How little I knew you Geraldine Ferraro

When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president in 1984, I had no idea what it meant to be a feminist and to be limited as a member of a marginalized group. But I did have the impression that Ferraro must have been a Very Bad Person, based on the people talked about her, both in terms of content and tone. It didn't occur to me that her gender had anything to do with it. Her passing on the weekend provides me with an opportunity to reflect on how little I understood at the time about her and what she did for us.

That year, I was thirteen years old and in grade eight. I was not following politics at all. To me, the most significant event on the world stage was the birth of UK's Prince Harry in September. I knew that there was a presidential election in the US and who candidates were. I knew that Geraldine Ferraro was running. I had no idea what the issues were in the election. But I did have the impression that Ferraro must be a Very Bad Person.

The news was always critical. She had said the wrong thing. She was doing things she shouldn't have. Her past was questionable. More damaging than the facts were the implications, which read like a laundry list of words to marginalize someone: incompetent, immoral, not Christian, too uppity, exceeding her capabilities... The adults around me (both men and women) seemed to feel a sense of outrage; how dare she run for Vice President!

It did not strike me as remarkable that a woman was running for the position.  I had the mistaken idea that the world always was and will be this way. It didn't occur to me that people expressed these sentiments about her, because she was a woman. I had the mistaken idea that men and women had equal opportunity in our society.

To give you an idea of how unenlightened I was, let me tell you about the most memorable scene (to me) from the move Top Gun. Maverick (Tom Cruise) had kept Charlie (Kelly McGillis) waiting, because he stayed to play beach volleyball with his mates. When Maverick arrived at Charlie's place, he made weak excuses and asked her to wait some more while he had a shower. Charlie said no and made him talk to her un-showered. This scene amazed me, because it was an example of a woman not letting a man get away with bad behavior. In my daily life, male relatives often acted badly, and women just put up with it. It never occurred to me that there was something that we could do about it.


But, in a sense, there wasn't anything we could do about it. On one occasion, I did resist and it didn't work out well. My brother, sister, and I were supposed to take turns making lunch to bring to school. My brother, being the youngest and the only son, often shirked his duties with little reprimand from our parents. The job was often left to me and my sister. We probably should have just not made his lunch until he pitched in. But that was too blatant and would have drawn the ire of our parents. My sister and I hatched a plan: we would make his sandwich inside-out with the bread in the middle, the meat on the outside, and the condiments on top. We giggled like fiends as we prepared this messy revenge. When my brother came home, he was furious. (My husband says that it was probably because we embarrassed him in front of his friends.) He raged and yelled at us. And what did we do? We did what we saw our female role models did. We acquiesced and didn't do it again. It's astonishing, now that I look back on it. The me in 2011 would never put up with something like this. I don't think we did our brother any favors either.


Reading Ferraro's obituary gave me a new appreciation for what she did and how far I have come. I know what it's like to be under attack. I know what it's like to have special attacks lobbed at me with astonishing vitriol, because I was a woman and I dared. She held up remarkably against the barrage of attacks. She opened up possibilities for women who followed. Rest in peace, Geraldine Ferraro.

Accounting for Taste on International Women's Day

It is International Women's Day today, and I wanted to acknowledge it with a post. It can be difficult to explain to men why women's rights is still an issue. After all, laws and regulations that prohibit women's participation are decreasing and opportunities are increasing. But the point is that there is still lots left to do because women and women's views are marginal, meaning they are not the default assumptions.

Let me try to explain using a story.

Movie star and activist, George Clooney, has a reputation for being a practical joker. One of his more elaborate pranks involved an enormous hideous painting that he had pick up  from the curb on garbage day.  George often played golf with his close friend, Richard Kind. For a year, whenever Richard asked him to go play golf, he would say, "I can't. I've got art class." Finally, Richard's birthday rolled around and George gave him the big, garish painting, with his signature and in a frame. George said, "'My art teacher's really proud of me but this (painting) is the first one we're both really proud of. You've been so supportive, I want you to have it." It hung over Richard's couch for two years and George would send instruct their mutual friends to go and compliment the painting in superlatives. Everyone else was in on the joke.

