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Tag: Women and Girls

  • Federal Officials Promise to Restore Funding to Women’s Health Initiative

    Federal Officials Promise to Restore Funding to Women’s Health Initiative


    After an outcry from scientists and health experts, federal health officials on Thursday said they would restore funding to the Women’s Health Initiative, one of the largest and longest studies of women’s health ever carried out.

    The findings of the W.H.I. and its randomized controlled trials have changed medical practices and helped shape clinical guidelines, preventing hundreds of thousands of cases of cardiovascular disease and breast cancer.

    “These studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women’s health,” said Emily G. Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

    “We are now working to fully restore funding to these essential research efforts,” she added. The National Institutes of Health “remains deeply committed to advancing public health through rigorous gold standard research, and we are taking immediate steps to ensure the continuity of these studies.”

    The W.H.I., which began in the 1990s when few women were included in clinical research, enrolled over 160,000 participants across the nation. It continues to follow some 42,000 women, tracking data on cardiovascular disease and aging, as well as frailty, vision loss and mental health.

    Researchers have hoped to use the findings to learn more about how to maintain mobility and cognitive function and slow memory loss, detect cancer earlier, and predict the risks of other diseases.

    H.H.S. had informed the leaders of the research team that it would terminate contracts for the W.H.I.’s regional centers in September, although the clinical coordinating center, based at Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, would be funded through at least January 2026. As of early Thursday evening, the investigators had not been informed the grants were being restored.

    Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said shutting down the trial would be “a devastating loss for women’s health research.”

    Not only did the initiative lead to major advancements in women’s health, “it has paved the way for a generation of researchers focused on women’s health — which has long been overlooked and underfunded,” Ms. Murray said.

    The W.H.I. included a number of randomized controlled trials and has contributed to more than 2,000 research papers. But it is probably best known for a study of hormone replacement therapy that was abruptly halted in 2002, after investigators found that older women who took a combination of estrogen and progestin experienced a small but significant increase in the risk of breast cancer.

    Until then, hormone replacement therapy was widely believed to protect women from cardiovascular disease. But the trial found that even though the hormone combination reduced colorectal cancer and hip fractures, it put women at higher risk for heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.

    Dr. JoAnn Manson, one of the long-term principal investigators of the study and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, called the announcement of funding cuts “heartbreaking.”

    The original decision to cut funding, she said, was perplexing, given statements by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, about the importance of reducing chronic disease in America.

    “There is no better example of the scientific impact of research on chronic disease prevention than the W.H.I.,” Dr. Manson said.

    The lessons learned from the hormone study have resulted in enormous savings in health care costs, researchers have found — about $35 billion between 2003 and 2012, according to one study, because of the number of cancer and cardiovascular disease cases that had been averted. For every dollar spent on the W.H.I., $140 was saved.

    One randomized trial carried out by the W.H.I. looked at the impact of a low-fat diet, high in fruits and vegetables. Though researchers initially found a reduction only in ovarian cancer, long-term follow-up showed that the diet also reduced deaths from breast cancer.

    Another study of calcium and vitamin D found that supplements provided a modest benefit for preserving bone mass and preventing hip fractures in older women, but did not prevent other fractures or colorectal cancer.

    The findings influenced medical guidelines, which currently do not recommend that all women routinely take the supplements.

    The participants in the initiative are now 78 to 108 years old, and some scientists conceded that an argument could be made for winding down the trial. But careful planning is typically given to closing out such a large and wide-ranging study.

    “There’s still so much we need to learn,” said Garnet Anderson, senior vice president and director of the public health sciences division at Fred Hutch Cancer Center and a principal investigator of the initiative.

    “No one has ever studied 13,000 women over the age of 90 to know: What are their health needs? How to live such a long and health life?” she said. “We’d love to know the secrets of success for healthy aging.”

    One reason that the study was begun in the 1990s was that there was a dearth of information and research on women’s health, and little evidence on which to base clinical recommendations, said Marian Neuhouser, who heads the cancer prevention program at Fred Hutch Cancer Center and is chair of the W.H.I. steering committee.

    “Women are half the population,” Dr. Neuhouser said, “but they had not been included in research. It had mostly been men, and the results were so-called extrapolated to women.”



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  • Paige Bueckers: A Basketball Star is Born

    Paige Bueckers: A Basketball Star is Born


    Her confidence comes partly from her faith, Ms. Bueckers said on a video call in March, a couple weeks before the N.C.A.A. final. It was a rest day for the Huskies, and she had slept until 11 a.m. that morning. She had gone to a sauna and shot 100 free throws before the call; afterward, she had a massage appointment.

    Ms. Bueckers, who grew up outside Minneapolis, described her faith as a major part of her identity, which has also been shaped by her family. Her parents, Amy Dettbarn and Bob Bueckers, divorced when she was a toddler, and Ms. Bueckers was raised mostly by her father. She has three half siblings, including a 12-year-old half brother, Drew, whose mother is Black. “Drew doesn’t leave her hip,” Mr. Bueckers said figuratively, adding that Ms. Bueckers had been a role model to all of her siblings.

    Ms. Bueckers was raised Catholic but now attends a church that she characterized as nondenominational. Her faith, she explained, has helped her be more decisive. “I know that whatever decision I’m going to make is going to be the right one, and it’s going to turn out the right way,” she said.

    Has Ms. Bueckers, who works with the stylist Brittany Hampton, decided on a look for Monday’s W.N.B.A. draft? In fact, Ms. Hampton said, she is planning to wear several. “Her draft day is her opulence moment,” the stylist said. “It’s going to be power dressing for sure.” Ms. Hampton, 36, said to expect “liquid rhinestone cascades,” “embellishments” and “bold elegance.”

    For last year’s draft, which Ms. Bueckers attended as the guest of former UConn teammates, she wore a Louis Vuitton ensemble of a white vest, shirt and trousers. A TikTok video of her showing it off received comments including “GIRL GOT DRIPPP,” “The fit is GIVINGGG” and “Paige A Whole Vibe.”





