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On 26 September 2017, King Salman issued an order to allow women to drive in Saudi Arabia, with new guidelines to be created and implemented by the following June.

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Valentina Tereshkova

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly to space when she launched on the Vostok 6 mission June 16, 1963. Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to go into space when she flew Vostok 6 in 1963. She spent almost three days in space and orbited Earth 48 times.

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Women are more vocal in their demand for respect, privacy, dignity, and equal pay. For example, there still is anxiety about women in the workplace rather than the home while it is clear that women need to work given two incomes are now often necessary to properly raise and support children.

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Marie CurieThe first woman to win a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel. Curie is also the only woman to have won multiple Nobel Prizes; in 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

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Marie CurieThe first woman to win a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel. Curie is also the only woman to have won multiple Nobel Prizes; in 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Tafthttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Taft

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Through our advocacy programs, Joyful Heart seeks healing and justice for survivors of violence and abuse. We work in partnership at the federal, state and local levels, and with non-profit organizations, law enforcement, advocates and survivors to bring attention, funding and reforms to improve the criminal justice response to sexual violence.

Since 2010, we've made the elimination of the rape kit backlog-hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits across the country-our top advocacy priority. The rape kit backlog represents a failure of the criminal justice system to protect survivors and to hold perpetrators accountable. Testing rape kits sends the message that we take sexual assault seriously-that survivors and their cases matter. Not testing rape kits sends the opposite message.

Eliminating the backlog of untested rape kits is a cornerstone to improving our nation's criminal justice response to sexual violence. The Joyful Heart Foundation is at the forefront of this work:

Identifying, investigating and auditing untested rape kit backlogs;

Securing federal, state and municipal funds to test backlogged kits;

Developing and advocating for a national policy agenda to address the systemic issues that led to the backlog;

Advocating for state laws that mandate testing of all backlogged kits and new kits;

Advising jurisdictions working to eliminate their backlogs of untested rape kits on the implementation of survivor-centered, trauma-informed policies and protocols for victim notification; and

Working with jurisdictions to assist them in the development and implementation of survivor-centered reforms.

In September 2015, Joyful Heart Founder & President Mariska Hargitay stood beside Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., as they awarded both the federal funds and grants from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office-nearly $80 million in funding for more than 40 law enforcement agencies in 20 states to address their backlogs of untested rape kits.

Please visit our nationally recognized site, ENDTHEBACKLOG.org, to learn more about our efforts to identify and articulate the nature and extent of the rape kit backlog nationwide. You will find an interactive map displaying information on where the backlog exists and where reforms are being made, an extensive media and resource archive, and integrated blogs with relevant updates and commentary.

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Through our advocacy programs, Joyful Heart seeks healing and justice for survivors of violence and abuse. We work in partnership at the federal, state and local levels, and with non-profit organizations, law enforcement, advocates and survivors to bring attention, funding and reforms to improve the criminal justice response to sexual violence.

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Pre-settlement: Iroquois women have the power to nominate—and depose—council elders and chiefs.

1647: Margaret Brent demands two votes from the Maryland Assembly: one as a landowner and one as the legal representative of the colony’s proprietor, Lord Baltimore. She is refused.

1790: New Jersey gives the vote to “all free inhabitants” of the state. It is revoked from women in 1807.

1838: Kentucky allows widows to vote in local school elections, but only if they have no children enrolled.

1840: Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton meet in London, where they are among the women delegates refused credentials to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Women are very active abolitionists but are rarely in leadership positions.

1848: Mott and Stanton organize the Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., and take a cue from the Founding Fathers in issuing the Declaration of Sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

1868: The 14th Amendment guarantees civil rights to all citizens but gives the vote to men only.

1869: Wyoming Territory gives women the right to vote. The national suffrage movement splits into two factions: one that supports the 14th Amendment and the franchise for black men and one that calls for woman suffrage above all else.

1887: Federal legislation to end polygamy in Utah contains a measure to disenfranchise women, who had won the vote there in 1870. They wouldn’t get it back until 1895.

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After 18 years without justice, Joanie Scheske believed the man who raped her would never be caught.

That changed when St. Louis police called in 2009. Evidence in a separate, eight-year old sexual assault was finally tested and matched her attacker's DNA.

Rapist Mark Frisella, whose attack was so brutal Scheske still suffers from epilepsy, is serving 19 years in prison.