I want you to imagine what it was like being Richard. For years, he looked at this painting and thought it was awful, but everyone thought it looked amazing. He probably had many feelings of self-doubt, questioned his own taste, and his ability to appreciate art. He was the odd one out and constantly being reinforced by messages from his friends.

Being a woman is a bit like this. I'm constantly bombarded with tiny hints that I'm the odd one out, that I'm not the default. Karen Valby wrote, "When women rally around something in pop culture, it isn't long before the objects of their attraction are loudly trivialized or dismissed." Take the book (and movie) "Eat, Pray, Love" for example, which tells the story of how a woman got over being an unhappy divorcee by traveling the world. In other words, it's a rite of passage story where the main character is a woman and the antagonists are inside of her. Not your typical story, which in part accounts for its success. The novel made it to number one on The New York Times paperback nonfiction list and was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It doesn't get much bigger than this.

Yet the page for this book on Amazon.com is filled with hateful comments, not just by men and not just by people who have read the book. Elizabeth Gilbert has stopped reading and responding to the reviews. She sums up the reaction to the popularity of the book and movie this way: "If women like it, it must be stupid." In high school, there were certain musicians that girls liked, such as Duran Duran and Corey Hart, and boys always made fun of us for liking. I could never understand what was so bad about them. It's like a twisted version of the prank that George Clooney pulled. But the worst part is it's not a joke.

The blog "My Fault I'm Female" features anecdotes sent in by readers when they had to face stereotypes or deal with unequal treatment or plain old incomprehension, just because they were female. I like reading this blog because it reminds me that I'm not crazy and that it's OK for me to be angry at the thousand tiny cuts that I suffer because my existence challenges assumptions.

Living on the margins is an odd thing. On the one hand, things are never easy, because I'm not one of the "cool kids," to borrow a metaphor from high school social interactions. Interactions always have to be negotiated and discovered anew, because things can't be taken for granted. On the other hand, there are advantages to being able to understand and appreciate cool and not cool. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Shikha Dalmia's arguments in "Long Live the American Dream" are just plain wrong

A link to an article came across my Twitter feed yesterday and I was flabbergasted by how wrong it was. Lots of things get me riled up, but it's not often that I feel the need to write a point by point rebuttal. Please pardon the self-indulgent length of this article, but here it is.

The article was "Long Live the American Dream by Shikha Dalmia. The link that received pointed to reason.com, a free-market magazine that I had not heard of before, but the article originally appeared as an opinion piece in The Daily. Throughout the piece, Dalmia uses bait-and-switch reasoning; she raises a point, cites statistics that make America look better than India and China, but don't directly support her point. Although Dalmia's argument rest on five pillars, she also makes a number of off-hand comments that are just plain wrong.

Let's start at the top.

Americans, hit first by outsourcing and then a recession, are becoming deeply pessimistic about their country’s ability to maintain its economic leadership in a globalized world. America’s Aristophanes, Jon Stewart, commented during a recent interview with Anand Giridhardas, author of India Calling: “The American dream is still alive—it’s just alive in India.” Likewise, 20 percent Americans in a December National Journal poll believed that the U.S. economy was no longer the strongest. Nearly half picked China instead.

Concerns about how America is doing economically surfaced recently in response to the news that China's economy is now the second largest in the world (knocking Japan into third place.)  Rhetoric quickly turned to per capita GDP, a metric that still makes the US look good ($42000 vs $6200), and some argue is a better measure of real wealth. The poke at Jon Stewart would be funnier, if his joke didn't strike so close to home. If America is doing so well, why did President Obama go to India last year to sign deals worth $10 billion in trade to create 54000 jobs? Dominant economic models pin prosperity on sustained growth, which isn't happening anymore, so we have to look elsewhere for markets. For better or for worse, companies are looking to India's and China's rising middle classes as potential buyers.

But there are at least five reasons why neither India nor China will knock America off its economic perch any time soon, at least not by the only measure that matters: Offering the best life to the most people.