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  • Overlooked No More: Katharine McCormick, Force Behind the Birth Control Pill

    Overlooked No More: Katharine McCormick, Force Behind the Birth Control Pill


    This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

    Katharine Dexter McCormick, who was born to a life of wealth, which she compounded through marriage, could have sat back and simply enjoyed the many advantages that flowed her way. Instead, she put her considerable fortune — matched by her considerable willfulness — into making life better for women.

    An activist, philanthropist and benefactor, McCormick used her wealth strategically, most notably to underwrite the basic research that led to the development of the birth control pill in the late 1950s.

    Before then, contraception in the United States was extremely limited, with bans on diaphragms and condoms. The advent of the pill made it easier for women to plan when and whether to have children, and it fueled the explosive sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today, the pill, despite some side effects, is the most widely used form of reversible contraception in the United States.

    McCormick’s interest in birth control began in the 1910s, when she learned of Margaret Sanger, the feminist leader who had been jailed for opening the nation’s first birth control clinic. She shared Sanger’s fervent belief that women should be able to chart their own biological destinies.

    The two met in 1917 and soon hatched an elaborate scheme to smuggle diaphragms into the United States.

    Diaphragms had been banned under the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal crime to send or deliver through the mail “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material — including pornography, contraceptives and items used for abortions. (The law, which still prohibits mailing items related to abortions, has received renewed attention since the federal right to abortion was overturned in 2022.)

    McCormick, who was fluent in French and German, traveled to Europe, where diaphragms were in common use. She had studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was able to pose as a scientist in meetings with diaphragm manufacturers.

    “She purchased hundreds of the devices and hired local seamstresses to sew them into dresses, evening gowns and coats,” according to a 2011 article in M.I.T. Technology Review. “Then she had the garments wrapped and packed neatly into trunks for shipment.”

    She and her steamer trunks made it through customs. If the authorities had stopped her, the article said, they would have found “nothing but slightly puffy dresses in the possession of a bossy socialite, a woman oozing such self-importance and tipping her porters so grandly that no one suspected a thing.”

    From 1922 to 1925, McCormick smuggled more than 1,000 diaphragms into Sanger’s clinics.

    After her husband died in 1947, McCormick inherited a considerable amount of money, and she asked Sanger for advice on how to put it to use advancing research into contraception. In 1953, Sanger introduced her to Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min-Chueh Chang, researchers at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts, who were trying to develop a safe, reliable oral contraceptive.

    She was excited by their work and provided almost all the funding — $2 million (about $23 million today) — required to develop the pill. She even moved to Worcester to monitor and encourage their research. Pincus’s wife, Elizabeth, described McCormick as a warrior: “Little old woman she was not. She was a grenadier.”

    Katharine Moore Dexter was born into an affluent, socially activist family on Aug. 27, 1875, in Dexter, Mich., west of Detroit. The town was named for her grandfather, Samuel W. Dexter, who founded it in 1824 and maintained an Underground Railroad stop in his home, where Katharine was born; her great-grandfather, Samuel Dexter, was Treasury secretary under President John Adams.

    Katharine and her older brother, Samuel T. Dexter, grew up in Chicago. Their mother, Josephine (Moore) Dexter, was a Boston Brahmin who supported women’s rights. Their father, Wirt Dexter, was a high-powered lawyer who served as president of the Chicago Bar Association and as a director of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. He also headed the relief committee after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and was a major real estate developer.

    Katharine’s father died when she was 14. A few years later, her brother died of meningitis while attending Harvard Law School. Those early deaths pointed her toward a career in medicine.

    She attended M.I.T. and majored in biology, rare achievements for a woman of that era. She arrived with a mind of her own and successfully challenged a rule that female students had to wear hats at all times, arguing that they posed a fire hazard in the science labs. She graduated in 1904 and planned to attend medical school.

    But by then, she had started dating the dashing Stanley Robert McCormick, whom she had known in Chicago and who was an heir to an immense fortune built on a mechanical harvesting machine that his father had invented. As a young lawyer, he helped negotiate a merger that made his family a major owner of International Harvester; by 1909, it was the fourth-largest industrial company in America, measured in assets.

    McCormick persuaded Katharine to marry him instead of going to medical school. They wed at her mother’s château in Switzerland and settled in Brookline, Mass.

    But even before they married, he had shown signs of mental instability, and he began experiencing violent, paranoid delusions. He was hospitalized with what was later determined to be schizophrenia, and remained under psychiatric care — mostly at Riven Rock, the McCormick family estate in Montecito, Calif. — until his death. She never divorced him and never remarried. They had no children.

    Katharine McCormick spent decades mired in personal, medical and legal disputes with her husband’s siblings. They battled over his treatment, his guardianship and eventually his estate, as detailed in a 2007 article in Prologue, a publication of the National Archives. She was his sole beneficiary, inheriting about $40 million ($563 million in today’s dollars). Combined with the $10 million (more than $222 million today) she had inherited from her mother, that made her one of the wealthiest women in America.

    As her husband’s illness consumed her personal life, McCormick threw herself into social causes. She contributed financially to the suffrage movement, gave speeches and rose in leadership to become treasurer and vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After women won the right to vote in 1920, the association evolved into the League of Women Voters; McCormick became its vice president.

    In 1927, she established the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School, believing that a malfunctioning adrenal gland was responsible for her husband’s schizophrenia. She provided funding for two decades and acquired an expertise in endocrinology that later informed her interest in the development of an oral contraceptive.

    After the F.D.A. approved the pill, McCormick turned her attention to funding the first on-campus residence for women at M.I.T. When she studied there, women had no housing, one of several factors that discouraged them from applying. “I believe if we can get them properly housed,” she said, “that the best scientific education in our country will be open to them permanently.”

    McCormick Hall, named for her husband, opened on the institute’s Cambridge campus in 1963. At the time, women made up about 3 percent of the school’s undergraduates; today, they make up about 50 percent.

