equality

Britain’s Chantelle Cameron has vacated her WBC light-welterweight world title in protest at not being able to compete under the same rules as male fighters.

In women’s professional boxing title fights are usually over 10 rounds, each of two minutes, while men’s title bouts are 12 rounds of three minutes.

“Women’s boxing has come a long way, but there’s still progress to be made,” said 34-year-old Cameron.

“I’ve always believed in equality, and that includes the choice to fight equal rounds, equal opportunities, and equal respect.

“I’m proud of my accomplishment in becoming a WBC champion, but it’s time to take a stand for what’s right and for the future of the sport.”

Cameron was elevated from ‘interim’ champion to full WBC light-welterweight world champion last month after Ireland’s Katie Taylor informed the sanctioning body she planned to take time away from boxing.

Since turning professional in 2017, Cameron has won 21 of 22 fights, is a former undisputed light-welterweight world champion and has also held a world title at lightweight.

She handed Taylor her first career defeat in May 2023 to become undisputed champion, before losing the rematch six months later.

A trilogy bout had been mandated, but Taylor chose not to pursue it as she takes a break from the sport.

Pope Leo XVI is set to meet with representatives from a pro-LGBTQIA+ equality group.

Back in May, the religious figure made history when he was elected as the first US-born pontiff. His placement came two weeks after the passing of Pope Francis, who died after suffering a stroke that was then followed by a coma and irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse.

In his first public address, Pope Leo XVI said: “We want to be a synodal church, a church that moves forward, a church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close above all to those who are suffering.”

Since that fateful day, the new pontiff has dived headfirst into his holy tenure and is wasting no time to implement change.

On 14 August, the Vatican announced that eight representatives from We are Church (WAC) will participate in a Holy Year meeting of synodal teams and participatory bodies – describing it as “a first for the international church reform movement.”

The aforementioned reps will also be allotted time with Pope Leo XIV and “pass through the holy door,” which is described as a “powerful act of spiritual renewal.”

The landmark Jubilee celebrations are scheduled to take place from 24 October to 26 October.

Shortly after the news was announced, Christian Weisner of We are Church expressed excitement over the group’s inclusion while speaking to Vatican Radio.

“We were pleased that this meeting of synodal teams and bodies of the World Synod will also take place in the Vatican as part of the Holy Year, and that the invitation was open,” he said.

“After two major synodal assemblies in autumn 2023 and autumn 2024, it is important that the synodal spirit and synodal networking remain alive and become even more visible and tangible. This is what we hope for from the meeting, and are happy to contribute to it.

“Our patient work over 30 years, during which we have often been present in Rome at bishops’ synods, council commemorations, papal elections, and other events, may have contributed to this. I also see the passage through the Holy Door as a sign for the church as a whole: to leave mistakes behind and to set out again and again in Christian hope.”

Founded in 1995, WAC has committed itself to “the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church on the basis of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the theological spirit developed from it.”

The equality group, which is represented in more than twenty countries and has presence in or is cooperating with similar groups, has committed itself to five goals: Shared decision making, full equality for all genders, free choice between a celibate and non-celibate lifestyle, positive evaluation of sexuality and good news instead of a threatening message.

For more information about the LGBTQIA+ and women’s equality group, click here.

“Welcome to Kihnu. We are not a matriarchy,” says Mare Mätas as she meets me off the ferry. I’ve stepped on to the wild and windswept Kihnu island, which floats in the Gulf of Riga off Estonia’s western coast like a castaway from another time. Just four miles (7km) long and two miles wide, this Baltic outpost is a world unto itself that has long been shielded from the full impact of modernity, a place where motorbikes share the road with horse-drawn carts, and women in bright striped skirts still sing ancient sea songs. But Kihnu is no museum – it’s a living, breathing culture all of its own, proudly cared for by its 700 or so residents.

Mare, a traditional culture specialist and local guide, promptly ushers me into the open back of her truck and takes me on a whistlestop tour of the island, giving me a history quiz as we stop at the museum, the lighthouse, the cemetery and the school.

The men of Kihnu would once have spent many months away at sea, sailing or hunting seals. Out of necessity, the women of the island became the heads of the family as well as the keepers of the island’s cultural heritage. This led to Kihnu being nicknamed “the island of women”, and the BBC even proclaimed it “Europe’s last surviving matriarchy”. But Mare is very clear: “If you must use a word, you could say that our culture is matrifocal. But I prefer to say that on Kihnu we are simply equal. Women have status in the community, and older women have a higher status – they are seen as wise elders. Women work as the guardians of our culture, and we look after the circle of life on the island – we have the children, we tend the land, we care for the dead.”

