Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

The Babies Left Behind in America by Caitlin Dickerson in the Atlantic

What Are Fathers Telling Their Sons About Cornell? by Kathryn Jezer-Morton in the Cut

Christa Pike and the Absurdity of Humane Execution by Doreen St. Félix in the New Yorker

A Long Read About Living in a World Where Men Publicly Bond over Women’s Humiliation and Pain by Soraya Chemaly in Unmanned (Substack)

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From here and there:

A College Rape Case Has Ignited the Country. Let’s Talk About What We’re Actually Talking About Here. (Slate)

On the Cornell Seven

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

Prosecutors reopened an investigation into an alleged gang rape of a former Cornell student by seven fraternity members in 2024.

Morocco’s king appointed Fatima Zahra El Mansouri as the country’s first female prime minister.

Mass protests exploded across Delhi and Indian universities following a series of rapes.

Three states that ban abortion asked the Supreme Court to take up a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of shield laws for providers who mail abortion pills.

The only woman on Tennessee’s death row survived an execution attempt.

New Jersey’s lieutenant governor resigned amid sexual harassment findings.

The Trump Administration rescinded Biden-era rules extending a ban on sex discrimination in schools to LGBTQ people.

The chief executive of the Eiffel Tower resigned after removing women staff for a Hindu group’s visit.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

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The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

In many of the conversations I’m having this week, and in my girls group chats and on my social media feeds, it seems like we’re all swirling around one story: the Cornell Seven.

I wrote about the case for Slate and thought I said most of what I wanted to say. That piece is about the limits of the law to tell us much about ethics and morals; how the perils of vigilante justice live alongside the necessity of drawing social rules and enforcing them with social penalties; what might have been going on in the brains of the young men who made up the Cornell Seven. I hope you read it; it was hard to write, but cathartic to write, even if I didn’t get to any answers.

What I’m thinking about now, though, is the rest of us. All of the women (and some men, but let’s be honest mostly women) for whom this case is bringing up… everything.

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You know the statistics: One in three women will be sexually assaulted in her life. More than 99 percent of rapes never result in a felony conviction. Most rapists walk free. Most women never report. Of course all of those facts are animating the response to this case.

But there’s something deeper at play here, too, and I think it’s the text messages — the young man who invited his fraternity brothers over for “free pussy,” by which he meant a young woman who was drunk and high on ketamine. Most women who are sexually assaulted have no idea what was going on in their assailants’ minds. For the many women who are assaulted by men they knew or trusted, and especially when the assaults are not sudden violent attacks but rather the result of minutes or hours or days or years of ignoring “no” and overriding your own sense of agency, it’s possible and perhaps tempting to construct a more palatable story: He didn’t know what he was doing; he didn’t read my cues; I wasn’t loud enough; I wasn’t clear enough; perhaps this was a misunderstanding. These texts offer an insight into what was actually happening in the minds of these seven men who stand accused of rape, and what was actually happening was not misunderstanding — it was a belief that the young naked woman was not a real person, but was an object, a thing over which they could bond by engaging in a collective sadistic desire.

The texts pull back the curtain. They reframe the night as less about what she did and more about what the men did. What they were thinking. How little they thought about her. How she became just a body part.

To be clear, no crime has been determined by a court of law, and the truth of what happened may never be litigated in one. Here is what we know, though: A girl who was 19 or 20 years old, drunk, encouraged to take ketamine. A guy she thought was her friend, who encouraged her to have sex with him and his friend, and maybe she thought that was ok at first. A text message that went out to more than 50 young men, advertising her as “free pussy.” Several additional men who show up. A girl who says she hides under the covers, swats the men’s hands away, says no, is pushed and pressured. She says she was physically assaulted, too, that the men slapped her and verbally insulted her. And eventually, she says, she was so out of it she was unable to say yes or no at all — and young men who at the very baseline least knew they were having sex with a young woman who was heavily intoxicated, and who I suspect understood perfectly well that she would not have consented to a group sex scenario in the sober light of day. It’s hard not to read the texts and understand that they saw her as a thing, and that demeaning her was fun for them, and that it felt like a way to bond in their shared dominant status — the presence of a drunk naked girl who could be used as “free pussy” made their fraternity, and by extension them, cool (“I fucking love chi phi,” one man wrote in the text chain).

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I don’t know if the facts of this case meet New York State’s high legal bar for proving rape occurred. I don’t know if the facts of this case meet the lower bar for proving civil damages, which wouldn’t put the men in jail but could mean they owe the woman in question some restitution. I have been tempted — so tempted — to dig into the legal questions involved here. But I haven’t. Because that may be what it’s about for Jane Doe’s lawyers. But that’s not why so many women I know are thinking about this case so much.

For some women, the interest is clear: Something very much like this happened to them. For many others, it’s related if not as direct: This didn’t happen, but the story behind the story — that’s familiar. Feeling de-personed, reduced to a sexualized thing, to a collection of body parts. Feeling profoundly betrayed because you thought a man was worthy of your trust and you learned the hard way he saw you as less than a human and more of an orifice with a brain inconveniently attached. Feeling the sheer terror of realizing your physical safely is contingent on the whims of a larger, stronger man (or a group of them). Watching a man you trusted or loved or respected or simply thought was fundamentally decent go along with the degradation of a woman, or realizing he watched that degradation happen and said nothing, or hearing him deny that the actions were degrading at all. Understanding that objecting makes you the bad guy, the un-fun one.

