Happy International Women’s Day! A Blog Carnival Calling All Women to Send a Message of Strength
Happy International Women’s Day, and welcome to the first #callingallwomen blog carnival. This March – Women’s History Month – 25 women’s funds from across the U.S. are uniting to promote solutions to the critical issues that women face.
Against the backdrop of an intensified war on women, the “Calling All Women: Send a Message of Strength” campaign is raising awareness of the inequality that exists and highlighting the change that women’s organizations are advancing in communities around the country. The campaign is encouraging women to “Sound Off” about the issues that matter most in their lives.
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As this video demonstrates, equality for women has not yet been fully realized in 2012. With women still earning only 77 percent of men’s pay – and disparities in access to health care and education pervasive, we cannot afford to take any steps backward. Yet, some politicians are openly supporting a reversal of women’s rights – from attempts to deny us access to contraception to deeming us unfit for military combat.
Against the backdrop of an intensified war on women, the “Calling All Women: Send a Message of Strength” campaign is raising awareness of the inequality that exists and highlighting the change that women’s organizations are advancing in communities around the country. The campaign is encouraging women to “Sound Off” about the issues that matter most in their lives.
Popout
As this video demonstrates, equality for women has not yet been fully realized in 2012. With women still earning only 77 percent of men’s pay – and disparities in access to health care and education pervasive, we cannot afford to take any steps backward. Yet, some politicians are openly supporting a reversal of women’s rights – from attempts to deny us access to contraception to deeming us unfit for military combat.
The Value Of A Woman
In theory, a year of human life is priceless, or so says Kathleen Kingsbury in her Time/Health Article ‘The Value Of A Human Life.’ In reality, she goes on to write, it’s worth $50,000. That’s the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical [...]
Women Voters and Voter ID
This week marks the 47th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” a seminal event in voting rights history. The televised images of protesters being brutally assaulted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge sparked a national outcry and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Fast forward to today, voting rights are under assault. The [...]
State-Sanctioned Shaming and the Battle for Reproductive Rights
For almost all American women, reproductive rights are not mere fodder for political debate. Rather, they encompass highly personal decisions. Do I want to get pregnant? Do I want to remain pregnant? They are unavoidable choices made by heterosexually active women—including Catholic women, who use contraception at the same very high rates as other U.S. [...]
Challenging Women’s Imprisonment in the United States, the World’s Top Jailer
On many measures of well-being, women in the United States fare better than their counterparts around the world, but when it comes to imprisonment, the situation changes: Of all the women and girls in prison in the world, one in three is confined right here in the United States. With only five percent of the [...]
Latte Factor: End Breastfeeding Discrimination
Joanne* had her baby, took a 12 week job protected leave through the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and then dutifully returned to work. She spoke with her supervisor about her desire to continue pumping her breast milk and they worked out a reasonable schedule for her to use a back room to pump. Her [...]
Rhode Island: We’ve got your back for paid family leave
Ten years ago I was standing on a balcony, trying to coax my puppy, Sabrina, back inside. Sabrina was barking wildly, but not moving. As I stepped towards her, the balcony collapsed. I fell two stories, directly against a brick wall, and landed on cement stairs. Thankfully, for me, there had been a late spring snow that [...]
Barefoot and Pregnant: What This “War on Women” is Really About
Women’s History Month is arriving this year in the midst of a “War on Women.” Many of the battles in today’s war are being fought on familiar ground—around women’s reproductive health and choice—but the surrounding context is quite different from that of wars gone by. In today’s America, women make up half of the workforce [...]
We’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Women’s History Creates the Future
“If women want any rights more than they got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.” — Sojourner Truth, 1797-1883, former slave, abolitionist, women’s rights activist, Methodist minister Truth’s admonition seems archaic now. Why are we still “talking about it?” Is women’s history of struggle for equal rights relevant in [...]
Happy International Women’s Day! Dedicate Your Day.
I love International Women’s Day. I remember great lectures in honor of this day in college, visiting my old hometown Fort Wayne, Indiana for their 99th annual city-wide celebration of the day, and just love the thought of a pause in the calendar to honor heroic women. I realize everyday should be International Women’s Day, [...]
