Weekly Dance Break: Ain’t Your Mama (J. Lo)

Jenny From the Block takes on working women tropes and unequal divisions of labor, all while wearing a pair of ass-less chaps (no comment). Other gems? A serious purple power-suit, a nod to BumbleBFF, and a crowd of awakened women dancing in the streets. But seriously, about the oppressive men in this video—where did she even find those living Ken-dolls? 😂

 

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Women at Work: Eileen (Writer/Editor)

Editor’s Note: I am very excited to introduce the inaugural interview of our new series, “Women at Work.” This series aims to open up conversations about what work women do, what aspects of work they find fulfilling, and what improvements can be made to their part of the American workplace. We’ll talk to women in a broad range of fields, in different stages of their careers.  Greater transparency benefits everyone! Our first interview is with 91-year-old Eileen Lavine, a retired editor who began her career several decades ago.

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1) What did you do for a living? What do you do now? 

I was a writer and editor for most of my career. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1945, and knew when I first entered college that I wanted to have a career in journalism. I had also been an editor of my high school newspaper (an enormous all-girls school in Manhattan), and as soon as I started college (at the age of 16 ½), I went to the office of The Daily Cardinal, the award-winning newspaper at Wisconsin, and started as a reporter.  That was September 1941 – and when we entered World War II in December, many of the male students went into service – so The Cardinal was run mostly by women, and I became the first woman to serve a full year’s term as executive editor.

2) When you were in school, what did you imagine you would do for a living? Did you have a strong sense of direction in terms of career, or a sense that there were many options open to you?

Yes, I had a strong sense of direction – I did not want to major in journalism, but rather in American Institutions, an inter-department major where I concentrated in political science, history, sociology and economics, all much more valuable for journalism.

When I graduated, I went to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and received my M.S. degree. Then I worked as a reporter and Assistant Sunday Editor on the New Bedford (Mass.) Standard-Times for about 2 years.  I then came back home to New York and worked as an assistant to Dorothy Gordon, who had youth forums on radio for the New York Times – my job was doing forums at junior and senior high schools around the city on current events and cultural issues.  After 2 years, my job ended and with my generous severance pay I went on a six-week Grand Tour of Europe, ending up in Paris where I stayed for a year doing some free-lance writing for UNESCO and the Economic Cooperation Administration (US Marshall Plan). When I came back home, I became editor of a welfare and health newspaper published by the Community Council of New York.  I married and was doing free-lance writing when my first child was born, then we moved to Washington, DC (my husband was an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission) – and I started doing part-time work for a nonprofit association in the medical field, writing and editing newsletters and other materials.

In 1968, a group of us – all women whose husbands were employed – incorporated ourselves as Information Services, Inc., an editorial business that produced newsletters, brochures, conference proceedings,, public relations programs, etc. mostly for health and education organizations and government agencies.  I was President of the company for much of its existence and also was active in the formation of the National Association of Women Business Owners.  We were a low-key firm, mostly housewives working part time on a variety of assignments.  It was quite unique at the time, but we were fortunate in that the organization that had brought us together in the first place continued to pay for the rent and office supplies, and also most of us had husbands who were working and had health benefits.  Our company closed in 1998.  Since that time I have been a volunteer, first as a mentor for young Black and Latino students in reading and acculturation projects and a member of the Board of Directors of the organization sponsoring this program , and for the past eight years, I have been a senior editor at Moment Magazine, a bi-monthly publication founded 40 years ago by Elie Wiesel as an independent magazine on Jewish cultural, social and political issues. I have written articles for the magazine, and I do copy editing and proofreading for each issue.

3) Did your family, friends, and other people around you support your ambitions to be a writer and editor? Was there pressure to do something else with your career/life?

Yes, my family and friends strongly supported my ambitions to be a journalist.  From my high school days, I always went to the 070 section in the public library to read books about journalists. My father, who was a doctor, died when I was 10, and my mother was very supportive of me and my two sisters in everything we did, from going to college out of town, working on the high school newspaper, and going to graduate school (I lived at home that year). My friends also had career goals, and most of my close friends worked after college and after they were married (although most, I believe, stopped working when they first had children, returning to work in later years).  I don’t recall any friends of the family questioning my ambitions.  My older sister, who graduated from college in 1941, got a master’s in economics at Columbia, worked for several yeas after she married, then returned to work when her sons were older. Ditto for my younger sister.  There was never any pressure for any of us to do anything else.

4) Do you see major differences in the way that women are seen and treated in the workforce, from your early days as a writer and editor to your time now at Moment Magazine? 

Eileen celebrates her 91st birthday at Moment Magazine.

Obviously, women in general have many more opportunities today – but remember, my college years were during World War II and women took over many jobs at that time. Some of my friends in college accelerated to get out of college in 3 years instead of 4 to take advantage of these jobs.
For a year in 1948 I worked on two trade magazines, before my job opened up at the NY Times, and the staffs were all women including the top editors. At Moment, the staff is almost all women, except for the design and production manager. We have had male fellows for one-year stints, but the latest fellows have been female.  I am continually impressed at the professionalism, capability and skill of all these women – and it has been a real pleasure for me to work with them.