I can accept that the only measure that matters is offering the best life to the most people. However, this measure is not discussed further in the article. I would have been happy to accept an argument that people in America have more rights and freedoms than others in the world and that we do a better job of ensuring that human beings live with dignity (though this isn't necessarily true, it's true enough for a comparison with India or China). Unfortunately, the rest of the argument doesn't follow through on this assertion (offering the best life to the most people).

America Wastes No Talent
Conventional wisdom holds that America’s global competitiveness is driven by geniuses flocking to its shore and producing breathtaking inventions.

It's not just conventional wisdom, people do flock to the US. In 2009, 37% of the doctorates earned in science and engineering were awarded to temporary visa holders. In other words, 14,724 people who were not US citizens or permanent residents received Ph.D.s that year. This figure is up from 27% in 1989. As a university professor in computer science, I have seen applications from both foreign and domestic students. While there are geniuses in both categories, many of our best students were educated elsewhere.

But America’s real genius lies not in tapping genius—but every scrap of talent up-and-down the scale.

If only this were true. The current unemployment rate is 9.8% and over 4 million of these people have been unemployed for over a year. This is a lot of talent not being tapped into. Furthermore, there are a lot of students finishing high school without even basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The California State Universities routinely offer remedial courses in these areas to make up for what students should have learned in high school, but didn't.

Another way we squander talent is by making health care unreachable. I have an acquaintance who does not have health insurance, so she can't get treatment for her seizures. (Probably epilepsy, but she doesn't know for certain.) Because she isn't treated, she misses a lot of work. Because she doesn't have a solid work history, she can only work part time and can't get health insurance. If she could get affordable treatment and medication, she would be able to make a bigger contribution to society, rather than languishing because her talent wasn't being tapped.

A 2005 World Bank study found that the bulk of a people’s wealth comes not from tangible capital like raw resources and infrastructure. It comes from intangible wealth: effective government, secure property rights, a functioning judiciary. Such intangible factors put the equivalent of $418,000 at the disposal of every American resident. India and China? $3,738 and $4,208 respectively.

To me, this is bait-and-switch reasoning.  While I am persuaded that intangible wealth is a good thing, what does intangible wealth have to do with not wasting genius? It's possible that there is a link between intangible wealth and the possibility of starting a business that succeeds, it's not made here.

America’s vast intangible wealth makes everyone more productive and successful. Personal attributes—talent, looks, smarts—matter only on the margins.

This is complete fiction. Sexism, racism, and other kinds of discrimination are alive and well. (The margins are alive and well too, but that's an argument for another day.) Talent, looks, and smarts matter everywhere. And even with them, one might not succeed.

Having witnessed the life trajectory of many Indian immigrants, what’s striking to me is that, with some exceptions, it doesn’t matter whether they are the best in their profession in India or just mediocre. Within 10 to 15 years of arriving, they land in a very similar space. They get good jobs, buy homes, have children, send them to decent schools and colleges and save for their retirement. The differences in their standard of living would have been far greater had they stayed home.

I have seen this too, but it's not the whole story. Many Americans (non-immigrants) are having trouble achieving the same prosperity. It's possible that these are lackluster citizens who don't like to work hard, but there are too many of them to simply blame the individual. Enough adult children are moving back in with their parents after a few years in the work force that a term has been coined: the Boomerang generation.

My colleague, Prof. Kavita Philip has been studying the growing tech industry in Bangalore. She has found a growing number of Indians who went abroad to earn their doctorates and to work are now returning home. While their total pay packet might be less, it buys them a much higher standard of living. They can afford to hire cooks, housekeepers, or nannies. As well, the work environment is less formal, more collegial, and more family-friendly. Their American dreams are alive and well in India.

America Does Not Have India’s Infrastructure Deficit or China’s Civil Society Deficit
India’s gap with America extends not just to intangible capital but tangible capital as well. Basic facilities in India—roads, water, sewage—remain primitive. For example, a 2010 McKinsey Global Institute report found that India treats 30 percent of raw sewage, whereas the international norm is 100 percent. India provides 105 liters of water per person per day, the minimum standard is 150 liters. It needs to spend twice the slated expenditures over the next 10 years to deliver basic services.

