On this week’s 51%, there’s help for very low birth weight premature babies, and an artist brings awareness to street harassment.
The children’s hospital at Westchester Medical Center in New York has a first-of-its-kind facility to process pre-term human milk for extreme low birth weight babies. I spoke with the head of the new donor milk bank at the hospital in Valhalla.
Every day, all over the world, women young and old; of different body types; queer and straight; dressed for work or a night on the town, are catcalled and denigrated simply for walking down the street. It’s a form of street harassment, and it’s something Tatyana Fazlalizadeh wants to stop. So she uses her street art portraits to explore how women of all backgrounds experience daily hostility in public spaces. Fazlalizadeh is a classically trained oil painter, and she turned to street art in 2012 to highlight the issue she felt was being overlooked. Her artwork became the project: Stop Telling Women To Smile, in which she speaks with women about harassment, fear and empowerment. In her debut book “Stop Telling Women to Smile: Stories of Street Harassment and How We're Taking Back Our Power,” Fazlalizadeh profiles 10 women of various backgrounds and locations. The 34-year-old says it was her own experiences of harassment and empowerment that inspired her to start the project eight years ago.
“Stop Telling Women to Smile: Stories of Street Harassment and How We’re Taking Back Our Power” comes out February 4.
That’s our show for this week. Thanks to Tina Renick for production assistance. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock. Our theme music is Glow in the Dark by Kevin Bartlett. This show is a national production of Northeast Public Radio. If you’d like to hear this show again, sign up for our podcast, or visit the 51% archives on our web site at wamc.org. And follow us on Twitter @51PercentRadio
