Alaska state Sen. Pete Kelly (R) is declaring war on fetal alcohol syndrome, and he's proposing to place state-funded pregnancy tests in bars and restaurants so that women can figure out if they're pregnant before drinking. But he also told the Anchorage Daily News this week that he opposes increased access to contraception, because birth control is only for women "who don't want to act responsibly."

"Literally, you can go into the bathroom at the bar and test," said Kelly in his interview this week, describing his plan. "So if you’re drinking, you’re out at the big birthday celebration and you’re kind of like, ‘Gee, I wonder if I -- ?’ You should be able to go in the bathroom and there’s that plastic, Plexiglas bowl in there."

The interviewer asked if Kelly would also support making free birth control available in bars. Kelly is opposed to abortion access, and providing additional access to contraception could help sexually active women and men avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Kelly, however, said he opposed such a move.

"The thinking is a little opposite," he replied. "This assumes that if you know, you’ll act responsibly. Birth control is for people who don’t necessarily want to act responsibly."

When the interviewer noted that using birth control could be viewed as "acting responsibly," Kelly said he wasn't sure.

"Maybe, maybe not. That's a level of social engineering that we don't want to get into. All we want to do is make sure that people are informed and they'll make the right decision," he replied.

In a statement sent to reporters, Alaska Democratic Party Executive Director said, "Republicans need to stop their war on Alaska women."

As Dana Liebelson at Mother Jones notes, "Alaska does not accept federal money from the government's Medicaid expansion, which would fund contraception, and state Sen. Fred Dyson (R-Eagle River) recently spoke out against it, declaring that if people can afford lattes, they can afford birth control."

In Ohio and 30 other states, a man who impregnates a woman through rape can successfully sue her for child custody and visitation rights. While there is a bill currently pending in the Ohio State Senate that would block attackers' parental rights, it has been stalled in the Criminal Justice Committee since it was introduced in January.

On Wednesday, three Ohio State University students with the reproductive rights organization Choice USA will deliver a petition to State Sen. John Eklund (R), chair of the Criminal Justice Committee, demanding that he advance the bill. The petition, created by the progressive advocacy group Ultraviolet, has already collected 60,000 signatures.

"No survivor should have to worry that her attacker is going to sue her if she becomes pregnant and has a child because of the rape," the petition says. "No one should have to spend a lifetime tethered to their rapist, especially if it means watching a violent offender raise your child. But this is a potential reality for the 32,000 women who become pregnant from rape each year."

Eklund did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since convicted rapist Ariel Castro held three women captive in his basement for 10 years in his Ohio home, repeatedly raping them and impregnating one, multiple Ohio state lawmakers have introduced bills that would protect rape survivors from child custody lawsuits. Castro had asked for permission during his trial to see the 6-year-old girl he fathered by sexual assault.

Happy Women’s History Month! Today I’d like to share with you the story of one woman who was challenging norms around race, gender, and class before it got cool.

Juana Briones was one of the first woman pioneers here on the Best West Coast of the United States. She lived throughout the Bay Area and her experiences as a woman of color living in California speak deeply to many of the movements for change happening today. Hers is a history that needs to be taught in schools and to our politicians. Maybe then Arizona would not be able to ban Mexican-American Studies, or Texas would support Mexican-American Studies as an option for schools. Maybe then, our politicians would understand what immigrants mean when they say “We didn’t cross the Border. The Border crossed US.”

As children growing up in California, we learn a lot about the Gold Rush, and the men who “discovered” or “founded” our state. (Obviously, “discovery” is a totally false term to represent the encounter that happened between indigenous groups who had been here for centuries and the colonizers.) But we know that there were plenty of women who played crucial roles in making California what it is today, and our history is incomplete without them.

Juana was born in Santa Cruz, California in 1802, to Ysidora and Marcos Briones, who were both registered as mulattos in the 1790 census. In 1820, Juana married Apolinario Miranda, and had 11 biological children between 1821 and 1841. During this time, Juana began the first of many business ventures, building an adobe house in what is now San Francisco’s North Beach district, and establishing a successful dairy and produce farm which catered to local merchants and sailors. She soon developed a large and diverse social network who would help her in challenging the patriarchal and unjust society she worked within.

In 1844, Juana left her husband after six years of appealing to religious and secular institutions for a divorce. Apolinario was physically, sexually, and verbally abusive, and though Juana never acquired a legal divorce, she successfully left him, dropped his name, and moved her children to their home in North Beach. Juana’s was reportedly the second non-native family to settle in Yerba Buena, what we now call San Francisco. However, once there, she worked closely with the indigenous population, buying land from them, formally adopting two indigenous children, and learning from their medicinal practices as an established curandera and midwife.

There are an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits in the US. (Photo credit: Lonnie Timmons III, Plain Dealer)
Back in 2009, over 11,000 kits were found abandoned in a Detroit Police storage facility. After processing just 1,600 of them so far, Detroit has identified about 100 serial rapists and ten convicted rapists. Those perpetrators have moved on from Michigan to commit similar crimes in 23 other states.

