On this week’s 51%, we discuss The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics with author Janet R. Jakobsen.

In The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (NYU Press), Janet R. Jakobsen examines how gender and sexuality have reappeared time and again at the center of political life, and is marked by a series of widely recognized issues and movements. Jakobsen is a professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Columbia’s Barnard College.

That’s our show for this week. Thanks to Tina Renick for production assistance. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock. Our theme music is Glow in the Dark by Kevin Bartlett. This show is a national production of Northeast Public Radio. If you’d like to hear this show again, sign up for our podcast, or visit the 51% archives on our web site at wamc.org. And follow us on Twitter @51PercentRadio This week’s show is #1629.

On this episode of 51%, we discuss eating disorders: what they look like, why they develop, and how they're treated. We also speak with advocates with the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders, or STRIPED, who are working to restrict the sale of over-the-counter diet pills to minors.

Guests: S. Bryn Austin, STRIPED director; Joanne Chung; and Dr. Julie Morrison, owner and director of HPA/Livewell in Albany, New York

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While 51% typically focuses on women’s stories, the subject of today’s episode is not necessarily unique to the female experience. We’re talking about eating disorders, which can affect people of all genders, ages, and races. In fact, they’re a lot more common than you might think, and as with other mental illnesses, cases have surged during the coronavirus pandemic.

S. Bryn Austin is an award-winning researcher and professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and Boston Children’s Hospital.

"Eating disorders are common, they are deadly, and they are expensive," says Austin. "Eating disorders will affect nearly 30 million Americans in their lifetime, or close to 9 percent of the U.S. population. And eating disorders are among the deadliest of any mental condition, with over 10,000 Americans needlessly dying each year — that equates to one death every 52 minutes. Think about that: every 52 minutes, somebody’s sister or brother, parent, or child dies from this preventable and treatable condition.”

So what are these preventable and treatable conditions? Well, when we talk about eating disorders, we usually talk about the big three: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. A person with anorexia nervosa will restrict their food intake, purge, over-exercise, and otherwise do what they can to achieve or maintain a dangerously low body weight. A person with bulimia nervosa gets there by eating large amounts of food, followed by bouts of self-induced vomiting. Binge eating, meanwhile, sometimes results in weight gain, as a person seemingly “loses control” and eats an exorbitant amount of food in short bursts of time.

The National Eating Disorder Association says binge eating is the most common eating disorder in the U.S. — but overall, it details 11 different conditions on its website, with the vague “unspecified feeding or eating disorder” among them. Austin says the range of ways in which we fall out with our bodies is wide.

"Eating disorders can be related to many kinds of factors. There’s widespread pressure to lose weight, to maintain a lower weight. And it’s not just what’s considered beautiful — there is frank discrimination that’s happening all across the country related to weight," she adds. "It’s legal, in most parts of the U.S., to not hire somebody, to fire someone — they can even be fired and told it’s happening because of their weight, and in most places people don’t have any recourse. We know it happens in schools: there’s evidence that teachers are rating students at higher weights with lower subjective scores. They’ll rate them lower on academic performance, completely unrelated to their academic performance, and instead related to these biases around weight.

These biases set people up, especially young people, to feel like they need to do anything they can to keep weight off. And that sets up a really dangerous cycle, for many people, of weight loss and weight regain.”

Austin says there are many ways that American society is not equipped to prevent or tackle eating disorders — and it’s a costly situation, as eating disorders cost the U.S. more than 10,000 lives and roughly $65 billion a year. So in 2009, she started the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders, or STRIPED, to build a network of trained professionals around the issue. Their latest focus has been a trio of bills in the California, Massachusetts, and New York state legisl

This week on 51%, we bring you the first part of a two-part series on rape and sexual abuse. Host Jackie Orchard visits the crime victim services unit of a hospital to learn about what’s involved in a forensic rape exam. And a counselor tells us what recovery looks like after an abuse.

A warning that today’s program contains details and subject matter than may not be appropriate for all listeners. We’re going to be discussing sexual assault for the next half hour.

Grace Coons is the supervisor of the forensic examiner program in the Crime Victim Services Unit at St. Peter’s Health Partners. Standing in the emergency department at Samaritan Hospital in Troy, New York, she opens a rape kit to show me the envelopes and instructions inside.

I have to say, imagining going through the steps as if I were the patient – a genital swab, photos of bruising, DNA samples, and recounting the story for the advocate or the nurse to hear – it seems overwhelming. But Coons has a very confident air about her. Like a mom you would call late at night if you were in trouble – and she would swoop in and make it all OK.

