Australia roasts another woman on the spit of public life
The savaging has been so grotesque in its meanness, ugly in its intolerance and alarming in its violence,
Julia Baird is a journalist and author
The savaging has been so grotesque in its meanness, ugly in its intolerance and alarming in its violence,
On the northern beaches of Sydney, teenagers are killing themselves.
As the court case regarding Rebel Wilson has revealed, there remains an archaic – if comprehensible – coyness about the age of women in the film industry who know years relate directly to earning capacity.
It's uncomfortable but necessary to remember what colossal fools we have been.
Perhaps it's not that women should be more confident, but we should all learn to be more sceptical of what confidence actually brings.
Ramifications of Bill O'Reilly's ouster from Fox News could be huge, especially in the media.
We barely blink when women in the sciences achieve (who remembers that Professor Elizabeth Blackburn won a Nobel prize in 2009?), so it is hardly surprising we are often caught napping when they die.
This week, I wanted to write about how to maintain sanity in the face of the precariousness of and, ugliness in, the world. Yet as I opened my laptop to write, tales of desperate Syrians poured from my radio, and my fingers froze for hours.
We are facing a monstrous, growing crisis of credibility and we cannot be complacent
In Trumpian terms – and by that I mean in the terms determined by men who rate women simply according to their decorative value – Florence Nightingale was a "nasty woman". Lionised as a gentle "lady of the lamp" who wandered through hospital wards tending to wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War, we seem to have forgotten her fierceness: a young women who burned to abandon all social obligations and just work, who spurned suitors and lobbied politicians, who adored statistics and pioneered pie charts, and who revolutionised the medical establishment.
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