 

5) Was the gendered wage gap and ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] a big topic of discussion during your time at Information Services, Inc.? What do you think can be done to further improve the working conditions of women today, if anything?

We didn’t discuss gendered wage gaps at Information Services because we were all part-time housewives whose husbands made most of the family income. So we really had no concern about the issue. However, we did march in support of the ERA and that was a big topic of discussion among us all.

As far as improving the working conditions of women today, I think professionally, women have made their marks already at the top levels of many fields, including journalism. The major issue today is how to improve working conditions for women at the lower end [of the job spectrum], to give them education and training so that they can move up and aspire to better jobs.

Our next interview is with Eileen’s daughter, Amy! What kinds of working women would you like to see us interview?

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The Good, The Bad, and The Absolutely Terrifying – Colorado

S.T.’s note: I wrote most of this story on Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon, I was just finishing up when the news of the San Bernardino shooting broke. That mass shootings pile up on top of one another so rapidly that one occurs as I wrote about one from a few days earlier is both tragic and outrageous. As of now, we do not know what was behind the San Bernardino shooting, if anything. I decided to go ahead with this piece because there is a link between words and actions, between violent speech and violent deeds; we see that link in violence against women, in violence against black men and women, in violence against Muslims. But the only thing that connects every single mass shooting that has occurred in the U.S.—in 2015, by the way, there have been more mass shootings than days in the year so far—is the guns. I am at a complete loss as to how we address gun control. So I talk and write about the things I feel capable of talking and writing about. 

Some days—some weeks—it feels impossible to find the good in news about women’s reproductive health and rights. Still, it is important not to lose hope completely, so I will tell you that the state of Alabama has stopped trying to defund their (two) Planned Parenthood clinics, and is even covering Planned Parenthood’s legal fees. That is about all the good news I feel I can bring you today, but the resilience of Colorado’s Planned Parenthood clinic and spike in donations after Friday’s devastating shooting cannot be overlooked.

Now, let’s talk about the shooting. Where do we begin? Do we begin with the event itself? On Friday, November 27^th, the day after Thanksgiving, a man entered Colorado’s only Planned Parenthood clinic, and murdered three people, wounding nine others. Do we talk about the murderer, Robert Dear? He certainly fits the profile. His ex-wife, Barbara Micheau, divorced him in 1993, describing him as a “serial philanderer and a problem gambler, a man who kicked her, beat her head against the floor and fathered two children with other women while they were together.” According to both Micheau and Dear’s own statements, he has a history of justifying his actions through the “belief that he will be saved.” Dear has a clear history—domestic violence, vandalizing a different Planned Parenthood clinic, praise for other anti-abortion terrorists—of radically violent misogyny.

 

Or do we talk, again, about gun control, hoping desperately we aren’t just throwing our voices into the wind? In a sharp condemnation of the way much of America reacts to this sort of senseless violence, President Obama said Saturday that “If we truly care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them.” Just days later, another mass shooting occurred in San Bernardino, with 14 killed and 14 more injured. I am, in all honestly, too exhausted to say anything further on gun control. Over and over and over, Americans cower in fear in movie theaters, malls, schools, offices, because we cannot, or will not, take real action on gun control. I don’t know how to talk about it anymore.

 

Maybe we talk about the victims. There are three in Colorado—I made a donation to the Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in their name, and if you have the means to do so, I urge you to do the same. Their names are Garrett Swasey, Ke’Arre Stewart, and Jennifer Markovsky. All three of them leave behind young children. All three of them were there to help others. Garrett Swasey, a police officer, was killed responding to the call from the clinic. Ke’Arre Stewart, an Iraq war veteran, had gone to Planned Parenthood to accompany a friend. He was shot outside the clinic, and ran back in to warn others with his dying breath. Jennifer Markovsky was also there to support a friend (her friend was also shot, but is not critically injured), and has been widely described by those she left behind as a kind-hearted person who would do anything for her friends, husband, and children.

 

But more than anything, I want to talk about the way we talk about abortion. As an individual, Robert Dear is a misogynist Christian extremist, a right-wing terrorist, no more connected to Christianity than Jihadist terrorists are to Islam. As individuals, each of the three victims cared for the people in their lives—the friends they accompanied to the clinic, the children they raised, the citizens they died protecting—and leave behind devastated families. As national phenomena, gun control and large-scale violence are issues we need to fight with everything we’ve got. But while this violence and the devastation it has caused are being described, and rightly so, as “senseless,” it is not random, nor, in a sick way, is it all too difficult to understand.

 

I do not think that responding to this atrocity by talking about abortion rights is simply a calculating move to further a political agenda while in a national spotlight. I think it is insulting to those who have died to pretend that there was no reason they were killed, nothing behind the violence. In particular, Stewart and Markowitz were killed because they made the decision to be there for their friends as their friends sought basic healthcare. They were killed—Robert Dear killed them—because, whatever their respective personal beliefs, they assisted women they cared for in getting necessary medical care from one of the only places in the state that offers it, or at least offers it at an affordable price.

