February: Cleveland, Columbus, Phoenix, Canyon TX  March: Dayton, Louisville, Napa

Yesterday, commenter Kathleen left the following response on Violet’s post about the murder of Aasiya Hassan:
Can we stop calling it an “honor” killing? There’s nothing honorable about it. I propose we change it to vanity killing or some other term that more accurately describes the male arrogance behind these kinds of murders.
There’s the rub: culturally-specific details aside, crimes of violence against women are almost invariably crimes of vanity — for what are passion and despair and rage and jealousy but vanity?
As The New Agenda embarks on an initiative to have …

Aasiya and Muzzammil Hassan at the Bridges TV studio
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Police say an upstate New York television executive who sought to improve the image of Muslims in the media beheaded his wife after she filed for divorce.
Muzzammil Hassan (moo-ZAHM’-mel HAH’-sahn) is charged with murdering his wife, Aasiya (AH’-see-ya) Hassan. Police say she had an order of protection against her husband and he had been kicked out of the house they shared in Orchard Park, near Buffalo.
They accuse the 44-year-old Hassan of cutting off his wife’s head at the …

For many years a broad coalition of groups has worked together to advocate for tougher laws against hate crimes – all hate crimes. One of the primary goals of this coalition is to expand the legal definition of hate crimes to include those who are victimized not only because of race, religion, or national origin, but actual or perceived gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability. Current federal law does not provide authority for involvement in these four categories of cases at all.
The coalition of groups is a “dream …

Women in the U.S. are being disproportionately affected by the recession which has been handed to us by the banks and Wall Street. Their extraordinary and unabashed greed has put us all in jeopardy. Top Wall Street executives and automakers, when bellying up to the trough and taking a publicly-funded hand out, may have to rein themselves in and make do with a $500,000 salary. (Perhaps they saved something from the prior years’ $15 million-plus bonuses and can dip that to make ends meet.)
But women may lose their …

Gloria Feldt is an activist, author (she most recently co-wrote Kathleen Turner’s memoir, Send Yourself Roses), blogger (Heartfeldt Politics), and former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Originally published at Heartfeldt Politics.
Gloria Feldt
Seems like the 787 billion dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus package Congress has passed and sent to the President’s desk is just good enough. Though notable for its size, it doesn’t advance bold initiatives that could define Obama’s presidency, nor does it grapple with big, confounding issues like universal health care. …

What Every Woman Should Know is a bi-weekly series on American Women’s History.
Samplers are an aspect of history that is exclusively associated with women. As many feminists have noted, sewing has traditionally been women’s work, and it has been the assignment of just this kind of tedious, time-consuming labor that has contributed to our inability to participate meaningfully in the public sphere in ways that men have, among other consequences we’ve suffered. Few will argue that having literally clothed all of humanity for millennia, we have universally been a kind …

Boca Raton, Florida
Ophelia is taking the night off this week, but she’ll be back next week with a special guest (Peggy Klaus – more details to come) so stay tuned!
Not coincidentally, Amy Siskind, founder and president of The New Agenda, will be the guest speaker at the Republican Women’s Club of Boca Raton on Wednesday, February 18. The meeting starts at 6:00 pm and will be held at the Broken Sound Country Club. Visit their website for details or contact Lisa Macci at 561-252-8528 or lisamacci@msn.com.

Judith Hope is the founder of the The Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee, whom we posted about previously in our “Women Who Help Women” series. Kirsten Gillibrand
I want to tell you about my good friend Kirsten Gillibrand, and why I think she will be an outstanding US Senator for NY State.
I got to know Kirsten in the early days of organizing for the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee, a group with an impressive track record of electing progressive democratic women to state and local office.
Kirsten was a successful young corporate lawyer in …

As we discussed in our recent blog piece,The Fraternity of Leadership continues:
Our country is an a financial mess of epic proportion. And who got us here? A fraternity of leadership that has led our country astray.
In that piece, we described a “fraternity prank” where Merrill Lynch moved up their bonus payout date ahead of their planned merger with Bank of America, in order to payout billions of dollars in bonuses (after losing $27 billion for fiscal 2008).
Well, just when we thought that the fraternity pranks could not get any worse, …