"I had a really difficult time wrapping my head around why that rape kit was never tested," Scheske said. "My case is a poster child as to why you test these kits."

A USA TODAY Media Network investigation identified tens of thousands of sexual assault evidence kits never tested by police.

In the most detailed nationwide inventory of untested rape kits ever, USA TODAY and journalists from more than 75 Gannett newspapers and TEGNA TV stations have found at least 70,000 neglected kits in an open-records campaign covering 1,000-plus police agencies - and counting. Despite its scope, the agency-by-agency count covers a fraction of the nation's 18,000 police departments, suggesting the number of untested rape kits reaches into the hundreds of thousands.

The kits contain forensic evidence collected from survivors in a painstaking and invasive process that can last four to six hours. Testing can yield DNA evidence that helps identify suspects, bolster prosecutions and in some cases exonerate the wrongly accused.

The records reveal widespread inconsistency in how police handle rape evidence from agency to agency, and even officer to officer. Some departments test every rape kit. Others send as few as two in 10 to crime labs.

Decades of promises from politicians, and more than $1 billion in federal funding, has failed to fix the problems. The roughly $1,000 cost to analyze each kit is among the hindrances for police.

Records obtained from police agencies in all 50 states show:

* While attention has been focused on large metro police agencies, tens of thousands of untested sexual assault kits are accumulating almost without notice at rural and smaller city departments. Hundreds of rape kits remain untested in places like Muncie, Ind., Visalia, Calif., St. Cloud, Minn., and Green Bay, Wis.

* In most states and at most law enforcement agencies, there are no written guidelines for processing sex-crime evidence. Decisions often are left to the discretion of investigating officers, leading to inconsistencies.

"It's like a baby's mobile: You touch one piece and it moves all the others. It's not just one person."
Jeanie Scheske
* Although uploading offenders' DNA information into state and national databases is proven to identify serial predators who move across jurisdictions, police often treat rape kits as if the evidence is relevant only to the single assault with which it is associated.

* Authorities at all levels of government are failing to quantify the problem. At least 50 major law enforcement agencies - from Montgomery, Ala., to Reno, Nev. - have never counted the untested rape kits in their evidence rooms. Most states haven't undertaken an inventory.

* The U.S. Department of Justice is failing to comply with a 2013 law that was meant to get more rape kits tested and set national protocols for processing sexual assault evidence.

For rape survivors like Scheske, the accumulation of untested evidence is more than abstract statistics.

"Every single one of those rape kits is a person, and (their) family and friends," she said. "It's like a baby's mobile: You touch one piece and it moves all the others. It's not just one person. Everyone that their sphere of influence touches is affected by what happens to a victim."

CLOSE

Debbie Smith of Williamsburg, Va., is one of thousands whose cases were solved by DNA analysis. After a masked man invaded her home in 1989 and raped her - threatening to come back and kill her if she told anyone - she lived in constant fear of his return for more than six years.

Smith remembers the day she was notified that a DNA match identified her attacker. He was already behind bars in Maryland for another crime. "It was the first time in those 6½ years that I took a deliberate breath. I wanted to breathe. I wanted to live."

The inconsistent analysis of rape kits persists even as comprehensive testing in some cities - including New York, Cleveland and Detroit - has demonstrated the power of the previously unused evidence to identify unknown assailants, confirm the accounts of sexual assault survivors, and exonerate wrongly accused suspects.

The results showed the discretion investigating officers have over whether to test rape kits has often been misused, said Sarah Haacke Byrd, managing director of the Joyful Heart Foundation, a group pushing for testing of all kits tied to a reported sexual assault.

"Time and time again, we have seen that law enforcement frequently disbelieves victims when they're seeking help from law enforcement," she said. Mandatory testing "takes discretion out of the hands of law enforcement."

In the course of this investigation, the questions from local and national journalists started prompting change, even before publication. State agencies and local police that didn't know how many untested rape kits they held started counting because of reporters' questions and open records requests. Those new audits alone found more than 2,000 kits containing untested evidence. Several agencies decided, based on reporters' inquiries, to send some or all of their untested rape kits to crime labs. In South Carolina, told of the findings, legislative leaders began pursuing statewide standards defining when police should test rape evidence.

Yet for uncounted thousands more rape survivors, the evidence remains untested, in storage.

