Feminine Wisdom

(WOMENSENEWS)--Late last year, when a young mother of four came through the doors of St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Sister Margaret Mary McBride made a difficult decision. The choice she made would turn out to be the definitive one of her career.

read more

UNITED NATIONS (WOMENSENEWS)--A precocious, gender-sensitive civil society movement stirring in Bangladesh since the 1970s is expected to make the country a star among nations meeting here in September to re-affirm 15-year development pledges that face a deadline in 2015.

read more

WASHINGTON (WOMENSENEWS)--A recent government agency report finding that marriage promotion programs have not helped women escape poverty--a central tenet of welfare policy under President George W. Bush--gives Stephanie Coontz the chance to say "I told you so."

read more

read more

MEXICO CITY (WOMENSENEWS)--When Mexico decriminalized undocumented migration from the nations south of its border through its country two years ago, it also started allowing migrant victims of violence access to humanitarian visas.

However, the visas are rarely issued and the process is so slow it's nearly useless.

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--July's new movies include several superb narrative features and documentaries directed by women. But before we look at those, let's praise Sally Berger, a curator at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), for putting together a remarkable retrospective (July 7 to 24) of the films and videos of Sally Potter, the brilliant British feminist moviemaker.

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--When she looks at her suburban street, Geri Barish sees cancer. She believes it's under her feet, in the soil that came from landfill and has been sprayed with pesticides. She believes it's overhead, in the electric transformers that hang from telephone poles on her quiet cul-de-sac.

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--Female authors this year have produced something for every type of summer reading, from light, fluffy and popular to feminist tracts and epic literary explorations.

read more

My girlfriend had a beautiful baby boy two weeks ago. Now she's having tearful meltdowns nearly every day.

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--More than one million current and former Wal-Mart female employees alleging gender discrimination stand to be certified this summer as the largest civil rights class action in history.

read more

I'm as fierce an advocate as exists for crime victims, but I'm having a tough time figuring out how to feel about Al Gore being publicly accused now of committing a sexual assault in 2006.

It's not that he didn't seem the "type." After the Catholic priest scandal, I gave up thinking there was a man alive who wasn't capable, though if Jimmy Carter gets in the same trouble I will lose my lunch.

read more

DALLOL, Ethiopia (WOMENSENEWS)--The schoolmaster at Kursawat, a rural area in the Afar region of Ethiopia, is struggling to bring awareness of the benefits of girl education and the risks of female genital mutilation.

read more

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--When I was a kid, my family and I used to make a parlor game out of the question, "What would life have been like if we had lived a century ago?"

It always made for an interesting game, so long as we skipped over the fact that most of us would not have made it into the world in those days.

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--Janna Jones (not her real name) used to love her job in the information technology, or IT, industry when she was working in the Washington, D.C., area as a computer analyst. Her company worked on mostly large government contracts.

read more

TULTITLAN, Mexico (WOMENSENEWS)--Exhausted from walking long distances the night before, Joyce was sleeping silently on the floor of the migrant shelter here, curled on her side, when a shelter organizer woke her up to tell her story to a reporter.

She was the only woman among roughly 150 men and boys, some as young as 14.

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--After Laurie Stewart's boss died of breast cancer five years ago, she and five other women at the funeral each vowed to do what they could to prevent the disease.

That night, Stewart--who has asked that her first name be changed--found a lump in her breast.

read more

SRINAGAR, Indian-administered Kashmir (WOMENSENEWS)--Her father is a retired agrostologist, which means he studied grasses. And in her childhood she loved playing with boys.

Maybe that helps explain Nuzhat Gul's confidence as the first female turf manager of the Royal Springs Golf Course in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.

read more

(WOMENSENEWS)--When Helen Thomas, the veteran White House columnist, offered her personal viewpoints on Israel on the sidelines of Jewish Heritage Day outside of the White House, her unguarded remarks were caught on video. The video clip quickly amassed a major audience on the Web, a medium that Thomas has long criticized and that proved her own undoing.

read more