Tag: Gender

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10772 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-07-22 19:39:36 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-07-22 19:39:36 [post_content] =>

It's been over four years since I moved to Japan, and I'm still baffled by the country's food sexism.

My first visit to Japan was a flurry of city lights, fresh sushi, and cherry blossoms in 2017. Between crying (joyful tears) three times in the Studio Ghibli Museum, and chasing down a cotton candy rainbow in Harajuku, I returned to the U.S. thinking, That was the best trip of my life. But on my second visit two years later, I started seeing the societal cracks I’d initially overlooked. While talking to a local near Tokyo’s Arakawa River about our favorite Japanese foods, I excitedly shared my love for strawberry shortcakes.

“That’s for women,” he replied.

I was stunned.

It’s been over four years now since I moved to Tokyo. My early ignorant bliss of Japan being a fantasyland—when it is in fact a very real place with very real problems—has long subsided. But my echoing bafflement over the country’s food sexism has remained and only grown over time.

Japan has a misogyny problem. In June 2023, the country faced international criticism for sending a male minister, instead of a woman, to lead a G7 meeting on women's empowerment. According to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Report (a way to measure gender equality across categories like economic participation, education, health, political empowerment, and more), Japan ranked 118th out of 146 countries. And despite electing its first female prime minister in 2025, which on the surface, seemed like a win for equality, it was a superficial victory: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi ascended to power as a hardline conservative who championed traditional gender roles. She even voted against a woman becoming Emperor in 2021, echoing her political party’s stance on maintaining the country’s sexist male-only succession rule. The decision risks the end of Japan's 1,500-year-old monarchy, the oldest continuous hereditary dynasty in the world.

In a society built upon patriarchy (and actively maintaining it), these entrenched beliefs have far-reaching ripple effects that seep into the fabric of everyday life. Groping on packed commuter trains and notorious workplace harassment are just the tip of the misogynistic iceberg. From lingering high heel mandates to the negative social stigmas around showing cleavage, there are countless other everyday instances that feel like never-ending microaggressive daggers, magnifying the depths of the country’s prejudice and discrimination against women. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that this bleeds into the country’s relationship with food. It’s even unusual for women to be sushi chefs, due to false beliefs that women’s hands are too warm to handle raw fish and that menstruation can impact a person’s ability to taste.

As a professional food writer, I’ve long been privy to how sexism impacts dining culture. But in Tokyo, it’s something I’ve seen and experienced firsthand. Recently, while working on a restaurant guide, I pushed my normal ramen-eating limits by visiting 10 different shops in a month, continuously finding myself in a line of mostly, if not all, men. It’s common to see queues of men in business suits waiting for hot ramen throughout the city, but it was only after seeing it so often up-close that I picked up on—and felt—the stark gender imbalance.

Reading restaurant reviews in Japanese only further confirmed my growing suspicions. “This ramen isn’t good for women because it’s too big” was a common theme; or on the flip side, “This place is amazing! Even I, as a [mere] woman, can eat the whole bowl!!!” There was also a constant pattern of reviewers mentioning whether it was acceptable for women to dine alone at certain ramen shops, or if the ramen was “light” enough for women to eat.

The message across these reviews was clear: Women can have ramen, but it can’t be too large, or too fatty, and must be somewhere acceptable to the male gaze.

What I’ve seen for ramen is the same for sweets, but the inverse. Inside many dessert shops, a sea of women customers quietly sit and enjoy their cakes and other pastries, without a man in sight. The bare walls, minimal decor, and ambient slurping sounds of a standard ramen shop are replaced with detailed crown modeling and the clinking of tiny forks on floral porcelain plates. Lines of men in business suits are swapped with lines of women in dresses and skirts. While I have also seen men in these shops on occasion, they are often accompanied by a woman on what appears to be a date.

As an “outsider,” especially as an American living in Japan, I recognize it’s easier to notice and be critical of a culture that’s not my own. After all, the U.S. has its own sexist food norms, and is far from immune to toxic stereotypes around food. Remember Women Laughing Alone with Salad? Or when tall, bearded men were wrapping meat logs in bacon? Today, guys are slapping raw meat down on countertops so hard and so often that it’s become background noise on TikTok, all while the current administration uses MAHA and MAGA to strengthen the stereotype of meat consumption as a cultural symbol of “traditional” masculinity. The U.S. might have slightly greater gender parity with regards to desserts (even though they still lean more heavily towards women), but like many countries, we are not exempt from our own forms of food misogyny.

This is to say, Japan’s culturally-specific gendered relationships with food do not live in a void. There is home-grown food sexism in Japan, yes, but there are just as many beliefs that have developed via global influences, including its diet culture amongst women.

Despite the ongoing patriarchal stronghold, cultural shifts in food have also started to emerge here. There’s a rise in a movement called ramen girls (or ramen joshi in Japanese), where some women make a concerted effort to slurp down as much ramen as they can. Women ramen influencers have also attracted large audiences in recent years, like Satoko Morimoto, who proudly claims to eat more than 600 bowls of ramen a year and has amassed over 53,000 Instagram followers. More men are leaving the post-war “carnivorous” image behind and are embracing the sweeter things in life, too. Some refer to them as “herbivore men,” a term that can carry a derogatory image because of its outward rejection of old masculine ideals—but they persist all the same.

When I do witness a man enjoying dessert alone in a room full of women, or a woman dining solo going ham on a bowl of tsukemen—I think to myself, YES! To me, it’s a small, quiet act of resistance against gender expectations. There’s a lot of room for progress, but these small changes can have a snowball effect in changing not just Japan’s food culture but more widely, its entrenched national sexism. I believe anyone, regardless of their gender, should be able to eat ramen, little cakes, and whatever else they want, whenever they damn well please. The food doesn’t care, so why should we?

When I think back to my second trip to Japan, I always remember my chat with that Tokyo local. After he told me that cake was only for women, I asked him, “Do you not like shortcakes? They’re so good!” He looked away shyly. “I do,” he said, “but I don’t tell people.”

Wherever he is, I hope he’s more than just occasionally throwing down on the tallest, thickest slices of strawberry shortcake out there, fully owning his sweet tooth for all to see.

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July 22, 2026August 3, 2026

Let Men Eat Cake (and Women Eat Ramen)

by Kiera Wright-Ruiz

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10558 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-05-15 19:59:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-05-15 19:59:48 [post_content] =>

Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana.

To get ahead of the odds against them—an unsympathetic media, a punitive legislature influenced by the American Christian right, and a public uninformed about biological diversity—the intersex movement in Ghana has had to get crafty.

In January 2025, the Ghanaian government announced a new constitutional review process, instituted by President John Mahama shortly after he was sworn in. Its main aims were to “propose reforms to enhance transparency, limit executive power, strengthen checks and balances, and improve judicial and local government structures."

In it, however, the intersex movement saw an opportunity: All of Ghana’s constitution could be reviewed. This included Article 17, which states that all are equal before the law and no one is to be discriminated against on the basis of race, place of origin, political opinions, color, gender, occupation, religion, or creed. If the movement could propose a review of Article 17, they reasoned, perhaps they could amend it to explicitly include that no one could be discriminated against based on their sex characteristics, or if they are of indeterminate gender (intersex).

It seemed like a solid plan.

After several strategy meetings, legal review, and input from constitutional law experts, however, the leaders of the movement realized it would not be so straightforward. Article 17 represented an “entrenched position," meaning a long-held view that was unlikely to change. As such, not only would it be difficult to convince the public of the importance of including intersex people for protection under the constitution, socially; legally, it would also require a referendum to pass.

The intersex movement already had only a few allies among the political class, and based on their findings, they also knew a majority of the public did not understand the concept of indeterminate gender—that someone may be born male with female sex organs, for instance, and should not be discriminated against for something out of their control. Making matters worse, the media also regularly conflated sexuality with gender in bad faith: A slate of investigations by friendly NGOs had revealed some major media organizations had even received funding from anti-LGBTQIA+ rights groups.

They changed tack.

Instead, the movement decided to seek an intervention through Article 28, which provides for the protection of children’s rights. They proposed that the provision be updated to explicitly ensure the recognition and protection of intersex children, who, in Ghana, are currently subjected to “corrective” and “forced” surgeries and medical procedures, according to firsthand accounts reported to Intersex Ghana, the country’s first intersex-led human rights organization.

Specifically, the group hoped to protect intersex children from “medically unnecessary, nonconsensual and irreversible procedures, intended to alter their sex characteristics.” These speculative procedures—sanctioned by doctors and parents without due consideration for the well-being of the child—can have lifelong physical, psychological, and even economic consequences, impairing the child’s ability to make a living in the future, says Lawrence Shone Edem Adjei, director of Intersex Ghana, over a video call.

"At age 14, I have undergone more than six surgeries after non-consensual procedures were performed on me at birth. I feel like the doctors used me for studies,” intersex advocate Emmanuella Kwarteng shared in one testimonial.

Kwarteng’s experience is not an uncommon one, and Intersex Ghana has had to intervene in a number of medical cases gone awry. In one particular case, Adjei recounts that a child had gone through up to eight surgeries over a span of ten years. Initially, their testes were removed, and the child was identified as female. Years later, doctors realized their initial procedure had caused the child to begin bleeding internally during menstruation. An additional surgery then had to be performed to remove the child’s womb.

“It's like just trial and error," Adjei says.

To make the case for intersex children in front of the constitutional review committee, and to prevent this from happening again, the intersex movement put together a murderer’s row of accomplices. Alongside activists like Adjei, this included two doctors, three lawyers, a High Court judge, and families with intersex children who could share their lived experiences.

It was a particularly precarious time: The intersex rights movement was working with significantly fewer resources than it had ever had. Intersex Ghana and other NGOs had been depleted by the U.S.-led funding cuts to pro-LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy groups all over the world, and philanthropic support had dried up.

The movement was throwing everything it had left at this case. Before the constitutional review committee, it had a few propositions. First, that the Ghanaian government provides an additional gender “I” (or intersex) on its Birth and Death registry upon discovery at birth that a child is not identified with one gender. Second, that the Ghanaian government outlaws and criminalizes forced surgeries to deter doctors from performing them, regardless of the demands of the child’s parents. Controversially, by Adjei’s own admission, “We are not in favor of the parents serving consent.” Instead, the movement proposed that the intersex individual be allowed to develop naturally. When the child is of age, they can then make an informed decision on their own bodies.

The advocates made their case to the constitutional review panel, drawing precedent from a case in Kenya. In the 2014 case, Baby A v Attorney General, an intersex child was denied a birth certificate because their sex had been marked with a question mark, effectively barring them from participating in civic life. The court, hedging, declined to admit a human rights violation, but still ordered the state to issue the birth certificate and begin the slow work of collecting data, developing medical guidelines, and contemplating a legal framework for intersex people. As a result of the case, the Kenyan government is now mandated to collect data on intersex individuals, and consider legal reforms and protections for them more broadly.

This landmark court case eventually resulted in an Intersex Persons Bill in 2024 which, among other things, guaranteed the “prohibition of harmful medical practices” against intersex people—including children.

The advocates argued that Ghana should follow Kenya’s example and recognize intersex people as a distinct legal entity, allow for intersex markers in civil documentation, include intersex persons in national census and data gathering, and establish a national commission for intersex individuals. They further argued that the condition of being “intersex” is not in conflict with Ghanaian cultural values by demonstrating support from religious and traditional leaders.

After months of deliberation, which included hearing from anti-intersex and anti-LGBTQ+ groups opposed to the proposed changes, Ghana’s constitutional review committee reached a decision. They recommended to the government that the constitution be amended to “provide for the right of every child to bodily integrity, including freedom from irreversible, non-consensual medical or surgical interventions that are not strictly necessary to preserve life or prevent serious and immediate harm; that the best interests of the child shall override social, cosmetic, cultural or expediency-based justifications for invasive medical procedures; for protection for intersex children, recognising their distinctive vulnerability to medically unnecessary ‘normalising’ interventions carried out before informed consent is possible.”

The movement was thrilled.

Their excitement, however, was short-lived. Soon after the committee submitted its recommendations, anti-intersex rhetoric started appearing in the press. On a national news show, Ghanaian legislator Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah called the proposed protections the “most crucial” part of the constitutional review, claiming the changes would “transform our constitution”—but not for the better.

“We know that these things can be the entrance of LGBTQ,” Awuah said, repeating a common trope widespread in the media that conflates sexuality with gender. “You want to sneak this into the constitution!”

Awuah was not accusing anyone in particular with his statement, but turned to fellow guest Oliver Barker-Vormawor, an activist and lawyer involved in the constitutional deliberations. In response, Barker-Vormawor defended the committee’s recommendations.

“We're saying that these are medical decisions that must be made, not parents using cultural basis to demand for surgeries to be imposed on children,” Barker-Vormawor said, reiterating their intentions.

In reality, the intersex movement in Ghana has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the LGBTQ+ movement as a safety and security strategy. It is also one of the biggest criticisms the movement faces from its potential allies. When an anti-LGBTQ+ bill was first introduced in Ghana in July 2021, intersex advocates campaigned tirelessly for the removal of intersex persons from the law, which included recommendations for surgery and hormonal treatments to “correct” them. Later that year, Intersex Ghana sent a memo to the Ghanaian legislature’s Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, asking for the bill to be thrown out in its entirety. But overall, the movement continues to tread the line between distinction and solidarity with its LGBTQ+ allies as best it can.