Yup, infrastructure is important and lots of work needs to be done in India. But we must not become complacent about the infrastructure that is needed in the United States. The US Chamber of Commerce has been studying the transportation infrastructure gap and its impact on economic growth. There gaps in water and sewage infrastructure too. We live in an era where big government is unpopular, so the necessary investments into roads, water, and other utilities are not being made. We are currently living off the investments made in the 1960s when people were dreaming about changing the world, and they did. And what about infrastructure that will be important in the coming years? In the US, we have some of the poorest broadband connectivity in the developed work. We pay more for it and receive slower service than elsewhere. The electrical distribution system is in need of an overhaul as well. Electricity is especially important in the information age, because so many of our digital appliances relies on it. The technology exists to build a "smart grid" to replace the existing crumbling system, but project lacks public support.

China, meanwhile, has a major civil society problem. America has made about $100 trillion in Social Security and Medicare promises to seniors that it can’t fund. But American seniors face nothing like the kind of destitution that the Chinese do. China’s one-child policy has decimated the natural safety net that old people rely on in traditional societies. And China offers no public safety net to the vast majority of village-born. Worse, many Chinese have invested their nest eggs is various asset bubbles that will wipe out their only means of subsistence if they burst, making the Great Depression look like a beach party.

China definitely has some shortcomings, but these are not the ones that are affecting economic prosperity. While China's seniors aren't surrounded by children and grandchildren they way they used to be, this shift occurs in any country that moves from an agrarian to an industrial economy. The developed world has social programs, because it is not unusual for people to move away from their families to find work. The industrial revolution led to factories, which led to migrant workers, which led to nuclear families, which led to a lower birth rate. The effect of China's one child policy on birthrate is indistinguishable from the effect of industrialization, though there are plenty of other negative outcomes. We too are facing similar problems with a "top heavy" demographic distribution where there are not enough young people (or incomes) to look after a growing number of elderly.

While Chinese are disciplined savers, they are not high-risk investors. They tend to sock money away diligently in boring old bank accounts. We Americans need to be much more worried about the stock market wiping out our retirement savings, as was the case during the financial crisis in 2008.

America Does Not Have Grinding Poverty
Despite all the recent hoopla about China becoming the world’s second biggest economy and India hoping to follow suit, the reality is that the per capita GDP—even measured by purchasing power parity—in both is pathetic. America’s is about $47,000, China’s $7,500, and India’s $3,290.
Worse, both still harbor medieval levels of poverty with 300 million people in each living on less than $1.25 a day. India’s IT boom gets big press, but it—along with all the tertiary industries it has spawned—employs 2.3 million people, or 0.2 percent of the population.
Neither country is a font of opportunity comparable to America.

I thought this article was about the American dream of prosperity and success, rather avoiding grinding poverty. Living on welfare or below the poverty line is grinding enough. Not living in squalor or eating dirt is a depressingly low bar and Aaron Huey's photojournalism shows that there are pockets in America where we have fallen short of even this low standard.

Dalmia's assertion obscures two facts. It's not China or India's current GDP (per capita or otherwise) that is drawing attention, but the growth rate. Both economies are growing steadily and China's per capita GDP is expected to exceed America's by 2050. In contrast , America's per capita GDP fell between 2008 and 2009.

American Education Is Superior

President Obama claims that America is in an “education arms race” with India and China. Rubbish.
Notwithstanding all the horror stories about American kids underperforming on standardized tests compared to Asian kids raised by Tiger moms, things are worse in India and China. India’s literacy rate is 66 percent. China puts its at 93 percent—but between 2000 and 2005, China’s illiterate population grew by 30 million. The same may happen in India, thanks to last year’s Right to Education Act whose regulations will cripple India’s private school market. The fundamental problem is that both countries put their resources into educating elite kids—and ignoring the rest.

America is also guilty of educating elite kids and ignoring the rest. Much of public education is funded through property taxes, which means districts with more expensive houses have more money to educate their children. One parent who tried to send her kids to a better school outside their catchment area was sent to jail. This disparity is further compounded by the fundraising by PTAs to further goldplate a school. At the same time, there are rural and inner city schools that don't have a library. We have some great teachers who are pouring their hearts into teaching, but they and their unions are under attack. While budget cuts, low wages, and lack of respect drive away talented teachers, the rich are putting their children into private schools. So much for educating the non-elite.

