Cruz. Earlier this month, Sen. Cruz campaigned alongside state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the lawmaker behind Texas' extreme abortion ban.

"On the one hand, you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences, who's had to work harder and do more and overcome and achieves the second highest office in the land and is putting forward concrete proposals to directly address the things that are vital in our neighborhoods and our communities. "And on the other side, you have someone who has consistently shown disregard, not just for the communities, but for you as a person, and you're thinking about sitting out? And you're coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses? I've got a problem with that because-because part of it makes me think, and I'm speaking to men directly now, part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you're coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that." -Former President Barack Obama, speaking to Black men who are reluctant to vote for Kamala Harris, during a campaign stop in Pittsburgh.

Milestones

+ A Tennessee court temporarily lifted the state's total abortion ban for patients with dangerous complications or lethal fetal diagnoses. The three-judge (all women) panel agreed that unclear wording in the law prevents women from getting medically necessary care.

Plaintiff and OB-GYN Dr. Laura Andreson celebrated, "today's ruling isn't only about our lawsuit; it's about upholding patients' access to crucial healthcare and allowing doctors to practice medicine without fear. By temporarily blocking the state ban on abortion as applied to patients experiencing the same unthinkable diagnoses that my co-plaintiffs were forced to face, the panel has prevented immeasurable suffering."

+ Conversely, a week after it was struck down by a judge, Georgia's Supreme Court reinstated the state's six-week abortion ban while they consider the case.

In 2009, the first bill President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, eliminating that statute of limitations. During her long legal battle, Ledbetter became an activist and joined Obama on the campaign trail. She spoke at multiple Democratic National Conventions, and wrote a memoir Grace and Grit. Her story is also told in the 2024 film Lilly, which premiered days before her death.

Lilly Ledbetter never set out to be a trailblazer or a household name. She just wanted to be paid the same as a man for her hard work. But this grandmother from Alabama kept on fighting until the day I signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law - my first as president.... pic.twitter.com/Z4ZxsDbIU5
- Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 14, 2024

+ The Supreme Court refused a request from the Biden administration to send an Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) abortion case back to the lower courts. As a result, the current ruling will stand, allowing Texas hospitals to refuse to provide abortion care even in emergencies. The legal principle isn't yet settled at a national level, as the Biden Administration attempts to argue that EMTALA requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care even if it's illegal under state law.

Dallas reproductive justice organization the Afiya Center warned that Black women will be disproportionately affected. "No doubt, Black women will suffer unnecessary injuries, risk criminal prosecution, and worst of all preventable deaths due to this ruling. ... When bans and bills and laws are put into place that impact people, Black people will be the ones who are always disenfranchised, and marginalized people will be overly impacted and heavily criminalized by the decision that they make."

+ Attorney Generals in Kansas, Missouri and Idaho are attempting to make abortion medication illegal for minors, and prevent abortion providers from mailing medication to states with abortion bans. If successful, their complaint against the FDA could diminish access to mifepristone across the country.

+ Floridians Protecting Freedom's Yes on 4 campaign raised a record $17,216,884 between Oct. 5 and 11, bringing their total to almost $90,000,000 from over 40,000 donors. The abortion rights campaign has knocked on over 500,000 doors and made calls to over 450,000 Floridians so far.

+ California became the first state to legally recognize intersectionality. The state's new amendment to anti-discrimination protections explicitly includes discrimination against the intersection of two or more protected characteristics, like gender, race, age or sexuality.

Former President Jimmy Carter was among those voting for Kamala Harris in Georgia, fulfilling his goal to live long enough to cast his vote for her. Carter turned 100 on Oct. 1, becoming the oldest former U.S. president ever.

+ A New York woman may face felony charges after experiencing a miscarriage in a restaurant bathroom. The fetus wouldn't have been able to survive, a medical examiner found, but police are still considering criminal charges for "concealing a human corpse" - despite New York not classifying a fetus as "human remains" until later in pregnancy.

One of the women, Jackie Noyola, spoke out: "While we are grateful that this fraudulent case is finally over, we are angry for ourselves and others who have been terrorized for the simple act of supporting a friend who is facing abuse. No one should ever have to fear punishment, criminalization, or a lengthy court battle for helping someone they care about."

How We're Doing

+ Abortion is now the number one issue for women under 30 this election. Almost 40 percent of young women said it was the most important issue for their vote-double the number before Vice President Harris became the Democratic nominee.

Harris is also gaining on Trump in economic issues. About 46 percent of women voters trust Harris over Trump to address household costs, compared to 39 percent that prefer Trump. Harris also has a lead on healthcare costs, and Black women strongly prefer Harris on inflation.

+ Just weeks before the election, women are motivated and energized. Since June, there was a 24 percentage point increase in the number of women who are satisfied with their choice of candidates, and a 19 point increase in the number who are more motivated to vote than in previous presidential elections.

+ Despite claiming to oppose non-consensual nudity, X (formerly Twitter) is slow to respond to reports of revenge porn. When researchers tested X's internal reporting procedure, none of the 25 fake harmful images they posted were removed. But when they flagged similar images through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), all 25 were removed within a day.

Unfortunately, many victims can't use the DMCA, because they didn't create the images or own the copyright. Non-consensual intimate imagery causes the most harm in the first 48 hours it's online, so effective review and removal procedures are critical. Researchers concluded that a new law may be needed to ensure accountability and quick action from online platforms.

+ As a result of Texas abortion laws, over 75 percent of the state's OB-GYNs now believe they can't practice medicine according to best practices, and 60 percent fear legal consequences for practicing evidence-based medicine. Over 20 percent have thought about or are planning to leave Texas, and 57 percent of OB-GYN residents say that abortion laws are relevant to their decision to stay or leave the state after residency.

Up next:

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Keeping Score: Federal Judge to DeSantis, 'It's the First Amendment, Stupid'; N.Y. Woman Investigated for Pregnancy Loss; Abortion Is #1 Issue for Women Voters Under 30 - Ms. Magazine

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In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can't-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement's many

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Find out the essential issues that are mobilizing young voters to the polls nationwide.

This essay is part of a Women & Democracy multimedia package focused on Gen Z and student voters. The future envisioned by young leaders is bright-it's built on reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, sustainability, freedom from violence and economic opportunity. Explore essays, a brand-new podcast, videos and more from some of your most loved (or soon to be!) influencers and writers, brought to you by Ms., DoSomething, the nonprofit that helps make volunteerism "cool," and The Anthem Awards, the social impact arm of The Webbys.

In an increasingly fragmented landscape, young people are adamantly fighting for the world they want. Gen Z is known for channeling personal passions into social and environmental causes, holding a high standard for taking care of our people and the earth.

Young people are not devoting themselves to specific politicians or parties, opting to rally behind issues directly impacting their lives and futures. With voters aged 18-34 constituting nearly one-fifth of the American electorate, they're already shaping the future of the nation's democracy. The issues they support-chief among them, climate change-reflect a priority to protect the civil liberties and world they're inheriting.

Climate Change

Climate change stands out as the principal issue for young people, with 59 percent of U.S. adults under 30 expressing concern about the longevity of our planet.

In addition to climate change, there are two critical issues that threaten our environment: biodiversity loss and pollution. Collectively known as the triple planetary crisis, young people understand internationally coordinated efforts as the way out.

Youth are championing not just awareness but also concrete solutions, advocating for conservation efforts and the rights of vulnerable groups, including Indigenous communities who are often marginalized in decision-making processes. This generation is not waiting for permission; they are taking action, promoting lifestyle changes and demanding systemic reforms to mitigate pollution and overconsumption.

Reproductive Rights

In the wake of shifting reproductive rights, young people are making their voices heard. Polls indicate that 44 percent of those aged 18-26 disagree with the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. And among the total top percentile of issues young people care about, reproductive rights and bodily autonomy proved to be the top.

As a Ms. analysis of the Harvard Youth Poll noted, "Inflation won every time-except when paired with women's reproductive rights, where it was considered the more important issue: 57 percent to 43 percent."

This issue isn't just about choice; it's tied to broader concerns about mental health, bodily autonomy and liberty, healthcare access, and economic stability. The implications of restrictive abortion laws influence where young people decide to study, live and work, emphasizing the importance of fighting for reproductive rights in their advocacy.

Economic Realities

How can I think about voting about abortion when I can't afford rent?

While environmental issues and abortion rights dominate discussions, young people are also concerned about economic stability. A staggering 53 percent of respondents identified inflation as a top issue, with many struggling to meet basic needs amid rising prices.

Young voices echo the sentiments of a generation grappling with student loan debt and the unaffordability of housing and healthcare. As one person poignantly expressed in a focus group run by The Harvard Gazette, "How can I think about voting about abortion when I can't afford rent?"

It's intersectional. This intertwining of social and economic issues reveals a critical truth: young people's overall well-being and safety largely depend on their financial standing. Activists are frustrated with the lack of systemic action addressing this lapse in basic needs in many parts of the U.S.

Foreign Policy

Young voters are also increasingly vocal about foreign policy, emphasizing the need for a more collaborative approach to global challenges and more regulated U.S. involvement.

A significant majority supports measures to address these concerns, and when it comes to complex international conflicts, young Americans favor dialogue and ceasefires over military intervention. This perspective is reflective of a generation that values diplomacy and humanitarianism, seeking to bridge divides rather than deepen them.

A survey by the Pew Research Center reported that 56 percent of young people say "preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction" should be one of the top three foreign policy priorities for the country. A move away from previous generations, Gen Z is headstrong about taking a less exceptionalistic attitude toward diplomacy.

It's evident young people are not just passive observers; they are active participants, driven by passion and purpose. Their engagement with key issues signals a shift towards a more informed and active electorate. By rallying around causes that matter, young people are not only shaping their own futures but also redefining the landscape of civic engagement.
Empowering young women *and* young men is essential to restoring U.S. democracy. If you agree, sign up for our daily or weekly emails to hear from (and join!) the multigenerational feminists building the future. Or go back to the essay collection.

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The Top Four Causes Igniting Young People - Ms. Magazine

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By rallying around causes that matter, young people are not only shaping their own futures but also redefining the landscape of civic engagement. (This essay is part of a Women

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Florida Censors Pro-Abortion Rights TV Ads

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Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has become the epicenter of an alarming assault on core American freedoms, with free speech in the cross hairs. From schools to universities to private

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Care Policies Can Help Win Elections. Elections Can Help Win Care Policies.

