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      Shaming Child-Free People Doesn’t Raise the Birthrate

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      On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data on fertility trends from 1990 to 2023, showing that the birthrate declined slightly in 2023 to 1.62 from 1.66 in 2022. The demographer Jennifer Sciubba summarized the statistics in her newsletter, noting that overall, fertility has declined 22 percent since 1990 in the United States but that “the real decline is much more recent, taking a turn around 2007, just before the Great Recession.”The biggest drop in fertility is among teenagers, Sciubba writes, and the birthrate among women over 30 has increased, with a particular surge in births among women over 40. Sciubba predicts that the birthrate overall will plateau, continuing to hover between 1.55 and 1.7 for the next decade.Being below replacement birthrate presents economic challenges, including to Social Security, though this may not yet be cause for immediate alarm. I don’t know how you can argue that fewer teenage parents is a bad thing, since very few teenagers are emotionally or financially equipped to raise children.I’m not worried that the United States is going to become South Korea. That country, which has the world’s lowest birthrate at 0.75, is the subject of a recent article by The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who does a good job describing what a truly anti-natal society looks like. A 20-something South Korean woman tells him: “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.”Governmental and societal pressure has not really worked to increase the birthrate in South Korea. It’s a society that enforces traditional gender roles and that blames feminists and working women for the decline in fertility. “The insinuation that women are at fault for the demographic crisis has turned gender friction into gender war,” Lewis-Kraus writes, with women swearing off men entirely with the 4B movement rather than become tradwives.In the United States, we see our own very muted version of this dynamic playing out. Religious conservatives slam “childless cat ladies,” and in return, some liberal young women are going “boy sober.” Again, I do not predict that this is going to greatly affect the birthrate in the near term; the United States is a much more gender-progressive and diverse country than South Korea is.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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      Steeling My Daughters Against a New Kind of Misogyny

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      Since President Trump started announcing his cabinet picks, I have been trying to write a Very Serious Essay about the Current State of Feminism.When Pete Hegseth was confirmed, even after so many horrifying details of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, that seemed like an obvious blow to the basic ideals of gender equality. In a marginally just world for women, credible allegations of sexual or domestic violence would prevent a person from being considered for such a vaunted position in the first place.I started trying to write this essay by gathering data about women’s progress and trying to quantify how it has stalled. Though the vibes seem truly awful, I didn’t want to go by just potentially illusory internet trends or the vile choices of our commander in chief.Yet it would be disingenuous to ignore how far we have come since the 1970s, when most women didn’t even have access to credit. Women now outnumber men at American colleges and in the college-educated labor force. A higher percentage of Gen Z women say they’re feminists than women of any other generation.But: Roe is dead. Who knows what might happen with access to contraceptives or abortion medication in the next four years?We’re in a period of backlash against women’s progress, beyond what is happening in and around the Oval Office. “Surveys from 2024 show that support for traditional gender roles is increasing” among both Republican men and Republican women, according to the political scientists Michael Tesler, John Sides and Colette Marcellin in a guest essay for Times Opinion. They conclude that “any growing gender traditionalism may be a reaction to societal trends and not a cause of these trends.”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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      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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      ‘Paint Me a Road Out of Here’: Faith Ringgold’s Gift to Prisoners

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      In this documentary, the artist depicts what a more just and beautiful world might look like.In 1971, the artist Faith Ringgold received a grant to make a painting for a public institution in New York City. She decided to ask the prisoners in the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island what they wanted to see in a painting. “I want to see a road leading out of here,” one incarcerated woman told her.Ringgold took that idea and ran with it. She didn’t paint a literal road. Instead, her canvas — entitled “For the Women’s House” and installed at the prison in January 1972 — is divided into eight sections. In each, women are depicted performing jobs traditionally held by men at the time: bus driver, construction worker, basketball player, president. The road is implied: Seeing women in positions and roles they don’t always occupy can open up the viewer’s world. She might be in a prison for now, but there’s a place for her worth aspiring to beyond these walls.This was Ringgold’s imagination at work, always depicting what a more just and beautiful world might look like, particularly for the people whom the powerful prefer to ignore. Ringgold and “For the Women’s House” both appear in the documentary “Paint Me a Road Out of Here” (in theaters), directed by Catherine Gund, and hearing and seeing her talk is reason enough to see the film. Ringgold died in 2024 at 93, and is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, a native New Yorker who was unflagging in her activism and commitments to dismantle racism wherever it surfaced. As a Black woman and an artist, she insisted on coupling political meaning with her work, which is suffused with curiosity and joy.“Paint Me a Road Out Of Here” is not a biographical film about Ringgold, even though you’ll learn a lot about her biography from it. The film has bigger aspirations, connecting art, prisons, activism and an expansive life. One major subject in the film is the artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, an executive producer of the film whose prison reform work often draws on her own experiences while incarcerated. Shortly after her own arrest, for example, Baxter went into labor — 43 hours while shackled to a bed.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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      Lorraine O’Grady, Artist Who Defied Category, Is Dead at 90

