The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday morning on a case that could have profound effects on the way elections are run in the United States. It is one of the most important and polarizing cases of the current term, and the outcome might – maybe – be a compromise.

Over three hours, the justices probed, challenged, muttered, and at times laughed their way through a case about recent political gerrymandering in North Carolina. Looming over the argument in the case of Moore v. Harper was the phrase that has energized and frightened court watchers in almost equal measure since the court took up the case in June: the independent state legislature theory.

The ISL theory – a fringe interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s elections clause that has never been endorsed by a court majority – holds that state legislatures have exclusive power to regulate federal elections, free of checks and balances from other branches of state government, like the governor or judiciary. Simply put, Moore asks if a state’s judiciary has the authority to override the state legislature’s redistricting power.

Conservative groups say the theory would be a fairer, more democratic way to draw congressional maps than what happened in North Carolina. (The state Supreme Court there struck down the legislature’s map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and replaced it with its own.)

Critics – a broad and ideologically diverse range of them – counter that state courts shouldn’t be forbidden by the federal courts from interpreting their own state constitutions. Beyond that, they argue that giving state legislatures this authority would transform how federal elections are conducted across the country – creating a two-tier voting system in which rules, procedures, and perhaps even rights vary between state and federal elections.

Wednesday’s argument careened across the legal, historical, and intellectual map – from the English Bill of Rights to antebellum Virginia; from the legal theory of originalism to textualism, then to federalism. Going in, the broad ISL theory had previously been cited approvingly by four conservative justices. Coming out, there seemed a modicum of agreement that state legislatures shouldn’t enjoy unchecked power over setting the rules for federal elections.

What a majority could coalesce around is unclear. But after two existentially fraught election cycles, some of the justices appear wary of throwing another boulder into America’s calming, but still tense, electoral pond.

“This is a proposal that gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country,” said Justice Elena Kagan. “And you might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most.”

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Timothy Moore, speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, speaks to the media outside the Supreme Court following oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, Dec. 7, 2022. The case could reshape how federal elections are run.

The meaning of “legislature”

The elections clause of the Constitution states that the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding federal elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” The debate in Moore boils down (in part) to the meaning of the word “Legislature.”

Read to its most extreme, ISL proponents say the word means exactly that: the state’s legislature. Critics argue the word instead means all governmental branches in a state – an interpretation, they note, the high court has upheld numerous times over its history. Past rulings from the court have held that ballot initiatives, gubernatorial vetoes, and independent redistricting commissions are all constitutional under the elections clause.

David Thompson, arguing for the North Carolina legislature, said early on they aren’t saying any of those rulings should be overturned.

We “accept all the court’s precedents,” added Mr. Thompson. “What can’t happen is there can’t be a substantive limitation” by other state actors on how state legislatures manage federal elections.

Much of Wednesday’s argument focused then on what those limitations are, and when federal courts could apply them. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who appears to be one of the justices likely to be decisive in Moore, said such limitations would be “notoriously difficult lines to draw.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh also voiced some skepticism, particularly in comparing Mr. Thompson’s ISL arguments with the interpretation the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist offered in a concurrence to Bush v. Gore.

The Rehnquist concurrence “seemed to acknowledge that state courts would have a role interpreting state law, and that federal court review of that should be, in his words, deferential,” said Justice Kavanaugh, who also worked on the case as part of former President George W. Bush’s legal team.

The critics in Moore, he added, “are okay” with that general principle for reviewing state constitutional interpretation, but “your position seems to go further than that.”

Chief Justice John Roberts also appeared skeptical of some of Mr. Thompson’s arguments, but the rest of the court appears evenly divided. The court’s three liberal justices were most critical of the ISL position, questioning not just what limitations courts could impose under this theory, but the fundamentals of the theory itself.

A state legislature “would ordinarily be bound by all of the limitations in the state constitution,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“In the context of the elections clause,” she added, “why do those evaporate?”

The power of state courts

Lawyers for the North Carolina legislature argued that, because state legislative power over federal elections derives from the U.S. Constitution, the state constitution – and thus state courts – should have little influence.

Justices and opposition lawyers nonetheless raised a catalog of issues with the ISL theory – echoing concerns filed in amicus briefs including one signed by the chief justice of every state supreme court in the country. Critics of the ISL theory include some of the most prominent conservative judges and lawyers in the U.S., including the co-founder of the Federalist Society, a prominent Republican former federal appeals court judge, and George W. Bush’s lawyer in the 2000 Florida recount.

