this will not stop at trans people.
The Lucy Stone League is a women's rights organization founded in 1921.[1] Its motto is "A wife should no more take her husband's name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost."[2] It was the first group to fight for women to be allowed to keep their maiden name after marriage—and to use it legally.[3]
It was among the first feminist groups to arise from the suffrage movement and gained attention for seeking and preserving women's own-name rights, such as the particular ones which follow in this article.
The group took its name from Lucy Stone (1818–1893), the first married woman in the United States to carry her birth name through life (she married in 1855). The New York Times called the group the "Maiden Namers". They held their first meetings, debates, and functions at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, including the founding meeting on 17 May 1921.[4]
The founder of the Lucy Stone League was Ruth Hale, a New York City journalist and critic. The wife of New York World columnist Heywood Broun, Ruth Hale challenged in federal court any government edict that would not recognize a married woman (such as herself) by the name she chose to use.[3] The only one in her household called Mrs. Heywood Broun was the cat.[5]
The League became so well known that a new term, Lucy Stoner, came into common use, meaning anyone who advocates that a wife be allowed to keep and use her own name. This term was eventually included in dictionaries.[6] Women who choose not to use their husbands' surnames have also been called Lucy Stoners.[7]
During France's long revolutionary period, a lot of things changed, including how you could end your marriage. In this episode, Christine takes a look at the introduction of divorce in France, including some of the ways you could (and couldn't) legally split from your spouse from the dawn of the French Revolution through the Napoleonic years and beyond.
“Today, we must fight the State and the capitalists who are establishing their control over everything,” says Anjali while also remembering an early intervention she was a part of during the first days of the protests around New Delhi. “Women protesters were not being given the time on stage … we shared this concern with the farm leaders…The next day, our woman comrade was the first speaker.”
“When there is a social movement, society moves forward at a faster pace, you just have to be there to make the argument,” Anjali says.
For the moment to be revolutionary, it must be even more inclusively revolutionary, they say. Are we brave enough to listen to them about the extraordinary moment they are witnessing as well as shaping?
9/27/19 - Starting next year, you'll see celebration galore for the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, often celebrated as voting rights for American women. But which women could vote? We talk with historian Lisa Tetrault about the myths of suffrage (spoiler alert: it's not actually a right) and the racist politics of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Then we move to the state of suffrage today with activists Arekia Bennett of Mississippi Votes and DeJuana Thompson of Woke Vote, who are working to ensure that marginalized people are enfranchised under new waves of voter suppression.
The Myth of Seneca Falls and other writing by historian Lisa Tetrault
Mississippi Votes is working with youth to expand voter access and civic engagement. Read more from Arekia Bennett in a recent editorial for The Root.
Woke Vote works to train new organizers and mobilize historically disenfranchised voters of color.
If you’re a women who likes to wear pants at work, you should care about the court case
The mystery of why women go on and on and on after their procreative function has ceased has occupied some of the great minds of the ages. I am sorry to report that many of those minds have not been forward-thinking. “It is a well-known fact … that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration” and they become “quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing,” Sigmund Freud pronounced. The male-dominated medical community of the mid-20th century was similarly dismissive. “The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,” opined the gynecologist Robert Wilson, who elaborated on this theme in his 1966 best seller, Feminine Forever. The influential book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to market hormone-replacement therapy.
Even the architects of the sexual revolution were fixated on fertility as a marker of femininity, an attitude that seems doubly unfair coming from the people who gave us the pill. “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,” wrote the psychiatrist David Reuben in 1969 in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, adding that the postmenopausal woman comes “as close as she can to being a man.” Or rather, “not really a man but no longer a functional woman.”
Mattern has her own audacious theory as to why: Menopause is a key to our success as a species. In humanity’s hunter-gatherer days, tribes needed a balance of producers and consumers—people who brought in food, and people who ate it. Most adults did both. Not so children, who remain dependent during the long period of brain development. Members who could bring in food for more than one person without adding to the population were crucial.
Enter the postmenopausal female. The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes studied a modern foraging tribe, the Hadza, and found that an energetic group of older women brought “more food into camp than any other age and sex category.” This paved the way for the Grandmother Hypothesis: Not only do older women serve as food producers, but they are providers of “allocare,” communal child care. In the Hadza and other tribes, Mattern writes, women “reach peak foraging productivity in their 50s and continue to produce a caloric surplus through old age.” She points out that tribes have been known to kill members who can’t contribute. If grandmothers aren’t murdered, she reasons, that is because they are useful.
Mattern makes the case that menopause probably emerged in humans when we diverged from chimpanzees millions of years ago. It gave Homo sapiens an advantage over other species of hominids such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, she proposes. Limiting childbearing to younger women, whose offspring could be cared for by older women, enabled the species to bounce back from an epidemic or a crisis: Those fertile women could reproduce quickly, but no woman could do so forever, sparing the tribe the risk of overpopulation. With the advent of farming, menopause still served an important purpose. The most prosperous time for a peasant family was postmenopausal, Mattern argues, when older children could help and the family no longer had new members to support. Nowadays, with fewer children and more resources, she brightly adds, “women past menopause, who historically used their energy surplus to help their families survive, can now use it in other ways.” While Steinke experienced menopause as a shutting-down, Mattern sees it as an opening-up.