    By the time she died of a stroke on Dec. 28, 1967, at her home in Boston, McCormick had played a major role in expanding opportunities for women in the 20th century. She was 92.

    Apart from a short article in The Boston Globe, her death drew little notice. The later obituaries of the birth-control researchers she had supported did not mention her role in their achievement.

    In her will, she left $5 million (more than $46 million today) to the Planned Parenthood Federation and $1 million (more than $9 million today) to Pincus’s laboratories. Earlier, she had donated her inherited property in Switzerland to the U.S. government for use by its diplomatic mission in Geneva. She left most of the rest of her estate to M.I.T.



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  • Girls to the Front: Punk Pioneers Are Coming to Lincoln Center

    Girls to the Front: Punk Pioneers Are Coming to Lincoln Center


    For the Bronx crew ESG, another group formed by sisters — Renee Scroggins and her younger siblings Valerie, Deborah and Marie, along with a friend, Tito Libran — Lincoln Center was the far-off home of the New York Philharmonic, watched on PBS. Renee Scroggins, ESG’s frontwoman, said the show next month will be the first time she has set foot in the space. (ESG has performed at Carnegie Hall, and in arenas like Barclays Center, opening for Robyn, one of the many acts that followed in its sonic footprints.)

    ESG — it stands for emerald, sapphire and gold — was born as a way for the Scroggins girls to stay out of trouble, and its unique sound blended all the genres they were surrounded by in the Boogie Down borough, circa the late ’70s and early ’80s: punk, funk, hip-hop and Latin grooves. “We like to play music that makes people dance,” Scroggins, 65, said, in a phone interview from her home in Georgia. Crafting the Lincoln Center set list for the group, which now includes her children, she had one mantra: “You should not be sitting in your seat.”

    Their joyful vibe was not always easy to come by. Her sister Valerie was once derided by a sound tech for drumming “like a girl,” Scroggins recalled. At another gig, “she beat that drum so hard that the stage started to come apart,” Scroggins said. “Those two stories go hand-in-hand in my mind.”

    And even as its music became part of countless hits for others, ESG did not earn royalties, given the contracts the bandmates signed early in their career. (In 1992, they released an EP called “Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills.”) They fought for recognition, too. Once, when they were performing the wordless, spooky “UFO,” “I heard a kid say, ‘They are doing Doug E. Fresh!’” Scroggins recalled. “I said, excuse me, young man, Doug E. Fresh was doing ESG. Get it straight!”

    Still, ESG remained true to their own path. “The whole course of our career, we stayed on independent labels, if not putting it out ourselves,” Scroggins said. “We wanted to do it our way.”

    That ethos animates this Songbook series, its creators said. (It concludes with a performance by Ana Tijoux, the French-Chilean rapper, returning after a decadelong break.)



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  • What Evie Magazine, a ‘Conservative Cosmo,’ Thinks Women Want 

    What Evie Magazine, a ‘Conservative Cosmo,’ Thinks Women Want 


    “Does Brittany look oppressed to you?” Gabriel Hugoboom asked, gesturing toward his wife.

    Mrs. Hugoboom did not. The model, clad in thigh-high black boots, was perched on a cream-colored couch in the couple’s new apartment, poking fun at her critics. As editor in chief of Evie, a women’s publication opposed to what she calls “modern” feminism, Mrs. Hugoboom has been accused of participating in her own subjugation and undermining women’s rights, claims she finds ridiculous and unfair.

    “There are all these people that are so triggered and angry that we exist,” she said. Those seeking left-wing views had other publications to read, she added: “Why can’t there be one that offers women an alternative?”

    Behind her, floor-to-ceiling windows showed off a dizzying view of the city’s skyline. The turnkey rental in Midtown Manhattan was a work in progress, since half of the Hugobooms’ belongings were still in Miami, where they had lived until last month. But it was spotless, luxurious and spacious enough for them to fit their two young daughters (as well as the relatives who often fly in to help care for them) and work from home on building what they call their “feminine” business empire.

    The Hugobooms, both 33, are co-founders of two companies: Evie, a glossy magazine and website that Mrs. Hugoboom has described as a “conservative Cosmo,” and 28, a menstrual cycle-based wellness app backed by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Through 28, they sell a supplement called “Toxic Breakup” that encourages women to quit hormonal birth control, and through Evie, they release limited-edition clothing — most recently, a corseted “raw milkmaid” sundress “inspired by the hardworking dairymaids of 18th-century Europe.”

    “We want to build the one-stop shop for femininity,” said Mrs. Hugoboom, who is the public face of both businesses.

    Femininity does not mean feminism, which Mrs. Hugoboom doesn’t define as equal rights but as a self-hating movement that is anti-family and anti-male — one that shames women who “choose conventional roles.” Despite running two companies, she is particularly critical of what she calls “girlboss feminism.”

    Her interpretation of that term — which went from broadly celebrated to roundly dismissed in the 2010s — is that it encourages women to “be just like men” to succeed in corporate fields. Such messaging, she says, has made women anxious, lonely and unfulfilled. Instead, she believes, faith, family and love, not “casual sex, careerism or ideological activism,” supply the greatest satisfaction.

    “I think more women want a soft life, a beautiful life, than feeling all this pressure to do all these things,” Mrs. Hugoboom explained.

    At first glance, Evie seems nonpartisan, publishing content daily about topics like award season red carpets and styling skinny jeans. But readers who click past “hot girl” health trends and Adam Brody appreciation posts will find articles that promote positions that are fringe even within conservative circles — criticisms of no-fault divorce and I.V.F., for example — packaged in a fun and approachable format. (A typical Evie headline: “Amy From ‘Love Is Blind’ Is Right To Be Hesitant About Birth Control.”)

    The publication assumes that the Evie reader aspires to be a wife and mother, even while it acknowledges that she has some options: She can study and work (just not at the expense of a family), she can be sexually adventurous (with her husband), and she can even delay pregnancy (by using “natural” fertility tracking methods).

