Elizabeth Debold

O.M.G... Hillary Clinton in public without makeup. That this is news or newsworthy is bananas, and once again points to the bizarre obsession with women's appearance in contexts where one should just, as Jezebel's caption read, "give zero fuc*s." But it does count as more evidence...

The War on Women has many fronts -- here in the U.S., abroad, and across forums on the Internet. In the U.S., the range of hostilities spans the gamut from lewd (Limbaugh) to degrading (state-sanctioned vaginal penetration) to downright dangerous...

In last week's Newsweek cover story, "Spanking Goes Mainstream," author Katie Roiphe set the blogosphere atwitter with her commentary on the cultural trend of bright young women willingly engaged in BDSM relationships: 50 Shades of Grey, Lena Dunham's HBO series...

Earlier this week, I listened to Marianne Williamson kick off The Inspiring Women Summit in a dialogue with Summit founder Devaa Haley Mitchell. Williamson had intended to speak about "Where Women Are Today," but ended up addressing more fundamental issues in the contemporary spiritual world. I was really...

Last month -- Women's History Month- - I was struck by an exchange between Sheryl Sandberg and Gloria Steinem at the Women in the World Conference because I felt it captured important generational difference among feminists. Business Insider reported that Sandberg asked Steinem if we're in the midst...

March is Women's History Month. Doesn't that sound dreadfully boring, like some required course from college? These thirty-one days actually commemorate women's courageous struggles for self-determination and justice, but with that almost academic label on it, it all seems rather, well, passé. History, obviously, is all in the past. So,...

Imagine what it must be like for Caster Semenya, the top South African female runner who was in the news recently because her sex has recently been challenged. By "sex" I am not referring to her sexuality, but to the physical, biological characteristics that determine whether one is male or...

Will embracing woman-centered spirituality take us beyond patriarchy?

I remember this one Sunday afternoon in 1988 with the sharp vividness that memory usually reserves for truly significant or disastrous events. But this was such a small thing. I was in the bathtub reading the New York Times when I came...

The mission of the EnlightenNext women is to pioneer a new stage of human culture through transforming themselves and their relationships. For culture to change, the core dynamics that define who we are and how we relate need to evolve. While women and men have become social equals by law,...

I was just sitting down to write a memorial for Jacqueline Péry D'Alincourt (1919-2009), whose courage during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II was beyond measure, when I read the most recent EnlightenNext...

Sorry about using that tired question "what do women want?" to start off this post. Freud asked it--likening women's consicousness to a dark continent both unexplored and presumably unknowable--and every exasperated male writer and far too many marketers have used it since. But the question...

I'd like to challenge one of the most popular beliefs of our era: that women have a profoundly different value set than men, and that embracing these particularly feminine values will change the world. Men, and masculine thinking, have dominated the world and made...