Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood isn't completely a feminist issue, but it certainly does affect women, which makes it very relevant to feminism.  Planned Parenthood has been in the news a lot lately, especially with the recent election of President Trump.

Planned Parenthood is first and foremost a healthcare and sex ed provider, including cancer screenings and sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing.  The organization began in 1916 when Margaret Sanger, sister Ethel Byrne and friend Fania Mindell opened a birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn to give birth control information and advice to women.  Sanger's mother died at the age of 50 after her body had been through eleven children and seven miscarriages.  Sanger went on to be a nurse in New York and study birth control methods in Europe.

Then, in 1951, Planned Parenthood awarded a grant to biologists Gregory Pincus and M.C. Chang and obstetrician John Rock to do research on the birth control pill.  In 1952, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) was formed at the third International Conference on Planned Parenthood in Bombay, India.

In 1961, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that married couples were allowed to use birth control.  This happend when Estelle Griswold, Executive of Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, opened a control clinic in 1961.  One out of every four married women under 45 in the United States was on the pill.  In 1972, birth control was legalized for unmarried people.  In January 1973, the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case ruled that a woman's right to privacy extended to her right to get an abortion.  Only four years later in 1977, the Hyde Amendment was passed, which is described later in this article.

Since its origins in 1916 in Brooklyn, Planned Parenthood has been an international organization dedicated to women's rights.  Planned Parenthood's mission statement, "A Reason for Being", says, "Planned Parenthood believes in the fundamental right of each individual, throughout the world, to manage his or her fertility, regardless of the individual's income, marital status, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, or residence. We believe that respect and value for diversity in all aspects of our organization are essential to our well-being. We believe that reproductive self-determination must be voluntary and preserve the individual's right to privacy. We further believe that such self-determination will contribute to an enhancement of the quality of life and strong family relationships."

Planned Parenthood helps 2.5 million people each year and nearly two-thirds of those people rely on public programs to help pay for their care.  84% of Planned Parenthood clients are age 20 or older, and it is estimated that one in five women in the United States have been to a Planned Parenthood facility.

As outlined in its history, Planned Parenthood's health centers focus on preventative measures, i.e. access to birth control and knowledge of sex and STIs and help to prevent approximately 579,000 unwanted pregnancies each year.  Other services include 270,000 Pap smears and 360,000 breast exams, both of which are essential to cancer detection.  Planned Parenthood also provides more than 4.2 million tests and treatments for STIs and its affiliates provide educational programs to 1.5 million people each year.

According to its most recent annual report, only 3% of all of Planned Parenthood services are abortion services.

Photo credit to Planned Parenthood 2014-2015 Annual Report

If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, 47 million women could lose access to birth control without a co-pay.  Planned Parenthood provides affordable birth control to its patients, which in turn reduces abortions.  To celebrate preventative actions against unwanted pregnancy, the "Birth Control Helped Me _____." campaign was launched.  Women tweeted #BirthControlHelpedMe with a reason birth control has helped them.

Photo credit to Teri Bossard Twitter

In early January, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan announced plans to defund Planned Parenthood, criticizing its practice of giving aborted fetus tissue to research facilities.  As clearly exemplified, Planned Parenthood goes far beyond abortion procedures, but if the rest of this article wasn't enough to persuade you, the Hyde Amendment, first passed in 1977 and most recently made permanent on January 24, 2017 by the House of Representatives, makes using federal tax dollars for abortion services illegal.  Since federal funding doesn't go towards abortion services, the only thing that defunding Planned Parenthood would do is cut funding toward services that would either reduce the number of abortions or vital healthcare screenings, such as cancer or STI testing.  So, the question is, since Planned Parenthood defunding wouldn't affect abortion services, why exactly does Speaker Ryan want to defund it?

White Feminism

There's absolutely no doubt in the world that different minorities face different struggles, and that certain minorities sometimes overlook the struggles other minorities.  This happens more often than it should in feminism, and it's called "white feminism".

White feminism is when one focuses on issues concerning well-off white women and fails to address oppression faced by women of color and other women without privilege.  A great example of this happened just last week.  Conservative talk show host Tomi Lahren, who is known for her less than kind words towards liberals, admitted to being pro-choice, and got suspended for a week, however, according to several news sites including New York Daily News, she may not return to the show despite the remaining six months on her contract.

At first, this sounds pretty great, right?  She thinks women should have the right to choose whether she wants to get an abortion and the government has no place in that decision.  So, she's not really as bad as people made her out to be, right? Not so fast.

