Herstory

The very real economic component of gender disparity, of how male privilege affects women, continues to be heard in serious talks about modern sex work and feminism today. The issue of censorship limiting discussions of the same — as well as discussions and depictions of truth, sexuality, and other taboos — also continues.

The All Options Pregnancy Resource Center, which will be located in Bloomington, Indiana, is seen by its supporters as an antidote to the strategy employed at anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers of limiting accurate information about and access to abortion care.

The Supreme Court's historic Griswold v. Connecticut decision may have legalized contraception use between married couples, but with the Hobby Lobby case, the Roberts Court is poised to take us one giant step backward.

We see hypocrisy around on reproductive health care every day, but this The Daily Show segment with Ilyse Hogue reveals a new twist on a double standard that you've probably never heard of before.

The Women in Politics Map 2014 launched by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and UN Women today shows that while progress on women’s political participation continues to be largely positive across the world, glass ceilings remain firmly in place for women at the highest levels.

"... nine months before [Rosa] Parks’ historic action, a 15-year-old teenager named Claudette Colvin did the very same thing. She was arrested, and her case led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s order for the desegregation of Alabama’s bus system.

Now 73, Claudette Colvin joins us for a rare interview along with Brooklyn College Professor Jeanne Theoharis, author of "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks." Theoharis says Parks’ act of defiance may not have happened if not for Colvin’s nine months before.

Colvin says learning about African-American history in school inspired her act. "I could not move, because history had me glued to the seat," she recalls telling the bus driver and the police officer who came to arrest her. "It felt like Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on another shoulder." 

Maybe you don't want to call it a "war on women". Maybe you find the word "war" to be over-the-top, despite the facts regarding bombings, shootings, rape, and other violent attacks against women, i...

After three days of vomiting, heavy bleeding and agonizing pain, she stumbled into a maternity hospital. Doctors rushed her into surgery where they stopped the bleeding, and repaired her perforated uterus, botched in the first abortion attempt...

Abortion is illegal in Haiti but women and girls are losing their uteruses and their lives as they turn to clandestine, increasingly deadly ways to terminate their pregnancies. These unsafe abortions are leading to a public health crisis in a region with one of the world’s highest rates of unintended pregnancies, experts say.

The women's health movement of the 1960s and 1970s transformed the doctor-patient relationship and yielded the novel concept that women can take control of their own health, says Laurie Edwards in this excerpt from "In the Kingdom of the Sick."...

For women, this change started with the radical notion that they had a right to know about their own bodies, had a right to control their own health care and belonged in medical schools where they could fully participate in the very health care decisions that have such significance in their lives. The grassroots women's health activism that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s was fostered by an equally diverse group of advocates, among them middle-class white women, middle- and working-class African Americans, lesbians and heterosexuals.

In May of this year, I talked to Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With A Vision in New Orleans about her approach to organizing. WWAV scored a significant grassroots legal and political victory in the last year with the NO Justice campaign, which removed hundreds of cis and trans women from Louisiana’s registered felony sexual offender rolls. Deon is a longtime activist in the city of New Orleans, with a history of organizing low-income women of color around reproductive justice, harm reduction, and human rights.

...We are not all in the same boat. And if we keep playing like we are, we’re not really going to make the kind of change we’d like to see. Because the women I work with are never going to be able to jump into the sex workers’ rights movement. They don’t feel like that movement is for them.