A lot of the stories provided by my fellow WOW participants this week were about sheroes: women who’ve done amazing things. Coincidentally, my Top Comments diary this week dealt with two books about women leaders in the fight against two of history’s greatest evils: slavery and the Holocaust.
175 years ago, the Seneca Falls Convention kicked off the movement for women’s suffrage. Many of the participants didn’t live to see the 19th Amendment ratified, but they never stopped fighting. May we have the same persistence in pursuit of equality.
Women scientists are re-examining animal behavior through a feminist lens.
15-year-old Rylee Brooke: No one is too young for climate activism.
Don’t forget to check out WOW2 for more about amazing women, past and present!
As always, this diary is a group effort. Thanks to mettle fatigue, elenacarlena, Angmar, officebss, ramara, J Graham, and the WOW crew for links and discussion.
Reproductive Rights:
Via Jessica Valenti: A judge ruled in favor of the 15 women who sued Texas after the state’s abortion ban put their health and lives at risk. Travis County District Judge Jessica Mangrum issued a temporary injunction that will stop the law from being enforced against doctors who provide abortions using “good faith judgement” that a pregnancy is unsafe for the pregnant person, or that a fetus is unlikely to survive. Texas will definitely appeal; but for now, people in the state with dangerous or doomed pregnancies should be able to get care.
Also via Jessica Valenti: The authorization of PEPFAR—the highly successful global AIDs program—is set to expire on September 30 as the anti-abortion fight over its reauthorization continues. Anti-abortion Republicans are blocking its reauthorization over allegations that PEPFAR funding is going towards abortions (which is not only false, but illegal).
Maternal deaths have nearly doubled since 2018, with Black women by far the most at risk.
Cosmopolitan profiles the Miscarriage & Abortion Hotline.
Pennsylvania has ended state funding for deceptive “crisis pregnancy centers.”
Almost 2 million American women now live in “double deserts” with no abortion or maternity care.
Idaho politicians are directly asking hospitals for abortion records.
NPR/ NYT podcast series on the Yale fertility clinic patient pain case (nurse was stealing fentanyl and replacing it with saline).
Violence and Harassment:
Rudy Giuliani’s former assistant Noelle Dunphy is suing him for sexual harassment, and the details are as gross as you’d expect from him.
In Oregon, a brave woman escaped from a makeshift cell where a man had held her captive in his garage. The man was captured, and is suspected in at least 4 other sexual assaults. Authorities are asking any other victims to come forward.
In Iran, chemical attacks on girls’ schools cause some parents to pull their daughters out of school.
Man arrested on the weird charge of breaking into women’s homes and rubbing their feet while they slept.
The19thNews *Young Americans who identify with gun culture are more likely to believe in male supremacy, research shows * " first-of-its-kind study surveyed over 4000 14- to 30-year old Americans and highlights the role that social media is playing in misogyny — and the U.S. gun violence epidemic."
Media:
David Cox argues that despite its overtly feminist message, Barbie still bows to the patriarchy.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus on sexism, aging, and fighting fascism.
Tributes to the late Sinead O’Connor: NPR and Jacobin.
Anita Sarkeesian will be shutting down Feminist Frequency, her website critiquing video games. It still seems weird that there is so much misogyny in video games. That guys are celebrating this announcement shows how little has changed.
Gilgamesh, legendary warrior of ancient Mesopotamia, is widely considered to be the world’s first literary hero. But what if there is another figure, equally charismatic but far less well known, with a stronger claim to the title? What if the world’s first literary hero was, in fact, a woman?
Justice:
Who is Tanya Chutkan, the judge assigned to TFG’s January 6th case?
Women in History & Prehistory:
In mettle fatigue’s recent diary about the archeological evidence that women’s roles in the ancient world were far more complex than previously thought, JGraham offered a handy list of sources:
Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy web.sas.upenn.edu/…
Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future www.spdbooks.org/…
The Forest People humanjourney.us/…
Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists www.amazon.com/…
Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality web.sas.upenn.edu/...
“Hunting and Gathering,” The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology www.anthroencyclopedia.com/…
Hadza people en.wikipedia.org/…
The Patriarchs by Angela Saini www.amazon.com/...