    Evie positions motherhood as under attack, citing falling birthrates, despite polling showing that most Americans still want to have or have children. “Be a rebel. Start a family,” reads a full-page ad for Evie that depicts a shirtless man sensually kissing a pregnant belly.

    Stephen K. Bannon has gushed about Evie’s “incredible coverage.” Candace Owens, a prominent right-wing commentator who recently started her own media platform geared toward women, is a longtime fan; she said her first photo shoot appeared in Evie. So is Brett Cooper, a leading conservative YouTuber who hosts a show aimed at Gen-Z women. “I think they were definitely ahead of the curve,” she said of Evie.

    Even critics of Evie acknowledge the appeal of its messaging. “It’s a perfectly pretty gateway drug to ideologies which exist to protect the privileged and further disenfranchise the marginalized,” Sara Petersen, author of the book “Momfluenced,” wrote in a Substack post.

    Emily Amick, the author of “Democracy in Retrograde” and a former counsel to Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said that Democrats needed to take seriously Evie and its contemporaries in what she called today’s conservative “girly-pop ecosystem.” These media outlets, she added, are zeroing in on “moderate, apolitical, exhausted women” who are broken down by the lack of support for working mothers.

    “By weaving identity politics and conservative values into lifestyle and wellness content, the right has been able to capture a cohort of women voters that the left never dreamed they could lose,” Ms. Amick recently wrote on her Substack, Emily In Your Phone.

    The Hugobooms are explicit about wanting to reach women who feel left behind. “Millions of women have been forgotten by the publishing world,” reads a statement on Evie’s “About” page. “Women are no longer buying what they’re selling. And if you’re reading this, we have a feeling you’re going to feel right at home.”

    As a teenager, Mrs. Hugoboom, who was born Brittany Martinez, read popular teen and women’s magazines and participated in their model searches, once winning an Elle Girl competition. She was raised Catholic by parents who often moved around the country because of her father’s job in banking, and said she became a “tradcath,” a trendy term for Traditionalist Catholic, around a decade ago.

    “Now I prefer the Latin Mass,” Mrs. Hugoboom said. “One of my friends is an exorcist. I love that stuff.” Mr. Hugoboom proposed to her in front of the Vatican.

    She met Mr. Hugoboom when they were both 18-year-old students at the University of Dallas. He grew up in Memphis as one of eight children of naturopath parents. “They were very MAHA, before MAHA was even a thing,” Mr. Hugoboom said, referring to the “Make America Healthy Again” slogan of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

    On one early date, Mr. Hugoboom recalled, he took Mrs. Hugoboom to Whole Foods to introduce her to “real cheese,” as opposed to the “American” kind.

    “You probably saved me from obesity,” said Mrs. Hugoboom, who joked that she grew up on Lunchables.

    The Hugobooms eventually dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles, where she modeled for companies like Bebe and Adidas while he worked in creative development.

    By the late 2010s, many women’s magazines had moved sharply to the left, influenced in part by the rising popularity of feminist online media such as Jezebel and The Cut. Mrs. Hugoboom loved pop culture and fashion, but the publications she read to learn more about, say, Taylor Swift, also featured articles about polyamory and Marxism. And nowhere, she said, could she find much positive content about marriage and motherhood.

    Thus the idea for Evie Magazine was born: a stylish publication rooted in celebrating “femininity.” It would be as escapist and aspirational as any other mainstream women’s magazine — except Evie cover girls would not be politicians in power suits but the type of women who might compete in beauty pageants two weeks after giving birth to their eighth child (which their most recent cover girl, the Utah influencer Hannah Neeleman, actually did). The magazine’s name is a riff on the first woman in the Bible: “Eve screwed the world,” Mrs. Hugoboom said, “and this is a new Eve who will save the world.”

    Mrs. Hugoboom said that one media mogul told the couple that their concept was doomed because there was no such thing as a conservative woman, and that the best-case scenario was that women would marry conservative men and adopt their views. “I think women are a little more interesting than that, and they have their own thoughts,” Mrs. Hugoboom said, still bristling years later.

    They officially launched in 2019, eventually raising money from private angel investors that the Hugobooms declined to name. (One investor, Mrs. Hugoboom’s father, is also listed as an executive in records for Evie’s holding company.)

    “She’s Classier than Cosmo, Sexier than Refinery29, and Smarter than Bustle,” Ms. Hugoboom wrote in an article for the website Quillette announcing her new venture. Conservatives needed a magazine like Evie, she argued, because ignoring pop culture came at their own peril: “We need to involve ourselves in the creation of pop culture, and thereby help change how that category is defined.”

    Many of Evie’s writers have been affiliated with conservative institutions, and the website regularly publishes content that reflects today’s conservative positions, including opposition to abortion, transgender rights and vaccines, as well as support for the Trump family. People have labeled Evie “far-right,” which the Hugobooms find irritating; they repeatedly called it a “double standard,” arguing that outlets like Teen Vogue and Refinery29 aren’t always described as explicitly left. The couple, both of whom voted for President Donald J. Trump, said they felt that the way conservatives were portrayed in mainstream media was outdated.

    They pointed to perspectives that are unconventional for a right-leaning publication. For example, Evie publishes adventurous and explicit sex tips, albeit with “married women only” disclaimers. Evie has advised women who say their partners pressure them into unwanted sexual acts to resist. Writers for the site have called out misogyny in online “manosphere” and “incel” communities. And Evie models wear string bikinis and crop tops because in the words of one Evie writer, “modest isn’t always hottest.” To the dismay of some conservative readers, the sundresses that Evie has sold are so low cut that, as Mrs. Hugoboom once joked on X, “side effects may include an unplanned pregnancy.”

