Maybe the Angry Women - 12

It was 1963.

New York City.

A twenty-eight-year-old freelance journalist was trying to get a serious assignment. She wanted to write about politics. She wanted to write about the growing civil rights movement.

But the male editors at the major magazines just laughed at her. They told her she was too pretty to be a serious reporter. They handed her assignments about nylon stockings, dating tips, and how to cook for a husband.

She realized that the media establishment was never going to give her a seat at the table. So, she decided to blow up the table.

She shoved her feet into three-inch stiletto heels. She strapped herself into a suffocatingly tight satin bodice. She pinned a fluffy white tail to her back and put on a pair of fake ears.

Her name was Gloria Steinem.

She went undercover as a "Bunny" at Hugh Hefner's wildly popular Playboy Club in Manhattan.

The media had spent years selling the Playboy Club as the ultimate symbol of glamorous, liberated, modern sexuality. Gloria didn't buy it. She suspected it was just the same old exploitation wrapped in a shiny new bow.

She was right.

She spent weeks working inside the club, taking meticulous notes. She documented the grueling physical demands, the rampant, normalized sexual harassment from customers, and the mathematically rigged wage system that kept the women broke and dependent on the club.

She published her two-part exposé, "A Bunny's Tale." It was a sensation. It completely shattered the glamorous facade of Hefner's empire.

But exposing the Playboy Club wasn't her endgame. It was just her opening act.

Gloria realized that as long as she was writing for magazines owned and edited by men, she would always be playing by their rules. The stories that actually mattered to women domestic violence, workplace discrimination, the fight for reproductive rights were considered "unprintable" by the mainstream press.

So, in 1971, she joined forces with a group of fierce, radical women to do something unprecedented.

They launched their own magazine.

They called it Ms. The title itself was a rebellion. At the time, women were defined entirely by their marital status Miss if you were single, Mrs. if you belonged to a man. Ms. was a declaration of independence.

The male publishing executives predicted the magazine would be a catastrophic failure. They gave it a month.

The preview issue sold out of its 300,000-copy run in just eight days.

Ms. magazine gave an entire generation of women the vocabulary to articulate their oppression. It became the beating heart of the second-wave feminist movement.

Gloria became the most famous feminist in the world. With her signature aviator glasses and streaked hair, she weaponized the very same conventional attractiveness that the media had tried to use to dismiss her. She forced the television cameras to pay attention, and when they rolled, she hit them with razor-sharp, unapologetic political demands.

She spent decades traveling the globe, organizing strikes, marching for the Equal Rights Amendment, and building a movement that spanned class and racial lines.

She is now in her nineties, and she has never stopped fighting.

As she famously warned: "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."

She taught us that if the establishment refuses to let you tell your story, you don't lower your voice. You build your own printing press.

She was the brilliant political journalist who went undercover in a bunny suit to expose an exploitative empire, and then forged a publishing revolution that fundamentally changed what it meant to be a woman in America."

SOURCE: Giggle Grid FB page

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"As a woman I am extremely aware that the reason I have my rights is because a woman somewhere got up, got MOUTHY, organised, raged, made herself INCREDIBLY inconvenient until things changed for the better for all of us. Which is precisely why I see women who uphold the patriarchy as traitors to all women. It's wild how some women are so quick to benefit from the sacrifices of others, yet they won't lift a finger to challenge the system.

These women are complicit in their own oppression, and it's heartbreaking. They're perpetuating the same toxic ideologies that have held us back for centuries. Newsflash: if you're not actively working to dismantle the patriarchy, you're contributing to it.

We need to call out these women, not celebrate them. We need to recognize the harm they're causing and encourage them to do better. The women who fought for our rights didn't do it so we could be silent accomplices to the system.

How do you think we can hold women accountable for upholding the patriarchy?

SOURCE: FB page Real Point

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Portland, Oregon! Showing up for multiracial democracy! For Renee Good and the people of Minneapolis! Out against the nightmare of violent authoritarian rule.

Women journalists to Human Rights for the World

 

World's History on FaceBook, Feb. 1, 2026

In March 1933, the Red Room of the White House overflowed with women—reporters sitting cross‑legged on the carpet, leaning against walls, balancing notebooks on their knees. The manager of the Associated Press scoffed at the sight, predicting the whole experiment wouldn’t last six months. He was wrong by about twelve years. Eleanor Roosevelt’s strategy was deceptively simple: if news organizations wanted access to the First Lady—if they wanted to know what was happening inside the White House—they would have to hire women. No exceptions. No men allowed.