Still, some argue the two movements are ultimately inseparable because of their intersections: There are people who are intersex and trans; or intersex and gay.

“The movement has become too medicalized,” intersex and trans activist Awo Dufie Fofie says.

Dufie, assigned male at birth, later discovered she was intersex in her 20s, and initially went great lengths to reverse the growth of breast tissue in her body. At some point, she was taking fifteen pills a day. Upon meeting a queer elder—who had also been born a hypereffeminate male, but had socially transitioned to female in the 1950s—Awo stopped blocking estrogen in her body and instead let her body develop as it would without pharmaceutical intervention.

The intersex movement often has to make its case through visual aids of intersex bodies, Dufie argues, and as such, she believes it has created “a system that becomes a bit puritan about who can rightfully call themselves intersex and who is intersex enough to represent the community.” When Awo decided to transition, she was even advised by a fellow advocate that if she made it public, it would make the intersex movement “look bad."

"It is my sincere hope that intersex advocacy…adopts a much more decolonial framework and approach which embodies and centers the entire experiences of intersex people, such as their everyday lives,” she says. “Not only what medical conditions we have and how much intersexphobia we experience.”

Adjei acknowledges the catch-22 the intersex movement finds itself in, and understands why it believes it has to advocate for itself by providing distinctions between sexuality and gender. But she also believes it must also be in solidarity with the queer movement because of their overlap and intersections—including continued discrimination. “Ghanaians will not differentiate between an intersex person walking by and an LGBT person,” Adjei says. An effeminate but masculine-presenting intersex person is just as likely to be attacked—as has happened in many cases across the country—as a gay man expressing himself in a way that might be considered feminine.

“I was not seen as human growing up… because I had two genitalia,” Comfort Bugre, an intersex person, shared in a testimonial presented to the review committee.

“Growing up, I was isolated from people due to my intersex condition. I was relocated because people found out and started calling me names,” Elorm Enne, another intersex advocate, shared in a separate testimonial.

Currently, the hard-won constitutional review recommendation is in the implementation stage, and the Presidency has set up a committee to see how proposals may be effected.

The intersex movement is counting on seeing three things: First, large scale research on intersex people across the country, both to shed light on the quantitative heft of these protections, and to better understand the prevalence and diversity of intersexuality. Second, mass sensitization and public education across the country’s 16 regions on the harms of corrective child surgeries, in partnership with key institutions such as the Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Civic Education. And perhaps most importantly, the legitimacy of intersex as its own gender, and protection for all intersex people in the country.

The movement is tempering ambition with pragmatism. Advocates are also preparing for an outcome where the recommendation is struck down, or isn’t implemented, either in whole or in part. But if this comes to pass, the movement—with whatever funding it has left—plans to play its trump card. There are a number of government agencies and offices that should be involved in protecting intersex children: medical boards, the Attorney General’s office, the Ministry of Health, local government administrations.

It plans to sue all of them.

Additional Research by Nyameye Kiki Akumia.

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May 15, 2026May 15, 2026

“I Was Not Seen as Human Growing Up”

by Ayodeji Rotinwa

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8696 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-12 18:58:30 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-12 18:58:30 [post_content] =>

Meet the mothers caring for Ukraine's most vulnerable children.

One summer day in 2022, Varvara, an autistic 6-year-old girl from Ukraine, approached her mother Oksana while she was on the phone with the police. Oksana, now 39, was inquiring about her husband Maksim, a Ukrainian soldier who had been reported dead, but whose body still hadn’t been found.

“Mom,” Varvara said, “I know that dad is already in heaven.” She pointed toward the sky.

It was at this moment that Oksana realized her daughter was not like other children. “Varvara somehow understood that her father had been killed while he was defending Kharkiv from the Russian troops,” Oksana says, tears streaming down her face. “I never told her the truth; she only knew that her daddy moved to a faraway place… But she understands everything.”

Like Oksana, thousands of mothers in Ukraine are raising their children alone as a direct result of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Although the number of war widows has not officially been confirmed by Ukrainian authorities, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement last February that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the war began in 2022. As the fighting continues, it is mostly women who care for the country’s children. Some of these women live on the frontlines and use their own bodies to shield their toddlers from Russian attacks. Others have to safeguard children and teenagers who suffer from post-traumatic stress, developed after witnessing and experiencing atrocities during the war. Others, like Oksana, have to take care of children in increasingly difficult circumstances, managing their households and earning a living while grieving for their dead husbands, or else worrying about those alive but still fighting.

Disabled children are particularly vulnerable during war, in part because they are unable to access the same resources normally available for their ensured safety and care. On the frontline or under Russian occupation, that means that they might not have access to a hospital or needed medications, let alone specialists or therapy, as deteriorating mental health is a widespread issue in war-torn countries. Beyond that, being in the epicenter of the fighting makes children more vulnerable to PTSD and shock, as well as to physical injuries, which can further impact their mental state.

According to UN Women, of the 14.6 million people needing humanitarian assistance in Ukraine in 2024, 8 million were women—many of them single mothers, the elderly, or victims of gender-based violence. A large number of these women take care of children and loved ones with disabilities. The Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development reports that over 3 million persons with disabilities currently live in Ukraine—but this estimate almost definitely falls short of the actual numbers, and will likely continue to increase due to war-related injuries.

Of those, 1.8 million people with disabilities are already in need of humanitarian aid because of the war, a number that will also likely only increase. But where resources have fallen short, mothers across the country have singlehandedly done everything in their power to fill the gap.

Defending Ukraine Since Day One

The city of Kharkiv, where Oksana and Varvara live, was among the first to be invaded by Russian troops following the start of the war on February 24, 2022, in what Russian President Vladimir Putin called “a special military operation.” To this day, Kharkiv remains one of the most dangerous cities in Ukraine, and is regularly hit by both airstrikes and artillery.

“My husband, who has been in the Ukrainian army since 2015, told me he was going to fight immediately after Kharkiv was invaded,” Oksana says. She was left alone with their two daughters: Varvara, now nine, and Sofiia, 17. Her husband Maksim never came back; and even after he was confirmed dead, Oksana shares, it took ten months to find his body.

“It was hell,” Oksana tells me. “I am still taking antidepressants.”

Varvara, who was diagnosed on the autism spectrum at the age of three, has also become increasingly fearful as the war has unfolded. “Whenever she sees dead or injured persons, she says in her own words: ‘A bad boy has been shooting,’” Oksana says. Still, she says it has been difficult for them both. “Whenever the sirens sound, Varvara is extremely stressed—much more than a [neurotypical] child. She experiences panic several times a day.”

Oksana and her daughters, Varvara (top) and Sofiia (right). (Photo courtesy of Oksana.)

Luckily, Varvara is sociable and likes going to school, which is often her only source of joy—and a great source of comfort for her mother. In the suburbs of Kharkiv, Varvara attends classes at a specialized institution, where a local humanitarian organization recently built a bomb shelter specially tailored for children with disabilities, with heating, restrooms, and a library. Disabled children like Varvara—who are extremely afraid of air raids—can spend their entire days there peacefully.

Alyona Budagovska, a communication officer for People in Need, the NGO that constructed the bunker, tells The Conversationalist that families with disabled children in Ukraine face extraordinary challenges. For example, many parents cannot carry their children to safety during air raids, and standard public shelters are often inaccessible or too far away. In some cases, children are left behind out of fear or desperation, including children who are bed-bound or too heavy to be carried.

“In the context of war, children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable, yet often the most overlooked. Many of them attend specialized schools that lack the most basic protection against missile attacks,” Budagovska says. “Building shelters in [these] schools is about more than concrete walls—it’s about dignity and inclusion.”

Oksana feels relieved that her daughter likes school, and that her two daughters get along well. Yet, she says, it is still difficult being left without her husband, who she says knew Varvara best. “My daughters love each other very much and that makes me happy, but it doesn’t replace my husband,” she says. While her loving family is a source of resilience, both she and her daughters continue to be affected by grief.

Mothers On the Frontline

Oksana’s experience is far from singular. In frontline towns and villages across Ukraine, thousands of single mothers also raise their children without any support, despite the incredible risks. According to UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, there are currently 1.9 million children in need inside the country. But prior to the war, Ukraine already had one of the highest rates of child institutionalization in the world, and the highest in Europe. Of these children, UNICEF reports nearly half of them were disabled. Now, the agency reports that 16 children are killed or injured in Ukraine on average every week.

Denys, a 7-year old boy from the Kherson region, is one of the survivors of such frontline attacks—together with his mother, Iuliia, 25, who also suffers from heavy injuries. Both of them were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and are overcoming psychological hardships, facing the challenge of healing both physically and mentally in the aftermath of their attack.

In late April, I meet them in their home village only a few miles away from Kherson, currently the most dangerous city in Ukraine. Upon entering their home, I learn that a Russian drone has shattered a local house just three hours before my arrival. These FPV (first person view) drone attacks and artillery strikes continue on a daily basis—and can be heard as I conduct interviews.

Iuliia is still in shock after the morning attack, and cries relentlessly during our conversation, while Denys is silent, hiding in another room.

“My husband died on the frontline in Kherson shortly after the war broke out,” Iuliia says. “Up until that point, we lived just like everyone else: We had jobs, we worked on a farm, we had our daily worries… Then, everything turned upside down.”

Iuliia and her son, still grieving their loss, had continued living in the destroyed village, even as artillery strikes became more and more frequent. But one night, everything changed.

She and Denys were sleeping in their house—each in a different room—when they awoke to a loud sound. Then, came the shock and the chaos: a Russian missile had hit their home, reducing it to ruins.

Iuliia and her son were lucky in their misfortune: They both survived, but suffered severe concussions, head trauma, and PTSD. Iuliia, who was closer to the explosion, also sustained skin wounds and severe damage to her inner ear.

“The ambulance immediately took us to the nearest hospital,” Iuliia recalls, shuddering at the memory. “We spent several days there. They gave us injections, syrups, medicines, and we underwent various procedures.”

Once Iuliia and Denys were released from the hospital, they also needed to find a safe place to stay. “Our house has been turned into ruins; there is no roof, and the walls are broken,” she tells me. “I literally had to go back and dig out some of our basic personal belongings from the [rubble].”

The pair decided to live, temporarily, with Iuliia’s sister. But their first night there quickly turned into a nightmare. “As we were falling asleep, a rocket hit the property right next to my sister’s house, with shrapnel hitting our walls,” Iuliia tells me, crying. Following that night, she says she suffered a breakdown.

“If I could somehow force myself to function before [the second attack], I really can’t now,” Iuliia tells me. “I have severe PTSD and need to rest and consult a psychologist. I am constantly short of breath, my hands are shaking, my vision is going black.”

But Iuliia tells me she has no savings, and nowhere to go. While Denys is sometimes cared for by their family and friends in the village, she says she has lost hope for a better future. She still suffers from earaches, tinnitus, dizziness, hypervigilance, flashbacks, and frequent blackouts. Denys, she says, is seeing several doctors and a therapist, and is in need of rehabilitation. While he is healing well from his physical injuries, there are multiple layers of trauma that he needs to talk through with a psychologist, especially due to his young age: losing his father as a toddler; losing his home in a bombardment; witnessing his mother and family members injured and suffering.

Iuliia cries whenever she talks about her son. “Denys is everything to me,” she says. “Children heal faster from some wounds; he recovered from his concussion faster than I did. At age seven, he is stronger than I am at 25.” Like many other mothers in Ukraine, she is facing the impossible challenge of remaining calm and composed in front of her child, despite facing deep physical and psychological wounds herself. But taking care of an injured child while suffering from PTSD and her own injuries, in a village hit by drones every day, is one of the most difficult things she has ever had to endure. Her only recourse, she says, has been to reach out to the very few humanitarian NGOs operating where she lives.

Giles Duley, the UN Global Advocate for Persons with Disability in Conflict and CEO of Legacy of War Foundation, which provides aid to people on the frontlines, tells me that in conflict, the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society are often forgotten or ignored. “The elderly, single parent families, and those living with disability are at far higher risk from collapsing healthcare systems, displacement, and lack of social services—in Ukraine we have seen those with disabilities unable to evacuate frontline areas; vital medical facilities targeted by Russian [forces]; and vulnerable communities left without healthcare,” he says.

“The war has also exacerbated previously existing inequalities, with disproportionate effects on older women and single mothers,” he adds.

Surviving Occupation with a Disability

Olena, 54, has felt the weight of this inequality as a single mother to a disabled child. She and her son, Misha, 12, come from Mykhailo-Laryne, a small village near Mykolaiv in the south of Ukraine that was occupied between late February and November in 2022. Her ex-husband, Misha’s father, lives in a different town, and is unable to help support their child financially, in part because of the distance, and in part because of the war.

Olena’s son Misha has an intellectual disability, and she believes he is likely also on the autism spectrum—but she has been unable to take him to a psychiatrist since the war broke out. Traveling, even to neighboring Mykolaiv, is too expensive for her, and while their village was occupied, it was “absolutely unthinkable,” she says.