“To accept [North Carolina’s] claim, you’d have to ignore the text, history, and structure of our federal Constitution, as well as nearly every state constitution today,” said Neal Katyal, a former acting U.S. solicitor general who represented North Carolina voters and voter advocacy groups.

“They claim the word ‘legislature’ means a species of state law that has literally never existed,” he added. “State lawmaking, unconstrained by a state constitution – that the founders intended to create that animal, surely someone would have said something.”

Instead, experts and briefs describe, most early state constitutions included requirements for how federal elections should be conducted, such as requiring ballots instead of voice votes. The framers, meanwhile, had a well-documented desire for checks and balances throughout U.S. government.

Indeed, in terms of originalism – the judicial philosophy that judges should be bound by the original meaning of the Constitution’s text, which a majority of justices profess to follow – “the more you focus on [it], the weaker the ISL case looks from my vantage point,” said Vikram Amar, dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, on a press call last week organized by the Brennan Center for Justice.

The original meaning of “legislature” in the elections clause “was clear,” according to an amicus brief Dean Amar co-wrote with a pair of constitutional law professors, including Steven Calabresi, a co-founder of the Federalist Society. State legislatures were “created and constrained by the state constitution,” the brief added, and not “independent” in any context.

Most justices on Wednesday didn’t devote time to plumbing historical or originalist arguments over the ISL theory. Instead, they wrestled with that potential compromise – the “notoriously difficult lines” Justice Barrett described.

In that sense, fears leading up to the Moore argument that the court could overnight plunge America’s electoral system into chaos and confusion have been somewhat assuaged. Setting aside disagreements over text, history, and original meaning, there was some agreement that federal courts could impose new standards on state courts adjudicating gerrymandering claims, without revoking state courts’ judicial review power entirely.

Whether a majority of justices are able to find an agreement like that remains to be seen. But on the press call last week, Eliza Sweren-Becker, counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, said even a compromise ruling would be “unprincipled” and “result in chaos.”

Anything short of rejecting the ISL theory wholesale, she added, “asks the court to do something that the court has never done before, that flies in the face of history, that flies in the face of practice.”

Michael McConnell, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former federal appeals court judge, isn’t so sure.

He agrees that state legislatures, created and bound by their state constitutions, can’t be “independent” when it comes to federal elections. But he thinks the specific reference to “legislatures” in the elections clause means they should be given some special authority over federal elections.

“The most plausible, the most convincing, and also the most practical way to put those oppositions together,” he says, is to say “the legislature has to do the actual districting, but it’s subject to standard judicial review.”

“In the current hyper-partisan environment,” he adds, the parties and the amici “are all adopting one extreme position [or] the other, instead of looking for a middle-ground interpretation.”   

Valery Sharifulin/Sputnik/Kremlin/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his speech at the 10th National Congress of Judges in Moscow, Nov. 29, 2022. Although his decision to invade Ukraine has run into widespread public opposition, he shows no sign of altering course.

It is the strongman leader’s nightmare conundrum: how to change course on a core policy without imperiling the aura of omniscience and political invulnerability on which his power ultimately rests.

And that’s now a problem for three of the world’s most firmly embedded autocrats – Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

They may well find a way out of their current policy predicaments and defuse the popular discontent making itself felt even in their tightly policed countries.

But the challenge they are facing could be altering the terms of what U.S. President Joe Biden has called the central narrative of 21^st -century world politics: the struggle between autocracy and democracy.

As recently as 10 months ago, at a summit held days before Mr. Putin rolled his tanks into Ukraine, he and Mr. Xi were confidently promoting the advantages of their brand of nationalist autocracy over what they saw as the West’s flaccid, flailing democracies.

Now those words ring more hollow, and not only because of the unexpected strength and cohesion democracies have shown in pushing back against Mr. Putin’s invasion.

There has also been a change on the other side of the scales.

Andy Wong/AP

Chinese leader Xi Jinping introduces new members of the Politburo Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Oct. 23, 2022. Mr. Xi has unexpectedly abandoned his strict "zero-COVID" policy, relaxing restrictions that had sparked rare public protests.

The predicament facing the leaders of China, Russia, and Iran is providing something of a reality check on their claims to have found a better, more responsive, and effective style of government. It is also highlighting ways in which democratic government – despite its own problems and frustrations – possesses inbuilt strengths that autocracy lacks.

