Women's Movements & the Law

"This book contains personal stories by and about some of the most revered and influential judges in the United States. They also provide a unique and deeply instructive glimpse into our justice system. In the following pages you will come across a remarkable array of female jurists: trailblazers, legal entrepreneurs, political strategists and mentors. This is a book about imagination, and what it took and still takes for women, and by extension other minorities invisible to the constitution and the law, to imagine themselves into a structure that didn't include them"--

We need to invest in building communities for those who have been furthest from opportunity, writes Highland Project founder Gabrielle Wyatt.

March is Women’s History Month and the CRIVblog would like to highlight some sources of information related to Women’s History and legal rights for women.   First up is The National Women…

Filmmaker Jennifer Fox talks more about surviving childhood sexual abuse and her decision to reveal that her abuser 50 years ago was the legendary Olympic rower and coach Ted Nash, who died in 2021. Fox is the director of The Tale, a narrative memoir based on Fox’s own life experience.

We speak with writer and filmmaker Jennifer Fox, whose 2018 movie The Tale dealt with childhood sexual abuse. She has now come forward to name her abuser. The film is a narrative memoir based in part on Fox’s own life experience about being abused by a coach as a young girl. While the main character is named Fox, the name of the abusive coach was fictionalized. Now Fox has revealed the man who abused her as Ted Nash, the legendary Olympic rower and coach who died in 2021. Nash took part in 11 Olympic teams as a rower or coach, and USRowing, the national governing body for the sport, is now investigating the allegations. Fox recently revealed Nash’s name to The New York Times and tells Democracy Now!, in her first broadcast interview since the story, that he began abusing her when she was 13. She says her inner voice told her she could not rest until she publicly named Nash. “It’s very important to bring this other story out to the world now and to show this other part of the man that people put on a pedestal and made into a god,” says Fox, who adds that more women may still come forward about Nash. “It’s a very important act to stand up to power in this way, for me and for others.”

Black mothering is an inherently political act. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than women of any other race; black mothers must stand before television cameras reminding the world that their slain children were human beings. The author explores how to ensure her daughter lives with dignity and joy, learning how to parent boldly in uncertain times and cope with the anxieties that sometimes threaten to consume her. McClain spoke with mothers on the frontlines of movements for social, political and cultural change who are grappling with the same questions.

Reproducing Race, an ethnography of pregnancy and birth at a large New York City public hospital, explores the role of race in the medical setting. Khiara M. Bridges investigates how race--commonly seen as biological in the medical world--is socially constructed among women dependent on the public healthcare system for prenatal care and childbirth. Bridges argues that race carries powerful material consequences for these women even when it is not explicitly named, showing how they are marginalized by the practices and assumptions of the clinic staff. Deftly weaving ethnographic evidence into broader discussions of Medicaid and racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality, Bridges shines new light on the politics of healthcare for the poor, demonstrating how the "medicalization" of social problems reproduces racial stereotypes and governs the bodies of poor women of color.

"A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy."--Dust jacket.;At nineteen Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985. -- adapted from jacket

The accomplishments of pioneering American doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental cesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. "Medical Bondage" breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as "medical superbodies" highly suited for medical experimentation. Even as they were advancing, these doctors were legitimizing groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. "Medical Bondage" moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. -- From publisher's description.

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years - using a Black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on Black women's - especially poor Black women's - control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose White mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its listeners a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new, and socially transformative, definition of "liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a Black feminist perspective.

Angela Y. Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements. Fifty years after its original publication, the author revisits her life's story in print.

A global pandemic. Police violence. Protests. An economic crisis. Our democracy at risk—and with it, many of the freedoms we enjoy, tenuous though they may already be. We are facing intersecting challenges at this moment in America, and it’s often difficult to know where to focus our attention and energy, let alone…

Henry Crown fellow Anand Giridharadas delivers his keynote address, "The Thriving World, The Wilting World, & You," at the 2015 Aspen Action Forum. Recorded Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at the Aspen Action Forum in Aspen, Colorado. http://www.aspenactionforum.org

Federal officials say they've arrested a 29-year-old Wisconsin man in connection with the May 2022 incident. They found him with the help of forensics and fast food.

Across every sphere, from health to the economy, security to social protection, the impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbated for women and girls simply by virtue of their sex. This policy brief by the UN Secretary-General explores how women and girls’ lives are changing in the face of COVID-19, and outlines suggested priority measures to accompany both the immediate response and longer-term recovery efforts.

The vice presidential nominee inherits their legacy but also the stubborn resistance to their efforts.

A group of lawmakers in Elizabeth, N.J., authorized plans to build a monument to transgender civil rights activist Marsha P. Johnson. According to Union County officials, this would make Johnson the first transgender person in the country to be honored with a monument.

Ninety-three percent of child care workers are women, and 45 percent are Black, Asian or Latino, while half of child care businesses are minority-owned.

“You wouldn’t like this job,” she says she was told. Facebook is only 3.9 percent Black and is facing an EEOC investigation.

Black women lead four of America's most prominent cities at a historic time for race relations. Activists question whether they're meeting the moment.

Four families in Florida sued the state on Thursday over new rules prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender youth, arguing the bans violate the US Constitution and should be thrown out.

Kentucky's Democratic governor has vetoed a sweeping Republican measure aimed at regulating the lives of transgender youths. Gov. Andy Beshear said in his veto message Friday that the bill would increase youth suicides.

March 23 (Reuters) - A conservative federal judge in Texas soon USA Food and Medicine To the office USAcould reconsider or order approval of the 22-year-old app

US News is a recognized leader in college, grad school, hospital, mutual fund, and car rankings. Track elected officials, research health conditions, and find news you can use in politics, business, health, and education.

By Le’Shawn Turner (Follow us on LinkedIn) From the minds of women came innovations, inventions, creations, and advancement. From the hearts of women came love, acceptance, bravery, and …

Listen to Forgotten: Women of Juárez on Spotify.