For good reason. Coons has been an examiner for about four years and has seen hundreds of patients for varying types of abuse. Coons is a nurse practitioner and manages about 38 per diem nurses. They take varying shifts to administer forensic examinations for victims of rape and abuse. And the amount of abuse patients they see is… upsetting.

“This year, we're actually averaging approximately 40 per month,” Coons said. “Last year total, our program saw 280 patients. So far, at the close of May, our program was at 215. So we're almost double the volume of last year, just with this year.”

Coons says it’s nearly impossible to identify trends of who gets raped or abused.

“There is no set demographic,” Coons said. “It can happen to male, female, transgender, all ages, we see basically from infant all the way to elderly folks in their 80s. So there's a very wide range of our patient population. So it's not a specific demographic, or race or anything like that.”

Coons says they see patients for all types of abuse, not just sexual. Usually children come in because of a domestic violence incident.

“We could see them for a physical assault, we could also see them for a sexual assault exam,” Coons said. “So it might be something that is either known and so we are collecting evidence for a known sexual assault, or something that is presumed or that there's a hunch, you know, that something just doesn't seem right. Maybe somebody heard something or, you know, their genitalia has suspicious redness, you know, when an unusual bruise… or a child just not acting right and the parent or guardian wants the child checked out. Sometimes we can also see pediatric patients because of CPS involvement and CPS is requesting the exam.

Coons says her department is trying to set standards for domestic violence patients across the state, hoping New York will develop a set evidence collection kit for domestic violence examinations.

“In New York State, there is a set kit which would be used for any sexual assault patient throughout the state,” Coons said. “So if you were seeing here or Buffalo, you know, anywhere from corner to corner of the state, then you would have the exact same evidence kit collected for you. But those standards don't exist for domestic violence patients. There's also not a reimbursement process for domestic violence patients. So that would have to go through that individual's insurance at this point, whereas someone who were sexually assaulted, can have their services, free of charge in your state would pay for that. So we're looking to kind of set some standards and best practice protocols for New York State.”

Coons says Crime Victim Services also sees patients who are victims of general physical assault, human trafficking, abuse, neglect, and elder abuse. But most patients are sexual assaul

On this week’s 51%, we take a tour of the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Executive Director Jennifer Gabriel previews the hall’s latest class, and shares her goals for the museum’s expansion.

Guests: Jennifer Gabriel, Executive Director of the National Women's Hall of Fame; Natalie Rudd, Learning & Engagement Manager

51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. The show is hosted by Jesse King, its executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and its theme is “Lolita” by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue.

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You’re listening to 51%, a WAMC production dedicated to women’s issues and experiences. Thanks for tuning in, I’m Jesse King. This week, we’re taking a field trip to Seneca Falls, New York. Now, Seneca Falls is an important location for women’s history, being the site of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, where activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Martha Wright signed the “Declaration of Sentiments” calling for equal rights for women. 

There are a lot of places we could visit in Seneca Falls and talk about, but today we’re stopping at the National Women’s Hall of Fame. It’s been a part of the area for decades, but after years of renovations it now occupies the historic Seneca Knitting Mill on Canal Street, in plain view of the recreated Wesleyan Chapel, where the Seneca Falls Convention took place. 

So after saddling up the company vehicle and making my way west to Seneca County, I found my way to the wool mill, a large stone structure nestled by the Seneca-Cayuga Canal. I'm immediately greeted by Executive Director Jennifer Gabriel and Learning & Engagement Manager Natalie Rudd, who are kind enough to hold open the door as I lug in my recording equipment. Gabriel was selected to be the museum's new executive director after a six-month, national search in July. She says she's spent the past two decades working in non-profit organizations in New York, Colorado, and California - particularly in fundraising - and that might come in handy for the National Women's Hall of Fame, as it grows into its new space and navigates the coronavirus pandemic.

I got the change to sit down with Gabriel, and started by asking about the Hall's history, and her vision for its future.

How has the museum gotten to where it is today? What are your goals as executive director?

So the National Women’s Hall of Fame is over 50 years old, we’re the first and oldest organization and museum dedicated to telling the stories of great American women. The whole organization began in the late ‘60s, when a woman named Shirley Hartley learned about the Hall of Great Americans, which was housed at New York University. And she was really troubled to learn that only a small portion of the people that were honored there were women. And being from Seneca Falls and working in Seneca Falls, she really felt strongly that this was the place that needed to house an organization dedicated specifically to celebrating women. And so she came back to Seneca Falls, gathered her friends and some associates and colleagues, and created what she called “The Founders Tea,” which was a homage to the tea that Elizabeth Cady Stanton first organized with Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, and all of the people that we associate with the women's rights movement. So Shirley Hartley did a similar tea, and that was the impetus for the founding of the National Women's Hall of Fame.