Of course, Detroit is not alone. Nationwide, there are an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits. One of our favorite actress/activists Law and Order: SVU’s Mariska Hargitay (read her Feministing Five interview here) has been raising awareness about this issue for awhile now. Her organization, The Joyful Heart Foundation, has launched a project called End The Backlog to pressure cities and states to prioritize testing their kits. (She’s also producing a documentary about the problem.) And thankfully, 17 states have proposed new legislation to address their backlogs.

There’s a ton of reasons that the rape kit backlog is national shame. For one thing, as Hargitay notes, “One would assume that if someone endures a four- to six-hour invasive examination, that that evidence would be handled with care.” And while police departments say testing evidence is expensive and they just don’t have the resources, they’re making choices about which cases they believe are worth moving forward. Sarah Tofte, the director of policy and advocacy for Joyful Heart, explained to ThinkProgress, “They’re making subjective judgments about whether they’re likely to get a conviction, what this rape looks like, whether the victim is credible, and what the victim’s worth to society is…Ultimately, it’s about, does this victim deserve justice?”

In other words, if we didn’t live in a rape culture in which all but the most “perfect victims” are doubted, you can bet your ass there wouldn’t be such a backlog. As Hargitay said, “To me, this is the clearest and most shocking demonstration of how we regard these crimes.”

All of the efforts to get more women into tech will fail as long as the culture assumes that their labor is less valuable.


Silicon Valley fetishizes a particular type of engineer -- young, male, awkward, unattached. This fetish is so normalized in startup culture that it often goes unseen for what it is: the specific, narrow fantasy of venture capitalists, deployed to focus their investment and attention. The disproportionate success of a very few individuals who fit this image has led to a kind of shortcut logic or “pattern matching” which assumes that these outward traits themselves determine success.

Silicon Valley has built an architecture of compensation to distribute value, attention, and funding accordingly.

The focus on this particular type of founder or employee often goes uncritiqued, then, in terms of the stresses, conflicts, and inequities it creates in the startup environment, where there is always less celebrated, less visible, and often much less valued work to be done. Both men and women experience the negative impacts of a culture that fetishizes the simultaneous power and lack of responsibility of its “rock stars,” forcing coworkers to silently accommodate their behavior, often without equivalent support or compensation.

Fetishizing Founders
Contrary to the outsider assumption that Silicon Valley’s sexism manifests mainly in the traditional sexual harassment of women, Silicon Valley’s fetish for the awkward young engineer is unabashed, physical and often sexual.

A t-shirt sighted on a startup employee in downtown San Francisco reads "Who's your data?", at once figuring its wearer as male, sexually dominant, and unlike the "daddy" the data replaces, technical and nerdy - data as sexual dominance and vice versa. Technical and sexual dominance are made synonymous on the t-shirt in a way that is not unique to this particular company. An early ad for YCombinator read, “Larry and Sergey won’t respect you in the morning,” positing the young entrepreneur as submissive sexual partner to famous founders and invoking the shame of an ill-conceived one-night stand if he doesn’t found a startup: “They didn't go to work for someone else's company. They started their own. Why shouldn't you?”

There are an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits in the US. (Photo credit: Lonnie Timmons III, Plain Dealer)
Back in 2009, over 11,000 kits were found abandoned in a Detroit Police storage facility. After processing just 1,600 of them so far, Detroit has identified about 100 serial rapists and ten convicted rapists. Those perpetrators have moved on from Michigan to commit similar crimes in 23 other states.

Of course, Detroit is not alone. Nationwide, there are an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits. One of our favorite actress/activists Law and Order: SVU’s Mariska Hargitay (read her Feministing Five interview here) has been raising awareness about this issue for awhile now. Her organization, The Joyful Heart Foundation, has launched a project called End The Backlog to pressure cities and states to prioritize testing their kits. (She’s also producing a documentary about the problem.) And thankfully, 17 states have proposed new legislation to address their backlogs.

There’s a ton of reasons that the rape kit backlog is national shame. For one thing, as Hargitay notes, “One would assume that if someone endures a four- to six-hour invasive examination, that that evidence would be handled with care.” And while police departments say testing evidence is expensive and they just don’t have the resources, they’re making choices about which cases they believe are worth moving forward. Sarah Tofte, the director of policy and advocacy for Joyful Heart, explained to ThinkProgress, “They’re making subjective judgments about whether they’re likely to get a conviction, what this rape looks like, whether the victim is credible, and what the victim’s worth to society is…Ultimately, it’s about, does this victim deserve justice?”

In other words, if we didn’t live in a rape culture in which all but the most “perfect victims” are doubted, you can bet your ass there wouldn’t be such a backlog. As Hargitay said, “To me, this is the clearest and most shocking demonstration of how we regard these crimes.”

Of course, the most urgent and concrete reason we should be testing rape kits is that they can identify rapists. (That’s kinda the point.) And since most rapists are serial rapists, that helps prevent future assaults. The stats from Detroit are similar to those in other cities and states that have tackled their backlogs: Once New York City processed its 17,000-kit backlog in 2001, the arrest rate for rape cases jumped from 40 percent to 70 percent. After working through 2,000 untested kits, Ohio has found nearly 200 matches with DNA in a criminal database.