    Mrs. Hugoboom said this modern and uniquely “feminine” perspective is why they have a diversity of readers, and why they believe they were early to cover many topics that have now filtered into the mainstream, including criticism of hookup culture and the need for greater dialogue around women’s hormonal health. The Hugobooms provided The Times with an analysis by the marketing agency Iron Light that found similar levels of Democrats and Republicans among their subscribers.

    In February, Evie’s social content garnered about 100 million views, according to an internal report the Hugobooms provided from the analytics tool Sprout Social. Evie’s social media following, which is about a half-million people across its platforms, is significantly smaller than its competitors (Cosmopolitan, for example, has more than four million followers on Instagram alone), but Evie’s following showed strong growth during the same time some competitors experienced a decline, according to the limited data the couple shared.

    The Hugobooms declined to share more detailed growth data about Evie, saying that the information was too sensitive because they plan to raise a second round of funding. But page views and subscribers may not be the point.

    The couple said they are inspired by Glossier, the international beauty brand that had its roots in a blog with a relatively small but loyal follower count. Within a decade, it was a billion-dollar business turning out product after product.

    Soon after they launched Evie, the Hugobooms started brainstorming their next venture. Maybe a clean beauty brand? What about a “classically feminine” line of lingerie? They grew interested in women’s fertility because many women Mrs. Hugoboom knew were having trouble getting pregnant, she said, adding that they wanted to develop a product that would “empower” women to understand their bodies.

    Through some fortuitous networking, they landed a meeting with Mr. Thiel and asked him to invest in a wellness app based on a typical menstrual cycle.

    Mr. Thiel, who once suggested women’s suffrage was bad for America, did not seem like a natural investor in femtech. But he is one of many influential conservatives who believe declining birthrates pose a threat to economic growth and societal well-being.

    They pitched him on “the fertility crisis,” Mrs. Hugoboom recalled.

    “He was like, ‘And no one else is doing this?’ And it was like, ‘No, no one else,’ and he was like, ‘OK, sounds like a good idea,” she said. A spokesperson for Mr. Thiel confirmed that he personally invested $2 million in the app, 28. (They raised $3.2 million in total.)

    Natural family planning methods involve making decisions based on awareness of fertility windows. The app suggests foods and exercises for different stages of a woman’s cycle — “lazy girl glutes” and grass-fed butter during the luteal phase — along with workout videos, recipes and emotional guidance. It also pushes a message that hormonal birth control is bad for you. “Goodbye toxicity,” one advertisement reads for the birth control “detox” supplements it sells through the app.

    The annual print editions of Evie include ads for 28. The website has published dozens of critical articles about hormonal birth control, along with critical articles about other, non-hormonal forms of birth control, such as copper I.U.D.s and even condoms. And it runs alarming stories about women experiencing deadly side effects from hormonal birth control, such as blood clots, even though the risk of clots is extremely rare — in fact, women are more likely to develop clots in pregnancy.

    Evie is “pro-life, obviously,” Mrs. Hugoboom said, but she rolled her eyes and shook her head when asked if she believed all birth control should be banned. “If you don’t want to be a mom, don’t be a mom,” she said. “No one should force you to be one. It’s hard work. It’s harder than being a girl boss.”

    Given the pill’s known side effects, there have been increasing calls for doctors and researchers to take women’s complaints about adverse reactions more seriously. But severe complications are rare. By planting the idea that birth control is dangerous, both Evie and 28 are serving a larger political agenda, critics say. They point to conservative politicians and powerful groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom that are trying to restrict access to contraception.

    Katie Gatti Tassin, the co-host of the culture and politics podcast “Diabolical Lies,” said she recently realized while in the middle of recording an episode about Evie that she herself had been influenced in this way. Ms. Gatti Tassin, 30, quit the pill in 2022 because of a vague sense she should “get in touch” with her body’s natural cycle, she said. But it wasn’t until she recorded the episode for her show that Ms. Gatti Tassin realized she had been swayed by anti-contraception social media content from wellness and lifestyle influencers.

    “If somebody like me, who sits around all day thinking about feminism and lefty politics, is still feeling a little bit weird about birth control, I think that speaks to the potency of the project and the approach they are taking,” Ms. Gatti Tassin said.

    Back at the Hugobooms’ apartment, as the sun set below the skyline, their two daughters, ages 3 and 1, wandered in with Mr. Hugoboom’s sister, who was on babysitting duty. The baby, dressed in pale pink, sat in Mrs. Hugoboom’s lap and fed her mother cheese crunchies as she continued to talk about her businesses. The scene could have easily appeared in a mid-2010s magazine profile of a female founder striving for a work-life balance, embodying the exact sort of feminism Mrs. Hugoboom denounces.

    But Mrs. Hugoboom sees no tension in the fact that she is one of a growing number of female conservative content creators whose platforms promote a return to old-fashioned gender roles, even though their own career trajectories defy those traditional norms. Nor is she particularly interested in debating whether it might not be feminism, but instead a severe lack of structural support — affordable child care, paid parental leave — that has left American women feeling unsupported and alone.

    Some see Mrs. Hugoboom as following in the footsteps of famous anti-feminist figures like Phyllis Schlafly, who secured their own professional success by opposing policies that would bring about greater equality between men and women. Unsurprisingly, Evie writers have praised Mrs. Schlafly, calling her a “proud housewife” and a “winner.” But Mrs. Hugoboom said that she has no mentors, and that she was unsure what the future held for her.

    At times her eyes lit up as she discussed all of the new products she and her husband might one day release: TV shows, podcasts, more supplements. (Along with Glossier, Mr. Hugoboom also cited Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s media company, as an inspiration.) Or, Mrs. Hugoboom mused, perhaps she would end up “with six kids, maybe teaching Pilates part time.”

    Despite the years of labor she has put into building the two businesses, she insisted that she believed most women weren’t cut out for hard-charging careers.

    “I think when most women try to do that, they fail,” she said. “Then they feel upset about it, when it’s not really in their nature.”

    Stephanie Castillo and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.