Olena and her son, Misha. (Photo courtesy of Sara Cincurova.)

Olena currently works as a school assistant for a disabled girl at a local school—but with her single salary and prices skyrocketing since the outbreak of the war, she frequently struggles to buy food, she says. As a school assistant, she earns approximately $88 USD a month at most—but her salary is often cut down significantly, as it largely depends on the number of hours she works per week.

Apart from this severe financial hardship, what Olena suffers from the most is when she sees the inhabitants of her village mock and hurt her Misha, who is her only child.

“People have this narrow-minded mentality in our village… They often used to make fun of Misha, calling him [slurs],” Olena says with pain in her eyes. But Misha is a talented and sensitive boy, she adds. “He is kind, curious, and a patriot. He loves cooking, he is always cheerful.”

Olena is currently receiving humanitarian aid from a local NGO, Voices of Children. The organization works with a wide range of children—including those with disabilities and/or on the autism spectrum. Olha Yerokhina, a Communication Manager for the organization, tells me that whenever a family with a neurodivergent child asks for help, “We listen, we try to understand the need, and even if we can’t provide specialized support in-house, we do our best to refer [the family] to trusted professionals or partner organizations.”

The NGO also supports Ukrainian mothers just like Olena. “[Mothers] are often overwhelmed and left to navigate [the] complex reality alone,” Yerokhina says.

At the end of the interview, Olena recalls the one—and perhaps only—positive aspect that the war has had on her and her son. “People are now more accepting of Misha’s disability,” she says. “During the occupation, many have reconsidered their values and their priorities.”

“They now make less fun of Misha and accept he is a human being, and treat him with more love.”

[post_title] => Motherhood on the Frontlines [post_excerpt] => Meet the mothers caring for Ukraine's most vulnerable children. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => single-mothers-ukraine-russia-war-conflict-frontlines-violence-motherhood-widows-vulnerable-children [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 22:47:03 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 22:47:03 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8696 [menu_order] => 13 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 12, 2025August 3, 2026

Motherhood on the Frontlines

by Sara Cincurova

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8525 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-06-05 18:35:51 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-06-05 18:35:51 [post_content] =>

We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift.

I once believed that the presence of a female leader signaled real progress—a sign that gender equality had taken root. As a girl growing up in China, I watched with admiration as women like President Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan and President Park Geun-hye in South Korea rose to the highest offices in their respective countries. Their success seemed to promise a future in which women’s voices would be equally heard, equally respected—that perhaps women might finally be seen as equals.

But as I began to study gender and politics more deeply, particularly across East and Southeast Asia, that initial optimism gave way to unease. Representation alone, I realized, does not guarantee change. Even more alarmingly, the symbolic presence of women in power can obscure the systemic barriers that continue to shape—and often silence—most women’s participation in political life.

Globally, this problem has proven surmountable. In Scandinavia, gender quotas and institutional reforms have helped elevate women to between 40% and 50% of parliamentary seats, reflecting not only a shift in numbers but a broader cultural embrace of women as political leaders. Similar gender quotas in Mexico—which elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, last year—have led to women making up 50% of seats in congress, after gender parity was enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2014.

In contrast, however, East and Southeast Asian democracies continue to lag behind—not only in representation, but in the structural support needed to close the gender gap. Japan, for example, despite being one of the world’s largest economies, has seen little progress in this area. Women occupy roughly 16% of seats in the national legislature—a statistic that reveals not just electoral imbalance, but deeper societal expectations about leadership, gender roles, and public legitimacy. As of April of this year, the percentage of women who hold parliamentary seats in India (13.8%), Cambodia (13.6%), Malaysia (13.5%), Sri Lanka (9.8%), and Bhutan (4.3%) remains even lower. And in China, there have been no women in the politburo since 2022, something the United Nations has flagged as a matter of great concern.

So, are women truly gaining power in Asia, or are they simply there to make politics look more gender equal?

Analyzing data from the Asian Barometer Survey suggests the reason women’s political participation remains low in Asia is as much a numbers problem as it is a cultural one. Founded in 1971, the ABS is a cross-national survey that aims to gather “public opinion data on issues such as political values, democracy, governance, human security, and economic reforms.” In a 2020 academic paper from the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Sarah Liu, one surprising finding from the 2010–2012 survey was how the gender of the interviewer affected women’s answers. Faced with female researchers, women opened up about their political beliefs. With male interviewers, many of them hesitated. This suggests a much deeper problem with Asia’s gender divide, rooted in women feeling both uncomfortable with and unwelcome in politics.

Across many societies, not just in Asia, politics is still seen as a man’s domain, where women are expected to support, not lead. But in East and Southeast Asia, where traditional gender roles continue to shape public and private life, this attitude is amplified. Even in modern cities, women are constantly told that politics is not their space. For me, it wasn’t that anyone said I couldn’t be a leader when I was growing up—it was that no one ever expected me to be one. And when women are constantly told that something isn’t an option for them, it makes sense that, eventually, they might actually start to believe it.

When women do step forward to lead, they also face a very different kind of scrutiny to their male peers. Their private lives are often judged more harshly than their professional ones, and given as much attention, if not more. When Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s first female president, critics focused on the fact that she was unmarried—as if being single made her unfit to lead. But when it comes to unmarried male leaders, no one ever even thinks to question it.

The media frequently contributes to this double standard. I remember watching coverage of Shoko Kawata, a 33-year-old woman who became the youngest female city mayor in Japanese history after winning her election in Yawata, Kyoto Prefecture in 2023. I was furious that the story’s focus was not on what she’d said in her speech, but on what she was wearing. Other reports also emphasized her love of tea ceremony and traditional kimono attire—while barely mentioning her actual policy goals. Her agenda had been reduced to its aesthetics: her clothes were that day’s headline news, while her policies went overlooked.

Even within political institutions, this bias persists. In Japan, a young Tokyo assemblywoman was once heckled by her male colleagues while speaking about the need for better childcare policies. This incident occurred in 2014, when Ayaka Shiomura, a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, was addressing how the government might better support mothers in light of Japan’s drastically decreasing birth rate. During her speech, several male lawmakers interrupted her with sexist remarks such as “Go and get married!” and “Can you even have children?” One of them, Akihiro Suzuki, later admitted to the heckling and publicly apologized. But the incident sparked widespread outrage, and served as another stark reminder of the entrenched gender bias in even the most formal of political spaces.

Fueling all this is the deeper issue that women are still expected to prioritize the family above all. This problem isn’t singular to Asia, but nonetheless, it feels especially pervasive here: Even in the public sphere, women are still trapped in private expectations. When a woman chooses public service, some see it as a betrayal of her “real” duty. The media asks, “Can she have it all?”—a question they’d never ask of a man, and one that has never been asked of a father.

These attitudes don’t just make the job harder. They make women question whether the space was ever meant for them. And in many ways, it still isn’t—something that keeps women out of politics, and keeps everyone, regardless of gender, chained to the status quo.

Yet, despite persistent challenges, women politicians in Asia have continued to make remarkable strides. President Tsai and President Park both shattered historical barriers to ascend to the highest levels of national leadership in their respective countries, proving that women are more than capable of leading. They also both drove meaningful social and economic change during their terms—even in systems not designed for them.

As the first woman president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen and her administration actively pushed for gender-equal policies, earning Taiwan the top spot in Asia—and one of the highest rankings globally—for gender equality. One particularly meaningful initiative was an amendment requiring companies with more than 100 employees to provide childcare facilities—helping to ease the burden on working mothers. Tsai also supported policies that loosened loan restrictions for women entrepreneurs and promoted female participation in the economy as a path to structural change.

Beyond legislation, she repeatedly called for dismantling gender stereotypes and encouraged women to participate in public life—raising both the visibility and legitimacy of women in leadership. Under her eight-year tenure, Taiwan’s economy grew steadily, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 3.15%, and even reached 6.6% in 2021—a rare achievement during global economic uncertainty.

Park Geun-hye’s presidency, meanwhile, offered a different but equally important approach to leadership. While her administration made more modest progress on gender-specific reforms, it recognized the challenges faced by working mothers and proposed expanding childcare services to support female employment. More broadly, Park’s role as a woman navigating a traditionally male-dominated political landscape was also deeply symbolic.

Under her leadership, South Korea expanded its global economic footprint by signing free trade agreements with 52 countries, including China and Vietnam—bolstering South Korea’s export markets and international competitiveness. These policy efforts, though not always framed through a gender lens, reflected a broader vision of national growth, with women as increasingly visible participants.

Tsai and Park’s contributions—each shaped by their own context—highlight the transformative power and potential of women’s leadership. For millions of women across Asia, seeing them in positions of power—on television, in parliament, in international headlines—continues to deliver an enduring message: women belong here. And their presence alone continues to inspire others to imagine what is possible when women are no longer the exception.

Change won’t come overnight. Cultural shifts take time. But every honest conversation, every woman who speaks up, every moment of resistance matters—so hopefully, one day, girls growing up in East or Southeast Asia will see women in power and think: “That could be me.” Not because it’s rare, but because it’s normal.

To achieve this, we don’t just need more women in office. We need political systems that respect their leadership, media that reports on their work—not their wardrobe—and societies that stop measuring women by outdated standards. We need women in Asia to not just be seen in politics, but truly heard.

[post_title] => When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions? [post_excerpt] => We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => women-leaders-asia-politics-tsai-ing-wen-taiwan-park-geun-hye-south-korea-government-gender-parity-equality [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 22:48:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 22:48:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8525 [menu_order] => 14 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 5, 2025August 3, 2026

When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions?

by Sun Youyang

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7813 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-02-03 23:03:39 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-02-03 23:03:39 [post_content] =>

From my recent travels, the answer seems to be "no."

Listen to this article on The Conversationalist Podcast. | 25:01 min

I’ve been to at least 15 countries in the last two and a half years, some of them repeatedly, including frequent trips to Nigeria and the United Kingdom for personal and family commitments. But most of my travel has been while working on my forthcoming book, Foremothers, including visiting new countries for the first time, such as Brazil, or some, for the first time in a long time, like South Africa.

Foremothers, slated for release in the near future, has taken much more time and much more out of me than I thought it would when I first conceived of it over seven years ago. Surprisingly, this hasn’t just been because of the laborious effort of working on a cross-continental, multicultural, multigenerational, women-centered historical nonfiction book. It has also been due to the universal sentiment of doom and gloom I kept encountering while researching and writing it—raising my internal and intellectual alarm bells beyond the scope of the project. As such, in the wake of my travels, I’ve found myself repeatedly considering a new and troubling question: Is it just me, or is anyone, anywhere having a good time?

Of course, the very premise of this good time and its practice may not even be universally defined. What constitutes a good time in Dakar, Senegal may not be the same as in Lagos, Portugal. But even if the specifics of a good time and good times are relative, we can all agree—as difficult as it may be for us to do, given our abundant disagreements—that having a good time on a broader scale must consist of some fundamentals. For any country or society or group of people anywhere to claim it, for example, there must be established, uncontestable liberties that its people, irrespective of their differences, enjoy collectively. Healthy, nourishing, affordable food must be available to its inhabitants. Their most humble abodes, whatever they look like, ought to be functional and secure to the environment they live in. Basically, there should be basic human rights, and then some, for all. And even though, across communities and nations, these good time aims may not previously have been achieved, this did not change its pursuit for and by subsequent generations. It seems, however, this is no longer the case.

To the pessimists and realists, whose differences have become the same, these so-called “good times” have always been little more than a post-World War II mirage, chased by the utopic dreamers who don’t understand the real world and how it works. To others, the vision has long lost its luster because too many of us are unwilling to pay the price it would take to accomplish it, from living with less, to partaking in simultaneous revolutions more. This view, most embodied by the old-school retired optimists, has also found favor with the apolitical and the nihilistic, who mimic each other so closely they can hardly be told apart. But even for the optimists still-in-residence, and indeed those rare fools who dare to be counted and characterized as the hopeful, the dream of a good time appears increasingly illusive, increasingly difficult to hold onto. This, I think, has been the greatest throughline of my travels, and perhaps the most worrying, too—a collective loss of hope among everyone, but especially amongst the hopeful.

The reasons why appear obvious enough. COVID and its poor handling by political and public health institutions alike around the globe. The economic frustrations stemming from a widespread rise in cost of living and inflation, and the ebbs in job opportunity and security; everywhere, the rich have got richer, and the poor have got poorer, with fewer people able to make it to, and stay within, the in-between. Climate change is unequivocally upon us and we are living through its effects, wondering with each unprecedented event or catastrophic change to a people’s way of life, the longevity of our human existence on Earth. We have become witnesses to, if not reluctant consumers of, the daily accounts of the violence of apartheid, war, and the unjust global nation-state dynamics respective to Palestine-Israel, to Sudan, and elsewhere, mainly in the Global South—even as the most hopeful among us have protested and petitioned continuously in the face of ever-creeping sentiments of powerlessness.

