On 11 March 2013, SLAM and 70 percent of the approximately 112 nonmanagerial workers at the DoubleTree (housekeepers, banquet servers, front desk agents, van drivers, and Scullers Jazz Club employees) filed a petition stating their desire to be able to decide without the influence of hotel management whether or not to join Unite Here, which already represented Harvard’s dining hall employees.
The Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) campus, a satellite campus of the University of Delaware (UD) is located just half a mile from the primary campus in Newark, Delaware. During the efforts to fully develop the STAR campus, UD offered to lease 43 acres of the campus to The Data Center (TDC) to build a 900,000 square foot data center with an attached 279 megawatt natural gas power plant, an amount five times the energy demand of the city of Newark.
In 1993, the Polish Parliament, with the support of the Catholic Church, passed a bill known as the “abortion compromise,” which was intended to decrease abortions and increase overall birth rates in Poland. The law prohibits abortion in all cases except rape, incest, or when the pregnant person or fetus’s life is in danger.
In the state of Kentucky, specific breastfeeding laws exist in order to protect women while breastfeeding their babies. Section 211.755 mandates that “a mother may breastfeed her baby or express breast milk in any location, public or private, where the mother is otherwise authorized to be.” Furthermore, women seen in the act of breastfeeding will not be considered for “indecent exposure, sexual conduct, lewd touching, or obscenity.”
On 18 March 1970, a group of feminists staged a sit-in at the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ) to protest how the magazine’s mostly male editorial board depicted women. At the time, LHJ was the second largest women’s magazine in the United States. The sit-in involved women from groups such as Media Women, New York Radical Feminists, National Organization of Women (NOW), the Redstockings, and Barnard College students.
On 14 October 2007, citizens of El Alto, Bolivia demanded that all bars and brothels facilitating sex work be located at least 3,200 feet away from schools, because they believed that the establishments were facilitating crime in the area. They then began a three-day rampage of the bars and brothels in the impoverished red-lights district of El Alto. These El Alto citizens, primarily parents and students, burned or destroyed at least 50 brothels, burned sex workers’ belongings, and beat sex workers.
In dire economic crisis under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe, many Zimbabwean citizens and human rights activists felt that Zimbabwe was a “dictatorship under another name.” Political violence was common, especially in the months leading up to the general election of March 2008, and the government used police to violently suppress any voices that opposed the current leadership. The organization Women of Zimbabwe Arise (“WOZA”, a Ndebele word meaning “come forward”) was formed in 2003 to give women a voice against injustice and violence.
Tuba Group factory workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, stood up against
exploitation in the summer of 2014. The company, in which five factories
made products for businesses like Walmart and H&M, had become
notorious in recent years for some of the lowest employee wages in the
world (about US $38 a month) and the 2012 “Tarzeen factory fire” that
killed 112 workers. Since February of 2014, Delwar Hossain, the owner of
the group, had been in jail for the workplace negligence that lead to
the tragedy. However, workers continued to face unfair treatment.
Since 1885, housing was a major concern for residents of Glasgow, in particular those who relied on tenement housing for shelter. These residents were primarily men who worked in industrial labor and their families. Glasgow received an influx of roughly 70,000 new residents in the three years leading up to 1915. The city did not respond with enough new housing and in fact built fewer than two thousand tenements to meet this need, which created high demand for a small number of apartments. By this time, Glasgow had become the most overcrowded city in Britain.
In 2001, in a southern Turkish village near Siirt, the water lines connecting to the public water supply broke down. This was not the first time that the 27-year-old system had malfunctioned and left the 600-person village without running water for a period of months. Women in the village were obligated to walk to a small public fountain in order to collect water to carry home—a distance of several miles, in some cases—in order to have water for drinking, cooking, and bathing.
In January 2011, Governor Sam Brownback took office in the U.S. state of Kansas. In rapid succession, strict new anti-abortion legislation passed through both houses of the state legislature.
Brownback signed into law new restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion, parental consent clauses for minors, blocks on Planned Parenthood funding (including that for non-abortion services), and limits on late-term abortion. Many of these measures went into effect during summer 2011.
At the start of the 21st century, the remote town of Barbacoas, in southern Colombia, was connected to the rest of the region by only one roadway. This 57 km highway between Barbacoas and the nearest town, Junin, was in major disrepair and could take between 14 and 24 hours to travel. Due to political instability, guerilla warfare by the FARC and other nongovernmental paramilitary groups, and the remoteness of the region, the government failed to maintain the condition of the highway and let it fall into disrepair.
Bangladesh, located to the east of India, is a leading global garment manufacturer, producing clothing for such American companies as Gap, Walmart, and J.C. Penney. The Ready Made Garment (RMG) industry makes up 80% of the country’s exports and employs about 4 million Bangladeshis, 80% of whom are women. A survey published by the Japan External Trade Organization in December 2013 reported that Bangladesh garment workers earn nearly the lowest monthly wage in the world, second only to Myanmar.
