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    Overlooked No More: Maria W. Stewart, Trailblazing Voice for Black Women

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    She was the first Black woman to publicly address other women, using essays and lectures in the 1830s to champion their rights and challenge oppression.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.One day in 1831, Maria W. Stewart walked into the Boston offices of the publisher William Lloyd Garrison with a manuscript in hand that she was hoping he would print in his recently launched newspaper, The Liberator.Garrison was a famous white abolitionist; Stewart was a 28-year-old former indentured servant. In her manuscript, a political manifesto, she recounted her upbringing and described the conditions for Black women in an oppressive America.She also argued for equal opportunity for Black Americans, and she did something no Black woman had done before: speak directly and publicly to other women, urging them to educate themselves, “to promote and patronize each other” and, even more, “to sue for your rights and privileges.” As the historian Kristin Waters, the author of “Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought” (2022), told Worcester State University in 2022, Stewart was “one of the very first writers to express what we would now call ‘feminism.’”Garrison didn’t hesitate to publish Stewart’s “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,” as well as many more of her essays, in what would become America’s pre-eminent abolitionist newspaper.The masthead of the Oct. 8, 1831, issue of the Liberator, which contained Stewart’s first essay.The LiberatorWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Possible Remains of Indigenous Women Slain in Canada Found in Landfill

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      The search in Manitoba uncovered possible human remains from two victims of a serial killer, a devastating case that spotlighted an epidemic of violence against Indigenous women in Canada.The authorities in the western Canadian province of Manitoba said on Wednesday that they had found what could be the remains of two Indigenous women murdered by a serial killer, a possible breakthrough in a case that has devastated local communities and brought to the fore the issue of violence against Indigenous women in Canada.During a search of the Prairie Green Landfill near Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, experts “identified potential human remains in the search material,” the provincial government said in a statement.The families of the two victims, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, had been notified and visited the site, it said, adding that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other agencies would take over the investigations.Between March and May 2022, Jeremy Anthony Michael Skibicki, then 35, killed four Indigenous women, all from the Winnipeg area. He was arrested in December the same year. He had expressed support for the far right on social media, filling his Facebook page with white supremacist, misogynistic and antisemitic comments.Last year he was sentenced to 25 years in prison without parole for the first-degree murders of Ms. Myran, who was 26 when she was killed; Ms. Harris, who was 39; Rebecca Contois, 24; and an unidentified woman whom First Nations elders called Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, which means Buffalo Woman.Donna Bartlett, grandmother of Marcedes Myran, with her great-granddaughter in Winnipeg last year.Sebastien St-Jean/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSome of Ms. Contois’s remains were recovered in a separate landfill in 2022, but the remains of the unidentified woman, Ms. Harris and Ms. Myran were never found.The latter two women were killed within days of each other in early May 2022, the authorities said at the time. Both were from Long Plain First Nation, a reserve about 55 miles west of Winnipeg, and had been reported to the police as missing.Ms. Harris’s and Ms. Myran’s families, friends and communities had mounted a relentless fight to persuade the authorities, both local and federal, to permit and to fund a thorough search for their remains in Prairie Green Landfill, where GPS evidence suggested they had likely been dumped.The Canadian government had resisted the landfill search, citing costs and technical difficulties.In 2022 the homicide rate of Indigenous women and girls in Canada was more than six times higher than that of their non-Indigenous counterparts.Cambria Harris, the daughter of Ms. Harris, who has led the fight for the recovery of her mother’s and Ms. Myran’s remains, asked for privacy. “I would like this time to grieve in peace,” she said on a social media posting.Jorden Myran, a sister of Ms. Myran, did not respond to a written request for comment. More

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      Prison Officials Detail Treatment of Trans Inmates Under Trump Gender Order

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      The federal Bureau of Prisons is banning the use of preferred pronouns, stopping special pat-down procedures and rejecting underwear requests from transgender prisoners.The Bureau of Prisons on Friday laid out strict new guidelines for the treatment of transgender inmates to comply with President Trump’s executive order on gender recognition, including ending special procedures for pat-down searches and barring prisoners from purchasing the underwear of their choice.The guidelines, dated Feb. 21 and obtained by The New York Times, show the extraordinary steps that the federal government will have to take to comply with the president’s edict that there are only two sexes, established at conception, and that men who “self-identify as women” pose a threat to the safety of women.The prison memo was issued on the same day that a new group of transgender women rushed to court to try to stop their transfer from all-female prisons to all-male facilities, saying that the move would place them at an elevated risk of physical and sexual violence. Already, a preliminary injunction issued Feb. 18 had blocked the transfer of three transgender women to male prisons.But the new lawsuit said the bureau informed the trans women not participating in earlier suits that they were to be transferred to male prisons “imminently.”The Bureau of Prison’s two-page memo details the treatment expected of transgender inmates at length. The guidelines require prison staff to refer to inmates by “their legal name or pronouns corresponding to their biological sex.”It said that transgender women would no longer be shielded from pat-down searches by male guards and that they would no longer be permitted to buy bras and other women’s clothing at the commissary. Public funds would no longer be used to purchase items that bind breasts, remove hair or allow trans men to use urinals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Marks Black History Month, Even as He Slams the Value of Diversity

