Chances are, if you’re into academic feminism or if you’ve taken a Gender Studies class in the past 15-20 years, you’ve heard of Judith Butler. Butler, a feminist theorist who helped found queer theory, is generally regarded as one of the most important philosophers of our time: she’s extremely prolific and her work literally changed …
My family used to take a lot of road trips and we would stop at those markers by the side of the road that tell what important thing happened there. I remember realizing at some point that most of these markers – and most statues and monuments – were about men. I was shocked, for …
Dear Friends, It has been so fun to celebrate the month of February. As we all know, it’s the season of St. Valentine, of love. There are so many kinds of love—romantic love, familial love, puppy love (love of your puppy), and then there is the GLI love. At camp we take time every day …
Around this time every year, we start thinking deeply about the relationship between gender and sexual violence at Take Back the Night (TBTN), the anti-violence group I co-coordinate. We are in the thick of planning our annual March and Speakout and for the last few years, we’ve organized it as a women’s led march (that …
I’ve been reading a book called Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism by Nona Willis Aronowitz and the late Emma Bee Bernstein. In the book, Nona and Emma, two young feminists, recount their recent cross-country road trip. The goal of their trip was to meet with more than a hundred women—most of them young women—in order find out what women think about feminism. The book is a beautiful and thought-provoking narrative collage of interviews and photos, interwoven with pieces of feminist history and thoughts from the road. The book’s innovative format—it reads like a magazine, or like a blog really—makes it easily accessible and fun to read in both short bursts and for long periods of time. To me, the book makes feminism come alive: every interviewee has her own take on feminism, which demonstrates both the flexibility and the vivacity of the concept and movement.
I recently came across this article by Linda Babcock from 2008 called, “Women, Repeat This: Don’t Ask, Don’t Get.” The article deals with the issues of Babcock’s new book Women Don’t Ask. Babcock noticed through her own life and by watching the careers of women around her, that women often were promoted after men, simply because they didn’t ask for it, like the men often did. Her solution? Women need to start asking for things.