The ‘Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia’(CSM) was formed in 1989 as an organized response to the mistreatment of Russian soldiers during times of war and forced military service for young men who were still in school. Early activity of the CSM’s led to the return of 17,600 men a year earlier than expected from military service. Their organization, led by Maria Kirbasova, continues to oppose war and fight for better treatment of soldiers even today. Their most notable actions were taken in the earlier half of the first Chechen War, namely the “March of Parental Compassion.”
Mary Ann Good planted the tree that came
to be known as the Wolseley Elm, along with many others, on her family farm in
1860, before Wolseley Avenue existed. Mary’s elms began to be removed as the city
of Winnipeg expanded, until the Wolseley Elm was the only elm remaining that did
not stand on the side of the road. The city of Winnipeg made its first attempt
to remove the tree to make way for Wolseley Avenue sometime between 1907 and
1909. The City paved Wolseley Avenue with asphalt in 1925 and the Elm came
On February 19th, 2012 hundreds of women in Richmond, Virginia protested two bills in the Virginia state Senate, coordinated in part by NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia. The first of these bills had already passed the Senate, called the “personhood bill,” sponsored by Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Prince William), which states that life begins at conception and would give rights to a fertilized egg. The other bill would require that women seeking abortions undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, which requires a probe being inserted into the vagina.
In the early 2000s Israeli bus lines began gender segregation as part of a pilot project. The gender segregation was part of the ultra-orthodox community’s religious guidelines. By February of 2007 there were more than thirty gender-segregated Haredi bus routes operating. Most of these bus lines were less expensive and more easily accessible than other bus routes. On 23 February 2007, New York-born novelist, feminist, and observant-Orthodox Jew Naomi Regan was asked to move to the back of a gender-segregated bus in Jerusalem.
On 16 December 2012, six men raped and nearly beat a 23-year-old woman to death in New Delhi, the capital of the Republic of India. The woman had boarded a local bus with a male companion that night. Once the couple was on the bus, the six men began to taunt the couple. They gagged and beat the woman’s friend until he was unconscious. Then, the six men dragged the woman to the back of the bus, beat her with an iron rod, and gang-raped her. Following their attack, the men threw both the woman and her friend out onto the streets.
On 29 June 2003, the Israeli Ministry of Finance amended the Hok HaHasderim, a bill passed in 1985 in order to combat existing hyperinflation and aid in the creation and development of an austerity program. The late June amendment enormously decreased single mothers’ welfare allowances. Single mothers across the nation, who were already struggling to make ends meet, were both hurt and angered by the amendment. On 2 July 2003, one such woman, a 43-year-old single mother named Vicky Knafo, marched two-hundred and fifty kilometers from her home in Mitzpe Ramon to Jerusalem.
On 18 July 2010, Icelandic pop-singer and cultural icon Bjork called for Iceland’s Parliament to review the sale of Iceland’s geo-thermal company HS Orka to Vancouver-based company Magma Energy Corporation in order to consider the environmental and political implications of such a sale. Bjork argued that the sale of Iceland’s natural resources, like geo-thermal energy, should be decisions made by all Icelanders, and not just those affiliated with the company.
In Brazil in
2000, the Margaridas, or Daisies, formed in honor of Margarida Maria Alves, a
union leader renowned for surmounting the embedded cultural stereotypes and
obstacles for women, especially those working in rural areas. Alves
became the president of the Rural Worker’s Union in her town, but was
reportedly assassinated in 1983, at the age of 50, because of her advocacy for
those working in rural or forested areas.
After her death, she became a feminist icon in the fight for equality
In Dagenham, East London, 54,813 men, and only 187 women worked in Ford’s flagship factory. The women there were classified as “unskilled workers,” though male employees performing the same or similar jobs were classified as “skilled workers.” As a result the men were on a higher pay scale than the women. Female employees of the factory were deeply upset when they learned this fact, and even more enraged when they discovered that teenage boy floor-sweepers were paid higher wages than they were.
The Karura forest is an urban 2500 acre forest in Nairobi.
The Kenyan government had a common practice of land grabbing or secretly
selling public lands to private companies and political allies. Wangari
Maathai, who later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, mobilized the
Green Belt Movement to action when developers began to clear sections of the
Karura forest to build luxury homes and offices for political allies of the
government in 1998.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is best known for the unique fashion blouse they produced and the horrific fire that killed 146 workers, women who might have lived if the owners had been forced to ensure safety standards in the factory. Historically, the 1911 tragedy defined the Triangle workers as the victims of disaster.
Reforms to the Canadian Criminal Code legalized abortion in 1969. Under the direction of Pierre Trudeau’s government, a constitutional amendment was made to Section 251 of the Code. The alteration limited legal abortions to be performed only when the mother’s health was at risk. In addition, abortions could only be performed in credible hospitals with licensed physicians and needed to be approved by a panel of doctors called Therapeutic Abortion Committees, which often consisted of all males.