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The issues of “abortion” and “care” are highly intertwined and reinforced in voters’ minds. For many women, anger over the war on their fundamental right to control their own bodies

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The Witch Hunts of the 1600s Never Really Ended

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An excerpt from Mary Anne Franks’ new book, Fearless Speech: Breaking Free From the First Amendment: ’Amber Heard was professionally blacklisted, constantly surveilled by the press and the public, and

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This excerpt is from the first chapter of my new book, Exposed: The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam. Here, I emphasize the importance of stigma when it comes to the pelvic exam. It's an awkward procedure in part because of the question of impropriety. When is it OK to touch a person's genitals? Stories in the media remind us that it is a procedure easily abused or misconstrued, with devastating consequences.

Larry Nassar, the former doctor for the U.S. women's gymnastics team, was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison in 2018 after over 250 women accused him of sexual assault. Nassar is not representative of the majority of medical professionals who perform pelvic exams-but his story serves as a warning of how easy it is for pelvic violence to happen under the façade of medical treatment. Nassar got away with sex crimes precisely because of the stigma surrounding reproductive healthcare. Without a common language to articulate what should be going on down there, it makes it harder to identify what shouldn't.

Editor's note: This excerpt has been lightly edited for style. It contains descriptions of sexual violence.
"He said he was doing a medical treatment."

In September of 2000, Tasha, a 15-year-old gymnast, called her mother from Sydney, Australia, with some exciting news. Three weeks earlier, she was not Olympic-bound; she had not been placed in the Olympic trials. But, shortly after the trials, she received a call from Béla Károlyi who asked her to be an alternate. She flew down to his ranch to train, then directly to Sydney. And now, after a member of the team withdrew with injuries, she wouldn't just be on the sidelines; she was officially competing.

Her mother, Joy Schwikert, answered the call from work-at the craps table at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where she worked as the first-ever female craps dealer, along with Tasha's father, Shannon Warren. Joy high-fived the other dealers in the pit, and the shouting " echoed off the slot machines." The U.S. Olympic Committee had funds to fly one parent over, but not both, so the workers at Caesar's took up a collection to fly her father and younger sister Jordan (also a gymnast) as well. Though they didn't have any more money than the Schwickerts, "everyone wanted me to see my daughter at the Olympics," her father said.

Tasha was over the moon-she was competing, and her whole family would be there: sister, mother, father, and even her mother's identical twin Jill, who, along with Joy, had been a professional tennis player in the 1970s. They would be there to witness her win the team bronze medal.

Tasha never expected to be an Olympian, according to the Los Angeles Times. "She is not a typical gymnast, groomed as a tiny tot to be the next Mary Lou." But she and her sister loved the sport. "We didn't do this for the Olympics," her father explained. "We did this because our girls love it. What a journey this is."[

What a journey, indeed. The exciting phone call from Béla inviting her to join as an alternate would change her life in more than one way. His invitation to train at the Karolyi Ranch en route to Sydney was not a choice; it was a requirement of anyone competing on the U.S. team, thanks to some changes within USA Gymnastics. But she was excited to go; ever since she was 13 and on the junior national team, she had been "awestruck" by Béla. Now he would be training her!

Tasha Schwikert unwittingly entered the ranch at one of its most intense times.

"We were all so broken down and injured," remembered Jeannette Antolin, who was a member of the U.S. national team from 1995 to 2000. "No one was taking care of their bodies. We were all malnutritioned. Most of us had eating disorders at the time. Most of us were being abused by Larry and not knowing it."

Schwikert joined the ranks of the abused after an injury she believes was caused by Béla. She and her teammates were busy performing elevated splits, propping their front legs "up on a stack of mats so they can extend beyond 180 degrees." Béla would forcibly push down on the shoulders of a gymnast who didn't appear as flexible, forcing her legs closer to the ground. When he pushed Schwikert, she felt unbearable pain, and the next day she found she could barely walk, and was sent to Larry Nassar for treatment (she would eventually be diagnosed with a partially torn tendon in her groin).

It was a treatment like none other she had experienced. "He massaged and penetrated me vaginally with his bare hands, claiming it was a medical treatment that would loosen my muscles," she explained. She didn't question it and she didn't resist. "I trusted him because he was a respected doctor." She didn't understand that what he was doing was wrong; she didn't know about sexual abuse, and had "no experience with boys or sex."

Years later, as she put the pieces together, she saw things differently. "Now my whole Olympic experience is clouded by the fact I saw Larry Nassar four times a day."

A few years later, at the age of 14, she suffered an Achilles injury. Nassar invited her to stay in his house in Lansing, Mich., for a week in order to "treat" her. Tasha's parents were thrilled, as money was in short supply. He worked on her three times a day, either in a training room at Michigan State University (where he had an office), or on a massage table in his basement. "He would start by massaging my Achilles tendon and would work his way up my leg, eventually penetrating me," she recalled. Apparently Nassar had told her that there was a "pressure point in her vagina that would increase blood flow to the tissue in her heel." At the time, she didn't question it. "It was like staying with family," she wrote, "like visiting a trusted uncle."

But it wasn't until the scandal unfolded in August of 2016 that she realized what Nassar had done to her. "I wrestled emotionally with the fact that I had been so manipulated. Me, the strong, impermeable African American athlete," she reflected. "I beat myself up about it. I kept thinking, I should have known; I should have known."

Therapy helped her come to terms with her guilt and self-blame. "I couldn't see at first that the blame was on him, not me, for using his position as the Olympic doctor to take advantage of children."

And, like the four Olympians who spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September of 2021, she became angry at those who should have prevented the abuse. "The adults I trusted as a kid to keep me safe-not just Larry, but also the officials at USA Gymnastics-had profoundly let me down. They had failed to protect me."

They had also, it turns out, failed to protect her younger sister. Like Tasha, Jordan went to the Karolyi Ranch in her early teens, where she suffered a major back injury after "relentless pounding and repetitive stress." Like so many Nassar survivors, she believed Nassar knew the best medical techniques; he was, after all, a "world-renowned doctor." Jordan assumed that the invasive procedure he performed on her was specific to her injuries. "I never imagined that he did it to everyone," she said. And she had no idea that he had done the same to her older sister. "We never talked about it."

Like Tasha, she knew nothing about sexual abuse. "I had always thought of it as something more violent, like a rapist holding you down, not something your doctor would do while pretending to help you."

Like so many Nassar survivors, it wasn't until the story broke in the news that Jordan recognized that the "treatment" she'd received was so similar to what others described. "That's when it all came to light. His hand had been in my vagina, and not for medical reasons. I felt disgusted." At first she wanted to block it out, but as the scandal grew, she finally went to Tasha, to reveal her secret. "We were both surprised to hear that it had happened to the other. It was a hard conversation to have."

On Oct. 29, 2018, they filed civil suits against both the United States Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics.

Up next:

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'The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam': Larry Nassar and the National Nightmare - Ms. Magazine

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An excerpt from Exposed: The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam: 'Tasha Schwikert unwittingly entered the ranch at one of its most intense times. 'We were all so broken down and

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Here is the recording from Dalton Police Chief Deanna Strout from October 16, 2024.

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done. Zoom is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, CA.

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Column | Women who accused Brett Kavanaugh were silenced again

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We talk to the National Women’s Law Center about how the FBI non-investigation in Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh is the same, old story.

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Here's the link to the September 18 session with Dr. Mary Hunt of WATER. You might want to watch it a second time ;)

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Barbara Rodriguez, The 19th, Grace Panetta, The 19th

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Anti-Trans Laws May Complicate Access to the Ballot for Trans Voters

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Advocacy groups are mobilizing to safeguard access to the ballot as states implement laws that could deter trans people from voting in November.

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THIS THURSDAY, September 12: Book Club Event with Author Pashtana Durrani

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THIS THURSDAY: Book Club Event with Author Pashtana Durrani

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Inspired by generations of her family's unwavering belief in the power of education, Pashtana Durrani recognized her calling early in life: to educate Afghanistan's girls and young women, raised in a society where learning is forbidden.

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The Walz record: Abortion rights, free lunches for schoolkids, and disputes over a riot response

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Gov. Tim Walz and his fellow Democrats have enacted big changes in the two years that they’ve had full control of the Minnesota Legislature, from expansions of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights to initiatives aimed at making life easier for families.

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Ohio Man Sentenced to 66 Months in Prison After Threatening a Planned Parenthood - Feminist Majority Foundation

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On Wednesday July 24, the United States Department of Justice released a statement about the recent sentencing of a man charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act). The convicted 33-year-old, Mohamed Waes, was charged concerning threats he made against the Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio in 2022. Waes made […]

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Apartness: How South Africa’s History of Apartheid Guides the Future for Afghanistan’s Women and Girls - Feminist Majority Foundation

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In 1973, after decades of racist policies by South Africa’s National Party, the United Nations ratified a document that officially defined racial apartheid. This convention defined the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons […]

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Equali-tea at the DNC: A united call for the ERA – Feminist Majority

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As the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago, the excitement and enthusiasm in the air were unmistakable. At the iconic Palmer House Hilton, the Feminist Majority and ERA Coalition hosted the Feminist Equalitea, bringing together a diverse and dynamic crowd and filling the historic State Ballroom with more than 400 passionate advocates for equality. There was a coalition of seasoned activists and eager newcomers alike, all united by a shared commitment to ensuring women and young voters are the difference-makers in the 2024 election.

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Taliban’s New Law Prohibits Afghan Women from Speaking in Public and Mandates Full Body Covering. Time to Codify Gender Apartheid. – Feminist Majority

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The Taliban’s new law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice marks another severe regression in the human rights and freedoms of Afghan women. It confirms and expands the Taliban’s oppressive measures that the regime has imposed since its return to power in August 2021.

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One of the producers, Nina Keneally, is an OLLI member!

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Looking for Information on L.G.B.T.Q. Travel to Florida? Don’t Ask Florida.

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The state’s travel website recently removed pages dedicated to L.G.B.T.Q. travel. Some Floridians aren’t happy about it.

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THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT DATABASE – Veteran Feminists of America

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Welcome to the Veteran Feminists of America
Pioneer Histories Project The activists of the Second Wave feminist movement literally changed the world. From 1965 to 1982, thousands of women (and men) from coast to coast took actions – small and large – that made our country more equitable

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Here's the recording from Linda Baxter's talk on midwifery on August 21.

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Here's a talk from Farrah Cukor, literary rep at United Talent Agency.

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Helen Hailes: “Gaslighting in Intimate Partner Violence”, January 17.