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  • The Women Most Affected by Abortion Bans

    The Women Most Affected by Abortion Bans


    Abortion bans successfully prevented some women from getting abortions in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, according to a detailed new study of birth data from 2023. The effects were most pronounced among women in certain groups — Black and Hispanic women, women without a college degree, and women living farthest from a clinic.

    Abortion has continued to rise since the period the data covers, especially through pills shipped into states with bans. But the study identifies the groups of women who are most likely to be affected by bans.

    For the average woman in states that banned abortion, the distance to a clinic increased to 300 miles from 50 miles, resulting in a 2.8 percent increase in births relative to what would have been expected without a ban.

    For Hispanic women living 300 miles from a clinic, births increased 3.8 percent. For Black women, it was 3.2 percent, and for white women 2 percent.

    “It really tracks, both that women who are poorer and younger and have less education are more likely to have an unintended pregnancy, and more likely to be unable to overcome the barriers to abortion care,” said Dr. Alison Norris, an epidemiology professor at Ohio State who helps lead a nationwide abortion counting effort and was not involved in the new study.

    The working paper, released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is the first to analyze detailed local patterns in births soon after the Dobbs decision in 2022, a period when abortion was declining or about flat nationwide.

    Unexpectedly, abortions have increased nationwide since then. Researchers say this is evidence of unmet demand for abortions before Dobbs. Since then, telehealth and a surge in financial assistance have made it easier for women to get abortions, in both states with bans and where it remained legal.

    But the new findings suggest that the assistance didn’t reach everyone. State bans appear to have prevented some women from having abortions they would have sought if they were legal.

    The national increase in abortion masks that some people were “trapped by bans,” said Caitlin Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College and an author of the paper with Daniel Dench and Mayra Pineda-Torres at Georgia Tech. “What’s happened is an increase in inequality of access: Access is increasing for some people and not for others.”

    The rise in births was small, suggesting that most women who wanted abortions had still gotten them, said Diana Greene Foster, the director of research at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California at San Francisco. Still, she said, the new study was persuasive in showing the effects of bans: “I now feel more convinced that some people really did have to carry pregnancies to term.”

    John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, said that a federal abortion ban would work better than a patchwork of state policies, and that states like Texas needed to do more to reduce out-of-state travel and mail-order abortion pills. But he did think Texas’ law was making a difference.

    “We obviously are seeing the evidence that the bans are actually preventing abortions,” he said. “They’re actually saving lives.”

    Previous studies have measured changes in the abortion rate, but Professor Myers said looking at the number of babies born is the most definitive way to know whether abortion bans actually work. Research from the years before Roe was overturned showed that longer distances from clinics affected abortions and births.

    “This is the paper I’ve been waiting to write for years,” she said. “These are the data I was waiting for.”

    The data she wanted was detailed birth certificates filed in 2023. Mothers include information about their age, race, marital status, level of education and home address in nearly every state, making demographic comparisons possible. The researchers used a statistical method that compared places with similar birthrates before Dobbs to estimate how much a ban changed the expected birthrate.

    They also used county-level data to look at changes in births within states. In counties in states with bans where the distance to the nearest clinic in another state didn’t change, births increased 1 percent. In counties where the distance increased by more than 200 miles, births increased 5 percent.

    In Texas, the largest state with an abortion ban, births increased more in Houston, where the nearest clinic is 600 miles away in Kansas, than they did in El Paso, where the nearest clinic is 20 miles away in New Mexico. Similarly, births increased more in the South, where states are surrounded by other states with bans, but very little in eastern Missouri, where there are abortion clinics across the border in Illinois.

    The researchers also looked at appointment availability at nearby clinics, because some clinics have been overrun with people traveling from other states. They found that if women were unable to get an appointment within two weeks, births increased even more.

    Still, even in places with bans that had no change in distance to the nearest clinic or appointment availability there, relative births increased slightly, which Professor Myers attributed to “a chilling effect” of bans.

    The findings are in line with other research. A previous analysis, using state-level data through 2023 and a different statistical method, found that births increased 1.7 percent, and more among women who were Black or Hispanic, unmarried, without college degrees, or on Medicaid.

    “Using different methods, using slightly different data, we’re coming to the same conclusion about the disparate impacts of these policies on populations,” said Suzanne Bell, a demographer at Johns Hopkins and an author of that paper. “I think that’s adding further evidence to the notion that these are real impacts that we’re capturing.”

    Since the study’s county-level data ends after 2023, it’s possible that births in states with bans have decreased since then. Abortions nationwide have continued to increase, including for women in states with bans.

    Doctors in states that passed so-called shield laws, which protect them from legal liability if they send pills into states with bans, began doing so in earnest during the summer of 2023. Abortions done this way would not affect birth data until 2024.

    But using provisional state-level birth data from 2024, the new paper found almost no change in births from 2023. This data is less reliable, but researchers said that even with shield laws, some women are still unlikely to get an abortion — especially those with fewer resources, who may not know about telehealth abortion sites or are wary of ordering pills online.



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  • ‘The Interview’: Lady Gaga’s Latest Experiment? Happiness.

    ‘The Interview’: Lady Gaga’s Latest Experiment? Happiness.



    The pop superstar reflects on her struggles with mental health, the pressures of the music industry and why she’s returned to the sound that made her famous.



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  • Women with Postpartum Depression Experienced Brain Changes During Pregnancy, Study Finds

    Women with Postpartum Depression Experienced Brain Changes During Pregnancy, Study Finds


    Postpartum depression affects about one in every seven women who give birth, but little is known about what happens in the brains of pregnant women who experience it. A new study begins to shed some light.

    Researchers scanned the brains of dozens of women in the weeks before and after childbirth and found that two brain areas involved in the processing and control of emotions increased in size in women who developed symptoms of postpartum depression.

    The results, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, constitute some of the first evidence that postpartum depression is associated with changes in the brain during pregnancy.

