The Iran War Will Touch Everything
  March 10, 2026 Greetings Meteor readers, International Women’s Day was on Sunday, and I had the great pleasure of celebrating it with my daughter at a New York Sirens game where she got to watch her first hockey fight. Nothing says “girl power” like the feminine urge to strangle your rival. In today’s newsletter, we focus on the war in Iran and its effect on every part of our lives. Plus, bad news for Wyoming and a piping fresh slice of women’s history from Nona Willis Aronowitz. Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONIt touches everything: The United States is 11 days into the war with Iran and, unlike previous wars, the administration has not quite yet figured out how to brand and promote this invasion of a sovereign nation to the masses. That isn’t for lack of trying—Trump and his ilk are selling this war to the troops as “part of God’s divine plan,” blessed by Jesus to bring about Armageddon. (Tell me you didn’t finish reading the Bible without telling me…) Americans, for their part, have done their best to roll with the punches, joking about the start of WWIII (again) and facing down potential nuclear winter with as much humor as can be managed. This dissociation is somewhat understandable. The moment in front of us is almost too grave to comprehend. We wonder what this war will cost us and worry that, for civilians, it may cost everything. It certainly already has for Iranian women and children. The fact of the matter is, this war will touch every aspect of our world. In this moment, we look to fellow journalists who have begun to unpack the ways how. Women’s rights: “In every war, women and girls are among the first whose security becomes fragile,” one Iranian photographer tells Outlook India. “When a girls’ school is bombed, it is not only a building that is destroyed, it sends a message that the future of girls is once again under threat.” Power vacuums, like the one created by the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are detrimental to women’s movements—fighting for your rights inevitably takes a backseat to fleeing for your very life from airstrikes and gunfire. The looming influence of AI: Carole Cadwalladr writes about what she calls the “broligarchy’s first war” and how the influence of billionaire tech bros is reshaping warfare. “Was it AI that selected the Iranian school where at least 168 people were killed, mostly children?” she writes. “This is a crucial question. Were those children the collateral damage of an AI hallucination? We can’t let this moment pass. Minab, like Aberfan, is a place that should be burned onto our brains.”  A MASS FUNERAL HELD IN IRAN FOR THE STUDENTS AND FACULTY KILLED BY AN AIRSTRIKE LAST MONTH. (PHOTO BY HANDOUT VIA GETTY IMAGES) Climate disasters: Acid rain fell over Tehran this weekend after the U.S. bombed an oil site in the region. Iranians, who are already enduring a historic drought, must now contend with their water supplies being polluted for years. Journalists Mark Herstgaard and Giles Trendle explain how that impact will not be limited to the Middle East, because “modern warfare is inextricably linked with climate change.” As a number of studies have already shown, it’s women who bear the brunt of a worsening climate. The global economy: We’ve already seen it at the gas pump and in the stock market: This war is hammering the economy. And it’s not just in the United States. Trump promised in a horrendous and lie-riddled speech yesterday that he would initiate attacks from which Iran would “never recover.” Were that to happen, entire nations would be brought to unimaginable levels of economic distress. AND:
 NO TOXIC FANS IN THE COTTAGE!!!! (VIA GETTY IMAGES)  SLICE OF WOMEN’S HISTORY 🍕Johnnie Tillmon, radical welfare rights activistThroughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  TILLMON PHOTOGRAPHED BY BRIAN LANKER, 1988. (VIA NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. COPYRIGHT BRIAN LANKER ARCHIVE) “I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare.” Welfare rights activist Johnnie Tillmon proudly wrote those words in 1972 in Ms. magazine. Born in 1926 in Arkansas as a sharecropper’s daughter, she worked in the cotton fields at age seven and later in laundromats while she struggled as a single mother of six children. But in 1963, after a tonsillectomy landed her in the hospital, she reluctantly applied for welfare so she could better handle the demands of motherhood. She was taken aback by how caseworkers denigrated her and policed her personal life. Welfare officials questioned her purchases, inventoried her fridge, and barred her from, as she put it, “male company.” Tillmon’s experience wasn’t unique: Welfare recipients—especially Black women, who were largely barred from collecting welfare until the 1960s—were routinely persecuted, their homes searched and their sexual histories interrogated. Some were even sterilized as a condition to claim benefits.  MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL WELFARE RIGHTS ORGANIZATION AT A MARCH IN BOSTON IN 1969. (THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES) Tillmon’s own experience formed the backbone of her life’s work. She started organizing her fellow welfare recipients and formed Aid to Needy Children Mothers Anonymous, a group that assisted people who’d been kicked off welfare. That group later became part of the National Welfare Rights Organization, which grew to 30,000 members by 1968. She argued for a guaranteed minimum income decades before UBI became a standard leftist rallying cry. And while some women were arguing for liberation from domesticity, Tillmon was arguing for liberation from government oversight. In the same 1972 essay, she called welfare “the most prejudiced institution in this country” and “like a super-sexist marriage.” She drew a parallel between men and the Black Power-inflected concept of “The Man”—oppressive, white, patriarchal institutions like the police, the prisons, and bureaucracies like the welfare system. “For Tillmon, economic independence—which meant being untethered from exploitative employers and from the constraints of the market—also ensured freedom,” Premilla Nadasen, a professor of history at Barnard College who has written extensively about Tillmon, told The Meteor. That included freedom for women to raise and choose the size of their families; “nobody realizes more than poor women that all women should have the right to control their own reproduction,” Tillmon wrote. Now, in an age when government assistance has been eviscerated and motherhood has been idealized as a white Christian pursuit, Nadasen says, “it’s really powerful to reimagine the world through Johnnie Tillmon’s radical vision.” Her work was not only about “the right to a living wage for women’s work,” Tillmon wrote. It was about “the right to life itself.” —Nona Willis Aronowitz  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