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      The Black History Month reception held at the White House on Thursday had all of the pomp of celebrations past. Guests sipped champagne and snacked on lamb chops and collard greens. The crowd delighted in their invitations, snapping selfies. And when President Trump walked out alongside one of the greatest Black athletes in the world, Tiger Woods, the crowd roared with their phones in the air.But the dissonance in the East Room was jarring.Mr. Trump may have praised the contributions of Black Americans on Thursday, but he has spent the weeks since his inauguration eviscerating federal programs aimed at combating inequality in America. He has suggested that efforts spurred by the civil rights movement had made victims out of white people. He blamed a deadly plane crash over the Potomac River on diversity programs in the Federal Aviation Administration.On Thursday, Mr. Trump tried to show appreciation to the Black community by extolling those he sees as representative of Black American progress.“Let me ask you,” Mr. Trump said as he began his remarks, “is there anybody like our Tiger?”Mr. Trump and Mr. Woods are actively engaged in negotiations in search of a lucrative golf merger deal, and the president referred to Mr. Woods repeatedly during his roughly 20-minute address a crowd of several hundred guests. Mr. Woods wasn’t the only Black athlete to get a shout-out; Mr. Trump also heralded Muhammad Ali and Kobe Bryant.During his remarks, Mr. Trump made little reference to issues that have historically plagued the Black community, such as elevated poverty rates, the wage and wealth gap between Black and white Americans, and gun violence. He promised to put statues of Black Americans in a new “National Garden of American Heroes.”Among those to be honored was Prince Estabrook, an enslaved man and the first Black American to spill blood in the Revolutionary War, along with Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin — and maybe Mr. Woods one day, Mr. Trump said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Orders Halt to Aid to South Africa, Claiming Mistreatment of White Landowners

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      President Trump on Friday ordered that all foreign assistance to South Africa be halted and said his administration would prioritize the resettling of white, “Afrikaner refugees” into the United States because of what he called actions by the country’s government that “racially disfavored landowners.”In the order, Mr. Trump said that “the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa” and that American officials should do everything possible to help “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”It follows Mr. Trump’s accusation on his social media site on Sunday that the South African government was engaged in a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum.” He vowed a full investigation and promised to cut off aid.“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” the president wrote in the post. “It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention.”The order was stunning in providing official American backing to long-held conspiracy theories about the mistreatment of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.Mr. Trump has made repeated claims without evidence that echoed those conspiracy theories. In 2018, he ordered his secretary of state to look into “the large scale killing of farmers” — a claim disputed by official figures and the country’s biggest farmers’ group.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      There Is No Excuse for the Bullying of Sarah McBride

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      It’s hard to imagine how terrifying it must be to be a trans person, or the parent of one, in America right now.Donald Trump and his party, having triumphed in an election in which they demonized trans people, seem hellbent on driving them out of public life. Democrats, some of whom blame the party for staking out positions on trans issues that they couldn’t publicly defend, are shellshocked and confused. Democratic leaders have been far too quiet as congressional Republicans, giddy and vengeful in victory, seek to humiliate their new colleague, Representative-elect Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, by barring her and other trans people from using the appropriate single-sex bathrooms in the Capitol.I say this as someone who has been called a TERF, a contemptuous acronym that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, more times than I can count. For a decade now, I’ve been trying to balance a belief in the rights of trans people with my skepticism of some trans activist positions. I’ve written with a degree of sympathy about feminists who’ve been ostracized for wanting to maintain women’s-only spaces. I believe that the science behind youth gender medicine is unsettled, and I dislike jargon like “sex assigned at birth” that tries to mystify or elide the reality of biological sex. (Except for rare exceptions, doctors don’t “assign” sex, they identify it.) I care very little about sports, but it seems dishonest to deny that male puberty tends to confer advantages on trans women athletes.Occasionally, I receive angry or plaintive messages from trans people accusing me of helping America down a slippery slope that has brought us to our lamentable present, when discrimination against trans people has been normalized to a degree that recently seemed unthinkable. During Trump’s first presidential campaign, he said his trans supporter Caitlyn Jenner was welcome to use whatever bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower. At the time, North Carolina’s bathroom bill, which resulted in economically painful boycotts of the state, was widely seen as a self-inflicted wound.Eight years later, anti-trans rhetoric was a central part of the Trump campaign; between Oct. 7 and Oct. 20, more than 41 percent of pro-Trump ads promoted anti-trans messages. Over a dozen states now have laws restricting trans people’s access to single-sex bathrooms. In the face of this onslaught against a tiny and vulnerable group of people, there’s pressure on liberals to keep any qualms we might have about elements of progressive gender ideology to ourselves.That’s one reason, despite my interest in sex and gender, I haven’t written about these debates as much as I otherwise might have. But I’m increasingly convinced that this widespread reticence hasn’t served anyone very well. The basic right of trans people to live in safety and dignity, free from discrimination, should be uncontested. But evolving ideas about sex and gender create new complexities and conflicts, and when progressives refuse to talk about them forthrightly, instead defaulting to clichés like “trans women are women,” people can feel lied to and become radicalized.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Young Women Will Never Stop Talking About Sexism

