Here’s a follow-up to my mini-review last week of NBC’s The Playboy Club: a Daily Beast article, “My Mom’s Life as a Playboy Bunny,” by Susanna Spier. Spier interviews her mother about what things were really like. Was Hugh Hefner’s comment — that bunnies could be anything they wanted to be — accurate? Ha. We […]
Gender & Sexuality
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Reading Between the Rights
Nearly 50 years after Griswold v. Connecticut, conservatives think the Constitution protects your privacy.
Posted inLaw and Justice
Gay on Trial
After state-level defeats, lawyers are taking the case for gay rights to federal court.
Posted inArticle
Pause for Concern
In July 2002, the Women’s Heath Initiative (WHI) of the National Institutes of Health announced an abrupt end to its study of so-called Hormone “Replacement Therapy” (used to treat symptoms associated with menopause) because the treatment posed risks of cancer and heart disease. Since this was previously considered the gold standard of menopause science, almost […]
Posted inSpecial Report
The New Case for Marriage
Marriage is undeniably a changed institution, because wedlock is no longer obligatory on the old patriarchal terms. For women this has been a hard-won, historic victory. Divorce became easier starting with the first wave of feminism in the early 1900s, and the second wave, beginning in the 1960s, obtained for women more kinds of work, […]
Posted inCivil Rights in America
The Antifeminist Seduction
In a curious, back-handed compliment, conservatives have appropriated feminist language in arguing that feminism itself is the cause of women’s problems today.
Posted inCivil Rights in America
The Care Equation
Women used to do all the unpaid work of caring for the kids of aging parents. Although career barriers have fallen, women won’t have real equal opportunity until America recognizes its crisis of caring.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Ally McBeal’s Younger Sisters
Why do the young women on television act so childishly—especially when the children are so adult?
Posted inCivil Rights in America
The Feminism Gap
“Feminists Don’t Know What to Think,” declared U.S. News & World Report in late September. Pointed editorials in the Atlanta Constitution and the New York Daily News condemned “Feminism’s Double Standard” and “Silent Feminists’ Shame.” Maureen Dowd even proclaimed in her New York Times column that feminists had committed “mass suicide” by failing to condemn […]