From the category archives:

class and economics

For Some Kenyan Women, Toilet Use Means Sexual Violence

by Cara July 12, 2010

Trigger Warning for discussion/descriptions of sexual violence. Last week, Amnesty International released a report about how women in some areas of Nairobi, Kenya are afraid to leave their homes at night to use the bathroom, due to the persistent threat of sexual violence. The report, Insecurity and indignity: Women’s experiences in the slums of Nairobi, [...]

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Financial Interests Get in the Way of Meaningful Rights for Domestic Violence Victims

by Cara May 14, 2010

A new Massachusetts bill regarding victims of domestic violence has recently passed the State Senate, and is headed to the House. If approved, the bill would guarantee workers who are also victims of intimate partner violence some protections from their employers: The approved bill would require businesses to give employees who are victims of domestic [...]

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Court Gives Women the Right to Sue Wal-Mart for Gender Discrimination

by Cara April 27, 2010

Yesterday, a federal appeals court ruled that a class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart, for alleged discrimination against female employees, can go forward. For almost ten years, the company has attempted to block the lawsuit, and is still unprepared to give up: A federal appeals court ruled Monday that thousands of female Wal-Mart employees can sue [...]

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Trial for Officer Accused of Rape Invokes Victim-Blaming Myths

by Cara March 23, 2010

In Providence, Rhode Island, a police officer is on trial for allegedly raping an intoxicated woman that he had offered to drive home. Back in 2007, the woman alleges that Officer Marcus Huffman picked her up outside of a nightclub, after she had been refused admittance on the grounds that she was too intoxicated. She [...]

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Anti-Choicers Target Women of Color: How Should Pro-Choicers Respond?

by Cara February 23, 2010

Earlier this month, Renee wrote a post about an Atlanta billboard targeting black women’s reproductive rights by pointing to the higher rates of abortion among black women, and claiming that abortion clinics are attempting to abort black children out of existence. It’s a great post, touching on many things that will come up here, and [...]

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Book Review: Promises I Can Keep

by Cara February 15, 2010

I’m the kind of person who hoards books, and finds difficulty getting the the time to read them all within what most people would consider to be an even remotely reasonable timeframe. While that’s something I’m working on getting under control, the consequence is that I’m also the kind of person, who, if she ever [...]

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Remembering Dr. King

by Cara January 18, 2010

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [...]

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Pretending That Individual Choices Will Help Correct Structural Problems

by Cara September 11, 2009

The other day, I received a press release titled “It’s Riskier to Have a Baby in the U.S. Than in Cuba or the Czech Republic.” This, actually, I knew. The U.S. has one of the worst infant mortality rates in the industrialized world — and one of the worst maternal mortality rates as well. And [...]

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Women Who Would Have Medicaid-Funded Abortions Instead Often Give Birth

by Cara July 14, 2009

A new study just released by the Guttmacher Institute (pdf; news release here) determined that “approximately one-fourth of women who would have Medicaid-funded abortions instead give birth when this funding is unavailable.” Whatever the actual number of women who are essentially forced to give birth due to a lack of funding for abortion is, as [...]

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Americans Broadly Support Abortion Coverage in Health Reform

by Cara July 9, 2009

You my have heard — or you may not, as it seems to be getting little mainstream media coverage — that health care reform is in trouble. With Republicans and blue-dog Democrats sensing that some sort of of government coverage is likely to be successfully created this time around, they’re shifting tactics somewhat from attempting [...]

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