2. Michael Wilcox: Topic TBD on March 20.

3. Leyn Burrows on self defense for women vs. men on February 21.

5. Janis Broderick, ED of the EFC and staff, to present to the Gender SIG and Diversity Committee, April 17.

6. Chris Canning Wilson on the role of women in the Middle East on May 15.

8. Linda Baxter on midwifery on August 21.

9. Mal Wasserman with book review: Undaunted and/or The Exceptions, June 19.

10. Mary Hunt, PhD on feminist theology on September 18.

11. Chief Deanna Strout on women in criminal justice on October 16.

12. Farrah Cukor, literary rep at United Talent Agency, on July 17.

13. Farah Cherif D’Ouezzan, co-founder of the Center for Cross Cultural Learning on growing up female in Morocco on November 20.

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Thanks to Mary Rogers for this article in the Washington Post

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Here's the recording of Mal Wasserman's presentation of "The Exceptions"

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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This is a free webinar on June 26 at 7:00 EDT. I may be late but I'll try to make it!

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The Women’s Movement: How We Changed Your Life and Lessons for Today

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Eventbrite - Veteran Feminists of America presents The Women’s Movement: How We Changed Your Life and Lessons for Today - Wednesday, June 26, 2024 - Find event and ticket information.

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How We Changed Your Life

by Muriel Fox

Published by: New Village Press

Imprint: New Village Press

320 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 36 b/w images

Hardcover

9781613322444

Published: June 2024

$28.00

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eBook

9781613322451

Published: June 2024

$28.00

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A rare first-person account of the women's movementA comprehensive, indexed memoir about the Second Wave women's movement by the cofounder of the National ...

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Ms. Global: Millions in Sudan Face Ethnic Cleansing, Mexico Elects First Woman President, and More

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The U.S. ranks as the 19th most dangerous country for women, 11th in maternal mortality, 30th in closing the gender pay gap, 75th in women’s political representation, and painfully lacks

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In a historic first, Claudia Sheinbaum has been elected Mexico's first female president.

While votes are still being tallied, Sheinbaum is on track for a landslide victory, winning around 58 to 60% of votes, according to Mexico's electoral agency. Other candidates, Xóchitl Gálvez and Jorge Álvarez Máynez are predicted to get around 27% and 9% of the vote respectively. This is a huge win in a country where women's suffrage was not granted until 1953 and also marks the first time where the two main opponents were women.

Gender-related issues are among Sheinbaum's main concerns for when she takes office on October 1st as Mexico has one of the highest rates of murder and violence against women. According to UN Women, 10 women are killed in Mexico each day, with thousands more disappearing annually. Women across the country gather every International Women's Day to protest against and raise awareness on the issue of femicide, the killing of a woman or girl on account of her gender.

Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist with a Ph.D. in engineering, previously served as mayor of Mexico City. She was part of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 shared with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. She is also Mexico's first Jewish president.

In Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Fresno, Mexican voters went to local consulate offices to cast their votes, according to Mexico's National Electoral Institute.
(Leer en español.) México elige la primera presidenta
En un momento histórico, Claudia Sheinbaum se convirtió en la primera mujer y la primera persona judía en ser electa a la presidencia de México.

En los resultados iniciales, Sheinbaum ganó con al menos el 58 por ciento del voto, según las autoridades electorales. Su competidora más cercana, Xóchitl Gálvez ganó al menos 29 por ciento del voto. Jorge Álvarez Máynez obtuvo tercer lugar con 9 por ciento del voto.

Es una victoria monumental en un país donde las mujeres no podían votar hasta 1953. Esta elección también sirve como la primera vez que las dos oponentes principales eran mujeres. Cuestiones de género serán importantes cuando Sheinbaum asuma el cargo en octubre. México tiene una de las tasas de homicidio y violencia contra las mujeres más altas en el mundo. Según UN Women, 10 mujeres son asesinadas cada día y miles de mujeres son desaparecidas cada año. Mujeres en el país se reúnen en el día internacional de la mujer para protestar contra y generar conciencia sobre el feminicidio, el asesinato de una mujer por machismo o misoginia.

Claudia Sheinbaum, científica medioambiental con un doctorado en ingeniería y exjefa de gobierno de Ciudad de México. Fue parte de un panel de expertos de las Naciones Unidas en 2007 cuyo trabajo recibió un Premio Nobel de la Paz con el anterior vicepresidente estadounidense Al Gore.

En ciudades como Dallas, Houston, Los Ángeles, San Francisco, San Diego y Fresno, votantes mexicanos fueron a los consulados locales para emitir sus votos, según el Instituto Federal Electoral en México.

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Mexico Elects its First Female President - Feminist Majority Foundation

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In a historic first, Claudia Sheinbaum has been elected Mexico's first female president. While votes are still being tallied, Sheinbaum is on track for a landslide victory, winning around 58 to 60% of votes, according to Mexico's electoral agency. Other candidates, Xóchitl Gálvez and Jorge Álvarez Máynez are predicted to get around 27% and 9% [...]

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As clergy sex abuse crisis simmers, Southern Baptists focus on ousting women pastors.

Beginning this Sunday, thousands of Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) delegates will assemble in Indianapolis, and one of the most misogynistic gatherings in all of Christendom will be on display.

Southern Baptists hold to "male headship" as the purportedly God-ordered right way. Though this has long been their belief, they're now doubling down and seeking to enshrine the practice into their Constitution.

Southern Baptists Prepare to Purge Women Pastors ... Again

The SBC's doctrinal statement declares that "the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture." Though this language is obviously exclusionary, in recent years, many in the denomination have deemed it not effective enough in keeping women out. Some churches were interpreting it to mean only that a woman couldn't be the head pastor of a church.

Horrors. With much metaphorical hand-wringing and hyperventilating, manly men of the Southern Baptist Convention called such waywardness a "liberal drift" and deemed it intolerable.

So, at the SBC's annual gathering in June, thousands of delegates will take a final vote on whether to amend the SBC's Constitution so as to assure that no affiliated church can affirm, appoint or employ a woman as " any kind of pastor or elder."

That's right. They want to assure that women can't even work as children's pastors, or as associate pastors under the supervision of a male head pastor. In other words, Southern Baptists can't even bear to have women pastors under the thumb of "men as qualified by Scripture." They just want women out of the pastorate altogether.

Southern Baptists previously voted in favor of this amendment in June 2023. However, to go into effect, the amendment must be approved by a two-thirds vote two years in a row. So, the issue of women pastors will again dominate the convention this June in Indianapolis.

The sponsor of the amendment, pastor Mike Law from Virginia, previously circulated what was widely decried as a hit list of 176 female pastors targeted for ouster. And in 2023, the SBC was so rabid about women pastors that it purported to oust a church that wasn't even affiliated and hadn't been for over two decades. The church had quit long ago, but apparently the SBC still wanted the adrenaline rush of saying, "You're fired."

Southern Baptists can't even bear to have women pastors under the thumb of 'men as qualified by Scripture.' They just want women out of the pastorate altogether.

For all the inquisitorial hoopla that Southern Baptists have generated around the issue, you might imagine that women pastors were taking over the denomination. But of course, the reality is that their numbers are small and shrinking.

North Carolina has about 4,300 Southern Baptist churches, and there are only about 20 women pastors within them.

Ten years ago, the number of Southern Baptist women pastors in North Carolina was around 200, and 20 years ago, it was around 400.

So, why is there such an enormous backlash against women pastors? Southern Baptists have already done such a good job of running them off that, if they just waited a few more years, it appears their problem would nearly solve itself.

The Sacralization of Southern Baptist Misogyny

Southern Baptists believe that casting women out from leadership is what God wants from them, and this belief effectively blinds them to the harm of their teachings and practices. In other words, their theology serves not only to legitimize such misogyny but to sacralize it; misogyny is a theological mandate that they pursue with evangelical zeal.

They don't see their misogyny as immoral; they see it as a mission from God. And of course, it just so happens that "God's will" serves their ends of status quo power.

No one should ever forget that the Southern Baptist Convention has its very origins in a theology that sanctified the enslavement of human beings, consecrated the Confederacy, and birthed a bloody civil war. That's how dangerous and powerful their theology is. Those same roots feed their theology of misogyny today.

Misogyny is a theological mandate that they pursue with evangelical zeal.

The Misogynistic Theology Fosters Abuse in the Family

It's not only in the church where men hold the power; it's also in the family. According to Southern Baptist belief, "a wife is to submit herself graciously" to the leadership of her husband.

Perhaps you imagine that submitting to a husband's leadership would mean that a women should copy his political views or should let him control the checkbook. But "gracious submission" is also a Southern Baptist tenet for women's sexuality. Just look at the " gold nugget of advice " that megachurch celebrity pastor Josh Howerton recently delivered to the thousands of women in his congregation:

"When you get to his wedding night ... stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do."

The people in the pews applauded Howerton's crude rhetoric. But when a video of Howerton's sermon was posted online, countless people expressed disgust with such an objectifying and misogynistic view of sex, marriage and male entitlement.

Howerton then doubled down and criticized the criticizers. It was "a joke," he insisted.

Many others in evangelicalism jumped on board with the "it was a joke" defense, often tossing in the trope that the women, who were objecting to being objectified, were just "too sensitive." As if talking about women as though they were blow-up sex dolls were somehow funny. As if doing it as a pastor to a crowd of over 10,000 were normal.

This kind of dehumanizing indoctrination has been going on for decades within evangelicalism, in sermon after sermon and book after book, and almost always with the implicit message that this is the way God wants it. Women who protest get labeled as " bad and ungodly " ... or worse.

The reason Southern Baptists have let male sexual entitlement go on so long, explained columnist Rick Pidcock, "is that it is merely one expression of their larger context of sacralized male authority and female submission." They aren't seeking to dismantle beliefs and practices that further rape culture; they're trying to spread them through preaching, "discipling," and evangelizing.

The SBC's Misogynistic Beliefs Prop Up a Culture Blind to Sexual Abuse

The SBC's uproar about women pastors comes in the midst of the SBC's widely-publicized and unabated clergy sex abuse crisis. A faith group in which people are indoctrinated from childhood into the notion that men should have authority over women-and that this is God's holy plan-is a faith group in which some men will use that authority in unholy ways-to groom and sexually abuse women and children.

And with men always in charge, women's voices remain always lesser, so that when they seek to report abuse, they are seldom heard.