So a year later in 1969, we were incorporated as a nonprofit organization. And we've been right here in Seneca Falls ever since. Sometime in the late ‘70s, the organization moved from the basement of one of the local colleges to a small storefront on Fall Street in downtown Seneca Falls, and that's where we lived and thrived for 41 years. Eventually, we got to the point where we had outgrown that space, and so, in 2007, the organization embarked on a major campaign to purchase an

On this week’s 51%, A Marine Corps Boot Camp in California opens to women; a writer discusses what she calls America’s obsession, breasts and women make some progress among Oscar nominees.

For the first time, the Marine Corps has fully opened both its boot camps to women. The first female recruits arrived in San Diego recently - at a camp that since 1923 had trained only men. Women will also continue to train at the Marine Corps' other facility at Parris Island, South Carolina. But integrating boot camp is just one of the hurdles in bringing gender equity to the Corps, as Steve Walsh reports for the American Homefront Project.

Leslie Lehr wants to talk about boobs. She’s gone from size AA to DDD and everything in between, from puberty to motherhood, enhancement to cancer, and more. And she’s not alone. Lehr’s new book A Boob’s Life: How America’s Obsession Shaped You—and Me blends her personal narrative with history, starting in the 1960s with the women’s liberation movement and moving to the current feminist dialogue and what it means to be a woman. Lehr is a prize-winning author, screenwriter, and essayist. Her essays have been published in the New York Times and Huffington Post. Lehr spoke with 51%’s Elizabeth Hill about why she decided to tell her story.

The 93rd Oscars are scheduled for April 25th, having been postponed from February because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And, for the first time, more than one female has been nominated in the best director category in the same year. Previously, only five women have ever been nominated for the Oscars’ best director. Chloé Zhao is nominated for Nomadland and Emerald Fennell, for Promising Young Woman. Zhao already made history as the first Asian woman to win best director at the Golden Globe Awards in February.

“Nomadland,” based on a 2017 non-fiction book of the same name, is about a woman in her 60s who, after losing everything in the Great Recession, embarks on a journey through the American West, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad. The thriller, “Promising Young Woman” tells the story of a young woman who is traumatized by a tragic event in her past, and seeks out vengeance against those who crossed her path.

Dr. Mia Mask is a film professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She teaches African American cinema, feminist film theory, and other courses. We spoke with her about the two women nominated for best director, and more.

That’s our show for this week. Thanks to Tina Renick for production assistance. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock. Our theme music is Glow in the Dark by Kevin Bartlett. This show is a national production of Northeast Public Radio. Follow us on Twitter @51PercentRadio.

Photo courtesy of Pegasus.

This week on 51%, we visit the Akwesasne Nation near the U.S. – Canada border to learn about indigenous women leaders.

Driving north from Albany, New York to the U.S.- Canada border, I almost don’t notice crossing over into the Akwesasne nation. The only indicator in this rural town is a red and purple sign that says “Akwesasne – land where the partridge drums.” Just as I turn my head to get a longer look – a new sign catches my eye: three indigenous women with red paint on their faces. On their arms in black paint: “stop the violence.”

“Break the Silence” the billboard says, with a phone number.

I turn onto a gravel road and pass through a community of small houses. The gravel ends at a beautiful log home with farm equipment and a pristine yurt behind it. Just past a raised bed garden, rolling farm fields stretch out as far as I can see, and meet a lush wood line. The air in this place, so close to the Adirondack Mountains, is crisp and clean. It reminds me of when I lived in Alaska.

I park out of the way of incoming tractors and am immediately licked to death by the friendliest dog I’ve ever met, as a woman greets me.

Mama Bear has welcomed me to the Akwesasne Nation, which straddles Ontario and Quebec, to learn about indigenous women. The U.S. government recognizes the land as the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation – Mama Bear recognizes it as the land where women hold power.

(Episode discusses broken treaties, drug use in indigenous communities, and the epidemic of missing indigenous women.)

Thanks to the Akwesasne Women Singers for contributing their songs to this piece, you can follow their channel on YouTube. Thanks to Teio Swathe’s cover of “bear fox, sky world” which was also used in this piece.

