The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen Read Free Book Online Page A

and Canada—to legalize same-sex marriage. England and New Zealand legalize civil unions.
    The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra hires the first female conductor to head a major American orchestra.
    Cindy Sheehan, the mother of soldier Casey Sheehan who died in Iraq on April 2004, reinvigorates the antiwar movement when she camps outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, until he will explain why her son died.
    China officially outlaws sexual harassment and family violence. Women in Silicon Valley hold a conference to address their relative invisibility in the blogosphere and in cyberspace.
    At the U.N. Beijing Plus Ten Conference, delegates reaffirm the 1995 Beijing Plan for Action, a broad platform that asserted women’s rights as human rights. Many view the U.S. rightward political turn as a major obstacle for improving women’s status around the world. Activists call for mainstreaming gender concerns into development, diplomacy, and peacemaking.
    Hurricane Katrina causes catastrophic destruction of the Gulf Coast. The people most affected are those households headed by African American women, among the poorest in the region.
    Network television broadcasts
Commander in Chief
, the first series about a woman assuming the presidency of the United States. Rosa Parks, who ignited the Montgomery Bus boycott when she refused to give up her front bus seat in 1955, dies at age 92. She is the first female African American whose body lies in state in the Capitol rotunda.
    Access to abortion becomes a serious problem: One-third of American women live in areas where there are no providers.
    The film
Brokeback Mountain
challenges an iconic image of American masculinity by showing ranch hands whose love endures throughout their marriages and adult lives.
    Mukhtaran Bibi, gang-raped in Pakistan on a local council order for crimes committed by her brother, is honored by
Glamour
magazine as a “woman of the year.” With funds from compensation and
New York Times
readers, she builds girls’ schools in her village, but fears assassination.
    The Sundance Channel broadcasts an eight-part documentary series,
Transgeneration
, that follows four transgender college studentsfor a year. A feature film,
TransAmerica
, tells the story of a transgender woman who discovers she has fathered a teenage son.
    Forty years after the modern women’s movement began, women make up 15 percent of both houses of Congress, at least 50 percent of those enrolled in law and medical schools, and 46 percent of the U.S. labor force.
    Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, elected president of Liberia, is the first female leader of an African nation; Angela Merkel becomes the first female chancellor of Germany.
    2006  Betty Friedan, author of the groundbreaking 1963
Feminine Mystique
, dies at age 85.
    Coretta King, who took up the nonviolent civil rights campaign of her assassinated husband, dies at age 78.
    Effa Manley is the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame. A white woman who passed as an African American, she co-owned (with her black husband) the New Jersey-based Eagles, who won the Negro Leagues World Series in 1946.
    Progressive Michelle Bachelet wins the presidency in Chile. Serious speculation about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential aspirations suggests that an American woman president is no longer unimaginable.
    South Dakota passes legislation banning all abortions in the state, including for victims of rape and incest, setting up a direct challenge to
Roe v. Wade.
    The 2006 American Time Use Survey released by the Labor Bureau finds that women, regardless of marital status, spend more time on housework and child care than men. More specifically, women report spending one hour a day on housework and three-quarters of an hour on food prepartion, while men do fifteen minutes on each task. More than half of the women surveyed said they had done housework in the past twenty-four hours, while only one in five