In 2022, an independent investigatory report concluded that, for decades, the SBC's top leaders had been systematically focused on protecting the denomination against liability risks, to the exclusion of almost everything else, including the safety of kids and congregants against clergy sex abuse. Leaders covered up abuse, bullied survivors and stonewalled proposals for reform. They denigrated survivors even as they promoted perpetrators and their enablers. (I myself was denounced as being part of a satanic scheme.)

With men always in charge, women's voices remain always lesser, so that when they seek to report abuse, they are seldom heard.

Yet here we are two years after that report, and there has been no real reckoning within the faith group. SBC officials have spewed platitudes and promises, but meaningful reform has been nearly nonexistent. There is still no functional system for institutionally holding accountable pastors who rape and molest the young and vulnerable. Nor is there any effective system for imposing consequences on those who enable and cover up their colleagues' abuses.

When you combine the SBC's misogynistic, authoritarian theology, which relegates females to second-class status, with an institutional structure lacking in effective accountability systems, you wind up with an institution in which abuse can run rampant. That's the Southern Baptist Convention.

Thanks to dogged journalists and attorneys, reports of Southern Baptist clergy sex abuse and coverups continue in the news on an almost daily basis. Yet the SBC does almost nothing to earnestly address the problem. Instead, like the "bread and circuses" of imperial Rome, the SBC uses an anti-women agenda to appease their base and divert attention from their abuse scandal.

The Dangers of Underestimating the Southern Baptist Convention

As troubling as Southern Baptist beliefs and practices are, the faith group is too big and too mainstream to be dismissed as fringe. Their extremism hides in plain sight.

With 13 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant faith group in the country. Considered as a bellwether for white evangelicals, and enmeshed with the Republican Party, the SBC carries an outsized influence disproportionate to its numbers.

In statehouses, school boards, and city councils across the country, we've seen the harm that evangelicals can do when they rally their constituencies-rolling back rights for LGBTQ people, banning books, restricting contraceptive access, limiting women's healthcare and fostering discrimination against trans people.

The current speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is a Southern Baptist. He's second in the line of succession to the presidency, and he embodies the " biblical worldview " of the Southern Baptist Convention. As someone who has long observed Southern Baptists, that knowledge has me quaking.

Southern Baptist seminary president Al Mohler recently wrote that it was "morally insane" that the law does not apply "some form of criminal sanction" to women who have abortions. He allowed that, depending on the circumstances, there could be distinctions between the level of culpability, such as between manslaughter and first-degree murder.

Because Mohler is an evangelical heavy-weight, his words brought credence to a movement many may have previously dismissed: the " abortion abolitionists" who seek to prosecute and imprison women who have abortions. Across much of evangelicalism, "abortion abolitionists" cheered Mohler's words with the frenzy of face-painted football fans.

Of course, like women everywhere, Southern Baptists also have abortions. Reportedly, one in three women in Southern Baptist churches have had an abortion... though they seldom talk about it with church people. This means that Mohler and the abolitionists would apparently wish for one-third of the women in Southern Baptist churches to be criminally prosecuted, and would wish it for women outside their evangelical tribe as well.

The Southern Baptist Convention is a powerful and influential voting bloc, and its people are mission-driven. If the SBC acquires still more power, much about The Handmaid's Tale may seem less of a fictional dystopia and more of a real possibility.
Up next:

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Southern Baptists Pursue a Mission of Misogyny - Ms. Magazine

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This weekend, thousands of Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) delegates will assemble in Indianapolis, and one of the most misogynistic gatherings in all of Christendom will be on display. With 13

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Here's the recording of the presentation in April by B Bradburd and Emma Lenski of the Elizabeth Freeman Center

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Register for The Ark Effect™

Radical Self Preservation and Leadership for Catastrophe Survival: How to Divest, Rewild and Keep Everyone Safe (2-Part Journey in the Ark Effect Series)

From July 26-28 to October 12-15, 2024

Upstate New York, NY, USA

and Oaxaca, Mexico

The Inaugural Class is Limited to 14

You may choose to only register for one part of the journey, but we encourage you to register for both as they each build on each other.

Becoming Wild Again: Why Cohorts Work for Women

We're creating cohorts at Restore Forward by hosting leadership retreats for women. Retreats create the transcendent spaces we need to navigate multiple crossroads of female identities and experiences, including those identifying as trans and queer.

We examine and critique gender and culture as constructs of history, while unearthing and celebrating women's cultural, spiritual and artistic productions, including art, photography, music, theater, as well as women's presses and periodicals, their sciences, cosmologies, and medicines.

﻿ Join a Rewilding cohort at Restore Forward where we can step into the revolutionary potential of women's cultures of resistance around the world.

Navigating Intentional Communal Living

Tuesday, May 14, 2024 at 4pm ET

This is a regularly hosted circle that is helpful for any beginner seeking to learn more about living intentionally with a group of people.

Navigating Intentional Communal Living

﻿

With ecosystem devastation at its highest due to massive deforestation, unsustainable agriculture practices of mono-crop culture, climate change, and other calamities happening at this time, what is a way that we can start working together to be more sustainable or even regenerative? It starts with how we live.

﻿

There are so many models of intentional communities out there, that it can be overwhelming. This basic primer will endeavor to cover the different ways we could model living well together.

Just Rituals - African Movement Therapy

May 14, 2024 at 5 PM ET

Learn more about the

Just Rituals Series on our website.

"Just Rituals" - African Movement Therapy™

﻿

Just Rituals or "Justice Rituals" is about rituals at the intersection of justice. Until now, there hasn't been a widely recognized therapy called "African Movement Therapy." However, ancestrally, people of African descent have used movement as therapeutic modalities for centuries. As movement therapy in general, encompasses a variety of techniques that utilize movement and physical activity to promote psychological, emotional, and physical well-being-including the more mainstream forms of dance therapy, yoga therapy.

Restore Forward invites you to learn and move with us using African body-centered therapies, culturally specific somatic experiencing and other body-centered rituals toward healing justice, body sovereignty and body justice, that have existed but remained unrecognized by mainstream society. It's time to honor and center the just and the multiple rituals we are calling "African Movement Therapies".

Join our weekly

Grief Recovery Circle

May 16, 2024 at 6pm ET

This is a regularly hosted circle that is open to anyone experiencing grief, at any stage of loss.

Grief Recovery Circle

Here is a support circle for people who need that compassionate, open hearted, safe space to process their grief. This circle can look like many things, for everyone grieves in different ways. When we come together and share our hurts, we can feel less alone. When our heart breaks, it's because it doesn't have the capacity of love to hold that the moment is calling for. When we feel our heartbreak and grieve that loss, we can put our hearts back together to love more deeply. Let's rediscover the depth and quality of love that the world is asking for us to live and embody.

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Becoming Wild Again: Why Cohorts Work for Women ✨

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Register for The Ark Effect™ Radical Self Preservation and Leadership for Catastrophe Survival: How to Divest, Rewild and Keep Everyone Safe (2-Part Journey in the Ark Effect Series) From July

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Here's the recording from the April presentation by B Bradburd of the Elizabeth Freeman Center and Emma Lenski of Berkshire Pride: 

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Here's the recording from the April presentation by B Bradburd of the Elizabeth Freeman Center and Emma Lenski of Berkshire Pride: 

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Keeping stories like Huang's circulating as they remain behind bars continues to show the world that we will not let their stories go uncriticized or unheard.

"In 2018, [the Chinese government] started coming for me," said Huang (Sophia) Xueqin-reporter and winner of the International Women's Media Foundation's Wallis Annenberg Justice for Women Journalists Award -in an interview in May 2019 with the University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

Huang had been reporting on sexual assault at top Chinese universities and media companies on WeChat since 2016. Huang's reporting sparked a wave of #MeToo allegations against various high-ranking media personalities and professors in China.

By the time of her interview with the University of Michigan, all of the reporting Huang had done on sexual harassment had been completely wiped from WeChat. Huang described the censorship she faced as "severe."

The extreme backlash Huang faced for her reporting included an onslaught of threats, bullying on her personal pages, and intimidation from authorities-eventually leading to her arrest in September 2021. As of this month, Huang has been jailed and almost entirely cut off from her friends, family and advocacy groups for over 750 days.

In 2016, Huang noted the lack of mainstream coverage of a story about a young woman who had been assaulted by her internship professor at the School of Journalism at Jinan University-Huang's alma mater. Huang began sifting through the comments sections of the reporting outlets and noticed a disturbing pattern: Most of the commenters weren't addressing that the professor had taken advantage of a student, but instead focused on the perceived shortcomings of the woman.

"Everyone was talking about the various 'problems' that girl had, including her clothes-but what did her clothes say about her?" said Huang. "These comments implied that this girl had many reasons for being sexually assaulted."

The woman's story pushed Huang to reflect on her experience of being harassed by a professor during undergrad. She began questioning other women journalists about their experiences in the field. Later that year, at a conference at the National University of Singapore, Huang asked a group of fellow female reporters if they had similar experiences; out of the nine in the room with her, six shared that they, too, had faced harassment while working.

These moments catapulted Huang into her work as one of the leading voices in the Chinese #MeToo movement. Huang's campaign against sexual assault started with her posing at various universities and news outlets throughout China, holding up signs with "#MeToo" written on them. As people began to take notice, they started reaching out to her for help sharing their stories.

Huang meticulously catalogued and researched each story sent to her with thoughtful attention and care. She eventually uncovered stories of assault from various universities in China, including Peking University, Wuhan University of Technology, Henan University and Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.

"I think prevention and education is needed ... because some things are kind of still a taboo for Chinese people to talk about," Huang said. "The government has to play a bigger role, there is still a lot of space for them to improve. Because, in China, even though we are talking about sexual harassment, this word is still new to us. We don't have a clear definition of sexual harassment. ... The government should allow people to talk about it, allow the lawyers or the experts to study it, and should introduce a law to make a very clear definition of sexual harassment."

According to a report by the IWMF, 70 percent of women journalists have experienced sexual harassment while working. A study by Huang found that 84 percent of Chinese female journalists had experienced harassment relating to their work. Still, less than 50 percent tell anyone about their experience, only 3 percent report the incident to their employers and under 1 percent file police reports. Women who chose not to share their stories said they feared that speaking out would negatively affect their personal lives and their careers.

Globally, newsrooms are headed by men; an IWMF report that surveyed 60 different countries found that in most countries, men hold the vast majority of leadership positions at media organizations and two-thirds of all reporting jobs belong to men.

Female reporters of Asian descent who critically write about China receive increasingly aggressive backlash, according to a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Journalist Vicky Xu said, "The harassment of Chinese journalists like myself is mainstream. It's a mainstream position that is encouraged by the state."