 

I do not know what sort of care those women were seeking. I do not know if they were there for abortions or ultrasounds, pap smears or breast exams. I don’t care. If anyone tells me that “they weren’t even there to get abortions,” or repeats  the statistic that only 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services are actually abortion, my stomach will tighten. Yes, the other 97% of Planned Parenthood’s services are very important. Yes, millions of women—and some men, too—will lose access (do lose access) to important healthcare when Planned Parenthoods are shut down or attacked because of that 3%. But when we justify Planned Parenthood’s existence through all the other wonderful and important work it does, we suggest that abortion needs to be justified. That maybe there’s something a little icky about abortion. That maybe we should just focus on the other things, and not talk about that too much.

 

Let me be clear: I fully understand why, as an individual, religious or not, some people feel that they would never be able to get an abortion. I fully understand why some people are deeply, deeply uncomfortable with the idea of anyone getting an abortion. And perhaps for some people, some of that discomfort will never go away. But I also feel certain that the more we talk about it, and the more open and varied ways we find to talk about it, the more that discomfort will dissipate. Still, it is okay to feel discomfort around abortion; what is painfully necessary is to extend that discomfort to include empathy. And the way the most vocal advocates of the anti-abortion movement speak does everything it can to quash any semblance of empathy for women seeking abortions.

 

So, let’s talk about talking about abortion. When I was thirteen, I was in DC’s Dupont Circle with my dad and some classmates. What looked like a mini version of one those buses designed for tours—railings and a megaphone affixed to the top—drove by. But this bus was plastered with pictures of tiny, half-formed fetuses, covered in blood and goop, faces contorted as if they were crying out in pain. The megaphone at the top blared rhetoric about “baby-killers,” “murderers,” “sin,” but mostly I remember those pictures, so much larger than life and so graphic. That was fourteen years ago; since then, anti-abortion rhetoric has gotten a stronger hold in American media and politics, and reproductive rights have been rolled back across several states. Over the summer, an undercover video making it seem as if Planned Parenthood runs some sort organ farm, made waves and inspired even more regressive legislation; despite being debunked, these videos succeeded in generating more fear and hate around both abortion itself and Planned Parenthood in particular. It is widely reported that after he was taken into custody, Robert Dear said “no more baby parts.” It would seem that these videos had an impact on him. As Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus succinctly puts it: “inflammatory rhetoric inflames.” Marcus cites the rhetoric of those like Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina. Let’s not forget Ben Carson’s comparison between abortion and slavery. And that’s just this political season. The extreme right-wing rhetoric is toxic and dangerous, and the extreme right-wing terrorists who follow this rhetoric (not just around abortion) are a national crisis. But to return to my earlier point, we also need to talk about how pro-choice people discuss abortion, because often, there are issues there too.

 

For some people, abortion is a decision made out of desperation, an incredibly difficult one, a sacrifice for already existent children. Two women I know have told me very similar stories about their mothers: pro-life Catholic women who got pregnant when they already had children to care for, whose pregnancies—for health reasons, for financial reasons—would have rendered them incapable of caring for the children who needed them. Both of these women did something they believed was ‘sinful’ in order to provide a life for the children they had. On the other end of the spectrum are women like Emily Letts, who knew immediately that she did not want to be pregnant, and for whom an abortion was a simple medical procedure. There are as many reasons for getting an abortion, as many feelings about one’s own abortion, as there are women who have had them. There aren’t right or wrong reasons for not wanting to continue a pregnancy or have a child. There are not right or wrong ways to feel about one’s decision. It is important to note that 95% percent of women who have abortions do not regret them afterwards (and there will always be a small percent of people who regret any major decision, this is inevitable).

 

This is what we need to talk about. Not only the women who we think of getting abortions out of desperation—young teenagers, rape victims, women with health issues—they are very important. But the women who simply know that they are not ready to have children, that they do not want to spend nine months of their life going through major body changes, conducting their lives differently, are just as important. While, on the one hand, we need to work on sex-education and access to birth control to make abortions rare in addition to safe and accessible, we also need to normalize abortions. We need to hear more stories. We need to say the word out loud, and not in hushed tones or with euphemisms. The Colorado shooting was an act of terrorism, meant to both punish people for going against an extreme ideology and scare people away from seeking abortions or providing them. We need to push against this terror, to make the world safer for women seeking abortions and the men and women who provide them. So let’s talk about gun control, let’s talk about violence, let’s talk about extremism, let’s honor the dead. But let’s also talk about abortion, and do so openly and unafraid.

Project Spotlight: Driven Media

Acro: First, please introduce yourselves.

I’m Samantha Harrington. I’m 22, originally from Wisconsin and I graduated with degrees in Journalism and Arabic from UNC in May 2015. I like sunflowers and Joan Didion and tea and good music and friends and talking and painting (in no particular order haha).

 

I’m Hannah Doksansky, a 21-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia, who will graduate in the spring from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I drink coffee by the gallon, spend many hours catching up on the phone with friends, and take the occasional photo to document everything.

 

Acro: Give us an intro to your project. What is it called, what do you do, and what was the inspiration for getting started?

