In our era of political “bromances” between leaders who value aggression and belittle sensitivity, it’s easy to forget that expectations as to how men should interact with other men are always changing. In the 1820s, President Andrew Jackson, whose legacy Donald Trump has embraced, fashioned himself as one of the most virile men of his… Read more →
Tag: politics
Empty Chairs at the Cancer Center: The Threat of ACA Repeal
I spend a lot of time in the place no one wants to be — the cancer center. Every two weeks I’m there with my husband. He is the patient; I am the partner. Sadly, it is always crowded. The chairs are filled and it is hard to find a place to sit, but eventually… Read more →
Referendum on a Life in the Woods
For three decades, my dad’s brothers framed houses. The three of them had a small construction business in rural Connecticut. The eldest sometimes led projects as a general contractor, and other times they worked as subcontractors. With their skills and their self-made business, they also built cozy, modest houses for themselves. That part of Connecticut… Read more →
Silence and Noise: What AIDS Activism and Social Memory Can Teach Us
In the mid-1980s, when I was a twenty-something college dropout, I met people my age or older who knew a lot about history, about our history, the history of queer people. Part of this history included that of the men who were forced to wear the pink triangle in the Nazi concentration camps. And maybe… Read more →
When the Man Gets You Down… Or the Power of Transnational Feminism
Over the last fifteen years, Latin America has seen the rise and fall of women in politics. A decade before the U.S. (almost) elected their first woman president, Chile elected Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010 and 2014-present); Argentina voted in Cristina Kirchner (2007-1015); and Brazil chose Dilma Rousseff (2010-2016). These women ran on mainly leftist platforms and… Read more →
Best of 2016
Let’s face it, 2016 was a dumpster fire and we’re glad to see it die a fiery death. But in between the political cataclysms, celebrity deaths, and general terribleness, there were moments in 2016 that gave us life. Nursing Clio presents its second annual Best Of list. Favorite Book Laura Ansley: I read a lot… Read more →
Housewives Against Dictatorship: The Bolivian Hunger Strike of 1978
On December 28, 1977 four women and fourteen children arrived at the offices of Archbishop Nelson Manrique in La Paz, Bolivia and began a hunger strike in the highest capital city in the world. Aurora de Lora, Nely de Paniagua, Angélica de Flores, and Luzmila de Pimentel had travelled two hundred miles from the mining… Read more →
Nurse-Midwives are With Women, Walking a Middle Path to a Safe and Rewarding Birth
In childbirth politics as in all politics, extreme viewpoints make the news, and sensible centrists are ignored. A couple of years ago, Ricki Lake provoked a firestorm of debate about home birth with her film, The Business of Being Born, which showcased gloriously crunchy New York City home births, and made the case for the… Read more →
Protesting the ERA
Like many of my fellow Americans, I was glued to the television on election night. After months of the media and politicos enumerating the many reasons why Donald Trump would never win, I watched in shock as he became president-elect of the United States. The following morning, I learned that 42% of American women who… Read more →
Emotion and Fantasy: Marcus Garvey and a Blueprint for Modern Protest Movements
Here’s a trivia question: what was the largest African American organization in history? Hint: It wasn’t the NAACP, not SNCC or CORE or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, not even the Nation of Islam with its 1995 Million Man March. Instead, it was the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a curious and short-lived movement that was… Read more →