Courtesy Loganberry Books Photograph: Courtesy of Loganberry Books
A bookstore in Cleveland kicked off International Women’s Day by turning around every volume on their shelves written by a male author. It took the eight employees of Loganberry Books, a new, used and rare bookstore with a feminist bent, two hours to go through nearly 10,000 titles.
The books will stay facing backwards for several weeks throughout Women’s History month. Harriet Logan, the store’s founder, said the act was “a metaphor of silencing the male voice – at least for this month”.
To draw attention to female authors, a Cleveland bookstore celebrated Women’s History Month by turning every male-written book in the fiction room backward on its shelf.
Eight of the all-female employees of Loganberry Books went through about 10,000 books, a process that took about two hours. They’ll leave the books turned around for the next two weeks.
“Pictures are loud communicators,” Harriett Logan, the bookstore’s founder and owner, told Heat Street. “So we are in essence not just highlighting the disparity but bringing more focus to the women’s books now, because they’re the only ones legible on the shelf.”
“To give the floor and attention to women, you need to be able to hear them,” Logan told Heat Street. “And if someone else is talking over them, that just doesn’t happen.”
As part of a campaign to push Wall Street firms to place more women on their boards, the U.S. fund manager State Street on Tuesday installed a statue of girl opposite the famous Charging Bull.
Although women have made some headway against the glass ceiling, State Street said one out of four of the companies that make up the Russell 3000 Index still have no female representation on their boards.
“Today, we are calling on companies to take concrete steps to increase gender diversity on their boards, and have issued clear guidance to help them begin to take action,” State Street Global Advisors CEO Ron O’Hanley said in a statement.
Much the same as the charging bull, the little bronze girl by artist Kristen Visbal was put up in the wee hours of the morning as “guerilla art,” McNally said. But, unlike the bull, the firm discussed it with the city beforehand so that it could remain at least temporarily.
“We’re actively pursuing that it stays for a month,” she said. “If the city decides that it should stay in perpetuity, we’re absolutely on board with that.”
The Women’s March is calling on people in Washington, DC to rally on the steps of Congress while Democratic women in the US House stage a symbolic walkout.
In celebration of International Women’s Day, the short film “I March for ______,” directed by Sam Campodonico-Ludwig, examines the growth of women’s activism in the US with an intimate look at their divisions and similarities.
In Argentina, a day of protest kicks off at 12pm ART with a “ruidazo” – a widespread, noisy protest carried out by banging objects, usually pots and pans, from balconies or on sidewalks outside the home or workplace.
The ruidazo will be followed by a 5pm march in the capital city of Buenos Aires from Congress to the Casa Rosada presidential palace.
Argentina is home to the Ni Una Menos movement (or “Not One Less,” meaning not one more woman lost to male violence) a grassroots response to Argentina’s high rates of deadly domestic violence.
From 2008 to 2016, the rate at which Argentinian women are murdered shot up 78%. In 2012, Argentina passed a law in 2012 that recognized domestic violence homicides and honor killings as “femicide”.
There were 322 victims of femicide last year in Argentina, or one woman murdered every 30 hours. So far in 2017, the violence has not abated. Casa del Encuentro NGO, a safe home for victims of male violence, estimates that this year, one woman has died every 18 hours as a result of intimate partner or family violence.
Today’s 5pm march will be titled “We’re Not All Here,” in reference to the women lives have been lost.
More school districts in the US are shutting down as the #DayWithoutAWoman campaign leaves them short-handed. Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in North Carolina, Alexandria Virginia Public Schools in Virginia, and now, Prince George’s County in Maryland:
Several Prince George’s County schools are stillserving lunch for students who rely on its school lunch program.
In the US, Women Democrats in the House will stage a walkout
In the US House of Representatives, Democratic women are planning to stage a walkout Wednesday afternoon in solidarity with the women’s strike. Several of them will speak in honor of International Women’s Day, the Hill reports, and then, shortly after noon, they will walk out.
“I think it’s important women in Congress show our solidarity,” Rep. Lois Frankel, of Florida, told the Hill. Frankel helped arrange the walkout.
The women won’t be missing any votes, such as a vote on a defense spending bill that is expected to pass.
“We considered a lot of different options, but our feeling is that there is so much mischief going on in this Congress that we cannot turn our backs,” Frankel said. “We think it would actually be sort of the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish.”
International Women’s Day is getting underway in the Americas. In the US, some media companies are already participating in the women’s strike, or #DayWithoutAWoman. MTV’s social media accounts are on autopilot:
And the news sites Bustle and Romper have gone dark completely:
For 24 hours, we will not be creating any new content on either of our sites or on any of our sites’ social channels. Because, quite simply, without women, there is no Bustle. There is no Romper. Without our editorial team, which is 97 percent female, we would be unable to produce a site that aims to provide support and a megaphone for women to express how they’re feeling about the world. And there’s no time like the present to prove just how important those women’s voices are to the world — to media, to business, and beyond.
Some of its staff will spend the day volunteering for domestic violence shelters, food banks, and “other charities that reach out to women and marginalized communities in need.”
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