Voices & Votes for Women's Rights

Sophie Grant set out from the Italian coast on July 4th and, 29 days later, ran into Monaco on Saturday night as the fastest human being ever recorded on one of the most difficult trails on Earth. The 1,242-mile (2,000 km) Via Alpina crosses eight countries and climbs more than 359,000 feet (109,000 meters) -- the equivalent of scaling Everest from sea level twelve times over. The previous record, held by British runner Jake Catterall, was 35 days; the fastest woman before her had needed 38. Grant, a 42-year-old New Zealand native, beat them both, taking six days off the outright mark.

For 29 days she ran fifteen to eighteen hours at a stretch, often setting out at three in the morning, through storms, flooded trails, wildfire detours, and heat approaching 104 degrees. In the final week, she cut her sleep to as little as ninety minutes a night to protect the lead she had built. When people asked how she got through the hardest moments, she gave the same answer every time: "Just one step. That's all you have to do. Just one step forward."

Grant is no stranger to suffering on a mountain -- she has finished the brutal 205-mile (330 km) Tor des Géants three times -- but this run carried something the others did not. Last year, she and her friend, the ultrarunner Stephanie Case, were the subjects of a documentary called "Off Course," which followed the two women through their parallel attempts to become mothers through IVF, the losses along the way, and the friendship that held through all of it.

"Running is an outlet for all my emotions," Grant has said. "For joy, for sadness, for grief. It's where I go and just put my stuff." The film, she says, was the catalyst for this challenge -- and of everything she has done, this run means the most to her.

The two friends' paths diverged. Case's IVF succeeded, and she gave birth to a daughter, Pepper, in late 2024 -- then, six months postpartum, won the 62-mile (100-kilometer) Ultra-Trail Snowdonia in Wales while pausing to breastfeed at the aid stations. For Grant, the hope of motherhood remains uncertain. What both women share is a refusal to stay quiet about how hard any of it is. That same honesty -- about her body, her limits, what it takes to be a woman doing something this hard -- drew tens of thousands to follow Grant's run across the Alps.

She was crewed the whole way by her husband, George Woods, her friend Zoe Salt behind the camera, and the family dog, Nila. Asked at the finish line in Monaco how she felt, Grant said simply: "ecstatic, but knackered. I'm really tired." And then, still stunned by the scale of her accomplishment, added: "I can't believe I did it."

Huge congratulations to Sophie on this extraordinary achievement!

To see more photos from her incredible journey, visit https://www.instagram.com/sophieamygrant/

For an inspiring picture book about the woman who became the first to officially run the Boston Marathon by registering simply as K. Switzer -- and had a race official physically try to remove her from the course -- we highly recommend "Her Fearless Run: Kathrine Switzer's Historic Boston Marathon" for ages 4 to 8 at https://www.amightygirl.com/her-fearless-run

For an excellent book for adult readers about 22 trailblazing women runners, we recommend “First Ladies of Running: 22 Inspiring Profiles of the Rebels, Rule Breakers, and Visionaries Who Changed the Sport Forever,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/first-ladies-of-running

For a book celebrating trailblazers and record-breakers across more than forty sports, from the 1800s to today, we recommend "Women in Sports: 50 Fearless Athletes Who Played to Win" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/women-in-sports

For a fantastic t-shirt that speaks to the fact that strength has nothing to do with gender, check out the “I'm not strong for a girl. I'm just strong.” t-shirt for both kids and adults at https://www.amightygirl.com/strong-t-shirt

Thanks to the Female Quotient for sharing this image!

"... vowing to choke off abortion pills sent through the mail, in every state ..."

Todd Blanche, Trump's nominee for attorney general, got caught on leaked audio vowing to choke off abortion pills sent through the mail, in every state, including the ones that voted to protect them.

His weapon is a law from 1873, written when women couldn't vote and Ulysses S. Grant sat in the White House.

On the private call, Blanche told anti-abortion activists the administration is working "so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state." The religious group that hosted the call, Intercessors for America, had posted the recording itself, then quietly scrubbed it once people noticed.

Strip away the vague language and here is the plan.

Blanche wants to revive the Comstock Act, an 1870s anti-vice law named for Anthony Comstock, a crusader who spent his life hunting obscenity, contraception, and anything he deemed indecent.