At first, she played along with the expectations of the male establishment, discussing White House social events, household decisions, and the entertaining of foreign dignitaries—topics deemed appropriate for the “women’s pages.” But everything changed when Prohibition ended. When reporters asked President Franklin Roosevelt whether beer would be served at the White House, he simply smiled and said, “Ask Eleanor.” She delivered the answer at her next women‑only press conference, forcing male reporters to beg their female colleagues for details. And she didn’t stop with beer. Week after week, she made real news—defending equal pay for equal work, advocating for low‑cost housing, speaking boldly about civil rights, and championing the idea of a minimum wage before it existed.

The press conferences quickly became essential. The Associated Press hired Bess Furman. United Press brought on Ruby Black. The New York Herald Tribune sent Emma Bugbee for “a few days,” and she stayed for months, her stories landing on the front page. Newsrooms across the country suddenly discovered that women could do the job—and that if they didn’t hire them, they couldn’t cover the First Lady. Over twelve years, Eleanor Roosevelt held 348 women‑only press conferences. Ruby Black called it “a New Deal for newswomen.”

But Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence didn’t end there. After FDR’s death in 1945, President Harry Truman appointed her as a delegate to the newly formed United Nations. Her male colleagues, assuming she posed little threat, assigned her to Committee III, which handled humanitarian and cultural issues—“soft” topics they believed would keep her out of the way. They were disastrously mistaken. She was unanimously elected chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights.

For three years, she navigated the treacherous landscape of early Cold War politics, uniting eighteen nations with clashing ideologies, competing interests, and deep mistrust. Communist states faced off against Western democracies. Colonial powers negotiated alongside newly independent nations. Delegates brought different religions, cultures, and definitions of “human rights.” Through it all, she listened, negotiated, compromised when possible, and stood firm when necessary.

On December 10, 1948, she presented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the UN General Assembly. The vote was overwhelming: forty‑eight nations in favor, none opposed. As the results were announced, every delegate rose in a standing ovation. Eleanor Roosevelt called the document “an international Magna Carta for all mankind.” Seventy‑six years later, it remains the foundation of international human rights law, translated into more than 500 languages and defining the fundamental rights belonging to every person on Earth.

Eleanor Roosevelt considered it (The Declaration of Human Rights) her greatest achievement—and she was right. Her journey is astonishing: from a woman holding press conferences in a crowded White House parlor because there weren’t enough chairs, to the architect of the document that defines human dignity for the world. From male reporters smirking in doorways, to male diplomats rising to applaud. From being dismissed as a housewife dabbling in politics, to drafting the moral framework of the modern era.

Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t just break glass ceilings. She built ladders so others could climb after her. And when those ladders reached high enough, she used them to lift the entire world.

See the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on separate link.

Title IX Amendment - that opened doors for women and girl athletes in schools.

The author of Title IX Amendment - that opened doors for women and girl athletes in schools.

 Patsy Mink -- the first woman of color elected to the U.S. Congress and the co-author of the landmark women's educational equity Title IX Amendment -- was born on this day in 1927. A third generation Japanese American from Hawaii, Mink became engaged in political activism from a young age, in part motivated by witnessing the discrimination her father faced as the only Japanese American civil engineer working on Maui during the World War II period. In one of her early acts of political activism, when she moved to the mainland to attend the University of Nebraska, Mink organized a coalition of students, community members, and businesses to successfully bring an end to the university's long-standing policy of racially segregating student housing.

After graduating, she applied to twenty medical schools but was denied admission to all because none would accept women. Mink decided that the judicial process would be the best way to compel the schools to accept female students and shifted her focus to law. She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1951. After returning to Hawaii, Mink was elected to the Hawaii Territorial Legislature and, after Hawaii became a state in 1959, she served in the Hawaii State Senate.

In 1965, Mink became the first woman of color elected to the U.S. Congress where she served from 1965-1977 and again from 1990 until her death in 2002. During her tenure in Congress, Mink gained a reputation as a vocal advocate for women's rights and civil rights, and was a leading opponent to the war in Vietnam. Although her outspokenness engendered criticism at times, Mink believed in standing by her ideals, famously stating: "It is easy enough to vote right and be consistently with the majority. But it is more often more important to be ahead of the majority and this means being willing to cut the first furrow in the ground and stand alone for a while if necessary."

One of her greatest legacies is the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act, the breakthrough 1972 U.S. civil rights law which prohibits gender discrimination in any educational program or activity. Mink was one of the bill's principal authors and the driving force behind its passage; it was later renamed Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in her honor. Filmmaker Kimberlee Bassford, who made the documentary "Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority," describes Mink's influence as follows: "Mink's story captures the spirit of a generation of trailblazing women and shows that one person — armed with vision, drive, and perseverance — can make a difference. I never doubted that I would have the opportunity to go to college — even graduate school — and to play sports. Women of my generation take for granted the very things that Patsy Mink fought for."

