Daily excerpts of new fashion, culture, lifestyle, activism and women's news posts 2007-2019.
Serena Williams Shares The Naked Truth In Essay + Images By Alexi Lubomirski For Harper's UK
Serena Williams is a lioness, covering the August 2019 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK for ‘Serena Unretouched: The Naked Truth’. Miguel Enamorado styles the black goddess in unadulterated, head-to-toe glam for images by Alexi Lubomirski./ Hair by Vernon François; makeup by Tyron Machhausen
Karlie Kloss Talks Leaving Victoria's Secret + Joining Judaism In British Vogue August Cover Story
Superstar Karlie Kloss covers the August 2019 issue of British Vogue, lensed by Steven Meisel. Karlie wears a Versace sweater and Bulgari jewelry styled by Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful, who chooses a fabulous gown by Marc Jacobs for one preview shot and Dior checks for another.
Now for the real story, which is Karlie delivering a loving gut punch to Victoria’s Secret, its second in two days. On Monday, NIKE made it known that they now sell more bras in North America than any other retailer.
New Abortion Ban Lawsuit Places Black Georgians Squarely at the Center of the Fight
A new lawsuit filed last week could eventually force the U.S. Supreme Court to examine how laws that attack abortion access disproportionately affect Black women and other women of color.
Centering the conversation on some of the state’s most vulnerable people was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU’s) motivation for naming SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging HB 481, Georgia’s six-week abortion ban.
“I think the ACLU was very intentional,” Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, told me in an interview. “The way that they wanted to approach this particular lawsuit was to make sure it was rooted in reproductive justice.”
Reproductive justice centers “three interconnected human rights values: the right not to have children using safe birth control, abortion, or abstinence; the right to have children under the conditions we choose; and the right to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments.” Black women coined the term in 1994.
Megan Rapinoe Says US Women's Soccer Team Accepts AOC's Invite To The People's House
Megan Rapinoe, the captain of the US Soccer Women’s National Team, has said the team will not attend any White House celebrations honoring the women if the US wins the 2019 World Cup, as they are currently positioned to do.
Rapinoe responded to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, however, saying the team would be pleased to visit the people’s House of Representatives following the tournament — world champs or not.
The purple-haired, gay captain of the women’s team responded to Trump’s tweet about the team coming to the White House — if they are champs, of course, only if they are champs because Trump doesn’t like losers. Rapinoe set the ego-maniac Prez back on his haunches, saying "she’s “not going to the F…ing White House if we win.”
Trump quoted her for the whole world, with his series of presidential admonishments:
James Fields, Jr., the white supremacist who murdered Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others driving his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 has received a life sentence in federal prison.
Prosecutors had argued that Mr. Fields’s racist, anti-Semitic beliefs motivated his decision to attend the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and use his automobile in an act of domestic terrorism. Thomas T. Cullen, the United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said after hearing the sentence that the case set a precedent for future instances of domestic terrorism.
Mr. Fields was one of hundreds of young white supremacists who swarmed Charlottesville in August 2017, marching with tiki torches shouting “The Jews will not replace us.”
Tory Burch Asks Forbes Summit Why The Debate Around Equal Pay For Women Continues
Forbes considers Tory Burch to be one of America’s richest self-made women, estimating her net worth at $850 million. Judged today by her competence, strategic thinking and brand positioning, Tory Burch, who previously worked at Ralph Lauren and Vera Wang, says that when she launched her lifestyle brand in 2004, she wan’t taken very seriously.
Burch joined ultimate equal-pay activist Lilly Ledbetter to discuss the impact of the gender pay gap in a Forbes Women’s Summit discussion moderated by Cosmopolitan editor Jessica Pels. Ledbetter is known as the Alabama area manager at a Goodyear plant who learned through an anonymous note that she was paid 35%-40% less than men in her same position.
Ledbetter’s case wound its way through the US court system, until the Supreme Court in 2007 overturned a $3 million verdict in her favor, ruling that pay discrimination lawsuits must filed within 180 days of her first unequal paycheck. President Obama effectively nullified the court’s decision in 2009, making the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first new law of his administration. Obama stipulated that the statute of limitations for filing equal-pay lawsuits based on pay discrimination resets with each new paycheck that is part of the discriminatory act.
Conservatives have spent the better part of a decade arguing the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit, which provides insurance coverage for a host of contraception without additional cost or co-pay, violates religious freedom principles. Those efforts have had mixed results. Despite two turns before the U.S. Supreme Court, dozens of lower court orders, and a handful of executive orders from President Trump, the benefit remains in place—but employers who object to it can avoid complying with it.
