Joan Walsh.

• Author: Burke, Julia
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

As an MSNBC correspondent and Salon.com editor-at-large and former editor-in-chief, Joan Walsh has gone head-to-head with conservatives from Pat Buchanan to Bill O'Reilly. She's covered reproductive rights as the movement has suffered crippling setbacks in the states in recent years.

Walsh was born in Brooklyn, New York, and went to high school in a suburb of Milwaukee. She went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was campus editor of The Daily Cardinal in 1978, when she covered the anti-apartheid divestiture movement. She wrote one of her first magazine articles for The Progressive in 1980, and in 1982 she wrote an article for In These Times on a police killing of a black man. "The issue never goes away," she says.

She was hired by In These Times and credits it and The Progressive with being "invaluable for those coming of age in the Reagan years to realize that we weren't alone and that there had been a proud radical tradition in this country even before the 1960s, and it was our job to make sure there was a proud radical future, too." From there, she went on to her successful career at Salon and MSNBC. She wrote What's the Matter with White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America, which came out in 2012.

Walsh visited Madison recently for an organizing event for women's rights and reproductive justice. Dubbed "V to Shining V," the event was held in eight states around the country under the auspices of Lady Parts Justice, a feminist organization that focuses on women's health activism and mixes it with more than a dollop of wit.

At the event on September 27 at Genna's Lounge, across the street from the domed capitol building, Walsh stressed the importance of fighting conservative attempts to discourage low-income voters and people of color from going to the polls, and she urged attendees to be voting rights activists. "Voting can't just be a white-middle-class thing where you turn eighteen and you get your country club membership and register to vote," she quipped.

Walsh shared her thoughts with The Progressive on the future of feminism and reproductive rights, and her perspective as a career journalist on the challenges and successes of new media.

Q: What's the key to getting more women out to vote in midterm and local elections--especially young women and women from marginalized groups?

Joan Walsh: I don't think there's just one key. There are probably several. But the strategy that Lady Parts Justice is taking is...