Girl Crush: Rowan Blanchard and Cecile Richards

“Girl Meets World” star Rowan Blanchard and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards discussed feminism, social media, and more last month; in PAPER Magazine's “Girl Crush” series. It was an ideal match--a quickly rising television star and young progressive voice and a longtime advocate for women's reproductive rights--and Blanchard mentioned Richards as one of her role models, while Richards praised the use of social media among today's young women as a way to get stories out and help mobilize people. “Whether it was their own sexual health stories, their own things that have concerned them, the issues they’ve dealt with as a woman,” she says in the interview. “It can be a really democratizing force.”

The entire discussion is fascinating. Click through to read the entire interview.

papermag.com - In our 'Girl Crush' series, women with mutual admiration for one another get together for conversations that offer illuminating looks into what it's like to be a woman right now.

Back in August, Rowan Blanchard posted an impressively thoughtful essay to Instagram about the importance of intersectionality in feminism, catapulting the 14-year-old Disney Channel star of Girl Meets World into becoming a rising voice of her generation. Her poise, eloquence, and commitment to promoting equality and understanding are traits also shared by Cecile Richards. The president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America was recently in the spotlight for the way she intelligently and gracefully testified before Congress during a House hearing that included accusations and bullying from GOP lawmakers attempting to cut federal funding from the organization. A few months after these events, Richards and Blanchard got together to discuss why it's more important than ever that young women receive information about reproductive health, and why despite this fraught political landscape, there's a lot of reason for hope.

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Woman President Shows Malawi the Way

Malawi’s President Joyce Banda took office during a difficult time economically and politically, in addition to being first woman to be head of state in southern Africa. She is a true leader, for her country as well as for women: Banda has appointed women to key positions since taking power, and even before taking office she spearheaded efforts such as founding National Association for Business Women.

She sat down with IPS News to discuss the link between women's empowerment and sustainable development, health care and education for women and girls, upcoming legislation that will empower and protect women, and much more.

ipsnews.net - Malawi’s President Joyce Banda knows a thing or two about women’s empowerment. After all she is the first female southern African head of state.

But she has not had it easy. Banda had a tough job fixing a sputtering economy after taking over from her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika who died in office on April 5, 2012. In 2011 the country witnessed nationwide protests against Mutharika and the failing economy. The United Kingdom, Malawi’s largest donor, had suspended $550 million in aid after Mutharika expelled its ambassador for calling him an autocrat.

But she did succeed. Since taking office she has implemented of a number of austerity measures, which included selling the country’s presidential jet for $15 million and taking a 30 percent cut in her salary. She also embarked on a range of reforms that not everyone has agreed with. The most controversial has been cultivating closer ties with international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, which is known for its heavy-handed austerity plans.

But in June, the World Bank said the country’s economy was recovering, with manufacturing expected to grow 6 percent and agriculture 5.7 percent.

In September 2012, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute reported that since Mutharika’s increasingly autocratic rule ended, respect for democracy and human rights has returned to the country under Banda’s presidency.

Read more, including excerpts from the interview, here.

Roxane Gay and Rebecca Traister Talk Sex, Female Friendship, and What It Means to be Single Now

Roxane Gay; author of An Untamed State (2014), the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), and Hunger (coming this year); spoke with journalist Rebecca Traister to mark the release of her book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. Traister interviewed dozens of women from all over the United States for her book, painting a diverse and nuanced picture about how marriage has changed in recent decades for women.  Gay interviews Traister about her new book; changing trends, queer issues, gender dynamics, how the stigma of being single is changing and more. Traister and Gay discuss being married as it's shaped by choice, race, and class; women's identity as married or single people; and what marriage means to women today—and to Traister.

“Living singly in your twenties and thirties—and beyond—isn't a tryout for life: It is real life,” Traister says.

Read the introduction here, and click through to Elle.com to read the interview.

elle.com - In Beyoncé's ring finger-wagging 2008 anthem, "Single Ladies," she celebrates independent women who would rather be single than settle. In Rebecca Traister's new book, All the Single Ladies (Simon & Schuster), which borrows both the refrain and the feminist spirit of that song, she chronicles the rise of unmarried women in America and the different people we're becoming because of it. "For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn't always feel that way," Traister writes, noting that there were 3.9 million more single adult women in 2014 than there were in 2010. In 1960, 59 percent of American adults between 18 and and 29 were married; in 2011, it was just 20 percent. The book is wonderfully inclusive, examining single women from all walks of life—working-, middle-, and upper-class women; women of color and white women; queer and straight ones.

Traister has built a reputation as one of America's preeminent feminist voices through her work for Salon, the New Republic, ELLE (where she is a longtime contributing editor), and now New York magazine. Her first book, Big Girls Don't Cry, examined the 2008 presidential election and its cultural and political consequences via the cycle's cast of female power players, including women voters, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin. With All the Single Ladies, she brings her trademark intelligence and wit to bear, interspersing her own experiences and observations with dozens of interviews with women all over the country, plus historical context, from so-called Boston marriages (the nineteenth-century name for women who lived together) and the Brontë sisters to Murphy Brown and Sex and the City.

Visit Elle.com to read Roxane Gay's interview with Rebecca Traister.