Tomi has an extensive history of saying some controversial things that quite frankly are uninformed and borderline hate speech, such as when she tweeted the Black Lives Matter movement is the new KKK.  The tweet has since been deleted, but Daily Mail grabbed a screenshot while it was still out on the internet.

Photo courtesy of Daily Mail

However, after she told the world she's pro-choice on the talk show The View (her answer begins around 3:30), women all over the country flocked to praise her for holding such a feminist viewpoint.  Someone even wrote an article on The Odyssey Online apologizing to her for tearing her down.

This is the perfect example of white feminism.

People were willing to forgive Tomi and suddenly have a complete attitude change toward her because she said she's pro-choice.  They were willing to forget all of the racist rhetoric she's been spewing for months, and even the hateful comments she made about the Women's March a little over two months ago, calling them "snowflakes", saying they were crying and playing the victim card.

Photo courtesy of Tomi Lahren Twitter

Feminism that ignores the struggles of fellow minority sisters is not real feminism.  You can't claim to fight for women's rights unless you fight for ALL women's rights.  This is called "intersectional feminsim".

An article from USA Today reports "If feminism is advocating for women's rights and equality between the sexes, intersectional feminism is the understanding of how women's overlapping identities — including race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation — impact the way they experience oppression and discrimination."  According to the same article, intersectionality is a term first coined in 1989 by UCLA and Columbia Law professor  Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in her seminal paper on race theory.

The feminist movement is no stranger to discrimination; there is a long history of racial tension coupled with women's rights movements.  The National Public Radio analyzes this history.  In the article, Boston University historian Ashley Farmer says, "When we actually get down to representation or creating a list of demands or mobilizing around a set of ideas...it tends to be that white middle-class or upper-class women's priorities get put above the rest."

One particularly infamous movement involving white feminism is the suffragette movement in the early twentieth century.  Although she made great strides for women's suffrage, Susan B. Anthony was no friend to black people.  According to Wesleyan University, she said  “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman”, and, even worse than that, according to Women in World History Curriculum, she even said, "...The old anti slavery school says women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of the woman be brought up first and that of the negro last...."  Not exactly the kindest thing coming from someone who was supposedly all about equality.

Photo courtesy of Us Weekly

Intersectional feminism is important in modern day society, because without it, it's easy to ignore struggles faced by minorities within feminism, such as transgender bathroom laws or the fact that while white women are, on average, paid less than men, women of color are paid even less than white women.  Without intersectionality, feminism is not truly feminism.  There are only victories for the feminist movement when all women benefit.

What do you think?  Do you think that white feminism is dangerous in modern day society?  How might white feminism negatively affect other minorities?

The Bechdel Test

One thing that is really important to all minorities is representation in the media, which includes everything from books to television shows to movies.  Feminism is no exception to this.  It's extremely important for women to be portrayed as complex characters who are vastly different from one another.  In 1985, a little thing called the Bechdel Test came into existence, and it would challenge lack of representation for decades.

The idea that shaped the Bechdel Test is certainly nothing new.  In 1929, English author and modernist Virginia Woolf wrote an essay entitled "A Room of One's Own".  In this essay, Woolf observed the literature of her time, saying, "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. [...] And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. [...] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that [...]"  Basically, she's saying that women in popular literature of the time are only represented as relatives and usually not mentioned unless they have a relationship to a man.

The Bechdel Test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip "Dykes To Watch Out For".  In a strip titled "The Rule", a woman explains to her friend her "rules" for which movies she watches.

"The Rule" from "Dykes To Watch Out For" by Alison Bechdel

These rules eventually came to be known as the Bechdel Test.  The rules are:
1. The movie has at least two women in it
2. The women talk to each other
3. They talk about something other than a man

The Bechdel test is also called the "Bechdel rule", "Bechdel's law", the "No Movie Measure", or even the "Bechdel-Wallace test", which acknowledges Liz Wallace, who was an inspiration for the comic strip.  An article by Dr. K. Faith Lawrence suggests that there is an extension of the rule: the two women must have names and are not just referred to by their description or job title in the credits.  In a YouTube video posted to her blog "Feminist Frequency", Anita Sarkeesian applies the Bechdel Test to the 2011 Oscar nominees for Best Picture, and proposes that an addendum that women must talk for more than 60 seconds be applied.  She argues that if women only exchange a few lines, it's kind of difficult to make the claim that the film features women of depth and character.  Even with this new rule, the bar is still set pretty low for women's representation in films.

