She led a sit-in to ensure protections for people with disabilities and laid the groundwork for the Americans with Disabilities Act. She’s calling on all of us to act radically to build a different kind of future for cinema—not only for the women being actively hurt inside the industry but for those outside it, whose lives, purchasing decisions, and sense of selves are shaped by the stories told. She’s proving how a groundswell of activism, led by everyday women, could create the incentives our political leaders need to change course and make affordable healthcare accessible for everybody. Read more →

By Dina Gilio-Whitaker | Long before there was ever a concept called “feminism” in the US settler State, there was the knowledge of women’s power in Indigenous communities. The imposition of foreign cultures, and Christianity in particular, was corrosive to societies that were typically matrilineal or matrifocal, were foundationally equitable in the distribution of power between the genders, and often respected the existence of a third gender and non-hetero relationships. As Christianity swept over the continent, it instilled Indigenous societies with patriarchal values that sought not only to diminish women’s inherent cultural power but also to pathologize alternative gender identities, relationships, and marriage practices outside the bounds of monogamy, establishing a general pattern of gender and relationship suppression that constructs modern American society and reordered Native societies. Read more →

We’re going two for two—our second author to appear this year on The Daily Show! On March 4, Trevor Noah interviewed disability rights activist Judith Heumann on The Daily Show in honor of Women’s History Month. And we’re squeeing again like the book groupies we are! “Reading this book, I expected to be impressed by it, but I wasn’t quite expecting how much of a badass you would be,” Noah told Heumann. And he’s right: she’s a total badass! Read more →

By Kristen Joiner | Judy Heumann isn’t nice. Let me be clear. Judy Heumann, one of the most transformative disability rights leaders of our time, is very friendly. Just take a walk around her Washington, DC, block. You’ll see that she’s on a first-name basis with everyone, from the doorman to the bus driver. But she is not nice. For the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of waking up and imagining myself into Judy Heumann’s shoes. Read more →

By Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross | It is true that we [Black women] embody the motto coined by Nannie Helen Burroughs for the school she headed in 1909: “We specialize in the wholly impossible.” The motto, together with Nannie’s own history, stands as evidence that a Black woman could, and did, push past daunting obstacles to live a life decidedly less ordinary. Read more →

Announcing the Oscars nominee lineup for best director with John Cho, Issa Rae threw the best shade at the Academy. “Congratulations to those men.” We feel you, Issa! In all the Oscars’ ninety-two years, only five women have ever been nominated for the award, Katheryn Bigelow being the only one to win it for The Hurt Locker. Yet Bigelow’s win was in 2009. Why were no women nominated for best director this year? Or perhaps the better question is how. How does this keep happening? Because it’s symptomatic of a much larger issue. Read more →

You won’t find corny-ass statements here proclaiming that the year 2020 will usher a time of clearer vision. Puh-lease. That’s tired. What’s worth saying here, however, is we need to keep our eyes on the issues that matter to us as we begin a new decade. Now that’s wired. We can get a picture of what matters by looking back at some of the top read blog posts on the Broadside in 2019. Read more →

A Q&A with Patricia Powell | I was initially an economics major but when I took my first creative writing class, everything changed. All my bottled-up feelings of loss came undone. I was twenty at the time and had only been in the States for four years. Writing had already stirred up so many feelings about home and the people I had left behind, those I had loved with all my heart and would never see again—my great aunt who raised me, for example, and who died shortly after I left. Read more →

By Leah Vernon | The identity battle with my hijab continued well into adulthood. As I started to come to terms with it, that it was in fact my choice to wear it or not, others’ disdain for it mounted. I was hyperaware of my surroundings when I wore it, especially around white folks—they were the ones doing the most when it came to assaults and verbal attacks. Read more →

By Ruth Behar | If I had to choose one aspect of my life that had the greatest impact on me as a thinker and a writer, it would be that I was born a Jew in Cuba. And after that, it would be that I came to the United States as an immigrant child, carrying this doubled sense of identity which would eventually be articulated in an American context in the English language, but always with a longing for the native Spanish that was spoken in my family. As a girl and a young woman growing up in New York, I struggled to find a way to give voice to the experience of being a Cuban immigrant, while always yearning to know the island that my family remembered nostalgically, but to which I was told we would never again return to live. Read more →