It took more than a decade for Michael J. Brown to face justice for the 1993 rape of a school-aged girl at a New York City apartment complex.

On Aug. 6, 1993, Brown followed the girl inside a Queens apartment building where she was visiting a friend. He placed his hand over her mouth and abducted her, taking her to the rooftop, where he raped her and knocked her unconscious with a brick, according to court records.

The victim was taken to a local hospital, where she was interviewed by police and a rape kit was prepared. Then, for nine years, that evidence sat in a freezer among a trove of 16,000 untested rape kits held by the New York City Police Department.

In prior decades, the evidence had little value unless new leads emerged. But DNA technology advanced and state and federal governments built offender databases. Police and policymakers saw value in analyzing the evidence.

In the late 1990s, NYPD spent $12 million to send every kit to a private lab for analysis. About 2,000 matched DNA in offender databases - "cold hits" as police call them. One of the matches: Michael Brown.

His DNA had been entered into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database after an unrelated crime in Maryland. The DNA match led to his indictment in 2003 for the New York girl's rape. He was convicted in 2005.

Other cities and several states followed New York's example and now send all rape kits for testing. New laws and changing attitudes in some jurisdictions have led to CODIS matches resulting in thousands of new investigations and hundreds of indictments - many involving serial offenders tied to sex crimes in different parts of the country.

Testing by Cleveland-area prosecutors linked more than 200 alleged serial rapists to 600 assaults. Statewide, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine's effort to collect and test sexual assault kits has resulted in at least 2,285 CODIS hits so far.

In Houston, analysis of about 6,600 untested rape kits resulted in about 850 matches, 29 prosecutions and six convictions.

And, since the Colorado Bureau of Investigation began requiring police statewide to submit sexual assault kits for testing last year, more than 150 matches have been found.

Despite those successes, many police agencies haven't changed their policies.

In New York state, law enforcement agencies outside of New York City are under no legal requirement to test rape evidence. No state law exists requiring agencies to track how many untested kits are stored in their evidence rooms.

New York is one of 44 states with no law stipulating when police should test rape kits and 34 states that haven't conducted a statewide inventory.

"We need to have a full accounting for the state of what's left, what hasn't been tested, why it hasn't been tested and just clear it up," said New York State Assembly member Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat, who has introduced legislation requiring an inventory. The bill has yet to make it out of committee.

Interviews with law enforcement officials, and a review of police records obtained by USA TODAY, reveal sexual-assault-kit testing is often arbitrary and inconsistent among law enforcement agencies - and even within agencies.

In Jackson, Tenn., for example, notations in evidence records show contradictory reasons as to why rape kits were not tested. In some cases, the Jackson Police Department did not test evidence because the suspect's identity was already known, records show. In 13 other cases since 1998, records show police decided not to test kits because there was "no suspect" or "no known suspect," even though testing the kits could help identify a suspect.

Another untested sexual assault kit held by the Jackson Police Department is from a 2005 case where a woman was found under a car and told police in two separate interviews she was raped after using drugs with a man in a hotel, according to case records.

"She asked (him to) stop but he continued to have sexual intercourse with her," the investigator wrote in one report. But the investigator's notes from a third interview days later indicate "she did not remember what had happened" and the sex was voluntary. The case was closed. The sexual assault kit had not been tested as of last month.

"That should have been investigated further and I feel confident that it would be now," Jackson Police Capt. Mike Holt said of the case, noting changes over the past decade in how police interact with victims.

Law enforcement officials said the most common reason kits are not tested is there is not a prosecutable case, usually due to a lack of cooperation from victims.

Perceived lack of cooperation from a victim is not a valid reason to jettison forensic evidence, said Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Crime Victims Center, a Washington-based non-profit. Some survivors may fear retaliation if they press charges.

"The victim might not decide that they want to go forward with the case, but they might decide later on that they do," Fernandez said. "Or, if there's enough circumstantial evidence, including the kit, a jurisdiction could decide to go forward without the victim."

Some government officials and researchers have faulted police for a predisposition to doubt survivors' stories.

"The fact is that often rape kits are unsubmitted for testing because of a blame-the-victim mentality or because investigators mistrust the survivor's story," Illinois Attorney General Madigan told a U.S. Senate subcommittee at a hearing in May. "This outdated way of thinking must change."

