gender & feminism

Sunday Singalong: Violeta Parra

OK, this one is Violeta Parra, an incredibly haunting Chilean folk singer who saw folk music as a “weapon against oppression”.  Yeah which revolutionary didn’t? She and her children became the song-writers of the left-wing political movement of her country…. Read More ›

BFTP: The myth of bra burning feminists

In 1968, some activists demonstrated against the Miss America beauty pageant and threw objects of “female oppression” – bras, high-heeled shoes, girdles, curlers – into a trash can. They were arguing about liberation – there was never any bra-burning – but the myth of the feminist as a bra-burner was created by the western media. There was also a crucial word missed in the description of the trashed bras.

“I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because [Lego]’s just so good for little girls’ brains”

“If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot. A neuroscientist at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, Eliot is the author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, a 2009 survey of hundreds of scientific papers on gender differences in children

BFTP – Friday Hoyden: reading in public

This post is part of our Summer Slowdown repost series, and is revisited in solidarity with 15 year old Reddit user Lunam: comments on the original version of this post in October 2008 showed how often a dim view is taken of women reading in public.