All this has also come as trust in news media everywhere, but especially in the United States’ conglomerates, remains at record lows, and in the midst of a technological insurgency of misinformation and disinformation where even the media literate are as liable to conspiracies as they are to good-faith misinterpretations. Add to that a broken faith in political systems that no longer appear built for the world we live in today, tightly tethered to a system that continues to serve the most materially advantaged. But even more alarming still, is the broken trust permeating through the people we live near to and alongside, as a contagion of loneliness sweeps through the world, posing as much threat to our species’ health and well-being as future pandemics inevitably will—all of which is, in part, an outcome of a rise of individualism around the world.

This incomplete list of gloom and doom sounds bleak, because it is. Yet much of what has even been listed has always been true of our collective human experiences, in eras long past that in important ways were objectively worse than this one. What we are experiencing now, then, is just the latest iteration of the human condition, the sufferings and the sufferers altering every few hundred years or so. But this reality also stands in contrast with the objective progression of this time—in science, in medicine, in technology, in faith; in short, in all that we know makes for a good life, and a good time, for the many. In the context of our human history, perhaps these progressions frustrate us all the more because in spite of them, the human condition has not been permanently altered. But maybe the biggest difference between the eras of yesteryear and today, is that so many of the people I have encountered in my travels, whatever their politics and whatever our disagreements, do not believe that those who come after them will enjoy a better future.

From what I’ve observed during my travels, it’s not difficult to see why. In Nigeria, the country of my birth, years of unfettered greed and complacency by politicians and the rise of high-influence people who prop up ethnocentrism and religious bigotry, in tandem with a return to the old-school tricks of its former dictatorship era, including threats of violence and free speech suppression, have led to a national mood of despondency for an otherwise almost hazardously hopeful people—a people I ordinarily advise to be more skeptical. This has dashed the reveries of my elders, peers, and juniors, some of whom returned home at the turn of the late aughts, in the midst of a prodigious cultural boom, to partake in a contemporary attempt of nation-building when the country looked on the ascent economically. Today, Nigeria is experiencing what has been called its worst economic crisis in a generation, and the high cost of basic needs has resulted in over 30 million people facing food insecurity in 2025.

In South Africa, high unemployment and depletion in the quality of public services have resulted in the economic disempowerment of everyday citizens, who blame migrants with its cause, stoking the country’s African-centric xenophobia. All of this has been laid at the feet of its African National Congress (ANC) party, the former heroes of the apartheid struggle who lost their 20 years of political dominance in 2024. Following South Africa’s elections last May, the ANC was all but forced to form a political coalition with the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, the latter of which a journalist friend of mine referred to as “the residual party of white privilege.”

But even the more hopeful chances we might have anticipated at achieving a “good time” have struggled to achieve it. This includes Brazil, a place where the people seem to most demonstrate the desire for a good time—partly because that Brazilian label runs deep in the national fabric, and partly as a result of their 2022 election in which leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva replaced the authoritarian-like Jair Bolsonaro. In the weeks after Lula was sworn in, I attended carnival in both Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, documenting the joyous tradition and its history, and was told by many of the relief they felt at Lula’s return, his third time at the helm of the nation. Yet Bolsonaro’s continued influence prevails to the point of his own possible comeback, even despite a recent police report of his attempt at a failed coup in those same 2022 elections.

Meanwhile, as in much of the West, right-wing extremists in Portugal gained support via parliamentary representation during its general elections in March last year, and the once open, migrant-friendly policies of the country that drove its digital nomad explosion are now set to be restricted. In the UK, the self-inflicted Brexit wound has come to fester in the last few years following its summer 2016 vote. Compounded with the COVID years, it has left the country’s economy smaller, and exacerbated its cost of living crisis; any night out in London will confirm a decimated scene, unveiling how the once Swinging City hardly deserves to be mentioned among its global equivalents anymore. In the United States, where I have lived for much of my adult life, the early days of a second Trump presidency have already brought about a sense of impending chaos and doom throughout structures and institutions, political, cultural, and economic, after his landslide victory in November. Much ink will continue to be spilled as to how and why he was reelected at all, but the fears of the authoritarianism that accompany Trump’s presence long preceded his first administration, and will supersede the current one. It’s unclear, too, if the coalitions that oppose his presidency even have the wherewithal to form and execute an integrated vision that will safeguard the communities they claim to defend, not only against Trump’s actions, but for the good of the people, regardless of who sits in The White House.

Of course, some ordinary people—and not those who actually benefit from these global state of affairs—have boasted of victory in all of these instances. Their overall political participation (and not just their electoral one), or lack thereof, stems from a plethora of grievances and discontent—many real, some imagined—leading to a need to believe that their side will at least see gains, or more honestly, not suffer quite as much as the “losers.” This of course is an effective political strategy set up by those who truly benefit—convincing their base that despite the lack of evidence that surrounds them, they have been victorious. But a cursory examination of the whole, along with the many candid if unsuspecting admissions people have shared with me during my travels—including from those claiming electoral victory—nonetheless reveals that none, regardless of which political side they may be on, believe that their life will marginally improve after an election. The winning side confesses deep-seated dejections as much as the imagined losing side, in sometimes unspoken but always communicated anxieties that the good times are no longer within one’s reach, nor within one’s children’s reach, if they ever even were.

The privilege of observing this phenomenon these last few years has been witnessing how its cultural ramifications have grown alongside its political ones. This is obvious in the rise of the rhetoric and content of trad wives and the manosphere, indicating a desire to suppress women’s rights and keep men in less empowered, less diverse visions of masculinity. Oppression begets repression to more than its victims, and because it does, a good time becomes impossible for all, oppressor and oppressed alike. Relatedly, another cultural consequence can be seen in the choice—when it is a choice—to delay or wholly repudiate parenthood, not only because of the real expenses associated with it, but because so many have decided they would rather deny themselves the experience than foist the offerings of this dystopia we are headed towards onto their potential offspring. But less obvious manifestations can also be seen in how so much of the latest sociotechnological innovations are not improving our material lives but instead inviting us to escape into virtual apathy and antipathy. It struck me continuously throughout my travels how much even when around others, people expressed a desire to abscond into their digital lives, most often to nurse parasocial relationships where they imagined their counterparts as more fulfilled than them, counterparts who they seem to have outsourced their hopes and dreams to. Witnessing all this and more, and as someone who ordinarily accepts that little is new under the sun—seasons of plenty and joy live alongside seasons of paucity and pain as a fact of life, and we are called to persist in all of them—I, who considers myself among the hopeful, began to wonder if hope here is even the answer. Moreover, what does hope even look like under such universal malaise?

The truth is I don’t have a unanimous solution, or at least, not yet. Certainly, building coalition across issues in ways that acknowledge our political and social differences has been advocated for by those more knowledgeable than I, as have mutual aid collectives in our communities by movement leaders at the frontlines of our despair. There are guides to survival that have been written in the form of literature, such as Octavia Butler’s Parables, or nonfiction directives we can follow to address the underlying litany of systemic problems we face, offered in books like David Graber’s The Utopia of Rules. But because of the work I do as a journalist and the work I have been doing as a forthcoming author, and because of who I am—a person whose imagination is wired to pursue history in order to realize the future—I have found myself meditating on not only the stories of significant women of the past that I’ve collected for Foremothers, but on those of my own foreparents, too.

In the past year especially, I have contemplated not infrequently the lives of my foreparents, including those I never met and those that in my own lifetime transitioned beyond the physical realm. I have thought about the conditions they endured—from illness to war to colonization to migrations, new and old. And I have thought about the fears they overcame, the joys they found, and the unwavering perseverance they had to continue on; at least in part, for the sake of descendants they would never meet. And they did this not always because they believed they could promise their descendants a good life, but because they believed that whatever progress they made—even the most minute—should never see its end when their own lives ended on this Earth, but instead, be built upon with each generation that followed. Their responsibility to those who they could not know would come after them, was, above all else, a refusal to succumb to whatever hopelessness their circumstances presented, and instead a choice to hold onto an imagination that made no promises of what was to come, but only of what is possible.

For what it’s worth, although I didn’t hear this same sentiment expressed in great quantities throughout my travels, the debt of continuing to carry as a testament to one’s forebearers was the singular throughline even the most faintly hopeful people managed to convey. From a source in Luanda, Angola who told me how our dues to our ancestors is what can propel us forward in times of difficulty, to colleagues I encountered in Nairobi, Kenya who proposed that in order to keep moving forward, we must look continually to all those who have survived before us.

All the same, I cannot promise myself a good time knowing what I have seen these last few years and even prior to them, much less can I promise a good time to anybody who will come after me. I also cannot promise relief will come anywhere, because for most of us, even those of us who might have the means and privilege of movement, there is nowhere to run to, to escape this intercontinental anguish. But alongside the pragmatism of collective coalitions in our communities, small and big, that we must adopt in order to persist, we owe it to the foreparents gone and the foreparents still to come to never let our imagination yield to believing that both good and better times are not possible. Our collective survival depends on it.

[post_title] => Is Anyone, Anywhere Having a Good Time? [post_excerpt] => From my recent travels, the answer seems to be "no." [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => is-anyone-anywhere-having-a-good-time [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:27:04 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:27:04 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7813 [menu_order] => 29 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 3, 2025August 3, 2026

Is Anyone, Anywhere Having a Good Time?

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7175 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-09-06 23:15:35 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-09-06 23:15:35 [post_content] =>

If we want to restore and preserve abortion rights in the United States, we have to fight harder for the ERA.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s overdue decision to suspend his reelection campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the nomination has given the Democratic Party a decent shot at winning in November. It has also freed the Democrats to emphasize an issue they believe will drive voters to the polls: At its recent national convention, the party put reproductive rights and the “power of women” front and center, hoping to capitalize on voters’ very rational fear of a potential nationwide abortion ban if Trump is reelected.

But while the landscape for abortion rights will be less bleak if Democrats retain the White House next year, electing Harris alone will not be enough to restore these rights or prevent them from being ripped away again. Nor will it keep the far-right Supreme Court from laying the groundwork for the next Republican administration to implement the same reactionary social policies favored by the architects of Project 2025, the so-called blueprint for a second Trump term.

Aside from changing the composition of the Court, many advocates believe that passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is the best and possibly the only way to restore our abortion rights, and, more broadly, to protect the rights of millions of American women and LGBTQ+ people from current and future attacks. First proposed in 1923, the ERA would prohibit gender discrimination and ensure that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”—something our Constitution does not explicitly guarantee. Most crucially, it would also safeguard these rights no matter which political party is in power. Its passage has rarely felt so urgent; in the wake of Dobbs, Americans cannot afford to leave the ERA’s fate up to the leaders of either party. Congress has already repeatedly failed to pass federal legislation to protect abortion rights: With so much at stake, demanding that the Biden administration immediately publish this badly needed amendment, and, to a lesser extent, joining efforts to add gender equality provisions to state constitutions has become far more crucial to preserving our rights than voting alone.

According to the American Bar Association (ABA) and other experts, the ERA has already achieved the number of state ratifications required to add it to the Constitution. (Conservative activists argue that some states’ decisions to rescind their original ratifications means the ERA never met this threshold, but many legal scholars say those rescissions are legally invalid and can be ignored.) But while Biden has repeatedly affirmed his support for the ERA, he has, to the outrage of its proponents, resisted publishing it for years. Why he is so reluctant is anyone’s guess. Perhaps his administration is taking a conservative approach due to perceived legal issues and a general fear of rocking the boat, despite the ERA’s popularity and legal validity. Or maybe they think it’s in their best interest to preserve threats to equality that double as fundraising tools for the Democratic Party and its allies, which help them retain the support of voters who know today’s GOP will do nothing to publish the ERA or protect abortion rights, but still hold out hope that the Democrats might.

It could also be personal: Biden, who is technically pro-choice, is a notably poor advocate with an appalling record on the issue. By contrast, Harris speaks passionately about abortion and, in March, became the first sitting U.S. president or vice president to visit an abortion clinic in an official capacity. In her convention speech, she declared, “We trust women,” and vowed that when “Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom” she would “proudly sign it into law.” Yet she offered no explanation as to why this didn’t happen when Democrats controlled Congress, no strategy for ensuring that it happens in the next Congress, and no reason why the Democratic administration she is currently a part of hasn’t yet published the ERA. There is also no reason to assume that if Harris wins in November, she will honor her 2019 presidential campaign pledge to pass the ERA in her first 100 days in office, either. In fact, she did not mention the ERA in her speech at all, despite the party’s promise in its official 2024 platform that “Democrats will fight to make the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land.” Notably, this year’s platform also promised that “Democrats will work to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act”—something then President Obama promised to do over a decade ago—and repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal programs like Medicaid from covering the cost of most abortions, and which Biden supported until June 2019. It did not explain how they plan to do so. (Neither the Biden administration nor the Harris campaign responded to my requests for comment by the time this was published.)

Nicole Vorrasi Bates, Executive Director of the pro-ERA organization Shattering Glass, did not mince words in a recent phone call. “Both parties are playing political football with the rights and lives of 187 million women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people,” she said. Regardless of who is in the White House, the Supreme Court will issue rulings in the next year that could further damage women’s legal standing for decades to come by subjecting claims of gender discrimination to a lower standard of judicial review—something that theoretically could not happen if we could point to language in the Constitution that explicitly guarantees sex equality, rather than relying on what many legal scholars consider an implicit guarantee under the 14^th Amendment.