    Researchers found that women with symptoms of depression in the first month after giving birth also had increases in the volume of their amygdala, a brain area that plays a key role in emotional processing. Women who rated their childbirth experience as difficult or stressful — a perception that is often associated with postpartum depression — also showed increases in the volume of the hippocampus, a brain area that helps regulate emotions.

    “This is really the first step in trying to understand how does the brain change in people who have a normal course of pregnancy and then those who experience perinatal depression, and what can we do about it,” said Dr. Sheila Shanmugan, an assistant professor of psychiatry, obstetrics-gynecology and radiology at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study.

    “The big takeaways are about how there are these really profound brain changes during pregnancy and how now we’re seeing it in depression circuitry specifically,” she said.

    The study was conducted in Madrid by a team that has led efforts to document the effects of pregnancy on the brain. It is part of a growing body of research that has found that certain brain networks, especially those involved in social and emotional processing, shrink during pregnancy, possibly undergoing a fine-tuning process in preparation for parenting. Such changes correspond with surges in pregnancy hormones, especially estrogen, and some last at least two years after childbirth, researchers have found.

    The new study appears to be the first to scan and compare brain areas during pregnancy and after childbirth and link the changes to postpartum depression, said Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist who heads the Pregnancy and the Brain Lab at Amsterdam University Medical Center and was not involved in the study.

    The study authors and other researchers said it was not clear whether the increased volume in the amygdala and hippocampus drove depressive symptoms and perceptions of stress during childbirth or whether the brain changes were occurring in response to the symptoms and stressors. It was also unclear from the brain scans why some women seemed to be more vulnerable to these symptoms than others.

    “It might be that those persons whose amygdala is more susceptible to change are also at higher risk of suffering postpartum depression,” said the study’s senior author, Susana Carmona, a neuroscientist who leads the Neuromaternal Laboratory at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Gregorio Marañón in Madrid. “It can also be the other way around,” she said, “that somehow these depression symptoms produce an increase in the amygdala volume.”

    The researchers studied 88 pregnant women who had not previously given birth and who did not have previous histories of depression or other neuropsychiatric conditions. For a control group, they also looked at 30 women who were not pregnant. The pregnant women underwent brain scans during their third trimester and about a month after they gave birth.

    The women completed standard questionnaires to assess whether they had symptoms of postpartum depression. After childbirth, 15 women showed moderate symptoms of depression and another 13 showed symptoms of depression serious enough to warrant seeking medical help, Dr. Carmona said.

    The women also completed questionnaires about whether they perceived their childbirth experience as difficult. Previous studies have shown that “a negative birth experience is associated with increases in depression scores,” Dr. Carmona said. She said difficult childbirth experiences were not necessarily medically challenging deliveries, but could be uncomplicated deliveries that the women perceived as stressful because of factors like rude hospital staff.

    Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study, called the results “really fascinating,” adding that they point the way to further research “trying to figure out which areas of the brain are changing the most in relation to a variety of outcomes after you give birth, such as mood, anxiety, depression.”

    Dr. Pritschet, who wrote an article with Dr. Shanmugan in the same issue of the journal that advocates for research to determine individualized brain signatures of perinatal depression, said the findings of the new study help identify a road map for eventually improving the prediction, diagnosis and treatment of postpartum depression.

    “If we routinely show certain brain areas are implicated, what do we do? How can we intervene early?” she said. “What is the normal amount of change? Why might that area be vulnerable? Lots of interesting questions to ask next.”



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  • Woodworking Is Losing Its Macho Edge Thanks to These Women

    Woodworking Is Losing Its Macho Edge Thanks to These Women


    This article is part of our Design special section about the reverence for handmade objects.

    It often starts with a box. These utilitarian objects are expressions of a woodworker’s technical rigor and style. But for Wendy Maruyama, who earned a master’s degree in furniture design from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1980, boxes were also political statements. Early in her career, she created boxes awash in vivid color, perched atop 4-foot-tall stands with spiked handles on their lids. Auction sites frequently describe these pieces as “modesty boxes,” but they started out with a specific use: to hold an 18-pack of tampons.

    “I loved the idea of gender-specific furniture — making something that men could not possibly grasp or experience,” Ms. Maruyama, 73, recently said in an email interview. One of the few women in the American studio furniture movement, a cohort that combined fine woodworking skills with artistic expression, she went on to build larger versions that held menstrual pads and sex toys.

    Last year, the Fresno Art Museum handed Ms. Maruyama its Distinguished Woman Artist award and hosted her first career survey. No furniture maker before her has received the honor, which has previously gone to the sculptor Ruth Asawa, the assemblage artist Betye Saar and the weaver Kay Sekimachi. In November, the Manhattan gallery Superhouse exhibited her prismatic tambour cabinets in “Colorama,” a show that also included furniture by her friend and fellow woodworker Tom Loeser.

    Ms. Maruyama is not alone in stepping into a gender-specific spotlight. With boundaries dissolving between craft and high art, and women in both areas enjoying a new wave of appreciation, woodworking — which has long been and still remains a male-dominated field — has become more interesting. It is filled with narrative content, social commentary and visually daring forms courtesy of its female makers. Path breakers of the American studio furniture movement who are now in their 70s and 80s are still creating new work, while younger generations of women who learned from them continue to advance the medium.

    “Over the years, women are much more likely to be woodworkers or furniture makers or designers,” said Rosanne Somerson, 70, a woodworker who co-founded the Rhode Island School of Design’s furniture design department in 1995 and later became the institution’s president. “With every generation, interests change. My generation had more of a lineage from high-level decorative arts, but women now are bringing in a lot more narrative interest and identity issues; it’s less about the highest levels of craft and more about the highest levels of expression — and almost provocation.”

    Because the material carries so many cultural and ecological associations, it is well suited to engage with contemporary issues. Joyce Lin, 30, a furniture maker in Houston, created her “Material Autopsy” series of conceptual domestic objects to explore the impact of our industrialized society and how most of us are far removed from how things are made. For one chair in the series, which looks like it was grown from a single log sliced open to reveal its rings, Ms. Lin riffed on the decorative arts tradition of faux bois, or realistic-looking artificial wood.

