Womens Rights Archives

This is from the beautifully written book Marilyn by Gloria Steinem (these are Marilyn’s own words):
“You’re judged by how you look, not by what you are. Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first [...]

Jack Warner of Warner Brothers on talent (and why we as women should be proud of striving for excellence by sticking our necks out instead of getting nowhere by playing nice):
“When you’re dealing with talented people, I guess you have to expect some trouble. You never hear a peep from the duds.”

I’m currently reading the biography of Bette Davis, Mother Goddam by Whitney Stine with commentary by Bette Davis. What a fascinating woman! (I love reading bios of famous women, next up on my reading list, Thank Heaven by Leslie Caron.)
Included is this passage from Now, Voyager, a quote by Walt Whitman, as Bette [...]

From the Times:
…De Niro’s well-known discomfort with interviews shouldn’t be confused with vanity. He just doesn’t buy into his own celebrity status. This much is obvious from Everybody’s Fine, in which he seems to take delight in the evidence of ageing that so many of his fellow A-listers spend millions trying to disguise. The same [...]

The US buys nearly 20% of its petroleum from this country. From Feminist Majority:
A Saudi Arabian woman, Sawsan Salim, has been sentenced to 300 lashings and one and a half years in prison for filing harassment complaints about government officials and appearing in court in the northern Qasim region without a male guardian present. [...]

Forget about the self-absorbed Woody Allen kvetching on a couch stereotype, or the “crazy” label associated with seeking psychological help, once you get past all that and just try it, you may find just talking about things to a therapist helps you. From Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! (and they make the point but [...]

From the BBC:
Her new occupation is the result of an online vote hosted by Barbie’s makers, Mattel – and the doll itself was unveiled last week at the New York Toy Fair.
The new doll is decked out in black spangled leggings and a lime-green fitted tunic patterned with binary code, worn under a slinky waistcoat, [...]

If you are enjoying the figure skating at this year’s Olympics, here’s a really beautiful performance from 1968 Olympic Champion Peggy Fleming you may also enjoy:

Could it be we got to know the characters and used our imaginations (which we do possess, dear screenwriters)?
If you’ve ever seen Father Goose, there is a scene where Cary Grant is teaching Leslie Caron to fish with her hands. The innocent proximity of their fully clothed bodies make them both suddenly [...]

With the release of every Jane Austen adaptation, purists take exception to this and that. Which is part of the fun.
But I’ve only found two recent dramatizations too dreadful to watch a second time: The 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice (curiously renamed Pride & Prejudice) and the 2007 version of Mansfield Park. [...]

The African Queen, starring Katharine Hepburn at 44 and Humphrey Bogart at 51, has always been one of my favorite movies of all time. A reminder of a time when it wasn’t so unusual for a feature film starring older adults to be made and enjoyed. It’s Complicated, a rare film with over [...]

Long time listener/viewer of Tavis Smiley here, he always does a nice job with the interviews and this was no exception. He encouraged Hillary to speak about her commitment to the world’s girls and women and how empowering them makes the world a better place (she noted how women being abused is a sign [...]

Alec Baldwin:
“What’s worse than waking up with a 25-year-old woman, you know what I mean? You want to go shoot yourself because you have nothing to say to her. Seriously. It’s sad but there are men who go for whatever their earliest ideal of a sexual partner was, they stay with that ideal, meaning men [...]

Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza said he ruled “In defense of the integrity of the justice system, he needs to surrender.” In fact, the integrity of the justice system has already been harmed in this case. They gave the unrepentant child rapist a discount because he was a famous filmmaker, yet he still skipped [...]

From the Washington Post:
Women remain a distinct minority — there are 182 accredited ambassadors in Washington — but their rise from a cadre of five in the late 1990s to five times that is opening up what had been an elite’s men club for more than a century. A key reason is the increase [...]

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend backed Hillary Clinton, by the way. Count me as one of those “former Catholics”. From Bonnie Erbe:
Churches are empty all over Europe, where a more-educated populace has been moving on. In the United States, church membership remains stable but the demographic is changing; the church is losing long-standing, more-educated [...]

From Amy Suskind:
There’s an old adage: you roll with dogs, you get fleas. Well President Obama must be pretty darn itchy right about now. Obama’s selection of Warren and Summers is a constant reminder of where women and gays stand in Obama’s pecking order. It’s not been a particularly good press week for two well [...]