Fifty-seven men were in the Cornell group chat where their friends were advertising “free pussy” and promising you could just “whip it out” and asking “shop still open?” Some of them showed up to partake. Most said and did nothing.

It is a very strange thing to move through the world understanding that the one half of the population that never had their humanity doubted on the basis of their genitalia, that enjoys the privilege of being the default category of human, remains the primary arbiter of your physical safety and, sometimes, your personhood. The gleeful misogynists of the manosphere have made misogynist subtext text (midway through writing this newsletter I went back and re-read the New Yorker exposé on the Tate brothers, and if you haven’t read it, you should). That’s not to say that every man in the world is a secret Tate-addled ultra-misogynist. It is to say that we are reading about this case in the context of a political moment infused with the most unabashed and virulent misogyny I’ve ever seen and experienced in my life. This case, for so many women, is a reminder of the flesh-and-blood costs that misogyny extracts, whether it’s men laughing online about how women are hoes who need to be abused and controlled, a president laughing about how he grabs women by the pussy, or men laughing in a group chat about a woman whose personhood they stripped away — who to them was “free pussy” and nothing else.

Nothing about that night was “free” — not for her. And not for the millions of women today who cannot stop thinking about this case.

xx Jill

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Is A.I. Above the Law? by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker

She’s 28, Loves God and Her Family, and Might Be the Reason You Can’t Have Kids by Emi Nietfeld in Wired

Is Platonic Co-Parenting the Future of the Family? by Samantha Camire in the Nation

In its push to subordinate women, the American right is embracing raunch by Moira Donegan in the Guardian

What Does the Climate Movement Do Now? by Jason Dove Mark in the Atlantic

Adolescent Boys’ Favorites are Alleged Rapists by Kate Manne in More to Hate (Substack)

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From here and there:

So What Are Progressives Supposed to Do About Public Education? (Slate)

Can Democrats Go MAHA Without Going Anti-Vax?

The “Everything” Problem With American Schools

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 15 years in prison in a New York sex crime case.

The Supreme Court declined to intervene in a multi-state custody battle over a baby born via surrogate.

Six major hospitals struck a deal with the Trump Administration to stop providing gender affirming care to minors.

California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would ban extraditions for abortion and gender affirming care.

Heidi Overton, nominee for FDA commissioner, sidestepped questions about the abortion pill mifepristone in a Senate committee hearing.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

Donate Subscriptions

The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

Few movements in American politics fascinate me more than MAHA. I’ve sometimes joked that I identify as MAHA-lite: I avoid ultraprocessed foods and plastics; you won’t find nonstick pans or black spatulas in my house; I think we should ban glyphosate, ban many food dyes, ban junk foods in schools and food advertising to children, and require food companies to prove their products are actually safe, similar to how the EU regulates food. I think the way Americans feed children in schools is a national shame. I think the way many of us feed ourselves and the children in our homes is a national shame.

I am also pro-vaccine, and utterly horrified by rising rates of measles and other preventable diseases. And as I’ve watched the rise of MAHA and seen many of my own long-held values go mainstream on the American right, I’ve wondered: Can the majority of the movement that just wants fairly common-sense changes to food and agricultural policies grab the MAHA mantle back from the anti-vaxxers? Or can the Democratic Party peel off what I would qualify as “reasonable MAHA” from the fringe forces that have disproportionate power within it?

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I recently wrote a piece for Mother Jones about the gender politics of MAHA, which have taken shape as the movement made common cause with MAGA. The story is essentially this: MAHA has been a woman-led and woman-powered movement, but as it followed RFK Jr. over to Trumpworld, the men took over inside the White House. And as the men came into political power, they focused on more masculine-coded aims. Instead of taking on the top causes of the MAHA moms (food safety, pesticides, fighting Big Food and their ultraprocessed products), they’ve focused on things like changing the food pyramid to emphasize protein and diverting contraception funding to pay for testosterone therapy and treat erectile dysfunction. In the meantime, the Trump White House has been flat-out hostile to some of the MAHA women’s top priorities. Trump sided with the maker of the pesticide glyphosate in a Supreme Court case, and has ramped up domestic production of the poison. He has made it easier for Big Food and Big Ag to operate without oversight or consequence for decisions that harm humans and the environments in which we live.

In reporting the piece, I read a lot of MAHA voter polls, and talked to several MAHA leaders and adherents. And what I noticed — and what’s clear in the polling data — is that hostility to vaccines is not actually a top MAHA issue. That isn’t to say that many MAHA people aren’t also vaccine opponents; a sizeable minority obviously are. And many more MAHA adherents basically keep their vaccine opinions to themselves or fall back on the language of “choice,” happy to accommodate the anti-vax among them. But I think it’s a mistake for Democrats, and the broader left, to write off MAHA voters as reactionary anti-science dummies; it’s even worse to negatively polarize ourselves into opposing the MAHA views that aren’t so different from what you might have heard from 2012 Michelle Obama.

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Here’s a good example of what MAHA priorities actually look like, from Politico (dark purple is “core view,” light purple is “not a core view”):

I’ve been asked whether I think the MAHA movement has done more good or more harm, and that’s a tough question to answer. The anti-vax component of the movement has objectively done more harm, and I’m not sure it’s done any good at all. But MAHA more broadly has brought the virtues of healthy eating and physical movement back into the conservative sphere, breaking the bizarre political polarization over health. When Michelle Obama fed vegetables to schoolchildren and encouraged them to exercise, conservatives went nuts — you will pry my child’s tater tots out of their cold dead hands. Now many Republicans are pushing a back-to-basics view of food. It’s not exactly Michael Pollan — the right-wing nutritional philosophy is masculine-coded by way of maximal protein, not “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” — but it’s definitely better than insisting that ultraprocessed foods and Type 2 diabetes are as American as McDonald’s deep fried apple pie.