 

Driven Media is a journalism startup that aims to help young women understand their lives and potential. We do this through multimedia stories about the lives, relationships and stories of real women. As young women, we really felt that gap and lack of representation of women in the media. When you are looking for inspiration and hope and just a good story that you can relate to, it just isn’t there. We wanted to change that, and felt like we had the skill set to, so we did. –sam

 

Our team consists of Sam and I, who rove down the east coast in a tiny green prius, and two women named Josie and Hrisanthi who create multimedia interactives for each story while also working full time at newspapers. We all met at an entrepreneurial journalism lab at UNC and knew from group projects that our skill sets could be combined to create better storytelling. (HD)

 

Acro: What are you hoping to achieve through Driven Media? Is there something about storytelling (and, in particular, mobile storytelling!) as a medium that’s particularly useful for achieving your goals?

 

I think we’re trying to achieve a world in which women can share stories and learn from one another. We’re just trying to be the platform that facilitates that learning. You can connect to anyone online that has access to internet. It lets us transcend physical and geographic space and limitations in an awesome way. And obviously mobile is super important. Our target audience is young women. Young people get a lot of their information on their phones (I know I do). So every story we do we want to make sure looks good on mobile. Surprisingly our analytics show that still like 70% of people are getting to our content on desktops, but I expect mobile will become a bigger and bigger thing for us. –sam

 

Acro: What is your method? How do you go about finding subjects and collecting stories?

 

We basically show up in a place and call everyone and anyone we can. We’re focusing on a series of stories this fall about immigration while traveling down the east coast. So that means we’re in a new place every two weeks and really have to start the discovery process all over again. Generally we start with organizations—cultural associations, resettlement agencies, restaurants, etc—but sometimes we turn to social media to find people. In West Virginia I searched Twitter for people who had tweeted, “West Virginia and Filipino,” and just tweeted back at them. It looked pretty desperate responding to like 3-year-old tweets, but almost everyone responded.  Once we’ve found people to talk to we do some like exploratory interviews to figure out what the story is. Then once we’re at that point we try to figure out the best way to tell it. Should this be an audio piece? Or is video or text better? Things like that. –sam

 

Acro: What are the particular challenges of your project, if any?

 

Oh, do we encounter challenges. Our biggest challenge is always money. We crowdfunded $50,000 to launch the company in August, which enabled us to make necessary investments like equipment and a car. But we know that Driven cannot continue to exist without a viable business model. We brainstorm often new ways to make money to sustain future tours. (HD)

Another challenge worth noting is that we are always on tour. Sam and I work very hard to make sure we maintain a balanced lifestyle because we can easily slip into a pattern where we work constantly. We try to see every place that we visit and explore a little bit. We found that our stories are better when we take a moment to breathe every once and awhile! (HD)

 

Acro: Where is the project going from here? Do you have plans to broaden it, and/or are you in the process of collecting more stories? What’s your vision for the project in the future?

 

We are releasing stories weekly but our fall tour will come to a close in December. In the spring, we are going to take a break so that I can graduate college and we can focus on the viability of the company. We are exploring many revenue models so that we can hit the road again in the summer. This fall we have told the stories of immigrant women in five cities, but we will most likely switch to a new, yet to be determined theme for future tours. Reach out if you have ideas for new topics! (HD)

 

Acro: What do you think it would take for women, and especially women of color, to have more meaningful representation in journalism and news media?

 

So I think the biggest way is just by getting more women (of all backgrounds) involved in producing media. It’s really hard because I feel like so much of media success is just being in the right place at the right time. But at the same time I also believe that just working hard and talking to everyone opens so many doors. If you have an idea, the worst thing you can do is keep it to yourself. Shout it out to mentors and friends and strangers alike. Ask them to introduce you to anyone who they think might be interested in what you want to do. You never know who you’ll meet and where they’ll lead you. And once you’re in a place where you’re producing content and you have an audience you have to continue to be firm and loud about what you want. Challenge traditional concepts of what kind of stories are important and how they should be told. –sam

 

 

Website: http://drivenmedia.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Driven-Media-1445558525744107/?fref=ts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/media_driven

 

Weekly Link Roundup: 11/20/15

Goodreads from this week on feminist friendships, ISIS, and more.

The Good, The Bad, And the Absolutely Terrifying (in Abortion Legislation) Part II: Everything’s a Giant Shitshow

The Good:

Right now, the “good” is less about “awesome things happening” and more about “some of the terrible things that could have happened didn’t happen!”

The Senate did not pass the House’s bill to defund Planned Parenthood. So, that’s good, considering one in five women have used Planned Parenthood’s services, and 2.7 million women and men visit Planned Parenthood centers annually.

The Government has not shut down. That’s good. Two years ago, the Republicans successfully threw a massive temper tantrum, and effectively screwed over roughly 2 million people for two weeks; 800,000 did not work at all, and another 1.3 million were required to go to work without knowing when – or if – they would be paid.

Planned Parenthood has also raised a fair amount of money amidst all the crazy; donations have spiked recently, and my favorite trend is donating to PP in the name of virulently pro-life politicians.

The Bad:

Speaking of donations, however, despite reports to the contrary Mark Zuckerberg did NOT donate just shy of one million dollars to Planned Parenthood. Several years ago, he donated 18 million Facebook shares to a charitable umbrella organization; Planned Parenthood is one of the many organizations it supports. This is hardly catastrophic news, but since most of the “good” news I have to report is about bad things that didn’t happen, here’s a piece of “bad” news about a good thing that didn’t actually happen.