The women of Kihnu have been lighthouse keepers, tractor drivers and even stand-in priests. Today, they play ancient melodies on violin and accordion, teach their daughters traditional dances and sing Kihnu’s eerily beautiful runic songs, believed to be of pre-Christian origin. Most eyecatchingly, they wear traditional dress – bright red woollen skirts, embroidered blouses and patterned headscarves. These aren’t just garments donned for weddings or festivals – this is the only place in Estonia where folk dress is still donned daily.

Mare is wearing a red striped kört skirt and woollen jacket. Her daughters, in their teens and 20s, pair their traditional skirts with slogan T-shirts. The skirts are woven every winter and each tells the story of the wearer. Young women usually wear red – they are supposedly in the “fairytale” era of their lives. If a woman is in mourning, she will don a black skirt. Over the months, her skirts will include more red and purple stripes until she’s dressed in joyful red again. A married woman wears an apron over her skirt, and new fashions and patterns still influence designs today. “When paisley was brought to the island from India, we began using it for our headscarves,” explains Mare. “And in the 1960s, when miniskirts were the rage, we wore mini körts!”

I spot women of all ages dressed in bright flashes of red as I cycle about the island’s dirt roads on a sit-up-and-beg-bike. Kihnu is a patchwork of wildflower meadows and pine groves, edged by rocky coastline and dotted with wooden homes painted in primary yellows and reds. Outside one homestead I meet Jaak Visnap. An artist from Tallinn, he has run naive art camps here every summer for 20 years. Historically, many of the island’s sailors were also naive painters (artists who typically have no formal training and exhibit a simplicity in their work), and when I meet Jaak, he and a group of painting students from Kihnu and the mainland are busy working on richly coloured paintings for an exhibition in the island’s museum.

Estonians often label themselves as cold and standoffish, but the painters welcome me warmly and offer me wine. The sun comes out and transforms the island – moody grey skies swept away by golden light – so I join them for a swim in the warm, shallow sea. As we bob on our backs in the evening glow, Viola from Tallinn tells me a joke: “It’s raining, and a foreigner asks an Estonian man: ‘Don’t you have summer in this country?’ ‘Of course,’ he replies. ‘But sadly I was at work that day.’”

Before I leave the painters, I ask Jaak how the island has changed since his first summer here. “This used to be the fishing island,” he says. “Now, it’s the tourist island.” But visitors don’t seem to have transformed Kihnu just yet. Locals may drive modern cars and trucks, but I also pass Soviet-era motorbikes with side cars. There are a few shops and cafes, but they sell smoked dried fish and seal meat as well as coffee and cakes.

Outside her craft shop, I meet Elly Karjam, who knits the traditional troi sweaters worn by Kihnu’s men, beautifully patterned in blue and white wool woven into protective symbols. “I can knit hundreds of jumpers every winter, and each takes me 200 hours,” she says, her fingers clicking in a blur as she works on a new masterpiece for the local priest.

Mare tells me that the island only wants to attract tourists interested in culture and craftsmanship, and that the islanders are musing over whether campervans should be banned. But tourism also allows the next generation to remain on the island, rather than leave for the mainland in search of work. And for now, most visitors seem to embrace slow travel, staying with local people in guest houses and B&Bs, and visiting to join midsummer dances and violin festivals, to learn to paint or knit, or just to find pastoral peace.

The “island of women” is a misnomer. Instead, Kihnu feels like an old-fashioned yet balanced place that moves to the beat of its own drum (or perhaps, the hum of its own accordion). In winter, cloaked in snow, it must be a tough place to live. But in summer, this slow-paced island is a joy to explore. As I leave, the rain that makes it so lush and green returns. The ferry has barely left the harbour before Kihnu is swallowed in the grey sea, a place of legend once again.

Kihnu is reached by a one-hour ferry crossing (foot passengers €4 one way, cars €16 one way) from Munalaid harbour, which is an hour’s bus journey from the coastal town of Pärnu. See visitkihnu.ee. Mare Mätas offers guided tours of Kihnu as well as guesthouse accommodation on her farm, about £40 a person a night, kihnumare.ee. Elly Karjam offers comfy bedrooms and a traditional sauna on her homestead, where she also sells her knitting and homemade crafts, visitestonia.com/en/elly-bed-breakfast-in-kihnu. Pitch a tent at Kihnu Vald campsite, kihnurand.ee

WASHINGTON — On the morning of Nov. 22, 1971, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s usually stern expression dissolved into a satisfied smile when she read the New York Post’s banner headline: “High Court Outlaws Sex Discrimination.”

