The Feminist Eagles

How High School Activism Is On The Rise

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary recently announced that “feminism” was the most searched for word in 2017. Several key historical moments last year prompted this spike, including the January 21st Women’s March and the recent #MeToo campaign. Our societal reckoning with the deeply entrenched patriarchal structure and institutional racism has been a long time ...
Read More
The Feminist Eagles

Sexual Harassment and #MenToo

The Five Stages of Belief

The headlines are full of revelations of sexual harassment by men in power, and women, who are typically the targets of harassers, are “getting it” -- in many cases coming to new consciousness about the pervasive effects of men’s sense of sexual entitlement. Many men, though, are having trouble wrapping ...
Read More
Sexual Harassment and #MenToo

Working On The Work of Working Out

A history of fitness in America

“You don’t want to be an aerobics instructor forever, do you?” Condescending and incredulous, the Rolling Stone journalist played by John Travolta asks this question of Jessie (Jamie Lee Curtis), his costar and L.A. fitness queen in the 1985 film Perfect. Jessie’s celebrity in the superficial, slightly louche, SoCal workout scene is portrayed as ...
Read More
Working On The Work of Working Out

Women Rule?

We’re Getting Closer

We may be in for another Year of the Woman. The last year to get that designation was 1992, which saw a great leap upward in the number of women elected to Congress, from 29 to 47 in the House and from 2 to 7 in the Senate. This followed ...
Read More
Women Rule?

The Reckoning

Sexual harassment, #MeToo, and the pain of radical change

But this is the only way, because threaded throughout our friendships and professional networks and communities and yes, even families, were agreements that were deadly to people’s bodies and minds and lives. Complicity, secrecy, denial, acceptance of the unacceptable -- all were woven into the fabric of our lives. There ...
Read More
Placeholder

A Feminist Policy Wonk’s Memoir

A short take on Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened

We have opinions about her. We have arguments. We have history. We call her “Hillary.” It doesn’t matter if we have ever met her (I haven’t) or if we have canvassed neighborhoods for her presidential campaign (I have). We all have ideas about Hillary. And feelings. Maybe this would be ...
Read More
Placeholder

Sex in the Time of Communism

The ripple effect of the #metoo campaign

My first sexual experience was on a bus in Bucharest. I was 7, surrounded by a throng of people. Like many other kids who lived in the communist bloc, I had parents who worked full time, which meant that I mostly went to school alone. I also came back from ...
Read More
Placeholder

Trump, Freud, and the Puzzle of Femininity

Our fear of the feminine might be the great riddle of democracy

But our president is the Greatest Repudiator. Not only has he sought to repudiate the Paris Climate Accord, UNESCO, women’s reproductive rights, and Obamacare; he has also demonstrated that he is obsessed with repudiating everything Obama. He practically revels in ignoring if not dismissing democratic values we take for granted: ...
Read More
Placeholder

A Woman’s Work

A Library of One’s Own

Read the news with a suffragist of 1913. Women’s rights advocates scanning the society page of the Atlanta Constitution on the morning of 4 June had a bevy of personas to peruse. There was the “Woman Shopper” gliding through a downy Eden of department stores: “Your presence, your influence and the wholesome atmosphere that ...
Read More
Placeholder

40th Anniversary of the International Women’s Year Conference

University of Houston celebrates feminism then and now

 From November 18 to 21, 1977, over 20,000 people gathered in Houston, Texas to celebrate International Women's Year and identify goals for women for the next decade. This was the first and only national women's conference to be sponsored by the federal government. On November 6 and 7, 2017, a few hundred people ...
Read More
40th Anniversary of the International Women’s Year Conference

Can Marriage Ever Be Really Equal?

Law and Sexuality

This is essay is part of the OOPS course Law and Sexuality. Assuming the heterosexual marriage contract is a tool used by men to exploit women and marriage an institution by which the unpaid labor of women is extorted and appropriated by their husbands, do non-heterosexual marriages reproduce the same form ...
Read More
Placeholder