Eleanor J. Bader
Eleanor J. Bader is a teacher, freelance writer and activist from Brooklyn, NY. She is also the co-author of Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism, St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
All Work
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160 Years of Feminist (and Anti-Feminist) Art in One Book
The Art of Feminism offers a fascinating look at the visuals of women's suffrage in the United States and Britain. But it skimps on how more contemporary feminists have used art to agitate.
Hipsters on the Road: A Graphic Novel About Gen X Love, Travel, and Political Polarization
Roll your eyes at their vegetarian, all-natural fabric-wearing selves. But the fictional couple in Amongst the Liberal Elite say that Trumpism is a cancer and civic engagement is the best treatment.
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Culture & Conversation Abortion
Talking About ‘Ordinary’ Abortion and Keeping It Legal: Q&A With Author Katie Watson
The Northwestern professor says focusing on physicians' rights has been a mistake, but that telling personal abortion stories in private can help right the ship and effect social change.
Culture & Conversation Politics
Resisting the Rage That Paralyzes: Rebecca Solnit Writes of Organized Anger
Inertia is understandable these days. But Standing Rock's sweeping coalition and today's activists' use of the past should give—dare we say it?—some hope.
Culture & Conversation Politics
Can We Reclaim the Word ‘Cunt’? This Book Thinks So.
I don't agree. First published in 1998, Inga Muscio's provocative book still makes an unconvincing case and also repeats troubling anti-choice rhetoric. But it has valuable insights about confronting sexual violence and learning trans inclusivity.
Culture & Conversation Maternity and Birthing
‘Things That Helped’ Is an Elegant Memoir of Living Through Postpartum Depression
In this essay collection that's a testament to recovery, Jessica Friedmann writes about debilitating sadness and inertia after her son's birth—and how creativity helped her find balance again.
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Film Resurrects Letters From Feminists Past—But to What Effect?
A new documentary follows women's responses to Ms. magazine's coverage and catalogs their concerns about police violence, sexual harassment, and lesbian visibility, among other issues.
Culture & Conversation Abortion
In New Book, A Pro-Choice Author Who Says Abortion’s Legality Is Beside the Point
It's a strange opinion from an attorney and law professor. Because we know what happens when abortion is banned or inaccessible.
Culture & Conversation Human Rights
Menstrual Inequity Is a Global ‘Code Red Crisis,’ Says Book ‘Periods Gone Public’
On any given day, more than 800 million people are having their period worldwide. But far too many of them don't have access to sanitary products or facilities for hygiene or disposal.
Culture & Conversation Violence
Film Reunites Woman With Abusive Ex. But Is He ‘A Better Man’?
The answer is unclear. But in making the documentary herself, survivor Attiya Khan gets a rare chance to document her own healing.
Culture & Conversation Human Rights
‘Ask’: New Book Pushes Readers to Build a Broad Consent Culture
An anthology looks at consent in the bedroom, jail, workplace, hospital, and community.
Here’s a Fact: Some Women Do Regret Becoming Mothers
And we need to talk about it if we're going to truly advocate for reproductive choice, argues a book by sociologist Orna Donath.
On Diapers and the Divine: Book Explores Parenting as Spiritual Practice
Mothering made Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg feel more connected to God, but her book Nurture the Wow doesn't always acknowledge that feeling is not universal.
Culture & Conversation Science
In ‘Inferior,’ a Story of Science’s Long Collusion With Patriarchy
Writer Angela Saini deconstructs the cultural expectations that have meshed with scientific research to reinforce beliefs about male superiority and gender.
Culture & Conversation Family Planning
‘Scattered Seeds’: New Book Gives Inside Look at the Business, Families of Sperm Donation
Journalist Jacqueline Mroz argues that sperm donation makes having children accessible for more people. But it also raises questions about bias, privacy, and the gene pool.
Culture & Conversation Human Rights
Author Jill Filipovic on the Radical Notion That Women Deserve Pleasure and Joy
In her new book, The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, she asks: What would the world look like if our laws and policies prioritized feeling good—and gave women the resources to live their best lives without our accusing them of being selfish or slutty?
Culture & Conversation Politics
Thanks, Ronald Reagan: Today’s ‘Kill It to Save It’ Politics Are Not New
The Trump administration's slash-and-burn approach to governing has its origins in the Vietnam conflict and the Gipper's rhetoric blaming the poor, liberals, and supposed over-reliance on government for U.S. ills.
