The Radium Girls

The Radium Girls documents the war women factory workers health battle | Life | Life

It was the miracle of the age, the secret of vibrant health, the magic formula for a brighter life. It turned darkness into light. It was liquid sunshine. Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in December, 1898. It seemed the most exciting element imaginable. It was also one of the most dangerous. It didn’t take long to become a widely available sensation.

Who would not want a watch you could see in the dark? And what young woman doing low-paid clerical work in a boring office would not want to enhance her pay packet and status with a skilled job in a company riding the crest of the luminous wave.

To work at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, was to be part of something special.

While the company’s scientist owner laboured away in his laboratory exploring new ways of exploiting radium, the women were working with maximum speed applying precious radium to the hands and faces of watches, helping feed a demand that was nighon insatiable.

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Vatican Newspaper Hosts Womens' Supplement

From the Guardian:

The Vatican's official newspaper is for the first time in its 150-year history publishing an all-colour women's supplement "to give voice to the value that women bring to the church".

Women, Church, World will be edited by women and published withL'Osservatore Romano, the newspaper founded in 1861 and published by the Holy See on the last Thursday of every month.

The new section will promote a keener understanding of the "under-appreciated treasure" of women in the church, according to editor Giovanni Maria Vian.

The launch coincides with the worst scandal to hit the Vatican in years as leaked letters addressed to the pope expose a world of jealous, spiteful prelates and petty rivalries.

Vian said Pope Benedict backed the supplement, which he said would hire non-Catholic contributors.

Fortune 500's Six Amazing Women

From (I)Investopedia:

For decades they were denied the top executive jobs in American corporations, but now women (as of mid-May 2012) run 18 of the Fortune 500 companies, among the nation's biggest. Twenty-one women CEOs also run companies in the Fortune 501-1000 category. Despite this narrowing of the gender gap at the top of the executive pyramid, women still only account for a small percentage of CEOs in America's largest corporations. Those women who have ascended to the top job, however, have been successful in running their respective companies.

FIFA's Lydia Nsekera

From the Citizen:

Burundi's Lydia Nsekera has entered the history books after becoming the first woman co-opted onto FIFA's Executive Committee last week.

Nsekera, 45, is the only woman in charge of a national federation thanks to her role as president of the Burundi Football Federation (FFB) and was already a member of FIFA committees for women's football, the women's World Cup and the organising committee for Olympic football tournaments.

This latest appointment is just the next step in Nsekera's groundbreaking career.

Her rise to prominence has been remarkable -- she took over the running of a garage left to her by her husband after his death in 2003 before breaking into the "terribly macho" world of Burundian football.

Birdhurst Lodge - One Woman's Tale

From the Independant:

Nowadays, it seems incredible that women should have had to hide their 'shame' – a Victorian word still in common currency in the 1950s – in such forbidding institutions, austere relics of 19th-century workhouses and 18th-century penitentiaries. Even worse were the cases of unmarried mothers discovered in mental asylums in the 1970s, having been incarcerated there for decades, thanks to the post-war influence of such notorious experts as the child psychiatrist John Bowlby who condemned "the neurotic character" of the "socially unacceptable" unmarried mother.

The turnover at Birdhurst Lodge was brisk, with each woman's stay limited to three months: six weeks before the birth and six weeks afterwards. The timing was partly to give the mothers a chance to bond with their babies before deciding whether to have them adopted, but also a calculated move to let enough time elapse to make sure the babies were developmentally healthy, since adoptive couples did not want disabled children. The official stigma surrounding illegitimacy, together with queues of childless couples wanting to adopt in the days before fertility treatment, meant that the mother-and-baby homes that were widely established in Britain between the two world wars by the main churches and the Salvation Army were seen to be neatly solving two societal problems at once: they effectively operated as baby farms. And of course it made economic sense, since the adoptive parents would donate money to the religious charities running such homes.

See also: 

* Houses of Shame

* History of Christian Family Concern

50 Women We Admire

From today's Herald Sun Weekend:

On our list, there are some obvious choices: such as the trio of incredibly courageous women who shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize, including Yemeni activist Tawakel Karman, a true force behind last year's Arab Spring. And Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the world's most respected women after more than two decades of fighting for freedom in her country.