It begins with how decisions get made – a process that inexorably narrows, as an autocrat amasses more and more power, to include few voices beyond the autocrat-in-chief. Autocracies lack the institutional checks that shape policy decisions in democracies, such as public opinion, independent news media, open debate, and robust opposition parties.

Nowhere has the contrast been more starkly evident than in China, where frustration with the official “zero-COVID” policy, imposed through three years of lockdowns, erupted last month into the first major public protests since the bloody 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. They broke out on the heels of a Communist Party Congress formally endorsing Mr. Xi as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.

From the outset of the pandemic, it is Mr. Xi who has framed China’s response, with lockdowns of hundreds of millions of citizens and a pervasively enforced system of frequent testing and quarantines. He has trumpeted it as evidence of the superiority of his “China model” over Western countries where the number of cases has been far higher. But on Wednesday, the government effectively abandoned the “zero-COVID” policy, relaxing many of the unpopular restrictions.

In Moscow, the decision to attack Ukraine was taken by President Putin and a small group of pliant advisers. Now, an invasion envisaged as a short, sharp victory has seen Russian forces blocked, battered, and pushed back by the Ukrainians.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, backed a campaign to tighten enforcement of the law obliging all women to wear the traditional headscarf. The death of a young woman arrested by the country’s morality police for wearing her headscarf improperly has sparked the most widespread protests against the regime since it came to power in 1979.

Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/AP

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addresses a meeting of the Basij paramilitary force in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 26, 2022, praising its efforts to quash dissent. The Basij has taken a leading role in clamping down on demonstrations ignited by the death of a young woman while in the custody of Iran's morality police.

Faced with the prospect of having to rethink, recast, or retreat from core policy decisions, the leaders of all three countries are facing a distinctly autocratic quandary: how to avoid projecting any sign of weakness or vulnerability.

The safest option is to make no change at all. That’s the route Mr. Putin and Ayatollah Khamenei seem determined to take for the time being.

This makes Mr. Xi’s decision in recent days to change course on his pandemic policy all the more extraordinary. Though the government had signaled that it would ease the restrictions over time, the president confidently reaffirmed the wisdom of his “zero-COVID” policy at the recent party congress, and was clearly not contemplating any early, major change.

The fact that many restrictions are now being lifted seems to reflect the depth of Mr. Xi’s concern about the public protests.

It has been an autocratic change of course. The official government line is that the “zero-COVID” campaign has been a success. And while restrictions have been loosened, police presence at protest sites has been strengthened, references to the demonstrations have been scrubbed from China’s already censored cyberspace, and some protesters have been detained.

Democratic leaders, of course, also make decisions that go wrong, and they face protests.

The results can be messy, sometimes forcing a change of policy, a change of leader, or a period of gridlock as arguments inside and outside government determine what comes next.

Yet the stakes are dramatically different in China, Russia, and Iran. There, any major shift risks calling into question the power, judgment, and political interests of a single person.

Perhaps one old democrat, Britain’s Winston Churchill, put the distinction best. “Democracy is the worst form of government,” he said, “except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

Mary Altaffer/AP/File

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art are seen on the museum's staircase, April 29, 2021, in New York. At a time of new energy in the U.S. labor movement, unions are on the rise at museums and cultural institutions nationwide, with some making big wins against low wages and a lack of workplace accountability.

Emily Searles wants all of her co-workers to know her salary. She isn’t boasting: The development operations manager at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is also a union organizer and wants to keep her bosses accountable. So she posts her pay in BAM’s Slack communications channel to encourage transparency. This way, any chasm in earnings between two employees working similar roles can be brought to light. 

It was this kind of gap that helped launch her labor activism in the first place. Before management and staff at the New York City performing arts venue signed their first union contract covering front-facing workers in September 2020, Ms. Searles found out that a colleague in the same department made $8,000 less than she did. She adds that for years workers had faced low-pay, poor communication from management, and a culture of elitism that implicitly called on staff to trade lower wages for the prestige of working in the arts. 

At a time of new energy in the U.S. labor movement, unions are on the rise at museums and cultural institutions nationwide, and in some cases they are making big wins against chronically low wages and a lack of workplace accountability. Workers at BAM and elsewhere have won increases in base salaries, challenging models that have long perpetuated an economically stratified workforce. 

The path can be two steps forward, one back. But experts and organizers say the long-term effects of unionization could be far-reaching as a new generation of cultural workers asserts its dignity and desire for a workplace voice. 