This guest post is brought to you by Mary Kay Devine, a Chicago-based feminist and mother of four. Mary Kay’s day job is the Director of Community Initiatives at Women Employed, a nonprofit that mobilizes people and organizations to expand educational and employment opportunities for America’s working women. Founded in 1973, WE has a 40-year track record of opening doors, breaking barriers, and creating fairer workplaces for women. For more information, visit www.womenemployed.org. PS. I love this org! – Deborah

March is Women’s History Month – a month when the American public honors women and their voices. But even in 2014, we’re not hearing enough of those voices. The Women’s Media Center recently released their annual report on the state of women in the media, and the numbers were grim. Male front-page bylines in print media outnumber female front-page bylines by 3 to 1. Only 25% of guests on Sunday talk shows are women. Men write the majority of newspaper op-eds. And all-too-often, women reporters are still consigned to writing about “pink topics” like food and fashion.

Women Employed, an organization that has spent the last four decades opening doors, breaking barriers, and creating fairer workplaces for women, recently brought two prominent journalists together to discuss the ongoing problem of gender discrimination. They talked about gender bias in newsrooms, and also in other workplaces, as well as what women can do about it.

“We loved Newsweek! We just wanted Newsweek to be better for women.” That’s what author and trailblazing journalist Lynn Povich told the sold-out crowd at The Newsweek case that changed the workplace…or did it? Povich shared the story of how she and her female colleagues confronted blatant sexism at Newsweek in the 1960s. In an era when female employees were told that “women don’t write at Newsweek,” they refused to accept it. She and 45 of her female colleagues brought a landmark lawsuit against the magazine in 1970—and won! Povich eventually became not only a writer for Newsweek, but also their first female senior editor.

Povich was joined by Jesse Ellison, a recent Newsweek writer who, forty years after the original lawsuit, came to realize that she and the other women around her were still experiencing gender discrimination. “The young men around us were getting much better story assignments, they were getting raises and promotions much more easily… We were each having to work much harder than our male peers to get to the same end.” So in 2010, she banded together with her female colleagues to co-author a Newsweek article on the 40th anniversary of the landmark lawsuit questioning how much has actually changed for working women.

WOMEN IN ASIA

The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon
Delve into courtesan cultures, including artistic practices and cultural production, often overlooked or diminished in relevancy.
The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power: Explorations in Early Indian History by Kumkum Roy
Discover the distinct strategies through which men and women constituted their identities in India for all their implications, tensions, and inconsistencies.
Cornelia Sorabji: India’s Pioneer Woman Lawyer: A Biography by Suparna Gooptu
Learn about Sorabji’s decisive role in opening up the legal profession to women long before they were allowed to plead before the courts of law, including her writings and personal correspondence.
WOMEN IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Cleopatra: A Biography by Duane W. Roller
Uncover not the figure in popular culture, arts, and literature of the last five hundred years — but the real last Greek queen of Egypt.
Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Place women in their proper role as mothers of a nation — central to the history of Iran during successive regimes in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire by Leslie P. Peirce
Examine the sources of royal women’s power and assess the reactions of contemporaries, which ranged from loyal devotion to armed opposition.
- See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2014/03/womens-history-month-reading-list/#sthash.3n4fwQbx.dpuf

Recently, the news and the Internet have been abuzz with stories about Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and pop star Beyoncé Knowles and their mission to ban the word “bossy” as it applies to girls and women. Their campaign makes sense. It’s no secret that in America, attributes praised in men are often vilified in women. Where a man is bold, confident, daring and a real “go-getter”, a woman is aggressive, bitchy, cocky or a “ball-breaker”. In other words, assertive girls and women get called “bossy”.

Little girls who emerge as natural leaders on the playground are discouraged from being “bossy”. Where little boys might be encouraged to seize the reins of whatever game or activity in which they’re engaged, little girls are scolded to “share”, and “let so-and-so take control, now”. It’s as if being a natural leader is a bad thing, a threat to their femininity. Or worse, a girl’s assertiveness emasculates the boys around her.

Labelling anyone with a negative description like “bossy” damages their self-esteem. And it just isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to squash a girl’s natural leadership skills so that she isn’t labelled as aggressive. Yet while I agree with the thesis behind Ms. Sandberg’s and Ms. Knowles’ campaign, I believe that another term should be eliminated as well. I want to destroy, once and for all, the myth of the “Angry Black Woman”.

Just like the “bossy” label, the Angry Black Woman (ABW) label diminishes and trivializes the experiences and feelings of Black women. If every time a Black woman asserts her rights she gets pigeon-holed as an ABW, her voice is silenced. No one hears her.

The exception, of course, is when Black women speak out for issues that affect men, too. Our outrage is fine as long as we’re marching for civil rights or protesting new voting laws which seek to disenfranchise minorities. Our wrath is justified when we decry the modern day lynching of our young Black men under the Stand Your Ground laws. When we’re rallying against these injustices, our tears are celebrated, held up as emblems of the struggle: grieving mothers, clutching the photographs of our slain sons. But the moment we speak up for ourselves, we become the Angry Black Woman.