a week of important news for women

If you missed it, Betty White hosted Saturday Night Live the past weekend and Jos at Feminisig.com wrote about it.

Betty White hosted Saturday Night Live this past weekend following a Facebook campaign for her to appear on the show. She was joined by female alums of the show’s cast Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer, Molly Shannon, and Rachel Dratch.
White is the oldest person to ever host SNL. She also represents an important step toward gender parity on the show: men have hosted 482 episodes, while women have only hosted 194. The numbers are improving this season, with 12 men and 11 women hosting.

Anushay Hossain  at Ms. Blog tells us that after three years the United Nations Commission of Inquiry investigating the death of Benazir Bhutto released a report [PDF] which tells us nothing we did not already know.

The 2007 assassination of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Bhutto could have been prevented if the government of then-president Pervez Musharraf had provided her with “adequate security”. Thank you, U.N.! Only took you three years to make that obvious fact official. Where is Musharraf now, anyway? What is the point of pointing fingers so long after Bhutto’s death? A false attempt at garnering accountability is what this is. The truth is, too many men and too many politicians were only too happy to see this woman go. However, there is one good thing that this report does do. It makes us remember Benazir Bhutto.

Congresswoman Lois Capps talks about the importance of “Saving Mother’s Lives” at Majority Speaks.

As we celebrate Mother’s Day with our mothers, daughters, and sisters, it is important that we remember the mothers around the world we have lost.  Every single year several hundred thousand girls and women across the world die from pregnancy-related causes.  Ninety-nine percent of deaths associated with pregnancy and childbirth occur in the developing world, and the overwhelming majority is preventable.
I can think of no better way to honor the sacrifices made by mothers around the world than by investing in their health and working to ensure that no woman dies unnecessarily as a result of carrying her child. Safe motherhood should be a basic right for all women.  We have a moral obligation to make the right investments to ensure that all women, no matter where they live, have access to basic, life-saving care. 

Amanda Marcotte at RH Reality Check talks about the “Pill and the Fertility Control Revolution”

Last week, I interviewed Elaine Tyler May about her remarkable new history America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation.  One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is how May busts the myth that the pill created the sexual revolution, pointing out that this would require single women using the pill en masse in order to have sex, and that simply didn’t happen during the sexual revolution era of the 60s and early 70s.  The pill’s main appeal was to women who were already sexually active, and the pill was used not for a sexual revolution so much as a fertility control revolution, as a way for sexually active women to take advantage of all the new opportunities that feminism was opening up for them. In fact, May found that as late as 1972, “three-fourths of sexually active young single women rarely or never used contraception.”

What about the rest of the world? Artfullyaware wrote about grandmothers in Africa, Africa’s newest special interest group and their summit to put spotlight on Africa’s ‘forgotten victims’ of Aids.

Their collective wisdom is incalculable – and so is the collective burden they carry when families are torn apart by Aids.
Africa’s newest special interest group is that of grandmothers. They will attend their first special conference this week to share experiences and call for international recognition of their uniquely difficult circumstances.
A summit of grandparents in the west might prompt jokes about bingo and dentures, but the inaugural African Grandmothers’ Gathering, starting in Swaziland on Thursday, is a gravely serious affair.
More than 450 grandmothers from 12 African countries will meet to discuss the impact of losing adult children to Aids, becoming the head of a household and raising grief-stricken grandchildren as their own.
These forgotten victims hope to build a “solidarity movement” across Africa to make the case that grandmothers need targeted support from international donors and aid agencies.

Also, President Obama announced Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the Supreme Court nominee: “Three Women On The Supreme Court = Overthrow Of Patriarchy. Not.”(via Feminist Peace Network).

After a day of  omigawd how can our Socialist, Muslim non-American president appoint two women in a row to the Supreme Court because that amounts to discrimination against men,Ezra Klein says it all: But more subtly invidious is the simple fact that people are so unused to seeing women appointed to the court that it’s somehow a scandal to see two of them named in a row. Two women and we’re talking about systematic discrimination. And that reaction means that even though the coin says there’s an even chance that Obama’s next pick will be a woman also, there’s probably not an even chance of it, as he’ll have to prove that he’s not favoring women.
Of course, Happy Mother’s Day all you moms! We know how much you care about us! Hope you had a great Mother’s Day with your children.

You want more feminist links? Check back here next Tuesday! And, if you have links to share, please email them to us or leave them in the comments.