While Planned Parenthood has not been defunded at the national level (yet), there are people out there doing everything they can to make sure individual clinics can’t run. Recently, a Planned Parenthood clinic outside LA was a victim of arson.

The Absolutely Terrifying:

While it’s good the government is still up and running at the moment, that could very well end soon. I’m not sure which is scarier: what would happen with a government shutdown, what would happen if Planned Parenthood does get defunded, or the fact that the Republican Party (who could hold the Presidency in just over a year) is willing to hold the country hostage to its demands (not to mention the fact that my two-year-old niece’s temper tantrums don’t come close to rivaling those of the GOP).

Even if the GOP doesn’t manage to shut down the government, they still might have other ways of defunding Planned Parenthood. Representative Reid Ribble, of the somewhat ironically-named “House Freedom Council” (‘freedom’ is just a thing for straight white men, right?) is determined to strike a bargain with the democrats over Planned Parenthood funding. While this seems somewhat unlikely, in 2011, President Obama did capitulate to GOP demands re: abortion restrictions in our nation’s capital (they can’t vote, so who cares?) in order to avoid…you guessed it…a government shutdown.[*]

[*] Note: The author is from DC, and has very strong feelings about DC’s congressional impotence. She is aware, however, that the rest of the nation does not feel as strongly.

Weekly Link Roundup!

Goodreads and things that caught our eye:

• 10 Ways Well-Meaning White Teachers Bring Racism Into Our Schools: “It is from this place of love that I work with teachers to help them improve their practice. And with the realities of the “education debt” and considering that 80% of our teachers are White while nearly half (and growing) of our students are youth of Color, part of improving teaching practice means paying more critical attention to race in our schools. Though I know there are actively racist teachers out there, most White teachers mean well and have no intention of being racist. Yet as people who are inscribed with Whiteness, it is possible for us to act in racist ways no matter our intentions. Uprooting racism from our daily actions takes a lifetime of work.”
• Claudia Rankine celebrates the excellence of Serena Williams: “The notable difference between white excellence and black excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine.” As my dear friend M put it, “I love Serena. I love Claudia Rankine. I love that these women exist.”
• Suffragettes Who Sucked: White Supremacy and Women’s Rights: reminding us that the phenomenon of “white feminism” (feminism that, in a nutshell, centers specifically white, mostly upper-class women while dismissing racial intersectionality) has been around for a while. The Toast compiles a list of notable feminist figures whose achievements in women’s rights had a dark side.
• 8 Ways Asian Americans Can Stand Up To Racist Presidential Candidates: pretty self-explanatory, and very important.
• Register to vote. Even if you’re jaded by the political circus. Our forerunners fought long and hard to win us the right to vote. You owe it to them, and to yourself, to at least pay attention to what is happening.
• Lessons from the Virginia Shooting: “the lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern prohibition…but that we should address gun deaths as a public health crisis. To protect the public, we regulate toys and mutual funds, ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we regulate guns as seriously as we regulate toys?”

The Good, The Bad, and The Absolutely Terrifying: The Week in Abortion Legislation

The Good: It often feels like we are being inundated with terrible news about reproductive rights, but there are good things happening too. For all the gynoticians out there telling us what we can and cannot do with our bodies, there are reproductive-rights champions fighting back at every level.

• On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld a 4th-circuit court ruling stating that North Carolina’s ultrasound law (which required women to view an ultrasound of their fetus prior to receiving an abortion) placed an undue burden on…wait for it…doctors. That’s right: the law was changed not because it limits women’s freedoms, but because forcing doctors to narrate ultrasounds to their patients violates their first-amendment right to freedom of speech. But hey, at least the ruling has a good outcome, right? (I’m appreciative of everything doctors do in this fight, but it’s pretty depressing that women’s agency over their own bodies isn’t enough).

• In unequivocal good news (well, for people who support reproductive rights), women in Oregon will now be able to get a year’s worth of birth control at a time, sparing them from going through this rigmarole every 30 days. Yay Oregon!

• In more potentially good news out of the PNW, Senator Patty Murray introduces a bill to make over-the-counter birth control available while keeping it covered by insurance companies. The bill is called “Affordability IS Accessibility,” and you can sign the petition for it here!

The Bad: In slightly more-familiar territory, the past week has seen another rash of clinic-shut-downs, bans, and insane lawsuits.

• Wisconsin, home to Scott Walker, misogynist extraordinaire, has a bill in the works that would implement a 20-week ban on abortions. While the future of the bill is unclear, Walker has said he will sign it into law, and even if it is later overturned by a federal court, it could do some serious damage (see below for why).

• I guess this is technically good news: apparently, murder charges against a Georgia woman arrested for taking an abortion pill have been dropped—but the mere fact that she was arrested—for murder—in the first place is pretty awful. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem Kenlissa Jones is fully off the hook, another reason I’m including this with “the bad.”