As plaintiff’s lawyer in a case before the Supreme Court, Ginsburg had succeeded in writing a new chapter in the history of women’s rights by asserting a simple philosophy that she learned from her mother: Women and men are equal.

That idea, which Ginsburg applied in case after case, made her the principle architect of a legal strategy that achieved many of the early legal gains for women. As a result, today’s women live in a world that bears the stamp of her personality, training and experience.

To be sure, despite three decades of progress for women, the Supreme Court still will be struggling with gender issues when Ginsburg–if confirmed by the Senate, as expected–takes her seat on the nine-member panel next fall. Men and women still do not fully agree on what that seemingly simple idea of equality should mean when it is applied to gender.

Further, many modern feminists have criticized Ginsburg’s approach even as they acknowledge what she achieved. Her line of argument, they have contended, has served in some ways to perpetuate discrimination against women. By emphasizing equality of men and women under the law instead of recognizing their differences, they have argued, Ginsburg inadvertently affirmed a system in which women must adhere to male standards to succeed, as she has done.

Nonetheless, her life story has shaped the lives of every woman in America. And the careful, one-deliberate-step-at-a-time approach to a complex and controversial issue that is revealed in the fine print of her arguments on the women’s rights cases casts valuable light on how she is likely to approach her work on the Supreme Court.

Certainly, Ginsburg was well-prepared to succeed in a man’s world. Nurtured by a mother who valued her daughter as much as any son, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell in 1954.

Yet like so many bright women of her era, Ginsburg had been encouraged to venture down a path of scholarship and achievement that inevitably would lead to disappointment. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1959, she could not get a job practicing law because the law firms she contacted in New York City thought married women were mostly interested in having babies.

“It was a classic case of discrimination,” said Kathleen Peratis, a New York City attorney who worked with Ginsburg on litigation in the 1970s.

While teaching civil procedure at Rutgers and doing volunteer work as counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Ginsburg began to see a new kind of legal complaint being filed around the country and sensed a changing mood among American women.

A teacher was challenging a school’s right to remove her from the classroom when she got pregnant; a woman worker was objecting that her employer provided health insurance only to men, and parents were complaining when their school-age daughters were excluded from publicly funded education programs that were offered to boys.

In those complaints, Ginsburg saw a compelling legal strategy that would win equal rights for women. She would help to challenge a variety of laws based on gender stereotypes, arguing that they violated the right of equal protection under the law provided in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

In essence, Ginsburg decided to duplicate what she described as “the orderly, step-by-step campaign” of the civil rights litigation that led to Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, which overturned the “separate but equal” principle. But she would substitute gender for race.

To understand just how novel Ginsburg’s approach was, it helps to remember that gender issues were never even mentioned in her constitutional law classes. Nor did she have the benefit of the vast fund of information that is now available on types of sex bias.

Law school courses on women’s rights issues did not begin appearing regularly on the curriculum until later. When Ginsburg set out to teach such a course at Rutgers, she found that reading the available literature “proved not to be a burdensome venture.”

Until 1971, the courts had held that because men and women had different responsibilities in our society, they could be treated differently under the law. This so-called “separate spheres” doctrine held that men were, by nature, the breadwinners and women the homemakers.

The turning point came when Ginsburg argued the case of Sally Reed of Idaho, who sought to be appointed administrator of the estate of a son who committed suicide at age 19. Her estranged husband, Cecil, also applied as administrator under an Idaho law that said: “As between persons equally entitled to administer a decedent’s estate, males must be preferred to females.”

By arguing that the Idaho law violated the 14th Amendment, Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court for the first time to declare that gender stereotyping was inconsistent with the equal protection principle. Ginsburg viewed Reed vs. Reed as the “awakening” of the court to gender issues.

But despite the enormous impact of the decision, Ginsburg had couched her arguments in such fine lines that Chief Justice Warren E. Burger’s opinion on behalf of a unanimous court did not explicitly acknowledge a break with precedent.

A close friend, Herma Hill Kay, now dean of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, recalls that while Ginsburg was pleased by her victory, “she did not paint the town red.” It was still not clear to her whether women would prevail in similar cases involving other restrictions.

Kay noted that Ginsburg’s legal legacy for women was built on an accumulation of small gains, not one decisive victory. During the 1970s, as head of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, she litigated a total of 20 cases that succeeded in establishing heightened constitutional scrutiny over gender-based distinctions written into federal, state and local laws.

