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Tag: Women and Girls

  • TEFAF: Ecofeminism Returns, With a Renewed Focus on the Environment and Women

    TEFAF: Ecofeminism Returns, With a Renewed Focus on the Environment and Women


    In 2018, the curator Catherine Taft began researching an exhibition on ecofeminism, assuming it would be a retrospective on a philosophy that had fallen out of fashion. Ecofeminism emerged from environmental, feminist, social justice and antinuclear activism in the 1970s.

    The movement resists traditional systems of patriarchy and capitalism that it contends subjugate women and exploit nature. It advocates for embracing collaboration, recognizing humanity’s dependence on ecosystems and respecting all life as sacred.

    But in the 1990s, critics accused ecofeminism of stereotyping and falsely equating women and nature. The backlash caused the movement to go dormant. Then Taft noticed a shift. The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests shined a light on social and environmental justice, leading to a re-emergence of ecofeminism.

    “People are using the term again and are excited to embrace ecofeminism as an approach,” Taft, deputy director of the Brick gallery in Los Angeles, said in a video interview. Consequently, she focused the show on the present and future, and reframed ecofeminism “as an expansive strategy for survival in 21st century life,” she said.

    Taft’s exhibition, “Life on Earth,” opened Feb. 28 in The Hague, Netherlands. At the same time, TEFAF Maastricht’s Focus initiative is showcasing two historic and contemporary ecofeminist artists. Together, these shows illuminate the many facets of this evolving movement.

    Fresh from bringing an ecofeminist exhibition to Frieze London 2024, Richard Saltoun Gallery is dedicating a TEFAF Maastricht show to the surrealist artist Juliana Seraphim, referred to in their news release as “an early pioneer of contemporary ecofeminist discourse.” Born in 1934 in Jaffa in southern Tel Aviv, Seraphim fled to Lebanon when the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out. As a painter, she was criticized by her fellow Palestinian artists for not addressing their cause.

    “Juliana was much more focused on women’s liberation,” said Niamh Coghlan, director of Richard Saltoun Gallery, in a video interview. “She felt that women were the most beautiful forms and the most sensitive, empathetic creatures on Earth. That was what she wanted to paint.”

    Seraphim, who died in 2005, saw a world marred by wars, inequalities, harsh living conditions and heartless social interactions. She wanted to show people what she called “a woman’s world,” infused with love, beauty, sensitivity and entanglement with nature.

    In her work “The Eye,” Seraphim painted women wearing insect wings and diaphanous dresses laced with capillaries, gliding through buildings resembling stone hoodoos. “Dance of Love” portrays sunken machines and buildings beneath a female form triumphantly springing from a flower amid pink swirls and a stylized snake. In “Flower Woman,” a sphinxlike woman’s head envelops petals and a seahorse, while butterfly wings cascade down her back and blossoms fill her breast. All three works are included in the Maastricht show.

    “You can see her playing with the way that the environment is the human body,” Coghlan said. “We’ve made a divisive point of saying that humans and the natural world are very different. But they’re the same thing. Juliana was interested in pulling them back together.”

    When the Norwegian fiber artist Gjertrud Hals casts about for inspiration, her mind catches elements of women’s culture and the environmental destruction she has witnessed. Growing up on the remote island of Finnoya, in the 1950s, she witnessed the overfishing that collapsed the population of fish and whales, forcing many families, including hers, to leave Finnoya.

    While living in the Norwegian fjords, Hals watched as a spectacular nearby waterfall was captured for hydropower. A year later, she and her husband launched a successful campaign to save a watershed from being dammed. Simultaneously, the feminist marches of the 1960s and the related push to elevate women’s crafts to fine art motivated Hals to learn weaving and embroider feminist quotes.

    Today, Hals said she is less political. But ecofeminist themes will subtly saturate her solo exhibition at TEFAF, presented by Galerie Maria Wettergren. Her fishnetlike paper vessels conjure the shapes of seashells and wombs while honoring the feminine tradition of fiber arts and speaking indirectly of womanhood and nature. “On one hand, they are vulnerable; on the other hand, they are strong,” Hals said in a video interview.

    In a nod to humans’ interconnectivity with nature, Hals muddles the natural and the human made. She fashioned shoes from roots and molded Japanese mulberry bark paper into small human heads, which she will display among similar-looking mushrooms plucked from trees.

    In “Golden,” a copper net weaving has “caught” golden herrings and other animals that Hals cut out from the insides of Norwegian caviar mayonnaise tubes, perhaps questioning the value placed on the living world. In “After the Storm,” shells and pearls seem to have washed up into a wire net, offering a hopeful message. “We are in a political situation more and more, not only in Norway but in Europe and generally,” Hals explained. “And we are hoping that one day there will be a time after the storm.”

    In curating “Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism” — which debuted last fall at the Brick in Los Angeles and is on show at West Den Haag museum in The Hague through July 27 — Taft aimed to portray ecofeminism as an intersectional movement. She also wanted to inspire hope amid multiple planetary crises. “Part of my work is to show that working together and finding communities where you can make a change really does make a difference,” she said.

    As such, a 24-hour online/in-person symposium on ecofeminist art will accompany the show on March 21. It will follow the sun from the Loop gallery in Seoul to West Den Haag to the Brick, encompassing communities of participants around the globe. At West Den Haag, the exhibition will feature nearly 20 artists from Colombia, Nigeria and other countries, many of whom merge eco-friendly lifestyles with their art.

    The art collective Institute of Queer Ecology presents videos of caterpillar chrysalises to envision how capitalist extractivism — depleting nature and exploiting human labor to maximize profit — could be reconstituted, butterflylike, into a regenerative system. The artist Yo-E Ryou created a soundscape and underwater maps that chronicle her experience learning sustainable seafood harvesting from the female free divers of Jeju Island, South Korea.

