The Unconstrained Podcast

Scott Johnson is currently the Violence Reporting Fellow for the Oakland Tribune. The past twelve years he worked as foreign correspondent for Newsweek and was the chief of its Africa Bureau from 2007 until its close in 2009. He spent most of the preceding decade reporting from the Middle East, covering wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was Baghdad bureau chief for two years during the height of the insurgency from 2005 to 2007.

This is a reading of the Feminist Platform submitted to the 2008 Democratic Convention by Feminists for Obama.

At Lysistrata's command, armed women have taken over the Acropolis, while the Chorus of Old Women faces off with the Chorus of Old Men, hurling sexist and suggestive invective at each other. Is there going to be a rumble on the road to peace? The stalwart representatives of law and order arrive to put down the insurgency and to put women back in their proper place, but Lysistrata and her comrades stand their ground.

Miriam Zoila Prez is a writer, blogger and reproductive justice activist. She works with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and is an Editor at Feministing. She was trained as a doula in 2004 and her blog is RadicalDoula.com.I spoke with Miriam about being a radical doula, an abortion doula, reproductive justice and the Too Many Aborted billboard campaign.

Lysistrata's brilliant plan to unite the women of individual Greek city-states in a sex strike proves a hard sell...to the women themselves...

The country is always at war. The men are always away on military campaign or they come back having died a ''glorious death.'' What's a woman to do? Lysistrata, Uber-Ancient-Greek-Activist, calls women to join her in a sex strike until desperation brings the men to their...senses.Lysistrata is the third and last of Aristophanes' peace plays, says translator Alan H. Sommerstein in his preface to the play: it was ''conceived at a time when Athens was going through the most desperate crisis she had known since the Persian War.'' As I say in this introduction to the play, although I've known about Lysistrata for decades, I'd always assumed it was a fairly grave play. Don't get me wrong--I prefer Greek tragedy to many forms of spectacle currently on Broadway! But Lysistrata is a bawdy comedy and, although one could argue that women would never achieve the solidarity necessary to carry off an effective sex strike, Aristophanes nails human foibles and stereotypes as recognizable to a 21st Century listener as to the audience of its first production in 411 B.C.Stay tuned for the reading of LYSISTRATA.

A hip-hopish scream of frustration, a full-throated protest and an African drumming backbeat...with my signature Yiddish accent.Drumming from African Tribal Music & Dances: Recorded Live, released by Legacy International. Lyrics & vocals by MadamaAmbi.

The American Psychological Association is sponsoring a Blog Party to mark Mental Health Month. This podcast is a reading from Judith Lewis Herman's book Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence--from domestic abuse to political terror. In this Chapter, titled A Forgotten History, Herman discusses how the women's movement brought violence against women into public awareness and put it on the trauma spectrum. Today, as a result of feminist activism, we recognize that rape, domestic violence and incest result in post-traumatic stress disorder.

''The boss is hurrying the life out of me.''Rose Cohen and her father immigrated from Czarist Russia to the tenements of New York City, working exhausting schedules under harsh conditions to survive and to send for the rest of the family. In this podcast, I read an excerpt from Rose Cohen's book, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side, published in 1918. She tells of her first days as a child worker in a garment sweatshop.My First Job by Rose Cohen is taken from Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy, edited by Leon Stein, published in 1977.

''In the public discourse the fetus has been elevated to an equal status with a living, breathing human being. More and more, women are viewed as the enemy of children, requiring the State's intervention to protect their developing children from them. But, in reality, women still conceive, nurture, give birth to and, in most cases, are the primary caregivers of children. Women are being reduced, once again, to the incubators of future generations with total responsibility but no power. That is the same oppressive view that the women's movement sought to challenge. It is not just abortion, but women's power to control their destinies that is at stake.''These words were written in 1995 by Laura Kaplan, who was a member of Jane, the underground abortion service that developed in Chicago before abortion was legalized in Roe v. Wade. In her book, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, Kaplan narrates an age-old story replayed in the context of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The story reminds us that abortion has been and will always be a decision ''rooted in the concrete conditions'' of a woman's life. ''She will weigh her decision and then try to act on it. This is what women have always done, irrespective of the law or even of the risks to their own lives.''In this podcast, I connect The Story of Jane to the current abortion battles, and then read excerpts of Kaplan's introduction to this riveting and relevant story for all women.