Women

Feminist and women's health issues

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International Women's Day promotes diversity, equality in Connecticut​

​Daily Campus, March 2016
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"​Women of all ages, colors and walks of life met Wednesday morning in the Old Judiciary Room of the State Capitol to celebrate Women’s Day with the Connecticut Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. Compared to the black and white photos of aging male officials that seemed to adorn every wall, the crowd of female professionals and students was positively vibrant.

Monica Raye Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, a national collective working to advance reproductive rights for women of color, opened her keynote speech, “Intersectional Feminism 101,” with a chant that soon morphed into a rousing singalong.
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“We must fight for freedom. We must fight for justice. It will take all of us to get to the other side,” Simpson said with the crowd."

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State legislators announce proposal for new affirmative consent bill
Daily Campus, Feb. 2016
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"Two state legislators announced the proposal of a new affirmative consent bill at the University of Connecticut Women’s Center Friday.

The bill, co-sponsored by state Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly, and state Rep. Gregory Haddad, D-Mansfield, would require university disciplinary boards in Connecticut to determine if there was “unambiguous and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity” when trying sexual assault cases, according to a Feb. 12 press release. This would apply to both public and private institutions of higher learning.

Flexer said the new legislation is intended to build on the sexual assault awareness programs signed into law by Gov. Dannel Malloy in 2014 by standardizing colleges’ definitions of consent.
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“One of the really important things is the training around consent and talking with students when they initially come to campus, and during their time on campus, about what consent is and what it looks like,” Flexer said. “A student who attends college in the state of Connecticut should have the same expectation of safety as a student who currently attends UConn.”

Man Up: Feminist scholar Michael Kimmel speaks on gender equality
Daily Campus, Feb. 2016

​"When Michael Kimmel, an internationally recognized feminist scholar from Stony Brook University, asked the women in the audience to raise their hands if they intended to have a successful career after graduating from the University of Connecticut, no one held back.

When he asked how many of those women’s mothers had worked full-time for at least 10 uninterrupted years, many of those hands fell away.

​After he raised the question of whose grandmothers had worked outside the home, less than a third of the hands remained. 

Then he asked himself a question: can women have it all, a fulfilling career and a supportive family life?

“The answer is no. Women can’t have it all because men do. We’re the ones who have careers and come home to a warm supportive family because women work the second shift,” Kimmel, the founder of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, said. “We’re going to have to do something different.”

Review: Jon Krakauer captures campus rape culture in action

Daily Campus, Jan. 2016
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“Jon Krakauer’s latest book about the epidemic of rape on college campuses is hard to get through.

While “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town” is, at it’s heart, a journalistic investigation into what went wrong at the University of Montana and the surrounding town of Missoula, Montana, it reads like a novel. This was the best and the worst thing about it.

On the one hand, “Missoula’s” engaging narrative style brought the legal process surrounding the all too typical cases of sexual assault on UM’s campus to life in a way on par with the work of bestselling authors like Jodi Picoult. By allowing the victims, assailants and members of law enforcement to speak for themselves through direct quotes mined from taped confessions, court transcripts and interviews, Krakauer leaves nothing to interpretation.
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This also left few questions as to what happened to University of Montana students Kerry Barrett, Kelsey Belnap, Allison Huget, Hillary McLaughlin, Cecilia Washburn* and Keely Williams at the hands of Missoula’s star football players. Their intensely personal accounts of sexual assault, and the heartbreaking cruelty inflicted upon them by the “Griz Nation” and the Missoula community for having the audacity to demand their assailants be held accountable, were too real to turn away from."