    Leslie Labowitz-Starus’s installation grew out of her 40-year art-life ecofeminist project, “Sproutime,” which blends a sprout-growing business, education at a farmers market, performance art and installations. At West Den Haag, she juxtaposes sprouts, soil and posters from women’s peace marches to illustrate how war destroys and contaminates soil, leading to food insecurity.

    The show gives viewers “openings to look at the world from a feminist perspective, which is about care, nurturing and not being aggressive,” Labowitz-Starus said in a video interview. “We’re saying there’s another way to be in the world, and our consciousness has to evolve.”



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  • Aggressive and Thrillingly Unflattering Clothes at Prada

    Aggressive and Thrillingly Unflattering Clothes at Prada


    Celebrities have been thin on the ground in Milan, in part thanks to fashion week’s conjunction with the Oscars, but a group came out for Prada, including Gal Gadot, Maya Hawke, Simone Ashley and Hunter Schafer.

    Ms. Schafer was wearing a pink top and gray briefs under a black satin coat, about a week after having worn a floral Prada sundress to the Independent Spirit Awards. Which was right after she had posted a video on TikTok noting that she had just received a new passport that, thanks to a Trump administration executive order, identified her as male. Even though, as a trans woman, she had had female gender markers on her documents since she was a young teen.

    “It’s impossible,” said Raf Simons, the Prada co-creative director, backstage, of Ms. Schafer’s situation. “But it’s happening.”

    And it’s part of the reason the question of femininity — what it looks like and what might define it now and in the future instead of in the past — was the question of the season for Mr. Simons and Miuccia Prada.

    Or rather, as Mrs. Prada said backstage, “What kind of femininity can you maintain in this difficult moment?”

    We are conditioned, Mr. Simons added, to think about that issue in a classic way, which generally is also a clichéd way: to embrace Ozempic and corsets and restrictions.

    But what if, they asked, you liberated yourself from all that? What if you ran screaming in the opposite direction?

    Cue a show conceived as a riposte to the whole idea of female stereotype. One that blew a raspberry in the eye of the male gaze and then turned its back for good measure. To a certain extent the exploration of ugliness and the imposition of unattainable female ideals have always been the existential subjects of Mrs. Prada’s career. Just as the tension between what she is trying to say (something political) with the seeming frivolity of her chosen vehicle (luxury fashion) has driven her designs. And her backstage conversations.

    Rarely, however, has the process looked so imperative. Or so much, frankly, like she and Mr. Simons were trolling the Miss Universe establishment and testing the limits of the Prada mystique.

    These are black times? Fine. Enter the little black dress — only imagine Audrey Hepburn playing the mad woman in Tiffany’s attic, storming out to a techno beat, ratting up her hair and letting out her seams. Then the little black dress might be a loose black schmatta, with just the ghost of a bow or some big, fabric-covered buttons. And things might mutate from there.

    Nothing fit quite right. Not the oversize knits that looked like sweater dresses gone survivalist, or the sofa-print Doris Day housedresses that seemed to have been pulled straight off a love seat, or the leather paper-bag waist skirts so un-body-con they jounced around the rib cage on their own. Instead of lingerie dressing there were scrunched-up pajama separates with the wrinkles baked in; instead of necklaces, jeweled ribbed necklines that appeared to have been severed from well-behaved cardigans; instead of buttons on a big gray overcoat, clusters of pearls, like little iridescent pustules. Their reshaping was more of a de-shaping.

    The result was aggressively, kind of thrillingly, unflattering (well, except for the lush shearling jackets that looked like mink, and the slick trousers — a few pieces have to be commercial). But it was also purposeful. These clothes weren’t trying to be charming and glamorous and failing. They were trying to force confrontation. They aimed to please no one except the body inside, freed from any binding, and the woman who inhabits that body.

    They definitely weren’t pretty, but they were something even more compelling: They were relevant.





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  • Susan F. Wood, Who Resigned From the F.D.A. Over Plan B, Dies at 66

    Susan F. Wood, Who Resigned From the F.D.A. Over Plan B, Dies at 66


    Susan F. Wood, a women’s health expert who resigned in protest from the Food and Drug Administration in 2005, accusing the agency of knuckling under to politics by not approving over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill known as Plan B, died on Jan. 17 at her home in London. She was 66.

    The cause was glioblastoma multiforme, a brain cancer, said Richard Payne, her husband.

    Dr. Wood was assistant commissioner for women’s health at the F.D.A. during the presidency of George W. Bush when Plan B, a form of emergency contraception, became a flashpoint in the abortion wars.

    An F.D.A. advisory panel voted 28-0 in 2003 that the pill was safe for nonprescription use. But senior agency officials disregarded precedent and refused to approve over-the-counter sales.

    Plan B contains high levels of progestin, a hormone found in ordinary birth control pills, and agency scientists considered it to be a contraceptive. But abortion opponents argued that its use was tantamount to ending pregnancies. They further warned that ready access would lead to promiscuous behavior by teenagers, though no data supported that claim.

    Dr. Wood and others believed that having emergency contraception available without a prescription would mean fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions.

    In August 2005, the F.D.A. commissioner, Lester M. Crawford, announced that the agency could not reach a decision on whether to authorize over-the-counter use of Plan B and did not expect to reach one soon.

    Dr. Wood blamed politics for the agency’s foot-dragging and resigned from a job she had held for five years. In an email to the staff, she wrote that she could no longer remain “when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled.”

    A report later that year by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, found that top agency officials had rejected over-the-counter sales even before the scientific review of Plan B was complete. Officials disputed the findings.

    Dr. Wood addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006, where she received a standing ovation. She criticized the F.D.A. for ignoring science because “social conservatives have extreme undue influence.”

