A Feminist's Thanks Giving

Today is a day when I want to give thanks for some human rights I deserve and some things I am lucky to have as a woman.

I am grateful that my parents were happy I was born a girl.
I am happy that my parents valued my education, and for all the education I have achieved and that I can use my education to take any job I choose.
For tampons and feminine sanitation, I feel lucky.
For contraception and the right to abortion, I thank the women who came before me.
For being free to marry who they choose when they choose, I am happy for my sisters who thinks this the right choice for them.
I wish my 17 year old daughter would appreciate her good fortune at having the right to drive.
I am thankful for a job that allows me to buy as much or as little clothes that I can wear as I please.
I am grateful for laws that protect me from rape and violence (the effectiveness of such are left for another day)
It is liberating to be able to have sex outside of marriage.
I am happy to not need a male escort to appear in public.
Without wanting to practice any religion, I am happy that I can change my mind at any time.
Lastly I am grateful for being able to write this piece without impunity or censorship.

Good intentions, exploitation and studying 'the poor'

I am an academic and thus I am required to do research and to write. As someone who studied sociology, social welfare, public health, international health, and economics I am plenty equipped to study poverty and the lives of poor people. And in my areas of study, these are the people of whom we ask questions, whether here or abroad.Were I to do a search of any library database using poverty as a keyword, I will get hundreds of hits for journal articles published in the past month alone. But I have decided that I will no longer study 'poverty' or 'the poor' because I find it exploitative in its convenience, somewhat useless in its findings and creates a conundrum in its recommendations: how to change poverty by changing the poor. We study how the poor shop, what they eat, what they drink, how fat they are, how (un)educated they are, how much health care they (don't) get, how they parent, and how a wide range of social, political and economic factors interact to inf

Family Planning Summit and the Voice of Poor Women

I decided to edit this piece to start with a video of Melinda Gates talking about her privilege to travel the world and meet women whose voices are not heard on the world stage and so she feels it is her obligation to speak on behalf of them. This gets at the heart of why I wrote this piece so I will let her speak in her own words before I speak mine in response: Melinda Gates interview on her work as family planning advocate I work in the development industry. Sometimes. I have worked in the family planning sector a long time. I have worked in safe motherhood a long time. And I have worked in AIDS. (That these are not integrated in the development sector is a topic for another post). I came to development through childhood experiences with development workers whose ideas were formed in some office far, far away using the most recent data and information on my Jamaican community. They were talented, mulitlingual and well-intentioned. But something about the experience left an ind

Goodbye Blogger, Hello Medium

Thank you for reading my posts on Provoking Policy. It has been a wonderful journey as a writer to be able to share my rants on issues that matter to me at various points in time. From now on, I will be writing on Medium as Ruth C. White, PhD . I have chosen Medium as a platform because it gives me more of an opportunity to read, write and share stories that matter.

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