By Rakia Clark | Meeting Mona Eltahawy for the first time is like a bolt of lightening. Bold, vibrant, bright red hair, tattoos on both forearms, big, big smile, the works. Sitting down for the first time to discuss what would become The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, I was captivated by the powerful simplicity of the book’s central questions: What would happen if girls around the world were trained up to embrace the same qualities we encourage in boys? What if women around the world lived their lives with the same freedom men felt? Read more →

Lyn Mikel Brown | Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg made her way to New York City a few weeks ago via an emission-free racing yacht. She’s here to tell us, as she’s been doing since she was eleven, that “our house is on fire.” The climate crisis is urgent. We dismiss it at our own peril. Read more →

By Michelle Oberman | None of the laws Oklahoma passed were new. They simply passed every measure enacted by other pro-life states, along with the occasional model bill drafted by Americans United for Life. The laws cover a broad range of issues. Some of the laws, such as a ban on sex-selective abortion, are plainly symbolic. Women seeking abortions in Oklahoma, as in other states, need not provide a reason for terminating their pregnancies. There is no way to enforce this provision. Read more →

The patriarchy is going down! Why? Because last week, we had the immense pleasure of having feminist giant Mona Eltahawy, author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, for a visit at the office! We couldn’t wait to meet her in person and can’t stop talking about her book. Her many many fans and followers on social media can’t stop talking about it, either. Eltahawy is fed the hell up with the patriarchy, and in her book, she calls on all women and girls to embrace the qualities they’ve been trained to avoid: to be angry, ambitious, profane, violent, attention-seeking, lustful, and powerful. Read more →

By Melinda Chateauvert | This year on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, I won’t be participating in the parties and parades that celebrate a movement for LGBTQ equality. It’s not JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out), really. I won’t be “gay” on June 25, because I want to honor the transwomen of color who started this protest and still haven’t gotten what they wanted. Stonewall was a riot. It was led by sex workers, street kids, drug users and hustlers, by marginalized African Americans and Latinx who were pissed off with police harassment and police violence. As World Pride approaches, I’m going to remember what caused that 1969 riot, and refuse to participate in the historical amnesia. Read more →

With the diploma in hand and the graduation cap thrown jubilantly into the air, the question remains: What’s the next step? Graduation heralds new beginnings and transition. But where and how to start? How should we prepare for the future when the world around us changes on a compulsory basis? In his book Don’t Knock the Hustle, S. Craig Watkins asks the same question and says we should plan to be future-ready. “What should schools be doing? Instead of preparing students to be college-ready or career-ready, schools must start producing students who are what I call ‘future-ready.’ The skills associated with future readiness are geared toward the long-term and oriented toward navigating a world marked by diversity, uncertainty, and complexity . . . a future-ready approach prepares students for the world we will build tomorrow.” Read more →

By Rebecca Todd Peters | On Saturday, a close friend walked out of her local Catholic church with her family in protest of the priest’s blatantly propagandistic pro-life homily. Apparently, he was praising the story of Abby Johnson’s conversion from Planned Parenthood clinic director to pro-life activist and the new film Unplanned, which tells her story. The film, released by a company that focuses on producing “Christian films,” received a nationwide release, was in fourth place after its first weekend in box offices, and has gone on to gross almost $18 million since opening day. Read more →

By Rebecca Todd Peters | Imagine a society with widespread stillbirths, miscarriages, and genetic deformities linked to sabotage and accidents at nuclear facilities, chemical and biological toxins leaking into the water supply, and the uncontrolled use of chemical insecticides and herbicides. Imagine now that in addition to dropping birth rates from this environmental apocalypse, a new strain of syphilis and rapidly increasing death rates from AIDS wipe out large segments of young, sexually active people from the reproductive pool. Could you imagine that in such a world, the fertility of the ruling class becomes so completely compromised by these disasters that many women can no longer conceive and bear children and the whole social order threatens to fall apart? Read more →

By Jeanne Theoharis | At the urging of both E. D. Nixon and Virginia Durr, in the summer of 1955, Parks decided to attend a two-week workshop at the Highlander Folk School entitled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” The Durrs had worked with Nixon on various civil rights cases, and on Nixon’s recommendation, Parks had started sewing for the Durr family, one of Montgomery’s most liberal white families Read more →

By Lynn K. Hall | Last week, Senator Martha McSally made headlines by publicly speaking out about having been raped while she served in the Air Force. Her testimony during the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee hearing on military sexual assault shocked many. In 1991, McSally became the first American woman to fly in combat, and later the first woman to command an Air Force fighter squadron.“I blamed myself. I was ashamed and confused. I thought I was strong but felt powerless,” McSally said during the hearing. Read more →