Reading Materials The new book "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" by Peggy Orenstein talks about the "princess phase" that little girls tend to go through, and how it affected her own parenting. She also (thankfully) goes into how it affects girls into teenage and adulthood — who is the fairest of them all? (More information via [...]

The other night, I watched a Frontline special called "The Warning" from 2009.  Immediately I thought this was a bad idea, but even without understanding all the economic and market terms and lingo you can easily understand the message and the end result of the interviews.  The reason we are in a recession started ten [...]

Recently, Jaime Keiles (of the Seventeen Magazine Project) asked some great questions about films and abortion: why do so few films depict abortions? Should we see them in films more often? Jaime had just finished watching Enter the Void, which includes a pretty realistic abortion scene. She noted that the scene made her uncomfortable, but [...]

The very first exchange in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues is as follows, “I bet you’re worried.” “We were worried.” “We were worried about vaginas.” I’ll admit it, after being a fervent Hillary Clinton supporter for years (and not just because I’m a New Yorker or a Seven Sisters College graduate), when Barack Obama won [...]

Reading Materials: The book “Girls are Mighty Fine” by Amy Martin is her newest collection  of cartoons, following The Single Girls and Bachelor Girl’s Mother Goose. Martin takes on female friendships and lifestyles in a way that’s gritty, honest and relatable — and it’s great to see a female cartoonist out there! (via Ms. Magazinee). [...]

Cross-posted with permission from Marcia G. Yerman With the assassination of Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab Province in Pakistan and an outspoken opponent of religious extremism, the divisions within Pakistani society are once again in the news.  Perhaps there is no better time to see the documentary Bhutto, which not only tells the story [...]

It used to be that most politicians, even those calling themselves “pro-life”, would allow for abortion for rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. That’s been the case for a long time. I can recall as a young woman, in the days before the Roe v. Wade decision January 22,1973, hearing of [...]

You may have missed this article, because it didn’t make the front page. It didn’t even make the first fifteen pages of the New York Times. To remedy this, I suggest you read Jennifer Steinhauer’s "Among Women in Congress, a Bond of Friendship." Steinhauer begins by describing the hospital room where Gabrielle Giffords first awoke [...]

Angelique’s village was invaded in the middle of the night.  She was tied up and suspended between two trees, her legs spread wide apart.  Seven men violently plunged themselves into her before she passed out from severe, torturous pain.  Later, they shoved sticks up her ruined and ravaged vagina.  She developed a medical condition that [...]

Reading Materials: Her Place at the Table: A leadership guide from women for women. Judith Williams, Deborah M. Kolb and Carol Frohlinger Jossey-Bass give us generally realistic and practical advice for this modern work environment. For more information, click here. Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle is a book of [...]