The Week in Women
Women are fighting back, and winning
Scenes from this life: Brooklyn, New York, April 2021
Hello, readers, and welcome to The Week in Women, a roundup of women’s rights news from around the world, followed by links to a few good features, longform pieces, podcasts, and radio stories in the universe of gender equality, international human rights, politics, and whatever else is interesting on the internet.
Enjoy, subscribe (or upgrade your subscription!), and share.
What to Know
Never Again, Again: Uighur women are not free even when they leave Xinjiang.
Chivalry: Turkey’s notoriously misogynist leader met with two EU presidents. Only the men got chairs.
Abandoned: With the U.S. set to withdraw from Afghanistan, concerns are mounting about protecting women’s rights.
Ignored: In Kyrgyzstan, another woman has been killed in a “bride kidnapping,” after one of her kidnappers stalked her for months. Her complaints to the police were laughed off. She was abducted and murdered.
Hands Off: Mali has failed its women, local feminist groups say, by not outlawing female genital mutilation — so they’ve taken their government to court.
She Says: Two years after mass protests, many led by women, took down Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, the women of Sudan are back out in the streets demanding their rights to equal treatment under the law.
Drag Him: Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan went full-tilt into blaming rape victims for their own attacks, and Pakistani women are livid. Gotta say: What did he expect, going out in public and talking like that?
On All Fronts: Syrian women are fighting a war, and fighting for equality.
Bad Moon Rising: A new party in the Israeli parliament: theocrats who want to turn the country into a misogynist cult.
No Boys Allowed: The lost age of women-only hotels.
Change is Gonna Come: In Ecuador, a conservative candidate looks likely to win the presidential election. But there’s some heartening news in the rise of the country’s leftist Indigenous party, which has brought together advocacy for the poor, socialism, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and environmentalism under one increasingly powerful umbrella.
Behind Bars: Bosco Ntaganda is one of the most notoriously brutal Congolese rebel leaders, and was convicted of rape, murder, using child soldiers, and a list of other atrocities back in 2019, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The ICC just upheld his conviction.
Dept. of Low Expectations: This is the kind of really good news that shouldn’t have to be news — the U.S. Department of State will again report on reproductive health in its Country Reports on Human Rights. During the Trump administration, those reporters were stripped of reproductive health statistics, including basic information on maternal mortality. Now, at least the basics are back.
Bye: A South Korean man has been sentenced to more than three decades in prison after he ran a website that promised girls and young women jobs, then forced them into porn.
Her Too: Two women have accused a Mexican politician of rape. He’s threatening to shut down elections unless he can run.
Indecent Exposure: A Russian feminist artist’s work depicts women’s bodies. Her country has put her on trial for pornography.
Safe Harbor: Very good news out of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the U.S., which has held that a Mexican woman’s feminist beliefs — and her husband’s violent reaction to those beliefs, along with her country’s failure to protect her — qualify her for asylum.
What to Read
The Woman Who Helped Shield the World from Coronavirus [The New York Times]
When Refugee Families Are Separated, Women Carry the Burden [Longreads]
George Floyd’s Body Is on Trial for Its Own Murder [Rolling Stone]
Take a Break
…and check out the responses to this thread to find a little bit of beauty:
…or tune in tomorrow as Diane Rehm interviews Isabel Allende on aging, feminism, and storytelling.
…and that’s it!
If you want more, or if you just like supporting feminist-minded journalism, always feel free to share — and even better, always feel free to subscribe.
xx Jill