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In 1980, Ronald Reagan's election brought the New Right to Washington. For feminists, it was the culmination of a series of devastating setbacks. The new administration gave the green light to an anti-feminist agenda that the Moral Majority, the Hyde Amendment and Phyllis Schlafly's Stop-ERA had already advanced. In the drastically altered climate, with the rightward turn affecting states and municipalities as well, feminist legislative and policy initiatives collapsed. Who truly spoke for the masses of women? Anti-feminists now insisted that they did. Faced with blockage at home, one response of American feminists was to reorient their political ambitions to women's movements abroad. A flourishing international women's movement looked to be a hospitable venue for American energies and ideas.

Critically examines how sexual violence came to be a major issue for US global feminism. A historical overview since the 1980s is provided. It is argued that the conservatism ushered in with Ronald Reagan lies behind the issue's rise to prominence in the US feminist movement; however, it is contended that consensus on ending violence against women is not accompanied by any actual understanding of how to achieve it. Adapted from the source document.

After years of feminist pressure to integrate the bylines of America's journals and newspapers of record, women's opinion pieces and political commentary remain scarce. Flora Lewis and Elizabeth Drew were notable forerunners, but the real change came with the women who broke into print in the late 1980s and 1990s: a group that included Barbara Ehrenreich, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Ellen Goodman, and Katha Pollitt. To varying degrees, they transformed the voice of the pundit on high to an identifiably female one, routinely treating "women's" issues, setting up confiding relationships with readers, and using feminist tartness as a weapon of choice when it came to deflating and skewering enemies.

Think back to a year and a half ago, to spring 2007, when this all began. Despite Hillary Clinton's advantages in connections and money going into the primaries, those in the know cited a multitude of reasons she would fall flat on her face. Women were one. "Women don't like her," the pundits declared with relish. They didn't like her even more than men didn't like her. She was too ambitious, a flip-flopper, a trimmer, an opportunist. She didn't deserve to be where she was. She should have left Bill years ago.

In early September 1968, American feminism announced its arrival to the nation, when a hundred women demonstrators from New York traveled down to Atlantic City to disrupt the Miss America pageant. The protest on the boardwalk was more or less antic and funny, skewering the proceedings inside the hall, which even then were starting to seem a bit tawdry. The feminists' major events included the crowning of a sheep as Miss America. And although the substance of the protests was not so frivolous, the slogans and denunciations seemed to many viewers as absurdities, the latest sign that the country had gone mad. Women?? Them too?? What's next??????!...

Hillary Clinton's solid stance on feminist issues - abortion rights (identical to Obama's) and universal health care and gay rights (to the left of Obama's) - did not put off blue-collar whites and Hispanics, male and female, who were supposed to be conservative on social issues. For the first time in American history, the desire for a fair deal for women - symbolized by this particular woman - migrated out of feminist identity politics into a presidential campaign and won the interest of a huge portion of the electorate. Leaving aside the congressional representatives, few prominent black women remained in Clinton's camp: exceptions who went on record were the ever independent-minded writer Michele Wallace, the artist Faith Ringgold, and the poet Maya Angelou, whom Hillary pressed into service. Adapted from the source document.

Pollitt's genius is to stage the central action around her driving lessons on the streets of New York-a comic premise in itself-undertaken under the tutelage of a kindly young Filipino instructor who provides a gentle but admonitory running commentary on her ineptness for what he views as the most basic of life tasks.

A symposium paper in response to Marshall Berman's paper, "1968: Lessons Learned" in which the author responds to the following questions from a modern leftist perspective: (1) What has changed and/or stayed the same since 1968? (2) What issues might be learned from 1968 for the future of the left? (3) How is knowledge of their success and failures useful to leftist today?

Nothing, I remember nothing," the middler-aged witness insisted to the court. "I was sick during the the genocide." She was standing before a man accused of multiple murders, an audience of her neighbors, and a row of judges at a session of gacaca, one of nine thousand local sessions set up by the Rwandan government in 2001 to try tens of thousands charged with participating in the 1994 genocide. On a Saturday last June, some thirty people from surrounding farms gathered outside a small government building tucked into a space between fields to participate in the trials of three prisoners. The scene was bucolic when I arrived—lush fields, twittering birds, butterflies. The simple structure, a galvanized roof over wooden benches, looked oddly like a picnic pavilion in a quiet American park. But the serenity was belied by the tense silence that hung over the crowd, as everyone waited to begin. The prisoners sat in front. One, a stooped middle-aged man, was nervous and fidgety; the other two, in their mid to late twenties, affected aggressive indifference.