College education in both countries, especially in engineering, is also vastly overrated. Harvard researcher Vivek Wadhwa has shown that, contrary to conventional wisdom, not only does America graduate comparable number of  engineers to India and China—American engineers are vastly superior.
But unless more Indian and Chinese kids get access to a quality education, their countries won’t be able to actualize their human potential, precisely what America does so well.

These points might be true, but Dalmia doesn't substantiate them here. In what way are American engineers superior? I have heard the arguments in both directions, but let me give this factoid: foreign applicants to graduate programs in science and engineering routinely earn a perfect scores on the quantitative section of the Graduate Record Exam, while American students do not. What human potential is being actualized? While education is definitely a good thing, one's literacy level does not determine one's value as a human being. The value of a human life is not counted in terms of economic output, but in the moments of love and laughter.

And the final point...

America Doesn’t Have a Culture of Hype
An important reason why the gloom-and-doom about America is unjustified is precisely that there is so much gloom-and-doom. Indians and Chinese, by contrast, have drunk their own Kool Aid. Their moribund economies have barely kicked into action and they are entertaining dreams of becoming the next global superpower. This bespeaks a profound megalomania—not to mention lopsided priorities. There is not a culture of hope in these countries, as Giridhardas told Jon Stewart. There is a culture of hype.
By contrast, Americans are their own worst critics—always looking for lessons to improve what is working and fix what’s not. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that although Americans were the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest of conditions, “a sort of cloud habitually covered their features.” Why? Because “they were constantly tormented by a vague fear of not having chosen the shortest route that can lead to...their wellbeing."

I agree that the current gloom-and-doom about the US economy is overblown, but it's not because America doesn't have a culture of hype. It's because the extremes make better news than the typical, expected, or mediocre. When the economy is booming, it's not as bright as the news reports make it out to be. When the economy is struggling, it's not as bad as the news reports make it out to be. America is not immune to hype. In our popular culture, there is an abundance of celebrities who are famous for being famous. The stereotype of the loud, overbearing, embarrassingly patriotic, and isolationist American is still prevalent abroad, and is still too often reinforced. (For a glimpse of this, see the portrayal of the US president in the movie Love Actually.)

Indeed, Americans have a grab-the-bull-by-its-horns quality so that they simply don’t hang around hoping for things to get better on their own. If the public school monopoly is failing kids, by golly, then they’ll homeschool them themselves. (Public schools are dysfunctional virtually everywhere, but which other country has spawned anything equivalent to America’s homeschooling movement?) The government responds ineffectually to the recession, modest by historic standards, and Americans go into panic mode. Grass-roots movements such as the Tea Party emerge to rein in the government. Pay Pal founder Peter Theil has even given close to a million dollars to the Seasteading Institute to establish new countries on the sea to experiment with new forms of government. This might be wacky but it puts an outside limit on how out-of-whack Americans will let their institutions get before they start fixing them.
This American spirit, ultimately, is the biggest reason to believe that the American dream is and will stay alive—in America.

The American spirit is indeed a great thing, but it's not the same as the American dream.

According to Wikipedia, the American dream is the "promise of the possibility of prosperity and success." If you ask an average American, what would this dream would include, you'd get a variety of answers. Many people think of it as getting ahead, or having enough to live comfortably and save up for some extras. Home ownership might come up. It's also common to expect to be better off than one's parents. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who mentioned intangible capital, infrastructure deficit, lack of grinding poverty, our superior education system, or our lack of culture of hype. While these may be true, they are not normally used as evidence that the American dream is alive.

After these rebuttals, what do we have left?

• Some points that are true, but not relevant to the American dream claim.
• Some side comments that are off the mark.
• Some points that are not supported by evidence or a solid argument.
• Some statistics.

In other words, an opinion that is just plain wrong.

