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Feminist Friday: International Women’s Day and Bad-Asses through Time

Hey, it’s time for Feminist Friday, which lately could also be called “Who Has Been Inappropriately up in Your Ladybusiness This Week?”

The answer? Lots of state legislatures, including Virginia, which passed a forced ultrasound bill (no longer requiring a transvaginal ultrasound, but a forced, medically unnecessary ultrasound nonetheless) into law, and Texas, where Governor Rick Perry is prepared to turn down federal dollars that fund vital women’s health clinics just to stick it to Planned Parenthood.

The backlash, however, has been wondrous to behold. Protests have hit the capitols in both states — and aren’t showing any signs of going away — and The Maddow Blog published an open letter from Virginia lawyer Tara Louise Casey.

Planned Parenthood hit back hard with a get-out-the-vote campaign, Women Are Watching, while ThinkProgress catalogued some impressively sarcastic legislation proposed in response to the flood of “personhood” and ultrasound bills.

Speaking of voting while being female, our own Karman Kregloe spotted this insane-yet-wonderful tribute to the women’s suffrage movement set to the tune of “Bad Romance.” You heard me.

While you’re getting your time-traveling bad-ass groove on, check out Ecosalon’s 20 photos of female activists throughout history, then look at io9’s nifty gallery of French trading cards from 1902 showing women of the future. They thought we’d have jobs, corsets, and a whole lot of style. Not to mention scandalously bare arms!

And we’re still pushing into new territory. Star soccer goalie Mo Isom entered walk-on tryouts to be a kicker for the LSU football team this week. Tryouts were Tuesday and Thursday, but final decisions probably won’t happen until August. Just in case you’re wondering if she has the kicking power, here she is scoring a goal… As a goalie. From 90 yards away. Good Luck, Mo!

I know this is unusual for this column, but I’d like to mention the heartening story of some women who had a dream, then gave up on it. You’ll be glad they did when you hear that the group is One Million Moms (which has, um, just over 45,000 members on Facebook as of this writing, but they’re not called One Million Mathematicians) and they’re giving up on trying to harass J. C. Penney into firing Ellen DeGeneres as their spokeswoman. Ellen was deemed inappropriate by the Missing 954,961 Moms because she has The Gay.

Based on their Facebook page, they’ve now channeled their energies into job training for the poor helping girls get into engineering holding negligee-only pillow fight parties trying to get companies to stop running ads on GCB.

It would be childish to watch that show, which airs Sundays on ABC at 10/9 Central and stars Kristen Chenoweth, out of sheer cussedness. Childish.

Hey, did you know that Thursday was International Women’s Day? Now you do. Some people celebrated by being smug, whiny dinguses, and got smacked down by Gawker.

Thanks to an idea from, my Twitter pal Dr. Mimi Poinsett, I put out a call for questionable International Woman’s Day celebrants, and Alan Mills came up with a beauty: British Prime Minister David Cameron tweeting about “important steps” taken on violence against women and getting flame-broiled with angry responses.

More productively, MSNBC ran a story on Beatrice Biira pulling herself out of poverty in Uganda and working to help other women do the same.

And Hypervocal ran this amazing, moving (And hopeful!) short on The Girl Effect.

I’ll just note that the goals of the girl effect — helping girls stay in school and control their fertility so they can have planned children and more money to take care of them — are the exact opposite of the goals of the anti—birth control crowd in our allegedly first-world nation.

That drove Ann Friedman up the walls too, so she told the story of International Slutty Women’s Day in GIFs. It’s a wee bit NSFW, but so very worth it.

Have a great weekend, you gutsy broads.

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