Our Dirty Laundry

Send us Fan Mail The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan is widely credited for initiating the "second wave" of feminism. Dissecting the problematic themes of this framework, and Friedan's writing itself, is an important beginning in tackling the overall issues with white feminism. 

Send us Fan Mail Season Three! Introducing the idea of feminist "waves" - where they came from and why they are problematic.

Send us Fan Mail We sadly note the passing of bell hooks. We encourage you all to read her work and the many online tributes to her. We particularly resonated with this piece by Mikki Kendall. bell hooks will definitely be making more appearances in the next season about white feminism. 

Send us Fan Mail Forced sterilizations in the workplace and its ties to Robert Bork, failed Regan Supreme Court Justice nominee.

Send us Fan Mail We didn't know the end of our book club would coincide with the (almost inevitable) roll back of Roe v Wade; but given the material we have covered this season, we should have seen this coming.  Read this, now: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/the-betrayal-of-roe.html

Send us Fan Mail A Thanksgiving minisode! Come learn about the Godmother of Thanksgiving, Sarah Hale. If you haven't heard about her before, you'll still recognize her immediately. Just remember what we've said in the past about white women commemorating things...

Send us Fan Mail Continuing the discussion of Jennifer Nelson's book, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. Wrapping up Chapter 3 and moving on to the Young Lords in Chapter 4. 

Send us Fan Mail Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement

Send us Fan Mail Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement by Jennifer Nelson. We get deeper into the Redstockings radical feminist group.

Send us Fan Mail Intro to "Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement" by Jennifer Nelson. We learn, again, that there is so much to history that we have no idea about and, once we learn it, we have the typical "ah, shit" response. It's not going out on a limb to say that abortion is a complex issue, but it get so much deeper when we add in race and eugenics and t...

Send us Fan Mail The little known history of reproductive testing and experimentation on Puerto Rican women in the early to mid 1900s. So many thanks to the authors and researchers we shout out in this episode. We will get links to their work here soon!

Send us Fan Mail An interview with the amazing Wayne Au , social justice and critical education theory expert, discussing eugenics in school testing. This conversation will make you rethink definitions of intelligence, success, educational standards and more! For more of Wayne's work, check out Rethinking Schools and his published books .

Send us Fan Mail We are joined by Cara Page and Susan Raffo for a conversation about eugenics: where we fit into the deeply embedded and continuing history of eugenics in politics, reproductive rights, legal systems, education, settlement, climate change...truly, truly everything around us is so intricately connected with the ideas we've been discussing in this series. We are grateful to Cara...

Send us Fan Mail The best bright-colored-trash-clothes on TV since the Tiger King, with a main serving of white women bullshit. Binge it now !

Send us Fan Mail This sterilization stuff ended, right? Right??? Well, no, of course it didn't. We cover: 1. The case of Madrigal v Quilligan and the documentary No Mas Bebes ( https://vimeo.com/ondemand/nomasbebes ) 2. Sterilization in California's women's prisons and the documentary Belly of the Beast ( https://hdpl.kanopy.com/video/belly-beast ) 3. Native American Sterilization i...

Send us Fan Mail We discuss lying-liar-pants Sherri Tenpenny and Mandy unloads her feelings about all of it.

Send us Fan Mail We're taking a little break from awfulness to catch up with Kate Schatz and learn about the impressive Lucretia Mott! Born in the late 1700s, Lucretia is a reminder that there have always been individuals who didn't just go along with the status quo. 

Send us Fan Mail Eugenic proponents had to find a way to whittle down the "undesirable" population in the US. Enter: sterilization. Join us to weave together the histories of anti-immigration sentiments, racism, ableism, and more to see how state sanctioned sterilization became mainstream in the early 1900s and continued through the 80s and even today. US policies became an influence for...

Send us Fan Mail The modern day Olympics has some roots in American eugenics...because, of course it does.

Send us Fan Mail The birth of reproductive rights in England and the US actually started in eugenics with a couple of white women. Join us in learning about Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, both historically renowned birth control advocates and women's rights icons...with a catch. As usual, "rights" for the "right" people. 

Send us Fan Mail Surprise (or not): The Olympics has a racism problem. This Olympics has seemed particularly egregious in its openly racist policies and procedures, so in this first of a two-part mini, we're outlining some of these problems - from Simone Biles, to Sha'Carri Richardson, to banned substances and swim caps. The Olympics didn't invent racism, but in true competitive spi...

Send us Fan Mail Our old suffragist friends turn to whiteness once again! In season one, we learned many of the early white suffragists turned their back on women of color in their efforts to secure the vote for themselves. Unsurprisingly, eugenics was also enthusiastically endorsed by many early feminists. Because it turns out, white supremacy has always been a helluva drug. Come learn about Char...

Send us Fan Mail It's a mini, but it turned into a maxi - we said we'd discuss slave labor camp weddings (aka plantation weddings) and we're also throwing in some information about balls. Dances, people, not *those* balls. Don't get too comfortable though, it's still a gross discussion.

Send us Fan Mail Mandy takes back the reigns for this laundry session, and there's gonna be several loads to get through. We're talking about eugenics - which is basically the idea that natural selection of the fittest could be accelerated through deliberate selection of the "fittest" and, even uglier, "deselection" of the "non-fit" or "degenerate"...

Send us Fan Mail When the South lost the Civil War, all the white women decided to give up on riding the wave of white privilege and jump on board with reconstruction and restitution, forever ending racial discrimin.....oh who the hell am I kidding! Of course they didn't! Along came the Daughter's of the Confederacy! Defenders of the "lost cause", memory keepers for confederate...