As of 2021, when Huang was arrested, China had 19 female journalists in prison -the most in the world.

Before her arrest, Huang was dedicated to continuing the fight she started when she posed with her #MeToo posters. On Sept. 19 2021, she hopped in her car and set off to the airport, where she planned to fly to the U.K. and start her master's degree in gender violence and conflict at the University of Sussex. Huang was arrested and charged with "inciting subversion of state power" on her way to the airport.

For the last two years, Huang has been detained in Guangzhou in what is known as a "black jail"-a nearly complete blackout of information has shrouded this case, her family has received little to no updates, and her lawyer was quietly replaced with a Chinese state-appointed lawyer.

What friends have been able to uncover about Huang's state has been concerning.

A friend of Huang who spoke to reporters at Radio Free Asia under the alias "Wanxia" stated that Huang was being tortured in the form of sleep deprivation and malnourishment.

Another friend commented that Huang was no longer menstruating and had lost a considerable amount of weight.

The U.N. working group on arbitrary detention has stated that Huang is being wrongfully detained and called for her release or for them to bring her detainment up to international standards.

Huang's trial began on Sept. 22, 2023-two years after her initial arrest. Plainclothes officers crowded the streets of Guangzhou, the streets to the court were shut down, and the courtroom itself was entirely off-limits to reporters and family.

Leading up to the trial, 70 people reported being questioned regarding the case, according to the Chinese Human Rights Defenders Network. The people reported harassment and extreme interrogation tactics. Several left the city of Guangzhou after being questioned;; others have said they no longer feel safe and suffer from PTSD.

Stories like Sophia Huang's can disappear with them, without proper coverage and follow-up. The IWMF's Wallis Annenberg Justice for Women Journalists Award "brings attention to women journalists who are detained, jailed or imprisoned." Keeping stories like Huang's circulating as they remain behind bars continues to show the world that we will not let their stories go uncriticized or unheard.

If found guilty of "inciting subversion of power," Huang faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. Huang knew the consequences of speaking up and still did so. "I felt that I could speak out because I didn't care about possible consequences," said Huang in 2019.

In her fearlessness, she stood up for people terrified into silence by an aggressively antifeminist government. As female journalists continue to be arrested for speaking their truth, we must continue to spread their stories as they are forced into silence.
The IWMF relies on donations to keep fighting for women journalists. You can donate Up next: .

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Sophia Huang Xueqin Won Awards for Her #MeToo Reporting. Today, Her Fate Remains a Mystery. - Ms. Magazine

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Women journalist Huang (Sophia) Xueqin's reporting sparked a wave of #MeToo allegations in China. She was censored, threatened and arrested.

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The International Women's Media Foundation honored the women of the Washington Post covering the Russian occupation of Ukraine, with its coveted Courage in Journalism award.

On Feb. 21, 2022, Siobhán O'Grady of the Washington Post boarded a flight from Cairo, Egypt, to Kyiv, Ukraine. Rumors had been swirling for weeks that the Russian invasion was imminent. But that did not prepare O'Grady for what would happen next: Just three days after arriving in Kyiv, Ukraine was under a full-scale attack, and she would spend the next seven weeks in the basement of her hotel.

This year, the International Women's Media Foundation honored O'Grady, chief Ukraine correspondent, with the Courage in Journalism award, along with several other women from the Washington Post reporting from Ukraine-including Ukraine bureau chief Isabelle Khurshudyan, video journalists Whitney Shefte and Whitney Leaming, contributing photojournalist Heidi Levine, Baghdad bureau chief Louisa Loveluck, national security reporter Missy Ryan, Bogotá bureau chief Samantha Schmidt, Berlin bureau chief Loveday Morris, contributing photographer Kasia Strek.

An estimated 20,000 to 50,000 women are enlisted in the Ukrainian military, but regulated to "women-specific roles," they rarely see combat. The lack of gender diversity in combat zones has led to unique difficulties for women journalists. Despite her years of experience in combat zones, Khurshudyan said she still has to pass a proverbial "ability check" when she reports from the frontline.

"What's frustrating to me is that men [soldiers] might take me less seriously, or won't take me to the frontlines because I'm a woman," she said. "That aspect definitely exists, that definitely happens. You have to try and show your credentials. Other women will try to slip in other work they've done."

O'Grady shared a similar view: Daily inequities with even the simplest things, such as hygiene issues or finding a safe spot to relieve oneself, can be exacerbated by the precarity of war reporting and can impact one's ability to focus on the task.

Each time they go out to report from a combat area, there is a conversation between everyone on the team. Khurshudyan said they go with the opinion of whoever is the least comfortable: If someone on the team is concerned about the security of a location, they don't go there.

Weighing your safety and the safety of your peers against reporting can be a constant battle. Dealing with the idea that you could witness or be a victim of extreme violence takes a toll on war reporters.

Khurshudyan and other women reporters from the Washington Post stayed throughout the bombings of Kharkiv in the Donetsk region. O'Grady was targeted twice while reporting on artillery combat.

What makes the reporting from the Washington Post on the war in Ukraine stand out is the focus on the universality of the trauma of war. Writing about war comes with traumas that the journalists themselves carry. O'Grady said on some level, she related to the family separation that the Ukrainian families she worked with had experienced; when she took the job in Ukraine, she was separated from her husband.

Khurshudyan has been in Ukraine longer than any other foreign reporter for the Washington Post. Memories of soldiers she interviewed who died only a few weeks after linger in her memory.

"As you settle down and have Ukrainian friends, you see how much suffering they are experiencing and how much their lives have changed starts to weigh on you, these horrible things are happening to people that you love," She said.

The friendships with local Ukrainians that developed carried a kind of trauma; grief is a communal experience. As the journalists became more enmeshed in their communities, they watched as their new friends processed loss and took on a part of the pain. Khurshudyan said that at times, "separating the difficulties of being at war and the impact of that and the professional detachment you need as a journalist can be difficult to maneuver but at the same time we're in the thick of it and that makes the reporting stronger."

O'Grady's journalistic passion lies in "human-centric stories"-an ethos seemingly shared by the other women reporters from the Washington Post covering Ukraine. O'Grady said being a woman in journalism opens doors that may be closed to her male peers. "The benefit of working as a woman is the gift of being welcomed into women's lives here."

This style of storytelling really shined in Shefte and O'Grady's coverage of a " bunker " maternity ward in Kyiv which centered on the humanity of expectant couples as they waited for birth and contemplated the potential loss that lingers in the minds of every Ukrainian since the beginning of the occupation. She described the atmosphere of a wartime maternity ward as "birth and joy amid horrific suffering."

The stories they captured drew attention to an often-forgotten wartime heroism: parenthood. When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law, which implemented a travel ban on most men between the ages of 18 and 60, the women of Ukraine became the de facto caregivers.,

"Women's lesser position in society has given women greater freedom of movement and protection from frontline military duties," Washington Post contributor and Professor Jessica Trisko Darden said "On the other hand, Ukraine's military policies helped to reinforce gender norms that fail to distribute family responsibilities equally."

As mothers fled Ukraine with their children, fathers were sent to war or stayed behind in their homes waiting for the call to arms. In her coverage of the underground hospital, O'Grady captures the intensities of these young families' contemplation: Either they stay together in the Ukraine, or separate.

The most dangerous thing a journalist can do is become disconnected from the people they're writing about.
Siobhán O'Grady

The barriers that exist for women journalists are plenty -they face specific gender violence on and offline, but what comes forth in the coverage from the Washington Post's women writers is the power of shared global bonds of womanhood and the communicative power that comes with that.

"I've been able to have these really intimate conversations with these people, a straight macho war reporter might not be able to create the same sense of comfort," O'Grady said. "I'm able to move between worlds, I can do the front line work, and I can do the sacred work of being in a maternity hospital underground in the first weeks of the war."

O'Grady recalled working on a story with two other journalists recognized by IWMF, Whitney Shefte and Anastacia Galouchka, covering the rape of a woman by Russian FSB agents. Having an all-female team covering these sensitive stories means they are able to make more space for comfort-something O'Grady recognizes occurs more often with women in the press corp. Covering stories of rape and other stories of war crimes against marginalized communities takes care, and the women of the Washington Post have made it clear that they enter these interviews from a place of shared humanity.

"The most dangerous thing a journalist can do is become disconnected from the people they're writing about," O'Grady said. "I hope I never become less human."

hey @Adele, you have a huge fan in Ukraine! Regina Kulynenko, 6, from Kryvyi Rih is on her way to compete in a singing competition abroad after taking first place in Kyiv. She serenaded us on the train out of Ukraine tonight. pic.twitter.com/XWhrqKTa7B
- Siobhán O'Grady (@siobhan_ogrady) March 27, 2023

Stories of motherhood, soldiers, civilians, grandparents, dogs, cats, and even the politicization of Aperol Spritz interweave in their storytelling, giving readers a better understanding of the vastness of living through a modern war.

Amongst the rubble, these women were able to uncover beauty, humor and humanity-which is perhaps best exemplified through the story of an older Ukrainian woman that stayed in her dilapidated building after a bombing that said she'd "rather sh*t outside in Ukraine than use the bathroom in Russia." Or through the young soldier learning to use an AK-47 for the first time that said he hadn't used a gun but had played Call of Duty.

O'Grady is a testament to IWMF's impact on women journalists; she credits IWMF with her career. When she was 23, she applied for a grant through IWMF. Despite her lack of experience, the organization took a chance on her. She went on a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she gained experience in foreign correspondence and went through their hostile environment training. This cemented her interest in this style of journalism and set her up on a trajectory that led to her full-circle career and winning the Courage in Journalism award along with her peers from the Washington Post.
The IWMF relies on donations to keep fighting for women journalists. You can donate Up next: .

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Women Reporting on Ukraine for WaPo Win IWMF's Courage in Journalism Award - Ms. Magazine

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The International Women's Media Foundation honored the women of the Washington Post covering Ukraine, with the Courage in Journalism award.

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"We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning." Sandra Cisneros

When droughts in Bolivia caused the potatoes cultivated by Senobia's family to fail, she began to look for solutions. She was only 7. Her big idea? Ice cream.

It took years but Senobia, now 24, opened Bolivia's first ecologically certified ice cream parlor in Bolivia. Utilizing natural products sourced from women in her community, Senobia's Meraki brand grew from a zucchini and black and yellow carob flavor, to a range that now includes mushroom as well as amaranth and features biodegradable packaging. She trains and employs single mothers and others with limited access to resources, working with a further 400 community members on a tree-planting initiative of a thousand pines per year. (!) Using what she has at her young age, Senobia is leveraging her power and holding the door open.