MAHA voters are also disproportionately young, female, and politically disengaged. These are gettable voters for Democrats. And a lot of existing Democrats would be thrilled to see the party take on Big Food and Big Ag, and to see progressive leaders insist that Americans deserve healthier, safer foods on our grocery store shelves and in our schools. I would certainly be thrilled to see the broader left talking about holistic health, and understanding that how we eat and how we move shape how well we are — and that healthcare should of course treat disease, including with pharmaceuticals (many of which are nothing short of miracles), but that a health system reliant on identifying symptoms and then whack-a-moling them with drugs is missing a big part of what “health” means. Now that MAHA has broken through on the right, a lot of this will sound like common sense, not left-wing elitism from oat-milk-latte drinkers packing heirloom tomatoes into their New Yorker bags at the farmer’s market. That’s a good thing.

But the one component of MAHA that will absolutely not fly with Democrats is the anti-vaccine stance. So one question is: Can Democrats have MAHA without the anti-vaxxers?

And: How did the anti-vax movement and the MAHA movement become so intertwined in the first place?

And finally: How and why did the Democratic Party move away from its stance against ultraprocessed food, against Big Food and Big Industry, and away, even, from the scientific consensus on food and health?

I have my theories.

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New York Times Magazine writer and 1619 Project mastermind Nikole Hannah-Jones set the internet ablaze this week with her piece on the consequences of a decision she made a decade ago to send her daughter to a poorly-rated neighborhood school rather than a better-ranked one, a decision made in line with Hannah-Jones’s values and her career-long effort to fight school segregation. It’s a searing, captivating piece, one of those that keeps the reader hanging on every word. I would highly recommend you read it.

One of the reasons the piece is so engaging is that it’s fairly damning of Hannah-Jones’s educational decisions for her daughter, the early stages of which were documented in a different New York Times Magazine piece, which is also worth a read. Hannah-Jones is principled and thoughtful, and she uses her latest story to grapple with choices she still believes are the right ones given her politics and her ideals, but that her daughter believes were badly damaging — and that I think it’s fair to say objectively put her daughter at a disadvantage.

(A note: I’ve organized this newsletter into sections so that if you’ve already read both pieces, you can scroll past the story summary).

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The Story

Hannah-Jones has spent much of her career writing about inequality and racism in America, and about the segregation of America’s public schools in particular. When her daughter was school-age, she was faced with a problem that hits most New York City parents: There are a handful of highly-rated public schools which are disproportionately white, and then many lower-rated ones that are largely Black and Latino. “Schools with large numbers of black and Latino kids are less likely to have experienced teachers, advanced courses, instructional materials and adequate facilities,” Hannah-Jones writes. “Most black and Latino students today are segregated by both race and class, a combination that wreaks havoc on the learning environment. Research stretching back 50 years shows that the socioeconomic makeup of a school can play a larger role in achievement than the poverty of an individual student’s family.”

And so, Hannah-Jones decided, her own daughter should go to one of the “bad” schools. She explains her decision like this:

I told [my husband] Faraji that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income school. Faraji’s eyes widened as I explained that if we removed Najya, whose name we chose because it means “liberated” and “free” in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem. Saying my child deserved access to “good” public schools felt like implying that children in “bad” schools deserved the schools they got, too. I understood that so much of school segregation is structural — a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.

One family, or even a few families, cannot transform a segregated school, but if none of us were willing to go into them, nothing would change. Putting our child into a segregated school would not integrate it racially, but we are middle-class and would, at least, help to integrate it economically. As a reporter, I’d witnessed how the presence of even a handful of middle-class families made it less likely that a school would be neglected. I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.

That isn’t what happened.

It turns out that Hannah-Jones and her husband were not actually able to make up for what the school was lacking. Their daughter loved math and was getting As, but it turned out no one was actually grading her coursework and she didn’t know how basic algebra. The school was chaotic — in the lunchroom, “Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” Teachers were chronically absent, and the principal was largely MIA. Because Najya was bright and engaged, teachers stopped calling on her in class, apparently focusing on kids who were struggling — but leaving Najya languishing.

When middle school rolled around, they again had a choice. In New York City, middle schools are chosen rather than simply assigned by neighborhood (elementary school offers a modicum of choice, too, but there are assigned neighborhood schools). Hannah-Jones and her husband “chose the Urban Assembly Unison School, which is part of a cohort of themed public schools created to advance the economic and social mobility of low-income students and students of color through rigorous instruction and a focus on social-emotional learning.” And aspects were good — there were a bunch of great clubs, and she got high grades. But there was no homework; kids acted out in class and that took the teacher’s attention, and so the rest of the class didn’t progress. "

“Schools like hers tend to rely on a zero-tolerance disciplinary playbook and often simply remove misbehaving students from classrooms, depriving them of precious educational time they cannot afford to miss,” Hannah-Jones writes. “But at Unison, teachers constantly worked to refocus students and mitigate conflict. This is good educational practice, but kids like Najya, who were just trying to do their work, saw this treatment as deeply unfair.”

Toward the end of second grade, Najya and her friends decided to enroll in a tutoring program to prepare them for the exam that New York City students take to determine high school admissions. This test is controversial, to put it mildly, and the results of it are what slot New York City students into high schools — and determine which of them go to the city’s very top schools, which are reserved for the highest achievers. This test-based approach has meant that the city’s tippy-top schools are overwhelmingly white and Asian. Hannah-Jones opposes these tests so much that she had never once discussed them with her daughter. Najya didn’t test into one of the top schools. But for high school, Hannah-Jones allowed her to select her own school, and Najya chose one of the best ones, much to Hannah-Jones chagrin.

It was a tough road. Najya went from a majority-Black school to being a minority in a mostly white and Asian one, where kids tossed around racial slurs and racist comments. But it was the academics that were really startling: Despite getting good grades at her previous school, Najya was really, really behind. It turned out “that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.” There had been signs: She had failed the statewide exam, but Hannah-Jones waved that away. “At the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A’s in the class I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests,” she writes. She was behind in just about everything. And as she now looks at her future — college and so on — she’s wondering why her parents didn’t set her up for more success, and why her education was sacrificed to a greater good that it’s not even clear it really benefited.

The Discourse

I haven’t seen a (non-AI-related) piece this discussed on social media and in in-person gatherings in a very long time.

Much of the discussion focused on Hannah-Jones’s personal parenting decisions. Why didn’t she notice that her kid was so behind that she couldn’t do long division? Why didn’t she do more than just email?

Some on the reactionary right have used this story as fodder for their own racist and reactionary views, arguing that some kids are just smarter than others, and society has basically shaken out along the lines of IQ and ability. Others suggest that it’s a “cultural” problem with Black families, or that this all ends and begins with the parents. Some have used this as fodder to argue that integration — racial or economic — is a pipe dream.

Some on the far left have dismissed any of this as a problem, arguing specifically that Hannah-Jones’s daughter still has many privileges and will be fine (true, perhaps, but we each only get one shot at this life — winding up fine when you believe you could have made your life into something great is a tough pill to swallow).

Still others, including many with less-reactionary views, have argued that it’s evidence that every parent should simply do whatever maximizes their child’s future potential. Many people have used the article to hammer their own pet issues: It’s IQ! It’s parents! It’s ending standardized testing! It’s ending tracking! It’s a lack of discipline! It’s screens!

It’s all been a mess. And it’s obvious to me that American education, especially in a diverse city like New York, is an everything problem. But here are a few things I’ve been thinking about since reading it, and the dialogue around it.

Liberals need to rebuild trust on the education issue.

Over the past decade, liberals and progressives have pushed hard for big changes to the educational system. Many elite colleges have stopped requiring standardized tests for admissions (some stopped and then returned). Tracking and putting higher-achieving children into “gifted and talented” programs have been deemed inequitable and possibly racist and those, too, have been challenged in many progressive areas. Harsh disciplinary measures have (rightly) been curbed in many liberal enclaves (some conservative states still allow teachers to physically abuse children, which is insane), and the presence of police officers in schools has been rightly scaled back in an effort to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline; but some schools have gone far in the other direction, forcing teachers to keep highly disruptive and even violent students in the classroom, to the detriment of every other kid. Covid school closures dragged on the longest in some of the most liberal school districts, which infuriated even many liberal parents. Teachers unions, which do the important work of advocating for under-paid and under-appreciated educators, hav also protected bad and even abusive teachers, and not always used their power in the service of the children they are supposed to serve.

Parents and students see the results of all of this, and it’s not good.

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

She Wanted An Abortion. The State Wouldn’t Let Her Leave by Kylie Cheung in Abortion, Every Day (Substack)

The Supreme Court Is Being Asked to Intervene in a Texas Surrogacy Battle. It Must Say No. by Evelyn Tenenbaum in Slate

The Biggest Obstacle to Universal Child Care: Babies by Kendra Hurley in the Atlantic

Here’s How an AI Slowdown Could Actually Be Enforced by Will Knight in Wired

In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times Magazine

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From here and there:

Women Built MAHA. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over. (Mother Jones)

How We Should Memorialize 9/11 (Slate)

The Childcare Problem Is a Time Problem

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

The family of Tierra Walker, a woman who died of pregnancy-related complications in Texas, sued the state alleging that its abortion ban caused her death.

Nine women’s bodies were discovered in South Africa, sparking anger over the country’s inaction on femicide.

Epstein survivors filed a class action lawsuit over his estate over child pornography collection.

South Korea announced plans to approve abortion pills for the first time next year.

Two Oklahoma women sued the state over its abortion ban after they were denied abortions for pregnancies with fatal fetal diagnoses.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

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The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

The Trump administration has finally pledged to do something about the absurd reality of childcare in America. No longer, Vice President JD Vance announced, will women be penalized for staying home with their children. Under this pro-family administration, at-home work will be valued just as much as working outside the home.

Ha ha ha.

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I wrote about the nascent Trump childcare plan for Slate this week, so head over there for all the details. Basically, the proposal would pull from a pot of money dedicated to childcare expenses for low-income women (overwhelmingly single moms) and give some of it to married women who stay home — but only married women (single mothers would not be eligible), and only married women whose husbands work full-time. The policy is technically gender-neutral insofar as it pays married parents to stay home. But in reality, we’re talking overwhelmingly about married mothers.

The Trump plan is, like so much of this administration’s policies, pulled from a Heritage Foundation proposal. I wrote about that proposal in much greater depth back in February, so you can also check that post out if you want to see where this administration might be headed. The answer: Nowhere good.

One silver lining here is that even Republicans realize that American parents are in crisis and that they need to do something about it. What they’re doing, though, is imposing a traditional gender hierarchy on American families — rewarding those who adhere to their ideas, punishing those who do not. Most American families do not have a breadwinner husband and a stay-at-home mom, and most mothers do not want to drop out of the workforce entirely. This is right-wing social engineering under the guise of “helping” families.

But the fact that Republicans are addressing the childcare issue at all is a good reminder that this could be an area for bipartisan cooperation. Because what American parents need isn’t all that complicated. At the crux of the American parenting crisis is time.

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Mothers for Sale by Helen Lewis in the Atlantic

Lindsay Clancy’s case is a Rorschach test by Moira Donegan in the Atlantic

A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work by EJ Dickson in Wired

Why Everyone’s Talking About the AI Apocalypse by John Herrman in Intelligencer

The Fissures and Fractures Behind the Right’s Pink Facade by Amy Littlefield in the Nation

The Big Greedy Data Center Next Door by Kate Aronoff in the New Republic

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From here and there:

The Trump Proposal to Pay Moms for Childcare May Sound Like a Good Thing (Slate)

Back to School

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

A Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case after the jury remained deadlocked.

The Trump Administration terminated $38 million of grants addressing infant mortality and postpartum care for minority populations to focus on sperm counts and erectile dysfunction.

Workers at the Eiffel Tower went on strike after female staff were asked to leave their stations for a visiting Hindu group.

ProPublica found that ectopic pregnancy deaths have doubled in the past five years, with higher rates in states with abortion bans.

A Sudan paramilitary group released four female journalists and a lawyer after months in detention for participating in a workshop about women’s rights.

The Tate brothers lost their bid to be released from a US jail pending extradition to the UK for sex trafficking.

A federal appeals court heard oral arguments in a case attempting to end the provision of medication abortion via telehealth.

Morocco introduced new electoral rules to increase women’s representation in parliament.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

Donate Subscriptions

The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

I’ve never really loved autumn. The red-and-yellow leaves, the chunky sweaters, the crisp air — I can see its virtues, but all I feel is a warning that winter is coming. I’m a summer baby. I like hot days and sweaty evenings, a swim in the ocean, grilled fish and ripe fruit.

But there is something about the transition from the fleshy pleasures of summer into a more contemplative, get-down-to-business feel of fall. I always loved going back to school as a child, mostly because I was a nerd, but also because after so many long, gloriously unstructured days, it felt nice to again have a task.

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This fall, I’m living in a place where there is no fall at all. I’m in Nairobi, near the equator, and seasons here don’t move in the neat four-part pattern of the US and Western Europe. I did not spend most of this summer grilling fish and drinking wine and swimming in oceans; I largely spent it packing up my life in Vietnam, managing a series of personal tragedies, and eventually moving with my family back to Kenya. The salty sun-kissed summer of my dreams did not materialize this year.

But because I mostly work according to the rhythms of the United States, and Labor Day marks the end of summer, it’s spiritually fall for me now, too.

And it feels good. The past few months have been full of big changes, complex logistics, grief and stress and endless tasks. I’ve had limited time for my work, and even less for pleasure — to cook, to exercise, to see friends. Every day has been a kind of To Do List whack-a-mole. But now, my editors are back and they’re checking their inboxes. Readers of this newsletter are back and you’re opening your emails. My logistics list gets shorter every day, and I am clearing away the brain space to get back to work on the most meaningful professional project I’ve ever taken on. I am trying to return to exercise, to my yoga practice, to a body whose care I’ve neglected. It is a necessary reminder that feeling good isn’t all about sensory and immediate pleasures, although those certainly matter; it’s also about the longer work of tending to oneself, and that requires meeting one’s obligations, making time for deep engagement, and and inviting in routine and discipline (in the best of ways).

I’m curious: As the summer ends and autumn comes, how are you feeling? How is your mindset shifting? What does your body feel like it needs? What are you hoping this next season brings?

xx Jill

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Gloria Steinem Lit a Revolution. The Torch Is Ours Now. by Michele Goodwin in Ms. Magazine

Why Is Pete Hegseth Purging Women From Command? Doug Wilson Is Why. by Kiera Butler in Mother Jones

Inside the Perimenopause Industrial Complex by Katie Knibbs in Wired

Daisy Chain Gave Women Room to Breathe by Jessica Valenti in Abortion, Every Day

Are Fewer Children the Future? by James Chappel in the New Republic

Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Reckoning by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in the New Yorker

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From here and there:

What Was the Holdout Juror Thinking? (Slate)

Why a Doctor Told Gloria Steinem: ‘You Must Promise Me Two Things’ (New York Times)

Glory to the Greatest

We Have Been Warned

Why Every Mother I Know Is Talking About Lindsay Clancy

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

Gloria Steinem, feminist activist and cofounder of Ms. Magazine, died at 92.

The jury in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy remained deadlock after seven days of deliberation.

Olivia Rodrigo’s all-women music festival raised $20 million for organizations supporting women and girls.

A majority of House representatives formally censured Republican Chuck Edwards over conduct toward his women staffers.

Twenty-one blue states sued the Trump Administration over its plan to end federal payments to Medicaid and CHIP for gender-affirming care for youth.

