Victoria Woodhull: First Woman Presidential Candidate

From National Review:

She was the first woman to run for president, the first to address a congressional committee, and the first to own a brokerage on Wall Street. She was also a con artist, a gold digger, and a scandal magnet. When she ran for president in 1872, she sat out Election Day in a Manhattan jail, arrested on charges of obscenity. Victoria Woodhull was unquestionably a pioneer in women’s rights, yet her legacy is so messy and complicated that she remains an outlier in feminist history.

read more here @ National Review

Female Administrators in Ancient Iran

Article - Colby College: 

Marta Ameri, assistant professor of art, has published an article titled “Who Holds the Keys? Identifying Female administrators at Shahr-i Sokhta” in Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies. The article compares the physical and iconographic aspects of seals found in the cemetery of the third millennium BCE Iranian site of Shahr-i Sokhta with those of seals used for administrative sealing to identify different groups of people responsible for controlling goods and resources. 

Ameri uses the observed similarity between seals used for sealing and those found buried in women’s graves to suggest that women were responsible for most of the administrative sealing at Shahr-i Sokhta in the mid-third millennium BC, and to call into question the often-unchallenged assumption that men were by default responsible for administration in ancient societies.

Blog Post: Girls Can Do Anything

From The Asia Foundation: 

Michelle Obama came to December's Grassroots Leaders Roundtable in Vietnam to deliver an urgent message: some of the world’s best minds are going undeveloped because of our failure to educate girls.

The GOA is a program of the Obama Foundation that empowers adolescent girls around the world through education, especially poor girls from disadvantaged communities, allowing them to achieve their full potential and transform their lives, families, and communities. Ms. Obama was accompanied to Vietnam by actors Julia Roberts, Lana Condor, and Ngo Thanh Van and Today Show cohost Jenna Bush Hager.

There is no single or simple approach to this mission, but roundtable participants all agreed that education is the key for these girls, and that they need holistic support, including tuition, soft-skills development, and leadership training, so they can rise to their full potential. We shared our successes and challenges, as well as the stories of girls in our programs who have achieved things far beyond our hopes. We talked about collaborating to maximize our resources, support one another, and inspire more action for girls’ education, and we discussed the progress that has been made and the many people who are working in their own way to support girls and young women who have been left behind due to circumstances beyond their control.

read more here @ The Asia Foundation

Legends of a Medieval Female Pope May Tell the Truth

From Live Science: 

Medieval legends claim that Pope Joan was the first and only female pope. And now, an analysis of ancient silver coins suggests that the ordained woman may have actually lived.

However, there is much debate over whether a pope named Johannes Anglicus existed, much less whether this pope was a man or woman. The doubt stems in part from the great deal of confusion over the identities of popes during the middle of the ninth century. For example, in the oldest surviving copy of the "Liber Pontificalis," the official book of biographies of popes during the early Middle Ages, "Pope Benedict III is missing entirely,"study author Michael Habicht, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told Live Science.

Now, Habicht has suggested that symbols on medieval coins show that Pope Johannes Anglicus may have existed, and so, Pope Joan may have been real as well. "The coins really turned the tables in favor of a covered-up but true story," Habicht said.

read more here @ Live Science

Hunan to Give Priority to Development of Textbook on Gender Equality for Schools

From All China Women's Federation: 

The Office of the Working Committee on Children and Women of the Hunan Provincial Government recently held a training session on gender equality education in elementary and secondary schools in Changsha, capital city of Central China's Hunan Province.

Zhong Bin, vice-president of the Hunan Women's Federation, urged to further promote the work of the gender equality education in elementary and secondary schools in an all-round way at the opening ceremony of the training session. She pointed out that several requirements should be met, including fully recognizing the significance of the work, understanding the rules of education and teaching in elementary and secondary schools, giving priority to the development of teaching materials or textbooks for elementary and secondary schools, strengthening the building and capacity of teaching staff and establishing the system of characteristic courses.

Education departments, schools and offices of the working committees on children and women, as the main parties involving in the gender equality education, should fulfill their duties and cooperate to promote the work, Zhong added.

Elderly Black Women in S. Africa Win Property Rights in Landmark Ruling

From allAfrica.com: 

For black women married before 1988, the husband owned all matrimonial assets and could sell them without consulting his wife - until a landmark win this month overturned the law.

Facing destitution when her marriage broke down, 72-year-old Agnes Sithole went to court to challenge a sexist law - and won not only a share of her husband's property but a legal victory that will protect some 400,000 other black South African women. Despite the legal victory, women's rights experts were wary of celebrating too soon.

read more here @ allAfrica.com

Why Caste Matters In Sexual Assault

The Logical Indian: 

A 19-year-old Dalit woman who had gone missing on December 31, was found hanging from a tree in Modasa, Gujarat on Sunday, January 5. The victim’s family has accused four men of gang-rape and murder....

A caste society is inherently violent in nature, and when it comes to Dalit women, the violence perpetrated on them is the most brutal.

As much as one may slam media houses for mentioning the caste factor in rape and murder cases, there is no doubt that it plays a major role in violence against these women. 

For Dalit women, violence is almost always associated with their caste positions, and also depends on how they behave within the system. For example, their resistance to or dissent towards the caste structure often triggers the violence.

This violence is not just meant to control women, but also to carefully maintain the caste structure.

read more here @ The Logical Indian

see more here @ International Dalit Solidarity Network

Police continue to demolish chhau sheds in far-western region

From Himalayan Times: 

Police administration has intensified the campaign to demolish chhau sheds where women are banished during their periods, ancient social tradition still in practice, in the far-western region.

Even though chief at District Police Office, Bajura, Tanka Prasad Bhattarai tried to convince a local woman sitting inside one of such sheds about banning of the traditional practice by the government, the woman declined to come out.

“We are compelled to sit outside as the society would not tolerate women sitting inside the house during mensuration,” Kunwar said, adding, “we do not have any alternative other than to sit inside the house as police have also warned to take action against those practising the tradition.”

The campaign was launched with urgency in far-western districts of the country after a woman died inside a chhau shed in Achham district in early December. Numerous women have lost their lives in the region over the years while staying inside menstrual huts, commonly from suffocation, extreme weather conditions, and snake-bite.

read more here @ Himalayan Times

Scythian horsewomen and the myth of the Amazons

From The Wild Hunt: 

In December 2019, the Russian Academy of Sciences reported finding the skeletal remains of four horsewomen. The burial site contained contained weapons and only female skeletons.

Archaeologists have dated the grave to between 400 and 301 B.C.E. and linked it to Scythian culture. Previously, archaeologists had found the burials of 11 young horsewomen along the Don River valley. This finding marks the first known burial of women of different ages in the same grave.

Tomb robbers had broken into the kurgan in either the 3rd or 2nd Century B.C.E. These ancient grave robbers only damaged the northern half of the kurgan. The disturbed half of the kurgan contained the skeletal remains of a woman aged between 20 and 25 as well as that of a young woman aged 12 or 13. The grave goods in this half of the kurgan included animal bones, iron hooks, iron knives, 30 iron arrowheads, fragments of ceramics, and harnesses for horses.

read more here @The Wild Hunt