Did you see that some 900 Florida teachers are going to lose their jobs because they can’t pass the math section of the state exam? Doesn’t matter if math is irrelevant to the subject they teach or if they have excellent skill ratings in their field. The article I saw began with a drama teacher who built her school’s program from scratch, but even though she is experienced and popular, she’ll be out on the street. And this comes at a time when the dramatic arts are more and more profitable, as the entertainment industry expands into new forms.  Read More 

But last weekend was the 170th anniversary of the world’s first call for women’s rights. It was on July 19 and 20, 1848, and nearly in Canada, in the northern New York town of Seneca Falls. That was because Lucretia Coffin Mott of Philadelphia visited her sister, Martha Coffin Wright, who lived nearby. Seneca Falls was home to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom Mott had met eight years earlier, when they both were rejected as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. They had tea at the home of Jane Hunt, and joined by another Quaker woman, Mary Ann M’Clintock, these five housewives and mothers ended their day by calling for a discussion that would set the feminist agenda far into the future.  Read More 

It’s hard to cut through the multiple details of the investigation into Russian interference in our 2016 election, but you should know that all seventeen (yes, 17!) US intelligence agencies agree that this happened. These people, who are both members of the military services and civilian employees of Congressional mandated federal agencies, have been tried and tested over and over again, most of them under several presidential administrations. They know what they are doing.  Read More 

I’m considering writing another book on women’s right to vote. My last one devoted solely to that subject was in 1998, and doing one twenty years later sounds like a plan. Since then, I’ve become much more aware of how the battle for women’s rights really was (and remains, in the case of reproductive rights) a battle against so-called states’ rights. I want to emphasize the big differences between states when it comes to the female half of the population.  Read More 

If you think that Mexico is sending drug dealers and rapists, but also think that Mexicans are taking Americans’ jobs: what exactly is it that you do for a living?  Read More 

My friend (and probably yours), retired University of South Florida lobbyist Kathy Betancourt, greeted me at a recent function by saying that she was going back out to her car to get something she had been carrying around since March. I assumed that the faded appearance of the New York Times was because of our summer sun – but no, the newspaper deliberately made the front page of this special section look old and ghostly. It was titled “Overlooked: Revisiting 167 years of New York Times history to provide obituaries to women who never got them.”  Read More 

It seems that nothing about the Trump administration has hit the public imagination – especially Republican women – as much as the separation of children from their parents during the immigration process. Former First Lady Laura Bush even wrote a piece for the Washington Post decrying the new policy imposed by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). She compared it to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but that is not a correct analogy, as men, women, and children were allowed to live as families in those camps. It’s more akin to Hitler’s concentration camps, where Jews and others were separated by gender and age. Think Sophie’s Choice.  Read More 

I’ve always been an optimist – probably too much so – but decades of researching and writing history compel me to see the sunny side. We have historical high points and low points, but in the long term, the valleys rise to become mountains. This has been the case ever since we climbed out of the sea. Progress is not straight, but it is steady.  Read More 

You see those wretched pictures of the Middle East, with bombed out concrete homes that always were ugly on their sea of sand, and you wonder, “What happened to the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon?” Or maybe you go to Egypt and marvel at the pyramids and see the chaotic state of life there today, and think “what happened?” Ditto with the abandonments of the Aztec and the Inca in Latin America and the once-Great Wall of China and many more.  Read More 

When we spent three months in Portugal, my daughter and I vowed to kiss the ground in front of Publix after we returned. I love the store! And I’m not surprised that they gave a bunch of money to Adam Putnam: both Publix’s founding family, the Jenkins, and the Putnams are old central Florida people. (You know there’s a county named Putnam, don’t you?) I’m also not surprised that some customers are outraged at Publix’s spending “our” money to take sides in the gubernatorial election. The solution: ban corporate contributions to candidates. We did that before, but the US Supreme Court ruled that money was free speech. We should overturn that.  Read More