In New Book of Essays, Rebecca Solnit Tackles the Silencing That’s Quieted So Many Women
In The Mother of All Questions, Solnit draws on an equation that has preoccupied women writers from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lorde: that silence is a form of marginalization.
Culture & Conversation Abortion
In New Novel About Abortion Provider’s Murder, Joyce Carol Oates Plays the Wrong Sympathy Card
In positioning two characters—a slain abortion provider and his killer—as equally culpable in their intersecting tragedies, Oates misses an important chance to denounce those who believe they have the right to impose their morality on the rest of us.
Culture & Conversation Maternity and Birthing
‘The Doulas’: A Guide to the Radical Practice of Quality Counseling and Care for Pregnant People
Being attentive to the individual patient should not be considered radical, but the fact that it is tells us how far the medical model has strayed from the promotion of human well-being. But thanks to a small group of feminist doulas, the pendulum may finally be swinging toward treatments that accommodate personal preferences, needs, and differences.
Culture & Conversation Violence
Swimming in the Waters of Patriarchy: A Q&A With Anti-Domestic Abuse Advocate Karen McAndless-Davis
In the new, updated edition of the book When Love Hurts, the authors deconstruct the persistent stereotypes about who experiences intimate partner violence and why.
‘Feminist Fight Club’: A Battle Cry Against Workplace Bias That Pulls Some of Its Punches
Author Jessica Bennett has written an often hilarious contemporary manual to help women combat everyday gender discrimination on the job. But the book falls short in imagining strategies to effect change on a societal level or addressing the needs of women outside the white-collar professions.
From ‘Mouseburger’ to Media Icon: Bio Traces Rise of Cosmo Editor Helen Gurley Brown
Helen Gurley Brown was a publishing giant and pop-culture feminist theorist. But according to her latest biographer, she was a mass of insecurities even as she confidently told single people, especially women, to take charge of their sex lives.
Culture & Conversation Abortion
With Buffer Zones and Decline of ‘Rescues’ Came Anti-Choice Legal Boom, Book Argues
University of Denver's Joshua Wilson argues that prosecutions of abortion-clinic protesters and the decline of "rescue" groups in the 1980s and 1990s boosted conservative anti-abortion legal activism nationwide.
Dating Up, Settling Down: Moira Weigel’s Book Details Shifts in Courtship
How Americans find partners has changed according to economic prospects, women's changing roles, and social movements.
Exploring Jewish Identity Through the Eyes of Women Artists
According to scholar Tahneer Oksman, women illustrators from the United States and Canada use their drawings to make sense of their religion, culture, and sometimes complicated relationships to Israel.
Culture & Conversation Economic Justice
‘Evicted’: How Renters, Especially Poor Black Women, Are Locked Out
Matthew Desmond compellingly focuses on the ways race, class, and gender intersect with housing loss in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
How Romance Novels ‘Imagine a World in Which Women Can Win’
In these books, one writer argues in a documentary about the genre, women "get rewarded for going after what you want. You can have sex without dying."
‘Winning Lies Not in a Single Victory,’ Writes Author of Buoyant New Book on Activism
An inspiring—if perhaps overly optimistic—book, When We Fight We Win!: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World, showcases six areas in which progressive shifts have already happened or are possible thanks to long-range activism and political vision.
‘The 1970s’: A Quirky, Scattershot Look Back at Feminism Four Decades Ago
The collection captures the giddiness of the decade and the unbridled enthusiasm for creating new ways of being and doing.
For Gloria Steinem, Adventure Lies ‘Just Beyond an Open Door’
My Life on the Road is part autobiography, part political treatise, and part impressionist account of the amazing people and places Gloria Steinem has encountered during the four-plus decades she’s been an itinerant feminist agitator.
Another, More Feminist, World Is Possible
'The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future,' offers a panoply of exhilarating responses to the question of what an ideal world looks like. And the future these writers dream of isn’t just a desirable one. As far as they’re concerned, it is an achievable one too.
The Economy Isn’t Rebounding for Everyone
As explained in Tim Wise’s new book, Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America, class inequality is a nationwide problem—and it is getting worse every year.
Rachel Hills Busts ‘The Sex Myth,’ With Eye-Opening, But Depressing, Results
Though limited in scope, Rachel Hills' The Sex Myth nudges readers to consider how sexual behavior impacts self-esteem and membership in desired social groups within secular Western culture.