Against the backdrop of countless climate disasters in the past year alone-hurricanes, floods and fires-Senobia's work stresses the cruelty of how young people are being robbed of their youth, forced to grapple with a heating world fueled by greed and indifference. Nevertheless, Senobia's leadership and entrepreneurship serve to remind us of the creative potential that girls and young women possess, their dedication to bettering their communities in the face of catastrophe, and the delightfully unexpected directions that can take.

This year's theme for World Earth Day, Planet vs. Plastics, highlights the need for responsible consumption and business practices. As Senobia puts it, standing in her shop flanked by a guitar and flowers, whereas tackling pollution and environmental protection are crucial to her business, a commitment to bring her community with her is an act of solidarity with the women in her community and their environment.

Against the backdrop of countless climate disasters in the past year alone-hurricanes, floods and fires-Senobia's work stresses the cruelty of how young people are being robbed of their youth, forced to grapple with a heating world fueled by greed and indifference.

How the Climate Crisis Effects Girls

We live in communities on a shared planet and therefore, the climate crisis must be approached collectively. Yet, due to a number of interconnected historical injustices, this we is often narrowly defined.

The global agenda to combat the degradation of the environment has recognized this reality: There is international consensus that countries that have contributed the most to global warming ought to bear the brunt of redress, as the impact is most strongly felt in areas that have contributed the least.

The funny thing about power is its insidiousness. Coverage of efforts to address the climate crisis have skewed north-a metaphor made literal when Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate was infamously cropped out of the Associated Press' published image from the Davos summit. Across decision-making platforms around the climate crisis, diverse representation and impactful engagement are still lacking.

Girls have been systematically erased from conversations about the climate crisis. For many in circumstances similar to Senobia's, this erasure has happened despite the life-changing impacts it is already having on their lives. Climate change is a crisis for girls' rights, as it exacerbates pre-existing risk factors and heightens them to dangerous extremes.

In Ethiopia, the conflict and drought pushed 14-year-old Asma's (name changed for privacy) family into poverty, coerced into making the difficult decision between her education and marrying her off to a wealthy older suitor who could better provide for her. Luckily, Asma's family was able to stand by her-sadly this is not the case for many.

The chaos following the immediate aftermath of climate disasters exposes girls to sexual harassment and abuse (caused by overcrowding and a lack of safe services), and slow onset climate impacts can lead to a steady decline of livelihoods, driving families to harmful 'coping strategies' such as child marriage.

Girls have been systematically erased from conversations about the climate crisis. ... This erasure has happened despite the life-changing impacts it is already having on their lives.

The effects of the climate crisis are being felt all over the world, but the intensity varies. In some areas, overlapping systems of oppression converge and lead to increased rates of child marriage.

Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Guinea, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger and South Sudan are the 10 highest risk global hotspots for the intersection of the climate crisis and child marriage. Crucially, a number of these countries have some of the youngest populations globally-a demographic shift heralded as essential to economic growth that holds the promise of more innovative solutions to the challenges of climate change and inequality, like Senobia and her ice cream shop. The hope and urgency of a new generation needed to confront a rapidly evolving planet. A last line of defense, perhaps.

Supporting Girls' Climate Activism

On the one hand, it was thrilling to see a girl (at the time), Greta Thunberg, as one of the most recognizable faces of the movement against the climate crisis, but on the other, less than 2 percent of national climate plans mention girls. We must resist disempowering notions of "giving voice to girls," and listen to them-both the ones that make it to global platforms and those who advocate within their own families and local communities-while drawing attention to their leadership on this issue

Before Senobia's big break, her family would later move to the city because the countryside had become unproductive, the earth infertile with recurrent drought. At 14, she was left to fend for her six brothers and herself, after her parents were forced to leave due to the expenses. She got a job as a substitute teacher for younger children and was also able to pay for her studies on a gastronomy course that changed her life, allowing her to achieve her dreams and become a key figure for the environment and women and girls' rights in her community.

Gender equality is one of the most revolutionary and transformative foundations required to change the world. A focus on girl-led movement building is critical for climate action combined with an investment in social behavioral models that challenge harmful gender norms.

A study of 70 countries over 40 years found that autonomous feminist movements-shared action to create change for gender equality, led by individuals and groups independent of government-were the key component in a country introducing policy protections for violence against women and children, surpassing factors such as progressive governments and women in parliaments.

With the increasing normalcy of climate disasters, we have reached the unfortunate point where the reality is one of adaptation: What can we do to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis now that it is here?

In addition to supporting girls' activism on climate change, policymakers must 'shockproof' the systems and services girls rely on most in the advent of climate disasters. Save the Children's report, " Girls as the centre of the storm-Her planet, her future, her solutions," explores how the climate crisis impacts girls' rights and recommends practical countermeasures.

Much of the discourse around the climate crisis has been around convincing-that climate change is real; that it is a consequence of human activity; that it poses an existential threat to the planet; and, that there are specific actions we can and must take to stop it. With the increasing normalcy of climate disasters, we have reached the unfortunate point where the reality is one of adaptation: What can we do to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis now that it is here?

What will it take for decision-makers to be convinced that girls should not just be a focus of responses, but also at the forefront of change? For girls like Senobia, biding their time has never been an option. Read the room.
Up next:

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Planet Versus Plastics: The Climate Crisis, Girls and Ice Cream - Ms. Magazine

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Girls have been systematically erased from conversations about the climate crisis, but they're taking action to fight for environmental justice.

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Climate change is not just an environmental crisis-it is a feminist crisis as well.

The environmental and feminist movements have grown like stems and branches of a twisting vine or tree. Sometimes merging, sometimes growing apart. At times they have strengthened each other. At others, they have grown distant. Ultimately, they both address similar forces of oppression and exploitation. They share a common goal of dismantling the "status quo." Their shared vision is the thriving of both women and nature. Climate change is not just an environmental crisis-it is a feminist crisis as well.

The following is an excerpt from Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice, depicting connections between environmental and feminist movements.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which many consider to have launched the modern environmental movement. In the book, Rachel detailed the natural and human health impacts of a then-widely used pesticide called DDT. She provided evidence of how the use of DDT was causing massive die-offs in birds and other species, how it entered the food chain, and how it was stored in human bodies, causing cancers and genetic damage.

Carson was attacked cruelly, personally and misogynistically for her work. Time magazine wrote that her book was an "emotional and inaccurate outburst" that was "hysterically overemphatic." Yale Environment 360 reported that "an official with the Federal Pest Control Review Board drew laughter from his audience when he remarked, 'I thought she was a spinster. What's she so worried about genetics for?'"

Nevertheless, in 1963, as she was dying from breast cancer (a fact she kept secret), Carson testified before Congress, advocating for laws and policies to control the use of DDT. She died a year later in 1964 at the age of 57, but her legacy continued to grow. Her work is said to have provoked the passage of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973), along with influencing the creation in 1970 of the Environmental Protection Agency, and galvanizing the first "Earth Day," on April 22 of that year.

Nature and women have suffered a long history together of exploitation and subordination.

In India, in the early 1970s, another women-led environmental battle was being fought. In the Garhwal Himalayas, logging had caused floods and landslides, and women were having to walk farther for water and fuelwood.

In response, many began hugging trees and refusing to let go to protect them from being logged, declaring that "loggers would have to kill them before they felled the trees." This act of defiance spread throughout the Indian Himalayas. The movement became known as the "Chipko movement," after the Hindi word that means "to hug or embrace."

These demonstrations had a direct impact, resulting in the banning of logging trees above a thousand meters in the Garhwal Himalayas.

In Kenya, also in the early 1970s, another women-led movement was gaining momentum, becoming one of the largest and most famous environmental campaigns in the country. The clearing of forests was causing streams to dry up and food supplies to become unreliable. As in India, women were having to walk farther to find wood for fuel and fencing as a result.

Wangari Maathai, born in 1940 in the village of Ihithe, had been witnessing changes in the environment that were a direct result of the colonial legacy in Kenya. Maathai noticed how women were coping with the paucity of fuelwood by buying more processed, less nutritious food that had the advantage of taking less time to cook. As a result, children were suffering from illnesses related to malnutrition.

To address these problems, Maathai launched an initiative, called the Green Belt Movement, encouraging women to plant seedlings. Since its inception, the Green Belt Movement has planted over 51 million trees.

It was around the time of these emerging movements in India and Kenya that the intertwined relationship between women and nature was given a name. "Ecofeminism" was first used by the French feminist Françoise d'Eaubonne in her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or death). "Ecofeminism" recognized how, through patriarchy and capitalism, the domination and exploitation of women and nature worked in parallel.

At the same time, the Goddess movement saw a revival. Although the Goddess movement challenged patriarchy, it was problematic in several ways. First, it was very white. In addition, depictions of Mother Earth within this movement were often highly sexualized. Several feminists also disagreed with the way women's relationship to nature was portrayed.

To deal with disharmony within the movement, different branches of feminism grew in different directions, often as reactions to each other. Several offshoots emerged, each with a slightly different interpretation of what ecofeminism meant.

Both "ecosocialist feminism" and "Marxist ecofeminism" rejected the idea of women's biological connection to nature. Marxist ecofeminists claimed that women's work and the benefits nature provides such as filtering fresh water, producing oxygen, pollinating plants, and providing food, were being treated as "free gifts" to be exploited by capitalism. In response to the "whiteness" of ecofeminism, "ecowomanism" focused on intersectionality while also incorporating religious, moral, and spiritual beliefs.

The focus of "Indigenous feminism" is on decolonization and rights specifically for Indigenous women and girls. Some have responded negatively to the use of the word "feminism," since it feels too closely associated with white women. In an op-ed in the Navajo Times entitled " Feminism Is Against Our Culture," multimedia artist and writer Venaya Yazzie writes that as a Diné woman, she considers the word "feminism" to be a "germ" with roots "in racism against the black man," and argues that it maintains a role in the continuing presence of colonialism.

Jihan Gearon, Indigenous feminist writer, artist and activist, argues that, at its heart, Indigenous feminism is about decolonizing. Restoring women's autonomy, agency, and what she calls "transformative power" could bring us to a better future in which everyone's diversity is valued and included.

"Imagine how much better this work will be when Indigenous matriarchs have autonomy, agency, and power once again," she said. "Not power over men or others, but transformative power, which grows from respect for self and equality with others, in all their diversity of identity, experience, and ability. This is the crux of Indigenous feminism."