“This is a truly fertile generational shift potentially going on in the labor movement,” says Jennifer Sherer, a labor expert with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “People who are learning firsthand how to organize unions will take that knowledge into any job they go into in the future.”

Growing momentum

The trend has been especially visible here in New York, where union organizing has surged since 2019, when lower Manhattan’s New Museum of Contemporary Art won its first contract after grueling negotiations and bitter pushback from management. 

While a handful of museum unions have existed for decades – notably at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art and the New York Historical Society – many more have formed over the past five years. From the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, workers at museums nationwide are winning union contracts after negotiations that sometimes last years. The Philadelphia Museum of Art Union ratified its first contract in October after a 19-day strike.

Courtesy of New Museum Union

New Museum of Contemporary Art staff members gather at the museum in New York City's lower Manhattan after officially beginning the formation of the New Museum Union on Jan. 11, 2019. Their shirts read “We deserve a fair contract.”

The wave of museum organizing comes amid the rise of independent unions at other private sector employers such as Starbucks and Amazon, and labor’s highest public approval in decades. According to an August 2022 Gallup Poll, 71% of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest rate Gallup has recorded since 1965. 

In some workplaces, widespread furloughs and layoffs at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 exposed the lack of collective bargaining to safeguard workers’ rights. One of the most significant outcomes of the New Museum’s contract was the net of support it provided for 31 union members who were furloughed in April 2020, says Francesca “Frankie” Altamura, an organizer and former curatorial assistant at the New Museum. 

Union members were able to negotiate a severance package, Ms. Altamura says, which likely would not have happened had the contract not been signed before the pandemic hit. But the union’s power has since diminished. Only seven of the initial 84-member bargaining unit remained employed at the museum by July 2020 – which Ms. Altamura says was management’s attempt to undercut the union’s influence. (A union charge, filed with the National Labor Relations Board, alleged the layoffs were retaliatory.)

Money for exhibits ... and for workers

Workers are pushing their concerns about pay and labor rights at a time of relatively strong finances for museums and cultural institutions. Museums in New York City and elsewhere are expanding and peak revenues are hitting new highs. 

Yet in much of the museum and art world, low wages for public-facing staff members are common – including for jobs that call for advanced degrees. Before the union contract, some staff at the New Museum were making less than $40,000, while the museum director, Lisa Phillips, had a salary of $737,350 in 2019. At BAM, there were full-time staff members who had never received a raise, despite having worked at the venue for years, Ms. Searles says. At both institutions, conversations between colleagues after work revealed these disparities, catalyzing their push to organize into formal unions.

“There’s a real parallel here with what we see in a lot of public employee and education organizing,” says Ms. Sherer, the Economic Policy Institute expert. “People who are deeply invested in their work are bringing demands to the table about their own conditions because they can’t sustain a career over a lifetime in the occupation that they love.”

It’s important to note, however, that museum management is often tied down by donor directives and the specific conditions of grant money, both of which make it difficult to channel funds directly into staff salaries, says Dina Bailey, owner of Mountain Top Vision, a consultant to museums on fundraising and diversity initiatives. And because museum director salaries have historically trended high, museums would have a hard time recruiting the most qualified directors if they reduced salaries, Ms. Bailey says. 

Josh Reynolds/AP/File

Museum curator Victoria Bunting (center) pickets in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Nov. 17, 2021. It took nearly 18 months and a strike for the MFA Union to reach a contract agreement with museum management.

“They took it very personally” 

But beyond wide pay gaps, workers at BAM and the New Museum reported widespread lack of communication between upper management and lower-level staff, as well as a general assumption by museum management that the prestige of the positions should be of greater importance to staff than their salaries. 

“I think there’s this ethos that when you work in the arts, you should be able to consider yourself lucky that you get to do this type of work,” Ms. Searles says. “And that’s why I think the pay is low – it’s almost like a privilege.”

Museum managements have a reputation for fighting hard against unions and during contract negotiations, says Maida Rosenstein, former president of United Auto Workers Local 2110 – the union representing both BAM and the New Museum. It took nearly 18 months and a strike for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Union to reach a contract agreement with museum management, and three years for the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union. 

At both BAM and the New Museum, management tried to convince workers that the union would be bad for the workplace. Ms. Altamura recalls how one longtime museum donor and member of the New Museum’s board of trustees spoke to staff at the museum’s theater about how a union would undermine the institution.

