[[link removed]] Ms. Memo: This Week in Women's Rights
June 21, 2023
From the ongoing fight for abortion rights and access, to elections, to the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment, there are a multitude of battles to keep up with. In this weekly roundup, find the absolute need-to-know news for feminists.
BANNED: Gender, Race and Sexuality Studies [[link removed]]
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BY AVIVA DOVE-VIEBAHN | Scary. Fascist. Dystopic. Unreal. Painful. Absurd.
These are just some of the words Floridians used to describe the proposed HB 999, a specter that loomed over educators this spring. While ultimately tabled, HB 999 spawned SB 266, which passed in early May. Throughout its evolution, this legislation and its foreboding restrictions have targeted the free flow of ideas, threatening to inhibit progressive pedagogy and limit the possibilities for diversity and inclusion at the college level.
While Florida has long been treated as a punchline to a national joke about regressive politics, “this is about to be the entire country’s problem,” warned Lorna Bracewell, women’s, gender and sexuality studies program coordinator and an associate professor of political science at Flagler College in St. Augustine. “Every Republican-dominated state legislature is watching closely what is happening in Florida.”
Flagler is a private college that remains insulated from the effects of these bills, for now, but in many ways that is immaterial to the larger issue. HB 999 exemplified “an existential threat to academic freedom and all the ideals that underpin public education,” Bracewell said, ruminating on the bill prior to its tabling.
SB 266 is equally catastrophic. “If these policies are permitted to go into effect … it’s a death knell for public education in the state—and it’s not going to be confined to the state.”
The first women’s studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies programs—so named at the time—were founded at U.S. universities more than 50 years ago. Since then, these disciplines have become well respected in academia, offering a place for students to challenge assumptions about gender, race and sexuality throughout history and in contemporary culture.
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Read more
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Who Was Dealt Out of the Debt Ceiling Deal? [[link removed]] How State Constitutions and Courts Can Lead on Reproductive Rights and Gender Equality [[link removed]]
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The Taliban Maintains Its Grip on Afghanistan as Its Citizens Starve, U.N. Reports Show [[link removed]] What’s on the Horizon for Working Women? [[link removed]]
What we're reading
Because it's hard to keep up with everything going on in the world right now. Here's what we're reading this week:
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"Documents
show
how
conservative
doctors
influenced
abortion,
trans
rights”
—
The
Washington
Post
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"Well-funded
Christian
group
behind
US
effort
to
roll
back
LGBTQ+
rights”
—
The
Guardian
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[link removed] [[link removed]] Tune in for a new episode of Ms. magazine's podcast, On the Issues with Michele Goodwin on Apple Podcasts [[link removed]] + Spotify [[link removed]] .
In this episode, Dr. Goodwin is joined by Ann Grundy to celebrate Juneteenth—which comes at a fraught moment in U.S. history. In 2023, Juneteenth comes with vestiges of the past, as book bans targeting queer, Black and Indigenous authors sweep the nation. Dr. Goodwin and Grundy remind us that these bans aren’t just attacks on critical race theory or women’s studies. They’re attacks on democracy and the First Amendment itself.
We hope you'll listen, subscribe, rate and review today!
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