A scene from another life (Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, December 2018)
Hello readers! As part of my 2021 sorting-out of what this newsletter will be, I’m introducing a new Monday edition, The Week in Women. It’ll be a roundup of women’s rights news from around the world, followed by links to a few good features, longform pieces, and the occasional podcast or radio story in the universe of gender equality / international human rights / politics.
Enjoy and, if you enjoy it, please do subscribe and share.
What to Know:
King the Feminist: Today in the United States, we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., a radical, often reviled, and much-surveilled activist for racial equality and economic justice. King was also a committed feminist, and women were his collaborators, productive critics, and intellectual inspirations and sounding-boards. Read more about the women who were key to King’s work and his legacy here.
Feds to pull out of nation’s uteruses: Get ready for Biden to undo many of the Trump administration’s restrictions on abortion access and contraception. (Also get ready to push for a lot more than just a return to the misogynist status quo).
Asylum is a feminist issue: As Joe Biden prepares to enter the White House and has pledged an easing of asylum restrictions, a caravan of some 7,000 migrants from Central America is making its way north, while Guatemalan security forces are beating them back. People migrate for a huge range of reasons — to find work, to find safety — but in previous migrant caravans, there have been a large number of women, children, and families. They are fleeing nations with some of the highest rates of violence against women in the world, including staggering rates of sexual violence, and some of the strictest laws barring access to emergency contraception and abortion. I wrote about this last year for POLITICO: “What do you do when you fear for your life and the state won’t protect you? Or if the state might make your already tenuous situation worse? The fraught calculations that face Sofia and her mom are endemic across Honduras, a country that remains in the grip of a rash of violence against women and girls. For some, the answer is simple and disruptive: They have to leave. When exhausted families, mothers toting babies and young women traveling alone arrive at the southern border of the United States, it’s not just gang violence or criminality in general that they’re fleeing. It’s also what Sofia whispers about to her bunny: men who beat, assault, rape and sometimes kill women and girls; law enforcement that does little to curtail them; and laws that deny many women who do survive the chance to retake control and steer their own lives.”
Women of the Arab Spring: It’s been 10 years since Tunisian women took to the streets, brought down their government, and kicked off the Arab Spring. But dreams of equal rights and full representation have stalled.
Squeal on Your Pig: The French #MeToo movement (#balancetonporc) has added another layer: Women and men speaking out about surviving incest, after “a scandal involving a prominent French intellectual accused of sexually abusing his teenage stepson … prompted a wave of testimonies on social media from people in France.”
Underreporting, stigma, backlash, retaliation: Why Nigeria is losing its fight to prosecute rape.
Power player: President-elect Joe Biden nominated Samantha Power, who he called “a world-renowned voice of conscience and moral clarity,” to run USAID.
Meet Roberta Kaplan: She’s the lawyer who is going to be the bane of Trump’s legal existence.
Presidential misogyny: Rodrigo Duterte, the violent misogynist president of the Philippines and truly one of the worst people on the planet, says women aren’t fit to be president — in response to rumors that his own daughter might run. This is an interesting position to take because Duterte is unfit for life in the company of other humans and unworthy of even the smallest morsel of attention, and yet here he is, president of his nation.
Abortion protester expands his terrorism: In the least-surprising news of the year, one of the men who stormed the Capitol Building on January 6th was an avid abortion clinic protester — and had been elected to state office in West Virginia. More about the connections between the anti-abortion movement and the rioters at the Capitol here.
State of American women: The Center for American Progress has an excellent breakdown of the women’s leadership gains in the U.S. in the last year, and where challenges still exist. The good news in short: Record numbers of women ran, including record numbers of women of color and LGBT women, and in less than 48 hours, Kamala Harris will ascend to the highest office of any woman in American political history. Please also read this delightful interview of Momala’s stepkids.
American death machine: The horrific, tragic story of Lisa Montgomery ends in execution. Montgomery, a woman who suffered a lifetime of unimaginable abuse and lived with severe mental illness, was the first woman to be federally executed in nearly 70 years, as part of the Trump administration’s unprecedented execution spree.
Marriage-making equality: In Bangladesh, a court rules that women still cannot become marriage registrars, because they would have “difficulties” performing Islamic ceremonies.
“I sing of a life that doesn’t exist”: In Afghanistan, fear has become a way of life, and women worry about what will happen if the Taliban regains power.
Speaking of religious zealots controlling women’s lives: The White House asked the Supreme Court to make it much harder for women to obtain medical abortions — those done with the “abortion pill” — and the Supreme Court obliged, reinstating a restriction requiring women to go pick up the pills in person at a doctor’s office (instead of treating the pills like… any other medication). This is very obviously not ideal in the midst of a pandemic, as it unnecessarily exposes women, health workers, and other patients to potential Covid-19 infection. Abortion-inducing medications have been used safely for decades, and there is no question that they are overwhelmingly safe and effective. For women in rural areas, abortion clinics are routinely far out of reach. And there is no medically necessary reason to require a woman to go to the doctor to get abortion medication — in many countries the world over, telemedicine works just fine. The only point of this law is to punish and inconvenience women — and in a pandemic, further endanger them.
Green queens: Argentina legalized abortion last month. How did they do it? (I wrote about this huge Argentinean feminist victory here).
Rest in Power: Deborah Rhode, the third-ever female law professor at Stanford and a leading scholar on women’s rights and legal ethics, died at age 68 this week.
What to Read:
The pre-Civil War fight against white supremacy, and the three women who strove for a more just society. [The New Yorker]
Donald Trump’s masculinity is an empty spectacle. [The Atlantic]
Women of color were shut out of Congress. Now they’re transforming it. [538]
Meet the QAnon Meme Queen. [The New York Times]
The 10 best political books of 2020 by Black women. [The Atlantic]
LISTEN: Where is George Gibney? “A famous Olympic coach charged with child sexual abuse never stood trial. Instead, he vanished. Reporter Mark Horgan travels across Ireland, the UK and the US on his trail.” [BBC] And an update from the New York Times.
LISTEN: How macho politics defined Trump’s presidency and fueled the Capitol riots [NPR]
Take a Break
…and listen to TH1RT3EN, Pharoahe Monch’s music trio with Marcus Machado and Daru Jones.
…or listen to a TikTok sea shanty, I hope while someone brings you sugar and tea and rum.
Have a beautiful week, readers.
xx Jill