Gender Equality Archives - Public Seminar

Feminism

Our Bodies, Ourselves, Online

Historian and activist Saniya Lee Ghanoui explains how a feminist classic entered the twenty-first century

October 27, 2022 • by Saniya Lee Ghanoui and Claire Potter

When we started, we knew we needed experts from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Women and gender-expansive people from different races brought their own perspectives, personal and expert, and that would help us address racial health disparities. ...

Gender

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

October 11, 2022 • by Skye C. Cleary and Luis Jaramillo

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

Gender

From the Vault: Labor Pains

“One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.”

September 13, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews

Since I hadn’t been able to get Angela to talk about what trial lawyering may have done to her sense of herself, her “identity” as a woman, I shifted to a different lens: Did she feel, I asked, that the presence of more women lawyers was humanizing the criminal law?...

Feminism

Wages Against Essential Work

Our undervaluation of traditionally female work is coming home to roost

July 9, 2020 • by Alissa G. Karl

The streets around Highland Hospital, a few blocks from my house in Rochester, New York, are lined with signage “thanking” and “supporting” the “essential” workers who labor there. Many signs are hand-made, propped on porches or taped to light poles; others are mass-produced, like campaign signs, anchored into residential lawns. ...

Activism

Protest as a Means of Political Change: An Indian Case Study

How the 2012 gang rape of Jyoti Singh and the protests that followed changed a nation

July 2, 2020 • by Natasha Behl

In this current political moment of mass protests for racial justice across America, many of us are wondering how effective these protests are. Can marching in the streets lead to enduring change? Can dissent and disruption help us achieve a more equal and just society? Consider what happened in India eight ...

Protest as a Means of Political Change: An Indian Case Study

Feature

Domestic Violence and France’s Inaction

Emmanuel Macron’s unfulfilled promises to women

April 18, 2019 • by Alice Marie Ghislaine Aparicio

As a French citizen, I had to make an important decision in 2017: vote for our next president. There were 12 candidates, but I didn’t feel like I had much choice. If I wanted to see my chosen candidate elected, the possibilities narrowed to four options. Jean-Luc Mélenchon was offering ...