How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

The Texas ruling takes us one step closer to the state surveillance of Ceaușescu’s Romania

_____ Across the United States, Republican-controlled legislatures are outlawing abortion, with the hope of bringing the issue before a sympathetic Supreme Court. If they succeed in revoking women's reproductive rights, the U.S. will quickly become a different society—one resembling Communist-era Romania.  “It was a horrible time,” recounts one Romanian gynecologist, referring to the period ...
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How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

Are You Looking for Jane?

From 1965 to 1973, the women of Chicago’s Jane Collective took the right to a safe abortion into their own hands. Literally.

_____ This week, when a Supreme Court majority permitted Texas to eviscerate Roe v. Wade and created a legal path for other states to end legal abortion after six weeks, I dashed off an email to feminist Heather Booth.  A lifetime organizer against social injustice, Booth’s work began in the civil rights and anti-war ...
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Are You Looking for Jane?

The Pride Wore White

Black trans women step out of the queer chorus

I’d come for Brooklyn Liberation for Black Trans Lives. We were asked to wear white. I blended in easily with the human snow of the crowd, wrapped all around the museum. Coming up Washington Avenue, so many white-clad bodies streaming, milling, chatting, buying ice cream from the truck, clapping and cheering ...
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The Pride Wore White

Believe Me: A Public Seminar Book Talk

Jaclyn Friedman, Samantha Irby, Tatiana Maslany, and Sabrina Hersi Issa talk feminism with co-executiv editor Claire Potter

Almost 150 viewers joined us for an hour of conversation and readings from a new collection of feminist essays that have never been more relevant.  Believe Me asks us to imagine a world in which we not only believe women, but act as though the things they report – harassment, sexual assault, ...
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Female Husbands

A Trans History

Female husband as a descriptive category lost its meaning in public discourse just as it proliferated in the U.S. from roughly 1878 to 1906. It had already largely fallen out of use in the U.K. Female husbands -- once defined by manhood and masculinity -- were quietly and subtly subsumed ...
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Female Husbands

Time and the Virus

The Gender Norm Challenge

Two weeks is a long time. Most people around the world think this now. Two weeks is fourteen days of not doing what we were supposed to do. It is enough time to put the largest economy in the world in recession. Clearly, it is enough time for catastrophe to ...
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Time and the Virus

Fragments of Memoir and Other Manuscripts

An excerpt from Honor Moore, “Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury”

“This is my oldest daughter.” I look at him and smile. “How do you do -- ” “You’ve got a great mom!” I would have said “a great mother.” I don’t like it when people use “mom” as a noun like that, and what does he know anyway, about this woman. He turns and ...
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Fragments of Memoir and Other Manuscripts

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

The National Book Critics Circle finalist on her biography, L.E.L.

Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth, returns to the world of 19th century female authors with L.E.L., an extensively researched recasting of the life and career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Long ignored and dismissed by critics, recently unearthed information has shed light on Landon’s personal life and by extension offered a new perspective ...
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Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

The Frustration of Being Elizabeth Warren

The significance of a campaign that couldn’t get a look from the voters

It is a familiar story, and one that frustrates many close followers of Democratic Party politics. The field has narrowed from a diverse array of candidates spanning different races, genders, ages, and sexual orientations, to two familiar white men who seek to unseat the current president. Warren’s departure from the field ...
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The Frustration of Being Elizabeth Warren

Don’t Cry for Her — Elizabeth Warren!

Democratic voters have shown themselves increasingly likely to vote for women, and Warren will be back in 2024

The commentariat -- almost to a woman -- wrung its collective hands when Warren dropped out of the race (where were they when she needed them?). Writing for The Guardian, Moira Donegan lamented that “As a woman, the Massachusetts senator always faced an uphill battle of double standards and misogynist resentment. She had ...
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Don’t Cry for Her — Elizabeth Warren!

When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

How AIDS and Social Issues Reinvigorated Soaps in the 1990’s

In this excerpt, Levine looks at how “the soaps”, challenged by flagging ratings in the 1990s, embraced the social issues of their day. --- Reality versus Fantasy As soap ratings initiated their slow decline by the later 1980s, the programs began to explore new developments in storytelling, shifting the boundaries of soap opera ...
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When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas