The Year in Women

2022 was a terrible year for women's rights. But a few good things happened, too.

Photo by Lindsey LaMont on Unsplash

Happy 2023, readers (can you still say Happy New Year on January 5th?). Let’s be honest: It’s been a rough one for women around the world, from American women who lost our right to abortion to Afghan women who have lost just about every right imaginable. But there are some bright spots, too. So here’s the rundown of how 2020 left the women of the world.

The Good

• Colombia expands abortion rights. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Colombian feminists, the country’s supreme court decriminalized abortion through 24 weeks of pregnancy. For the past decade, Latin American feminist groups have been making major reproductive rights gains, and Colombia has often been at the forefront. This decision is, hopefully, a sign of what else is to come on the continent.

• France expands abortion rights. On the tail of the US Supreme Court ending the era of legal abortion in America, the French looked at their own abortion law and said, nope. The country extended the period during which abortion is allowed without exception from 12 to 14 weeks (abortions are still allowed after 14 for a long list of reasons), and later enshrined abortion rights into the French constitution.

• Mexican women support American ones. In 2021, abortion became legal throughout Mexico, thanks to a decision from the Mexican Supreme Court. When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and American women — particularly those in the southern part of the country — found themselves stripped of their reproductive rights, Mexican feminist groups were ready and waiting. A new abortion underground has emerged, with feminists in Mexico leading the way and helping their sisters up north reclaim ownership of their bodies and lives.

• Brittney Griner was released. The WNBA player was convicted in a sham trial and sentenced to spend years in a Russian penal colony. After 10 months in captivity, she was released in a prisoner swap negotiated by the Biden administration.

• Paid family leave expanded in liberal US states. Despite a continued failure to implement paid family leave at the federal level, some states have taken matters into their own hands, and several enacted paid family leave policies last year.

• US soccer came to an equal pay agreement. After it came to light that the more-successful US Women’s Soccer team was making far less than the men’s, female players and their supporters demanded a change. In 2022, they won, with the US Soccer Federation agreeing to pay the women’s team fairly.

• An end to workplace sexual harassment NDAs. Congress also passed, and Joe Biden signed, a bill many years in the making, and responsive to so many #MeToo stories that were silenced because of nondisclosure agreements. The law bars employers from requiring employees to sign NDAs for workplace sexual harassment and assault.

• India recognizes marital rape and expands abortion rights. India’s high court held last year that marital rape is rape under Indian law, and that abortion rights extend to 24 weeks, regardless of a woman’s marital status.

• Spain expands abortion rights for teenagers and passes a menstrual leave law. Spain became the first European country to offer paid leave for people who struggle with painful periods. The country also began allowing abortions for 16- and 17-year-olds without parental consent.

The Bad

• The Taliban create a government of misogynist terror. In an entirely predictable outcome, the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan has meant that one of the most brutally repressive and misogynist regimes in the world has returned to its brutality and oppression of women. Women are trapped out home, barred from going out without a male companion. Women cannot attend university; girls cannot attend secondary school. Maternal mortality rates are soaring, and life has generally become close to unbearable for any women or girls who wish to live with basic rights and dignity.

• The United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the era of legal abortion in the United States. You’re reading this newsletter so I’m guessing you’re pretty up-to-date on what that’s looked like, but it’s meant that at least 13 states now criminalize abortion. As a direct result of these bans, dozens of women have nearly died of pregnancy complications that went untreated, because standard treatment protocol would involve ending the pregnancy, which could send a doctor to jail. Many women have wound up in the ICU; some have lost their uteruses or ovaries, or otherwise seen their fertility ended or diminished, all wholly unnecessarily. An untold number of women have been forced into parenthood before they were ready; some have died of preventable pregnancy-related causes. We are still just beginning to understand the scope of the damage this ruling has caused.

• Poland jails an abortion rights activist. Poland, a model nation for the American anti-abortion movement, has continued its crackdown on abortion rights and its descent into autocratic government by conducting a show trial of a feminist activist. Multiple Polish women have died because of the country’s near-total ban on abortion.

• Iran cracks down on rights protesters. I debated putting this one in the “good” section, because it’s equal parts inspiring and awful. After a young woman named Mahsa Amini died while in the custody of the Iranian morality police, anti-regime protests sprung up all over the country. These “Women Life Freedom” protests are among the most courageous and inspiring I’ve seen in my lifetime, with women and men alike demanding an end to the mandatory hijab laws and the morality police that enforce them, as well as democratic changes in Iran. Across the nation, they risk their lives showing up on the streets again and again and again, in violation of the law. Women are taking off their headscarves, burning hijabs, cutting their hair. But more than ten thousand protesters have been arrested.Some, including many children, have been killed or sentenced to death. This regime is not taking this in stride, and is enacting mass violence to maintain its misogynist authoritarian rule.

• Gender-based violence increased. We know that the pandemic was truly awful for intimate partner violence rates, as a great may women and children found themselves stuck at home with abusive partners, parents, and other family members, who were in turn exceedingly stressed out. Since 2020, rates of gender-based violence have ticked up, at the same time as investment in non-Covid emergencies has ticked down.

The Hopeful

And yet. Yes, the list of bad things isn’t just long, the bad things are really bad (in case you can’t tell, I really stretched the “good” list and truncated the “bad” so as not to be so horribly depressing). There have been so many times this year when I have felt profound despair.

But I am also positive that my despair, and yours, is not a luxury we can afford. Despair is deadening, quieting. Of course we are entitled to our sadness and our rage. But as long as we have some fight left, we are not entitled to give up and to allow others to fight for us.

One wonderful thing about getting to report on women’s rights issues is that I often get to close my laptop, ignore the headlines, and talk to people who are actually doing the work — the work to get safe abortion into women’s hands; the work to change restrictive laws that make women second-class citizens; the work to topple old ideologies and brutal governments. There are so so so so many of these people, and you’ll never read most of their names in the newspaper. But they’re working, dismantling, rebuilding.

Social change on the scale that feminist movements demand is enormous, and in the grand scheme of history, it is nothing short of miraculous how much has been accomplished in just the last century. But of course, none of it happened because of a miracle. Every centimeter women have gained was clawed for by millions, who understood that they were fighting for their own rights, yes, but that the feminist project will not be achieved in their lifetime. They understood that changing the fundamentals of society — and little is as fundamental as what we expect of men and women — is generational work. One year is nothing. This work extends well beyond the horizon of each of our lives.

There is going to be a push-pull of history. Right now, we’re in a pullback.

But nothing is forever.

And nothing worthwhile was ever easy.

xx Jill