My Dinner With a Bear Hunter
I had dinner last week with a woman who shoots large game with AR-15 rifles. Given our letter last week about leaning into difficult conversations with people whose opinions may differ from ours, the Fates seemed to be having a little fun with me. So there I sat across the table — for reasons too complicated to explain here and in my own dining room, by the way — from a 50-something resident of Alaska who lives with her engineer husband in Anchorage, where she raised her four sons. All six of them hunt bear and deer and other wildlife, all of which they eat.
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How Some Beer Drinkers Roll
We have good news and bad news.
Bad news first.
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Suffrage for Youth
Everyone has an opinion about statistics. There are those who stake their lives on them and those who ignore them summarily. Mark Twain is famous for reputedly saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics,” though he attributed the words to British Premier Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
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Banning Books Censoring Lessons and Redacting History
Many of us are watching our children and grandchildren head off to school this week, some for the first time. Those of us in the Northeast can be pretty sure (and yes, we've know about the problem in Ludlow, MA, but it's an outlier) that the shelves in school libraries will not be emptied of books that depict characters with two mothers or fathers, or boys or girls questioning their sexual…
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My One Hour in Lockdown
As I was sitting in my doctor’s office at Lahey in Danvers two days ago, finishing up a discussion about the state of my thyroid gland, she and I paused to listen to an announcement on the PA system. “There is an external situation. Everyone is advised to shelter in place. No one should leave the building until clearance is given.”
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The Decolonization of Design
When our kids were in grade school, some of their schoolmates wrote to a crayon manufacturer to protest the name of their “Flesh” crayon. They insisted it surely wasn’t the color of the skin of the Black children in their classroom, nor of any but the blondest and fairest of them all. The company responded and changed the name. Truth be told, the children’s letters were probably joined by hundreds, if not thousands, of others from around the country.
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There’s more to reproductive health care than abortion
Tonight at 7pm, Leading Ladies is hosting a Zoom panel to discuss Life After Roe v. Wade with Professor Carrie Baker, a reproductive rights expert and activist; Krisitie Monast, executive director of HealthQuarters; and Sara Stanley, executive director of HAWC (Healing Abuse, Working for Change).
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Never Too Late to Start Early Ed.
Access to quality education remains one of the primary concerns of Leading Ladies. Until all children in this country go to schools with equal resources, optimum class sizes, up-to-date books and technology, support services, trained teachers, and nutrition supplements and health care as needed, children in underrepresented communities and BIPOC populations will continue to fall behind and be unable to catch up in school and in life.
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Staggering Statistics and Devastating Details
We decided to change it up this week. Instead of presenting an in-depth look at one issue, we are offering some staggering statistics and devastating details about a variety of social justice issues of concern to us. We hope you will find them as compelling as we do — and as clarion calls to action for all of us.
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What’s A TCU? HBCU?
When President Biden delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress last Wednesday night, he talked passionately about the importance of expanding educational opportunity by providing free preschool and postsecondary schooling. He pointed to research showing that two years of preschool and post-high school training expands a child’s lifelong learning and earning achievements…
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