The quickest and most straightforward path to achieving that guarantee is to publish the ERA. As Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa explained in a 2020 Columbia Undergraduate Law Review article, “the Court has continually changed the test it uses to evaluate claims of sex-discrimination…Without [the ERA], the Court will continue to evaluate sex-discrimination cases without a steady metric, thereby leaving problems of inequality unsolved.” The fact that sex equality is not clearly guaranteed in the Constitution, Wadhwa wrote, gives the Court “a blank check to decide what test to use” and “how seriously to take challenges against statutes that discriminate on the basis of sex.”

Today, the vast majority of pro-ERA politicians are Democrats. But the ERA continues to enjoy broad bipartisan support among voters. A 2016 poll found that 90% of Republicans support it, which suggests that most non-elite Republicans favor basic equality—and GOP leaders are, on this issue, profoundly out of step with their base. A more recent 2022 poll shows that the vast majority of Americans still support the amendment—and gender equality—across party lines. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly derailed the ERA in the 1970s and left it for dead at the dawn of the Reagan era; decades later, fury at Trump resurrected it. Nevada ratified the ERA in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020, bringing the total number of state ratifications to the 38 required to make it part of the Constitution.

Twenty-nine states already explicitly guarantee sex or gender equality in their constitutions, which offers stronger and more durable protections for abortion rights than state laws banning discrimination. The ERA would guarantee these protections at the federal level. Such protections are necessary even in blue states with strong anti-discrimination laws for two main reasons: (1) laws are much easier to change and/or repeal than constitutional text and (2) gender discrimination claims are usually subject to intermediate scrutiny, which is a lower standard than the one applied in cases involving explicitly protected categories like race. This is because a minority of Americans with outsized power do not consider abortion a right and do not want U.S. courts to treat gender discrimination as seriously as other forms of prejudice. Once courts are required to apply the same standard to sex-discrimination cases, abortion restrictions, which apply almost exclusively to women, will be much harder to defend.

This is already clear at the state level. In Connecticut and New Mexico, the constitutions of which prohibit sex discrimination, courts have upheld public funding of abortion. The New Mexico Supreme Court is considering striking down abortion restrictions passed by conservative localities because they violate the state’s constitution. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled that abortion providers can challenge Pennsylvania’s ban on Medicaid coverage for abortion as sex discrimination under the state’s Equal Rights Amendment and constitutional equal protection provisions. Even in blood-red Utah, the state Supreme Court recently upheld a suspension of the state’s abortion ban, keeping the procedure legal while the ban is being challenged in court. In suing to block the Utah ban, Utah Planned Parenthood argued that it violated several provisions in the state’s constitution, including the right to gender equality.

But as Wendy J. Murphy explained in a recent law review article, amending state constitutions is an imperfect strategy for reasons similar to those put forth by Wadhwa. According to Murphy, only thirteen states enforce their own constitutional gender equity provisions under the highest standard of judicial review. In Texas, for example, the state constitution’s sex equality provision failed to protect Texas women when the state Supreme Court concluded that abortion-related funding restrictions do not deny equality “‘because of’ sex, even though only women [can] become pregnant.” As Murphy argued, “without the ERA, States are free to apply their State constitutional equality guarantees unequally to women.”

This doesn’t mean that states’ efforts are futile. A year ago, abortion rights supporters had reason for cautious optimism: Ballot measures designed to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions passed, and those intended to restrict such rights failed in all seven of the states, including red states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, that voted on these measures in the aftermath of Dobbs. In November, New Yorkers will vote on whether their constitution should guarantee equality regardless of gender and reproductive status. (New York’s constitution currently prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, creed or religion,” but not “sex.”) Floridians, too, will have the opportunity to enshrine abortion rights in their constitution. Abortion-related state constitutional amendments are also on the ballot or under consideration in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, and South Dakota.

Yet some recent efforts to protect abortion and other rights via state constitutions have stalled. Despite having approved a resolution calling on Congress to ratify the federal ERA in 2023, Minnesota was unable to pass a state ERA in 2024. Minnesota’s proposed amendment did not include the word “abortion,” but it would have protected Minnesotans’ right to make “decisions about all matters relating to one’s own pregnancy or decision whether to become or remain pregnant.” An effort to enshrine abortion rights in Maine’s constitution similarly failed in April after lawmakers voted against putting the proposal on the November ballot. The Maine proposal, which would have asked whether Mainers wanted their state constitution “to declare that every person has a right to reproductive autonomy,” also omitted the word “abortion,” though supporters did not avoid the word in promoting it.

Even states that have managed to get reproductive rights on the ballot have had to fight to include the word “abortion.” In New York, pro-choice advocates and legislators attempted to revise the language of the upcoming ballot measure to make its primary purpose—protecting abortion rights—clear, after the state board of elections voted to exclude the word “abortion” from the initiative’s description. Democrats challenged that decision on the grounds that the state is obligated to provide easy-to-understand explanations of ballot proposals to voters. A judge recently upheld the vague language, and state Democrats are now squabbling over whether to keep fighting for the broadly popular initiative or retreat in hopes of neutralizing bad-faith GOP attacks on Democrats in swing districts. But allowing an abortion-rights initiative to fail in deep-blue New York would have serious implications for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights nationwide.

Gender equality as a concept is broadly popular in the United States, whether or not it always exists in fact. And as we’ve seen many times in the wake of Dobbs, abortion rights are popular and restricting them is not. That’s why the GOP is working so hard to keep abortion off of state ballots and overrule the will of the voters, and why New York Democrats belatedly tried to tie the word “abortion” to the state’s upcoming ballot proposal: Both parties know that opportunities to defend abortion rights drive voter turnout. But whatever happens in November, our rights would be better protected if Biden simply published the ERA today.

Despite her frustration with the two major parties, Bates remains hopeful that the tide is beginning to turn. “In light of recent events, and given all that’s at stake, the momentum for ERA publication is growing exponentially,” she recently said. Whoever our next president is, one thing is clear: Actions speak louder than words, and we will need to do more than vote to take back our rights.

[post_title] => Voting Isn't Going to Be Enough [post_excerpt] => If we want to restore and preserve abortion rights in the United States, we have to fight harder for the ERA. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => 2024-election-abortion-rights-reproductive-justice-equal-rights-amendment-kamala-harris-dnc [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 16:50:44 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 16:50:44 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7175 [menu_order] => 48 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 6, 2024August 4, 2026

Voting Isn’t Going to Be Enough

by Raina Lipsitz

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According to one book, both a lot and very little has changed in the last 100 years.

From the moment I saw The Woman’s Book sitting on a dusty shelf in a secondhand shop, I knew I had to rescue it. I was fascinated: At 719 pages, the hefty tome—browned around the edges and threatening to fall apart—promised to teach well-off British women of 1911 everything they ought to know about womanhood, from poultry-keeping to child-rearing to overseeing the servants.

According to the hand-inked inscription, one lucky Miss Wilson received the manual as a Christmas gift in 1911, with “best wishes” from what looks to be a “Mr. Brooke.” Color me intrigued as to that relationship—but flipping through it, I could only assume that this Mr. Brooke had hoped to begin training his intended future wife, by sending her a literal manual on womanhood. While laying out various tasks, the book gives hints at what a woman’s purpose was in the early 20^th century. The gentlewoman’s aim is to avoid attracting the eye of the crowd. To contain boisterous laughter. To please.

So much has changed! I thought. But so little had, too.

There’s plenty in The Woman’s Book that feels like it’s from another world — the etiquette of visiting cards, how to make a fur muff. Yet a lot also feels familiar: the domestic and family labor that too naturally falls to women, the fact that if we want to embark on certain careers, we better expect a fight to get there. While some of the details might differ, it’s clear that the ultimate purpose of this prescriptive book was to tell women how to exist—and in that regard, we have work to do.

Courtesy of the author.

On Pregnancy

When I picked up The Woman’s Book, I was heavily pregnant, and reading every feminist birthing book I could get my hands on (a sure fire way to terrify yourself about childbirth). I immediately skipped to the baby section to find out what the women of the early 20th century were being told, only to discover that the section titled “Baby’s Arrival” was merely two paragraphs long, with nothing whatsoever about the act of giving birth itself.

On the general topic of dressing during pregnancy, however, there was a full page: three times the space given to pushing the thing out. One important part of pregnancy that is very well covered is whether or not one should wear a corset when with child—not for the safety of the fetus, of course, but because “an effort must be made to avoid appearing conspicuous.” (The author’s advice is to keep the corset, but to wear ones that aren’t quite so tight, giving an inch of priority to health over some idea of vanity.)

And ladies, no snacks during this special time (or, actually, ever), no trips to the theatre, and for god’s sake, please do avoid traveling by bus, train, or tram towards the end of the final trimester. Most importantly, “All morbid and sensational literature should be avoided.”

Over a century later, people who are not medical professionals still tell pregnant women what to do and when. We’re told to take all the drugs, do it without drugs, have a birth plan, don’t have a birth plan— meanwhile, some pregnant women aren’t told an awful lot at all. But never is unwanted advice more abundant than during this magical time. When a yoga teacher told me I had complications in birth because I “didn’t try hard enough” to do it naturally, it took every ounce of peace I had left not to finish her off with a flying warrior pose. I imagine I’d have felt the same if someone chided me for not wearing the proper pregnancy corset.

On Beauty

Unsurprisingly for a book with such strong opinions on pregnancy fashion, The Woman’s Book also has a fair amount of beauty advice. The book is packed with gold like: “Try and cultivate a more cheerful outlook upon life if you would permanently rid yourself of these vexing little lines between brows” and “Overwork and worry are powerful deterrents to all culture of beauty.” Because we women really should prioritize the absence of wrinkles over thinking too hard, of course. (For the record, mischievous grey hairs are usually also caused by worry—so we should all really just STOP WORRYING if we want to remain youthful.)

It’s also in this chapter that it becomes clear who, exactly, the book is targeting. One tip in particular that speaks pretty strongly to the diversity of the UK’s upper-class in 1911 is a set of instructions on how to whiten your neck and arms. For real. It involves bathing in milk (the service of dairy cows is never ending) and dusting on plenty of powder, effectively telling wealthy white women to transform themselves into donuts in order to be beautiful.

But don’t fret gentlewomen, because by 2024, we’ve been freed from this obsession with how contorting our faces makes us hideous, how our bodies must be a certain way, and why any of that matters. Unless of course you count the endless “new beauty obsessions” we’re encouraged to spend our hard-earned money on (which we still make less of than men, of course), the smoothing Instagram filters that it’s now normal to view the world through, and the constant need to define a bikini body as anything other than a body that happens to have a bikini on it.

On Work

After I got the book home safely, I decided to take a closer look at the contents page. Did I spy “careers for women” and “women in politics”? Had I been too quick to judge?

What’s incredible is that Florence B. Jack, the editor of The Woman’s Book, suggests the 1911 woman has it pretty good in the world of work. There are many vocations for a young lady, unlike in those pesky olden times. A woman can be a teacher, a private secretary, a florist, a beekeeper, even a lady clerk, for heaven’s sake! (Not to be confused with a regular clerk, of course.) She can also be the most “womanly profession” of them all: a nurse. But no matter your choice, Jack cautions, there is a catch—you have to be really good. There’s no room for mediocrity when you’re a woman. (Arguably, still true today.)

When it comes to my own profession of journalism, I might have found breaking through a bit trickier in 1911, as Jack warns this is a job “not so easily accessible as other callings.” It’s possible, but the budding female journalist has to be “really clever.” When it comes to training, a girl should get a position as a typist or secretary in a newspaper office. Leave journalism school to the chaps, eh? But if a woman is able to make a success of being a reporter, “her powers of intuition and her tact are so much greater than that found in the average man reporter that she is at times entrusted with very special duties.” Imagine that. An exceptional employee being given more responsibility than an average one. Do we even need feminism anymore?

Shockingly, the book also gives women of 1911 permission to be a doctor. It only asks that there be no female medical students at Oxford and Cambridge, thank you very much. Apparently there’s little “old-fashioned prejudice against the ‘woman doctor’” anymore, either, and even more encouragingly, “there is none of that ‘under-cutting of fees’ which has to be adopted by women in most other professions.” So if you want to earn the same as a man for the same job (will we women ever be satisfied?), start getting to grips with human biology. (Perhaps just don’t consult The Woman’s Book for anatomy lessons.) Oh, and if being a woman surgeon (prefix compulsory, of course) is your raison d'etre, best to get a new raison, because in this profession above all others, “prejudice will prove one of the most formidable opponents.” That old chestnut.

Comparatively, you would hope advice on “careers for women” in 2024 would encourage you to do any job you damn well please. But of course, that doesn’t mean that women and nonbinary people are treated the same as their male coworkers. Call me when female pilots aren’t getting mistaken for air stewards and the gender pay gap has been eradicated. And that’s before we intersect gender with class, race, geography, sexuality, and everything else that has an impact on salary and treatment in the workplace.