    Susan Franklin Wood was born on Nov. 5, 1958, in Jacksonville, Fla., one of four children of Dr. Jonathan Wood, a surgeon, and Betty (Dorscheid) Wood, who managed the home.

    She graduated from the Episcopal School of Jacksonville in 1976 and Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) in 1980. After earning a Ph.D. in biology from Boston University in 1989, she shifted her focus to health policy.

    In 1990 she received a fellowship as a science adviser to the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, a bipartisan group. Over five years on Capitol Hill, she helped push legislation to increase the representation of women in clinical trials and to expand research into breast cancer, infertility and contraception.

    In 1995 she became policy director in the Office on Women’s Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. She joined the F.D.A. in 2000 to lead the women’s health department.

    Objections to approving Plan B for over-the-counter sales zeroed in on whether it should be available to younger teenagers. The drug’s maker, Barr Laboratories, proposed restricting sales to people 16 and up.

    A senior F.D.A. official told Dr. Wood that the drug was on track to win nonprescription approval for those 17 and older, Dr. Wood recalled in an oral history that she recorded for the agency in 2019.

    “I heard that with my own little ears,” she said. “And everyone was waiting for the decision to come out, silently.”

    “But,” she added, “the decision never came out.”

    On a Friday afternoon, Dr. Crawford announced that an age restriction for over-the-counter sales would be hard for pharmacies to manage. The issue, he said, needed more study. In the meantime, nonprescription use was not approved for anyone.

    Dr. Wood quit the next Tuesday. She expected her decision to go mostly unnoticed. Instead, the news media instantly reported on it.

    “I ended up spending the next eight months really just traveling and speaking about this,” she said. “It affected the perception of whether or not you could trust government at the time.”

    In 2006, Dr. Wood joined the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University as a research professor. She became a full professor in 2017 and served as director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health there. She and her husband moved to the Isle of Mull in Scotland in 2017, with a second residence in London; she continued to teach remotely until she retired in 2022.

    Besides her husband, she is survived by a daughter, Bettie Wood Payne.

    The contretemps over Plan B eventually faded, overshadowed by more contentious episodes of abortion politics. Plan B finally won over-the-counter approval in 2013, though some states allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense it.

    In 2019, Dr. Wood said fears that easy access to a morning-after pill would be a “dangerous, radical, crazy” thing proved to be overblown.”

    “Once it’s over the counter, it’s no big deal,” she said. “And, sure enough, that’s what happened: It’s no big deal.”



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  • Health Officials Struggle to Comply With D.E.I. and Gender Orders

    Health Officials Struggle to Comply With D.E.I. and Gender Orders


    Federal and state health officials and staff members scrambled on Friday to comply with a 5 p.m. deadline by the Trump administration to terminate any programs that promote “gender ideology,” and to withdraw documents and any other media that may do so.

    Federal workers had already been ordered to halt diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, to scrub public references to those efforts and to place employees involved in them on administrative leave.

    At federal health agencies, veterans hospitals, and local and state health departments, compliance took a variety of forms. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, employees hurried to remove terms like “transgender,” “immigrant,” L.G.B.T.” and “pregnant people” from the website.

    Employees at some VA Hospitals were told that L.G.B.T.Q. flags and other displays were no longer acceptable, according to an administrative email reviewed by The New York Times.

    Bathrooms at health agencies were to be set aside for use by a single “biological sex,” according to federal directives, and the word “gender” was to be removed from agency forms.

    The instructions are a 180-degree pivot for health scientists and clinicians, who have worked for years to integrate diversity and equity into research and clinical services, including those for gay, lesbian and transgender individuals.

    The directives “risk dismantling programs that have been built up over decades to serve the needs of Americans,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.

    “What I’m worried about here is that in this attempt to make headlines, we’re issuing very bold and broad statements,” she said of the administration.

    The upheaval followed two executive orders that President Trump issued on Jan. 20. The one entitled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” terminated the federal government’s D.E.I. efforts.

    The other, “Defending Women From General Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” shut down governmental efforts to be more inclusive of a variety of gender expressions, including in scientific research.

    In both instances, the federal Office of Personnel Management followed up with memos explaining how to carry out the changes and issuing deadlines. The memos affected a broad swath of programs at all levels of government, but details were sparse.

    Some employees at the C.D.C. were befuddled by an order, for example, to delete mentions of gender from research databases, some dating back decades, as other government rules prohibit manipulation of scientific data.

    Agency web pages that have been deleted as part of President Trump’s “Defending Women” initiative include ones about ending gender-based violence and supporting L.G.B.T.Q. youths, and another about racism in health.

    C.D.C.’s AtlasPlus, which holds 20 years of surveillance data for H.I.V., tuberculosis, hepatitis B and other diseases, is missing.

    Also removed were the pages of the C.D.C.’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which surveys youngsters about dangerous activities like drinking and drug use, smoking and risky sexual behaviors that can lead to unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

    The survey reported recently on the high rates of depression among teenage girls and lesbian, gay and bisexual youth.

    Some directives from agency administrators, including one emailed to Veterans Affairs hospitals and reviewed by The Times, ordered the termination of “accessibility’’ programs, as well as other diversity and inclusion initiatives.

    The hospitals treat military veterans, many of whom are disabled.

    The C.D.C. itself told funding recipients on Wednesday that “any vestige, remnant, or renamed piece” of diversity programs funded by the federal government “are immediately, completely, and permanently terminated,” according to an unsigned memo obtained by The New York Times.

    Diversity and inclusion programs at federal agencies have also been disbanded, and scientific work groups have been ordered to halt their activities, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times.

    Public health experts warned that the D.E.I. prohibitions affect not only diversity in staffing, but health equity programs aimed at disadvantaged populations.