The Bechdel Test does not judge the quality of a film.  As Sarkseesian later mentioned in her video, "This test does not gauge the quality of a film.  It doesn't determine whether a film is feminist or not, and it doesn't even determine whether a film is woman centered."  She talks about the film True Grit, which follows the adventures of Mattie Ross struggling to get by in a man's world, and how even though this film is woman-centered, it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, because the female lead never talks to another woman except for an innkeeper, which doesn't total 60 seconds.

A surprising number of movies, some of which feature great female characters, don't pass the Bechdel Test.  According to Film School Rejects, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II actually doesn't pass the test.  It goes without saying that the Harry Potter series features several strong female characters: Hermione Granger, Ginny Weasley (maybe not so much in the films), Luna Lovegood, Molly Weasley, and even Professor McGonagall.  However, none of the female characters actually talk to each other.  Aside from a few comments between two female characters to one another, such as McGonagall to Molly Weasley when she "always wanted to use that spell", none of the women in the movie talk to each other.

A 2014 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media shows that in 120 films made worldwide from 2010 to 2013, only 31% of named characters were female, and 23% of the films had a female protagonist or co-protagonist, and only 7% of directors were women.  Even though the Bechdel Test is over 30 years old, it still seems like a few filmmakers could do with a lesson on representation in media.

So, what do you think?  Although it is somewhat flawed, is the Bechdel Test a good basic way to measure representation in movies?  Does it have a place in modern society?

The Hijab

In this week's blog post, I thought I would discuss something that's important to feminism, but is also pretty relevant with President Trump's recent travel bans: the hijab.  Before I delve into this post, though, what exactly is a hijab?  Many people use the word "hijab" to refer to any head covering worn by Muslim women.  However, the hijab is only one type of head covering in Islam.

Photo credit to Eastern Mennonite University

As pictured above, there are several types of head coverings, including the niqab, khimar and chador.  In my experience, the hijab is the head covering most seen in the United States, but the niqab and burka are the types of head coverings that are typically associated with oppressive Middle Eastern countries.  Some countries, such as Iran, require women to wear a head covering.  Some countries, such as Belgium and Tunisia, have actually banned wearing head coverings altogether.  Other countries, such as used to have a ban but have since lifted or loosened it.  These countries include Turkey, where teachers and government workers are allowed to wear head scarves, but military, police and judicial personnel must still refrain from wearing them. [source]

There are a variety of reasons women cover their heads.  Some believe that God told women to wear a head covering to fulfill His word, and it shows their devotion to God.  Some other women wear them to express their religious identity and connect themselves with Islam.  Others still use them to show a connection to their Middle Eastern cultural identity.  This statement is often made to show solidarity (politically or culturally) with their native countries and to challenge typical Western prejudices against the Arab-speaking world. [source]

There are plenty of women who choose not to cover their heads.  Some women believe that the part of the Qu'ran that instructs women to cover their heads is simply an interpretation of the scriptures, and it is not required.  Some others believe that head coverings have wrongly become the main focus of Islam, and choose to focus on their relationship with God rather than what they should be wearing. [source]

As many of you probably know, one of the most fundamental ideas of feminism is that a woman should be able to wear whatever she wants and still be treated with respect.  However, this is not limited to revealing clothes in clubs or at parties.  This also applies to women who choose to cover themselves for whatever reason.

An article from The Daily Californian opinion blog does an excellent job of succinctly explaining the oppressive myth surrounding the hijab: "...there is nothing inherently liberating or oppressive about the hijab, just like there is nothing inherently liberating about going naked.  The liberation lies in the choice."  This is exactly the thing so many people don't understand or are misinformed about when it comes to the hijab.  It is not inherently religious, and as long as wearing it is a choice, caliming that the hijab is oppressive is a misinformed statement, and just plain wrong.

Photo credit to US Message Board

The article goes on to mention how wearing head coverings is not a solely Islamic practice, but other religions, such as Judaism and Christianity, also mention head coverings and have some form of them within their religion, but these people are not seen as oppressed like Muslim women are.  And, it's worth noting that both Judaism and Christianity came before Islam.

Photo credit to Cloudmind

Lamyaa Alshehri, a senior at West York Area High School, speaks about her experience with the hijab in America.

"My hijab has become a part of my identity, but I did not always consider it to be so. When I first started wearing the hijab, I was in seventh grade. It was my choice. At the time, I did not know the significance of it and the meaning behind it. I wore it because I grew up around muslim women, who inspired me. They were strong and independent women. They were doctors, lawyers, artists, and engineers. They all wore the hijab and that encouraged me to do so. I felt very proud of it, at first. I was ignorant to the type of reactions I would have from people that were close to me. I lost many of my close friends and that had a huge impact on me considering I was still in middle school; but it also opened my eyes to the impact of preconceived ideas. Through all the backlash I faced for making that decision, the thought of taking the hijab off wasn’t something I considered.

