Abortion Doctor Assasinated

photo of Dr. George Tiller, shot to death this morning at church
Read story here.

Sonia Sotomayor

Matthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency

I was excited to hear that Obama's short list for Supreme Court nominees included only women (others included Elena Kagan, Janet Napolitano, and Diane P. Wood) ! Two out of nine is still not great- but a step in the right direction.
2 articles I found helpful on the nominee:
From RH Reality Check: Fair & Balanced:Weighing Sotomayor's Opinions
New York Times bio: Sotomayor, A Trailblazer and a Dreamer

Evidence suggests having daughters makes parents more feminist...

From FiveThirtyEight:

Having Daughters Rather Than Sons Makes You More Liberal

Interesting Excerpts:

The authors' key finding is that support for policies designed to address gender equity is greater among parents with daughters. This result emerges particularly strongly for fathers.

This is very interesting:

By collecting data on the voting records of US congressmen, Washington (2004) is able to go beyond this. She provides persuasive evidence that congressmen with female children tend to vote liberally on reproductive rights issues such as teen access to contraceptives. In a revision, Washington (2008) argues for a wider result, namely, that the congressmen vote more liberally on a range of issues such as working families flexibility and tax-free education.

URBAN BICYCLE ADVENTURE!!!!

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Defining Male and Female

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boylan writes of switching from being a man to being a woman after marrying a woman. She asks:

Is My Marriage Gay?

Legal scholars can (and have) devoted themselves to the ultimately frustrating task of defining “male” and “female” as entities fixed and unmoving. A better use of their time, however, might be to focus on accepting the elusiveness of gender — and to celebrate it. Whether a marriage like mine is a same-sex marriage or some other kind is hardly the point. What matters is that my spouse and I love each other, and that our legal union has been a good thing — for us, for our children and for our community.

Look how confusing it can get!

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

don't ask don't tell

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Feminist Novelist Marilyn French Dies

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Salon remembers French:

On May 2, feminist writer and theorist Marilyn French died at the age of 79. Not someone to shy away from a challenge, French once declared, "My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world."

French, who was born in Brooklyn, NY, first gained notoriety with her 1977 debut novel, "The Women's Room," which follows the character, Mira Ward, an American housewife in the 1950s, on her path to feminist awakening. Although a single line has lingered longest, "All men are rapists, and that's all they are" -- spoken by a character whose daughter has been gang-raped (not by French herself, though it has often been falsely attributed as such) -- The Guardian describes the book's deeper impact: "The novel spoke not just to French's contemporaries but also their daughters, who passed it hand to hand with the same enthusiasm they had shown four years earlier for Erica Jong's upbeat feminist novel, 'Fear of Flying.'"

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Gloria Steinem talks to the New York Times about "The Women's Room", written by French in 1977:

Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” had had on racial equality 25 years earlier.

“It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,” Ms. Steinem said in an interview Sunday. “It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.”

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