It’s 2010. And the efforts of women to alter their bodies for the approval of others makes me sadder than ever before. Will we ever get there? The article doesn’t mention the most commonly used whitening agent, hydroquinone, is so toxic, it’s banned in Europe. From the Christian Science Monitor:
The truth [...]

You don’t know what it’s like until you walk a mile in her shoes. From Alternet:
“She was real. They made her real for us. Those footprints were Dr. Tiller’s idea. He wasn’t a man with crazed eyes anticipating the kill like some anti-abortion activists would like you to picture. He understood the difficult position [...]

From the AP:
After suffering 10 years of horrific abuse at the hands of her husband, Rody Alvarado fled her native Guatemala in 1995 and applied for asylum in the U.S.
Last week, in a one-page decision, an immigration judge finally granted her request. It was the culmination of a long personal odyssey for Alvarado and [...]

“I have had Mr. Whiteaker’s offer of Marriage. I believe the only clear thing I felt on the occasion was Fear, as I have been long getting my Independence and am much afraid of losing it through some Need or Circumstance. If, as I feel, the proposal was forced by Loneliness, I am [...]

I find it interesting that the as ever hypocritical Republicans are using the new guidelines as a reason to oppose health care reform – yet they are fine with the existing system that excludes so many Americans with “pre-existing conditions” or who are seriously ill but are prevented from receiving critical care due to recission [...]

From Contact Music:
Cindy Crawford is urging women to stop buying magazines which feature super-skinny models – because it is up to the public to change body image stereotypes.
Crawford recently admitted she wouldn’t have become a successful supermodel if she had started out in 2009, because her body is too curvy for today’s catwalks.
The 43 year [...]

From Bonnie Erbe:
There’s been a ton of web chatter on the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the House version of healthcare reform. I’m sure you know what it is by now—it’s an amendment that would essentially bar private insurers from participating in the so-called public option if they provide coverage for private abortions at all.
Right now federal [...]

Here we go again. From Credo:
Why did pro-choice Democrats vote to approve the Stupak Amendment, the most serious assault on abortion rights in a generation?
According to FiveThirtyEight.com, 20 of the 64 Democrats who joined Republicans to pass the measure are nominally pro-choice. We’re telling these 20 Democrats — all of them men — to [...]

Abortions are often medically necessary. Especially late-term abortions, discussed in the article below, which can preserve the health and save the life of the woman as well as present the most humane option for the fetus. The procedure (D&X) that saved the health of the women in the stories below may no longer [...]

See them here, the “Democrats” who voted “yea” for abortion restrictions (all the Republicans voted “yea”):
worthless Democrats

From Bonnie Erbe:
Whether it was his treatment of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail or his clearly career-oriented mate who has been toned down and remorphed into a Stepford Wife, I just don’t get the impression this man is comfortable with women. Nor do I believe he cares about them beyond needing women’s votes. It’s [...]

Some quotes by women on friendship (I’ll add to these as I collect more):
Trouble is a sieve through which we sift our acquaintances. Those too big to pass through are our friends.
~ Arlene Francis
I always felt the great high privilege, relief, and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
~ Katherine Mansfield
It [...]

Roman Polanski was a 43 year old man who pumped champagne and quaaludes into a 13 year old girl in a hot tub then took off her clothes and had vaginal then anal sex with her while she said no, no, no. When charged, he pled guilty to a lesser charge after the victim’s [...]

Bravo! And good riddance to the creeps who objected to his decision. The article calls size 14 plus size, but it’s not. Size 14 UK is a US size 12, which is actually a really nice size, someone not heavy at all but curvy – womanly. The emaciated stick figures who [...]

The “old wives” got a bad rap. Even Apostle Paul, who advised women to take a backseat to men way back in the first century, to the delight of misogynists today who love to quote “scripture”, got a dig in at “old wives”: “But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself [...]

From Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally:
Harry: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally: Why not?
Harry: What I’m saying is — and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form — is that men and women can’t [...]

From the New York Times:
In an article in Wednesday’s New York Times about the vacation plans of the “God of Carnage” cast, Hope Davis spoke about how it takes a village — not to mention a good makeup artist and costume shop — to turn her into Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom she is playing in [...]

Let’s take a moment to remember Mary Jo Kopechne – and her parents. She was their only child. She cared deeply about civil rights and ending the Vietnam War. She was a religious person. She worked hard and had plans for a bright future. She died when she was only [...]

“This very important book will demonstrate beyond your worst dreams that the commercial needs of Big Pharma are the natural-born enemy of independent scientific research.” ~ John Le Carré, on Let Them Eat Prozac by David Healy
Phil Hartman’s wife had recently started taking Prozac when she killed her husband and then herself. The leader [...]

