I wrote this article on media literacy for On The Issues Magazine’s Spring ‘10 edition, published today. To explore the theme of this edition, “The Feminist Mind,” contributors look at ways readers can enhance their understanding of feminist and progressive values.
Media Literacy: Piercing Content and Who Controls It
by Jennifer L. Pozner
On The Issues magazine, […]

In 1973, the federal government started to pay for abortions for very poor women under Medicaid. It took three years until the Hyde amendment put a stop to it.
In addition, abortion services are not […]

By Guest Bloggers Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Courtney Young

The never-ending story “Why Can’t a Successful Black Woman Find a Man?” received another public forum on Wednesday night. This time it was neither BET nor TV One spewing the oft repeated statistic that 43% of black women have never been married. This time it was […]

An op-ed in the Boston Globe (April 15th, 2010) urges Americans to care for the happiness of our older citizens as the writer says the Japanese are beginning to do. The article focuses on a Japanese businessman who provides temp jobs for 370 people over 60 who have been forcibly retired.
Multiplied across […]

In every competition, there’s a winner and a loser.
The open Internet protections being debated by the Federal Communications Commission right now will determine who wins and who loses in the fight over whether big companies or regular people will control the Internet. I want everyday people to win.
In the fight over who will control the […]

This past Thursday (March 4), I saw a special, one-night-only nationwide screening of “Half the Sky.” The film, based on a staged event at NYU last fall, is in turn based on the book of the same title by NY Times reporters Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn. It featured readings […]

The spontaneous eruption over the new mammography regulations, and the confused history of the debate, warn us about the general relationships between government-issued medical guidelines, insurance coverage limits, and doctors’ discretion. […]

As I sit against the florescence of the television screen, watching the conservative Fox News pundit Glenn Beck drive political nails into progressive leaders using the fear of U.S. blacks and immigrants of color as his hammer, my memory harkens back to the year in which the book Push was set, 1987. During that time, […]

Ellen Goodman is usually thoughtful but in “The $250 donation to elders” (Boston Globe, Oct. 23) she doesn’t understand Social Security. The average woman receives only $896 a month.
She would get an additional $22 a month if Congress actually passes Obama’s proposed bill, intended […]

I found my first job in 1963 by looking through the “jobs for women” section of the classified ads in the local Colorado Springs newspapers. It would take another decade for those gender-segregated ads to disappear, and then only because National Organization for Women had filed its landmark complaint against the now defunct Pittsburgh Press . That case went would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and result in the 1973 ruling saying the practice was illegal.