So what do I think? As usual, I think the truth lies somewhere in between. I think things the American dream is not doing as well as Dalmia claims and that things in India and China are not as terrible as she claims. I think there are lots of people who still have the American dream, but are starting to wonder if they're ever going to achieve it, despite their best efforts. I think the world economy is changing and we need to do our best to understand it. I think economic models that are predicated on annual growth levels of 4% or more are busted and unsustainable. I think that the rich getting richer while the poor are getting poorer is not acceptable. We need to find ways of defining success that don't involve things or money. Living with less, living simply, living in harmony with others and the planet-- this sounds to me like a better dream.

The Buddy System for Working Moms

Madeleine Albright said, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." Her intention was to point out that women as sisters should help each other succeed. Successful women have an especially high burden in this regard. To me, her comment seemed to be directed at individual women. A couple of things that I read/heard this week made me wonder if this should be directed at the structural and social arrangements that we have. In other words, we as women need to systematically seek each other out to be partners and help each other succeed in the workplace. I give you two very different examples to illustrate, one from a former professor and one from an officer in the Navy.

A personal essay by Kathy Weston appeared in Science recently. She is a science writer, who used to be a professor at University College London. After 20 years in her position, a Research Assessment Exercise deemed her contribution to the department to be inadequate. She left before she could be fired. Her career started off well enough, but her research projects became more modest and unambitious over the years. The causes included the competing attentions of family and her own self-doubt. One paragraph of the essay especially caught my attention.

Trying to run a lab full time with small children at home is very likely to result in a drop in research productivity or quality, and yet little allowance is made for those of us, mostly women, who find ourselves in this situation. I believe I could have run my lab very successfully if I had been permitted to job-share with a close female colleague, also with two young children. Between us, we could have covered all the bases, and perhaps as a team we would have retained our competitive edge and hence our enthusiasm. This just does not happen in the male-oriented world of science in which, traditionally, dogs are keen to dine on dogs rather than share the bone between them, so to speak.

And the part about collaborating with a female colleague is important. While sharing a lab with a male colleague certainly would be beneficial, he would not be feeling the same pull from home and pressure to perform at work.


Petty Officer 1st Class Sheena Sullen was the subject of an story on NPR this morning. She had enlisted in the Navy and was about to be deployed on a missile destroyer. Her fiance had already been deployed, so there was no one available to look after her two children, ages 14 and 8. Sullen made a call to her childhood friend, Jihan Sanders. After careful consideration, Sanders quit her job and moved into Sullen's home in another state along with her own children, ages 12 and 9. It's an incredible act of friendship-- in both directions.

For Sanders, it is a privilege to be a temporary mother, as Sullen had been to her. "I never had a mother, so I didn't know what it was like, even how to act like a girl," Sanders says.

Sanders is helping Sullen at home, so Sullen can succeed at her job as a Naval officer. If Sullen could not have deployed, it would have been the end of her career.

What if women could have buddy systems that were not ad hoc? What if it became the norm for women to find other women to help them run households and research laboratories? This pairing up would have nothing to do with romantic relationships (and would probably be better if it didn't). It would be more like a sister than a mate. I don't want to suggest that Weston would still be professor if she had a buddy to share her lab. Her story could have done in any number of directions. But it would have helped, and it would probably help women, including me, would benefit from an arrangement like this.

And as a special bonus, that special place in hell would be a lot smaller.

Patriarchy is the enemy, not men or other women

There is a well-known phrase, "The personal is political." It is often used, but not well understood, and often not used correctly. It is often used to refer to the idea that personal issues become important in political campaigns. (Remember the "values voters" who helped to decided the 2004 presidential election?) The "political" in the phrase actually refers to power and the structures that perpetuate existing power relationships. The "personal" in the phrase refers to problems that women are encountering in their daily lives. Taken as a whole, the phrase is intended to say that women have problems that are personal, such as inequality in the workplace, finding good daycare, imbalances in household chores, and sexual violence, are actually caused by the political system. A blogger, Winter, from the Cardiff Feminist Network explains:

The theory that women are not to blame for their bad situations is crucial here because women have always been told that they are unhappy or faring badly in life because they are stupid, weak, mad, hysterical, having a period, pregnant, frigid, over-sexed, asking for it etc. The personal is political proposes that women are in bad situations because they experience gendered oppression and massive structural inequalities.

