The Week in Women
Here, every day is International Women's Day.
Scenes from another life: Jodhpur, India, October 2015
Happy International Women’s Day! You’ve come to the right place: This is 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
Princess Diaries: Did we all watch the Meghan and Harry interview with Oprah last night? Many people will have many takes today, but my biggest takeaway is that everyone wins when good men with challenging families go to therapy.
IWD2021: Here’s a good bunch of women worth celebrating. And here’s what’s going on around the world today.
Girls to the Back: Across the world, girls have made huge gains in education, health, literacy, and basic survival. Covid-19 could walk all of that back.
Feminist Freedom Fighters: Meet the women who are helping to provide safe abortions across the globe, whether abortion is legal or not.
Boy Boss: Joe Biden is spending International Women’s Day signing a bunch of executive orders seeking to firm up women’s rights. Among them:
Rolling back the Donald Trump / Betsey DeVos Title IX regulations on campus sexual assault, which women’s rights advocates say stacked the deck against survivors of sexual violence. A big sticking point here is how to balance the obligation schools have to protect the rights of (mostly) women to get an education without experiencing sexual violence, and the due process rights of the (mostly) men who are accused of campus sexual assault.
Establishing a Gender Policy Council to address, well, everything: Bias and discrimination in employment, housing, health, and caregiving. Trump inherited a similar council and disbanded it, because I guess who cares about half the population.
Baby Bucks: There’s a lot to love about the huge aid package Democrats just passed, and at the top of my list is the guaranteed money for families with kids. Child allowances are excellent, necessary public policy, and I really hope this sticks even after the moment of acute need subsides.
Conscientious Misogynists: Abortion is newly legal in Argentina, but conservatives are working overtime to make it hard to get.
A Room of One’s Own: In the Russian woods, a feminist retreat from Putin’s pressures.
She Deserved Better: Men failed Billie Holiday when she was alive. They’re still doing it now.
Doing it All: Mothers took huge employment hits this year thanks to Covid-19 and the fact that women still do the lion’s share of the work at home. But there’s some good news: Women may still be doing the lion’s share of the work at home, but at least they’re regaining some of those job losses.
Mama Earth: The future of the planet and the future of women’s rights are intertwined.
Gender-Bending: Drag Kings are ready to rule.
Couldn’t Have Happened to a Nicer Guy: An anti-abortion protester in Raleigh, North Carolina brought a gun to the clinic and shot himself in the leg.
Justifying Sexism with Feminism: The Swiss ban on face veils violates women’s rights, Amnesty International says. Maybe we should let women wear what they want? (And just a note of important context: Modesty culture remains a profoundly misogynist and widespread force, and many more countries mandate female modesty than ban veils; politicians could just leave women alone and let us dress ourselves to our liking).
Get ‘Em: Polish women are celebrating International Women’s Day by protesting their country’s restrictive abortion laws.
Gender Epidemic: The pandemic has set women’s rights back decades. And it’s not just women — people with disabilities have been hit extremely hard, too.
Just Say No: A regressive anti-feminist law is up for debate in Egypt, and women are not having it.
Trust No One: He founded an ultra-Orthodox “safety patrol” to protect his community. Now he’s charged with grooming and raping a child. And separately, a police officer was supposed to help a child rape victim. Instead, he’s now accused of assaulting her, too.
Heroes: Female journalists and media workers are risking it all — and sometimes losing their lives — in Afghanistan. Fundamentalist groups including the Islamic State are hunting them down.
Rest in Power: Moufida Tlatli, the groundbreaking Tunisian film director, died at 78. And civil rights activist Priscilla Chenoweth, who dedicated years of her life and her personal savings to exonerate a stranger wrongly convicted of murder, died at 90.
Security Moms: Women in political office are disproportionately targeted by misinformation — making gendered misinformation a serious security threat.
Police Abuse: Another horrifying video of police violence, this time of a cop pepper spraying a mother in front of her three-year-old child.
Busted: China needs a baby boom. Unfortunately, the country continues to restrict access to IVF and other fertility treatments.
Maybe He Should Stay Home? Idaho could have gotten a $6 million federal grant for childcare funding, but Republicans rejected it because, as one said, he opposed “any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home.”
Backlash: In Senegal, a massage therapist accused a popular politician of rape. Thousands of people, mostly men, marched in the streets in his defense, saying he was framed. Women’s rights advocates say he deserves a fair trial and not a frame-up — but that the backlash to the accusation could silence sexual assault survivors going forward.
Women In Power: Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national security adviser, is now at work on domestic policy for the Biden administration.
I’m For It: Women in Kosovo are finding power at the ballot box.
Ungagged: Biden lifted the Trump-era Global Gag Rule, and women in Kenya are breathing a sigh of relief.
Pro-life Pedophiles: Catholic clergy members abused some 10,000 French children, according to one independent commission.
Brought Back: 273 Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped last month have been returned.
Time’s Up: New York governor Andrew Cuomo is under investigation for sexual harassment.
Change is Gonna Come: Morocco criminalizes sex outside of marriage. Feminists say that law must be repealed.
The Stories We Tell: Two new books on female war correspondents show how a more diverse universe of storytellers means more varied and complex stories.
What to Read
Take a Break
…and watch the new Netflix Biggie documentary.
…or look for Malala on Apple TV+
…or take a walk through women’s history.
And that’s it! Celebrate women today and every day by supporting our rights to work, make our own decisions about our own bodies, and live our lives free of discrimination.
And of course subscribe to your favorite feminist newsletter, maybe this one.
xx Jill