Starting on October 11th, PBS launched a fascinating 5-part mini-series entitled “Women, War and Peace.” As they describe it: “Women, War & Peace challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain. The five-part series reveals that women have become primary targets in today’s armed conflicts and are suffering unprecedented casualties; yet, they are simultaneously emerging as necessary partners in brokering lasting peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict.”
Check out the trailer (embedded below). The full versions of the five episodes can be found here.
What grieves me most as a Swedish feminist is hearing that our movement is dead or that it is only a trend. I’ve argued with anti-feminists, whose best argument nowadays is that feminism advocates female supremacy. If this group of anti-feminists were small, I would not worry about their opinions because there will always be people who disagree with you. What troubles me, however, is that this way of viewing feminists seems to be mainstream in Sweden.
The Swedish media thrives on stories about feminists, who, the media says, claim that “men are animals” and that “any man would rape any woman at any time.” Hardly anyone seems to know what feminism is really about.
As a socialist-feminist I think that laws could help our society become more equal. I …
As a dusty third worldling, one of the things I learnt first was to see if there were other dusty people in the room whenever I go to any transnational feminist conferences. Something else I also learnt is to not expect ‘solidarity’ from anyone unless expressly proven otherwise — and these views are a result of the way people view me and my body in notIndia, what people assume of me in most internet spaces and fandoms. My friend and I compiled this list comprising of a few of the most repetitive and inane stereotypes that we’ve encountered of Third World Women. By no means is this list exhaustive, feel free to add your experiences in the comments — and tread carefully, the list is full of racial slurs and …
Senator Penny Wong, Federal Minister for Finance and Deregulation, was speaking when she was interrupted. ‘If I could finish?’ she snapped with justified annoyance, glaring across the room. Immediately the room broke into a chorus of “oooh”, like a bunch of sniggering schoolboys.
Then Opposition Senator David Bushby made a meowing noise.
Gotta give props to Penny Wong – she let him have it: ‘It is just extraordinary. The blokes are allowed to yell but if a woman stands her ground, you want to make that kind of comment. It’s not schoolyard politics, mate!’
The issue had been hotly debated in the Australian media. There is no doubt it was inappropriate, but there is argument over whether it …
Statistically, according to UNESCO’s 2005 Education For All monitoring report, only 31% of adult women can read and write in Malawi. This is shocking when compared to men – 80% of whom are literate. Kasungu district in Malawi, where the Join My Village project is taking place is no exception in terms of prioritizing boys when it comes to education. Kasungu is among the top list of districts where literacy levels are very low in women.
Once educated, a girl child is more capable of helping the greater family as she is the one that spends more time with them and so can act as a good mentor. An educated girl can easily manage to start a small business that can help the family financially. It is only through education …
Afghanistan has had a rough time in recent history. The sudden transformation from fashionable escape for the West to war-torn warlord-ruled landscape to complete Taliban control (and now it seems that the whole place is more or less up for grabs as the current government’s complicity with the Taliban has been revealed) has been something shocking to look at independently of any time period before or after a given moment, or in a historical panorama of the past century.
Kabul was once named the “Paris of the Middle East.” The high society women were very well integrated into European society and many took on French as a second language in an aristocratic gesture to their high-brow city’s namesake.
But the times have changed considerably since then. Anyone who kept up …
From a very young age my mother instilled in me a certain logic, if you can call it that. There were clothes that could be worn to school, to friends houses, out to dinner and to events and then there were what she called “play clothes” – clothes for lounging around the house, playing outside or engaging in any kind of athletic activity. The two were not to overlap. From the moment I would get home from school I was told to go upstairs and change into my play clothes before doing anything else. I never found this to be unusual since the only time I would see my mother in anything but her play clothes (jeans, a sweatshirt and slippers) was when she would run errands or go out …
