Madeleine M. Kunin

Who could have thought that May would bring us so many hues of green?

We feel refreshed just by slowly gazing at the trees in all their newborn shades. For a brief period, our thoughts can turn away from the bold black headlines of the daily news, and our ears...

If anyone still clings to the belief that social change is impossible in this country they have to think again after President Obama's announcement yesterday that he supports the right of gay and lesbian Americans to marry.

Yes, support for gay marriage has been growing among young people, but the...

Why are video games so violent? The ones I've seen remind me of the 4th of July, with everything exploding, buildings, cars, airplanes, men and women. Kill, kill, and kill for sport and entertainment.

Video games seem to be mostly a boy thing -- viewed by young boys and created...

The cover story of Newsweek reads: "The Fantasy Life of Working Women, why surrender is a feminist dream."

What fantasy life? Maybe the one percent of working women who have time to fantasize about getting spanked by their lovers, but not the 99 percent who are still trying...

I hadn't thought that women were particularly dangerous golfers. Could that be the reason that the Augusta National Golf club refuses to take down its "No Women Allowed" sign?

I wonder what the male members of the club are afraid of. Could they be thinking that women...

Vermont can be proud of the number of women who have served in public life.

Consuelo Northrop Bailey was the first woman in the nation to be elected Lieutenant Governor -- in 1954 -- and she was the first woman to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Vermont...

In President Obama's State of the Union address he made a good case for young people to stay in school. He said,

We also know that when students don't walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. When students are...

When young Hamlet vented his anger against Ophelia, he shouted, "Get thee to a nunnery!" That was what had happened to young women when they were spurned by lovers -- their only recourse was to be condemned to a cloistered life.

Not so for Sister Elizabeth Candon. For 74...

Governor Peter Shumlin's efforts to challenge the safety of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant does not mark the first time that a Vermont governor went toe to toe with the plant. In 1985, when I was governor, I learned that the plant had falsified inspection reports for years and...

There will be no more sleepovers in public spaces for Occupy Wall Street. The tents and camp stoves have been picked up and carted away -- gone. But the impact of this upstart political movement remains. The voices of students, union members, the disenchanted, the disenfranchised, the angry, and the...

This past weekend, hundreds and hundreds of Vermonters responded to the governor's call to help clean up the debris left behind by the onslaught of tropical storm Irene. We may never get the exact count -- it doesn't matter. What we got was another affirmation of the Vermont sense of...

"Ah, we're almost half way there," I said to myself as I got up to stretch my legs on the flight from Moscow to New York on September 11, 2001. A group of us were returning from a site visit to an environmental project of the Institute for Sustainable Communities,...

The widening schism between Congressional House Republicans and the president and Senate Democrats is more than a debt ceiling crises. It is more than a budget balancing crisis.

The inability of the two sides to reach a compromise reveals crises in the workings of Democracy itself.

The United States has...

My most vivid memory of Geraldine Ferraro, who died recently, is when we were on the stage together at Memorial Auditorium in Burlington for a Democratic rally. It was the fall of 1984. She was making a campaign stop in her race for vice president and I was running for...

It was a relaxed Saturday afternoon, until my neighbor told me the news: A shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona had killed six people and critically injured a congresswoman.

The bullets that went flying shattered more than innocent lives -- they splintered the glass bubble that we live in. We assume...

When John Boehner cries, as he did at a press conference the morning after the election as the anticipated new speaker of the House, he wins plaudits. So different from the time when Senator Muskie ran for president and was pilloried for shedding a tear in a snow storm in...

I already miss Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

During the President's state of the union addresses it was reassuring to see her sitting behind him. It will take some time for me to get used to John Boehner, not only because of his different politics, but also because once again, the Congress...

Women can decide the outcome of this election. Historically, women have voted strongly Democratic. As recently as 2008 there was a 13% gender gap for Barack Obama.

That was then. This is now. A recent poll said women were favoring Republicans by 6 %, the first time that I can...

The Senate vote against the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," was more than a repudiation of equal rights for our gay and lesbian citizens; it was downright unpatriotic.

I know we in Vermont have high expectations on this subject, having been the first state to create civil unions ten years...

What will it mean when Elena Kagan is confirmed, as expected, to become the third woman on the United States Supreme Court? Does gender still matter at a time when women appear to be doing so well, outsmarting boys in school, joining the work force in record numbers, and when...