I can’t pinpoint one event that transformed me into a feminist activist – rather, a succession of small personal events led to a decision to co-found my own women’s rights organization and make a lifelong commitment to fighting gender inequality wherever it may be.
I feel like I always knew I was a feminist. There were things in life that bothered me, that I knew were wrong. Walking to take the bus to school one morning, at 17 years old, a nagging realization bothered me. The domestic worker (or maid as she is called here in Singapore) was washing the car in her employer’s driveway at 7:30 in the morning. I heard that she wasn’t given a day’s rest, ever. She could only leave the house when her employer allowed …
How Far We Haven’t Come: Remembering the Nelson Pill Hearings
After attending a recent event commemorating past voices of the women’s health movement, I turned on the news to watch the recent contraceptive hearings, and realized just how far we haven’t come.
As has been pointed out by many over the course of the past few days, there were no women on the first panel of witnesses at the contraceptive hearing on February 16. “What I want to know is, where are the women?” asked Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney at the hearing on Thursday. “When I look at this panel, I don’t see one single woman representing the tens of millions of women across the country who want and need insurance coverage for basic preventive healthcare services, including family planning. Where are the women?”
The Perils of Being A Feminist in the Dominican Republic
I’m currently a senior at my high school here in the Dominican Republic. I was born in the States and have lived overseas almost my entire life. I’m also Hispanic– both my parents and the rest of my family are Cuban. I think this is a great thing, a blessing even. We’re all pretty close, we’re bilingual, our food is delicious, we have friends all around the world, and now we have many opportunities that we wouldn’t have been granted if we hadn’t moved around. I’m extremely grateful.
Nevertheless (did you feel there was an impending catch?), if you’re also Hispanic or if you have had any exposure to Latino culture, you’ve probably witnessed the drawbacks of the close-mindedness and conventionalism that are evident in my culture, and maybe you’ve …
I’ve always hated numbers.
Ok, maybe not “hate” since they do impact my daily life in positive ways.
But overall I really dislike numbers.
Not for what they inherently are or what good they’ve done for me. I’m thankful for all that they’ve helped us accomplish and I realize that they are irreplaceable.
But I’ve often focused on them too much and have let them play a role in defining who I am, my self-worth.
My height-
I’ve always been taller than most. Sometimes it made me want to go crawl in a hole somewhere. I didn’t want to stand out. I wanted to be that cute little girl that everyone coddled and gushed over. I wasn’t “cute.”
Now I know I’m beautiful, with maybe a bit more to love …
When I thought about what my college experience would be like as a high schooler, I never for a second even slightly entertained the faintest thought of joining a sorority. As a self-identified feminist, as someone who thought chapstick was a full face of makeup, and as someone who had about as much interest in enduring mosh-pits of grinding frat boys as she did in microbial taxonomy (read: none) I just had zero interest in what I, frankly, saw as an antiquated, possibly even anti-feminist and insulting tradition. Which is why when I pressed “send” on my sorority recruitment application last December, nobody was more surprised than I was.
Though I hadn’t entered college with a clear goal of finding my long, lost non-genetic “sisters,” my interest in joining a …
Recently, I was taking a course on linguistics, and we were discussing syntax. My professor asked the class– a room of roughly a hundred English students, mostly female– what pronoun to use when replacing the noun ‘boss’. It wasn’t a very serious question, but the response made him stop in his tracks. Over half the class had casually, but eagerly, called out ‘he’. It wasn’t until my astonished professor eyed us that everyone realised what they had said: that they had confirmed something we all thought to have been a thing of the past. There were nervous giggles and some shocked faces, including my own, because what’s so horrific is that I hadn’t realized it either.
As Grand Rapids, Michigan yawned good morning at 7:45 am and the sun began blinking hello, I sat in my human sexuality and relationships class, watching one of the best videos I have ever seen in an academic setting. I strongly recommend that each and every one of you watch Jean Kilbourne’s “Killing Us Softly 4”.
As an advocate for women’s rights, I found this video very compelling and inspirational. It describes the advertising business and its push for narrowly defined sexuality, materialism, and the objectification of women.
The funny thing is that I have always been infatuated with the glossy covers of Cosmo, Glamour, and Vogue. There was something so undeniably glamorous and appealing to me about these magazines and the flirty techniques they promoted. I even used to …
Saturday Vids: Representative Maureen Walsh Does The Right Thing
Representative Maureen Walsh was one of two Republicans in Washington who voted to pass the same-sex marriage bill on February 2nd. Here’s a video of her moving remarks about her honorable decision.