Read that slowly. Not a state ban. A federal one. It would reach California, New York, Illinois, every place where voters chose to protect this care. Comstock carves out no exceptions and carries up to five years in prison for a first offense.

And it would not stop at pills. The text is broad enough to swallow gloves, syringes, even the information itself.

Bans have never stopped abortions. They only decide who gets hurt. Since Dobbs, abortions actually rose, past 1.1 million in 2025, a 21% jump from 2020. Medication abortion is now the majority of all abortions in the country.

So what does a mail ban really do? It does not end abortion. It sends people back to bleeding in emergency rooms, to doctors too frightened of surveillance to treat a miscarriage, to funerals that never had to happen.

Trump swore in 2024 he would never touch Comstock. Blanche just promised his base the opposite behind closed doors, and when reporters noticed, the DOJ waved it off as a "mischaracterization."

They already know it is unpopular. That is why the pledge came on a private line and not a podium.

A 152-year-old anti-vice law is a strange weapon for a modern government, unless the goal was never health and always control.

In 2017, a woman opened a 2,800-year-old poem and found something every man before her had missed.

Not a plot hole. A single word.

Homer's Odyssey had been translated into English by roughly 60 different scholars over 400 years. Every one of them was a man. And in one scene near the very end of the poem, they had all made the same choice — quietly, without ever explaining why.

Here's the scene: Odysseus finally returns home after 20 years. While he was gone, invaders occupied his house. Twelve women who worked there — with zero power, zero rights, zero ability to say no to anyone — were forced into the invaders' beds. When Odysseus returns, he has all twelve of them hanged.

For centuries, English readers were told this was justice. Translators called the women "disloyal." "Guilty." "S***s." As if they'd chosen this. As if they'd betrayed someone.

But the actual Greek word Homer used for these women was dmôai.

It means "enslaved."

Not maids. Not staff. Property, with no right to refuse anyone — the suitors or their owner. Homer wrote it plainly. Translators, for 400 years, softened it into something these women could be blamed for.

Emily Wilson was the first to just... translate the word. "Slaves."

And the second she did, the entire scene flipped. This wasn't loyal justice against traitors. It was a powerful man killing enslaved women for surviving something they never had the power to refuse.

That single word had been quietly protecting the hero's reputation for four centuries.

It wasn't the only one. Homer's Penelope isn't the passive, weepy wife English readers grew up with — the Greek calls her periphron, which means shrewd, calculating, strategic. Wilson's Penelope spends 20 years running political circles around men who think they're in control. Calypso isn't Odysseus's "lover" holding him on her island out of devotion — the Greek word Homer uses means she held him captive. It was never a romance. It was a captivity story, just with the genders reversed from what readers expected.

None of this was Wilson rewriting Homer. It was Wilson refusing to keep rewriting him the way everyone before her had.

When critics accused her of injecting modern politics into an ancient text, her answer was simple: go read the Greek yourself. Every choice she made was already sitting there, untouched, for 2,800 years. She didn't add anything. She just stopped removing it.

That's the part that stays with you. It's not that the truth was hidden in some lost fragment we finally recovered. It was sitting in plain sight, in a word every translator had already read — and 60 people in a row decided, without ever saying so out loud, that readers weren't ready for it.

Sometimes rewriting history isn't about finding something new.

It's about finally saying the thing that was there all along.

In 1933, Helen Keller wrote a letter to the N**i students who were about to burn her book in their bonfires. "History has taught you nothing," she told them, "if you think you can kill ideas. You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds."

By then, Helen Keller -- pictured here with her friend Charlie Chaplin, who would go on to lampoon Hi**er in "The Great Dictator" -- was famous the world over as the deaf and blind girl who had learned to speak. But the N**is were not burning her childhood memoir. They were burning the work of a grown woman who had become one of the most outspoken political activists in America: a campaigner for labor rights, women's suffrage, and the rights of the disabled. She was an enemy of exactly the kind of power rising in Germany.

Helen Keller was born on this day in 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of a former Confederate officer, and lost her sight and hearing to a fever before she was two. The story of how her teacher, Anne Sullivan, reached her through the darkness -- spelling "water" into her palm at a backyard pump -- is one of the most famous in American life, told and retold in "The Miracle Worker." It usually stops there, with the triumphant child. It rarely follows her into the sixty years of work that came after.