Do We Live in a Christian America? Not Quite
For many conservative American politicians and members of the fundamentalist right wing, the idea that our nation is God’s “chosen land" is a frequently invoked trope. But a new book by Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding, suggests this is a misreading of history.
Aziz Ansari’s ‘Modern Romance’ Takes Surprisingly Earnest Look at Love
Part memoir, part sociological study, and part self-help treatise, Modern Romance zeroes in on contemporary dating mores with a perceptive eye toward the shifts that have taken place over the past several decades. While the book is immensely entertaining, however, it is not fluff.
Is the ‘Panic’ Over Sexting Really Warranted?
Amy Adele Hasinoff’s Sexting Panic: Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent is a reasoned, if academic, look at the ways teens use social media and the Internet to flirt, seduce, and tease, often transmitting sexual images that are intended for private viewing.
‘Blended’ Takes Poignant Look at Unique Issues Stepfamilies Face
Blended: Writers on the Stepfamily Experience notes that a whopping 95 million adults in the United States have a step-relationship. The book does not gloss over the difficulties involved with these situations, nor does it neglect the humor and affection often present.
‘Regarding Susan Sontag’ Humanizes Critic Without Romanticizing Her
Through its many in-depth interviews with those close to the scholar, Regarding Susan Sontag gives Sontag emotional depth while still serving as a showcase for her trademark swagger.
‘SLUT’ Takes Direct Aim at Stigma About Adolescents’ Sexuality
The book opens with 20 first-person narratives by young people who explore the bombardment of conflicting messages about sexuality that continually besiege them. Later in the text, the play mentioned in the anthology's title—also called "SLUT"—provides a case study about the ways slut-shaming impacts those on the receiving end of it.
‘Locked Down, Locked Out’ Puts a Face on the Criminal Justice System
Maya Schenwar's book uses her family's personal experiences with incarceration as a framing device for more general statistics about how the legal system works, addressing the racism, classism, heterosexism, and misogyny at the heart of law-and-order policies.
‘No Victories Are Permanent,’ Recalls Film About Feminism’s Beginnings
She's Beautiful When She's Angry, Mary Dore's new film about the birth of contemporary feminism, is an insightful, inspiring look at the struggles and triumphs of our foremothers.
Katha Pollitt’s ‘Pro’ Hopes to Sway the ‘Muddled Middle’ on Abortion Ethics
Pollitt's well-crafted defense of abortion as a social and ethical good will likely come as no surprise to most reproductive justice activists. But she's really targeting those who aren't convinced either way on the issue.
Analysis Maternity and Birthing
Buffalo Clinic First in the Nation to Offer Both Abortion and Birthing Services
"We’re working to give women the opportunity to have the birth they want or the abortion they need," said Katharine Morrison, who has owned Buffalo Womenservices since 2005.
Stoking Fire: ‘Banned Books Week’ Reminds Us That Censorship Is a Year-Round Problem
Even in the age of information, parents, pastors, and community groups still frequently attempt to stymie young people's access to "offensive" literature.
Stoking Fire: What’s Missing From Hillary Clinton’s ‘Hard Choices’
Women’s empowerment is key to Clinton’s vision of progress, and she is forthright in supporting women’s human rights. As such, it's curious that the book fails to address, among other things, maternal mortality, abortion, contraception, or the reproductive havoc caused by modern warfare.
Stoking Fire: Why Are Some Teachers Being Asked to Swear Allegiance to Catholic Doctrine?
As teachers across the country rejoice that the school year is over, Catholic school educators in a handful of areas are having to decide whether to sign employment contracts affirming their wholehearted belief in Catholic precepts.
Stoking Fire: The Adoption Movement’s ‘Supply Crunch’
A new report commissioned by Political Research Associates outlines how a drop-off in international adoptions increased demand for domestic adoption, raising questions about how "adoptions from Indian country factor in the equation."
Stoking Fire: The Knights of Columbus’ Efforts Against Choice and Marriage Equality
Although many local chapters of the Knights of Columbus, which is well over a century old, still devote themselves to aiding the indigent and disabled, a new report published by Catholics for Choice reveals how for the past two decades, the bulk of the organization’s fundraising and activism have gone to bolster anti-abortion and anti-marriage equality initiatives.
Stoking Fire: A Global Look at the Right’s Anti-Gay Rhetoric
A new report by People for the American Way examines the "globalization" of homophobia and offers chilling details about its spread.
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