On Politics

At last, we get to “women in politics.” In 1911, British women could be canvassers, speakers, and campaign organizers. But let’s not get carried away—they couldn’t be trusted to actually vote, let alone stand as political candidates themselves. Still, after all the advice on household management, what to wear, and how to correctly visit your neighbors, I was surprised that the final section of The Woman’s Book turned to the women’s suffrage movement. Now the men have lost interest, it seems to suggest, here’s what we really think.

There’s plenty of talk of servants and country houses throughout The Woman’s Book, so it’s no surprise that it wasn’t a book for all women: It was a book for privileged women. But I found it somewhat encouraging that one of its final comments is devoted to how the suffragist movement brought together women of all classes and politics, “the peeress and the laundry girl,” walking together in processions and fighting for what’s right. In particular, Jack talks about women’s desires to improve work and wages, so that work could be judged by its “true market value and not by the sex of the worker.” It’s a passionate take on why women want freer lives, and how their involvement in politics can create better circumstances for all of humanity.

In many ways, the same holds true today—and frustratingly, it feels like we’re still fighting for the same things. It also feels like we’re still fighting against the same things, too. I don’t know that a Woman’s Book of 2024 would pay quite so much attention to how to iron frills. But look at the pages of mainstream publications targeted at women and there’s an abundance of pieces on how to outfit prep, how to make a charcuterie board bigger than your actual house, and how to get a smoky lip. Aren’t we still being told how to exist? Isn’t this more of the same?

If instead of treating it as an endnote, there was a central focus on how to collectively push for progress for all of us, we might just be able to surpass all these objective measurements of how a woman should “be,” and instead tick the box of what we actually ought to know.

Courtesy of the author.

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August 15, 2024August 4, 2026

“Everything a Woman Ought to Know”

by Katie Dancey-Downs

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In her new memoir "Rebel Girl," riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna reckons with her mistakes.

When I first saw Bikini Kill perform live in 2022, it felt like a long time coming. The groundbreaking feminist punk band hadn’t toured in two decades, and in the intervening years, legions of listeners like me had become devout fans, and frontwoman Kathleen Hanna something of an unwitting feminist icon. Most of us figured we’d never actually get the chance to see her, Kathi Wilcox, Billy Karren, and Tobi Vail together on stage again—at least, not like in the band’s heyday. Bikini Kill’s live shows were the stuff of legends: brash refutations of macho-dude punks, where the band tore through fierce odes to feminist solidarity, and Hanna yelled into the mic about wanting “revolution, girl-style, now”—famously demanding, at every show, that the crowd make space for young women to come up to the front of the room.

But that was 20 years ago. The three women I watched on stage in New York (Karren didn’t join the reunion tour) were not the same young punks who’d played in grungy basements in the ’90s. They were a couple decades older and wiser; still committed to their feminist principles, but changed, years of experience and new perspectives now coloring their rallying cries. At the show I saw, Hanna’s slogan—“Girls to the front!”—got an overdue, if slightly clunky, corrective. It wasn’t just girls who deserved space at these shows, Hanna explained. Nonbinary people deserved to occupy that space, too, as did trans men—anyone who usually got shoved aside. It made sense to me that Hanna would reject—or at least reframe—her original sentiment, even if it temporarily robbed the iconic phrase of some of its power. The context around Hanna had changed, and punk had, too: Where she used to look out from the stage and see only a handful of young women, their views blocked by a moshpit of guys, she now saw a respectful, diverse crowd who didn’t have to be asked to make space for each other, because they’d already done it themselves.

I thought about this shift in punk feminism while reading Rebel Girl, Hanna’s new memoir, released last month. It’s a dense, often chaotic book that careens through Hanna’s fascinating life: her difficult childhood, her entrée into the punk scene, her early days on tour with Bikini Kill, then later as a solo artist and with Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. Throughout, Hanna grapples with what it means to be an artist and an activist, and how the sexist conditions for women in rock music have—and haven’t—changed since she first started making music. Hanna makes it clear that she never set out to become a feminist icon (she started a band, she writes, simply because she wanted “to be heard”), and that riot grrrl was always intended to be an anti-hierarchical movement, without a clear, singular leader. Maybe this is why what struck me most while reading Rebel Girl wasn’t Hanna’s righteousness, or her many triumphs, but the way she acknowledged her shortcomings—and the failures of the riot grrrl movement she helped pioneer.

With startling honesty, Hanna reflects over and over on the ignorance afforded to her by her privilege, a rare thing to witness from a celebrity of her magnitude. In one incident, she writes about offending Kurt Cobain, whom she’d initially befriended over their shared feminist politics. He’d gotten icy after she gifted him a copy of an inflammatory manifesto, and Hanna realized he may have felt like she was lording her expensive college education over him—“acting like Ms. Smarty Pants College Girl who had come to educate dumb working-class Kurt,” as she puts it, despite having worked as a stripper to make ends meet when she was a student. It was a crucial moment in her early understanding of intersectionality. “Being constantly put down as a woman,” she writes, “had blinded me to my own power to hurt people.”

Eventually, she’d witness this same lack of awareness in her peers. On one occasion, she writes about organizing a workshop called “Unlearning Racism” at a riot grrrl conference, and quickly realizing how few of her fellow white feminists had begun to think about—never mind concretely take action against—the intersecting oppressions women of color faced within the punk scene and more generally. Again, Hanna acknowledges her ignorance. “I realized that day that many BIPOC women were as disappointed in white punk feminists as I’d been by white male punks,” she writes. “And that was the problem…I hadn’t seen how so much of our punk feminism was really just white feminism.”

It’s not an entirely self-recriminating book. Hanna, too, has suffered plenty under the patriarchy, and more than anything else, her main nemesis throughout Rebel Girl is the unending violence she’s experienced at the hands of men: the abusive behavior of her father, betrayal and assault from trusted friends, and all manner of stalkers, creepy sound guys, and violent showgoers on tour. The book, too, is filled with moments of joy: Hanna finding her voice as a singer, witnessing her music connect with young women around the world, falling in love, starting a family. Hanna has long sat among my personal pantheon of feminist heroes, and it was enthralling to encounter the magic and power of her art throughout the book, and to peek behind the curtain of a creative life I’ve long admired.

But it’s the moments of tension, disappointment, and misjudgment in Rebel Girl that I still keep returning to. When I first fell in love with the moral certitude of Bikini Kill’s lyrics, it was easy to assume a certain kind of ethical perfection on the part of their author. These stories—laced with choices I didn’t always agree with—reveal a bigger, more complicated picture, one that was deeply humanizing and, in its own way, comforting to me as a reader. Over the years, I’ve loved Hanna’s creative output and been inspired by her commitment to feminism. But like her, I’ve made plenty of my own mistakes and failed to live up to my values innumerable times. Rather than absolution, Hanna’s confessions function as an honest acknowledgement of an uncomfortable truth: staying true to your values in a world that doesn’t always align with them means constantly making hard decisions. By her own admission, she didn’t always get it right.

When I finished reading Rebel Girl, I thought again about that moment when Hanna talked about “girls to the front” in New York. The fact that times have changed doesn’t mean the slogan had been unimpeachable in the ’90s; if anything, Hanna’s relatively tame qualifiers of today would have been far more punk if she’d said them then. But just because her rallying cry wasn't perfect doesn’t take away from the many people it inspired—and just because Hanna didn’t notice its limits then doesn’t disqualify her from seeing them and changing things now. Riot grrrl was a flawed movement, and Hanna a flawed person. Any version of history that ignores that fact erases the reality of what the feminist struggle actually looks like: exhilarating and empowering, yes, but also messy and filled with mistakes, both individual and collective. Rebel Girl feels all the more encouraging for its admissions of imperfection, as a humanizing reminder that even the most luminous icons have their flaws, and that striving for perfection at any cost can grind momentum to a halt. Instead, maybe it’s more powerful to take the mic when we have it, admit when we didn’t get things right, and make our way to the front, where we all belong.

Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna is available now.

[post_title] => Imperfect Feminists to the Front [post_excerpt] => In her new memoir “Rebel Girl,” riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna reckons with her mistakes. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => kathleen-hanna-rebel-girl-my-life-as-a-feminist-punk-memoir-review-bikini-kill-riot-grrrl [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:09:19 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:09:19 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6971 [menu_order] => 56 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 4, 2024August 4, 2026

Imperfect Feminists to the Front

by Marissa Lorusso

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I worried that coming out would further ostracize me from other feminists. Instead, it reinforced why I became one in the first place.

The reason why I waited so long to come out as nonbinary was because I thought it would ostracize me even further from other feminists. As a person disabled by chronic pain and fatigue from fibromyalgia, I’d already been made to feel out of place within feminism for the entirety of both my professional and academic careers. I'd also developed my writing voice during the so-called heyday of feminist blogging—a heyday that unfortunately wasn’t as utopian as people might suspect—and had experienced firsthand the complicated dynamics that arise when one’s platform makes them a target. Not wanting to separate myself further from other feminists, I chose to keep my complex feelings about my gender identity to myself. Until eventually, of course, I couldn’t.

It’s a bit of a cliché for people in the LGBTQIA community to say that they always knew they weren’t straight, or that they weren’t cis. But a part of me always knew I was nonbinary, even before I’d fully admitted it to myself. One of the defining features of my childhood and adolescence was my inner “eh…no” when people—mostly adults, but often my peers, as well—would try to label me as a “girl” or “young woman.” It would happen at school, and at home: As a child, I was prone to slouching, and my mom would encourage me to improve my posture by insisting, “Stand up straight! Like my dad used to say, ‘Be PROUD you’re a woman!’” Each time, a tiny voice inside my brain would whisper but I’m not a woman in response.

As my adolescence chugged on, I began receiving even more unwanted attention and scrutiny from peers regarding my “manly” voice—a direct quote from one of my bullies—as well as my rapidly changing body. I was not a fan of this attention, nor of the insistence that I was a girl, its implication that I should adapt myself to better seem like it. What was so great about being a girl, anyway? Or for that matter, being a boy? I just wanted to be myself.

It was around this time that I first discovered feminism. As a seventh grader, I read Dr. Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls and started quietly identifying as a feminist. Despite the difficulties I still faced from being bullied, Pipher’s book, and the idea of feminism, made me feel less alone. I daydreamed about finding a feminist community that I could contribute to and feel valued by in return—one that included a wide variety of perspectives from people with different life experiences, all working together to make a world where oppressions like sexism, ableism, racism, classism, and anti-fat bias were no longer the norm. In high school, I began openly identifying as a feminist, and eventually, got better at ignoring my peers’ asinine comments. But I still yearned for something more—something I couldn’t yet put my finger on.

I eventually found a community of feminist friends when I started college and chose to pursue a major in Women’s and Gender Studies. Needing a break from academic writing, I also started my own blog in 2005. I quickly noticed that most of the feminist blogs with the largest audiences tended to cover issues that catered to young, educated, white, middle/upper class, cis women. Sexism, body image, popular culture, media representation, sexuality, and reproductive rights are, of course, all subjects that deserve coverage, but the ways in which they intersected with disability never seemed to be covered in any depth. Despite the use of the word “intersectionality” from some of the more popular feminist bloggers, it seemed to me that few actually practiced it.

As it happened, I was not the only one to notice the absence of disability from the feminist blogosphere. In 2009, I collaborated with a group of disability bloggers to form a site called FWD/Feminists With Disabilities as a response. The tipping point had come when several of us noticed that one of the most popular feminist blogs had never published a post specifically about disability and feminism; and when disabled readers had raised their concerns in the comments, other commenters had piled on, insisting disability and feminism were two separate things, and that the disabled commenters were being “bullies.” FWD ultimately only lasted for two years; the amount of threats, derailing, and angry e-stomping we received—in our comments, inboxes, and elsewhere—mostly from other feminists, all ostensibly on our side, proved to be enough to burn us out.

Having to repeatedly explain what feminism and disability had to do with each other—and that disability and chronic illness are feminist issues—was grating. It was isolating. This isolation got worse when I entered a Master’s program for Women’s and Gender Studies, where I was the only physically disabled person in my grad cohort. I faced pushback from multiple professors in the department for supposedly not being energetic enough. Another professor, the department head at the time, threatened to fail me when I missed more than the allotted two classes due to pain and fatigue from my fibromyalgia, on the grounds that it “wouldn’t be fair to the other students.” I later found out that I was not the only disabled person whom she had treated this way.

Throughout this period, I kept wondering if I was a failure as a feminist because I was not performing youthful, sisterhood-uplifting feminism the right way. I was repeatedly made to feel “difficult,” just for pointing out how feminism was leaving disabled people behind. Yet resolutely declaring I am a disabled woman, and I belong here didn’t feel right, either. I had this slippery, niggling feeling in the back of my brain that the reason this was the case was that I was not a woman at all. But at the time, I was in close contact with enough feminists eager to tell me how I was doing both feminism and academic work wrong, that keeping quiet about my weird gender stuff was easier than further othering myself.

Eventually, in my mid-30s, the discomfort of performing as someone I was not outweighed the comfort of avoiding negative attention or questioning from people skeptical as to whether the nonbinary identity is real. Surprisingly, on the other side, I became even more of a feminist than ever before, not because my core beliefs had changed, but because coming out had allowed me to be my authentic self. I no longer felt like I needed to identify as a woman to be a good feminist, because, of course, I didn't.