Lamyaa Alshehri

Five years later, I have now grown into my hijab. I feel myself grow up to be more and more like the women I looked up to. They carried our family’s name and brought honor to it. They were feminists in their actions and thoughts. They treated patients, published books, built houses, and created paintings. They did all this with a hijab on their head. I never grew up thinking I was any less than a man. Islam has raised the status of women and encouraged many muslim women. I am as capable with a hijab, as I am without it. I, as a woman, am the one who is capable, not what I am wearing."

So, what do you think?  Do you think the hijab is oppressive, or that it is a personal choice that is not oppressive in and of itself?  How do you feel about the countries that have requirements for head coverings?  How do you feel about countries that have restrictions against head coverings?

Women's March on Washington

"Who runs the world?  GIRLS!"  Beyoncé Knowles sang these four simple yet powerful words at the beginning of her 2011 hit "Run the World".  The song vigorously promotes female empowerment.  The idea of female empowerment has been an extremely important topic in the past several years and has especially skyrocketed since the election of Donald Trump in November 2016.

The recent inauguration of President Trump brought thousands of people together all over the country to march for women's rights.  President Trump has a long and controversial history of misogynistic behavior, from claiming that he is entitled to grope women (which lead to many women coming forward with stories of alleged sexual misconduct) to relentlessly insulting Megyn Kelly, Carly Fiorina, and Hillary Clinton.  His election to the presidency has concerned many women's rights activists about how his personal behavior and views of women will affect his legislation while in office.

Photo credit to Rachel Emmons

As observed through the civil rights movement, the sufragette movement, or even the very foundations of our country, one of the best ways to get your point across in the United States is to protest.  One of the rights granted to the citizens in the Bill of Rights is the right to peacefully assemble, which has been used more and more in the past few years.  On January 21, the day after President Trump's inauguration, a different type of gathering was held in Washington, DC and in cities around the United States and the world.

Photo credit to Rachel Emmons

As mentioned in a New York Times article, the event started as a Facebook post shortly after the election.  Soon, hundreds of thousands of women flocked to the social network site to make their voices heard about President Trump's treatment of women.  People came out in enormous numbers; nearly 500,000 people marched in Washington, DC, while Chicago's crowd numbers were so much larger than originally anticipated, they had to cancel the march after the rally (but people marched anyway).

Penn State freshman Anelia Slavoff attended the march.  In response to inquisitions about her experience, she said, "Participating in this march was easily the most inspirational and moving experience I’ve had in my life.  I was surrounded by women and men, their ages ranging from toddler to elderly, that were all gathering for the same reason: to advocate for equality.  There was a very positive attitude in DC on that day, and there was never a moment I felt any negativity or threat from the people who were gathered.  Even though we were packed in hot subways, waiting in incredibly dense crowds, and experiencing what would typically be considered an unpleasant day, people were still singing in the metro and chatting excitedly with the people standing next to them.  It was a unifying experience for people around the country and world, and I believe it has potential to bring about real change.  My main motive in going to DC was to make my voice heard by a government that I fear won’t listen, and I truly believe we made our point heard on January 21st during our widespread peaceful protest."

Anelia Slavoff at the 2017 Women's March in Washington, DC

A movement within the Women's March was the Pussyhat Movement.  As aforementioned in the article, in 2005, Donald Trump was recorded on tape saying that he felt as though he could grope women because of his powerful position.  The response?  Thousands of women knitted "pussyhats", pink hats shaped like cat ears to slyly mock Trump's use of the word in the recordings.  The goal was to use the hats to express the demand of equal rights.

Pussyhats watching the news in L'Enfant Plaza
Photo credit to Rachel Emmons

Although President Trump did not attend any of the marches, he did take to Twitter to express his opinions on the march:

From Donald Trump's official Twitter

Although, after some time (and most likely consultation from some people close to him), he took to twitter with a different tone:

From Donald Trump's official Twitter

Even though the march was an overall success, the march was not well-received by everyone.  Television and online video host Tomi Lahren didn't hold anything back as she told her Facebook, Twitter and YouTube followers what she thought of the Women's March on Washington.  Other people who opposed the Women's March took to Facebook and Twitter with various memes about how women truly fighting for rights were the ones in the army and that women in America do have all of the rights they claim to want.

Photo credit to Rachel Emmons

So, what do you think?  Were the people marching justified, or was there no real reason for a march?

To view more of Rachel Emmons's work or get in contact her, please visit rachelemmons.com