Women's Rights Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

The Taliban’s Systematic Erasure of Women Is Crippling Afghan Society

The future of Afghanistan depends on the participation of all its citizens, not just half of them

April 7, 2025 • by Sima Samar

After the Taliban banned girls and women from studying beyond the sixth grade, in 2021, one avenue for education remained open: medical institutions, where they could train to become nurses, midwives, and pharmacists. However, in December 2024, Taliban officials announced that female students would now be barred from attending medical ...

The Taliban’s Systematic Erasure of Women Is Crippling Afghan Society

Gender

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

How do we reconcile these coexisting realities?

November 11, 2024 • by Ever Osorio

This July, two of the three party-backed candidates in the Mexican presidential elections were women. Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left-wing party, MORENA (an acronym for “Movement for National Regeneration”) won with between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in Mexico's democratic history. As ...

Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

Sex & Gender

Blurring the Line between Sex and Art

A conversation with Sophia Giovannitti about misled feminism, desiring objectification, and what is sacred under capitalism

March 29, 2023 • by Sophia Giovannitti and Josephine Houman

I think that outlawing sex work is a form of social control, and then the way that it becomes entrenched or ratified is by stoking fear in people about what sex work means and what it indicates. ...

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....

Uncategorized

The Women Who Built Playboy

An interview with podcast host Amy Rose Spiegel

October 6, 2022 • by Amy Rose Spiegel and Mette Kierstein

Women who were really responsible for shaping Playboy were Hefner’s closest confidants; they worked in the clubs and interacted with the magazine in ways that changed the trajectories of their lives....

Europe & Central Asia

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

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

September 7, 2021 • by Maria Bucur and Kristen R. Ghodsee

_____ 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 ...

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

Activism

Betty Friedan’s Radical Century

Because of this organizer, you can’t understand the twentieth century without talking about feminism

March 4, 2021 • by Peter Dreier

"A century after her birth, Betty Friedan’s radical ideas are common sense, and that’s a victory not just for feminists, but for everyone."...

Uncategorized

Vesna Kesic

In memoriam

December 31, 2020 • by Elzbieta Matynia

Photo: taken by Stephanie Damoff (provided by Elzbieta Matynia). Elzbieta Matynia is a Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and Director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies.

Democracy

Will Women Defeat Poland’s Illiberal Regime?

Protests erupt in Poland over abortion restrictions

November 11, 2020 • by Sławomir Sierakowski

After weeks of watching massive peaceful demonstrations against neighboring Belarus's authoritarian regime, Poles have finally taken to the streets to confront their own illiberal government. As in Belarus, Poland's de facto ruler, Jarosław Kaczyński has overplayed his hand – and women have been the first to smack it away. WARSAW – Authoritarian ...

Will Women Defeat Poland’s Illiberal Regime?

Why They Marched

A walk through suffrage history

July 26, 2019 • by Susan Ware

For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. In Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote Susan Ware uncovered a much broader ...

Walking Through Suffrage History

An interview with Susan Ware

July 25, 2019 • by Susan Ware and Elaine S. Abelson

--- Elaine S. Abelson [ESA]: Susan, this walk-through suffrage history has been fascinating for me. I teach the history of American women and thought I knew this history. Turns out I knew only ‘the highlights.’ Many of your stories surprised me for two reasons. First was the depth of your research ...