Our theme music is “Lolita” by Albany-based artist Girl Blue. 51% is a national production of Northeast Public Radio. A full transcript of this show is available on our flagship station's website. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @51PercentRadio

Join us next week for a special graduation episode – where we will meet a 78-year-old woman in Alabama who walked across the stage to receive her diploma this year. And – we’ll follow someone else’s non-traditional commencement journey – mine.

I’m your host Jackie Orchard. Until next week – remember, the future is fearless. 

On this week's 51%, we speak with Stephanie Johnson of the American Medical Association about a new campaign to promote heart health and self-care among Black women. We also discuss sexual health, vaginal pain, and postpartum care with Dr. Molly Rivest, a women's health practitioner based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Guests: Stephanie Johnson, spokesperson for the American Medical Association; Dr. Molly Rivest, Barrington OB-GYN

51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Our producer is Jesse King, our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is “Lolita” by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue.

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You're listening to 51%, a WAMC production dedicated to women's issues and experiences. Thanks for tuning in, and Jesse King. We've got another roundup of health-related interviews and stories for you today – as our first guest says, “Health is wealth.”

Stephanie Johnson is a spokesperson with the American Medical Association, and the brain behind its “Release the Pressure” campaign. Johnson helped launch Release the Pressure right around the time the pandemic hit the U.S., March of 2020, in hopes of providing Black women with better tools to monitor their health, particularly their heart health. She says the idea for the campaign came when her own mother was battling heart disease.

"Heart disease is something that has impacted my family for some time," says Johnson. "I lost my father to a stroke, my brother Bruce to a pulmonary embolism. And then my sister, not long after my mother passed away, also died of a stroke. Her name is Anita. And so I just was in awe of the statistics that more than 50 percent of Black women over the age of 20 have high blood pressure and more than 30 percent of Black adults in the country have heart disease. And I just could not believe why so many women and why the age 20 — I mean, typically when you're talking to your mom and dad, or aunts or uncles, about graduating from college, that doesn't usually include a conversation around, you know, 'You should be knowing your systolic and diastolic numbers.' One out of every two or three people might have high blood pressure and not even know it. That's just not the conversations that I was having with my parents, but it is exactly where we need to be now: having regular conversations with our teens, our kids, about health. And HIW is my moniker: 'Health is wealth.' And if I can get people to get on board with, they should be thinking about health the same way they think about picking a college, or picking a car or what have you — then that would be a significant change in this country toward improved health outcomes. That's the brainchild behind [Release the Pressure]. And what I saw is that people were working in silos, a ton of organizations with the same mission, but all having siloed work. So with Release the Pressure, we brought together like-minded squads: the American Heart Association, the Association of Black Cardiologists, the Minority Health Institute, AMA Foundation, NMA. Every one of those organizations that have a concerted mission to see health disparities broken down in this country. Let's pull together our resources, our expertise and everything that we have, and go after it."

Those numbers....I've never heard of those numbers either. And I feel like that's very surprising. I was going to ask you when should people start seriously looking at their heart health, and I would have never guessed 20.

It blows your mind right? I'm gonna say it again. 50 percent of black women over the age of 20 have high blood pressure. That's known as the silent killer in this country, because whether you don't feel the symptoms — and most people don't — bad things are happening inside your body that are putting stress on your organs and your heart and putting you on a path [to heart disease]. If you don't take proactive steps to monitor and know your numbers.

This week, we hear from the president of EMILY's List about her new book, Run to Win: Lessons in Leadership for Women Changing the World.

This week, we hear from the president of EMILY's List — the largest national resource for women in politics. Created by Ellen Malcolm in 1985 it helps fund campaigns for pro-choice, Democratic women, and strategically torchlight the balance of power in government. The name “EMILY's List” was an acronym for "Early Money Is Like Yeast" (i.e., it makes the dough rise).

Stephanie Schriock became president of EMILY's List in 2010. She has overseen more than a decade of growth in the organization, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, helping elect record numbers of women to the U.S. House and Senate. Her recently released book Run to Win: Lessons in Leadership for Women Changing the World is for women who are looking to lead. The book is organized around the steps EMILY's List uses to coach its candidates. The book contains lessons for any woman trying to succeed in a male-dominated field. And while the arena here is politics, the message is universal. 51%’s Joe Donahue spoke with Schriock just before Vice President Kamala Harris, who wrote the book’s foreword, took office.

It's been several weeks since President Biden signed an executive order allowing transgender people to serve in America’s armed forces. But they're not being fitted with camouflage uniforms just yet. Carson Frame reports for the American Homefront Project.