• A new ruling in Texas effectively shut down a majority of the state’s abortion clinics, in addition to banning abortions after 20 weeks and restricting the use of RU4-86, colloquially known as the “abortion pill.” With only 8 clinics left in the state, many Texas women are now hours away from abortion access, adding yet another hurdle to an ever-expanding list.

The Absolutely Terrifying: All I can say here is that I am deeply thankful for the power of veto; while I don’t know what will happen in the senate, I feel at least 90% confident that Obama will not allow the following law to come to be.

In May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a national 20-week abortion ban, initially introduced by Senator Trent Franks (AZ-R).Now, South Carolina senator and presidential hopeful Lindsay Graham is determined to see this bill through. Perhaps this ban is simply part of a presidential bid, or perhaps it’s part of an effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for the future of reproductive rights.

And in case you’re not sure why this law would be so terrible, here are some stories from women who have abortions beyond 20 weeks. Abortions after 20 weeks are incredibly rare; roughly 63% of abortions occur before 8 weeks, and less than 2% of abortions occur at the 21st week or beyond. As the above stories indicate, this ban would have very little effect on most women seeking abortions, but would be catastrophic to those who need late abortions for medical reasons.

In the Wake of Hobby Lobby: Abortion and the Satanic Temple

If you don’t remember last summer’s terrifying Supreme Court ruling, “Hobby Lobby” (the informal name for “Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc) was the case in which the Supreme Court decided that, since corporations are basically people, “closely-held” religious organizations could deny their employees health-care coverage that extends to certain forms of birth control. Here are a few links to refresh your memory.

 Hobby Lobby Wins Contraceptive Case

 Hobby Lobby 101

What The Hobby Lobby Ruling Means for America

The Satanic Temple is suing the state of Missouri for religious freedom – specifically, for the right to have an abortion without the added burden of MO’s 72-hour waiting period. This isn’t quite a first for the Satanic Temple; in the past, they have pushed for the right to display “Satanic” holiday decorations on government property as long as Christian groups could do the same. According to their website, the principle behind both their holiday displays and the current case is calling out the hypocrisy of religious freedom, which often seems to apply to Judeo-Christian denominations above all else.

So what do abortions have to do with Satanism? First, it is important to note that the so-called Satanic Temple is not, in fact, full of devil-worshippers. The tenets of the Satanic Temple involve:

• One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.
• Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.
• One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.

It is under this last listed tenet that the Satanic Temple is suing (although the phrase “inviolable body” appears elsewhere in their self-description). A woman identified as Mary Doe is the subject of the law suit; like many women in the many states with highly restrictive abortion laws, Mary could not afford the extra costs imposed by the mandated waiting period. Arguably, this is one of the purposes of the waiting period in the first place. The Washington Post writes:

In Missouri, women seeking an abortion at the one open abortion-providing clinic in the state have to make two trips to the clinic, 72 hours apart: The first is to receive counseling that “includes information designed to discourage her from having an abortion,” the Guttmacher Institute says, and the second after the required waiting period is for the procedure.

Whatever one’s religious beliefs, waiting periods are an added difficulty; in states like Missouri, with only one abortion clinic, or Texas, with few abortion clinics spread through much of the state, women either have to find a place to stay – which often means coughing up non-existent hotel funds – or make a long drive twice. Either scenario requires taking time off work, finding childcare (61% of women seeking abortions are already mothers), or both. These factors can amount to a prohibitive financial strain on women – and if you cannot afford childcare for 72 hours, an additional child would be, at the least, extremely difficult financially. In Mary Doe’s case, according to Slate,

Mary has the money for the abortion, but she doesn’t have the estimated extra $800 that she needs to travel to the only abortion clinic in the state, in St. Louis, a trip that will require gas, hotel, and child care.

 

The Satanic Temple succeeded in raising the funds for Mary in a day, but they also went further, helping her draft a letter outlining the reasons that the 72-hr waiting period is a burden on her (and their) beliefs. The core of the letter reads:

• My body is inviolable and subject to my will alone.
• I make any decision regarding my health based on the best scientific understanding of the world, even if the science does not comport with the religious or political beliefs of others.
• My inviolable body includes any fetal or embryonic tissue I carry so long as that tissue is unable to survive outside my body as an independent human being.
• I, and I alone, decide whether my inviolable body remains pregnant and I may, in good conscience, disregard the current or future condition of any fetal or embryonic tissue I carry in making that decision.

This letter initially targeted the clinic itself, which, as Slate points out, is not a great legal strategy; “The clinic, too, is being victimized by the regulation, and they’re not the authorities standing between Mary and her abortion.” The letter’s demands were rejected, but since then, the Satanic Temple has wised up – or, perhaps, has just finally succeeded in getting the funding necessary to go for the big guns.

On May 8^th, the Satanic Temple filed a petition for injunction against Missouri governor Jay Nixon. There are a few questions here. Will the case succeed? And, more importantly, what kind of influence will the case have, whether or not it does? That is, what kind of precedent will it set?

The Washington Post interviewed University of St. Thomas law professor Thomas Berg, who believes that “the Satanic Temple’s proposal essentially relies on the same question one would ask to determine whether the 72-hour waiting period violates the earlier decisions at the Supreme Court: Does the law impose a substantial burden on the individual seeking an abortion?” Berg told the Post that “if 72 hours is a substantial burden on religious conscience, it’s also a substantial burden under the privacy decisions.”