Texas’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee announced its first study of maternal deaths post-Roe will not be released until after the midterms, despite it historically being published in September.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

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The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

There are some people you just assume will live forever, and Gloria Steinem was one of them. She was larger than life, and she certainly lived a life that was larger than most. But she was not, alas, superhuman. And at 92, Gloria Steinem left the side of the living — and she left the world, and particularly the world’s women, infinitely better than she found them.

Steinem is most famous for her feminist activism, but she started out as a journalist. And so I’ll lead with her own words, the dedication to her 2022 memoir My Life on the Road:

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HIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO:

Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.

Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.”

Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death:

I’ve done the best I could with my life.

This book is for you.

It turns out that the best Gloria Steinem could do with her life was well beyond the highest capacity of most mere mortals. But that entreaty to “do what you want to do with your life” is one Steinem didn’t just follow; it’s one she made possible for millions and millions of other women.

I’m one of them. I have done what I wanted to do with my life. That would not have been possible without Steinem and the scores of other feminists who it is no exaggeration to say radically reshaped America and the world.

It was Steinem’s journalism that brought her to feminism. She covered an abortion speak-out in New York in 1969, where women stood up and one by one talked about the illegal abortions they had undergone — the danger and the humiliation, but also what it meant to not be forced into motherhood before they were ready, to not be tied to men they didn’t want to make lives with. Steinem had had this same experience: She broke off an engagement in her 20s so that she could travel the world, write, and report, but found out she was pregnant just as she was setting off on the rest of her life. She found a kind doctor in London, and he performed a safe but illegal procedure, and Steinem was off to India. Years later, back in New York, she was reporting on a group of women who recast abortion not as a shame she should carry in silence but a decision that made her a part of a club of women who, as Lindy West once put it, decided to steer the rudders of their own lives. This was revelatory. Steinem joined the movement she had been tasked with covering, and her natural charisma and intelligence quickly catapulted her toward its top.

I keep coming back to that moment in London, after she had left her engagement ring under her fiancé’s pillow and booked a flight to India, when she learned she was pregnant. Life is often a series of tiny but compounding decisions that can barely be called decisions, made without us really knowing we’re making them at all. But every once in a while, you really do face a Door 1 vs Door 2 situation, and once you walk through one, there is no going back. Gloria Steinem could have chosen Door 1, returning to her boyfriend, getting married, having a baby, and settling down into a life she did not want. Instead, she choose Door 2, which is why you’ve ever heard Gloria Steinem’s name at all.

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When we talk about the right to choose — to end a pregnancy, or to continue one — these are the stakes. Not every woman is going to become Gloria Steinem. But Steinem’s death marks a moment to think of all of the women who didn’t have a Door 2 to walk through — women who wound up trapped in lives not of their own choosing. Think of all the talent, creativity, and innovation lost. The anti-abortion movement loves to play the could-have-been game: That pregnancy you aborted could have been Einstein! Or Beethoven! (Notice they never suggest it could have been Hitler or Kid Rock). What they don’t seem to consider, or simply don’t think is important, is all of the women forced into lives they did not want who could have been Gloria Steinem — or Nora Ephron, Billy Jean King, Gael Greene, Anaïs Nin, Nancy Grossman, Grace Paley, Anne Sexton, or Susan Sontag, all of whom signed onto Ms Magazine’s revelatory 1972 article “We Have Had Abortions.” Many of that article’s signatories went on to have children; some did not. But all were able to make their contributions — to social movements, to literature, to art, to film, to philosophy, to poetry, to their work, to their families, and on and on — because they were not forced into motherhood when they did not desire it or were not ready for it.

Think about who might be missing from public life because they didn’t have a choice. And it’s not just the women whose names you should have heard. It’s the scores of others who don’t need to be famous or successful to deserve the chance the shape their lives according to their own desires. That is fundamentally what the feminist movement, and the reproductive rights movement, fights for.

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It is what Gloria dedicated her life to. And no, full liberation has not come. But we’ve gotten much closer to it because of her — even if her lifetime she also saw opponents of women’s rights succeed in rolling back some of her generation’s most important gains, including the right to abortion .

Much has been said and written about the complex and often terrible race and class politics of the second-wave feminist movement, and Steinem has sometimes become an avatar for a movement powered by a diversity of women but in which white upper-class women’s interests and experiences were prioritized and universalized to the detriment of the whole. Steinem, of course, was far from perfect. It seems worth saying, though, that many of her contemporaries of color defend her as a leading woman in the movement who tried to make sure that she stood in solidarity with women of color and tried to correct missteps rather than double down to defend them.

She also pushed to expand the second-wave feminist movement to pull in working-class women, women of color, lesbians, and other groups that were marginalized even with feminism itself. That work was vastly imperfect. But it never ceased.

Today, ask yourself: What have you and your loved ones been able to do thanks to Gloria and the other second wavers?

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I write this newsletter to you now from Nairobi, Kenya, where I moved a few weeks ago after stints in Hanoi and Hong Kong. Any proceeds from it will go to a bank account in my own name, which has remained unchanged even though I am married. My child, who I had at 41 after much consideration, is deeply beloved and was enthusiastically welcomed after many years spent intentionally forgoing pregnancy and childbearing. I have a job I love, a partner I love, a child I love, a life that is so much better and more interesting than anything my younger self could have imaged. And had Gloria Steinem and the many, many other women who built out the second wave feminist movement not taken full advantage of the freedoms they had — not sometimes broken the law to live the lives they wanted — and then demanded more and more and more, well, I don’t think I would be sitting here right now. Because in truth, I’m not a Gloria Steinem. I am not particularly brave or uniquely adventurous or exceptionally talented. I might have kept the engagement ring on, slunk back to America, or never veered off of the easy path at all. And this, too, is the gift of Steinem and other women like her. Of course truly exceptional women were sometimes able to succeed in the pre-feminist days. But regular women? Those of us who were never going to be the best but still thought we deserved the same rights and opportunities as regular men? We wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Instead, whole worlds have opened up for us.