Since coming out, I’ve realized that I have better ways to spend my time and energy than trying to make nondisabled feminists care about disability issues. In fact, I likely would have come out sooner if I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to get (mostly white and nondisabled) women in the feminist movement to acknowledge that disabled women exist, and that many disabled people of all genders are feminists. While it’s irritating that I still get misgendered by TERFs on social media sometimes, the block button is there for a reason: I can’t be anyone other than myself, and if “feminism is for everybody,” as bell hooks once wrote, then it’s for nonbinary people, too. In a time where nonbinary and trans people of all ages are being smeared as predators, simply for being who they are—and, in the sad recent case of high school student Nex Benedict, being threatened or killed due to the moral panic surrounding trans existence, fueled by the specter of “safety” for cisgender kids—it is crucial that feminists welcome people of all gender identities in the ongoing fight for gender equality. It only benefits all of us when we do.

[post_title] => Feminism is for Nonbinary People, Too [post_excerpt] => I worried that coming out would further ostracize me from other feminists. Instead, it reinforced why I became one in the first place. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => feminism-nonbinary-coming-out-disability-intersectionality [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:46:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:46:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6701 [menu_order] => 62 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 1, 2024August 4, 2026

Feminism is for Nonbinary People, Too

by Anna Hamilton

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When will we as a global community say enough is enough?

Recently, an incident occurred that should not be common but is: A woman—we will call her Ada—was assaulted by her husband. The couple had not been able to conceive a child, so her husband beat her, shouting insults while he did. Then, he threw her belongings out of the house into the night and told her not to return.

One of their neighbors who had heard the shouting came over, and convinced the husband to allow Ada back into the house. She remains there still, because like so many women suffering intimate-partner violence, she does not have anywhere else to go. The issue is exacerbated by her disability: Ada uses a wheelchair as a result of polio. With no job, Ada is dependent on her husband. Finding work is challenging because of her mobility issues and because she is uneducated. In Cameroon, where she lives, they do not believe sending girls with disabilities to school is necessary or worthwhile due to social stigma.

But what happened to Ada is far from an isolated occurrence. Violence against women and girls with a disability occurs around the world at astronomical rates. The UN estimates that women with a disability are at least three times more likely to experience violence from a partner, family member, or caregiver than women without a disability. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that between 40 and 68 percent of young women with a disability experience sexual violence before the age of eighteen.

To be a woman or a girl with a disability—physical, visual, intellectual, or multiple forms—is to always be vulnerable. We know this, because we both have a physical disability, from polio and scoliosis, respectively. We’ve both experienced various forms of discrimination and violence as children and women. And we both now work with survivors of violence with disabilities and their families.

One of the most painful realities we see in our work is that the violence perpetrated against a woman or girl with a disability is often done by someone who is supposed to care for them—a partner, a spouse, a caregiver, a teacher. These perpetrators have the advantage because they know their victims, or their families, are dependent on them. Like Ada, millions of women are forced to face the question, What do you do when the person you should be able to turn to is the one perpetrating the violence?

The difficult reality is that justice for these women is elusive. Women’s stories are often discounted, but a woman with a disability faces additional barriers to even having her story heard at all. There is an added layer of discrimination against them, as well as more practical hurdles. A deaf person who is unable to share her story without an interpreter. A woman in a wheelchair who needs transportation assistance to the police station or courthouse. A woman with an intellectual disability who may not even have the language to share what happened to her.

The complexity and scope of the problem are why we sent an open letter signed by more than 400 disability rights activists and our supporters to UN General-Secretary António Guterres, calling on him and his colleagues to support the creation, adoption, and implementation of a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) specific to ending violence against women and girls.

As we write in our letter: “With violence against women and girls in the spotlight, the specific and unique needs of violence against women and girls with disabilities has a chance to be seen and addressed in a larger and more comprehensive way.”

Nations’ familiarity with CEDAW—one of the most ratified treaties in the world—makes a new Optional Protocol the most sensible and expedient path to a binding framework that protects women and girls around the world, including and especially the most vulnerable, like us. An Optional Protocol to CEDAW would mandate various interventions proven to lower rates of violence, including legal reform, training and accountability for law enforcement and other professionals, comprehensive services for survivors, and violence-prevention education programs. Implementation could be monitored through a metrics-based system that would hold nations accountable for meeting clear benchmarks specific to States’ duties.

In other words, an Optional Protocol would require nations to address all forms of violence against all women and girls, in all spheres and under all circumstances—including better protection for women like Ada.

The alternative is to allow the violence to continue—an unconscionable alternative where women and girls around the world will continue to suffer. How many more women and girls must be harmed before the issue is taken seriously? It horrifies us to think that the men who perpetrate this violence will continue to get away with it, and go on to harm another woman, another child. When will we as a global community say enough is enough?

We know there is a solution. The international community has been working on this issue for more than 30 years, and it is time to take the next step.

As we write in our letter, “We have it within us to change the course of human history to one where every woman and girl lives a life free of violence.” The safety of women like Ada, like us, depends on it.

[post_title] => How International Law Can Better Protect Women and Girls with Disabilities [post_excerpt] => When will we as a global community say enough is enough? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => international-law-cedaw-convention-on-the-elimination-of-all-forms-of-discrimination-against-women-violence-girls-disability-abuse [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:51:17 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:51:17 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6461 [menu_order] => 69 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

December 6, 2023August 4, 2026

How International Law Can Better Protect Women and Girls with Disabilities

by Lilian Dibo Eyong and Meena Paudel

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One hundred years after the ERA was first introduced, we've never needed it more. So what's the holdup?

Most Americans believe that the United States Constitution guarantees equal rights to women under the law. It’s only natural. Women in the U.S. can vote, own property, drive cars, fly planes, serve in the military, get divorced, and establish credit in our own names. We make up around 47 percent of the workforce and have held senior positions in business, law, and government for decades. From 1973 to 2022, we even had federally protected abortion rights. We continue to be underpaid, mistreated in low-wage jobs, and underrepresented in the highest-paying professions, but most Americans believe that women are—and should be—equal citizens.

Under current law, however, we are not: For women to attain the legal status most assume we already have, the U.S. would need to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first introduced in Congress 100 years ago this year, and introduced in every session of Congress since.

Depending on who you ask, American women do have some constitutional protection already. Some legal scholars and Supreme Court justices have asserted that women are “persons” and thus covered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment, which reads, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But others disagree, and figures as diverse as the late archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee sex equality—something Ginsburg saw as an obstacle to full and lasting equality for women and Scalia saw as a fact not necessarily in need of a remedy.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, the stakes are higher than they have been in 50 years. The ERA would make gender equality explicit—which has been its purpose since it was first introduced. In 1923, women’s rights crusader Alice Paul authored what was originally known as the Lucretia Mott Amendment, in honor of the Quaker abolitionist and women’s rights activist. The text declared that, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” Over the years, this text has evolved, and today, the amendment reads, “Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.” But the spirit and purpose remain the same. (Supporters say that “sex” is synonymous with “gender” for the purposes of the amendment, which would apply to women of all gender identities and sexual orientations.)

It very nearly came to pass in the 1970s. Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY), then the powerful long-time chair of the House Judiciary Committee, had refused to hold a hearing on the ERA for over 30 years, when he finally succumbed to pressure from a new group of younger female legislators. The ERA passed both houses of Congress in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification, at which point 22 states voted to ratify it. By 1977, that number had increased to 35 of the 38 states required for it to become part of the Constitution. After around 100,000 supporters—described at the time by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, the ERA’s bitterest foe, as “a combination of Federal employees and radicals and lesbians”—marched in Washington in 1978, Congress voted to extend the original ratification deadline by three years. As supporters scrambled to reach the required threshold, lawmakers in five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to rescind their states’ initial ratification. The extended deadline expired in 1982.

A major cause of this disrupted momentum was Schlafly herself. Books and television series have told the story of Schlafly, a vicious bigot who led the well-orchestrated opposition campaign that defeated the ERA, at least temporarily, at the dawn of the Reagan era. Schlafly is widely credited with having halted the amendment at a time when it enjoyed broad bipartisan support, including from then President Richard Nixon, and was all but guaranteed to pass. But the ERA foundered in that era for other reasons, too. While supporters were going on weeks-long hunger strikes and selling their blood to raise money for the cause, opponents had personal wealth and possible assistance from shadowy corporate interests and far-right organizations like the John Birch Society on their side. Motivated by religious zeal, fear, and a feeling of being disrespected, opponents of the ERA caught supporters off-guard and, ultimately, out-organized them.

Why the ERA hasn’t become a recognized part of the Constitution in the last 30 years is less well-known, but not necessarily difficult to deduce. In recent years, it has often felt like society is moving backward and forward at the same time. The election of Donald Trump and elevation of alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the cratering of women’s workforce gains and deepening of the child care crisis that accompanied a global pandemic, and the overturning of Roe have made earlier eras look positively rosy in comparison. At the same time, social media has fueled and distorted a limited feminist resurgence. This new wave delivered the #MeToo movement, a renewal of feminist organizing around abortion rights and the ERA, and a predictable cycle of counterreaction, an earlier manifestation of which Susan Faludi memorably documented in her 1991 classic, Backlash. (American women might reasonably wonder if that backlash ever ended.)

Still, there has been progress. Fueled in part by anger at Trump’s election, organizers successfully pursued ratification of the ERA in Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020, bringing the total number of states that have ratified the amendment to the required 38. (Some argue that certain states’ decision to rescind ratification means the ERA has never achieved the required number; others say those rescissions are legally invalid and should be ignored.) President Biden affirmed his support for the ERA as recently as August. While running for president, Kamala Harris vowed to get it done in her first 100 days in office. With Trump out and Biden/Harris in, what’s holding it up?

Today’s advocates believe that the ERA deadline, which only appears in the preamble and not the text of the amendment itself, can be removed or extended by Congress, or even, if the threshold for ratification has been met, ignored altogether. Yet the Biden administration—which published a new memo in 2022 essentially punting the issue to Congress and the courts—has indirectly prevented this by failing to withdraw a 2020 Trump administration memo which stated, in part, “Congress has constitutional authority to impose a deadline for ratifying a proposed constitutional amendment…Congress may not revive a proposed amendment after a deadline for its ratification has expired.” Additionally, there is enduring opposition to the ERA from the reactionary right, which now includes nearly every senior GOP leader; behind-the-scenes opposition from the business interests that fund both major parties to varying degrees; and the reluctance of top Democratic officials to make it a priority.

The ERA has always had bipartisan support, but in the modern era, most of its advocates are Democrats. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) are the only congressional Republicans who support it today. Yet a 2016 poll found that 90% of Republicans support the ERA, which suggests that the Republican Party is, on this issue, profoundly out of step with its base. Still, it shouldn’t matter: Even with the GOP’s lurch to the right and subsequent withdrawal of support, the Democratic Party—which controlled at least one branch of government from 1992 to 2001, 2006 to 2016, and 2020 to today—should theoretically have been able to deliver by now on an amendment that most Americans want.

One theory as to why they haven’t is that if the ERA is finally adopted, it could diminish Democrats’ ability to raise money and swing elections by emphasizing ever-present threats to abortion, LGBTQ, and women’s rights. Those rights are indeed under threat, but adopting the ERA would strengthen them considerably—which is why the modern GOP so strongly opposes it, and why Democrats should rally behind it. Enshrining gender equality in state constitutions has already helped protect abortion rights at the state level; New Mexico’s state supreme court recently struck down a state law banning the funding of abortion-related services, citing the state’s ERA, which guarantees “equality of rights for persons regardless of sex.” If finally adopted, it would do the same at the national level. But without the ERA, it will be difficult and potentially impossible to safeguard those rights for the long term.

While the GOP has been largely hostile to abortion rights since Roe v. Wade, the Democratic Party has not defended them nearly as forcefully or consistently. Although many activists urged top Democrats to pass a federal law protecting abortion rights before the Dobbs decision, they essentially said that their hands were tied: Although they could and did pass such legislation in the House, it would never survive in the Senate. Right-wingers are as or more committed to banning abortion today as they were 50 years ago, while pro-choice supporters haven’t been as consistent, motivated, or likely to base their vote on abortion—although that is beginning to shift in light of Dobbs. As recently as 2019, some advocates insisted that the ERA has nothing to do with abortion rights; today, one of its main selling points is that it will protect them.

Corporate opposition to the ERA has remained steady, if covert. The amendment would make it easier to sue companies that pay women unequally or otherwise discriminate against them, which is why the insurance industry has historically opposed it. As Eleanor Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women, explained in 1982, “The real opposition [to the ERA], behind the visible political opposition, has been the special corporate interests that profit from sex discrimination.” In 2010, a blogger for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce approvingly quoted a characterization of equal pay advocates as possessing a “Scrooge-like fetish for money.” And as late as 2019, a Chamber of Commerce spokesman declined to comment on the ERA’s prospects, citing instead the organization’s support for the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity but would not provide protection as durable as the ERA—and which continues to languish in Congress.

