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A post from DoubleX writer Margaret Wheeler Johnson:
By definition, Martin Luther King Day both celebrates the end of
racial segregation and reminds us of a past this country can never live
down. For feminists, a particularly painful aspect of that past is the
segregation of the early fight for women’s suffrage. With her new book Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lyching,
historian Crystal N. Feimster provides an opportunity to better
understand the lack of sympathy between black and white suffragists and
how lynching spurred both to the political activism that eventually won
women the vote.
Feimster tracks white mob violence—and women’s views of it—from the
end of the Civil War to the early 1930’s, through the perspectives of
two prominent suffragists, black journalist Ida B. Wells and white
activist Rebecca Latimer Felton. Both used lynching as a platform in
their fight for women’s voting rights, but in very different ways ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
A few years ago, this would have been hard for me to say but now it's
easy: Thank the stars for Nicholas Kristof. He proved his pricelessness
as a voice of real reason on the NY Times op-ed page yet again by tackling the nuclear question of the role that religion plays in human rights abuses around the world.
Of course, since said human rights abuses involve oppression of women,
they're often not seen as human rights abuses, but from American purity
balls that imply that men own their daughters to female genital
mutilation, women's rights are being oppressed, with religion and
tradition as the excuses. Kristof doesn't pull his punches but directly
describes this uncomfortable reality in which one culture after another
hates on women while blaming God or gods for hating women ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Anne Applebaum puts the Neda video in context,
by forcefully arguing that women's rights advocates—not Bush or Obama
or Twitter—are behind the incredible energy in the Iranian vote and the
protests: "The truth is that the high turnout was the result of many
years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil
rights activists and, above all, women's groups, working largely
unnoticed and without much outside help." She also explains why the
presence of so many women on the streets matters:
For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic republic is...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Without question, this was the first serious foreign policy speech Obama has made as president. In giving it, he broke a number of taboos and slid over several potential minefields, reaffirming America's commitment to Israel as well as to Palestinian statehood in front of an Egyptian audience, and going out of his way to make statements about democracy, womens' rights, and religious freedom. If the speech were the dawn of a new age of public diplomacy then I'm all in favor.
Two things worried me about it, however... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Two notable pieces of news about women's rights and rape.
On the domestic front: Could the recession end up leading to a drop in rape convictions? Yesterday, ProPublica noted that the Los Angeles County police department is severely backlogged in processing rape kits—which sometimes contain DNA that leads to arrests and convictions. According to the site,
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has 4,700 untested rape kits, which potentially contain DNA evidence taken from sexual assault victims. The police department's backlog, which was the subject of a ProPublica and Los Angeles Times investigation [2] in November, is currently more than 4,000 cases. LAPD officers never sent many of the kits to the department's lab, which is underfunded and understaffed. ...
This LAPD says they hope to catch up on their backlog within four years.
Meanwhile, on the foreign front: Is Afghanistan sliding backward in its treatment of women? According to the United Nations, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has signed a bill that is a blow to women's rights; and it looks like he did so in a craven bid to gather votes before the summer elections. From what I can tell, not a peep yet from the White House about this bill. But activists are already demanding a response, and you can see why. According to the Independent,
the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home. ...
The bill draws explicit lines in the sand about consensual sex within marriage. It apparently "stipulates that a man can expect to have sex with his wife at least 'once every four nights' when travelling, unless they are ill." There is, however, a silver lining, as Beliefnet points out: The bill's proposed marriage age for girls was originally 9; in the final version, it's 16. It also originally contained "provisions" for temporary marriage, which some believe to be a form of legalized prostitution; those provisions were removed.