Afghan citizens at a March 2021 rally in Kabul to support peace talks between the Taliban and the government.
Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Burqas and male chaperones for women were features of the Taliban’s extremist rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s. Those policies are now back in some districts controlled by these Islamic militants.
In early 2021, some Taliban fighters surrendered their weapons to support peace talks with the Afghan government. Today the Islamic extremist group is battling government forces to control the country.
Xinhua/Emran Waak via Getty Images
Two decades have passed since the US invasion of Afghanistan toppled the Taliban’s Islamic extremist regime. Despite efforts to update its image, the group still holds hard-line views.
The story of Walatta Petros, a 17th-century Ethiopian noblewoman who was later made a saint, shows that Christianity has a complex history with abortion and contraception.
A 1721 manuscript/Wikimedia Commons
Abortion and contraception were quite common among premodern Christians, who also celebrated women’s celibacy as superior to marriage and childbearing.
A protest against bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, on April 8, 2021, after a young woman abducted for marriage was found dead.
Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP via Getty Images
In rural Kyrgyzstan, 1 in 3 marriages begins with an abduction. Older generations see this as a harmless tradition, but two brides have been killed since 2018. A study finds other problems, too.
In Morocco, most women’s lives, choices and mobility are controlled by men.
FADEL SENNA/AFP via Getty Images
Moha Ennaji, Université Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah
In Morocco, the COVID-19 pandemic has burdened women with more housework and duties at home, and violence against them has risen.
In this March 2019 photo, Afghan artists work on a barrier wall of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs marking International Women’s Day, in Kabul, Afghanistan.
(AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
Over the past 48 years, women in the US have married later, attained higher education and joined the workforce in record numbers. Could a conservative Supreme Court turn it all back?
Women’s Liberation supporters staging a sit-down protest in Trafalgar Square Post Office after a rally
Keystone Press/Alamy
As women around the world call out sexual misconduct, the role of men in rooting out misogyny needs to be considered
Long time there: U.S. troops maneuver around the central part of the Baghran river valley as they search for remnants of Taliban and al-Qaida forces on Feb. 24, 2003.
Aaron Favila/Pool/AP Photo
The Afghanistan War now has an end date: 9/11/21. Experts explain the history of US involvement in Afghanistan, the peace process to end that conflict and how the country’s women are uniquely at risk.
Turkish women take to the streets of Istanbul.
EPA-EFE/Erdem Sahin
While the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated gender inequalities, it has also incited women-led initiatives and mobilisations.
Members of a Salvadoran feminist group watch a virtual hearing March 10 on El Salvador’s abortion laws by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images
Hundreds of Salvadoran women have been prosecuted for homicide for having abortions, miscarriages or stillbirths since 1997. Now an international court must decide: Is that legal?
Planting paddy saplings in Patiala, India. Three-quarters of Indian farmers are women, but most don’t own their land.
Bharat Bhushan/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Most Indian farmers are women. But few own their land, and gender inequality limits their access to markets. These issues won’t be fixed by recent agricultural reforms; in fact, they may get worse.
Helping women is an explicit goal of the Biden administration’s pandemic relief plan. Does the gender focus extend to the world?
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Gender equality doesn’t top any country’s international agenda – yet. But ever more countries, including the US, are starting to discern that women’s rights really are human rights.
Audience members listen to Afghan parliamentarian Fawzia Koofi speak in 2014. Women’s access to politics increased greatly after the Taliban’s 2001 ouster.
Sha Marai/AFP via Getty Images
Afghan women interviewed about current talks between the government and the Taliban say, ‘There is no going back.’ Taliban fundamentalist rule in the 1990s forced women into poverty and subservience.
Victims of forced sterilizations protest in Lima, Peru, in 2014. Public hearings to uncover this dark chapter of the Fujimori dictatorship began in January.
Erneseto Benavides/AFP via Getty Images
Forced sterilization of Indigenous women was a covert part of ‘family planning’ under Fujimori. Over 200,000 Peruvians underwent tubal ligations between 1996 and 2001 – many without their consent.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young leaves the Federal Court in May, 2019.
AAP Image/Joel Carrett
In 1886, a Victorian judge deplored the disregard given to women’s rights in cases of sexual slander. Today, women are still fighting to protect their reputations and tell their stories.
Fertility is generally high in Northern Europe and low in Southern Europe.
Emma Bauso/Pexels
Gilles Pison, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN)
Fertility is higher in Northern Europe than in Southern Europe. To understand, let’s take a look at family policies, equality between women and men and the economic context.
Protestors in Poland have forced the government to pause plans to effectively ban terminations.
Congress had very few women members back in 1960, and just one woman of color: Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Mink, the first woman of color in Congress, brought a racially and historically aware brand of feminism into lawmaking and ran for president in 1972. But women’s history largely overlooks her.