From Kate Harding in Salon:
“You’re a bitch, a slut or a dyke — or you’re married, but even if you’re married, you’re still probably one of the three.” … a bit of good news is nice every once in a while, and the people interviewed for these articles are offering a cautiously optimistic [...]

I recently watched the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice (mysteriously titled Pride & Prejudice!) on DVD. The characters were so markedly changed as to be nearly unrecognizable yet plot elements from Jane Austen’s original story were somewhat retained, so the film made no sense whatsoever. How bad was it? I wrote [...]

I suppose Shalit was so busy attending her Young Republican meetings on campus that she skipped a few English classes, and never got around to reading literature actually written by real women in the “good old days” – for instance, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The basic premise of conservative Wendy Shalit’s A [...]

“Many women have given their lives to political organizations, laboring anonymously in the background while men of far less ability managed and mismanaged the public trust. These women hung back because they knew the men would not give them a chance. They knew their place and stayed in it. The amount of talent that has [...]

So much for women’s liberation – some young women today are less sexually satisfied now than women were in the old days. I’m all for two consenting adults making their own choices in private, but I do have a problem with a small segment of society [e.g., the porn industry] successfully pressuring young, inexperienced [...]

By the way, the translation was accurate, the student did in fact ask the Secretary of State of the United States for her husband’s opinion. From Jenice Armstrong in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
There’s a big difference between snippy and snapped, you got it? Besides, it’s not as if Clinton got up in the questioner’s face [...]

From ABC News:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived today in what is described by some as the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman.
She met with rape victims in eastern Congo where sexual violence is often used as a tool of war, describing the encounter as an “incredibly emotional, overwhelming experience.”
When Rwandan [...]

Yes, dear, your body is all anyone cares about… so you might as well sell it. What a lovely message to be giving girls. (Wanna see who you’re selling it to, Miley? Read the comments. Eeeeew.)
Listen and learn, hon:

“The killing of women is like killing a bird today in Afghanistan.” From RAWA:
A 27 years old Afghan woman committed self-immolation and died in Pushtoon Zarghon district of Herat province in Western Afghanistan on Monday, March 16.
Local officials confirmed the incident and say apparently she had committed self-immolation due to domestic violence. They say an [...]

From Kirsten Powers at Fox News:
There is something profoundly juvenile about adult men in the media grouping powerful women by crude stereotypes like “bitch” or “hot chick.”
Now that we’ve had a beer summit on race, how about a wine summit on sexism?
In the latest edition of an online feature called “Mouthpiece Theater,” Washington Post political [...]

I hardly recognize Agatha Christie’s mystery stories in the ITV Miss Marple series currently being shown the past two seasons of Masterpiece Theatre on PBS. Viewers are calling them “murder by adaptation”! Why on earth someone would think they could improve on Agatha Christie, who has only been outsold by the Bible and [...]

Who knows what to think of her, Obama picked her. I’d have given anything to see who Hillary would have picked. But listening to Lindsey Graham tell her it’s “time to reflect” I thought, what he really means is, it’s time to act more “feminine”. From NPR (check out the special report [...]

From Bonnie Erbe:
I don’t put it beyond President Obama to have purposely buried Secretary Clinton and denied her visibility. He strikes me as a politician who will say or do anything to get himself elected in the first place and re-elected in the second place. So he cut a deal, quieted down the Clinton contingent, [...]

An interview with Emily Bazelon in the New York Times:
Q: At your confirmation hearings in 1993, you talked­ about how you hoped to see three or four women on the court. How do you feel about how long it has taken to see simply one more woman nominated?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: My prediction was right for the [...]

From Computerworld:
The most important antigen is the machismo that continues to permeate these work environments. We found that 63% of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment. That’s a really high figure. The second one was the sheer isolation many women cope with daily. She might be the only woman on [...]

Gee, do you think? I mean, just every day I experience it. I keep telling my friends how sorry I am to have chosen this field, of the damned wearying yet constant sexism on so many levels (and the subtle ones are the most soul destroying). I’m as persistent as the next [...]

From Bonnie Erbe:
Women’s rights stalwart Frances Kissling questions why President Obama has appointed a woman as head of the Department Health and Humans Services’s Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives who, according to Kissling, believes abortion should be illegal and opposes birth control–even for married couples. Assuming Ms. Kissling is correct about Alexia Kelley’s views, [...]