Interestingly, when the federal Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA) was initially passed in 1993, a number of Catholic and pro-life groups worried that RFRA would be used for exactly this purpose – claiming a religious right to abortion – although they probably did not predict the involvement of the Satanic Temple.

The RFRA was drafted in response to a 1990 Supreme Court case in which some Native American men were fired from their jobs for using illegal peyote for ceremonial purposes. Democrats and Republicans alike were angered by the ruling, and, a truly bi-partisan bill came into being (once upon a time, “bipartisan” could be more than just a buzzword). But, as the conservative National Review reflects, both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Right to Life Committee were opposed to the RFRA. Both groups worried that “that under the RFRA women could claim the right to an abortion as a matter of religious belief,” and both groups advocated for an amendment to the bill that would specifically prohibit abortion-related claims. Due to this conflict (not so bipartisan after all?), it took three years – from 1990 to 1993 – for the bill to pass, and it was the newly-elected President Clinton who signed it into law.

Since then, RFRA has been used toward more conservative and traditionally Christian ends, the Hobby Lobby ruling being perhaps the most notorious example. The RFRA is a federal law that cannot be applied to states, so many other similar cases instead fall under the First Amendment. As the RFRA was designed to give more protection for religious exemptions than the Court has said is available under the First Amendment, First Amendment cases will look different than Hobby Lobby. However, there has certainly been a trend at both the state and federal level towards an understanding of “religious freedom” as the right not only to freely practice religion, but to use one’s religious values in a discriminatory manner (see, for example, what’s been going on in Indiana).

So will the Satanic Temple’s suit hold water in court? If the Satanic Temple is regarded as an established religion by the court (which, based on its previous success in Florida, seems likely), it seems this would be a yes; given that one’s “inviolable body” appears in three of the seven central tenets of the Temple, it does seem that a 72 hour waiting period – especially a financially prohibitive one – would prove a “substantial burden.”* But the more important question here is, what kind of precedent will this set? What will it mean for reproductive rights?

If, for example, it is found that the 72-hour waiting period placed a substantial burden on Mary’s religious freedom, this would be great – for established members of the Satanic Temple. Don’t get me wrong; my first thought on hearing about this suit was “Awesome. This underlines the hypocrisy of Hobby Lobby, where the “religious freedom” of the corporation is permitted to intrude on the religious freedom of the employee. Yes!”

But if it takes proof of a substantial religious burden to gain the right to an affordable, accessible abortion, what happens to everyone else? What about atheists, or Reform Jews, whose religion has no bearing on abortions? Even more concerning, what about devout Catholics, whose religious views might prohibit abortions? Even the most ardent pro-lifers can find themselves in situations in which abortions are medically necessary, life-saving procedures, or financially responsible choices made on behalf on their already existent children (61% of women who have abortions are already mothers).

Another concern: if this suit should succeed, how will it play out in the public eye? While the ­fight-the-patriarchy radical inside me cries, “who cares?,” the rest of me acknowledges that the way the public perceives abortion is very important to its legal future. While, as noted above, The Satanic Temple is, in fact, devoted to personal freedom, personal responsibility, and scientific accuracy rather than actual Devil-worship, the name itself will evoke darker images in the public imagination, and the last thing the pro-choice movement needs is an association between a woman’s right to decide what happens to her body and devil-worship. This is not sacrificing infants to Beelzebub, and we do not need anyone to make that association.

This is a fairly unique case, but it is neither the first nor the last in a series of reproductive-rights cases to raise religious freedom issues – sometimes involving the religious liberty of the person most directly involved, and sometimes the religious liberty of some other participant , like the employer in the Hobby Lobby case. From here on out, I will document some of the more interesting, concerning, or impactful cases and pieces of legislation involving the relationship between reproductive rights and religious rights.

*Updated 05/27/15 to reflect Mary Doe’s membership in the Satanic Temple

The Politics of Style: A Primer

Our mothers told us it’s what’s on the inside that counts. You do you, girl — all the bullies are just jealous of how smart, talented, funny and with-it you are. And then middle school proved our mothers wrong. Your hair is bad, those shoes are cheap and ugly, and nobody much cares about what’s happening inside your head, anyway. The cruel lesson of puberty for many of us is that your value must be legible on your body because, to quote our mothers again, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

This framing makes it seem as if our choices about the way we look are a problem of social coercion — that our personal choices are imposed more or less from the outside by the protean and mysterious pressures of Society. This isn’t totally wrong, but it doesn’t fully account for the complex tension between style as political resistance and style as social domination. Nobody wants to wear stilettos…except when they do. Heels may be torture devices designed specifically by the patriarchy to keep women slow and hobbled — a claim that the history of the high heel doesn’t quite support — but they are accessories that many women (and men) willingly, even joyfully, adopt for reasons that cannot be explained away as a mere capitulation to social pressure.