Other dynamics are evolving, slowly but surely. While the causes that motivate the religious right haven’t changed much in 50 years—aside from a shift from attacking gay marriage to attacking trans children—the ERA opponents of today have had to pivot from overt sexism to co-opting the language of equality. In 1970, you could say of ERA advocates, as then Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) did, “Now, if you want to convince me that ladies desire to be drafted, you send me some sweet young things in here of draft age and let them tell me that.” Today, opponents are often reduced to arguing that the ERA is unnecessary because American women already have equality under the law, or, in some cases, mimicking the language of advocates in an effort to sound more mainstream and modern. (See anti-ERA Republican Sen. John Kennedy’s recent declaration that, “Radical lawmakers cannot erase women or their rights from our Constitution,” which is, not coincidentally, similar to what a supporter might say of him.)

How can we move forward today? Modern supporters argue that the ERA has already been ratified and U.S. archivist Colleen Shogan, the head and chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration, need only recognize and publish it. This year lawmakers have introduced two major resolutions which support that interpretation. In January, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Lisa Murkowski and Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Cori Bush (D-MO), and others introduced a joint resolution to affirm the ratification of the ERA by removing what supporters see as an arbitrary and rescindable ratification deadline. In July, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) introduced a joint resolution stating that the ERA has already been ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution and calling on Shogan to certify and publish it. “In terms of which strategy is better, in my view, it's 100% the publication strategy,” Nicole Vorrasi Bates, executive director of the pro-gender equality nonprofit Shattering Glass, Inc., told me.

In response to questions about the best strategy for getting the ERA into the Constitution, what she sees as the primary obstacles to doing so, and why the Biden administration has not prioritized it, Rep. Pressley’s office sent a written statement which read, in part, “[T]he only thing standing in the way of the ERA becoming the 28^th Amendment is the arbitrary deadline imposed decades ago.” The statement also explained that she was both a co-lead on Rep. Bush’s July resolution and had introduced her own because, in her opinion, “We must use every tool available to get this over the finish line.”

Gillibrand has said that she also hopes to compel the Biden administration to call on Shogan to act or change the Senate’s filibuster rules so that measures like the ERA would need only a simple majority to move forward. Kate Kelly, author of Ordinary Equality: The Fearless Women and Queer People Who Shaped the U.S. Constitution and the Equal Rights Amendment, said the “most charitable interpretation” of the Biden administration’s foot-dragging is that the president is “waiting for the moment where enough people care, where enough of the next generation pick up the fight [and] turn it into an electoral issue, that its power and potential will be fully realized.” From the administration’s perspective, she explained, there may be some risk of creating a “constitutional crisis” if the president affirms that the ERA is part of the Constitution and the Supreme Court rejects that view. “Until the groundswell of support for the [ERA] in the modern day is equal to that potential risk, there is [from Biden’s point of view] no advantage to proceeding,” she said.

As it has in the past, a strong nationwide feminist movement with a coherent set of demands and demonstrated ability to disrupt business as usual and withhold or deliver votes could exert meaningful pressure on Congress and the White House. We don’t have that. Although support for abortion rights is stronger than it has been in decades, the movement to defend abortion rights—a critical component of the U.S. feminist movement from the 1960s to today—remains divided on vision and strategy. The task of the coming years is to build a cohesive one. As we learned from the partially successful battle for abortion rights in the 1960s and the heartbreaking defeat of the ERA in the 70s, progress is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Even constitutional amendments can be undone. The ERA, like anything of value, is worth fighting for. And American women of all stripes can’t wait another century for the law to give us our due.

[post_title] => It's Time to Pass the Equal Rights Amendment [post_excerpt] => One hundred years after the ERA was first introduced, we've never needed it more. So what's the holdup? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => equal-rights-amendment-history-era-united-states-constitution-gender-equality [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:55:19 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:55:19 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6095 [menu_order] => 73 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 20, 2023August 4, 2026

It’s Time to Pass the Equal Rights Amendment

by Raina Lipsitz

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Under international criminal law, apartheid only applies to discrimination based on race. A new open letter argues it should apply to gender discrimination, too.

In March of this year, a group of over 100 Iranian and Afghan women signatories published an open letter calling for the end of gender apartheid. The purpose of the letter was threefold: to raise awareness of what gender apartheid is, and how it's affecting women in Iran and Afghanistan; to encourage public statements and policy responses condemning these regimes; and to expand the definition of apartheid under international law. As the letter explains, currently, under international criminal law, use of the word apartheid is limited to race; but for years, activists around the world—and more specifically, in Iran and Afghanistan—have been using it to describe extreme, gender-based persecution, and the regimes that perpetrate it. The letter makes the case for why it's time we update the word's definition on the global stage.

Below, we spoke to one of the people behind the campaign, human rights lawyer Gissou Nia, on the letter's longterm goals, its challenges, and why language matters when it comes to gender persecution and apartheid.

How did the open letter come to be? How did you get involved?

The open letter came about with a core group of Iranian and Afghan women signatories. The genesis of this is that women's rights activists in Afghanistan and Iran have been using the term "gender apartheid" for years to describe, essentially, a system of subjugation and oppression that they are being repressed by. [But] when I spoke to some of these activists, not all of them had actually been aware that gender apartheid is not currently a crime under international law. Gender was not a part of that definition.

Apartheid, as defined under international criminal law—whether it’s a part of crimes against humanity or not—only applies to racial apartheid. So, [we] thought, why don’t we just change the definition? There have been incredible legal academics and jurors who have [already] been working on this, like Karima Bennoune, and what we wanted to achieve with the campaign is to supercharge [their] efforts. It’s an unbranded campaign—so there’s no one organization attached to it.

I’m curious what differentiates an apartheid regime from other forms of gender discrimination.

It’s a great question. One of the main things that people have asked is how is this distinct from gender persecution, let’s say. With gender persecution, which is a crime against humanity as defined under the ICC Rome Statute, that’s a more broadly defined crime. There may be some instances of something that you could charge as gender persecution that would amount to gender apartheid, but gender apartheid describes a certain type of treatment. It really focuses on the structures. The word “apartheid” comes from the word “apart” in Afrikaans, born out of the historical experience of South Africa—but it’s really about keeping one group separate from another. Here, you could say that [it’s] men subjugating and dominating women for purposes of entrenching power. I think that’s the distinguishing factor. Certainly, that would amount to a case of gender persecution, as well, and we’re not saying that it’s either/or—we think these are all complementary. In the case of race, we have both racial apartheid and racial persecution; so there’s no reason that we can’t have gender apartheid, as well.

I’d also say that gender apartheid, as opposed to gender discrimination, is much more extreme. Certainly misogyny and patriarchy exist everywhere. There are gender discriminatory laws in many different countries, including in the US. But a gender apartheid regime is something that’s quite distinct and different. It basically is saying that women are not worth a man. In the case of Iran, a woman’s value is worth half that of a man, legally. So they’re removed from public spaces. That’s why in Afghanistan, women and girls are not allowed to be educated, [why] they’ve been taken out of employment. The Taliban recently said that Afghan women cannot work for the UN in Afghanistan. So it’s essentially the removal of women from public spaces and from public life. And that’s enshrined in the law: You are formally not worth a man, and we are going to repress you, because that’s how we’re going to keep this regime in power.

When you say their value is less, how is that defined?

So, for example—I’m a lawyer, so this one for me is especially grating—if I was to give testimony in a court in Iran, my testimony would be worth half that of a man. I also wouldn’t be able to travel outside of Iran without the permission of my husband or my male guardian. I couldn’t ride a bike, I couldn’t go to sporting stadiums. I would be barred from certain types of higher education. Women do not have equal capacity, inheritance, divorce, marriage rights—anything that relates to the family, they’re unequal. And, of course, there’s the mandatory hijab laws, which we know sparked the outrage over Mahsa Amini’s murder.

For this particular campaign, why did you choose Iran and Afghanistan specifically? There are other countries where, arguably, [gender apartheid] would apply.

Because we were campaigning [and] were successful in removing the Islamic Republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Obviously all of that came about because of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran after Mahsa was killed at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police. There were a lot of Afghan women activists that wrote me after that and were congratulating me. [But] Afghanistan was still on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. True, the Taliban is not formally recognized before the UN, so the representative is from the former government and basically doesn’t represent anybody. Nonetheless, they’re still there.

And it really struck me, that while we’re speaking about Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran, and while there’s been such a global outpouring of attention and action and policy engagement and energy, right across the border, our Afghan sisters are dealing with a horrendous situation, of which the globe is exhibiting some form of paralysis, and a lack of direction on how to improve their circumstances.

I think a lot of Iranian women who are championing women’s rights have been thinking about our Afghan sisters, who we’re tied to through shared borders, shared culture, and in some cases shared language. These issues are interlinked and they’re not separate, and so we’ve been keen to do some joint activism. It’s something a bit new in terms of campaigning, and certainly once the law is adopted or as discussions continue, there may be other women that choose to engage with it who feel that they’re living under gender apartheid regimes. This was a campaign that Iranian and Afghan women came together to launch, but it doesn’t preclude other groups of women wanting to [sign] or get involved with this advocacy or get behind this mission. Anybody can sign, and support. But the number of gender apartheid regimes in the world is actually pretty few.

How many people have signed it so far?

I haven’t checked lately to see what the tracker is, but it was something like 5000.

Can you talk me through the three chief demands the letter makes?

So basically, the [three demands] are the way that we envision [passing the law] would happen. I’ll just walk you through the timeline. In the immediate, first of all, there’s a lot of people who are not familiar with what the term apartheid is even, [especially] under the age of 35. However, most of the decision makers that we are seeking to engage with are above the age of 35, and they’re in government, and they have direct recollection of those events in the eighties [in South Africa] until the dismantling of the apartheid system in 1990. It has a real moral and resonant power for those decision makers, so part of this campaign is aimed around introducing the term gender apartheid, so people are familiar with what that actually means. What does apartheid refer to, what does it refer to in the context of Iran and Afghanistan, and why is this still going on.

The second thing is, we want parliaments around the world to issue resolutions condemning the apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran. That’s moving forward in Canada, in the UK, in New Zealand, and now we’re doing a lot of outreach to states in South America and Africa because we think that will be very important to have a global frame. This isn’t just a Western effort, and we want to make sure that is understood.

The ultimate goal is to have some of the legal frameworks that apply to apartheid amended or introduced to include gender apartheid. One of our main goals is to have gender apartheid included in the definition at the upcoming global convention on crimes against humanity. It should be adopted at the end of 2024, with any luck, and we want to be included.

Do you think the history of the term being so associated with race helps or hinders the movement?

Well, it’s not called racial apartheid. It’s just called apartheid. The reason that apartheid doesn’t include gender is because it was created in the 20^th century out of the South Africa experience. I [also] think a lot of international criminal law [has been] created by men in small rooms, and not necessarily with women’s input and that’s changing. We see that there is an increased focus on gendered crimes. There’s even a reevaluation of the crime of genocide to focus more on the gendered aspects of it. Historically, people have assumed that genocide has to be mass killing, not realizing that actually, it could also just be sterilization, and those forms of genocide are much more focused around women.

The point is a lot of crimes that we grapple with are really viewed through more of a male lens, and there’s been a concrete effort to apply a gender lens to that. I think this ties into the reason why apartheid didn’t focus on gender. It wasn’t because there weren’t gender apartheid regimes. It was just because of the kind of dialogue that was happening in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.

Longer term, what happens if you succeed in changing international law? What happens if [gender apartheid] is criminalized?

The biggest thing is just that then it’ll be possible to be prosecuted, and there’ll be a lot of new pathways for accountability. It also ultimately will enforce prosecution of crimes like gender persecution, as well, because prosecutors will start to think more deeply about the gender aspects of crime. But while the end goal might be to have this legally enshrined, really, the goals are all along the way. Because what we want to do is raise awareness about what this crime is, but also drive policy actions.

I mean, with South Africa, the ask was really to financially isolate that regime and to get people—governments, companies—to stop doing business with them. With Iran and Afghanistan, they’re already very isolated, they’re already very sanctioned. It’s not about introducing new sanctions or dissuading companies from working with these states, because they already aren’t. It’s about reframing the discussion. Those sanctions are issued for nuclear proliferation, for WMDs, for ballistic missiles, for terrorism; they are not issued for human rights violations, and they’re definitely not issued for gender apartheid. So we want to start to reframe why it is that we’re saying that governments should not engage with these governments [so] they need to change their behavior. It makes it unacceptable.

The crime of apartheid as distinct to the crime of gender persecution, gender apartheid would introduce more of a question about third party actors. Because of the historical example of South Africa apartheid, there’s a question of liability. If governments and companies are complicit, or doing business with regimes that are perpetrating gender apartheid, are they willingly aiding and abetting this regime? It’s a bit more expansive than what’s currently on the books, in our view.

We’re not asking for increased sanctions as part of this campaign. What we’re asking for is that there clearly are demands that gender apartheid come to an end.

For more information, you can read the letter in its entirety, and join in signing it, at endgenderapartheid.today.

You Should Give a Sh*t About is an ongoing column highlighting local stories with a global impact. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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May 18, 2023August 4, 2026

You Should Give a Sh*t About: Gender Apartheid

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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