“I think women are afraid to say that they don’t want children because they’re going to get shunned. But I think that’s changing too now. I have more girlfriends who don’t have kids than those that do. And honestly? We don’t need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet.”
~ Cameron Diaz

From Time:
I met Hillary Clinton in the 1980s when she spoke in Washington at the Children’s Defense Fund. Already her essential public qualities ? intelligence, compassion, eloquence and wit ? were on display. She was also a fighter for causes that count. Whether people agreed with her or not, they learned quickly that it [...]

This was one pick that was sure to go through, no matter what. Time to pick a liberal with respect to civil liberties. What did Barry do? Just what I feared when I chose instead to support the far superior candidate, Hillary Clinton. He flubbed it, just as he’s flubbed other [...]

Last heard on the floor of the Republican National Convention.  This will get that image out of your mind!
From 1978: Roger Fisher, lead guitar and Ann Wilson, lead singer

The best Planned Parenthood can come up with is that Sotomayor will “respect precedence”. Not good. From the Daily News:
Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s 17 years on the federal bench means she has more experience than any other nominee in recent history, but it also means she has a record for critics to target.
Opponents are [...]

Surprise, surprise. Democrats of course waved Bush’s nominees through. Let that anti-choice young man sit on the bench for life, even the one who replaced the pro-choice woman. Obama sat mute as it happened. If he doesn’t appoint a pro-choice woman to the bench – and muscle her through… will Nancy [...]

Seen on Just Say No Deal:

I wrote down some of what Hillary said here (Hillary gets going at 2:48, after Smith’s illogical rant against Margaret Sanger):
…When I think about the suffering that I have seen of women around the world.
I’ve been in hospitals in Brazil where half of the women are enthusiastically and joyfully greeting [...]

Thanks to the male power structure of the Democratic party. From Bonnie Erbe at US News:
I believe Mrs. Obama’s “Mom-in-Chief” image was created more by Obama image-makers David Axelrod et. al. to soften her into a first lady Americans could love. I think it is a sad state of affairs that Americans are more [...]

I work in a male-dominated field where women are assumed to be brain dead until they prove otherwise – and they must prove otherwise again and again and again. Yet when I mention this challenge to male colleagues who have become friends, they express disbelief. They personally aren’t like that, they say, and [...]

Could it be something is missing in the current Hollywood offerings produced, directed, and written almost exclusively by old men and starring other old men bedding very young women in graphic detail? Could it be women want to see something a bit, well, romantic?
To honor these fine women (see my previous post about the [...]

From the New York Times:
…Justice Souter arrived at the court in 1990 as a presumptive conservative put there by President George Bush. Just two years later, he helped write a joint opinion with Justices Kennedy and Sandra Day O?Connor in Planned Parenthood v. Casey reaffirming the core constitutional right to abortion identified in Roe v. [...]

The way a woman wears her hair says a lot about the woman and her times, never more so than in the past. Needless departures from such truths serve no purpose other than to hopelessly muddle a story and needlessly distort our view of women in history.
In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a recent adaptation [...]

Clark Gable, while making Gone With The Wind, had to be persuaded to cry during the scene where Rhett Butler is anguished after Scarlet suffers a miscarriage. Gable thought crying was not manly and would ruin his reputation as a romantic lead. Director Victor Flemming had to bargain with him – they’d shoot [...]

From Ben Pershing in the Washington Post:
For the first time in recent memory, Hillary Clinton was a prominent figure in the headlines yesterday. She appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warning that the Pakistani government now faces an “existential threat” from Islamic militants. (At the same hearing, Howard Berman, the panel chairman, passed on [...]

From the Statesman:
Seventeen-year-olds will be able to buy the “morning after” emergency contraceptive without a doctor’s prescription, a decision that critics denounced as a blow to parental supervision of teens but that advocates said represents sound science.
The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it would accept a federal judge’s order that lifts Bush administration restrictions [...]

?When you know better, you do better.?

Her body inscribes an arc like a fine metal
point, her body is a feather floating.
Her bones are those of a swallow,
her bones are chalky.
Her bones are hollow as flutes.
Her flesh is only lacquer on muscles
[...]

After vilifying Hillary Clinton and giving Barack Obama a free pass, Obama fan rag The Nation is running an article entitled A Lexicon of Disappointment (had author Naomi Klein written in a more serious manner, no doubt she would be banished from The Nation for such heresy).
All is not well in Obamafanland, Klein says. [...]

