"During training, I would say out loud what others were merely thinking. For example, the day that white gynecologist [said], 'I don't understand my colleagues making [such a fuss] about excision. It's harassment! I always tell them to mind their own business when it comes to African clitorises.'

It's so much easier to say if you still have yours."


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UnCUT/VOICES: Unequivocally Against Female Genital Mutilation

While feminists in the 1960s and '70s dreamed that a "male Pill" was close to happening, today it has become a joke that such a drug has been "five years away" for decades.

Despite huge advances in sexual equality, we still live in a world where contraception is largely the responsibility of women. Scientists, doctors and women have been talking about the …


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In His Shorts: What Happened to Male Birth Control?

I had not planned to write a book on masculinity and war. But following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 with daily reports for a month of "loss of innocent lives," that term haunted me. "If we agree that it is wrong to kill civilians in war, then there must be others who can be killed." I knew, of course, the answer to the question that followed, "Who are …


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Equally Expendable: Looking at Men and War through a Feminist Paradigm

When a young creative on this past season of the show Mad Men was fired for posting a sexually explicit drawing of the firm's office manager, many in the audience cheered. That he was fired by a young woman taking control of her career only made the moment sweeter. Moments later, this woman rode the elevator with the colleague whose honor she defended and sought her …


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Double Standards in Economic and Political Clout

When I heard from Radical Women members who attended this summer's U.S. Social Forum that some participants in the Gender Justice workshop had questioned whether "equality" was a worthwhile goal, my first response was: "Oh no, are Women Studies academics caving to the rightwing?" It reminded me of how many reproductive rights groups have substituted the demure term "choice" …


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A Radical Look at the Question of Equality

As Gloria Feldt points out in her new book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change the Way We Think About Power and Leadership, the dial of women's progress is in many ways stuck.

The mainstream media is often quick to declare that gender …


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Gloria Feldt's "No Excuses" and Ways for Women to Think about Power

At Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, we know that abortion is an essential part of comprehensive health care for women, particularly for those with pre-existing conditions like heart disease or cancer. That's why our doctors strongly object to the recent decision of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding abortion.

The …


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MDs Tell HHS: High-Risk Patients Need Abortion Coverage

Every year at the National Poetry Slam poets from all over the country gather to tell their stories. A poetry slam is a competition invented in the late eighties by a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith. Poets generally have three minutes to present an original poem and are given scores by five judges picked randomly from the audience. Any given night, you can hear …


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Girls – and Women -- Are Slamming the Poetry Scene

Scan through the pages of a major music magazine, the arts section of The New York Times, Pitchfork.com or myriad other sources and count the number of female bylines you find on pop music criticism. Not many, right? (Or in the case of The Times, zero.) In music writing, gender disparity is a persistent feature.

One theory that has caught on …


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Female Music Critics Transcend Fan Culture

Remember the Virginia Slims ad campaign from 40 years ago? Directed at women, it announced, "You've come a long way, Baby." Ads showed black-and-white photos of Victorian era housewives, performing menial tasks, contrasted with slick, color portraits of ostensibly liberated 1960s' women, "

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Broadway Has A Long Way to Go, Baby

On August 26, we'll be celebrating the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. It's a good time to review what rights women have secured since August of 1920.

Actually, women secured no additional rights in the 44 years after suffrage was ratified. Then in 1964, the first federal law …


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Advancing Rights: 1964 Marks the Beginning of A New Era

The gender pay gap is standard measure of women's economic inequality. At the dawn of second-wave feminism, it was 59 cents: women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Today it's up to 77 cents, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity. That's progress, right? Here's even more rosy news: women without children now earn over 90 percent of men's wages. So maybe …


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Gender Pay Gap Underestimates Economic Inequality

Growing up in a small Missouri town Southern Baptist church in the 1960s, I recall very little being said about sex, sexuality, and gender. We didn't have sex education of any kind in my church. But I do remember that every pastor was a man. Every deacon was a man. Every greeter, usher, and offering collector was a man. Every person who read the scripture in church, who …


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Formation of Gender Identity in the Church

It's generally called "nontraditional" employment – women working in jobs that are mostly held by men. While becoming an auto mechanic may be a nontraditional career path for most women, in another sense, it was a totally traditional choice for Audra Fordin. She stepped into the boots of her auto-mechanic father, grandfather and great-grandfather, carrying on the 80-year-old …


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"Nontraditional": A Video Makes a Car Job Seem Auto-Matic

When I grow up
Please let me:
Be safe.
Learn to read and write.
Live with my parents
And my brothers and sisters.
Not be sold to work
As an indentured servant
Or a sex slave.
Have enough food
And clean water
To enable me to have
A healthy body and mind.
Keep my sexual organs


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A Prayer for the Girl-Child

Summer 2010 Café --EQUALITY: How much further away?

Spring 2010 Café --The Feminist MInd

Winter 2010 Café -- Passion, Freedon & Women

Fall 2009 Café -- Race, Feminism, Our Future

Summer 2009 Café -- Our Genders, Our Rights

Spring 2009 Café -- Lines in the Sand

Winter 2009 Café -- New Revolutions we Need

Fall 2008 Café -- What is Terror for Women?

Summer 2008 Café -- Works Hard for her Money: Feminists and Prostitutes

Spring 2008 Café -- HIV/AIDS Blowback hits Women Hard