I refuse to let this discussion devolve into an easy pitting of social pressure against personal choice — victimhood vs. agency — because, of course, personal desires are always already conditioned by social context, and social attitudes are produced and changed by individual choices. As the great pubic hair debate has depressingly exposed, there is no winning when our only options are capitulating to the patriarchy or radical autonomous choice. My point instead is that the spectrum between choice and non-choice always contains the possibility of playful self-determination as well as the promise that self-determination is limited by the options available in one’s social milieu.

Feminists have spilled a lot of tears and ink attempting to dismantle this deterministic correlation between personal style and social and political definition. That people, especially women, are not reducible to the way they look amounts to something of a truism. Throughout the 60s and 70s, our mothers in the Second Wave fought against the coercive sexualization of women’s bodies on one hand, and for the possibility of women’s body autonomy and self-determination on the other. Fashion was, and continues to be, a staging-ground for these battles precisely because it inhabits a space in which bodies, personal agency and social determination meet.

Women protest 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, NJ c/o San Francisco’s digital archive (foundsf.org)

Women’s libbers were (mis)named “bra-burners” precisely because of the way clothing can be used to represent and enact political projects. And despite the persistent rumor that feminists are ugly and fashion-backward, they have produced some prime style icons. Diane Von Furstenberg’s wrap dress defined the style of a generation of liberated women. Gloria Steinem, erstwhile Playboy bunny, vocal pro-choice activist and founder of the Ms. Foundation for Women, became the face of feminism not least because of her beauty and trendsetting style. And the mini skirt, the pantsuit and the bikini became emblems of political self-possession for women whose fashion choices were determined by middle class standards of modesty and respectability.

Gloria Steinem with her cat in 1970 | from The Guardian

What these kinds of struggles have managed to prove is that style is political. Regardless of your personal attention to clothing, your fashion choices have political content. The Afro and the Black is Beautiful movement reveal the politics of style in a particularly poignant way. When your body represents the very opposite of the reigning aesthetic model, the act of embracing and celebrating your own image is a radical political statement. Refusing the hold of “good hair” (hair that most closely approximates the texture of European hair without ever actually recreating it), the afro offered a way for black men and women to inhabit their bodies not as a negative project — removing as many markers of African heritage as possible — but as an affirmation of identity.

The afro came to be associated not only with black self-love, but also with the political organizing of the Black Power movement. The signature look of the Black Panther party included militaristic gear, a beret and an afro, and functioned not simply as a means of self-expression, but also as a political performance of provocation and solidarity. It represented the enactment of politics on the body and the use of aesthetic markers as political signifiers.

Angela Davis on cover of Newsweek, October 26, 1970

Similarly, body positivity and fatshion (fat fashion) activities turn fashion into a political project. Like Black is Beautiful, fatshion is interested in reclaiming the fat body as an aesthetic object in a culture that insistently desexualizes, humiliates, and vilifies it. When the pressures on fat people include government programs that target children, medical institutions that consistently discriminate against and humiliate fat people, and a culture of fat hate that straw-mans fat people for problems as diverse as environmental destruction and airline greed, choosing to inhabit your own skin unapologetically takes on a political dimension. This is similar to the arguments made by feminist, queer and anti-racism activists: simply owning a maligned and violently oppressed identity has political stakes.

Fatshion intersects with body positivity, disability and queer activism, but its main focus is accessibility. One of the recurrent calls in the fatshion community is for clothing that is affordable and stylish. Plus size clothing manufacturers have a habit of producing tent-like contraptions in bad prints on the assumption that fat women aren’t very interested in style and would rather hide their bodies than celebrate them. What’s more, plus size clothes tend to be sold at a significant markup compared to the same garment in a straight size.

Fatshion proves that dressing how you want is a political act, especially when simply finding clothes to fit your body is a major challenge to time and resources. Choosing self-love in the face of a stacked cultural deck is hard enough, but it’s even harder when the price of entry is so steep.

Of course, the political potential of style has its limits, and those limits are usually drawn and redrawn by the machinations of capitalism. Standards of beauty are capitalist productions in multiple ways. On one level, companies manufacture a need for their products by convincing consumers that their bodies are unacceptable without things to camouflage, contort, trim and otherwise discipline them. On another level, those who inhabit the most debased position in the market, whose labour powers the system, tend not to be the ones who determine aesthetic standards. If you choose to go far enough back, the Africans who were used as slave labor in the pre-capitalist and then fully capitalist slave system also represented the ugly and the grotesque for their European masters. In this context, the afro feels revolutionary for African Americans after centuries of oppression built at least in part on the disavowal of kinky hair by European and American whites.

Yet, choosing style as a political field of battle has the potential to reproduce the same oppressive mechanisms it seeks to challenge. How can you, for example, use fashion to express self-determination and personal autonomy when your clothing is produced by an oppressed labor force in the global south? How can you challenge aesthetic standards set by capitalism by contributing to the very system that produced them? How can you, in other words, style yourself responsibly? These are not insoluble problems, nor do they prove that style cannot be an empowering and pleasurable experiment in self-creation. Rather, they point to the fissures in a political project that relies on image (and self-image) to function.

This series will attempt to grapple with these problems in a way that does not rest exclusively on the personal choice/social determination dichotomy, and that keeps an eye always to the ways in which individual self-fashioning cooperates with and resists the mandates of collective political practice.

Stay tuned!

 By E.L.