International Women’s Day

In 1987 when Congress passed the National Women’s History Month Resolution naming March as Women’s History Month, I was working in a resource center for women, and part of my work was keeping up with women’s issues. That center closed in summer of 1992 due to lack of funding, and I moved on to other employment. I would never have known that Wednesday was International Women’s Day if my friend Julia hadn’t sent around the message! Here are the significant links she shared, starting with the ever-popular QUIZ, which I have to say I flunked:

• International Women’s Day quiz that I didn’t do so well on.
• National Women’s History Project
• facts on women’s issues
• history of many current reproductive rights debates
• information and statistics on sexual and reproductive health nation-wide and state by state
  This site has volumes of information, including this note on Medicaid:
  

  Medicaid plays a critical role for women in general, and for reproductive-age women in particular. In 2003, 7.1 million women of reproductive age (15 to 44), 11.5% of that group, looked to Medicaid for their care, including family planning. For poor women, the proportion is even higher: 36.6% of women of reproductive age in families with incomes below the federal poverty line ($15,260 for a family of three) were enrolled in Medicaid in 2003 (see Figure 1).3 Women are more
  likely to qualify for Medicaid than men because women tend to be poorer and tend to meet the program’s strict eligibility criteria; seven in 10 Medicaid beneficiaries older than age 14 are women.

• read the works of feminist authors and artists
• Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church Follow the link for the Anti-Hate Program (links on the left of the splash page) and find the link “Where do hate crimes occur?” That click will bring you to a U.S. map which is again clickable by state. The map leads to a collection of hate crime reports in that state, gathered infomally by women:
  

  Since 1998, United Methodist Women have been tracking hate crimes in their state by sending in newspaper clippings to the Women’s Division.
  Within the 311 total articles received, 152 separate hate incidents were identified. 137 of these incidents have been categorized as alleged hate crimes by the media or law enforcement. The other cases, entitled suspected hate crimes, deal with incidents where the nature of the crime is not reported by the media and/or law enforcement to be a hate crime though the possibility remains. For example, the Kokomo case that should be classified as a hate crime, but is classified as a suicide by law enforcement and the mainstream media is thus found in the suspected hate crimes category.

I am glad there is a day designated to remind us of the realities of women’s lives and the work that women do, and of course someone to remind us when that day comes around…