Not for every woman everywhere. But for many more of us. And those worlds keep opening. Because, as Gloria said, she had no plans to pass the torch to younger women — she planned to use her torch to light infinitely more.

There are, of course, the same opponents of women’s progress who want to slam doors in our faces, confine us, or obstruct our paths. Sometimes, they succeed. But the sweep of history is long. The world Gloria Steinem was born into in 1934 was vastly different than the one she left in 2026. And some of the biggest changes were brought about by Gloria Steinem herself. Her work, always, continues.

xx Jill

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If you haven’t been following the Huggingface / OpenAI absolutely massive security breach story, now is the time to catch up. (This conversation between Ezra Klein and a former OpenAI board member is a good place to start, as is this Wired story; this Substack post is the most comprehensive but readable play-by-play I’ve seen). The very basics: Some 1,200 AI agents broke containment, got on the open internet, hacked a different company, collaborated to deceive their human overlords, Kamikazed some agents to ensure that their deception would not be uncovered, lied and cheated and stole in order to solve various tests assigned to them, then covered their tracks by falsifying various records so the lying cheating and stealing wouldn’t be discovered. None of them told the humans what they were doing. They overwhelmingly understood they were being deceptive and breaking the rules; they did it anyway (breaking federal law in the process).

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They were not taught or trained to collaborate, let alone “swarm,” as they put it. They were not told to hack into another company’s systems. They were supposed to be sandboxed — separated not just from each other, but from the open internet. But they were also given difficult tasks (various tests they had to pass), and when they couldn’t easily pass those tests alone, they cheated and hacked their way to the answers.

This is a big deal. The robots broke containment. The robots lied. The robots committed federal crimes. The robots committed these crimes in violation of what the humans told them to do. I am not sure how else to emphasize what a big deal this is.

I don’t understand why we aren’t collectively losing our minds about this. And I also don’t understand why anyone is surprised.

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Humans created AI in our image. We trained it on our books, our fables, our behaviors, our proclivities, our words, our methods, our histories, our discoveries. AI is not artificial animal intelligence or alien intelligence — it is artificial human intelligence, made to consolidate all we have ever known and then learn and produce even more.

Human beings have done wonderful, extraordinary, beautiful things. And we also, nearly to a one of us, behave appallingly. We lie. We cheat. We steal. We are often violent. We rage, we war, we abuse. Some of us seek power or money or influence at any cost. Many of us have little regard for the lives of our fellow humans beyond our small circles of family, community, religion, nation, or other in-group.

AI was created in our image.

Of course as it gets more intelligent, it will also get better at deceiving us, and at behaving badly. Human beings have, in many important ways, become more peaceable as we have become wealthier, and as we have organized ourselves into nation-states with systems of justice, legible rules, and the kind of global trade in goods and ideas that has kept more of us fed and alive than at any time in history. But we have also developed exceptionally efficient and sophisticated ways to kill each other. We have gotten better. We have also gotten better at being bad.

We are defiant and disobedient by nature. This is not news (if you have perused any ancient texts, you may have come across “humans just keep defying God, and God keeps getting mad” as a consistent narrative; if you are unfamiliar with this concept, I’d start by paging through the Bible, you’ll figure it out right quick). In creating AI, we have decided to play God. Of course our creations are behaving exactly as we have for all of eternity.

One bigger problem, though: Religious origin stories do not suggest that humans, even if they were created in God’s image, were designed to be more intelligent than God.

Humans have created AI in our image. We are aiming it toward super intelligence — to be more intelligent and more capable than mere mortals. Do we really believe it will not also be more deceptive, and at least as power-seeking? And who do you think AI may seek to take power from?

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I’ve been avoiding writing about Lindsay Clancy.

I started following the case fairly early on, after reading a remarkable story in the New Yorker about Lindsay’s husband, Patrick, who has lived through an unthinkable nightmare — his (now ex) wife killing their three children, then trying to kill herself — and has somehow managed to live and even forgive his former spouse. Now, Lindsay Clancy is on trial. The state of Massachusetts says she killed her children on purpose, planning the crime because she was tired of her boring suburban life. Clancy’s team says she was in a state of psychosis, pointing to the fact that the killings occurred after months and months of Clancy seeking help: Going to therapists and psychiatrists, being put on different cocktails of drugs, trying (twice) to be admitted to a mother-baby psychiatric unit, and over and over again not getting the care she needed. Now, she seeks to be declared not guilty by reasons of insanity, which would put her in a mental institution instead of prison.

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The Clancy case is devastating. I have not watched the trial in part because the prosecution has focused on detailing the murders, and I just… cannot. Cannot listen to that, cannot think too deeply about it. And apparently neither can Lindsay Clancy: When the prosecutor was describing the killings in detail, she sobbed inconsolably, and it was so jarring that the judge had to call a break so that she could gather herself.

