Amazing feminist history through the lens of “Ms. Magazine”
In the years leading up to the birth of “Ms. Magazine”, women had trouble getting a credit card without a man’s signature, had few legal rights when it came to divorce or reproduction, and were expected to aspire solely to marriage and motherhood. Job listings were segregated (“Help wanted, male”). There was no Title IX [...]
...read morePro-slavery propaganda from the 1800s USA
Oh. My. God. Thanks to LoriAdorable’s Twitter stream, I learn that in the early 1800s, pro-slavery authors reacted to the anti-slavery classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin by writing their own pro-slavery propaganda. I guess that makes sense. What’s really cool is that you can go ahead and read one of those pro-slavery books, in all its [...]
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Welcome to the Dollhouse: Men and Beauty Products
Back when pretty much the only men wearing makeup were either rock lords or Boy George, I privately came up with the guideline that if any particular piece of grooming was something women generally performed while men generally didn’t, I could safely consider it “beauty work.” Nail polish and leg-shaving? Beauty work. Nail-trimming and hair-combing? [...]
...read moreGrassroots organizing for feminism, S&M, HIV, and everything else
I wrote this for Bitch Magazine’s Feminist Coming-Out Day Blog Carnival; the goal is to talk about feminist “click” moments. Earlier this month, my sex-positive documentary film series screened “Jane: An Abortion Service”. The film tells the extraordinary story of “Jane”, an underground network of women in Chicago who provided thousands of safe abortions in [...]
...read moreWhere are you from? Part 7
That is it, there is no more. Thank you for participating in this project. Writing it certainly helped me to clarify and work through a lot of my thinking and pain around this question, and I feel a lot easier within myself. I hope it was helpful for some of you, too. With all that [...]
...read moreWhere are you from? Part 6
Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. I wonder what the future looks like. I am thinking about what “where are you from” will mean in my family’s future. I wonder what it means even now, because we’ve all moved around a lot. My family is, by a combination of [...]
...read moreWhere are you from? Part 5
Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. How do you relate to where you are now? Does it feel like home? Who lets it feel like home? I have lived in this city all my life and it still feels transient. I’ve never quite understood the feeling and rhythm of this city, [...]
...read moreGrandmothers
This isn’t the post I was going to write today. I was going to write about the right to fuck up in feminist/progressive/social justice communities. Maybe you’ll get that one later in the week. But this morning I woke up late and the first thing Twitter told me was that Elizabeth Taylor had died. I [...]
...read moreWhere are you from? Part 4
Previously: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Where are you now? Is it home? Is it a place you can’t see your way to it being a home? Sometimes identifying a place as where you’re from isn’t just about your personal history there, your associations, and memories, and how well you know it, and [...]
...read moreWhere are you from? Part 3
Previously: Part 1 and Part 2. Who gets asked where they’re from? My mother is asked this all the time by strangers in the street. And she’ll answer, hesitatingly, with the country in which she lived prior to coming here, because that’s what people want to hear, satisfied they’ve correctly deduced her accent. (Or they’ll [...]
...read moreAbortion Provider Appreciation Day: Dr. Doug Laube of Wisconsin
Did you know that today is Abortion Provider Appreciation Day? Now you do. In honor of the occasion, I interviewed Dr. Doug Laube, an outspoken abortion provider from Wisconsin. Dr. Laube first started providing abortions in 1974 — one year after it became legal. I asked Dr. Laube what brought him to this perspective — [...]
...read moreWhere are you from? Part 2
Previously: Part 1. Just asking some questions by way of bringing the thinking behind where one might be from to light… How do you figure “fromness”? If you’re ever asked where you’re from, how do you answer? Is it a matter of… where you are? where you’re a citizen? where you identity as someone who [...]
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