And, finally, there are inclusions that may make you wonder. Lady Gaga? Well, she's one of the most powerful women in the entertainment world, whether you like her fashion sense or not. And our own Brynne Edelsten? Read on, and see why we reckon the Melbourne socialite deserves not just a break but a pat on the back.

So, here, in no particular order, are 50 women from Australia and abroad who we (the women of Weekend) reckon are pretty amazing. You will have heard of many of them. And, of course, for everyone on this list, there are hundreds of other champion females we could name, including our mums.

Top Women of 2011

From Barbara Lee of Huffington Post:

Women are being left off the page of every best-of-the-year list I have read so far. For starters, you have to be a princess to make it onto TIME's list of runners-up for "Person of the Year." Kate Middleton appears again on People magazine's "Most Intriguing" list and her younger sister, Pippa, is among the women on Barbara Walter's list of "10 Most Fascinating People." The others? Pop icons Katy Perry and the Kardashians, followed by Amanda Knox, who won her appeal in a high profile murder case. Somehow, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the only woman who ranks for Forbes' top 10 "Most Powerful People in the World" and is one of very few women to be recognized for leadership ability rather than lifestyle and looks in these year-end superlatives lists.

In an age of reality TV, it has become clear that voters expect candidates to entertain and perform. This is potentially dangerous territory for women who have to work harder to prove themselves as "serious" candidates in the first place. "In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms," as Writer/Director Jennifer Siebel Newsom describes in her provocative documentary, "Miss Representation," "the collective message that our young women and men overwhelmingly receive is that a woman's value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader." Let's not dismiss the accomplishments of women; let's celebrate them instead.

Sheng Nu - China's Leftover Women

From Care 2 dot com:

In China, the sexist term “leftover woman,” sheng nu, is widely used to describe an urban, professional female over the age of 27 who is still single. This derogatory term has been aggressively disseminated by the Chinese government, warning women that they will become spinsters if they do not marry by the time they turn 30. The irony of the media campaign is that China’s sex-ratio imbalance has resulted in a surplus of tens of millions of men who will not be able to find a bride.

In 2007, China’s Ministry of Education added the term “leftover woman” to its official lexicon, according to state media reports. In 2010, the All-China Women’s Federation and other government groups carried out a nationwide survey of more than 30,000 people in 31 provinces. Their findings on “leftover women” have been publicized repeatedly by China’s official media.

The article uses the heading “See What Category of ‘Leftover’ You Belong to.” The first category is leftover women aged 25 to 27 years, who are called “leftover fighters,” sheng dou shi, a play on the title of a popular martial arts film. It says these women “still have the courage to fight for a partner.”

The next category is 28- to 30-year-old women, or “the ones who must triumph,” bi sheng ke, a play on the Chinese name for Pizza Hut. It says these women have limited opportunities for romance because their careers leave them “no time for the hunt.”

The final category, 35 and older, is called the “master class of leftover women.” The term qi tian da sheng plays on the name of an ancient Chinese legend, the Monkey King. It says this category of woman “has a luxury apartment, private car and a company, so why did she become a leftover woman?”

Archaic Laws Regarding Women Repealled

From RedBank:

When governing bodies enact legislation in any era, it’s done with the expressed interest, one can only hope, in being not only fair and just, but representative of an entire citizenry.

Well, about that. Sure, men, namely white men, have acted in what they believe have been the country’s best interest since, um, forever, but that’s a difficult notion to honestly believe considering just how unequal representation has been since, um, forever.

On Monday, State Sen. Jen Beck (R-12) announced that several obsolete statutes concerning the status of women, enacted well before women had the right to vote, have been repealed from New Jersey State Law.

Women's Status & Life In Iran

Article in the Kurdish Globe by Sara Saye:

Iran has thousands years of civilization, and the country played a great role in social, political and economic transformation until the rise of Islam and Arab occupation.

Ancient Iran was one of the most powerful political entities and an empire with a multi-ethnic society. At times its borders extended from China to Egypt and from Yemen to central Asia. In analyzing the past traditions and norms of this society we find that beside the great male political and social figures of this land, the role of women was also remarkable. For example, a top admiral of the Persian Empire's navy 2,300 years ago was a woman and before that, women played an important role in building and leading the political establishment.

