From National Organization for Women

South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds today signed away the reproductive freedom of the women he is sworn to protect, with the specific intent of challenging and overturning Roe v. Wade and putting at risk the lives and freedom of women across the country.

Passed by the state legislature last month and scheduled to go into effect July 1, the law bans all abortions except when the life of the woman is at stake. To the rest of the women in his state -- including survivors of rape or incest, or women whose health or fertility are at risk -- Rounds sent the message that "government knows best" when it comes to family formation decisions.

From USA Today

DUBUQUE, Iowa — This quiet town where old-money neighborhoods perch atop steep bluffs along the banks of the Mississippi River seems an unlikely setting for a modern-day war. But Dubuque (pop. 57,000) is battling the aging of its population. It has watched many of its young people leave for college and never come back. It has seen hundreds arrive but stay just long enough to get a degree from one of its four colleges and universities.

So officials in Dubuque and other cities around the nation are trying to plug a brain drain by wooing young professionals. And they're getting more pointed in their pursuit: They're courting women.

Eager to retain and attract creative talent with high earnings potential, cities are taking note of a demographic shift: Today's 25- to 34-year-olds are part of the first generation where women are measurably better educated than men.

From The Daily Mail

We lost a generation to the revolution. Well, that normally happens. Social change brings suffering with it. The feminist revolution of the seventies and eighties was no exception. Our society may overflow with plenty - food, warmth, comfort - but emotional hardship is hitting our lost generation hard. Ask around, and find that for a particular band of women, those between, broadly, thirty and fifty, starvation of a certain kind is rife.

Lost generation women find themselves starved of love, sex, children, and leisure - no time to stand and stare, fall in love, visit family. They are over-worked, stressed, tired and exhausted. Employment is no longer a matter of choice, but of necessity. One man's wages can no longer keep a family, as once it did.

From BBC

Meeta Vyas was the only Indian woman in the company when she began her career in 1984 as a portfolio manager in an investment firm in New York City.

She was also the first Indian woman to lead a Nasdaq-listed company - a one-off in corporate America in her time. Now the presence of South Asian women in business leadership roles is no longer a rarity in the US, at least not in New York.

From Alternet

We've finally got the goods. After weeks of outcry over Harvard University president Lawrence Summers' unpublished comments at a recent conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce, Summers' office has finally released his eyebrow- raising speech in its full glory.

Women, he asserts, simply don't have a "taste" for scientific work; often they just seem to prefer childrearing to high-powered jobs. As evidence, Summers cites his daughters' fondness for asserting that they possess "daddy trucks" and "baby trucks," thus demonstrating that unsocialized females will always use heavy machinery to build families, rather than bridges. He also credits his insights to several unnamed studies from "empirical psychology" showing that aptitudes and taste preferences are biologically determined.

From Alternet

When one is in the business of correcting conservative misinformation, one spends a great deal of time watching Fox News Channel — America’s foremost purveyor of conservative misinformation.

After many thousands of hours of viewing Fox News’ stable of anchors, correspondents, and spinmeisters, one begins to see patterns emerge in FNC’s programming: on-screen text that bashes Democrats, reporters adopting White House terminology, etc. But after a while, the din of GOP talking points and anti- liberal screeds slowly fade and an altogether different pattern emerges. A person idly watching Fox News all day, for example, has an excellent chance of glancing at the screen and seeing some partial nudity or a male Fox News personality hitting on a female colleague on the air.

Fox presents itself as an organization devoted to professional journalism ("Fair and Balanced," "the most powerful name in news," etc.), and it enjoys the highest ratings share of the three major cable news networks. But how can a news network be taken seriously when it constantly airs footage of nearly naked women and then complains about TV becoming too raunchy?

From Alas, A Blog

Audra Williams has a really interesting piece about feminists in their 20s and early 30s on Rabble. I felt a little anxious about writing about it first, because I disagreed with her to the point where I was highly annoyed by what she was saying. But then I re-read it, and I realised that I agreed with her argument. Audra presents this problem as a generational one: second-wave feminists organised, third-wave feminists generally do not.

I think Audra has identified one possible reason, which is that feminism can be set up as a standard that women should attain, rather than a form of analysis. I had an activist friend tell me recently that she didn't know anything about feminism. Which shocked me, but I understood what she was saying, because feminism can be seen as something that happens in a rarefied atmosphere, that comes once you've taken a women's studies class and read the right books.

From media girl

In elementary school we learned that "men" meant "both men and women," and for a while we bought that ... until the Women's Movement. Unexamined sexism allowed us to say "doctor, he" and "nurse, she," and how language became a tool of control. A lot of time was spent in the 1970s removing sexist preconceptions from the language. The language lost some poetry as a result, but women gained some rights.

Perhaps most people - rightly or wrongly - believe that the biological difference between men and women are so different, that there never can be true equality. And men, who on the surface would seem to gain most from keeping women "not equal," are not the only culprits. Perhaps the majority of women agree.

From Woman of Color

I have long struggled with the emphasis that Chicanas specifically and women of color in general put on identity politics.

I understand the need to have a radical analysis of how women of color exists in the world and how our various identities intersect with oppression and violence. But at the same time, as in the case of Chicanas, I often feel that many women of color put most of their political organizing into shaping and then reshaping their identities, as opposed to challenging oppressive structures.