This is wonderful, I hadn’t read it until now. And there is a quote from Just Say No Deal’s Diane Mantouvalos. From Susan Faludi in the New York Times:
To understand their gloom, one has to take into account the legacy of American women’s political struggle, in which long yearned for transformational change always [...]

“Corset health issues date back to the 1800s when women willingly abused their bodies in the name of fashion. For some time in the nineteenth century, in America a definition of beauty included corsets, making women’s waists as small as possible. This process was not only painful for women but also resulted in broken ribs [...]

This exquisite movie is currently showing on Sundance Channel… After reading a couple of reviews from male reviewers (who predominate in the role) who didn’t get the picture and thus the ending, here is a particularly good review in TV Guide from Ken Fox:
The break between employer and employee proves so traumatic that the [...]

The make-or-break element of star magic at the heart of cinema, the way performances depend on writing and direction but finally call to us from their own sphere of sorcery… Masterpiece Theatre is in the midst of airing a series of dramatizations with the BBC of Charles Dickens’ works. Now playing, Little Dorrit. [...]

Bonnie Erbe supported a poor woman who made her own difficult reproductive decision. Enter a bunch of women-hating men pretending to be Christian (Tony, Barry, David, Steve, Corey, Dan, Tyler, Bill, Conrad, Jim, Tim, Steve, Dan 2, Vince, Joseph, Mike, Joe, Doug, and more… along with a woman or two who are probably really [...]

The White House Project
Women Count
What’s your point, honey?

Address Delivered by Mrs. Stanton Before the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Congress, Monday, January 18, 1892
There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which [...]

From Mark Lange in the Christian Science Monitor:
Male cognitive patterns of linear, command-and-control thinking are no longer optimal ? either with Gen-Y talent in the workplace, or with geopolitical conflict around the world. We’re heading into an era when we need leadership that enlists self-interest in support of the larger outcome ? less transactional and [...]

On Facebook:
DISTURB THE VATICAN POST
SEND A CONDOM TO THE POPE !
Pope Benedict the 16th, on a flight which was taking him to Cameroon, Africa, declared that the ?flea of HIV cannot be fought by distributing condoms? and that ?their use makes the flea even worse?. Such a shocking statement when it is of public [...]

10 percent of American women are on antidepressants (women are prescribed anti-depressants at twice the rate of men). Did you know doctors prescribe Prozac to women for PMS and menopause? From Charles Barber, author of Comfortably Numb, in Scientific American:
43 percent of those who had been prescribed antidepressants had no psychiatric diagnosis or [...]

I miss Carol Burnett’s face.
Carol Burnett is one of our most famous female comedians, known and loved for her rubber-faced expressions. Now she looks like an alien. Not old, not young, just strange.
Aging didn’t ruin her face, needless plastic surgery did. Her eyes, lips, and chin were fine as they were. [...]

From The Making of The African Queen by Katharine Hepburn (she was 41 when she made the film):
Ponthierville was quite a charming town. On the Congo…
I was curious to see the church and the nunnery. And to examine the town. There was also the question of feeding all of us – we [...]

From Bonnie Erbe in US News:
My gut reaction to watching President Obama make his announcement today is he’s more talk than walk when it comes to most advancements for women or for other so-called minority groups. Why? His main pursuit seems to be political expediency, making everyone love him and not taking controversial stands (because [...]

From Chronicle Books Blog:
…We had actual women of all ages, shapes, sizes, and political bents come to our laboratories and view images. We had sensors, heart rate monitors, and all kinds of bio feedback devices. We found that stuff like this:

was more appealing to most women than [a picture of Brad Pitt]…

First, from 1956, The Rainmaker with Burt Lancaster (what a man!) Lizzie (Katharine Hepburn) throws the “old maid” label back in the face of society at the urging of Starbuck (Burt Lancaster)…
Lizzie: I’ve got nothing to believe in.
Starbuck: You’re a woman. Believe in that.
Lizzie: How can I, when nobody else will?
Starbuck: [...]

I liked that sentence… From The Guardian:
…Regardless, I suspect that many older women have indeed reached that state of grace where they are confident enough to judge themselves – and demand to be judged by others – not only according to what they look like in the mirror. And, as Foxcroft concludes, when it [...]

Lighting in many establishments is unflattering, uncomfortable, and downright unsafe. The most problematic issues are:
Overhead spotlights.
Nobody looks good in bright overhead lighting. Any imperfection in the face is highlighted in sharp relief. And the rest is made grotesque. Everyone looks old, spotty, frizzy, and downright frightening. And it’s very uncomfortable [...]