This week, the Roberts Court will consider taking up a case that could settle the birth control benefit’s fate once and for all.
The case is The Little Sisters of the Poor Jeanne Jugan Residence v. California. Yes, that’s right. The Sisters are at it again.
To understand how yet another case like this could end up before the Roberts Court, let’s revisit for a moment the history of the contraception mandate. Originally proposed in 2012, the birth control benefit requires most employers to include coverage of FDA-approved contraceptives without co-pay in their employer-sponsored health insurance plans. The benefit contains an exemption for religious employers and an accommodation for religiously affiliated employers. The benefit, and the exemption and accommodation, launched a wave of objections and lawsuits that has not yet receded. The first batch of those lawsuits reached the Roberts Court in 2014 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the Court ruled that some for-profit employers could take advantage of the accommodation process.
Top image: THIS MAP APPEARED IN THE MAGAZINE PUCK DURING THE EMPIRE STATE CAMPAIGN, A HARD-FOUGHT REFERENDUM ON A SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT TO THE NEW YORK STATE CONSTITUTION—THE REFERENDUM FAILED IN 1915. Lower image: ‘Madre Luz’ by Pablo Machioli, installed in Baltimore at the site of a Confederate monument removed after Charlottesville. It was destroyed. via
Many Americans Viewed New York Harbor's Lady Liberty as a False Idol of Broken Promises
By Angela Serratore. First published on Smithsonian.com as ‘The Americans Who Saw Lady Liberty as a False Idol of Broken Promises’.
It was a crisp, clear fall day in New York City, and like many others, Lillie Devereaux Blake was eager to see the great French statue, donated by that country’s government to the United States as a token of friendship and a monument to liberty, finally unveiled. President Grover Cleveland was on Bedloe’s Island (since renamed Liberty Island), standing at the base of the statue, ready to give a speech. Designed in France, the statue had been shipped to New York in the spring of 1885, and now, in October 1886, it was finally assembled atop its pedestal.
“Presently the veil was withdrawn from her beautiful calm face,” wrote Blake of the day’s events, “and the air was rent with salvos of artillery fired to hail the new goddess; the earth and the sea trembled with the mighty concussions, and steam-whistles mingled their shrill shrieks with the shouts of the multitude—all this done by men in honor of a woman.”
Blake wasn’t watching from the island itself, though—in fact, only two women had been invited to the statue that day. Blake and other members of the New York State Women’s Suffrage Association, at that point New York’s leading women’s suffrage organization, had chartered their own boat in protest of the exclusion of women not just from the statue’s unveiling, but from the idea of liberty itself.
Blake’s protest is one of several highlighted at the new Statue of Liberty Museum, which opened earlier this month on Liberty Island. While the statue’s pedestal did at one point hold a small museum, the new space’s increased square footage allowed historians and exhibit designers to expand the story of Lady Liberty, her champions and her dissenters.
Women Have Been The Fueling Energy Of Christian Right Demands For Decades
By Emily Suzanne Johnson, Assistant Professor of History, Ball State University. First published on The Conversation
Alabama’s new abortion restrictions were signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey. But more has been said recently about the fact that the bill was passed by 25 white men in the state Senate. Media reports have pointed to how this law will disproportionately affect black and poor women.
Only four women currently serve in Alabama’s state Senate. Three voted against the bill, while one abstained.
In response to the Alabama vote, Democratic State Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison compared men’s votes on abortion legislation to “a dentist making a decision about heart surgery.”
“That’s why we need more women in office,” Coleman-Madison said.
Across the country, women are underrepresented in legislatures. But the question is: Would voting more women into office necessarily shift the politics of abortion?
The Escalation of Anti-Abortion Violence Ten Years After Dr. George Tiller’s Murder
By Jill Heaviside & Rosann Mariappuram. First published on Rewire.News
As we mark the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. George Tiller, it is incredible to think that, just over a month ago, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse was really asking how “the pro-life position is in any way violent.”
Violence has been a central tenet of the anti-abortion movement since before the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. As activists have sought control over the reproductive freedom of millions of people—particularly women of color, low-income women and families, and queer, gender-nonconforming, and transgender communities—they have used violence as a tactic of control, abuse, and fear across the United States.
Dr. Tiller was Wichita’s only abortion provider for 40 years and was known for his deep commitment to trusting women and their families’ reproductive health decisions. Because of his work, Dr. Tiller was a target of many anti-abortion groups; before he was killed, he survived a clinic bombing and a prior shooting.