Many historical documents indicated that in the various dynasties of ancient Iran, with its multi-ethnic structure, the social status of woman was respected. Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that the relatively liberal atmosphere and economic strength of those regimes resulted in some progress and improvements for both men and women.

Rape In Wartime

From CNN - Listening to the Victims:

It began as a headache. Then her throat started to feel tight. A dull pain welled in her chest and her joints ached.

But Victoria Sanford continued to do the interviews. Even in the middle of the night, the women in Guatemala always managed to find her, the "gringa" they heard had come to listen to them.

It was the early 1990s, years before the international community would formally recognize the Guatemalan government's role in the systematic rape of its Mayan women -- and decades before the current violence in Libya and elsewhere around the Middle East would once again remind the world of the brutal effectiveness of rape as a weapon of war.

Editor's Note: This is the first of two stories focusing on rape as a tool of war. The second story, being published tomorrow, looks at the untold stories of rape in the Holocaust. Both stories contain graphic language; discretion is advised.

 

Caroline Harriet Haslett

From the Irish Times:

THE VITAL ROLE played by domestic technology in allowing for greater gender equality has been widely recognised for some time now. By liberating women from much of the drudgery of domestic chores and extraordinarily labour-intensive tasks such as laundry, these developments were critical in facilitating greater female workforce participation.

 

A sizeable body of academic work has been written examining the social and economic repercussions of domestic technology. However, it speaks volumes that while the histories of the “domestic industrial revolution” focus on how they altered the lives of the women who used them, we rarely give as much thought to those women who were instrumental in creating such a revolution.

Chief among those was Caroline Harriet Haslett, the pioneering early 20th-century electrical engineer who spent her working life encouraging the adoption of technology in the cause of female emancipation. In many respects, her story foreshadows the sweeping changes in the role of women in society, but as so often with innovators and pioneers, she had to forge her own path with few antecedents to smooth the way.

Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates

From Today's Zaman:

To the outsider at least, the status of women in Turkey is both ambiguous and controversial. Ataturk’s reforms of the 1920s gave Turkish women rights unimaginable for their Ottoman-era predecessors, with Turkish women able to vote in parliamentary elections in 1934 and stand for election in 1935. In the 1937 elections 18 of the 550 members elected were women. However, in the last elections in 2007, there were still only 50 women elected, less than 10 percent of the total. Many other reforms have taken place in the same period that have given women parity with men – equal pay, equal rights to education and equal rights to inheritance, amongst others. On the surface at least, despite the less than impressive growth in the numbers of female deputies in the Turkish Parliament, Turkish women have achieved equality with their men-folk. But, as Üstün Bilgen Reinart’s fascinating book reveals, inequalities between men and women persist. How many working women here, for example, still give up their careers to become mothers and housewives? Even when married women with children continue to work full-time, how many of their husbands men cook, clean or look after their children?

Inspiring Women Summit 2011

From CSR Wire:

Organizer: The Shift Network

Date: 05.07.11, 08:00AM – 05.13.11, 04:00PM

Location:Worldwide - from your computer & telephone!

Sponsor:The Shift Network

Website: inspiringwomensummit.com

This is quite an exciting time in history to be a woman! More and more of us are waking up to our true gifts and helping midwife the birth of a new era that re-balances our culture with feminine qualities and leadership.

That’s why we're thrilled to be co-sponsoring the 2nd annual Inspiring Women Summit, May 7th-13th, which is bringing together empowered women from all over the world to make the biggest impact possible in these shifting times.

Click here to sign up now for this FREE virtual event: https://shiftnetwork.infusionsoft.com/go/iws3CSR/CSRwire/

Ancient & Mordern Nubian Women

From the Washington Times:

The land of Nubia extends from the first, as Aswan, to the fourth cataract, in the Nubian Desert. Nubia is divided into lower Nubia in Egypt and upper Nubia in Sudan.

Historically speaking Nubia’s strategic importance comes from the fact that it is the only continuously inhabited corridor between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa, which in many ways has shaped its history.

That Nubian history starts around 3100 B.C. similar to the Egyptian history; to keep track of Nubia’s history it is divided into Groups A, C and the Kerma culture.

History tells us Nubia enjoyed many episodes of political power under the kingdoms of Kerma, Napata as well as the Meriotic kingdoms. It is worth noting that the Golden Age of Nubia started after a decline in the Egyptianization of the Kush region-which lies to the south of Egypt and north of Sudan.

