Portside

This International Women’s Day, celebrate Henrietta Leavitt, who took us beyond the stars and into the galaxies.

The idea of 11th-century Scotland as a foreign land for the invading English army created powerful political possibilities in the dramatist’s mind ... with reference to Afghanistan and Iraq (and, perhaps, now Libya) ... seeing the play’s events from the perspectives of both the invaders (who, of course, consider themselves liberators) and the occupied population carries some rather profound implications for the politics of the modern world.

From March 9-20 more than 8,600 representatives of some 1,100 non-governmental organizations will participate in United Nations’ 59th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Their primary mission is to evaluate the progress in implementing the 20-year Platform for Action adopted at the historic 1995 Conference on Women in Beijing. Women advocates charge progress in implementing the Action Plan has been slow and uneven and major obstacles remain.

Dissent contributor Timothy Shenk interviews noted historian Jill Lepore about her new book The Secret History of Wonder Woman. The book reveals that Wonder Woman, which launched in 1941, was actually inspired by the suffragist feminists and birth control activists of the 1910s and was later an inspiration for women who were involved in women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and the early ’70s. According to Lepore, Wonder Woman is a missing link.

For 50 years, 83 year-old ‘Mathabiso Mosala has been a leader of the Lesotho National Council of Women, a coalition of women’s organizations that has tirelessly advocated for women’s rights in Lesotho, including winning Lesotho’s 1995 ratification of the Convention of the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the Lesotho government’s 2006 passage of the Legal Capacity of Married Person’s Act, which gave women the right to own and manage property.

For 50 years, 83 year-old ‘Mathabiso Mosala has been a leader of the Lesotho National Council of Women, a coalition of women’s organizations that has tirelessly advocated for women’s rights in Lesotho, including winning Lesotho’s 1995 ratification of the Convention of the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the Lesotho government’s 2006 passage of the Legal Capacity of Married Person’s Act, which gave women the right to own and manage property.

In a historic vote Algeria's parliament passed a law on Thursday criminalizing violence against women. But without amendment, observers say the new law is fatally flawed, because it fails to take into account the reality of the power relations and inequality between men and women. The law makes inflicting injury on one's spouse punishable with up to 20 years in prison. But, it also allows a survivor of domestic violence to pardon the perpetrator.

The evidence is overwhelming, the rich and powerful of Venezuela have followed a continuous, constantly morphing plan to de-stabilize the country and take over the government by any means necessary and the United States government knows about that plan, supports it and, as much as it can, is assisting in it. Is there a coup planned in Venezuela? All the time. Venezuela has lived under relentless political and physical sabotage as a result of its successes.

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Neanderthals divided some of their tasks according to their sex. A new study analyzed 99 teeth of 19 individuals from three different sites (El Sidron, in Asturias - Spain, L'Hortus in France, and Spy in Belgium), reveals that the dental grooves in the female fossils follow the same pattern, different to that found in male individuals.