“They took it very personally,” Ms. Altamura says. “People who don’t understand what a union is see unionizing as a very personal affront to their managerial abilities.”

Neither the New Museum nor the Philadelphia Museum of Art responded to the Monitor’s requests for comment. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Academy of Music declined to comment for this story.

Gains that come gradually

The New Museum’s contract now guarantees a minimum annual salary of $46,000 for full-time employees – less than the union wanted, but a firm floor that’s set to increase each year of the contract. BAM’s contract guarantees minimum salaries of $42,000 for assistant positions, with pay grades climbing from there, and outlines processes for which hourly positions can become salaried. 

But the wider effects of unionization on the museum industry will likely take time, as contracts evolve in successive bargaining cycles, Ms. Rosenstein says.

Still, Ms. Searles sees changes at BAM already. At work there’s an open dialogue among her colleagues about salaries, inequity, and workplace culture. She says people feel free to be vulnerable and honest about their working conditions – something many were afraid of in pre-union days. 

“I don’t know if I could go to a non-unionized job after this,” Ms. Searles says.

Editor’s note: One sentence has been corrected to signal that a union charge, alleging retaliation by management, was filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

For years, whenever Veronica Ogar’s period began, she would grab a piece of old cloth she kept for the purpose, fold it into layers, and stuff it into her underwear. Over the following days, she would keep to herself, avoiding the local market where she earned a living – her makeshift pad was barely fit for purpose – instead taking a financial hit while her period lasted. 

“If I risk going to the market and my clothes get stained, I would be the joke of the whole community,” she says, highlighting the societal pressure common in the region. It had never occurred to her she even had a choice. “It’s what I had been told to do from when I was child,” she adds, speaking in Nigerian Pidgin English.

Across the globe, millions of women and girls continue to be punished, or even endangered, when they have their periods. Not only do they lack access to facilities and products to manage their periods with dignity, they also have to navigate entrenched community stigma and sanctions.

The first time Ms. Ogar experienced menstruation, she hid in her room in the house where she lived with her aunt in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna. 

“I was confused and didn't understand why I was bleeding. I had never heard the term ‘period’ before and so didn’t know what it was,” she recalls. Eventually, a neighbor persuaded her to come out of her room. 

“She ... sternly warned me to avoid men, especially during my menses, as being around them will get me pregnant,” Ms. Ogar recalls. “I had the impression that [menstruation] was something that makes me unclean, and one should be ashamed and hide.” 

Period poverty pandemic

Period poverty – a lack of access to menstrual education, products, or hygiene facilities, which leads to the inability to manage periods with dignity – has long been widespread in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. 

Now, a burgeoning cost of living crisis has worsened matters in a country where more than 40 million women – more than the entire population of Canada – live in extreme poverty, Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights campaigners say.

For years, Ms. Ogar was among the 37% of menstruating women in Africa’s most populous country who couldn't afford safe, hygienic menstrual products. Now, soaring inflation, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has pushed the price of a packet of menstrual pads from 250 naira ($0.60) two years ago up to 1200 naira ($3), beyond the reach of many even in middle income brackets. 

“Understanding that about 82 million Nigerians survive, both in terms of feeding and all other expenses, on less than a dollar a day puts that problem into better perspective,” says Adebisi Yusuff Adebayo, Director of Research and Thought Leadership, a multinational NGO that has branches in Nigeria and other African countries.

But Nigeria’s period poverty crisis is not just due to economic pressures. It's also borne of a lack of information, which comes at a steep price. In response, Nigerian rights campaigners are finding innovative ways and local solutions to tackle a global problem in their region.

Ogar Monday

Goodness Ogeyi Odey (far left) stands with attendees of a reusable pad training in Ijiraga, in Cross River state, in Nigeria, on March 4, 2022.

From rags to self-made pads

One morning in May, 50-odd women sat down under the shade of a baobab tree in Ijegu, a small community in Nigeria’s southern state of Cross River.

In front of them stood a woman called Goodness Ogeyi Odey, who alternated between pointing at a large chart and using a stick to draw on the dusty ground.  

Soon, she had sketched a diagram that explained how hormones trigger the menstrual cycle. Next, she asked those gathered to share some of the things they had heard about periods. Almost every woman had a story about feeling fear, shame, or ostracism when they had their period. And for almost all, it was the first time they were hearing a scientific explanation of what happened to them each month.