After more than 10,000 untested sexual assault kits were discovered in Detroit in 2008, a landmark study funded by the Justice Department faulted police for "negative, victim‐blaming beliefs."

"Rape survivors were often assumed to be prostitutes and therefore what had happened to them was considered to be their own fault," researchers from Michigan State University wrote in their analysis of Detroit's rape investigations.

At some agencies, records reviewed by USA TODAY show untested sexual assault kits come from cases involving child victims.

Records from the Dallas Police Department show at least 43 sexual assault kits taken into custody from 1996 to 1999 were from children, some as young as 12. In an interview, Dallas police officials said there are likely many more kits from children among its inventory of more than 4,000, but there are no plans to specifically target them for testing.

"Often, someone will say that they were victimized. But when you get into the case, actually what it is, is that their parent had told them not to go visit a friend, so they had to make up a story," said Dallas police spokesman Major Jeff Cotner, who noted that testing of older kits could delay testing that is more urgently needed for current investigations.

Many law enforcement officials are adamant in their defense of leaving some kits untested.

At about $1,000 per kit, officials said submitting a rape kit for testing unnecessarily could divert resources from other policing needs or delay testing of evidence in cases where the need for analysis is more urgent.

"The kit itself isn't always the best science or the best evidence to a case," said Sgt. Trent Crump, spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department, which has accumulated 1,782 untested rape kits since 2000. He said the agency uses an "evidence-based testing procedure" to decide in each case.

A growing number of advocates are pushing universal testing.

"I think that in cities that have started testing all of their backlog, they're finding enough patterns of serial rapists for the information to be really valuable in current cases as well as the ones that have been sitting on shelves for years," said Scott Berkowitz, president of the non-profit Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

"It's amazing how, (for) many of these sexual predators, we have their DNA and we never tested the kit. It doesn't make any sense."
Col. Elmer Setting, New Castle Police Department
Over the past decade, Congress has appropriated about $1.2 billion to cut the nation's backlog of DNA testing needs, including sexual assault kits. In other terms: enough to test 1 million rape kits.

In 2013, Congress passed legislation to focus federal spending and set national testing standards. The Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry Act, or SAFER Act, required at least three-quarters of the funding for sexual assault kits be used for testing or taking inventory of the evidence. The law set up grants to help local police pay for inventories and testing. No grants have been awarded. A Justice Department steering committee met only once, in March 2014.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who authored the law, called it "completely unconscionable" that the Justice Department has not complied.

With federal action stalled, changes in how sexual assault evidence is treated is falling to state and local officials. As more cold hits emerge, some law enforcement leaders have started to advocate for more stringent record-keeping and testing policies.

Col. Elmer Setting, who leads the New Castle Police Department in Delaware, said he has pushed for a statewide mandate to test every rape kit.

"They've had success stories with testing these kits," he said. "It's amazing how, (for) many of these sexual predators, we have their DNA and we never tested the kit. It doesn't make any sense."

In addition to New York, bills are pending in other states - including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Maryland - to require inventories of untested rape kits. In five states, legislation is pending requiring testing of any new rape kits.

The mandatory testing bills being considered in New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia would add to testing laws on the books in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Washington.

"If we could catch more rapists through testing," said Rosenthal, the New York lawmaker, "we ought to test every single kit we have."

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Tens of thousands of rape kits go untested across USA

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After 18 years without justice, Joanie Scheske believed the man who raped her would never be caught. That changed when St. Louis police called in 2009. Evidence in a separate, eight-year old sexual assault was finally tested and matched her attacker's DNA.

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Feminism is a large movement, drawing all types of women to its helm. But there are lots of women who don't want to label themselves as a feminist. This could be because feminism isn't always clearly defined.

To some, it means equality in the workplace. For certain women, it means freedom when it comes to reproductive choices. Or, feminism is a strong position against men, and all of the advantages that they've had over women.

But has feminism gone too far? Instead of obtaining gender equality, are we just exchanging one dominating gender for another?

Why Some People Don't Subscribe to Feminism

In a project by YouTube channel Cut.com, 46 women, between the ages of 5 and 50, were asked to give a one-word description of feminism. Some responses included, "purposeless", "misguided", "overrated", "pretty awesome", and "necessary", just to name a few.

Why would some women (and men!) be deterred by feminism?