Mink, who also became first Asian American to seek the presidential nomination during the 1972 election, passed away in 2002. Her death occurred one week after the 2002 primary election, too late for her name to be removed from the general election ballot. As a result, Mink was posthumously re-elected to Congress on November 5, 2002.

Patsy Mink is one of the trailblazing women in U.S. politics featured in the excellent book, "Leading the Way: Women In Power" for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/leading-the-way

For a wonderful book for teaching tweens and teens about the history of Title IX and its impact on girls' lives, we highly recommend "Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX: The Law That Changed the Future of Girls in America" for ages 11 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/let-me-play

There is also a fantastic picture book about trailblazing women in sports - that includes an introduction to Title IX - for ages 6 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/girls-with-guts

For more books for children and teens that celebrate women's contributions to politics today and in the past, check out our blog post, “Remember the Ladies: 25 Children's Books on Women in Politics” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11162

And, for more stories of female trailblazers in all fields including science, the arts, and athletics, visit A Mighty Girl's "Role Models" section at https://www.amightygirl.com/.../history-biography/biography

First American convention for women's rights July 19, 1848

 The Seneca Falls Convention — the first convention for women's rights — began on July 19, 1848. The seed had been planted eight years earlier, and grew out of the abolitionist movement. Lucretia Mott and her husband were traveling to London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Aboard the ship, they met a pair of newlyweds — Henry and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — who were also on their way to the conference for their honeymoon. Once in London, the six female delegates, including Mott and Stanton, found that they would not be seated and could only attend the conference behind a drapery partition, because women were "constitutionally unfit for public and business meetings." Mott and Stanton were outraged, and together they agreed that they really should organize their own convention.

Eight years later, on July 11, they ran an unsigned announcement in the Seneca County Courier that read: "A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, N.Y. [...] During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend." Just a few days before, Stanton took the Declaration of Independence as her model and drafted what she called a Declaration of Sentiments, calling for religious, economical, and political equality.

Later in her life, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in her diary, "We are sowing winter wheat which the coming spring will see sprout and which other hands than ours will reap and enjoy." It would be 72 years before women would be granted the right to vote. Only one of the signers of the original Declaration of Sentiments was still living in 1920. Charlotte Woodward, who had been 19 and working in a glove factory in 1848, was too ill to cast her ballot.

Title IX importance!

 It was on this day in 1972 that Title IX was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. Title IX prohibited sex discrimination in any federally funded education activity or program. This applied to all schools, from elementary to universities, both public and private. Although the original language doesn't mention sports, the biggest change came for female athletes in high school and college, whose opportunities had been very limited.

In 1969, a part-time lecturer at the University of Maryland named Bernice Sandler was struggling to move up the career ladder. She had a doctorate in counseling psychology, but when she applied for one of her department's seven tenure-track positions, she wasn't even considered. One of her colleagues told her that even though she was qualified, she might as well not apply because she seemed "too strong for a woman." She was rejected twice more after that. One interviewer told her that she wasn't a real professor, but "just a housewife who went back to school."

Sandler didn't back down. Instead, she read everything she could find about workplace discrimination. She read about the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which was intended to equalize pay for men and women — but there was a broad exemption for anyone in "executive, professional, and administrative positions," including all teachers at any level. She found an executive order that President Johnson had ordered as an expansion of the Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for companies doing business with the government to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or nationality. It had been amended in 1967 to also prohibit discrimination based on sex. As soon as she read that, Sandler realized that she had found her loophole. She said, "Even though I was alone, I shrieked with my discovery." Since universities took funding from the government, they could technically be said to be "doing business with the government," and so they should be subject to Johnson's executive order as well.

Sandler ordered a class action charge against all universities and colleges in the country. She backed up her case with a long report of data, including statistics like the high ratio of female Ph.D.s to female faculty members. Hundreds of qualified women who had been denied academic positions wrote testimonials. Sandler worried that a federal order could be easily undone, and she believed that sex discrimination should be prohibited by a formal law. Representative Edith Green of Oregon, chair of the House Committee on Education, introduced the bill known as Title IX, requiring gender equity in education, as part of the 1972 Education Act. She actually encouraged women's groups and other supporters to stay silent on the issue, with the hope that Congress wouldn't think too hard about the significance of Title IX and just vote for it. That is exactly what happened. Someone raised a brief concern that the bill would require schools to allow women to play football. Once the bill's sponsors reassured everyone that this would not happen, the bill was passed.

Title IX revolutionized gender equity in education. Since its passage, the percentage of women obtaining degrees in higher education has steadily climbed, and women now outpace men in obtaining both bachelor's and graduate degrees. By far the greatest impact has been felt in sports. After the passage of Title IX, women's teams were required to have the same resources as men's teams — coaches, training facilities, locker rooms, equipment, etc. Spending on men's and women's sports had to be proportional to the number of athletes participating. In 1972, there were 170,000 men competing in NCAA sports and just 30,000 women — that number has now grown to 150,000. At the high school level, girls' participation in sports has increased by more than 900 percent.

