We spent all of winter in the NICU. When I was 25 weeks pregnant, I went into preterm labor and […]
A Burnout Confession: I’m a Foodie Academic Who Lost the Joy of Cooking
For most of last year, I worried that I’d broken my brain. As an academic whose job entails creating knowledge, […]
Men and Women Can (and Should) Be Friends in the Modern Workplace
As a teenager, I loved the film When Harry Met Sally and would watch it whenever I was home sick […]
I am a survivor: Childhood Sexual Abuses Collections & the Archives
“I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse,” are words that lend themselves to whispers in the night, a disclosure […]
Disability (and) Politics: The Fetterman Fiasco of Fall 2022
In Fall 2022, conservative pundits condemned Senator-elect John Fetterman (D-PA), who had survived a stroke the previous spring, using discriminatory […]
Dental Work and Colonoscopies, for Someone Who Used to Always Say OK
Content warning: This piece discusses parent-child sexual abuse, coercion, and addiction. Nobody likes getting a colonoscopy. It’s not just the […]
Excommunicating Feminism in the Mormon Church
On June 8, 2014, Kate Kelly received a letter from her bishop telling her that she could be excommunicated from […]
The Slippery Slopes of Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby
by Andrea Milne
Everybody and their sister is blogging about the Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby ruling, so I’ll spare you all the gory details, if for no other reason than to preserve my sanity. Here, in my (admittedly biased) opinion, are the most important things you need to know:
Big Berkshire Conference 2014 Report
By Heather Munro Prescott
Last month, I attended the 16th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (aka the Big Berks) at the University of Toronto. For those unfamiliar with this event, it is a triennial research conference held by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (aka the Little Berks). According to the Little Berks website, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians “formed in 1930 in response to women academics’ sense of professional isolation.” Women historians were allowed to join the American Historical Association (the professional organization for historians in the U.S.), but “were never invited to the ‘smokers,’ the parties, the dinners and the informal gatherings where the leading men of the profession introduced their graduate students to their colleagues and generally shepherded them into history jobs in colleges and universities.”
Sex as Construct, Rape as Reality, and Consent as Healing
By Jenna Tucker
I grew up in a culture obsessed with sexual ethics. As part of a group of Christian teenagers in the Midwest in the 1990’s, one thing we all knew, for certain, was that our religious and moral identities were directly linked to our relationships to sex. It was the culture that birthed virginity pledges and organized for abstinence-only sex education. I remember going to one of those Protestant mega-gatherings with youth groups from all over the country. The speaker gave us two messages that I carry with me to this day. The first was that we had to stop relying on our parents’ beliefs and develop our own relationship to God. The second was that we should not have sex and that anything that gave us sexual pleasure was sex. He was trying to head off our questions. Sex was bad, but what was sex? Could we have sex that didn’t risk pregnancy? Could we masturbate? What if we were engaged?