Nubian Kings and Queens came to power starting the 25th Dynasty and ruled the whole land of Egypt during a period known as the Napatan period (760-593 B.C.).

Japan: Wives Final Revolt

From the Bellingham Herald:

For centuries in this male-dominated society, women have been guided by the concept of ie, or household, in which wives are bound to their in-laws for life - and beyond.

Formally abolished at the end of World War II, the system has hung on in many parts of Japan. Yet quality-of-life changes here, including climbing divorce rates, higher education levels and increased geographic and social mobility among women, mean many are now thumbing their nose at a tradition that often forces a lifelong divorce from their own families.

"Women are rebelling against the idea of being buried for eternity with people they didn't even like that much in life. They see it as a form of eternal torture," said Yoriko Meguro, a sociologist at Tokyo's Sophia University and former Japanese representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. "The refusal to be buried in the husband's ancestral plot is the last stand against traditional family confinement."

At Aoyama cemetery, one of Tokyo's largest public burial grounds, new sections are reserved for people who want to be buried alone or with a spouse, unconnected to larger family sites.

Activists say the burial requirement is one of many outdated responsibilities women are forced to shoulder within the Japanese family structure. Many must perform duties such as caring for their in-laws.

Some of those traditions are also being challenged. In February, six women filed a lawsuit fighting a 113-year-old civil law that precludes brides from keeping their surnames when they marry, insisting that the law violates their right to equality.

Memorial: Triangle Waist Company Factory Fire

From the New York Times:

In the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, there is a haunting stone monument to the garment workers who died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 but were never identified. It contains the bas-relief figure of a kneeling woman, her head bowed, seemingly mourning not only the deaths, but also the fact that those buried below were so badly charred that relatives could not recognize them.

Almost a century after the fire, the five women and one man, all buried in coffins under the Evergreens monument, remained unknown to the public at large, though relatives and descendants knew that a loved one had never returned from the burning blouse factory.

Now those six have been identified, largely through the persistence of a researcher, Michael Hirsch, who became obsessed with learning all he could about the victims after he discovered that one of those killed, Lizzie Adler, a 24-year-old greenhorn from Romania, had lived on his block in the East Village.

An Ancient & Customary Evil

From the Economist:

Rape in war is as old as war itself. After the sack of Rome 16 centuries ago Saint Augustine called rape in wartime an “ancient and customary evil”. For soldiers, it has long been considered one of the spoils of war.

In 2008 the UN Security Council officially acknowledged that rape has been used as a tool of war. With these kinds of resolutions and global campaigns against rape in war, the world has become more sensitive. At least in theory, the Geneva Conventions, governing the treatment of civilians in war, are respected by politicians and generals in most decent states. Generals from rich countries know that their treatment of civilians in the theatre of war comes under ever closer scrutiny. The laws and customs of war are clear. But in many parts of the world, in the Hobbesian anarchy of irregular war, with ill-disciplined private armies or militias, these norms carry little weight.

"Secret" Jacobite Society

From BBC News:

A group that has its roots in a secret society which remained loyal to Bonnie Prince Charlie after the Battle of Culloden has opened up its membership.

Until now people have had to receive an invitation to join A Circle of Gentlemen.

Circle commodore Matthew Donnachie said by encouraging general membership, a fund could be created to support heritage and archaeology projects.

The move comes in the 265th anniversary year of the Battle of Culloden.

Established in Edinburgh in 1748, the original secret circle continued to back the prince after the Jacobites' defeat at Culloden, near Inverness, in 1746.

Its members continued to meet late into the 18th Century.

The modern version of the society followed discussions between Jacobite enthusiasts during the 1990s.

For the first time, the group has opened its membership to people living anywhere in the world.

Top Women in Technology

From Chip Chick:

2010 has been an interesting year in terms of technology. We’ve seen tablets become an everyday part of living (though we’re still not sure of their purpose), 3D viewing advance dramatically, and augmented reality took off, thanks to the rise of compatible mobile applications. Alongside these tangible products, there has been much advancement in the backend of science and technology with talented scientists researching medicines, creating programs and extending their knowledge of the virtual world. Many of these projects were spearheaded by women, and I’d like to draw your attention to the top thirteen women who have impacted technology in 2010.