by Caryl Rivers

Do we need to bring back the wire hanger?

This ordinary household item was once a powerful symbol of the battle for choice. It represented desperate women who, before Roe V. Wade, died at the hands of back-alley abortions or in their own attempts to end an...

Is Elizabeth Edwards a green-eyed monster savaging her straying husband and his lover in her new book to satisfy her lust for vengeance?

That's the opinion of some prominent critics -- especially women -- who see Elizabeth, with little sympathy, as a woman scorned and out for payback.

Maureen Dowd...

by Caryl Rivers

Ever wonder why the Vatican and conservative Catholics are out of touch with what real people -including their religious brethren--are thinking?

Well, there's this: conservatives are throwing a hissy fit because the President of the United States is getting an honorary degree from Notre Dame,...

Sarah Palin is feisty, gives a dynamite speech, and the camera loves her--not surprising, since she's a dead ringer for Tina Fey. She's positioning herself to run for president in 2012--but why is she still pushing fossil fuels when much of corporate America is going green?

The Alaska governor has...

By Caryl Rivers

The media still can't get a handle on Michelle Obama.

There's a strange duality in the way in which she's presented--either Michelle-O as Jackie-O, the comfortable essence of traditional femininity, or as something more sinister, a Valkyrie in the guise of a traditional female.

Many...

Could FDR have succeeded with the New Deal if he had been operating in a 24-hour continuous news cycle?

The answer is probably not. FDR had plenty of critics, including influential newspapers, conservative Republicans, clerics who railed from pulpits against him as a radical socialist and anti-Semites...

Some people think Barack Obama can end the culture wars. In historical terms, that would be like predicting in year 50 of the Hundred Years War, that the light at the end of the tunnel was just ahead.

The Culture Wars will continue because it's just about all the right...

There has been much ado, and rightly so, about the fact that Barack Obama is the first African-American president.

Little has been made of the fact that he is also the first half-black, half white president. This is significant because Barack Obama looks like the future. We are fast becoming...

As the first internet president prepares to take office, it's time to ask whether the new media environment is a triumph of democracy or a Tower of Babel.

The answer is that it's a little of both. Thanks to the internet, voices and opinions not backed by wads of cash...

Who remembers the Hungarian revolution?

I do, for one. I was a teenager who watched in horror on my black-and-white TV as gallant young Hungarians went up against Russian tanks in beat-up old trucks in 1956. They waited in vain for American help. It never came, and the Iron Curtain...

Maybe it's time to bring back the working class heroine.

OK, she went to Wellesley and Yale Law School, but Hillary Clinton turned out to be a world-class campaigner when it came to lunch-bucket Democrats, the ones who seem to be eluding Barack Obama.

The race is just too...

In the near future, will American women be legally barred from using the most popular form of birth control, the pill? And could a doctor who prescribes an IUD for a woman go to jail? What about the woman herself? Could she do hard time for her intrauterine device?

Sound...

Barack Obama's halo has slipped, and I, for one, hope it just falls off. He's no longer Saint Barack, but a charismatic, inspiring politician, who can dodge and feint when he needs to, and that's all to the good.

But that fact has made some on the left very...

"She Bad! She's Black! And she's angry!"

Does this sound like an ad for one of those 70s blacksploitation movies where dark-skinned chicks in big Afros went around kicking male butt?

Maybe. But it's how a lot of people these days are trying to represent Michelle Obama. It's rather like...

Will the sexism aimed at Hillary Clinton in the media and in political discourse create a new interest in feminism?

There are increasing reports that women who never experienced the snickering and mockery that greeted the feminist movement of the '70s are awakening to the fact that we may not...

Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick told the Boston Globe the other day, "I think the country is so hungry for leadership -- uplifting, visionary leadership -- that a lot of our traditional differences don't matter."

Well, maybe. But I have been around politics long enough to be a bit cynical about...

Maybe Barack Obama ought to go looking for his Inner Atheist, because lately, his spiritual advisers are throwing him under the bus instead of leading him towards a Sweet Chariot.

The performance of a Catholic priest in Obama's Chicago church, mocking Hillary Clinton in a cruel and humiliating way, is...

Does anyone wonder why women who support Hillary Clinton for president get (excuse the vernacular) PO'd at some of our fellow Democrats?

It's because very time we turn around, someone is dissing our candidate in ways that infuriate us. He (or she) is using sexist, insulting language about the first...

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright put forward a peculiar view of African- American versus European brains in his Press Club speech. It was a garbled mess, and it's surprising that his ideas on this subject have gotten very little attention in the mainstream media.

Wright argued that African-American children have a...

The mathematics of who's elite and who's "just folks" in presidential politics is somewhat mysterious. It doesn't correlate with class or income.

FDR, with his long, elegant cigarette holder, his little dog Fala and his aristocratic voice, should have been almost a caricature of upper-classness. But he used that voice...