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Women in North Korea are now allowed to ride bicycles, reported NBC News Aug. 17. The activity was banned for women in 1996 because it was not feminine. http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/17/13331864-women-allowed-on-bicycles-as-n-korea-turns-wheels-of-change?lite
The Center for Women Policy Studies released seven papers examining reproductive rights in contexts ranging from the Affordable Care Act to prisons. http://centerwomenpolicy.org/
Three women in the Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for hooliganism and inciting religious hatred, reported Ria Novosti Aug. 17. “Free Pussy Riot” rallies were staged in 48 cities around the world on Aug. 17, reported NY Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/women-struggling-new-york-city-recovers-article-1.1136621
A legal advocacy organization responded on Aug. 15 to a recent article in the New York Times that blames poverty on single motherhood. Legal Momentum claims that the problem is not single motherhood but “the flawed social policies that allow child poverty to persist in the U.S. at much higher rates than in other high-income countries.” http://www.legalmomentum.org/news-room/announcements/legal-momentum-helps.html
Helen Gurley Brown, who shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but also thoroughly enjoyed it — and who, as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more — died on Aug. 13 in Manhattan, The New York Times reported Aug. 14. She was 90 years old. As Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997, Brown was widely credited with being the first to introduce frank discussions of sex into magazines for women. Before she arrived at Cosmopolitan, Brown had already shaken the collective consciousness with her best-selling book “Sex and the Single Girl.” Brown routinely described herself as a feminist, but whether her work helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation has been publicly debated for decades. www.womensenews.org