In one case, the court ignored a warning from the solicitor general that thousands of laws would be jeopardized under the scheme advocated by Ginsburg. In fact, the Justice Department submitted a list to the court of more than 800 laws that contained gender references.

“The list proved extraordinarily helpful,” Ginsburg later recalled. “First, it provided a ready answer to those who claimed that with Title VII (of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) and the Equal Pay Act on the books, no more law-sanctioned sex discrimination existed. Second, it provided a stimulus for a next set of constitutional challenges.”

Ginsburg succeeded in challenging laws on jury service, military benefits and Social Security benefits, among other things. She was so successful, in fact, that she predicted at one point that women would achieve the full equality they sought under the law by 1978.

In the case of Frontiero vs. Richardson, an equal pay case that Ginsburg won, 8 to 1, the court stopped short of declaring that gender restrictions deserved “strict scrutiny” similar to those based on race. When only four justices supported strict scrutiny, it was assumed the court was waiting to see whether the proposed Equal Rights Amendment would be ratified by the states.

ERA later foundered amid a conservative backlash, and the court never permitted strict scrutiny of gender differences. As a result, while many gender-based laws have been eliminated, Ginsburg still sees the battle for women’s rights as “a story in the making.”

By precipitating a sea change in the historical balance between the sexes, Ginsburg won the admiration of many young women who aspired to break out of their traditional roles but also inspired the enmity of millions of other men and women who preferred the status quo.

Barbara Allen Babcock, law professor at Stanford University, remembered that some people viewed her as “something of a crank.”

As the years have passed, many of Ginsburg’s own allies also have begun to second-guess her approach to women’s rights. Some are critical of her for pressing cases that were either too trivial or dealt essentially with discrimination against men.

The case of Stephen Wiesenfeld, for example, involved a man who had played the role of homemaker while his wife worked. When the wife died in childbirth, Wiesenfeld was denied the Social Security benefits to which a widowed homemaker would have been entitled. The court struck down the Social Security regulation preventing him from getting benefits.

Ginsburg often chose cases in which gender stereotypes hurt men, according to her defenders, because she thought these cases would be more likely to persuade nine men sitting on the Supreme Court of her basic point: that gender stereotypes hurt both men and women.

Perhaps the most trivial-sounding case Ginsburg brought to the court was Craig vs. Boren, which challenged an Oklahoma law allowing girls to drink 3.2% beer at age 18 while boys had to wait until they were 21. “It’s hard to see that as a burning social issue,” said Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor and author of the book “Justice and Gender.”

Although Rhode is an admirer of the Supreme Court nominee, she noted that many younger women legal experts think Ginsburg should have challenged laws that were of more importance to women. She said that the cases chosen by Ginsburg “left us with a limited doctrinal legacy.”

But the most fundamental criticism heard of Ginsburg’s work is that she encouraged the court to preserve discriminatory laws applying to child bearing and other activities that mark differences between men and women through her arguments that men and women are equal. For example, the court has refused to outlaw the all-male military draft.

“Formal equality has not produced real equality,” Rhode noted. “Men remain the standard of analysis.”

Ginsburg’s critics also assert that formal equality has succeeded in opening doors only for the well-educated, comfortably situated women who are willing and able to play by men’s rules. Rhode said that it has been of less value to low-paid women.

In the face of such criticism, Ginsburg is uncharacteristically apologetic.

In a speech to the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989, she explained that in 1970 she “was hardly so bold or so prescient as to essay articulation of a comprehensive theoretical vision of a world in which men did not define women’s place. The endeavor was less lofty, more immediately and practically oriented.”

Ginsburg said that her approach was the only way to shake the notion that men and women naturally operate in different spheres.

Likewise, Ginsburg has angered feminists by criticizing the court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling, which established the right to an abortion.

In a speech earlier this year at New York University, she lamented that the lawyers challenged a Texas anti-abortion law on privacy grounds instead of challenging it under the equal protection clause. The Constitution does not explicitly mention a right to privacy.

Ginsburg’s views on abortion and her adherence to the concept of strict equality between men and women have fostered a widely held perception of her among younger feminists that she is old-fashioned and out-of-date.

“They call us equality feminists; we feel like dinosaurs,” quipped Peratis.

Still, most feminists are hoping that as a justice, Ginsburg will do what she failed to accomplish as an lawyer: persuade the court to declare gender bias a matter for strict scrutiny.