Harriot who?

January 20...

Today's the birthday of author and suffragist Harriot Stanton Blatch.

Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch (January 20, 1856 – November 20, 1940) was practically destined to become an activist. Her father, Henry B. Stanton, was an abolitionist, politician and journalist. And her mother was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the leader of the women's rights movement.

After college, she assisted her mother, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Susan B. Anthony in completing their comprehensive 'History of Woman Suffrage,' writing a hundred-page chapter on Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), the rival organization to the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) run by her mother and Anthony. In fact, it was her contribution that helped to reconcile to the two organizations, eventually merging into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

In 1882, she married William Blatch, an Englishman, and they moved to England where she spent the next 20 years moving in British reform circles, and completed a statistical study of rural English women women's conditions.

In 1902, they returned to the US where she quickly became involved in the Women's Trade Union League as well as joining the suffrage movement. She was disappointed with the quality of suffrage work from NAWSA, finding it too apathetic, too conservative, and too much concerned with internal affairs and affluent supporters.

So in 1907 she founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, reaching out to working women who had never really been considered for suffrage work. She used this connection to trade-unions to bring in a new sense of vitality to the movement, and in 1910 the league's name was changed to the Women's Political Union. She introduced her "open air tactics" with suffrage parades and by sending women into public to address men in fiery speeches.

During WWI, she devoted her time to the war effort, heading the Women's Land Army of America, which trained women to work on farms to replace men sent to the battlefront, to ensure crops could be planted and harvested to continuing feeding the nation as well as the troops.

From National Women's History Alliance on FB, Jan 20, 2022

The letter didn't seem to make much difference.

 On this day November 22 in 1744, Abigail Adams was born. This is from her most famous letter to John Adams in 1776:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independancy—and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.”

Image: Statue of Abigail Adams dedicated November 10, 2022 in Quincy, Massachusetts and sculpted by Sergey Eylanbekov, photo by Robert Bosworth for the Quincy Sun.

Women's Rights, Civil Rights, the poor...

  Happy birth anniversary (as Writer's Almanac remembered her in 2017) to...

"American activist Dorothy Day (1897). Day spent her life fighting for women’s rights, civil rights, and the poor. She was a lively and curious young woman when she landed in Greenwich Village after two years of college in Illinois. She quickly became part of the bohemian lifestyle, making friends with playwright Eugene O’Neill and writer John Reed, and working as a journalist for several socialist and progressive publications. She even interviewed Leon Trotsky. The New Yorker once referred to Dorothy Day as, “perhaps the most famous radical in the history of the American Catholic Church.”

Her days in the Village inspired her autobiographical novel The Eleventh Virgin (1924). She said: “I was only eighteen, so I wavered between my allegiance to Socialism, Syndicalism (the I.W.W.’s), and Anarchism. When I read Tolstoy I was an Anarchist. My allegiance to The Call kept me a Socialist, although a left-wing one, and my Americanism inclined me to the I.W.W. movement.” In the epilogue to the novel, she wrote, “I thought I was a free and emancipated young woman and found out I wasn’t at all […] Freedom is just a modernity gown, a new trapping that we women affect to capture the man we want.” When the movie rights were sold for $2,500, she bought a beach house and began writing in earnest.

She also converted to Catholicism and, along with Peter Maurin, a French Catholic social activist, began a publication called The Catholic Worker, devoted to issues of poverty, social justice, and civil rights. The first issue was edited in the kitchen of a tenement on Fifteenth Street, and the writers received no salaries. Printing was made possible by donations by regular people, like priests and shift workers, and even a homeless woman who donated a dollar. The paper debuted in 1933 and cost one penny. It still does.

In the first issue, Dorothy Day declared that the paper was, “For those who are sitting on park benches in the warm spring sunlight. For those who are huddling in shelters trying to escape the rain. For those who are walking the streets in the all but futile search for work.” The paper led to the creation of “houses of hospitality” in New York City and across the U.S., where homeless people, especially women, could seek shelter and assistance.

Day became something of a counter-culture icon during the 1960s, with radical Abbie Hoffman calling her “the original hippie.” She was an ardent anti-war activist and was often arrested during protests. Her last jail stay was when she was 76 years old. She served 10 days for walking a picket line with Cesar Chavez, the labor leader and civil rights activist.

Dorothy Day died in one of the very same hospitality houses she helped create. An employee said she died of “a long and hard life.”

About her life’s work serving the poor, Dorothy Day once said: “What we would like to do is change the world — make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute — the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words — we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”

And she said, “My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the Psalms.”