    “When I post photos of the piece online,” Ms. Lin said, “I get people who think I actually grew the wood and then there are a lot of people who think it was A.I.-generated.”

    For Kim Mupangilaï, 35, a Belgian Congolese interior designer in Brooklyn, N.Y., wood was a natural choice for her first furniture collection, introduced in 2023. “I really wanted my furniture to come from me, kind of like a self-portrait,” she said. Her utilitarian objects loosely refer to archival photographs taken in central Africa and are made of materials common in Congolese crafts, including teak, banana fibers and rattan. Her Mwasi armoire, an hourglass-shaped piece with woven doors, is currently on view at “Making Home —Smithsonian Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt museum, and she recently exhibited chairs and stools that refer to Art Nouveau and the colonial history of Belgium at the Fog Design + Art fair in San Francisco.

    Deirdre Visser, a curator and woodworker in San Francisco, said that speaking more directly about the role of gender in the field was important to welcoming new perspectives and creating more exciting objects.

    Her commentary has taken the form of a recent book called “Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century.” It features women and gender nonconforming people involved with the medium: from medieval turners to the Shaker who developed the first circular saw, to contemporary artists like Katie Hudnall, who leads the woodworking and furniture program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Yuri Kobayashi, who studied under Ms. Maruyama at San Diego State University and taught furniture design at RISD for many years. (Ms. Lin was one of her students.)

    Ms. Visser, 54, rejects the notion that to be classified as a female woodworker rather than just someone working in wood diminishes the maker. “All of us have identities we bring to making and that is, more and more, where the discussion is rooted,” she said. “The most cisgender, straight white male is also bringing identity and a set of experiences to the wood shop, and so this perceived neutrality of their identity as a maker is foolish.”

    Faye Toogood, a British designer, has become more attuned to the ways that her identity shapes what she creates. She used wood for her earliest works, but quickly shifted to industrial materials. “I looked to my left and my right and thought, if I want to be taken seriously, I need to pick up bronzes and steel,” she said. “I now realize that was because I felt like I was wacky in a male-dominated field of industrial design.”

    Recently, Ms. Toogood, 48, returned to wood with “Assemblage 7: Lost and Found II,” a series of monolithic chairs, tables and cabinets that includes pieces hand-carved from oak and covered in shellac, a finish popular in 18th-century England. “It made the pieces really modern but feel quite ancient at the same time,” she said.

    With all the leaps, woodworking can still be unwelcoming and isolating for women, and some makers are bent on building community and support.

    Natalie Shook, 42, an artist and self-taught woodworker in Brooklyn, is one of them. After her products grew from stools to large-scale modular shelving, she opened her own workshop. This allowed her to “completely insulate” herself from the hostility she had experienced at other shops, she said. “There is not an energy or assumption that women can’t do things in our studio.”

    Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon, who founded their woodworking studio Alexis & Ginger in 2023, a year after graduating from RISD, experienced culture shock once they left the cozy precincts of their academic furniture program. At school, they were able to “just focus on materiality and run full force into exploring and articulating our ideas,” Ms. Tingey, 34, said. “And that hasn’t always been the case since.” Sometimes they are the only women in their workshops. “But at least we have each other,” she added.

    Katie Thompson, 38, an artist in rural South Carolina, started a blog and Instagram account called Women of Woodworking in 2015 to connect with other makers. “I felt pretty isolated as a woman woodworker at the time and wanted to help amplify the stories of other women and gender nonconforming woodworkers out there so more people could see themselves being a part of the field, too,” she said. The community has grown to thousands of members from around the world and hosts interviews on Instagram Live and virtual meet-ups.

    Practitioners hope that this momentum continues. “As much as I’d love to believe the next few years will bring more progress for women in these fields, the political climate doesn’t give me much hope,” Ms. Maruyama said. “But I’d like to be wrong. I’ve been pleasantly surprised before.”





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  • A Jazz Quintet Bubbling With Good Vibes? Meet the Women of Artemis.

    A Jazz Quintet Bubbling With Good Vibes? Meet the Women of Artemis.


    “Is it true that all of you, except me, have never played there?” Rosnes asked her bandmates when they gathered for a video interview in late January.

    Excited chatter ensued. Several have taken the stage as side players or with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra at the 90-year-old club. “One thing I’m excited for you all to feel there is the sound,” said Rosnes, who has played there since the late 1980s, as a member of bands led by Shorter and Joe Henderson, and eventually as a headliner herself. “You can just hear each other so well.”

    Close listening is always crucial to jazz, especially in an ensemble that offers individual players such freedom. Rosnes praised how Ueda keeps audiences and musicians alike “glued to her joyousness, to the logic of her line and how she tells a story.” Miller, she said, is “the center of our gravity, always uplifting us.”

    Rosnes brings to Artemis the skills and focus that made her the first-call pianist for top bandleaders as soon as she arrived in New York from Vancouver, in late 1985. By 1990, she was releasing Blue Note albums herself; she’s recorded 10 for the label aside from her work with Artemis, including a duo album with her husband, the pianist Bill Charlap.

    The saxophonist Chris Potter, who has played with Rosnes since the 1990s, said her compositions and arrangements always bear her hallmark. “It’s not exactly straight ahead, it’s not avant-garde, it’s not fusion, it’s Renee music,” he said in an email. “You hear the jazz tradition, you hear classical influences, you hear the music she grew up listening to, you hear the music she’s studying now, but most importantly you hear a sound that only a woman who grew up in western Canada and got carried away by jazz music could create.”

    But no one artist’s identity defines Artemis. “Sometimes I feel more myself in this band than my own bands,” said Miller, an in-demand drummer. “In Artemis, I feel all of the things that I fell in love with when I first heard jazz and discovered the ways that I wanted to approach music.”



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