Audrey Flack comes to the Johnson Museum to discuss art, history and feminism.

The Vagina Monologues come to Bailey Hall; Sarah Angell gives her take.

Maggie Henry '14 argues that most jobs today perpetuate anti-feminist societal notions. 

Women’s biological clocks start ticking before birth, causing a decline in their ovarian reserve of eggs. According to a recent Scottish study, women lose 88 percent of their eggs by age 30, and by age 40, only three percent of their eggs remain. Should college girls be paying more attention to this declining fertility while making their life plans?

Some of Carolee Schneemann’s most famous artworks involv­­e naked bodies eating raw chickens (“Meat Joy,” 1964), a film of her and her boyfriend having sex from her cat’s vantage point (“Fuses,” 1965) and a performance where she unravels a poem stuffed up her vag (“Interior Scroll,” 1975). That is, she’s the type of exhibitionistic performance artist that your mother likely finds objectionable and that you probably find passé — though her work speaks, then and now, about the conflicting ideals that render womanhood passive and that make motherhood objectified.

Ever since French President Nicolas Sarkozy infamously stated that the burqa was “not welcome” in his country, triggering a contentious debate between Muslims, secularists and everyone in between, I’ve been struggling to identify what exactly is at issue. Women’s rights? Secularism? National security? French culture? Is the French parliamentary panel’s proposed ban on full-veils — the burqa and the niqab — legitimate legislation or the latest form of Islamophobia?

You know the story: Girl starts middle school as “mean girl.” Poetic justice intervenes, and after mean girl-related trauma in high school, girl swears off other girls for life. Because girl has mostly male friends, other girls deem girl a slut. Girl retaliates by deciding all girls suck, declares that she hates other women, makes the requisite “woman make me a sandwich!” jokes, and tells her mother, spitefully, that she is anti-feminist. (Girl clearly does not know what this means. Mom throws up hands in air.) Then: girl goes to college, meets cool women-folk, starts studying feminism, joins sorority. 3.5 years later, girl has more female than male buds, gets over-reactive to the same sexist jokes she used to make, and has been writing papers about vaginas, columning about breasts and even devoted her entire THESIS to ze wimyns.

Feminism is not dead — it is part of a tradition. The tradition did not start in the 1960s, nor at the turn of the 20th century. It has been around for centuries, and it lives on. I know this because, quite simply, I can feel it. Some people don’t want to call it feminism, and maybe there’s a better name for it. But I haven’t found it yet. Certain works of art and literature have shaped my understanding of what feminism stands for, by bringing into focus what I always knew but somehow ignored. For my last column at Cornell, I’d like to share them with you, in neither chronological nor alphabetical order.

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

A highly entertaining story about appreciating the work and love that goes into being a good mom.

All male playwrights are necessarily chauvinists. On the one hand, if they write plays without leading female characters, they are obviously enthralled with perpetuating the imbalance of roles in favor of men in a profession where the number of actresses outnumber their male counterparts. On the other hand, if they do write leading female characters, those characters are inevitably neurotic, damaged, benighted, angry, difficult and depressed.

“Look to your right, and look to your left,” Karen Shablin, a deeply pro-life activist from Feminist For Life, instructed her audience. “These people [may not] be here if their mother had exercised her choice.”

Feminist For Life is an organization aimed at continuing the efforts of early feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton to seek practical solutions to systematically eliminate the root causes for women to have abortions, according to the group’s website.

Shablin believes that abortions occur because society fails to meet the needs of women, and there is an urgent need to develop a holistic, women-centered solution because “women deserve better than abortion.”