Gearon wrote to me that, ultimately, "it's about building understanding, not asserting that everyone uses the same word/definition."

When we stand up against patriarchy, we are standing up for the rights of the earth as well.

In the 1980s, as a response to the social and environmental injustices, the environmental justice movement was born. Initiated and led primarily by Black American thought leaders and activists in the United States, such as Robert D. Bullard and Catherine Coleman Flowers, the movement has drawn attention to the ways in which poor communities have been disproportionately affected by pollution, resource extraction, and disposal of waste.

As the environmental and feminist movements started to splinter, the environmental justice movement sought to bring us back together again, with the common goal to protect nature with equality and fairness. If ever there was a time for the environmental and feminist movements to unite again, it is now.

How does Mother Earth live now within the environmental and feminist movements? Is it time to de-gender the earth? Nature and women have suffered a long history together of exploitation and subordination. They have been put into categories, where they are essentialized and viewed as powerless, passive or sexualized. When the exploitation of one is justified, or permitted, it facilitates exploitation of the other. When we stand up against patriarchy, we are standing up for the rights of the earth as well.

I asked Corrina Gould, chair and spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation, what she thought of de-gendering the earth. She laughed and replied, "We are her children. Everything grows from her. And yes, she's a woman. To say that women can't do anything else is ridiculous. That's a very narrow, patriarchal idea that doesn't fit with our cosmologies as Indigenous people. I think the complexity of women has been denigrated in Western society so that women are only for childbirth."

Meg Conkey, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the first anthropologists to apply a feminist lens to archeology, suggests that embracing the complexity of human history offers a more optimistic perspective about our human capacity to address climate change and gender inequalities-compared to alternative theories that suggest we are innately predisposed towards a specific social system, such as patriarchy or matriarchy.

Perhaps what is needed, instead of rejecting a view of the earth and nature as female, is to instead embrace that she is many things just as we as women are many things. We were never one thing. We were experimental and, across landscapes and continents and throughout time, we have lived in many different types of systems-and we still do.
Copyright © 2024 by Rebecca Kormos. This excerpt originally appeared Up next: Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

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From Rachel Carson to Wangari Maathai—Meet the Women Who Ignited Environmental Movements - Ms. Magazine

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The environmental and feminist movements have grown like stems and branches of a twisting vine or tree. Sometimes merging, sometimes growing apart. At times they have strengthened each other, yet at other times they have grown distant. Ultimately, they both address similar forces of oppression and exploitation. They share a common goal of dismantling the “status quo.” Their shared vision is the thriving of both women and nature. Climate change is not just an environmental crisis—it is a feminist crisis as well.

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Opinion | The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care

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Dr. Hilary Cass’s thoughtful medical review is a model for how we should address difficult issues.

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In the fall of 2022, the Texas representative Ann Johnson met with a group of ob-gyns who wanted her to know that their state's anti-abortion laws were risking women's lives. Johnson is a Democrat in a red state, with a reputation for bipartisan effectiveness and an avowed interest in public-health issues. Her district, the 134th, includes the Texas Medical Center-a vast research and treatment complex, which Johnson calls a "shining beacon in the state, and a draw to people around the world." In the meeting, though, the doctors described an atmosphere of frightening constraint.

A year earlier, the Texas Senate had passed S.B. 8, a law that banned abortions past the sixth week of pregnancy-or even earlier, if an ultrasound revealed electrical activity in fetal cells. Hospitals and lawyers were left scrambling to interpret the law. Did it also apply to miscarriage care? What if abortion was medically necessary? In the absence of clear guidelines, doctors were obliged to consult with peers or ethics committees regarding conditions as common as preterm ruptures of the amniotic sac, which account for roughly a third of premature births. While the deliberations stretched on, their patients' risk of infection and illness grew.

Then the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving each state to make its own laws about abortion. Texas legislators were ready; they had previously passed a so-called trigger law, linked to the fall of Roe, which banned the procedure entirely, "unless the mother's life is in danger." In order to secure access to an abortion in Texas, a woman had to be "at risk of death" or of "substantial impairment of a major bodily function."

Among the doctors who came to see Johnson was Todd Ivey, a tall man with graying hair. Ivey, who was then sixty, had worked in Houston for decades, but had always left the politics of medicine to politicians. "We assumed that they would do the right thing," he said. "Now they're stepping into the medical arena." Ivey spoke of treating a woman who had been diagnosed as having cancer early in her pregnancy. She was bearing her fifth child, and the cancer had spread to her spine. "I cannot leave my husband with four young children at home," she told him. Ivey asked an ethics committee to approve a termination that would allow her to receive chemotherapy and radiation. To his dismay, the request was denied. Though the woman's life was imminently at risk, it took Ivey four days to find a hospital and a physician that would perform the procedure. He came to see her case as evidence that a woman's illness, no matter how serious, wasn't enough to qualify for abortion in Texas.

For doctors, the risks of breaking the abortion ban were severe. A violation could result in a first-degree-felony charge, with the prospect of a substantial prison sentence, a fine of at least a hundred thousand dollars, and the loss of a medical license. Johnson said, of the conservative legislators who passed S.B. 8, "They very purposefully told the doctors, 'I'm going to get you, both personally and financially.' " One provision in the law allows private citizens to file a civil lawsuit against anyone who helps a woman secure an abortion, with the promise of a ten-thousand-dollar reward if they prevail in court. The doctors meeting with Johnson worried that no one could be trusted. What if a nurse-or a receptionist, or a custodian-were lured into making an allegation? Older physicians were considering early retirement. Younger ones wondered whether they had a future in Texas. Hospitals were struggling to retain workers and to recruit new ones.

Ivey described a widespread feeling of futility. When a pregnant woman arrived in the I.C.U. with a brain tumor, he struggled to find a hospital in Houston willing to perform an abortion so that she could start treatment. "No one wanted to do it," he said. The woman was ultimately able to terminate her pregnancy in Texas, but thousands of others have had to flee the state since abortion was outlawed. "Until you're in a room, speaking to a family whose wife has a recurrent tumor in her brain stem and can't access services because she's early pregnant," Ivey said, "or until you walk into an exam room and there's a mother who brings her eleven-year-old daughter, who was molested by the grandfather and is pregnant-I really don't appreciate someone telling me what the right thing to do is."

Johnson is adroit at navigating the complications of being a liberal in Texas. Her office is decorated with a framed picture of her and her wife, Sonya-but also with a cowhide rug and a bronze statue of a Texas Ranger, which belonged to her father. A petite woman of forty-nine, with short brown hair and a ready smile, Johnson has a plainspoken manner, which she cultivated as a chief prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorney's office. In 2020, she unseated a Republican who had served as a state representative for a decade. During the campaign, Johnson promised to uphold reproductive rights-a pledge that she renewed in 2022, when the midterm elections came less than five months after the fall of Roe.

The midterms proved to be a referendum on abortion rights, providing an advantage to Democrats across the country. But, in Texas, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, won reëlection by an eleven-point margin, and the G.O.P. gained four seats in the legislature, increasing its majority. Though Johnson kept her seat, she had to reckon with the results of the election. "We lost the debate on choice," she said. "We lost the messaging battle."

If Johnson were to amend the state's laws, she knew that she would have to be subtle. The mere mention of the word "abortion" would end conversations with Republicans in the House. Proposals to carve out exceptions for rape or incest were immediately dismissed, as were those designed to leave medical decisions to doctors. Anti-abortion advocates were skilled at creating resistance. "If you do anything around the abortion statute, the minute it files, people are looking for certain code sections or language," Johnson said. "Then they'll rally support against it."

During Johnson's time in the D.A.'s office, she had represented human-trafficking victims who faced prostitution convictions. She promoted the application of affirmative defense, which allowed courts to limit the criminal culpability of women who had been coerced into committing offenses.

It occurred to Johnson that affirmative defense could also help physicians. If the legislature created specific exemptions to the ban on abortion, then doctors who got sued could show that the treatment they had offered patients was compliant with the law. "Politically, we're not touching the abortion statute," she reasoned. "Republicans can still tell their people, 'You could sue all you want.' "

Early last year, Johnson took her idea to fellow House members, and presented some of the cases that doctors had been dealing with. "I would give them a complicated moral scenario, and they would say, 'Well, that's not an abortion,' " she recalled. "It's hard for people who have a political agenda, one they feel is unwavering, to see the result of the policy."

Anti-abortion lawmakers were distrustful of doctors, and questioned their motives. To prove her case, Johnson needed to find women whose lives had been directly affected by abortion bans. Her team scoured the Internet for stories, and sent out word through friends and relatives. Many of the women they found were too scared to talk. Others changed their minds midway: "I can't help you after all." But half a dozen agreed to speak with Johnson.

One morning, a thirty-two-year-old woman sat across from Johnson in an airy room on a quiet, tree-lined street near the Texas Capitol. The woman, who was joined by her mother, wanted Johnson to see a scar that ran along her abdomen, down to her pubic bone. Sixteen weeks into her pregnancy, the woman had been rushed to the hospital with ruptured membranes, which threatened the baby's survival. She ran the risk of developing an infection, and the baby was weeks from viability, but doctors said that, until she presented a "life-threatening physical condition," there was nothing they could do. After waiting for several days, the woman went into labor, and her baby died within minutes of delivery. By then, her placenta had become infected. The woman soon returned to the hospital with sepsis, a life-threatening condition, and this time she stayed for three weeks.

"Her body was wrecked," Johnson said. Nevertheless, she added, "She put great value in what her child's death could mean to other women." Stories like these reaffirmed Johnson's determination to reverse the law, or at least to clarify it. Change, though, would have to come by way of compromise. "To give in to anything might feel like capitulation," Donna Howard, a Democratic representative who chairs the Texas Women's Health Caucus, told her. "But politics is an incremental process."

H.B. 3058 was introduced as a shell bill, devoid of any potentially controversial language-which Johnson knew would give her more time to negotiate with lawmakers. She had found an unlikely sponsor for the bill: Bryan Hughes, a trial lawyer with a reputation as one of the State Senate's most conservative members. At fifty-four, Hughes has championed numerous controversial bills-including one that secured the right to carry a gun without a license and another meant to ban critical race theory in school-but he is best known as the architect of S.B. 8.

Like other Republicans, Hughes insisted that, if the laws were harming women, it was because doctors were misreading them. As reports surfaced of women being denied treatment for premature ruptures and ectopic pregnancies, Hughes sent a letter to the state medical board, suggesting that physicians were at fault. "Texas law makes it clear that a mother's life and major bodily function should be protected," he wrote. "Any deviation, such as these allegations, should be investigated as potential malpractice."