Dr. Tiller’s murder wasn’t an isolated incident. Anti-abortion extremists have killed at least 11 people since the 1990s. Their violent history includes the first recorded murder of an abortion provider, Dr. David Gunn, in 1993, and the 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, which claimed three lives and injured nine people.
Major Film Studios Follow Netflix In Putting Georgia On Notice Over Illegal Abortion Law
It was a slow start on whether or not America’s film industry would become involved in Georgia politics, threatening to abandon existing projects and future expansion of filming major projects like the revolutionary, Oscar-winning ‘Black Panther’ movie.
Netflix was the first major studio to take a stand against the medical-quackery ‘heartbeat bill banning abortion at about six weeks, joining the ACLU lawsuit in fighting the law not only as an infringement of Roe v. Wade, but as pseudo-science that has no basis in medical facts.
Today, an onslaught of new studios including Viacom, CBS, Sony, AMC, NBC Universal and Warner Media raises their collective business voices against the new law.
MacKenzie Bezos Joins Gates & Buffett 'The Giving Pledge', Sharing Half of Her New Fortune
There aren’t many solo images of MacKenzie Bezos out there. Even though the mom of four is a successful writers and played her own roll in the formation of Amazon, almost all images of MacKenzie include her husband Jeff Bezos.
Vogue US interviewed one of the world’s richest women in 2013 in advance of her “gripping new novel Traps”. The interview by Rebecca Johnson describes MacKenzie as a “bookish and she” girl who spent hours in her bedroom writing elaborate stories. She attended first Hotchkiss and then Princeton, a very deliberate choice that gave her access to writer Toni Morrison. One of America’s most important voices became Bezos’ mentor and called her in 2013 “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes . . . really one of the best.”
The Evolution of the Medieval Witch – and Why She’s Usually a Woman
By Jennifer Farrell, Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Exeter. First published on The Conversation.
Flying through the skies on a broomstick, the popular image of a witch is as a predominantly female figure – so much so that the costume has become the go-to Halloween outfit for women and girls alike. But where did this gendered stereotype come from? Part of the answer comes from medieval attitudes towards magic, and the particular behaviours attributed to men and women within the “crime” of witchcraft.
Taking one aspect of the witch’s characterisation in popular culture – her association with flight – we can see a transformation in attitudes between the early and later Middle Ages. In the 11th century, Bishop Burchard of Worms said of certain sinful beliefs:
Some wicked women, turning back to Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe [that] in the night hours they ride on certain animals with the pagan goddess Diana and a countless multitude of women, and they cross a great span of the world in the stillness of the dead of night.
According to Burchard, these women were actually asleep, but were held captive by the devil, who deceived their minds in dreams. He also believed that none but the very “stupid and dim-witted” could think that these flights had actually taken place.
Naomi Wolf's 'Outrages' Book Exposed On Air By BBC As Full Of Major Errors About Victorians
Author, activist Naomi Wolf is living the worst nightmare for a writer. She did not properly investigate the term "death recorded", a key research term in her new book 'Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, '
The error is a whopper, one that goes to a core premise of her book, which deals with people not only being imprisoned for 'illegal love acts' but -- according to Naomi -- being executed.
Wolf was interviewed on BBC Radio Thurs. where she apparently sat with interviewer Matthew Sweet , as he read to Wolf the definition of “death recorded,” a 19th-century English legal term. “Death recorded” means that a convict was pardoned for his crimes rather than given the death sentence.
The legal term means the exact opposite of what Naomi assumed. The error speaks volumes about her lack of scholarship and a book that is on sale as we speak.
How One State Has Become a Model for Protecting Abortion Rights From Supreme Court Conservatives
As Republican-controlled state legislatures across the United States pass near-total abortion bans, Vermont Democrats are looking to establish the country’s most comprehensive abortion rights protections.
The pro-choice effort in Vermont is two-pronged: a constitutional amendment via Proposition 5 to guarantee personal reproductive liberty, and bill H 57, which codifies the right to an abortion and prohibits public entities from interfering with a person’s right to choose.
Vermont’s Democratic-majority house and senate have passed both measures this session, and H 57 will soon head to the governor’s desk, where he can either sign it, allow it to become law by taking no action, or veto it. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott (R) does not plan to veto H 57, his spokesperson told Rewire.News.
