Kristen Lombardi, Sexual Assault on Campus. The Center for Public Integrity. 1 December 2009. “Students found ‘responsible’ for sexual assaults on campus often face little or no punishment from school judicial systems, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down, according to a year-long investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. Administrators believe the sanctions administered by the college judiciary system are a thoughtful way to hold abusive students accountable, but the Center’s probe has discovered that “responsible” findings rarely lead to tough punishments like expulsion — even in cases involving alleged repeat offenders.” Multi-part series of articles.
January 21, 2002
Lives of the Saints: the Mormon Church is struggling with a troubled legacy
Lawrence Wright, Lives of the Saints. The New Yorker, 21 January 2002. “At a time when Mormonism is booming, the Church is struggling with a troubled legacy.”
November 22, 1992
Republican Senator Bob Packwood Accused of Sexual Advances: Alleged Behavior Pattern Counters Image
Florence Graves and Charles E. Shepard, Packwood Accused of Sexual Advances: Alleged Behavior Pattern Counters Image. The Washington Post, 22 November 1992. “Ask those who have worked for Sen. Bob Packwood about his treatment of women, and two portraits emerge. One is the Oregon Republican’s record as a leading advocate of women’s rights during his 24 years in the Senate and his much-admired history of hiring women, promoting them and supporting their careers even after they leave his office. Women currently hold the most powerful posts on his staff. The other is a side of Packwood, 60, that few who have experienced it or heard about it want to talk about. Since Packwood’s earliest days on Capitol Hill, he has made uninvited sexual advances to women who have worked for him or with him, according to former staff members and lobbyists, including 10 women who, independently of each other, have given specific accounts of Packwood’s behavior toward them.”
August 1, 1992
The new free-trade heel: Nike’s profits jump on the backs of Asian workers
Jeffrey Ballinger, The new free-trade heel: Nike’s profits jump on the backs of Asian workers. Harper’s Magazine, August 1992. “Her only name is Sadisah, and it’s safe to say that she’s never heard of Michael Jordan. Nor is she spending her evenings watching him and his Olympic teammates gliding and dunking in prime time from Barcelona [1992]. But she has heard of the shoe company he endorses–Nike, whose logo can be seen on the shoes and uniforms of many American Olympic athletes this summer. Like Jordan, Sadisah works on behalf of Nike. You won’t see her, however, in the flashy TV images of freedom and individuality that smugly command us to JUST DO IT!–just spend upward of $130 for a pair of basketball shoes. Yet Sadisah is, in fact, one of the people who is doing it–making the actual shoes…
Update: Max Nisen, How Nike Solved Its Sweatshop Problem. Business Insider, 9 May 2013. “It wasn’t that long ago that Nike was being shamed in public for its labor practices to the point where it badly tarnished the company’s image and hurt sales. The recent factory collapse in Bangladesh was a reminder that even though Nike managed to turn around its image, large parts of the industry still haven’t changed much at all. Nike was an early target for the very reason it’s been so successful. Its business model was based on outsourcing its manufacturing, using the money it saved on aggressive marketing campaigns. Nike has managed to turn its image around. Nike hasn’t been completely successful in bringing factories into line, but there’s no denying that the company has executed one of the greatest image turnarounds in recent decades.”
February 19, 1963
The Problem That Has No Name, from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan, The Problem That Has No Name. From The Feminine Mystique, 1963. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night–she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question–‘Is this all?'”
November 1, 1909
The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall
George Kibbe Turner, The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall. McClure’s, November 1909.
June 25, 1892
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. First published in The New York Age, 25 June 1892. From The Anti Lynching Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1920 by Patricia A. Schechter: “In order to launch resistance to lynching, [Ida B. Wells] had to prove that lynching’s primary victims, African American men, were people worthy of sympathy and citizens deserving protection. At the same time, she needed to present herself — an educated, middle-class Southern woman of mixed racial ancestry — as a credible dispenser of truth, a “representative” public figure able to command social and amoral authority. The context of racism and sexism in which she functioned made both tasks difficult. Wells-Barnett described lynching as an expression of conflict over rights, physical integrity, human dignity, and social power and the movement to end it was similarly fraught and contentious.”