The Greatest Story Never Told
The Honduras Supreme Court has upheld the country’s absolute ban on emergency contraception, which would criminalize the sale, distribution, and use of the “morning-after pill” — imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is completely restricted.
The female of the species is more deadly than the male, cautioned Rudyard Kipling. Given Kipling’s love of mythology and prehistoric studies, he should perhaps have added “and smarter”. Because of all deities of wisdom across the globe and through known time, the massive majority – 97% – were (or are) female. Mankind, for the vast span of human experience, has worshipped at the shrine not of the god, but the goddess, of wisdom.
With the baby boomers (those born from 1946-1964) aging in increasing numbers, many books are being written to help them navigate the terrain of aging. For women specifically, there are an abundance of titles that tackle issues from the nuts and bolts of older sexuality to their inner emotional lives.
Indonesia is preparing to ban the mini-skirt under its tough anti-pornography laws ‘because they make men do things’.
The Muslim country’s powerful religious affairs minister said that one of the considerations in its review of what could be considered pornographic would be ‘when someone wears a skirt above the knee’.
Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.
This current of white-hot rage has to come as a surprise to some of you, because we tend to think “sexism” is being dismissive toward women, or paying them lower salaries — we don’t think of it as frenzied “burn the witch!” hatred
IT WAS MEDIEVAL. A group of men put a young unmarried woman on the stand and questioned her about the exact circumstances of the conception and birth and death of her newborn baby. She came from a tiny village in the west of Ireland. They had come down from the capital, Dublin. The pope had just come and gone from Ireland. The men wondered aloud if the woman had in fact given birth to two newborn babies who had been found dead in Kerry, though blood tests showed that she could only have been mother to one. The men put forward and examined for six months a theory of superfecundation, which postulates that a woman can conceive of twins by two men if she has sexual intercourse with both in the space of 24 hours.
An Irish woman who had a symphysiotomy performed after childbirth in 1969 has been awarded €450,000 ($600,000) for medical negligence.
Symphysiotomy was a procedure to break the pelvis during a difficult birth and was carried out on about 1,500 women in Ireland between 1944 and 1992.
On Saturday, March 10, the final morning of the Women in the World Third Annual Summit, The New York Times featured a four-column photo of Christine Lagarde, director of the International Monetary Fund with Chancellor Angela Merkel. The title was, “German Leader and I.M.F. Chief Split Over Debt.” Lagarde had been in Manhattan the previous evening for an interview before delegates at Women in the World, where she answered questions covering the global economy, the I.M.F., and her personal life challenges.
House Republicans, unsure how to proceed, have slowed their efforts to overturn a federal rule requiring employers, including religious institutions, to provide female employees with free health insurance coverage for contraceptives.
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