That’s our show for this week. Thanks to Tina Renick for production assistance. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock. Our theme music is Glow in the Dark by Kevin Bartlett. This show is a national production of Northeast Public Radio. Follow us on Twitter @51PercentRadio.

Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House.

On this week’s 51%, we discuss the growing burnout among healthcare workers during the coronavirus pandemic, and why some are leaving the profession. We also visit a new vacation spot for families and children battling serious illness, and speak with the new chief of surgery at a major hospital in New York state.

Guests: Candie St. Jean, nurse case manager at Cooley Dickinson Hospital; Dr. KMarie King, chief of surgery at Albany Medical Center

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You’re listening to 51%, a WAMC production dedicated to women’s issues and experiences. Thanks for giving us a listen, I’m Jesse King. We’re bringing you a trio of healthcare stories today — starting, of course, with the coronavirus pandemic. At this point, we’re all familiar with tales of the nurses and doctors battling the virus on the front lines, but what does the battle look and feel like now that the vaccine is out, and the country is straining for some version of normalcy? 

Well, in some ways, it's not all that different. COVID-19 hospitalizations are on the rise due to the Delta variant. Hospitals across the country are once again struggling to make room for new patients, only this time many of them rejected the vaccine that was supposed to be the light at the end of the tunnel. 

So many healthcare workers are burning out. Some are quitting, exacerbating staffing shortages and wait times nationwide. In March, Beacon Research in Boston surveyed 500 nurses across Massachusetts, and 37 percent said they see themselves leaving the profession sooner than they had planned. The Massachusetts Nursing Association is calling for a number of reforms, including better transparency from hospital administrators, decreased mental health boarding in emergency rooms, and the presumption that any healthcare staff diagnosed with COVID-19 caught it while on the job. A nurses’ strike at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester has stretched on for over six months over disputed working conditions. 

I recently spoke with Candie St. Jean, a nurse at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts. 

What is it like, being a nurse right now?

The talk is, you know, healthcare workers experiencing burnout, which is very, very real. But I want to stress, number one, burnout doesn't just happen because of a pandemic. Many of the things, if not all of the things that we're experiencing right now, were happening before COVID even hit in 2020. You know, not having adequate staff, etc. But the past few months, the people that are hospitalized are some of the most complex [cases] that we've ever seen. We've had patients come in that didn't seek care during most of 2020, so they're understandably much more complex. Also, socially, emotionally, people that didn't have enough support before this – many of the supports and resources were cut during the pandemic – and it just contributes to the complexity of patients. We're seeing more mental health admissions, we're seeing more addictions, alcohol intoxications, things like that, because of resources that have been cut.

So we've been taking care of these types of patients in recent months, and now we've got COVID ramping up again. It doesn't seem that the proactive planning has been happening this time around, either. You know, last year, elective procedures were cancelled. There were things put in place to not only save beds, but provide more adequate staffing. Those things are not in place right now. And yeah, there have been a number of healthcare workers that have left the profession, because they just can't do it anymore. I have had many of my nurses reach out to me in recent weeks and months that they feel their licenses are in jeopardy, because of the assignments they have. They have too many patients. We don't have enough ancillary staff. You know, there's one unit in particular that never has a secretary to answer the phone. And as a case manager – we coordinate with othe

On today’s 51%, we speak with one of the people responsible for bringing Hollywood to upstate New York. And we meet a producer of HBO’s new series “The Gilded Age,” which was filming this spring in New York’s Capital Region.

Holly Rymon is a producer on HBO’s new series, “The Gilded Age.”

“It's set in 1882,” Rymon said. “It's sort of the beginning of, you know, this sort of amazing time in history, which quite admittedly, I didn't know a whole lot about before I got involved in this project, where, you know, industry and you know, railroads, and all of these businesses are sort of just like taking off and there became people with an enormous amount of wealth. So, there's not a lot of checks and balances yet. And it was just like, insane wealth. So they were building mansions, and they were making homes. And there was new money and old money. Sort of a loose premise of the show is there is a family that has new money and they're ready to be in society and do all the things and then there's a family that's from the old money. And they're very, quite proud of that. And they're not really ready to accept the new folks. So there's a little bit of drama there.”

Rymon and I are sitting in Riverfront Park in Troy, New York. They filmed just a block away, transforming storefronts into hat boutiques and cigar shops from 1800s New York City. Rymon says the scenery was her favorite part of filming.

“It's gorgeous. Oh my god, I can't wait for people to see the show. It's just the costumes, the sets. It's just literally, literally stunning. It's really, really beautiful.”