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      I was not going to write any more election post-mortems based on the current data. California is still counting votes, and it will take months for the whole picture of the electorate to come into focus.But that hasn’t stopped chatter from strategists and politicians about the ways Democrats should change their candidates and messaging. There has been heavy emphasis on appealing to young men specifically, with many advising that the left should go about manufacturing its own Joe Rogan. One articulation of this viewpoint comes from Richard Reeves, who writes in an op-ed in The Boston Globe that Democrats shouldn’t talk about sexism, and claims that the problem is that they haven’t focused enough on issues affecting boys and men. James Carville keeps repeating the charge that “preachy females” are the problem and Democratic messaging comes across as “too feminine.”It feels absurd to ask rank-and-file Democrats to stop talking about sexism when Donald Trump himself and several of his cabinet picks so far have credible accusations of sexual misconduct lodged against them, and when Trump’s campaign sunk to new lows in disparaging women.Democrats should absolutely be soul-searching and figuring out ways to win. But Reeves’s suggestions — “More investments in vocational training, for example in apprenticeships and technical high schools, would mostly help boys and men to secure better jobs” — were already an explicit part of Harris’s platform for economic opportunity, which she talked up on the campaign trail.Harris did not mention sexism as a reason for her loss in her concession speech. And the overwhelming consensus was that Biden’s low approval ratings, and his failure to bring an end to inflation sooner, were the major reasons that she did not win. But does that negate the sexism raining down on our young women, who are walking across campus hearing their classmates tell them: “Your body, my choice”?Trump’s totally cavalier attitude about violence against women — the ones he said he would protect whether we “like it or not” — is most glaringly evident in his nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general. More than 100 nonpartisan organizations that combat sex trafficking and gender-based violence signed on to an open letter to the heads of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee asking them to reject Gaetz because he has been investigated for sex trafficking himself and said: “The nomination of Mr. Gaetz sends a signal to the country and the world that sexual misconduct and exploitation and corrupt behavior will not only go unpunished, but will be rewarded.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Man With Neo-Nazi Ties Sentenced to Life in Killing of Gay Ex-Classmate

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      Samuel Woodward, who espoused anti-gay rhetoric and had ties to Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi group, stabbed his victim 28 times in a hate-fueled murder, prosecutors said.A California man who expressed allegiance to a neo-Nazi group and espoused anti-gay rhetoric was sentenced to life in prison on Friday after a jury found him guilty of brutally killing a former high school classmate who was gay in a hate-motivated murder, the Orange County District Attorney’s office said.The man, Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 26, of Newport Beach, Calif., had reconnected with his former classmate, Blaze Bernstein, then a 19-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania, on a dating app for men seeking men, the authorities said.On the evening of Jan. 2, 2018, Mr. Woodward drove Mr. Bernstein, who believed they were going on a romantic encounter, to a park in Lake Forest, Calif., where Mr. Woodward brutally stabbed Mr. Bernstein 28 times and buried his body in a shallow grave in the park, the district attorney’s office said.On Friday, more than four months after a jury found Mr. Woodward guilty of first-degree murder with a hate crime enhancement, a judge in the Superior Court of Orange County sentenced Mr. Woodward to life in prison without parole, according to court records.“With every hateful stab of his knife, Samuel Woodward stabbed at the very heart of our entire community,” Todd Spitzer, the district attorney for Orange County, said in a statement.He added that “those who commit acts of hate against others will be punished and those who are victimized by hate will be protected.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gaza War Strains Europe’s Efforts at Social Cohesion

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      Institutions meant to promote civility, from soccer to song, have come under severe stress from rising antisemitism and anti-immigrant politics.The various institutions of postwar Europe were intended to keep the peace, bring warring peoples together and build a sense of continental attachment and even loyalty. From the growth of the European Union itself to other, softer organizations, dealing with culture or sports, the hope has always been to keep national passions within safe, larger limits.But growing antisemitism, increased migration and more extremist, anti-immigrant parties have led to backlash and divisions rather than comity. The long war in Gaza has only exacerbated these conflicts and their intensity, especially among young Muslims and others who feel outraged by Israeli bombings and by the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, a large proportion of them women and children.Those tensions were on full display in the recent violence surrounding a soccer match between an Israeli and a Dutch team in Amsterdam, where the authorities are investigating what they call antisemitic attacks on Israeli fans, as well as incendiary actions by both sides. Amsterdam is far from the only example of the divisions in Europe over the Gaza war and of the challenges they present to European governments.The normally amusing Eurovision Song Contest, which was held this year in Malmo, Sweden, a city with a significant Muslim population, was marred by pro-Palestinian protests against Eden Golan, a contestant from Israel, which participates as a full member.The original lyrics to her song, “October Rain,” in commemoration of the 1,200 Israelis who died from the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, which prompted Israel’s response in Gaza, were rejected by organizers for their political nature, so were altered to be less specific. Her performance was met with booing and jeering from some in the audience, but she did receive a wave of votes from online spectators, pushing her to fifth place.It was hardly the demonstration of togetherness in art and silliness that organizers have always intended.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More