For Keller never saw her own education as the happy ending of the story. She saw it as a debt. She had been lucky -- in her family, her teacher, her schooling -- and she knew that most blind and deaf children were not, shut away in institutions or written off entirely. She set out to change that, and she spent the rest of her life at it. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 as the first deafblind person ever to earn a bachelor's degree, and then used the fame that came with it as a tool.

She lectured in more than thirty countries. She pushed governments to build schools and libraries for the blind. As early as 1907 she campaigned to prevent infant blindness through a simple newborn eye treatment, a commonsense measure that, thanks in part to her, was widely adopted. For more than forty years she worked with the American Foundation for the Blind, and the organization she helped found in 1915 endures today as Helen Keller International, fighting blindness and malnutrition around the world.

What she refused to do was treat disability as a private misfortune. "The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness," she said, "but the attitude of seeing people towards them." Investigating why people went blind, she found that the poor lost their sight far more often than the rich -- to dangerous work, untreated illness, and the conditions poverty forced on them. The suffering she had been taught to see as fate, she came to see as a choice society made. In 1909 she joined the Socialist Party; in 1912 she joined the radical labor union known as the Wobblies; and she began to write and speak with the same ferocity she brought to everything.

She campaigned for Eugene Debs, marched for women's suffrage, and gave her money and her name to the NAACP when a white Southern woman doing so was rare and risky. She opposed the First World War as a slaughter staged for profit. In 1920 she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. For decades, the FBI kept a file on her.

And as fascism rose in Europe, Keller saw it clearly and early. She denounced Hi**er the very month he took power, in 1933. When civil war broke out in Spain, she backed the Republic against Franco's fascists. In 1938, while powerful Americans were still praising the N**i regime and the United States was turning Jewish refugees away at its borders, she wrote to the New York Times pleading with the paper to stop minimizing N**i atrocities. She singled out the world's silence about the disabled people trapped in Germany, the very people the N**is would soon begin murdering.

The N**is knew that she was dangerous -- a global figure who used her celebrity to denounce them. They put her book on the pyre with Einstein's and Freud's and Marx's, and in doing so they took her seriously. Keller took them seriously in return. Her open letter did not beg; it warned. And buried in it was a line that showed how clearly she saw what the burning really meant, at a moment when many looked away: "Do not imagine," she wrote, "that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here."

Helen Keller died in 1968, at eighty-seven, by then recast as a gentle symbol of perseverance, her politics quietly filed off. But the woman the N**is tried to burn was not only a symbol. She had spent her life insisting that the blind be educated, that the poor be protected, that the persecuted be defended -- and that no fire was big enough to burn an idea whose time had come.

"History has taught you nothing," she had told them, "if you think you can kill ideas."

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For two inspiring picture books about Helen Keller's extraordinary life, we highly recommend "Helen Keller: Little People, Big Dreams" (https://www.amightygirl.com/helen-keller-little-people) and "I Am Helen Keller" (https://www.amightygirl.com/i-am-helen-keller), both for ages 4 to 8

For more books to introduce kids to Helen Keller, we recommend the chapter book "Helen Keller: The World At Her Fingertips" for ages 4 to 7 (https://www.amightygirl.com/helen-keller-fingertips), the picture book "Helen's Big World: The Life of Helen Keller" for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/helen-s-world), and the classic children's biography for ages 7 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/helen-keller)

We also recommend "Helen Keller: The Story of My Life," her autobiography for young readers 11 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/helen-keller-the-story-of-my-life

For adult readers, we recommend the fascinating biography "After the Miracle: The Political Crusades of Helen Keller" (https://www.amightygirl.com/after-the-miracle) and "Helen Keller: A Life" (https://www.amightygirl.com/helen-keller-a-life)

For children's books that encourage understanding and acceptance of people with disabilities of all varieties, visit our blog post "Many Ways To Be Mighty: 35 Books Starring Mighty Girls with Disabilities" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12992

"What’s next, if paid Maternity Leave is being lazy and “charity” and women should be back at work the day after giving birth? We will be expected to give birth at work at a desk, “I’m sorry could you hold please while I pop this baby out, give me just one second!”, “thank you for holding, how can I help you?!” This is beyond gross and terrifying."

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/upshot/military-promotions-women-hegseth.html?campaign_id=29&emc=edit_up_20260810&instance_id=180112&nl=the-upshot®i_id=64431386&segment_id=224475&user_id=be9ce9572e002438c1c0c692b1944507