    For example, some programs help low-income seniors gain access to vaccines and communities of color who are at increased of conditions like diabetes.

    Including gender as a research factor in studies helps identify groups at risk of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, which has reached its highest levels in 50 years.

    “Health equity is basically all of public health,” Dr. Nuzzo said.

    “This work and these data and these studies are really important for us to answer the essential question of public health, which is who is being affected and how do we best target our limited resources,” she said.

    None of this would seem to align with the goals of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary, who has made chronic disease a main talking point. Most chronic conditions disproportionately affect people who are socially disadvantaged, including rural Americans and people of color.

    Some state health administrators have interpreted the D.E.I. directives as applying only to staffing and hiring. Health programs that do outreach to disadvantaged groups, including ethnic and racial minorities, will not be affected, they have told staffers.

    But one employee at a state H.I.V. prevention program said it was difficult to disentangle the two.

    “We are still not sure how this will affect our work if we are not allowed to talk about individuals who are transgender, as that is a lot of the population we work with in H.I.V.,” said the employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.

    Some V.A. hospitals have warned employees that prohibited D.E.I. activities “include displaying of pride symbols, e.g. flags, lanyards, signature blocks, etc.,” prompting staff at New York hospitals to remove wall hangings indicating they were welcoming to lesbian, gay and transgender patients.

    Some asked their supervisors whether they also needed to get rid of books in their offices. The ambiguity of the federal directives, coupled with employees’ heightened anxiety, “may lead them to take a sledgehammer when they really need a scalpel,” Dr. Nuzzo said.

    At one V.A. facility, administrators deleted all computer folders and files with the term “D.E.I.” in the name. “We gave them access to files and they disappeared from our folders,” said one employee speaking on condition of anonymity.

    “I think no one knows what to say,” the employee said. “Everyone’s walking on eggshells.”

    Agencies were instructed to turn off software features that prompted users to enter their pronouns in their signatures. The C.D.C. also deleted personal pronouns from its internal directory.

    The administration has also threatened employees who don’t inform on colleagues who defy the orders or try to “disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”

    Already, contractors working on health equity issues are being let go. At least one worker on a longtime contract was fired because of his role supporting such a project a year ago.

    Some C.D.C. officials began preemptively censoring material that discussed health equity even before Mr. Trump took office.

    Fearing that their programs would be shut down, they began deleting content from websites and holding back research findings, including those from a project that cost about $400,000.

    But for other projects, merely snipping out mentions of equity or gender is impossible because they are aimed specifically at reducing health disparities in chronic conditions.

    “I don’t think that there’s anything that our division works on that wouldn’t have to stop,” said one C.D.C. employee who wished to remain anonymous or fear of retaliation.

    Anticipating that the Trump administration may take aim at certain issues, some scientific groups have archived data related to H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases, births and deaths, education, environment and housing.

    On Friday, hundreds of scientists gathered for a “datathon,” in an attempt to preserve websites related to health equity.

    “There’s been a history in this country recently of trying to make data disappear, as if that makes problems disappear,” said Nancy Krieger, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University and a co-leader of the effort.

    “But the problems don’t disappear, and the suffering gets worse,” she said.

    Ellen Barrycontributed reporting.



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  • Only 3 Black Women Have Won the Grammys’ Top Award. Is Beyoncé Next?

    Only 3 Black Women Have Won the Grammys’ Top Award. Is Beyoncé Next?


    Since the year 2000, more and more Black women have been nominees for album of the year: India.Arie, Missy Elliott, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Rihanna, Janelle Monáe, Cardi B, H.E.R., Lizzo, Doja Cat, SZA and Mary J. Blige. But it’s Beyoncé’s appearances in this category — beginning with “I Am … Sasha Fierce” (2010) — that have garnered the most headlines. The tension between the evolving, colossal ambition and innovation of her nominated releases, their critical acclaim and their global popularity, set against the Grammy voters’ repeated unwillingness to reward these efforts, has amounted to the greatest ongoing Grammy drama: “Will she or won’t she win this year?”

    Beyoncé’s self-titled album was a cultural sensation, replete with unexpected forays into alternative R&B. Its out-of-nowhere arrival inaugurated the era of the “surprise” album drop. It was released with videos for each song, introducing the modern visual album. And it included the sampled speech of a feminist intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, expounding on gender equality. At the 2013 Grammys, it lost to “Morning Phase,” a moody album from the alt-rock shape-shifter Beck.

    The defeat did nothing to lessen her experimental boundary pushing. The 2016 magnum opus “Lemonade,” Beyoncé’s second visual album, turned a personal tale of domestic strife and wounded intimacies into a reckoning with slavery’s legacies, the fracturing of families and communities, the lingering effects of Black grief and mourning and the specifically acute ordeals facing Black women in American culture. It encompassed spoken-word poetry, archival voices, provocative samples and a visual vocabulary that yoked together allusions to iconic Black feminist art — the cinema of Dash, the photography of Weems — as well as scenes shot on former plantation sites and visions of post-Katrina New Orleans.

    “Lemonade” took the idea of the concept album and stretched it to its multi-formalistic limits, absorbing the tradition of Black women’s epics and becoming a sonic “vehicle,” as Griffin said in an interview, for “Black women’s epics” from multiple genres, “not just music but literary and visual ones as well.” The album was such a phenomenon that it spawned scholarly articles as well as a critical anthology, and it remains a staple on Black cultural studies syllabuses. Grammy voters were less bowled over, awarding album of the year to a visibly shocked Adele.



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  • Carol Downer, Feminist Leader in Women’s Health, Dies at 91

    Carol Downer, Feminist Leader in Women’s Health, Dies at 91


    Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women’s health movement who drew national fame for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy — so named because she was charged with practicing medicine without a license for dispensing yogurt to treat a yeast infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91.

    Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Angela Booth, who said she had suffered a heart attack a few weeks earlier.

    Ms. Downer was a self-described housewife and the mother of six in the late 1960s when she joined the women’s movement and began to work on the abortion committee of her local chapter of the National Organization for Women. Years earlier, she had had an illegal abortion, and she was determined that others should not suffer as she did.

    A psychologist named Harvey Karman had refined a technique for performing an abortion by suctioning the lining of a women’s uterus. It was safer, quicker and less painful than the more traditional dilation and curettage technique, and he was using it to perform early-term abortions and teaching doctors how to use it.

    Ms. Downer and others thought the technique was so simple that it could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the procedure themselves.

    Lorraine Rothman, another member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman’s device into a kit she patented called the Del-Em, which included a flexible tube, a syringe and a jar. Doctors called the technique a vacuum extraction. The women called it a menstrual extraction — it was also a way to to regulate menstrual flow — as a kind of linguistic feint.

    Ms. Downer set out to explain its use to a group of women at a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As she later recalled, when she began to describe the technique, which involved inserting the tube into the cervix, she realized that she was losing her audience. They were horrified. This was the era of back-room abortions, when women were dying from unsafe procedures, and here she was hawking what seemed to be an even more suspect practice.

    So she changed tactics. She lay down on a table, hiked up her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited her audience to look. The conversation veered from do-it-yourself abortions to an anatomy lesson.

    The women had never seen inside their own vaginas — it was not the habit of male gynecologists in those days to educate their patients about their own anatomy — and it was an “aha” moment for Ms. Downer. Like many women around the country — notably those in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, who would go on to produce the self-help bible “Our Bodies, Ourselves” — she became determined to teach women about their reproductive health.

    She and Ms. Rothman toured the country demonstrating cervical exams — and menstrual extraction. They so impressed the prominent anthropologist Margaret Mead that she declared the practice one of the most original ideas of the 20th century.

    “The idea of women being able to control their own birthrate is fundamental. It goes right to the heart of women’s political situation,” Ms. Downer told The Los Angeles Times when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “We both wanted to turn the whole thing upside down. We wanted to make women equal with men.”

    They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The next year, the police raided the place and confiscated, among other things, a tub of strawberry yogurt. As the story goes, a clinic worker protested: “You can’t have that. That’s my lunch!”

    Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Ms. Downer’s crime was her yogurt treatment, and Ms. Wilson’s was that she had fitted a woman with a diaphragm. Ms. Wilson was also charged with performing a menstrual extraction, conducting pregnancy testing and giving a pelvic exam. She pleaded guilty to the diaphragm charge and received a fine and probation.

    Ms. Downer decided to fight the yogurt charge. Using yogurt to treat a yeast infection, her defense claimed, was an old folk remedy, and in any case a yeast infection was so common that it did not require a doctor’s diagnosis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a gender and women’s studies professor, recounted in “Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement” (2024), the male foreman sent Ms. Downer a note of appreciation.

    “Carol — You’re not a downer, you’re a real upper!” he wrote. “Good Luck!”

    The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize women’s clinics, which were sprouting up all over the country. Though many in the women’s health movement were also working to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, particularly with regard to reproductive health, and to help those who needed it most gain access to medical services, Ms. Downer remained leery of what she felt was a patriarchal institution incapable of reform. She was not convinced that change was possible.

    She and others went on to found the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers, and she continued to research the ways women could manage their own fertility.

    Yet many feminists, abortion rights supporters and medical professionals were more than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman’s teaching; they were deeply opposed to having laypeople practice the procedure.

    “Carol Downer demonstrated a very reckless form of courage and defiance,” Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and author, said in an interview. “I had a problem with the paranoia around the medical profession, and although I of course harbored a similar distrust, I didn’t think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.”

    In the years after the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, vacuum extraction, the technique devised by Mr. Karman, became the most common surgical procedure used by doctors to end a pregnancy. It still is, said Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. The technique, she added, is safe when practiced by a medical professional.

    “There are risks and complications if it’s done wrong, notably uterine perforation,” she said in an interview, “which is what we train not to do. I’m fully in support of those who want to take control of their health and their lives, and it saddens me to think people might have to turn to these methods without the help of professionals, that they might not have access to these professionals.”

    In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, published “A Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” essentially a consumer guide to abortion.

    Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it “a print hotline in a time of government-ordered gag rules” as well as “a warning sign.”

    “When so few doctors perform abortions,” she wrote, “when so few medical schools teach the techniques, when so many states seek to impose so many restrictions, women reluctantly begin to take risks that other people call choices.”

    Carollyn Aurilla Chatham was born on Oct. 9, 1933, in Shawnee, Okla., and grew up there and in Glendale. Her father, Meade Chatham, was a clerk in a gas company; her mother, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.

    Carol studied sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, but dropped out during her first year when she was pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in college and worked as a cabdriver and then a special-education teacher before contracting tuberculosis.

    The family spent a year on welfare, an experience that Ms. Downer later said politicized her. Unlike most welfare recipients, she and her husband had additional support. They lived rent free in a house owned by her parents, and they received financial help from his parents and fellow teachers.

    “I began to gradually develop a radical political consciousness,” she said in an oral history conducted by the Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. “I mainly learned that no one survives on welfare without some kind of informal support network or a hustle.”

    She had four children and was separated from her husband when she became pregnant, and decided to have an abortion. It was 1962, five years before abortion was legalized in California and 11 years before Roe. While the procedure was performed by someone with experience and was medically safe, she received no anesthesia so that if the place — an office with no furniture beside a table — was raided by the police, she could get up and run.