Women weren’t included in clinical trials until the 1990s. While we make up 70% of chronic pain patients, 80% of pain medication has been tested only on men. Even in preclinical trials with cell lines and rodents, males have been favoured over females. Researchers have justified this bias by claiming that oestrous cycles in female rodents – and menstrual cycles in human women – would potentially corrupt results. If that were so, wouldn’t it be quite important to find out before selling the drug to women?
Eight of the 10 prescription drugs taken off the market by the US Food and Drug Administration between 1997 and 2000 owing to severe adverse effects caused greater health risks in women than men. A 2018 study found this was a result of “serious male biases in basic, preclinical, and clinical research”.
Get a free ebook of the discussed book, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on gutenberg here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32
*** Rather than affirm the positive potential of female sexual agency, the play repeatedly upholds the notion that women’s desire must be checked by masculine control. Lysistrata’s sex strike ultimately fails to offer real strategies women can adopt today to assert their right to make decisions about their own bodies, and in fact the play echoes long-standing arguments that they should not have this right at all.
*** Lysistrata in fact reveals how vigorously those benefitted by patriarchal systems will oppose women who defend their right to take part in the political process. In order to effect change, Lysistrata and her allies must challenge these patriarchal systems on multiple fronts, not through the sex-strike alone. This is true of all of the sex strikes often cited to prove the tactic’s efficacy. One well-known example, whose ties (or lack thereof) to Lysistrata have been nicely examined by Classicist Helen Morales, is the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, organized in 2003 by Leymah Gbowee to end the Second Liberian Civil War. Crucially, this involved not only a sex strike but also a series of non-violent protests by a coalition of Muslim and Christian women. Their actions were effective and helped to usher in the first female head of state in Africa, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. As Gbowee would later state, “It took three years of community awareness, sit-ins, and nonviolent demonstrations staged by ordinary ‘market women’….The sex-strike had little or no practical effect, but it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention.” In the end, it was concerted and wide-ranging intervention by women into the political sphere that affected real change.
“Due in large part to information that is accessible through the internet, and abortion pills, self-managed abortion is physically safer in 2019 than it’s ever been in the past,” Adams said. “But as the threats from the dangerous methods of the days of yore have waned, now legal threats from punitive state responses have emerged.”
Delaware state Rep. Richard Collins (R) said this week that he was sponsoring an anti-abortion bill because women are not replenishing the U.S. population quickly enough.
While speaking to WGMD-FM on Tuesday, Collins explained that he was introducing a bill that would require women to listen to the fetal heartbeat before having an abortion. A second bill would outlaw abortion after 20 weeks.
“God is moving in strange and wonderful ways, folks,” the lawmaker insisted. “Gun bills that we’ve talked about will save essentially no lives because it will have no impact on criminals getting of keeping their guns. But every single year, we kill hundreds of people in abortions.”
“You know, we have a massive problem in this country,” he continued. “Our birthrate is way, way below replacement [levels]. You know, we are just not having enough babies.”
According to Collins, women are “doing away” with their fetuses “before they have a chance to grow into these people that we need to support us.”
“These bills are very, very minor,” Collins said dismissively. “All that we’re adding is, let them see the baby moving within them and let them hear the heartbeat… Just add the ability to see it move — live action — and they say about 75% of the women will not do the abortion.”
In this episode, Joanne, Brian, and Nathan discuss stories of love that challenged social norms and transcended class, race, and gender. They explore how people subverted laws banning interracial marriage, and why a wave of heiresses running away with their coachmen caused a moral panic in the Gilded Age.
Defiant Brides
Joanne talks with writer Nancy Rubin Stuart about two Revolutionary-era women whose choice of romantic partner put them at odds with their family and country.
Malays, Not Mongolians
For centuries, dozens of states implemented anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting people of color from marrying whites. While the overarching reason behind the laws were to control the color line, the details of each statute depended on a state’s geography and racial makeup. Nathan talks with scholar Rachel Moran about the 1933 case Roldan v Los Angeles County and how Filipinos living in California were able to fight for their right to marry across racial lines.
Music:
Lady Lovers
The 1920’s have become synonymous with prohibition, flappers, and economic prosperity. But the decade also marked the emergence of the first queer black community networks. Nathan talks with historian Cookie Woolner about how African American blues singers like Ethel Waters and “Ma” Rainey were able to express a queer identity to mainstream audiences.
Music:
Another Elopement of the Familiar Sort
During the Gilded Age, elite families were in the grips of a moral panic. Wealthy heiresses were abandoning their inheritances and running off with their family’s coachmen – who, although young and handsome, were of exceedingly lower status. Historian Carolee Klimchok explains how these elopement scandals became a national sensation.
Music:
Irene Szoeke had an incredibly tough start to life — she was born in a prison camp during World War II. She was one of the lucky ones — Irene and her family survived the war and later found a home in Australia.
As she grew, Irene worked hard and asked big questions. So when an amazing new invention came to her work — a computer — Irene was the perfect person for the job.
Written and narrated by eight-year-old Ariana Szoeke-Campbell.
Duration: 6min 21sec