If you’ve been dying to learn how to perform an abortion on a papaya and have $1,600 to spare, Feminist Camp has got you covered. That may sound like a joke, but Feminist Camp isn’t for poster making, hashtagging Resist on all your Instagrams or even teaching you how to be a better feminist. Instead, campers will learn how to bring feminism into their daily lives and careers.
“It’s a tiny-sized conference,” said the camp’s co-director Carly Romeo. “We bring [participants] around the city to different organizations or companies that are doing feminist work or feminist-adjacent work. And the goal is to demystify the idea of feminist work.”
It’s International Women’s Day. As expected, restaurants and other businesses around town are participating in the #ADayWithoutaWoman strike. Even the Statue of Liberty took last night off in solidarity. To find out how you can join in, see our roundup of today’s events. We’ll have more coverage later; in the meantime, here’s what’s happening on social media.
Leta Hong Fincher is a sociologist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, and has written for the likes of The New York Timesand Dissent. Her new book explores the effects of sustained governmental campaigns that encourage women to marry young, in order to cut down the surplus of single men in the country. Fincher argues that women—terrified of becoming old maids at 27—are being shamed into matrimony (an institution which in China does little to protect women’s rights). In the process, female home-ownership and participation in the labor force has declined, while gendered wealth inequality is increasing. Contrary to the popular myth that women have fared well in China’s economic boom, Fincher highlights gender-based structural discrimination, and in doing so elucidates over-arching problems with China’s economy, politics and development. Join the author for a discussion of her work.