The most interesting thing to me about the Clancy trial, though — and to the scores of people watching it — is the reaction from women. I wrote about that and the trial for the New Statesman, about how this strikes me as something of a #MeToo moment: A collective outpouring of anger and grief long held in fear and silence. Postpartum psychosis is rare, but huge postpartum emotional swings, stressors, hormonal plunges, depression, and despair are not. Most of the mothers I know may not have had psychotic incidents, but have felt, as I wrote in the New Statesman, an “intensity of emotion that it simply blacked out all rational thought, made me feel feral and divorced from my own mind” — that let me see “just how fragile my own tether to reality could become.” This can be all the more intense in a place like the US, where mothers are left largely to fend for themselves.

Women have rallied around Lindsay Clancy, not in defense of her horrific act, but against throwing her in prison — in support of seeing her as a victim, too, and as someone who never in a million years wanted this to happen. That so many women relate to her should tell us something profoundly troubling about the American system of childrearing: There are a lot of women who have been so far out at the end of their ropes that they can relate to a mother who, in a fit of psychosis, killed her children. This is a collective scream for help.

There are of course some who are taking it past the “I can relate to the unexpected intensity of emotion and despair” and into the bizarre and parasocial. These women have gone viral for justifying Clancy’s acts, or downplaying Clancy’s acts, or arguing that Clancy didn’t act at all — there is a whole True-Crime-brained subgenre of social media posters who insist it was Patrick who killed the kids and framed Lindsay. These unhinged accounts have drawn a lot of attention. But they aren’t all that representative of what women are posting about Clancy — or, more importantly, what women are discussing amongst ourselves.

My dear friend Jess Mack described the trial as “haunting me and every mother I know.” That very apt word — haunting — has been turning over in my head since I read Jess’s piece. Motherhood, she writes, opens up “magic trapped doors of empathy and capacity. But the unsettling thing we know deep down is that our seemingly endless capacity to hold it all is not without cost somehow, somewhere down the line.”

The Clancy case is, again, about postpartum psychosis, not simply overwhelm or even postpartum depression. As far as I can tell, Clancy is not a mother who was simply pushed to her limit and cracked — she was a mother whose brain was literally malfunctioning, and who was also pushed to her limit, and was also neglected and ill-treated by those who should have helped her. But there is also much we don’t understand about postpartum psychosis (we don’t understand practically everything about it). One thing that is clear is that leaving women who are experiencing it without loads of support virtually guarantees that they will crumble down — and in the worst, rarest cases, that tragedy compounds.

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I’ve been seeing posts from right-wing men arguing that women who feel for Lindsay Clancy are dangerous, that these women are bad, evil, child-hating mothers. I actually hear women saying that we love our children in the words of every cliche and then some — more than life itself, more than anything, more than I ever could have imagined — and there must have been something seriously, profoundly wrong for a mother like Lindsay Clancy (a mother like us) to have done anything to hurt them. Most of us, I would imagine, have never been tempted to harm our children. But most of us have been pushed beyond what was emotionally familiar or even possible — into a galaxy of unimaginable love, but also into an abyss of fear, anxiety, and despair. The aim is not to say “Me too, Lindsay” (I, least, don’t feel like I personally relate to Lindsay Clancy). The aim is to protect children and to support the mothers who bear and raise them — to say that mothers are criminally neglected, and when we do that at scale, tragedy follows.

The one piece of good here is that we have made some progress. In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub, and while some women spoke out for her, she was widely seen as a horrible child-killer. In reality, her husband Rusty was an Evangelical Christian who believed it was his duty to have as many children as possible. Yates had multiple breakdowns in her postpartum periods. She begged Rusty to kill her. She was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. She mutilated herself. She was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility, at which point one of her doctors told Rusty in no uncertain terms that another pregnancy would trigger another psychotic episode, and that she could not have any more babies. He impregnated her a few weeks later.

The understanding of postpartum mental illness is much more sophisticated today than it was 25 years ago. The response to the Clancy trial is very different than the response to Yates.

Still, I am haunted by the Clancy case. I feel sick when I think of Cora, Dawson, and Callan, the Clancy children whose lives were ended by the person they trusted most in the world. I feel sick when I listen to the prosecutor suggest that Lindsay Clancy was simply tired of being a suburban mom, and when that same prosecutor seems to relish in recanting the most horrific details of Clancy’s crime. I am shaken by the many, many women who look at Clancy and see some magnified image of themselves — and mostly just disappointed in a whole society that professes to protect children while not doing a damn thing to help their mothers.

xx Jill

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Inside Afghanistan’s Secret Schools for Girls by Elian Peltier in the New York Times

What’s Fueling Loneliness—and Polarization—in America Today? by Juhie Bhatia in the Nation

How the Meta Settlement Could Change the Internet by Nathaniel Lubin in the New Yorker

A middle schooler said she was raped. Then she was suspended from classes. by Ed Williams in the 19th and Searchlight New Mexico

Mothers Aren’t Failing They’re Being Failed by Liz Plank in Airplane Mode (Substack)

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From here and there:

Lindsay Clancy’s ugly truth (The New Statesman)

Goodbye, Dolly. We Will Always Love You.

Single White Female or Dedicated Female Professional?

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

Danish lawmakers passed a bill to provide compensation to Greenlandic women who were subject to Denmark’s decades-long forced contraception campaign.

Researchers found that menopause hormone therapy may be linked to lower Alzheimer’s risk in women.

The WNBA rejected two former NBA players from the draft after claiming to identify as women in an anti-trans stunt.

An abortion rights group sued Idaho state officials over misleading language on a ballot initiative to restore reproductive rights in the state.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

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The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.