Three blogs from this week that you should read today, on women and girls:
“When girls bully girls and women bully women” – Eugene Cho
- Did you know that a girl is bullied every 7 minutes in America?
- Almost 1/3 of girls are directly involved in bullying – and on a regular basis. About 77% of students have been verbally bullied in some way.
- 43% of girls fear harassment in school bathrooms.
And the numbers go on.
“Violence Against Women Doesn’t Discriminate” – Sandi Villareal
When you hold a woman’s trembling hand as a nurse collects evidence from her brutal rape, it doesn’t much matter her sexual preference, ethnicity or legal status. When you sit behind a desk in Washington, D.C., apparently it does.
The House of Representatives passed on Wednesday a version of the Violence Against Women Act that would limit protections to immigrant, LGBT and American Indian abuse victims. House Republicans argue that Democrats are politicizing a non-issue, but stating fact is not partisan politics.
“Enough: Or, why we should all be laughing hysterically in the magazine aisle” – Rachel Held Evans
The brave women of Scripture—from Ruth to Deborah to Mary Magdalene to Mary of Bethany—remind me that there’s no one right way to be a woman, and that these images of perfection with which we are confronted every day are laughable to those of us who are in on the big secret: We are already enough.
And a favorite, often-referenced, quote to round it off:
Perhaps it is no wonder that women were first at the cradle and last at the cross. They had never known a man like this man. There never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made sick jokes about women; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took women’s questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out a certain sphere for women; who never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took women as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its point or pungency from female perversity. Nobody could get from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything funny or inferior about women.
– Dorothy Sayers, Are Women Human?