Month: March 2019

Source: In These Times

An interview with historian Alice Kessler-Harris on how the past 30 years have changed women’s workplace demands.

In 1981, Alice Kessler-Harris’ Women Have Always Worked delivered a short, sharp and lasting rebuke to standard U.S. histories that confined women to the domestic sphere. In five tightly argued but wide-ranging chapters, the book laid out the full scope of women’s work since the nation’s founding, from political activism to social reform, wage labor to household management, demonstrating that women have always been central to families, communities and the nation. Kessler-Harris, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia University and an expert in both women’s and labor history, has now updated the book to address the vast changes in women’s professional and public lives over the past 35 years. read more

Source: The Intercept

EIGHT MEMBERS OF Congress have taken a pledge to work to bring ongoing U.S. global military conflicts to a “responsible and expedient” end, the result of a first-of-its kind lobbying effort by military veterans on Capitol Hill.

The pledge was written and organized by a group called Common Defense, made up of veterans and military families, which advocates for scaling back U.S. military commitments overseas. Common Defense boasts of more than 20,000 veteran members in all 50 states, and it threw its endorsement behind almost 30 candidates in the last midterm election cycle. read more

Source: The Nation

Around the world, a stunning one in five children are growing up in a war zone today. Neither their governments, nor humanitarian-aid groups, nor their families can guarantee the basic elements of survival, much less anything like a happy childhood. That’s according to a bleak accounting by human-rights researchers that reveals that in many regions, it’s not soldiers who suffer the most on the front lines, but the estimated 420 million children who live in conflict-affected areas—about a fifth of all youth. The total count, drawn from an international database, represents an increase of 30 million between 2016 and 2017. The humanitarian group Save the Children (STC) estimates that conflict now impacts children at the highest rate in a generation. read more