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      She worked in collage, photography, performance, video and installation, and she dealt forthrightly with the complexities of race and gender.Lorraine O’Grady, a conceptual artist who had careers as a research economist, literary translator and rock critic before producing her first art in her 40s, and who went on to influence a generation of younger Black artists, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.Robert Ransick of the Lorraine O’Grady Trust confirmed the death.Embracingly interdisciplinary in her formal choices, Ms. O’Grady had no fixed style. She worked in collage, photography, performance, video and installation. And she dealt forthrightly with the complicated realities of race and gender, drawing on her own experience of being excluded from the white art world because she was Black and marginalized within the Black art world because she was a woman. As a result, no one knew quite what to do with her, and her art career remained little known until recently.The child of Lena and Edwin O’Grady, middle-class Jamaican immigrants who had, she said, “more education than they would be allowed to use in this country,“ Lorraine Eleanor O’Grady was born in Boston on Sept. 21, 1934, and grew up within a few blocks of the city’s main public library, where she spent much of her childhood reading and writing.In 1983, Ms. O’Grady created a participatory piece titled “Art Is …” in which performers descended into the street and invited spectators to pose for portrait photos within empty gilded frames.Lorraine O’Grady Courtesy Lorraine O’Grady TrustShe majored in economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College and, after graduation, took a job in Washington as a research economist with the U.S. Department of Labor, focusing on labor conditions in Africa and Latin America.But her path was a restless one. After a few years, she quit her government job and moved to Europe to write a novel. She returned to the U.S., where she studied at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For a while, to support herself, she taught high school Spanish. In 1970, she opened a commercial translation agency in Chicago that attracted clients ranging from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Playboy magazine.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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      Men in Caring Jobs Will Make Society More Equal

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      In her prescient 2012 book, “The End of Men,” my friend Hanna Rosin described a modern American dynamic between archetypes that she called “Plastic Woman” and “Cardboard Man.” These comic book characters represented American women who made miraculous social progress in the 20th century and American men who stalled out. That’s because women in the past 60 years or so have been able to be infinitely flexible and responsive to structural economic changes and men remained rigid planks. This hasn’t just caused a shift in the job market, it’s caused a shift in the marriage market, too. If men aren’t breadwinners, and they’re not caregivers, either — what are they for?Rosin explains that Plastic Woman went “from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If a space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it.” By contrast, Cardboard Man “hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way.”She added that a man’s sense of himself is often tied to having a traditionally masculine, physical job in construction, utility work or some kind of manufacturing. “They could move more quickly into new roles now open to them — college graduate, nurse, teacher, full-time father — but for some reason, they hesitate.”A lot of Rosin’s book still rings true 12 years later. Though on the campaign trail both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris promised to bring back those old-school, manly jobs, as Rebecca Patterson pointed out in an Opinion guest essay in October, manufacturing jobs are long gone and they’re not returning. “Even if every estimated open role is filled, the total employed in manufacturing would still be about three million short of its 1979 peak, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data,” Patterson noted.Which is why I was so pleased to see that Cardboard Man may be softening up, even as the political posturing around him may not have shifted. According to Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, “The number of male registered nurses in the U.S. has nearly tripled since the early 2000s,” going “from about 140,000 in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2023.” In health care, wage and market growth exceed the national average, and people still need emergency surgeries even in recessions, CNN’s Bryan Mena notes. Health care jobs are particularly vital in rural parts of the country, where hospitals may be among the largest employers in the area.Torry describes men who are moving into traditionally female jobs (or the “pink collar” sector) as rational economic actors who are dealing with the job market as it is, rather than as they wish it might be. “Many of the manufacturing jobs that are being moved overseas, replaced by automation or phased out of the American economy were mostly filled by men. As a result, other occupations traditionally dominated by women are now gaining a larger share of men, including elementary and middle schoolteachers and customer service representatives,” Torry writes.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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      Protests in Kenya Demand Action Over a Spate of Brutal Murders of Women

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      Almost 100 women have been killed in the span of three months, the police say. Rights groups want President William Ruto to declare femicide a national crisis.A university student was murdered, and her body dumped in a field. A long-distance Olympic runner died after she was severely burned in a gasoline attack. And a mother, her daughter and her niece were tortured and then killed, their mutilated bodies disposed of in different locations.A series of brutal murders in Kenya in recent months, documented by the police and human rights groups, has stunned a nation where anger over violence against women and girls has prompted nationwide protests. Calls are intensifying for the authorities to do more to stop the killings.The police say that 97 women were murdered from August to October this year, a staggering toll even in Kenya, where femicide has long been endemic. In July, sacks containing the body parts of women believed to have been murdered by a serial killer were discovered in a dump in the capital, Nairobi.On Tuesday, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Nairobi, demanding that the government take action to stop the killings. Smaller protests also took place in other towns and cities across the country, human rights groups said.In Nairobi, police tear-gassed demonstrators who had been chanting, “Stop killing women” and, “Women have rights, too.” At least three activists, including the executive director of Amnesty International Kenya, were detained, according to a statement by several rights groups.The outpouring of rage reflected the helplessness felt by many women in Kenya, and the desire to get justice for those who have been killed.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