Some friends invited me to see the movie Ocean’s 8.  The actresses are great, but I could care less about  females stepping into men’s worn-out roles.  Liberated women can do better. The last Ocean’s movie I saw starred the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawf

A funny thing happens when you ban girls from a boys’ club.  Not only do they create their own, (Click) but what they build tends to have wide appeal.  That’s what happened for Pooja Nath Sankar, now CEO of a Palo Alto Company called Piazza. Sankar didn’t plan to build a busin

It might be too early to worry about reverse discrimination with regard to women, but women-only colleges, like Wellesley, Mills and Smith are thriving and so are the ladies who lunch and wear extraordinary hats.   They are the ones who’ve kept the women-only associations alive. M

My morning began, as it usually does, by taking the pulse of Facebook. England’s royal wedding got most of the comments, which didn’t surprise me.  What did raise my eyebrows was a gentleman’s remark, someone who is usually supportive on women’s issues.  “Just can’t

I joked  with a friend, recently, that if religious conservatives have their way, abortions will be illegal at the point of coitus.  We both laughed.  But I’m not laughing anymore.  Iowa’s woman governor, Kim Reynolds, has signed a bill that makes abortion illegal at the first

When I served in public life, common knowledge was that the number of jail inmates swelled in winter.  Desperate to come in from the cold, the indigent resorted to petty crimes and waited for the police to arrest them.  Law enforcement officers became social workers.  Their job was

Recently, Ben Carson, head of Housing and Urban Development, proposed reducing rent subsidies almost threefold for the poorest of the poor.  If his proposal were to pass Congress, it  would mean the indigent would have to spend almost 2/3 of their income for housing, leaving 1/3 for

Recently, I spiced up a blog (2/2/2017) with a little alphabet profanity: WTF.  A couple of readers chuckled and seemed surprised that I either knew or would use the expression.  I may have been a school teacher at one time, but life in the Labor movement and in politics gave me a r

Yesterday’s blog (1/31/17) was about blue-collar workers and the potential for them to find new jobs in computer coding.  That’s good news.  But the job market has had a number of work opportunities for some time which men have been slow to consider.  I’m talking about pink c

The woman in this coroner’s photograph was called Gerri.  She died in 1964 attempting to give herself an abortion with a coat hanger.   Something went wrong and she bled to death alone on her bathroom floor.  If the picture offends anyone, I am sorry, but the circumstances shoul