Free Republic

What do you do if you throw a big party but nobody shows up? That wasn’t quite the case for Hillary Clinton this week, but it was close. It seems that one of her high profile, Big Apple supporters set up a private, “women only” event where the ladies would get some one on one face time with the presumptive Democrat nominee for the bargain basement price of only $2,700. Sadly, as the deadline approached, it became clear that not enough of Gotham’s ladies were up for the trip. Hillary Clinton had trouble attracting high-powered women to a New...

<p>"Eight of the 20 women who originally entered the school’s first co-ed class were allowed to recycle through the program after they fell out in their first go-round.”"</p>

On and off the campaign trail in the Carolinas, voters say they have ‘no hard feelings’ toward Hillary Clinton. They say the opposite about Republicans.Bryan Burns could not make up his mind. Here was this African-American voter in khaki shorts, a v-neck T-shirt and black-rimmed eyeglasses, browsing shops at the Crabtree Valley Mall, on a swelteringly hot Friday in the not-yet summer of the American south. And there was Hillary Clinton, who needs to win the minds of exactly this kind of voter, a 30-year-old Virginia native who has spent the last decade living in North Carolina, a state that...

As election fever sweeps the most socially conservative regions of Pakistan ahead of this weekend’s local government polls, one crucial group is feeling excluded. Following deals between local politicians and elders, women will have no say in the district and village council contests. The Guardian reports that the affected districts sit in the north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), sitting on the border with Afghanistan. In marginally less conservative

On Friday, the Army is expected to announce that all the women who attempted to graduate from Ranger School had officially failed to meet the standards, according to a military source. Ranger School, which grooms the Army’s most elite special operations fighting force, opened its doors to women for the first time this year. Eight of the 20 women who originally entered the school's first co-ed class were allowed to recycle through the program after they fell out in their first go-round. The Friday announcement will confirm that this happened again. To many, this means the system is working as...

A young generation of women is discovering a new brand of sexy in the most unlikely of places: their grandmothers’ underwear drawers. “When I walk into a lingerie store, I’m always like, ‘O.K., which drawer in here is for the grannies?’ ” Daphne Javitch, 35, said of her predilection for ample-bottomed undies. That preference led Ms. Javitch, back in 2010, to found Ten Undies, a line with a cult following that sells cotton full-bottom bikinis, boy shorts and high-waist briefs not unlike the kind immortalized in “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” (“Hello, mommy.”) Ten’s wares are comfortable and practical, to be sure,...

A national defense analyst says it's a disgrace that U.S. military officers are not fighting an ongoing effort to put women in front-line combat units.The Washington Times recently reported that Congress is prodding the armed forces to develop a special combat boot for women to minimize stress fractures due to marching and training. Bob Maginnis, a senior fellow for national security at the Family Research Council, says the issue is about more than combat boots for women.It's about women are not men. Women are not little men either," says Maginnis, who retired from the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel....

Ohio recently made headlines with reports that half the abortion clinics in that state have closed and several others have curtailed services, reducing abortion numbers to the lowest since 1976. “When abortion clinics close, abortions decline and lives are saved. It’s as simple as that,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue and co-author of the book Abortion Free. “We have worked in Ohio on a number of projects in cooperation with local leaders that, in part, contributed to this decline.” While some refuse to acknowledge that abortion clinic closures contribute to lower abortion numbers, Newman explains that the evidence...

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) is leading a new push to allow women to buy birth control without a prescription, hoping to deliver on one of the biggest promises of his freshman Senate campaign last year.A half-dozen Senate Republicans have signed onto Gardner’s bill, which would require drug companies that sell contraceptives to file an application to sell their products over the counter. “Most other drugs with such a long history of safe and routine use are available for purchase over the counter, and contraception should join them,” Gardner wrote in a statement. He said his bill would benefit women in...

An AP story about lesbians, drug cartels, gender neutrality, and high-heel shoe dress codes. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/65e3d1cc5b3b424cb5e89f472e6199c8/cannes-steps-big-trouble-high-heels-only-policy

WHEN our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign. Then I met the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous stay-at-home-moms, of my new habitat. My culture...

