How Black Women Fight for Our Democracy

A conversation about Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

A legal and cultural historian, Martha Jones has dedicated herself to telling the story of how Black Americans have shaped American democracy, even – or especially – when they were formally excluded from the democratic process itself.  Jones’s most recent contribution is Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and ...
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How Black Women Fight for Our Democracy

Ann Snitow Prize Awarded to Barnard Historian and Activist Premilla Nadasen

Nadasen’s work elevating the voices of poor and low-income Southern women has earned her the Prize’s inaugural award

The Awards Ceremony will take place, via Zoom, on January 14 at 6 PM. It will feature a conversation about care work, race, and grassroots organizing between Professor Nadasen and the historian, writer, and longtime activist Barbara Ransby. Ann Snitow was a feminist writer and teacher best remembered for her critical ...
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Ann Snitow Prize Awarded to Barnard Historian and Activist Premilla Nadasen

How Should We Commemorate Mary Wollstonecraft?

Why the current controversy is curiously appropriate

On Tuesday, November 10, the British sculptor Maggi Hambling’s new monument to Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled on Newington Green, in North London – and almost immediately, there was an uproar. On social media and in newspapers, the monument was variously decried (“What the actual fuck is this?”) and mocked as “a ...
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How Should We Commemorate Mary Wollstonecraft?

Will Women Defeat Poland’s Illiberal Regime?

Protests erupt in Poland over abortion restrictions

After weeks of watching massive peaceful demonstrations against neighboring Belarus's authoritarian regime, Poles have finally taken to the streets to confront their own illiberal government. As in Belarus, Poland's de facto ruler, Jarosław Kaczyński has overplayed his hand – and women have been the first to smack it away. WARSAW – Authoritarian ...
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Will Women Defeat Poland’s Illiberal Regime?

Feminist Legal Pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies at 87

Progressives mourn a SCOTUS legend, famous for potent dissents, who saw gender equity as a path to civil rights for all

----------- Today, flowers are strewn on the steps of the Supreme Court, where “Equal Justice Under Law” is carved in stone. More than a thousand people gathered there tonight to mourn the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last night from cancer at age 87. Justice Ginsburg was born in ...
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Feminist Legal Pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies at 87

Wages Against Essential Work

Our undervaluation of traditionally female work is coming home to roost

The streets around Highland Hospital, a few blocks from my house in Rochester, New York, are lined with signage “thanking” and “supporting” the “essential” workers who labor there. Many signs are hand-made, propped on porches or taped to light poles; others are mass-produced, like campaign signs, anchored into residential lawns. ...
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Wages Against Essential Work

Anarchafeminist Manifesto 1.0

Not one less!

There are many tools by which men exercise their privilege, but a useful, although temporary, list includes the following: death, the state, the capital, and the imaginal. Death because women are the object of a worldwide gendercide, the state because the sovereign state is an instrument of the sovereign sex, capital because its economics ...
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Anarchafeminist Manifesto 1.0

Nevertheless, She Persisted

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Eight

This is the eighth episode of Public Seminar’s podcast, Exiles on 12th Street. If you like it, go to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. Thanks to the bravery of several generations of activist women, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, finally granting women in the ...
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When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

How AIDS and Social Issues Reinvigorated Soaps in the 1990’s

In this excerpt, Levine looks at how “the soaps”, challenged by flagging ratings in the 1990s, embraced the social issues of their day. --- Reality versus Fantasy As soap ratings initiated their slow decline by the later 1980s, the programs began to explore new developments in storytelling, shifting the boundaries of soap opera ...
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When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

Why Bernie Is the True Feminist Choice

For feminists, this election presents a clear choice — between advancing the interests of 1 percent of women and fighting for the liberation of the rest

Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and their supporters, including those on the New York Times editorial board, are strongly making the case that the time has come for a woman to be president. Warren and her supporters have been especially persistent in these appeals to gender politics. If Bernie Sanders weren’t in the ...
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Why Bernie Is the True Feminist Choice

We Still Need the ERA

How Activists Can Learn From History to Win It This Time

To many older feminists, the ERA remains the unfinished business of the 1970s. Today’s gender justice activists should expect to battle the same coalition of corporations and social conservatives that defeated their predecessors in 1982. But to win this time, they must learn from their own history. The ERA is not ...
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