After all, oppressing women isn't a good thing, and something we should all be fighting against. Well, one of Britain's leading feminists, Jude Kelly, says that "feminism, like Suffragettes, is a word that is associated with struggle, and therefore it is associated with conflict."

And this conflict doesn't just refer to obstacles women have overcome, like pay inequality, job opportunities and voting rights.

The conflict exists today, when women pit themselves against men, and speak disparagingly about them and insult them, all in the name of feminism.

That's why some women don't want to refer to themselves as feminists - they don't consider themselves men-haters. And it's unfortunate that a movement aimed towards equality has led some women to trade places with their offenders.

Does Feminism Put Men at a Disadvantage?

At first glance, that question might look silly. How can men be at a disadvantage? They usually make more than women in the same careers. There are more men holding seats in the Senate and House. When it comes to CEO's, men outrank women, too.

But these are the popular places we look to when it comes to feminism.

Unfortunately, men are treated unequally in certain situations, and society tends to overlook them. Here are some examples.

Abusive Situations

Since an abused man can be perceived as weak and unmanly, they are often not given the same compassion and justice as an abused woman. And since there has been so much violence against women in the past, women can use this as justification to be abusive towards men.

Perhaps it's true that female perpetrators are not as common as men, but justifying any abuse may not be in feminism's favor. And in some cases, where an abused man or woman requires help, it is the woman who receives aid.

Is Alimony Outdated?

The socio-economic conditions of each divorced couple is obviously going to be different.

But in today's society, more and more women - thanks to the feminist movement - earn better, self-sustaining incomes. It may be worth asking if alimony is a fair arrangement, or simply a form of special treatment in a feministic society.

Child Custody

It is important that women have the opportunity to raise their own children, and perhaps because the traditional role of women is to be mothers, women often get full custody of their children.

But it is a striking statistic that only 10% of divorce cases end with allowing the father to hold custody of his children. Each individual court ruling does depend on various factors, but should more men be given the opportunity to play a bigger role in their children's life?

From these issues, it would seem that women, via the feminist movement, want to be seen and treated as equals, but sometimes that puts men at a disadvantage.

And if men try to speak out against this, they can appear whiny or effeminate.

What's worse, the male gender's misogynistic behaviors are usually used against them in order to deny them equal treatment.

Is Being a Man a Disadvantage?

In a recent study, it was found that twice as many women as men were hired in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

This is only problematic when corporations and educational institutions hire more women only to appear non-discriminating. Unfortunately, this is often a sure way to discriminate against qualified men, simply because they are men.

More women are attending university than in previous years, and are even outnumbering their male classmates. This can be due to the fact that female students perform better in early education. But why is that?

This study revealed that girls might not actually be performing better than their male counterparts. Instead, teachers assign higher grades to their female students, which leads to this grade gap.

This might not be the fault of the feminist movement, but it certainly doesn't lead to gender equality. And it will only further women's power over men in the coming years.

Suicide Rates

In the US alone, men are committing suicide 3.5 times more than women. In an equal world, it's important to know why.

Are men not receiving adequate medical and psychological support?

Are they ashamed of having depression or other mental disorders?

Do they feel misunderstood or powerless?

If men are expected to be providers, bread winners, and protectors, do we shame them when they fail to meet these gender-based, societal expectations?

The answers to these questions may shed some light on this stark statistic. It's important, that even while fighting for women equality, we not forget the value of men.

Are We Teaching Masculine Shame?

At a very young age, boys are now being taught the dangers of misogyny, abusive behavior and sex crimes. No one can argue the importance of raising respectful and decent men.

But this education is conducted within a feminist ideology, and it can be harmful to replace relationship-building skills with shame complexes.

Feminism started out as a woman's movement to help empower women. And this movement has made amazing strides in a short amount of time. Now that women are gaining ground and becoming more assured of their rightful place in society, it's important that men and women work together to respect and support each other.

Creating an equal world for one gender doesn't do us any good if we end up creating another set of inequalities.

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Is Feminism Overrated? It Probably is and Here's Why - Zerxza

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Feminism is a large movement, drawing all types of women to its helm. But there are lots of women who don't want to label themselves as a feminist. This could be because feminism isn't always clearly defined. To some, it means equality in the workplace.

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Women’s rights is allowing women to be equal to men

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Women’s rights is allowing women to be equal to men

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“Stay at home mom”, clean, “baby machine”