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said Saturday that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) would make a poor president for American women should he ever enter the White House. “He was a terrible governor for Florida women,” Wasserman Schultz tweeted. “Would be a disaster for women across the country.” Wasserman Schultz, who is also the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairwoman, was responding to an article she encountered online. [Snip] “And at the end of the day, while Jeb’s right-wing rhetoric might make him stand out from his family, in 2016’s ultra-conservative GOP field, Jeb’s positons will just make him blend...

When Elisabeth Bing became interested in childbirth techniques in the 1950s, women were often heavily medicated, dads were generally nowhere near the delivery room and expectant parents had far less information than many do today. Bing, the Lamaze International co-founder who popularized what was known as natural childbirth and helped change how women and doctors approached the delivery room, died Friday at 100 in her New York apartment, the organization said Saturday. The cause of her death wasn't immediately known. Trained as a physical therapist, Bing taught breathing and relaxation techniques to generations of expectant mothers, wrote several books about...

The Navy is proceeding with its plan to increase the number of women in the service to 25 percent with a similar goal of attaining that ratio in each ship and squadron, the vice chief of naval operations said Thursday. Women currently make up about 17 percent of the Navy, said Adm. Michelle Howard, who made a stop in Honolulu on her way to the International Maritime Defense Exhibition in Singapore, where she will meet with her counterparts from other nations in the region.

None from first-ever group of female soldiers training to be Army Rangers advance through first round: officials BY Rachelle Blidner NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, May 9, 2015, 5:24 PM The first-ever female soldiers allowed to train to be Army Rangers did not make it through the first round of the course, officials said Friday. Eight women and 101 men who made it through the first tests of the 20-day Crawl Phase will have to try again to pass the last few at one of the toughest soldier training schools, officials said.

The South Carolina Legislative Audit Council has issued a scathing report criticizing the state health department for numerous deficiencies in its inspection of the state’s three freestanding abortion facilities that could “result in serious problems for patients” if the problems are not addressed. The three free-standing abortion facilities operating in South Carolina are: The Women’s Clinic of Greenville, Planned Parenthood of Columbia, and the Charleston Women’s Medical Center in Charleston. Discrepancies were noted in the number of abortions performed at one facility and the number reported to the Department of Health and Environmental Control’s Public Health Statistics and Information Services....

Not Without My Daughter Trailer - Directed by Brian Gilbert and starring Sally Field, Alfred Molina, Sheila Rosenthal, Roshan Seth, Sarah Badel. An American woman, trapped in Islamic Iran by her brutish husband, must find a way to escape with her daughter.

Like a Pringles vendor sounding an alarm about obesity, Pope Francis fashioned himself a feminist last week. You are not reading The Onion. It was an epic mismatch of messenger and message, and I say that as someone who is thankful for this pope, admires him greatly and believes that a change of tone even without a change in teaching has meaning and warrants celebration. But a change of tone in defiance of fact should be flagged (and flogged) as such. And neither Pope Francis nor any other top official in the bastion of male entitlement known as the Vatican...

A Chinese attorney who escaped house arrest in his home country for his efforts to protect women from forced abortion for violating the government’s one-child policy said on Thursday that in the 35 years since the practice hundreds of millions of babies have been killed. “Over the past 35 years, China has killed a total of 360 to 400 million young lives as a result of its inhumane and violent birth control policies,” Chen Guangcheng, now senior fellow at Catholic University of America said at a hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China. “During a six-month period of 2005,...

This promises to turn into a sticky wicket for the New York City Fire Department. One of their upcoming graduates is going to be accepted into the ranks and go to work as a firefighter despite having failed a grueling physical test multiple times. This comes as a result of recent changes to the city’s criteria for how graduates are scored. Rebecca Wax, 33, is set to graduate Tuesday from the Fire Academy without passing the Functional Skills Training test, a grueling obstacle course of job-related tasks performed in full gear with a limited air supply, an insider has...