    In addition to Ms. Booth, Ms. Downer, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by two other daughters, Laura Brown and Shelby Coleman; two sons, David Brown and Frank Downer Jr.; eight grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren. Her second husband, Frank Downer, whom she married in 1965 after her divorce from Mr. Brown, died in 2012. A daughter, Victoria Siegel, died in 2021.

    Ms. Downer went back to school in the late 1980s. After earning a degree from Whittier Law School, in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment law.

    “There’s a through line from Carol Downer to the current reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” said Dr. Houck, the author of “Looking Through the Speculum.” “Hers was a form of activism where women could use their heads, their hands and their hearts.”



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  • Cancer’s New Face: Younger and Female

    Cancer’s New Face: Younger and Female


    More Americans are surviving cancer, but the disease is striking young and middle-aged adults and women more frequently, the American Cancer Society reported on Thursday.

    And despite overall improvements in survival, Black and Native Americans are dying of some cancers at rates two to three times higher than those among white Americans.

    These trends represent a marked change for an illness that has long been considered a disease of aging, and which used to affect far more men than women.

    The shifts reflect declines in smoking-related cancers and prostate cancer among older men and a disconcerting rise in cancer in people born since the 1950s.

    Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, but the leading cause among Americans under 85. The new report projects that some 2,041,910 new cases will occur this year and that 618,120 Americans will die of the disease.

    Six of the 10 most common cancers are on the rise, including cancers of the breast and the uterus. Also increasing are colorectal cancers among people under 65, as well as prostate cancer, melanoma and pancreatic cancer.

    “These unfavorable trends are tipped toward women,” said Rebecca L. Siegel, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society and the report’s first author.

    “Of all the cancers that are increasing, some are increasing in men, but it’s lopsided — more of this increase is happening in women.”

    Women are also being diagnosed at younger ages. Cancer rates are rising among women under 50 (so-called early-onset cancer), as well as among women 50 to 64.

    Despite increases in some early-onset cancers, like colorectal cancer and testicular cancer, “overall rates are flat in men under 50 and decreasing in those 50 to 64,” Ms. Siegel said.

    Several other troubling trends are outlined in the report. One is an increase in new cases of cervical cancer — a disease widely viewed as preventable in the United States — among women 30 to 44.

    The incidence of cervical cancer has plummeted since the mid-1970s, when Pap smear screening to detect precancerous changes became widely available. But recent surveys have found many women are postponing visits to their gynecologists.

    A Harris Poll survey of over 1,100 U.S. women conducted last year for BD, a medical technology company, found that 72 percent said they had put off a visit with their doctor that would have included screening; half said they didn’t know how frequently they should be screened for cervical cancer.

    (The current recommendation, not yet official, is a bit complicated. Get a Pap smear every three years from ages 21 to 29. Then, from ages 30 to 65, continue with a Pap smear every three years; or get a Pap smear plus a test for human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer, every five years; or alternatively, get tested for the virus every five years.)

    Another disturbing trend started in 2021 when, for the first time, lung cancer incidence in women under 65 surpassed the incidence in men: 15.7 cases per 100,000 women under 65, compared with 15.4 per 100,000 in men.

    Lung cancer has been declining over the past decade, but it has decreased more rapidly in men. Women took up smoking later than men and took longer to quit.

    There have also been upticks in smoking in people who were born after 1965, the year after the surgeon general first warned that cigarettes cause cancer.

    Smoking continues to be the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and will account for almost 500 cancer deaths daily in 2025, mostly from lung cancer, the American Cancer Society said.

    “There is growing concern that e-cigarettes and vaping may contribute to this burden in the future, given their carcinogenic potential and wide popularity,” the report said.

    Breast cancer rates have also been inching up for many years, increasing by about 1 percent a year between 2012 and 2021. The sharpest rise has been seen in women under 50, and there have been steep increases among Hispanic American, Asian American and Pacific Islander women.

    The increases are driven by detection of localized tumors and certain cancers fueled by hormones.

    Some of the rise results from changing fertility patterns. Childbearing and breastfeeding protect against breast cancer, but more American women are postponing childbirth — or are choosing not to bear children at all.

    Other risk factors include genetics, family history and heavy drinking — a habit that has increased in women under 50. In older women, excess body weight may play a role in cancer risk.

    Uterine cancer is the only cancer for which survival has actually decreased over the past 40 years, the A.C.S. said.

    Death rates are also rising for liver cancer among women, and for cancers of the oral cavity for both sexes.

    Pancreatic cancer has been increasing in incidence among both men and women for decades. It is now the third leading cause of cancer death. As with many other cancers, obesity is believed to contribute.

    Little progress has been made in the understanding and treatment of pancreatic cancer. Death rates have been rising since record-keeping started, rising to 13 per 100,000 in men and 10 per 100,000 in women today, up from about five per 100,000 in both men and women in the 1930s.

    The lack of progress has frustrated many scientists and physicians. The cancer is often fairly advanced when diagnosed, and the five-year survival rate is only 13 percent.

    “We need to make progress in specifically understanding what’s driving pancreatic cancers to grow, what treatment will then stave off these cancers, what can prevent it in the first place, and how we can screen for it early,” said Dr. Amy Abernethy, an oncologist who co-founded Highlander Health, which focuses on accelerating clinical research.

    Some experts are beginning to acknowledge that environmental exposures may be contributing to early-onset cancer, in addition to the usual suspects: lifestyle, genetics and family history.

    “I think that the rise in not just one but a variety of cancers in younger people, particularly in young women, suggests there is something broader going on than variations in individual genetics or population genetics,” said Neil Iyengar, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

    “It strongly points to the possibility that environmental exposures and our lifestyles in the U.S. are contributing to the rise of cancers in younger people.”

    Public health efforts aimed at reducing risky lifestyle behaviors have focused on people at higher risk and at older Americans, who still bear the brunt of cancer’s burden, he noted.

