Amanda Marcotte

Kermit Gosnell, the sadistic monster who exploited lack of access to safe abortion care among poor and immigrant women to both torture women and kill actual babies, is finally on trial and anti-choicers are having a feeding frenzy. Unable to muster actual compassion for Gosnell’s victims, anti-choicers got right to work seeking ways to exploit his crimes to further reduce access to safe, legal abortion — and to create more Gosnells in the future.

Madeleine Kunin certainly knows from women and work. She’s been the governor of Vermont and the Ambassador to Switzerland. Before all that, she did her time as a journalist, a college professor, and an activist. She’s seen the feminist movement go through many permutations, and in her new book The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family, she details out her vision for where feminism should go next. Kunin argues that the movement hasn’t paid quite enough attention to the family, and specifically advocating for policies that allow women (and men) the ability to balance their work lives and their family lives in our hectic, work-focused world.

When I first picked up the book “Rumpus Women,” I had to admit I had a moment of wondering why. In this modern era of blogging, personal essays by women are easy to come by, and in fact, we are absolutely swimming in them. Why go to the effort of cracking a book?

Well, this wonderful book reminded me why.

Women are roped into judging each other’s sexual behavior and controlling each other’s lives because we’re led to believe it’s our only realistic source of control.

Written by Amanda Marcotte for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Long before she wrote Share This!: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, Deanna Zandt was my social networking guru. Of course, I had the benefit of being her friend, so I was privy to her frequent and useful insights on the value of joining Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook, and the most effective ways to use these technologies to promote my ideas and my activism. It was Deanna who convinced me that it benefits your activism to humanize yourself on social networks, and even that you can really spread information far and wide 140 characters at a time. So I have to start off by saying: you rule, Deanna! Your guidance has been invaluable to me.

The American right wing faces a serious public relations problem, which is that their ideas, honestly presented, would largely fail to capture enough people’s enthusiasm to win elections. It’s a built-in downside when your philosophy elevates the interests of an elite few over the many; the many will not like it. So the only hope for continued movement in the conservative movement is to argue dishonestly, through fear and distraction, to incite panicked decisions instead of slow, thoughtful ones. Unfortunately for the right wing, our system is a deliberative democracy, and thus tends to bend towards the left with time.