Let's Row Together

A COLD plunge as the Earth HEATS up, climate activism, Locker Room Talk's blurb from Secretary Clinton, International Women's Day and reproductive freedom

Most mornings I freeze my body.

Or maybe it just feels that way after I submerge myself in my gym’s cold plunge pool. Its temperature hovers around 40 degrees F. Okay, so I’m not frozen; it just feels like I am. Last week, I watched as a woman about my age dipped her leg in, then pulled it out quickly before walking away. “Change your mind?,” I asked. “Well, when my lower leg cramped, I figured it wasn’t a good idea to put my whole body in,” she replied, as she headed into the sauna.

Judging from my newsfeed - driven by algorithms in which AI watches me Googling “cold plunge” – you’d think everybody wants to be chilled.

Top photo is a typical image of the plunge on the Web. Other photos show people wielding axes to cut a hole in the ice before they leap into water a whole lot colder than my gym’s cold plunge. Bottom photo is of a friend who gave me permission to click as she settled into her usual five minutes in the cold plunge. I last about a minute.

Maybe in the recesses of our minds we sink ourselves into really cold water as a way of psychically coping with the predictable, but disheartening, heat records piling up one month to the next. Less noticed, but equally worrisome, if that is possible, is the warming of our oceans as they absorb heat at an all-time record pace This sets us up for intensified hurricanes and cyclones with torrential rains and devastating floods.

You might want to plunge your head into ice water before I remind us of this week’s record- setting Texas wildfire - coming in the wake other raging fires that damage our health and scorch our Earth

And the Sierra Nevada snow blizzard.

In Boston, and I suspect other places, you can stop off at a pop-up “winter sauna village” for a bracing plunge and soothing sauna.

My antidote to climate despair is activism. I join others to confront systemic problems that demand our urgent attention if we’re going to pass on a livable climate to future generations. For me, this means working for the passage of a bill in the MA legislature to reduce risky investments in the fossil fuel industries that are causing our climate crisis and imperiling the pension fund on which many MA residents rely for retirement income.

I’m working on this issue with two groups — both national in scope, but propelled by community activism. If you are looking for ways to engage with others in climate activism, check out Mothers Out Front and Third Act.

Thank You

Let’s Row Together has three new paid subscribers. I make this content free to all, but people generously sign up for paid subscriptions. I appreciate their recognition of the time I devote to this weekly Substack and the value they find in its content.

WEEKLY BOOK BLURB

“Locker Room Talk gives us a front-row seat at Melissa Ludtke's celebrated courtroom battle when she went up against Major League Baseball and emerged with an enduring win for women's equal rights. I also admire her gutsy decision to share reflective insights on how the plentiful societal backlash against her buffeted her personal life as a 26-year old woman. Hers wasn't an easy struggle, but she persevered, and we are the better for it.”
  ~Hillary Rodham Clinton, former US Secretary of State

Secretary Clinton and I will talk about Locker Room Talk in the context of the ongoing fights for women’s equality in New York City early in 2025.

My book is NOT my memoir. It is the story of my courtroom fight for equal rights at a time in our history when millions of women were challenging the laws, policies and practices limiting our lives. Now, in our time of backlash and the reversal of hard-won rights, Locker Room Talk reminds us why the Fourteenth Amendment is essential to reinvigorating our nation’s fitful progress towards justice.

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International Women’s Day, 2024

Let us not forget the words then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton courageously spoke in Beijing, China at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995.

“WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.”

When Clinton said this, the Chinese government was targeting women with its brutal enforcement of its one-child reproductive policy. But during the several decades this policy was in effect, families were also investing educational resources in their only-child daughters. Traditionally, families dedicated those resources to sons, so the girls had not received the level of schooling that the boys did.

Now, these highly educated young women refuse to heed their leaders’ call to marry and procreate. Many choose to remain single.

This is what happens when male leaders institute policies and decide court cases that limit women’s reproductive freedom. In China, the men in charge relied on a missile scientist to develop its one-child policy. By applying “mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories” this man created China’s decades-long one-child policy to meet the government’s goal of stemming the nation’s population growth.

That goal was met, but the men had overlooked a basic fact: when women are highly educated – and China’s one-child generation women are better educated than their male peers – they have fewer children.

Now, in the midst of its tough economic slowdown, China’s male leaders are looking for ways to get women to have more babies. So far no one there has found a successful way to convince young women to have more children after leaders in prior decades had forced their mothers not to have more children than the law said they could.

Closer to home

In last night’s State of the Union, President Biden lashed out at those in America who would use courts and legislatures to control women’s reproductive freedom.

“Many of you in this chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom,” Biden said, before adding, “My God, what [other] freedom would you take away?

Well, Mr. President, let’s look at what’s percolating in the states:

OKLAHOMA

This same bill in the Oklahoma legislature would “ban contraception that would induce abortions or prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg.”

MISSOURI

A Democratic legislator has introduced a bill that attempts to clarify that state judges can grant a divorce even if one spouse is pregnant. “The notion that they can’t already has sparked anger from people who see it as an antiquated policy that controls women unfairly, possibly trapping them in abusive marriages.”

ALABAMA

After Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that IVF embryos have the rights of children under the state’s wrongful death law, rising pressure from Republicans, frightened by political implications of this theocratic ruling, convinced state legislators to protect IVF clinics.

FIERY PROMISE

“Women are not without electoral or political power. You’re about to realize just how much you got right about that.”

• President Biden in State of the Union

MUSIC to inspire us to Rise Up for Democracy! Composed/written by my friends.