    But the risk factors in young people may be different.

    Emerging research hints that maintaining regular sleeping patterns, for example, may also help to prevent cancer, he said.

    Lifestyle and behavioral changes can reduce the risk for many cancers, Ms. Siegel said.

    “I don’t think people realize how much control they have over their cancer risk,” she said. “There’s so much we can all do. Don’t smoke is the most important.”

    Among the others: Maintaining a healthy body weight; not consuming alcohol or consuming in moderation; eating a diet high in fruits and vegetables, and low in red and processed meat; physical activity; and regular cancer screenings.

    “There are all these things you can do, but they’re individual choices, so just pick one that you can focus on,” she said. “Small changes can make a difference.”



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  • Pasadena Teenager Starts Donation Drive to Help Girls Affected by California Wildfires

    Pasadena Teenager Starts Donation Drive to Help Girls Affected by California Wildfires


    A few miles from the rubble left behind by the Eaton fire, a Los Angeles art studio grew densely packed over the weekend with the supplies a teenage girl might need to start over.

    Sports bras and graphic T-shirts dangled from hangers. Converse sneakers were arrayed by size on the concrete floor. Clear plastic bins overflowed with deodorant, hair products and pastel pimple patches.

    All of the items collected in the airy warehouse in the Boyle Heights neighborhood were free to teenagers whose homes had been incinerated in the city’s devastating wildfires.

    While many relief efforts for victims of the fires have focused on more acute needs like shelter and food, Avery Colvert, an eighth grader in Pasadena, started a donation drive called Altadena Girls last week with a slightly less obvious remit. She wanted to offer young women essentials they had lost, plus some of the everyday luxuries that might help restore a touch of normalcy to their lives.

    Cristina Soltero spent more than two hours on Monday browsing with her 13-year-old niece, Mila, whose home in Altadena had been reduced to ash by the Eaton fire. The pajamas Mila had been wearing when her family evacuated were the only clothing she had left. Her budding record collection was destroyed.

    “It really just demolished her spirit,” said Ms. Soltero, 41, a nurse.

    While her parents searched for housing, Mila filled two Ikea bags with socks, hair ties and a Brandy Melville cardigan. She lit up when she discovered a dusty pink Stanley cup similar to the one she had left behind, her aunt said.

    “It was so difficult to not cry the entire time, because she was so happy,” Ms. Soltero said. “For a minute, she was just normal, shopping, not thinking about her loss.”

    Ms. Colvert, 14, created the Altadena Girls Instagram account on Friday with the help of her stepfather. Her house was spared, but many of her friends’ were not, she said in an interview with Time magazine. Her middle school, Eliot Arts Magnet, burned down.

    She posted a call on social media for new clothing, hygiene and beauty products, specifying the kinds of items that she thought would be deeply appreciated by teenage girls once they had secured food and shelter.

    “I started hearing from my friends about the stuff that they desperately needed, but were either afraid or ashamed to ask for,” Ms. Colvert wrote in an email. “Girl stuff. Teen girl stuff. Everything from bras and underwear to makeup and stuff to just make them feel like themselves.”

    The initiative quickly attracted high-profile support. Charli XCX called the organization “the coolest” on social media. Shipments of donated products arrived from Ariana Grande’s makeup brand, R.E.M. Beauty. Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, made a donation through their charitable foundation.

    Altadena Girls said it was setting up a new location in Pasadena to bring supplies closer to those affected by the wildfires. By Tuesday, an initiative inspired by the group had popped up to support teenage boys.

    Once Ashleeta Beauchamp, 35, determined she did not need to evacuate from her home in Sherman Oaks, she posted on Instagram that she was planning to make a delivery of hair care products for Black women to Altadena Girls.

    Her followers sent her around $800 to help purchase leave-in conditioner, moisturizing shampoo, bonnets, edge gel and wide-tooth combs. Ms. Beauchamp loaded up a cart at Target on Saturday with several of the products she uses on her own hair.

    “I want to make sure that everyone is taken care of, especially because the Black community was impacted so hard in Altadena,” said Ms. Beauchamp, who works in finance for the film industry and grew up nearby in La Crescenta.

    When she delivered the products to the studio space in Boyle Heights, she was cheered to see how many people were there dropping off donations and serving as volunteer stylists. She hoped their efforts would provide a moment of comfort to the young women whose lives had been upended.

    “Those kids have already been through enough,” she said.





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  • ‘Babygirl’ Is Starting Conversations About Sex, Kink and Desire

    ‘Babygirl’ Is Starting Conversations About Sex, Kink and Desire


    In reviews, in theaters and in group texts pinging across the country, “Babygirl,” the erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman, has proved somewhat divisive. Who has the power, Romy, the high-powered tech executive played by Ms. Kidman, or the 20-something intern, to whom she willingly submits? Are certain moments supposed to be sexy or funny? Is Romy’s kink — which involves being told what to do — even that kinky?

    Audiences are far from agreement, but among some women — particularly those around Ms. Kidman’s age, 57 — these questions have been more than enough to begin titillating conversations about sex and desire.

    “After the movie, some of the men were asking me if women really fake orgasms,’” said Elizabeth Robbins, 51, who watched the film with a mix of friends both male and female. In the movie’s opening scene, Romy dashes away to masturbate privately after faking an orgasm with her husband, whom she later cheats on as she explores an urge to be dominated.

    “It was like, ‘Yeah, we do.’”

    She said the group started asking themselves if they talk about their desires enough or if they talk about sex in a healthy way. When Ms. Robbins, an ophthalmic assistant in Boston, discussed this with two of her other friends — Elizabeth Pavese, 37, and Josephine Sasso, 47, with whom she hosts a podcast about erotic novels called the Lusty Library Podcast — the women said they’d had similar conversations with their circles after seeing the film.