There Is More Than One Religious View On Abortion -- Here's What Jewish Texts Say
By Rachel Mikva, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, Chicago Theological Seminary. First published on The Conversation.
Alabama’s governor signed a bill this week that criminalizes nearly all abortions, threatening providers with a felony conviction and up to 99 years in prison.
It is one of numerous efforts across the United States to restrict access to abortion and challenge the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide.
Six states have recently passed legislation that limit abortions to approximately six weeks after the end of a woman’s last period, before many know they are pregnant. Although the laws have not yet taken effect and several have been blocked on constitutional grounds, if enacted they would prohibit most abortions once a doctor can hear rhythmic electrical impulses in the developing fetus.
Sharon Stone Delivers Epic Sensuality, Age 61, Lensed By Branislav Simoncik For Vogue Portugal
Sharon Stone channels her defining role as an actor, playing Catherine Tramell in ‘Basic Instinct’, styled by Paris Libby in femme fatale looks suitable for a Hollywood icon. Photographer Branislav Simoncik captures the screen siren is stunning images — with a soft hand on retouching, bravo — for Vogue Portugal May 2019./ Hair by Giannandrea; makeup by Jo Baker
As fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg prepares to step down as chairwoman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America — turning over the position to Tom Ford — DVF celebrates her new role as chair of the fund-raising campaign for the Statue of Liberty Museum, which opened on Wednesday.
The designer is interviewed by friend Mellody Hobson, an African American businesswoman who is president of Ariel Investments and the former chairwoman of Dream Works Animation about her first job of raising $100 million for the Statue of Liberty Museum.
With Edwin Schlossberg, the museum’s designer, Von Furstenberg came up with the idea for an abstract “Stars and Stripes” mural for the entrance. The stripes are iron bars from the Statue of Liberty’s original armature created by Gustave Eiffel, and Diane’s friend sculptor Anh Duong designed 50 stars to sell to donors. It was easy, explained the philanthropist, activist businesswoman and wife of Barry Diller.
Read more details at Harper’s Bazaar US. Photographer Alexi Lubomirski captures Diane with models Akiima, Charlee Fraser and Emmy Rappe honoring one of Americans’ (well most Americans) most cherished symbols of the country we want to be again, as a member in high standing of the international community.
EMMY RAPPE (L), CHARLEE FRASER (C) AND AKIIMA (R)
Ohio Rep. John Becker (R) drew widespread criticism last week for an anti-abortion bill that would allow insurance coverage for the “reimplantation” of an ectopic pregnancy into the uterus—a treatment that does not exist. Physicians and pro-choice advocates have called the line in the bill “science fiction,” but Becker told Rewire.News he does have sources to back up his claim: two articles—one more than 100 years old—with anecdotal stories from physicians who claim that “reimplanting” ectopic pregnancies into the uterus is possible.
HB 182, which Becker first introduced in April, seeks to ban almost all insurance coverage of abortions in cases where the pregnant person’s life is not endangered. It also bans coverage of what Becker called “abortifacients,” or “drugs or devices used to prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum.” (This language seems based on a fundamental misunderstanding of pregnancy, medication abortion, and some forms of contraception.) Becker has saidthe intention of the bill is to “save lives” and cut costs for employers and insurers.
The bill received national attention when Dr. Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN and director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California, San Francisco, described ectopic pregnancies in a viral Twitter thread criticizing the bill. Ectopic pregnancies occur when a pregnancy grows outside of the uterus, usually in the fallopian tube, though Grossman wrote that they can rarely develop in the cervix or the abdomen as well. According to the Mayo Clinic, “an ectopic pregnancy can’t proceed normally. The fertilized egg can’t survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated.”
Ectopic pregnancies are the leading cause of maternal death in the first trimester.
NYU Hires Law Firm to Investigate Behavior of {Michael H} Steinhardt, a Prominent Donor
NYU said on Monday that it had hired a prominent law firm to investigate whether the namesake of its school of education, Michael H. Steinhardt, had engaged in inappropriate conduct with students, faculty or staff.
The review will be headed by Joan McPhee, a lawyer who last year helped lead an investigation of Lawrence G. Nassar, a USA Gymnastics team doctor who last year was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing young women. McPhee was hired by NYU as part of its response to a New York Times-ProPublica article that alleged a pattern of crude and demeaning sexual comments by Steinhardt toward women over decades.
Steinhardt, a hedge fund pioneer and philanthropist, denied many of the specifics of the allegations, saying that his behavior was always meant in jest, and never involved physical contact.
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