In one week, I plan to be sitting in Nationals Park watching the season opener of the Nationals. I’ve been waiting several long, cold months for this! Baseball is one of the few sports I really enjoy watching, live or on tv. It is also one of the only sports both my boyfriend and I [...]
Reflections on Health Care Reform, One Year Later
One year after health care reform became law, I want to reflect on the difference it has made in my life. Without health care reform, I would not be here today—literally. Alive? Well, yes. Interning in Washington, DC? Definitely not. When I graduated last spring, I started looked for a job in bioethics or advocacy [...]
Banging Chicks: The Language of Violence and Sexuality
Yesterday, fellow blogger Maggie Arden wrote a post called "Words Matter" on Fem2.0 about the use of language to devalue women. She was right about the idea that our every day language and the portrayal of women even in just the written media contributes to the overall discrimination of women. But the problem is even more [...]
Words Matter
At one point we were in an age of political correctness, yet now it seems we are forgetting that words matter. Or at least some people are forgetting it. We hear about people misspeaking, making clarifications and apologies for inappropriate things said. I’ve been reading the book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American [...]
Harmful Stereotypes: The Vilification of Men in Half the Sky
Have you had the chance to read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn? The book has been making the rounds of the feminist community, and for good reason. Kristof and WuDunn look at three of the greatest problems facing women worldwide: sex trafficking, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality. Kristof and WuDunn evaluate [...]
Moving Forward! (Mind the Gap)
This past week, I had the privilege of attending two conferences about women’s rights – the CARE National Conference and Celebration and the Feminist Majority Foundation’s National Young Feminist Leadership Conference. Both conferences featured keynote speakers and issue advocacy workshops, and then culminated in a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill. While the conferences touched [...]
what about this weekend
Reading Materials The new book "Chick Lit and Postfeminism " by Dr. Stephanie Harzewski examines bestsellers such as Bridget Jones’ Diary, The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and the City though the microscope of gender relations in the modern UK and USA. For more information, click here. Ntozake Shang in her new book "For Colored Girls" is [...]
Why Victim-Blaming Hurts: My Story
Earlier this week, the New York Times was rightly criticized for victim-blaming and overall bad reporting in a story about the gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas. The reporter, James C. McKinley, seems preoccupied with what the survivor wore, who she hung out with, and whether her mother was keeping a close watch—the [...]
Independent Women
Yesterday, I read a blog post on Maria Shriver’s website by Lindsay Schnaidt, who writes that women are too independent. Conveniently enough, I’d been reading a chapter in When Everything Changed, about marriage in the 1950s. It put me in an interesting position to compare the two worlds. Sixty years ago, women would not have [...]
A Noticeable Absence: Women in the Media on IWD
Yesterday, March 8, was International Women’s Day (IWD). On this day, groups around the world celebrated women in general and specifically, our political and social accomplishments. Happily, I follow feminist blogs and Twitter accounts that alerted me to this fact. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have known about it. I checked the New York [...]