Johnson had allies tell Hughes the women's stories that she had gathered. A malpractice lawyer named Jay Harvey also met with him and tried to change his mind. Harvey, who had known Hughes for twenty years, asked, How can doctors be faulted for denying care when faced with the threat of civil liability? In recent months, three women had approached Harvey about filing suit, after they were discharged from hospitals with ruptured membranes. In one case, the doctor had explicitly noted in the medical record, "Would otherwise terminate, but, for existing Texas state law, sent her home."

Others had approached Hughes about these kinds of cases. "We began to hear that there were situations where moms were not getting treatment," he told me. "Attorneys wanted to err on the side of caution, to protect the hospital, and were not allowing doctors to act in some of these life-threatening situations." It helped that some of the concerns came from influential donors. He heard from two "power couples" in Dallas: "The husbands called me and said, 'You know, my wife's concerned about this. We've heard there may be a way to fix this. We just hope you'll do whatever you can to get that done.' " Hughes conferred with leaders in the anti-abortion movement. "Women are being harmed," he told them. "Though we believe the law is clear, we'd like to find a way to clarify further."

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The Fight to Restore Abortion Rights in Texas

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Stephania Taladrid on H.B. 3058 and an unlikely political coalition in Texas who has tried to reform S.B. 8, a statewide abortion ban.

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The Brutality of Sugar: Debt, Child Marriage and Hysterectomies

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An investigation into the sugar-cane industry in the Indian state of Maharashtra found workers ensnared by debt and pushed into child marriages and unnecessary hysterectomies.

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In response to a petition filed eight years ago by nine lesbian couples, the High Court ruled that any distinction on the birth certificate of children of same-sex couples 'may send an offensive message that these are different relationships in essence and quality'

Israel's Population Authority will have to register both women in lesbian couples as mothers on the birth certificates of their shared children, the High Court of Justice ruled unanimously on Thursday.

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High Court orders state to allow two mothers to be listed on child's birth certificate

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In Response to a Petition Filed Eight Years Ago by Nine Lesbian Couples, the High Court Ruled That Any Distinction on the Birth Certificate of Children of Same-sex Couples 'May Send an Offensive Message That These Are Different Relationships in Essence and Quality'

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Florida's legislative session started only this week, and Republican lawmakers have already introduced more bills targeting LGBTQ people than there have been days in the new year.

Some of the bills - including one that would change the state's definition of sex and another that would criminalize "lewd or lascivious grooming" - are among the most extreme of the hundreds filed in state Legislatures so far this year. Another bill proposes prohibiting government employees from being required to use their colleagues' requested pronouns and yet another aims to protect children from "harmful material" online, though harmful material is so vague that advocates worry it could include LGBTQ content.

Additionally a measure proposed by the Republican state Sen. Jason Brodeur would declare nearly all published accusations of anti-LGBTQ bias to be "defamation per se." The bill would bar journalists from defending such accusations by citing their subject's "constitutionally protected religious expression or beliefs" or scientific beliefs, and those successfully sued would be liable for damages of at least $35,000.

"Florida has, for years, been an innovator of new assaults on freedom and equality, and this year's slate of bills is no different," said Brandon Wolf, a spokesperson for LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign who survived the Orlando, Florida, Pulse nightclub mass shooting. This session, we'll see escalating attacks on education, medical freedom, and the fundamental right of transgender people to exist as their authentic selves."

Among the most extreme bills is a sweeping measure, introduced by Republican Rep. Dean Black, that would require Floridians to sign an affidavit certifying that their driver's license or other state ID reflects the sex listed on their original birth certificate. As a result, transgender Floridians would have to turn in any existing ID that shows their gender identity and would not be able to receive such identification in the future.

Black's bill would also require any health insurance policy in the state that covers transition-related "prescriptions or procedures'' to also cover "treatment to detransition" from such procedures. It would also require coverage of so-called conversion therapy by requiring health insurance policies to cover mental health services "to treat a person's perception that his or her sex is inconsistent with the person's sex at birth" by affirming their birth sex.

The bill would also require any school district or state agency "that collects vital statistics for the purpose of complying with anti-discrimination laws or for the purpose of gathering accurate public health, crime, economic, or other data" to identify the birth sex of people in the data set, potentially restricting data collection on trans people.

Black said the bill aims to answer "the defining question of this decade, 'What is a woman?'"

"Indeed, this bill only serves to codify that which is already indisputable, but has sadly been weaponized by a radical political movement intent on rewriting the laws of nature to fit their own twisted agenda," Black said in a news release.

Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Florida isn't the first state to consider a measure that would prohibit trans people from having driver's licenses that reflect their gender identity. Montana, North Dakota, Kansas and Tennessee have enacted similar laws, and the ACLU is currently suing over Kansas' restriction. Two other states - Nebraska and Oklahoma - have enacted executive orders that similarly define sex in state law.

Branstetter said the bills are a "blatant effort" to contradict the Supreme Court's ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that federal employment law protects LGBTQ people from discrimination. Justice Neil Gorsuch's opinion specifically stated that discrimination based on sex includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

"In short, these bills are meant to grant wide power to the state to define 'transgender' out of existence," Branstetter said.

A novel bill filed by Republican Rep. Taylor Yarkosky makes "lewd or lascivious grooming" a criminal offense, which it defines as a person "preparing or encouraging a child to engage in sexual activity through overtly sexually themed communication with the child or in conduct with or observed by the child without permission from the child's parent or legal guardian."

Though the bill doesn't specifically name LGBTQ people, one of the bill's Republican sponsors has been publicly critical of all ages-drag performances, and the term "grooming" has recently been adopted by some conservative officials to describe LGBTQ-inclusive school policies and drag events where children are present.

Florida's slate of legislation continues a yearslong trend. Last year, Republican lawmakers in the state introduced 10 bills targeting LGBTQ people, with four becoming law, including a measure that expanded Florida's Parental Rights in Education act, or what critics call the "Don't Say Gay" law.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis initially signed the law in March 2022, it prohibited "classroom instruction" on "sexual orientation or gender identity" in kindergarten through third grade "or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate." The expanded measure, signed in May of last year, prohibits such classroom instruction from prekindergarten through eighth grade, restricts health education in sixth through 12th grade, and restricts what pronouns teachers and students can use. Since Florida passed the first version of the law, seven additional states have enacted similar measures restricting LGBTQ content in classrooms.

"Florida may be a laboratory for anti-LGBTQ+ hate, but it is not alone," Wolf, the Human Rights Campaign advocate, said. "The bills emerging from the state are part of a national extremist network's efforts to impose this agenda across the country."

Conservative lawmakers filed a record number of bills targeting LGBTQ people last year, with more than 500 state bills filed across the country, according to the ACLU. Seventy-five of those bills became law, according to an NBC News analysis.

Last month, Branstetter said the ACLU has tracked 212 such bills so far for 2024.

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Florida GOP proposes sex affidavits and 'grooming' bans in slate of anti-LGBTQ bills

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Florida's legislative session kicked off this week, and Republican lawmakers have already introduced more bills targeting LGBTQ people than there have been days in the new year.

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Muted response to transgender bathroom bills reflects a broader retreat on trans rights, advocates say

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GOP state lawmakers are pushing the most extreme versions of laws that restrict transgender people from using restrooms since North Carolina enacted HB 2 in 2016.

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A bill introduced in the Oklahoma Legislature on Monday would bar state agencies from celebrating LGBTQ Pride Month or displaying rainbow Pride flags on state property at anytime of year.

Oklahoma's " Patriotism Not Pride Act," introduced by Republican state Rep. Kevin West, would prohibit state agencies from using public funds to "develop, organize, administer, engage in, promote, or endorse any activity, including any event, initiative, official communication, social media post, educational program, or public campaign, that aims to promote or recognize Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Pride Month or any event with a similar theme."

If enacted, the bill would trigger an immediate state of emergency "necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health or safety" and would also ban any flag "that represents sexual orientation or gender identity" on state property or grounds.

The legislation, sponsored by West and Republican state Sen. David Bullard, is among the first to target the use of state funds for Pride initiatives and celebrations. So far this year, lawmakers in at least two other states - Florida and Tennessee - introduced bills that would ban rainbow Pride flags in schools. Florida's bill would also prohibit government employees, including lawmakers, from displaying rainbow flags.

West said he authored the legislation "because Oklahoma taxpayer dollars should not be used to promote or recognize activities that are not in line with the values of most Oklahomans."

"These groups would still have the freedom to express their views or opinions or tell the world about their lifestyle choices, they would simply not be able to use state resources to do so," West saidin an email.

Bullard did not immediately return a request for comment.

Nicole McAfee, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said the bill is "clearly designed to chill speech, and further disrupt the ability of Oklahoma agencies to serve" LGBTQ Oklahomans.

"We're everywhere - small towns, big cities, on tribal land, and everywhere in between," McAfee said in a statement to NBC News. "We make up communities, and even work for the state. You can't ban us or disappear us, and it's a shame that Rep. Kevin West is continuing his obsessive focus on targeting and isolating 2SLGBTQ+ Oklahomans with [this] latest attack. And yet, we've always been here and will always be here, during pride and beyond."

The bill is part of a larger wave of legislation targeting LGBTQ people, both in Oklahoma and nationwide. So far this year, state lawmakers have introduced nearly 400 such bills, and Oklahoma lawmakers have introduced 54 of them, the most of any state so far, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is tracking the legislation.

LGBTQ Pride Month was first recognized in June 1970, to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, which is widely credited as a turning point in the modern gay rights movement. President Bill Clinton was the first president to recognize the month in 1999 when he declared June "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month."

The Pride flag, which was introduced at the 1978 Gay Freedom Day march in San Francisco, has increasingly been the target of criticism and vandalism over the past two years.

In June, three men damaged Pride flags outside of the Stonewall National Monument in New York, and a Pride flag was burned outside of a city hall in Arizona. In February of last year, a woman set a Pride flag on fire outside of a New York City restaurant. In some cases, disputes over Pride flags have resulted in violence: In August, Laura Ann Carleton, a California business owner, was fatally shot after someone allegedly took issue with the Pride flag she had displayed outside of her clothing store.

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Oklahoma bill would ban state agencies from celebrating Pride Month

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A bill introduced in the Oklahoma Legislature on Monday would bar state agencies from celebrating LGBTQ Pride Month or displaying rainbow Pride flags on state property at anytime of year.