    “I went to see it with a friend last night, and the whole time we were whispering to each other,” said Ms. Pavese, who lives in Pawtucket, R.I. “We ended up having some conversations in the car home and learning a few things about each other that we didn’t know. It was pretty explicit.”

    “It was like, ‘OK, we are at this level now,’” she said. “We were already fairly open with each other, but it does take a little bit of prodding.”

    The film seems to be continuing the conversations women have had around “All Fours,” the novel by Miranda July published last spring that followed a 45-year-old mother and wife who embarks on a journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening spurred by an affair with a younger man.

    In the months since her book has been out in the world, Ms. July has been inundated with messages from women sharing their own stories.

    “Six months ago I would have said I am one of a million who was thinking about these issues in my own life,” Ms. July said in a phone interview. “Since my experience with readers over the last six months I no longer think I am unique.”

    “Women are really good at spreading the word,” she added.

    Recently, Ms. July created a Substack where she posts her writing and where people can gather to talk about “All Fours” — “not a book club! A place to talk about your own life,” she specifies. And some women have made their own hats that read “All Fours Group Chat” to signal to other women that they’re open to having a conversation not just about Ms. July’s novel but about the large themes it surfaces.

    “All it takes is for people to say, ‘Oh yeah, this is me too,’ or, ‘You may be wondering if I think this is beyond the pale, and well, I don’t,’” said Ms. July, who recently posted appreciatively about “Babygirl” in an Instagram story. “Then it’s a new way of thinking and communication that has ramifications.”

    These cultural moments can help people open up about their own lives, said Chantal Gautier, a sex and relationship therapist, who has a private practice in London and is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, and lessen stigma.

    “We need to have more movies like this so we can talk about these topics,” she said.

    Some women have been surprised by their friends’ willingness to open up after seeing the movie.

    When Victoria Villegas decided to go see “Babygirl,” she assumed she would have to go alone. “I was afraid that none of my friends would be interested in it, or my boyfriend,” she said.

    Before even seeing the film Ms. Villegas, 31, saw herself in the movie. Like Romy, Ms. Kidman’s character, she is into B.D.S.M. but said she had always felt shame about it, something she attributed to her Catholic upbringing. “Sex in general is already taboo, so having any wants or desires beyond the mainstream feels even more shameful,” she said.

    But when Ms. Villeagas told a friend she was going to see it, he surprised her by offering to come along. “There was one point in the movie where I pointed to the screen and said, ‘I’ve been here,’” she said. “I feel a lot closer to that friend now that I know this is something we can talk about together.”

    She’s also been discussing the movie’s themes with her female friends, including those who, like her, went to Catholic school and find it hard to open up about their sexuality.

    “I am still floored over it,” she said. “Having a movie like this is a huge deal for me, because I feel like it’s been something you want to keep on the down low or not talk about.”

    Ileana Melendez, 27, who works in advertising in San Juan, Puerto Rico, said even though she is a member of Generation Z, she still finds it hard to talk about sex.

    “I think there is something really, really common especially among women who go through certain upbringings like religious ones where we are taught to demonize our own desires and sexualities,” she said.

    She was particularly moved to see older women in the movie theater alongside her.

    “There was a group of women next to me in their 50s and 60s,” Ms. Melendez said. “The movie got them talking.” By the end, she said, “they were like, ‘OK, she got what they wanted.’”

    “I don’t know if they went through a transformation,” she added. “But they definitely seemed to have more of an openness to these experiences by the end.”



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  • ‘Babygirl’ Raises the Question: Is Menopause Sexy Now?

    ‘Babygirl’ Raises the Question: Is Menopause Sexy Now?


    Even given this post-#MeToo climate, it’s doubtful so many of these films would be made were the culture not rethinking what menopause means and can look like. Menopause, clinically defined as a full year without a menstrual period, and perimenopause, the years of hormonal change preceding it, are in the midst of a makeover, with actresses proudly lending their names and creaseless likenesses to menopause and perimenopause ventures. Naomi Watts, who starred in the bonkers 2013 age-gap romance “Adore,” founded Stripes Beauty, a company offering “holistic menopause solutions.” Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop sells Madame Ovary, a supplement to ease hormonal change. Halle Berry is starting RESPIN, an online community focused on menopausal health.

    It’s a truism that sex sells. And as these films, shows and corporate enterprises suggest, menopause might be sexy now.

    “We are finally uncoupling women’s sexuality from our fertility years,” said Shira Tarrant, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies.

    But as Tarrant acknowledged, that uncoupling is incomplete. And what exactly are those fertile years? Advances in reproductive technology have significantly increased their span. Actresses, Kidman among them, regularly have children after 40.

    Beyond the bedroom, these onscreen bodies are mostly opaque. No character in these recent films mentions hormonal change or suffers the ordinary embarrassments of a hot flash or a “crime scene” period. If this new visibility is liberatory, it is also very limited. Are you perhaps a woman who is slim, conventionally attractive, and more often than not white? Congratulations, you can represent your sex life for just a little longer. In these movies, limbs are lithe, faces smooth. The breasts are like military haircuts, high and tight. Thanks to advances in dermatology, cosmetics and surgery, women can be sexy at almost any age. As long as we look 32 forever.

    Very occasionally, an imperfect body makes its way onscreen — Diane Keaton’s fleeting nude scene in the 2003 romantic comedy “Something’s Gotta Give,” Emma Thompson’s open robe in 2022’s “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — but typically attractiveness equates to porelessness. This is the gruesome crux of the 2024 horror comedy “The Substance,” in which Demi Moore’s former starlet undergoes gooey agonies to retain her youth and beauty, birthing (asexually) a younger, hotter self.



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