Ms. Odey helps run the Edupad Yala project, a campaign that aims to demystify myths around menstruation and trains rural women on the production of reusable menstrual pads. The project has so far taught around 1,000 rural residents how to make pads with easy-to-source materials like absorbent cotton, fabric, buttons, needles, and thread. 

The whole exercise is tailored to take into account local realities. The science is explained in a way that’s entirely free of jargon. Since the women are often busy doing manual labor to keep the entire house running, the process of making the pads is designed to be taught in a single half-hour lesson, Ms. Odey explains. And, most importantly, it doesn’t require manuals or tools – meaning it can easily be passed on to new learners. 

“One of the girls in our last training held a training of her own for her church members after we left her community,” Ms. Odey says. 

Others organizations are stepping up, too. Alora Pads, a local socially-conscious company, recently began mass-producing affordable reusable pads in the country.

No more shame

Each time Ms. Ogar passes the needle through a piece of crossed-shaped cloth she had pinned to a chair, the young mother of four beams with pride. After about 15 minutes of sewing, she backstitches the fabric, cuts the edge with her teeth, and raises up her creation like a trophy: She has just made a reusable pad. 

Ms. Ogar, who was one of the women at the Ijegu meeting, says the training gave her the opportunity to unlearn long-held myths she carried since childhood – and had passed down to her own children. 

Nigeria’s Minister of Women Affairs, Pauline Tallen, says that the cost of such misinformation and societal pressure often carries lifelong repercussions. “This ... will, in the long run, be borne by women and girls, and will definitely affect schoolgirls across Nigeria.” 

The impact is often subtle. Joy Inyima, a secondary school student in Yahe, in Cross River state, isn’t among the 10% of girls across sub-Saharan Africa forced to miss school due to their period. But a traumatic early experience still haunts her. 

“I still remember the first time I saw my period. I was here in school. I stood up to get something when everyone behind me burst into laughter,” she says, still distressed as she recalls that it took huge consolation and pleading from her parents for her to return to school. 

Now, she says, she chooses to stay away from school during her period, risking falling behind. Teachers and students alike seem to accept this as the norm.

For others like Ms. Ogar, education may have come late. But it has been empowering. 

“I will [keep] making my own pads and using them,” she says, adding that she will no longer misses market days. “I have learned that periods are not unclean, and it is not something I should be ashamed of – and I won't be.”

AP

Women cook at a soup kitchen to feed residents in the Puerta de Hierro neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Nearly half of the world’s countries have at one time or another grappled with holding their leaders legally accountable for criminal conduct while in office. One of the more dramatic examples was this week’s conviction of Argentina’s former President (and current Vice President) Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The verdict, said prosecutors, marks “a before and after in terms of political corruption.”

“Today justice gives us hope that citizens can trust their institutions” and that “ethical values and integrity become a guide to each person [who has] the responsibility of ... being accountable for acts of government,” said prosecutors Diego Luciani and Sergio Mola in a statement Tuesday.

Ms. Fernández de Kirchner, a former first lady known throughout Argentina simply as Cristina, was sentenced to six years for enriching herself and friends through a scheme to divert $1 billion in public works contracts during her presidency from 2007 to 2015. The sentence also bars her from seeking or holding public office, but it won’t take effect until her options to appeal have been exhausted. She has consistently painted the charges against her as political conspiracies.

Investigating a past or present head of state raises difficult questions about safeguarding the public good. Democracy rests on the principle that no one is above the law, but it can be hard to insulate legal action against political leaders from real or imagined partisan agendas. Even so, probes now unfolding in places like South Africa, Peru, and the United States offer a counterpoint to the narrative that democracy faces a global recession. All relate to alleged corruption or official misconduct in one form or another – and they are showing that the best way to strengthen representative government is through an active pursuit of honesty and equality.

The latest annual assessment of anti-corruption efforts in Latin America by the Americas Society and Council of the Americas found halting progress across the region. Argentina’s overall score has decreased over the past three years. But one measurement offers an insight into the public’s impatience with dishonest government. Public opinion had shifted away from the former president long before she was convicted. An opinion poll in August found that 67% wanted to see her put behind bars.   

“In Argentina’s polarized environment, the trial of Cristina Kirchner was unlikely to be a painless process, even under the best of circumstances,” wrote Micah Rosen in the Global Anticorruption Blog. “Such cases are never easy. But there are ways to make the prosecution of powerful politicians more credible and more robust. If Argentinian democracy can survive the corruption of its leaders, it must take even greater pains to survive the response.”