"The personal is political" came from an essay of the same name by Carol Hanisch, written in 1969. She was working (at subsistence wages) for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) as a community organizer. She was using a technique called "consciousness raising," which involved a group of women discussing their personal problems, realizing that these were problems encountered by other women, and seeing the politics underlying their common problems. Consciousness raising was often perceived as "therapy" or worse, brainwashing women into militancy. Hanisch's essay was a memo back to SCEF defending the use of the technique. Later that year, the memo was published as part of an anthology of feminist writing and given the now-famous title.

There are other ideas in the essay that are not as well remembered, because they are more difficult to embrace. Hanisch also argues that feminism needs to be more tolerant and inclusive of multiple models of how to be women. She wrote:

One more thing: I think we must listen to what so-called apolitical women have to say—not so we can do a better job of organizing them but because together we are a mass movement. I think we who work full-time in the movement tend to become very narrow. What is happening now is that when non-movement women disagree with us, we assume it’s because they are “apolitical,” not because there might be something wrong with our thinking. Women have left the movement in droves. The obvious reasons are that we are tired of being sex slaves and doing shitwork for men whose hypocrisy is so blatant in their political stance of liberation for everybody (else). But there is really a lot more to it than that. I can’t quite articulate it yet. I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds.

In other words, feminism should be about making space for women to make meaningful choices. Work or not work, have children or not, live collectively or individually, to get breast implants or not, have polygamous marriages or none at all. Feminism is about ensuring that everyone has equal rights as human beings, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. It does not, or should not, impose a certain view of what women should be, e.g. politically active, not wearing make up, bra-burning, and angry. Hanisch takes this view because there are bigger fish to fry: patriarchy.

The groups that I have been in have also not gotten into “alternative life-styles” or what it means to be a “liberated” woman. We came early to the conclusion that all alternatives are bad under present conditions. Whether we live with or without a man, communally or in couples or alone, are married or unmarried, live with other women, go for free love, celibacy or lesbianism, or any combination, there are only good and bad things about each bad situation. There is no “more liberated” way; there are only bad alternatives.

This is part of one of the most important theories we are beginning to articulate. We call it “the pro-woman line.” What it says basically is that women are really neat people. The bad things that are said about us as women are either myths (women are stupid), tactics women use to struggle individually (women are bitches), or are actually things that we want to carry into the new society and want men to share too (women are sensitive, emotional). Women as oppressed people act out of necessity (act dumb in the presence of men), not out of choice. Women have developed great shuffling techniques for their own survival (look pretty and giggle to get or keep a job or man) which should be used when necessary until such time as the power of unity can take its place. Women are smart not to struggle alone (as are blacks and workers). It is no worse to be in the home than in the rat race of the job world. They are both bad. Women, like blacks, workers, must stop blaming ourselves for our “failures.”

As defined by Wikipedia, "Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and is dependent on female subordination." Patriarchy is the system that keeps us in our pre-defined roles, because there is no space, no accommodation for difference. To be clear, patriarchy hurts men just as much as it hurts women. There is a poster by Crimethinc., an anarchist art collective, that I love that is based on a poem by Nancy R. Smith, written around the same time as Hanisch's essay.

For every woman who is tired of acting weak when she knows she is strong, there is a man who is tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.

For every woman who is tired of acting dumb, there is a man who is burdened with the constant expectation of "knowing everything."

For every woman who is tired of being called "an emotional female," there is a man who is denied the right to weep and to be gentle.

For every woman who is called unfeminine when she competes, there is a man for whom competition is the only way to prove his masculinity.

For every woman who is tired of being a sex object, there is a man who must worry about his potency.

For every woman who feels "tied down" by her children, there is a man who is denied the full pleasures of shared parenthood.

For every woman who is denied meaningful employment or equal pay, there is a man who must bear full financial responsibility for another human being.

For every woman who was not taught the intricacies of an automobile, there is a man who was not taught the satisfactions of cooking.

For every woman who takes a step toward her own liberation, there is a man who finds the way to freedom has been made a little easier.

By Nancy R. Smith, copyright 1973

Patriarchy hurts us because it reduces our potential as human beings to live fulfilling lives. Feminism is about changing this social system. But it is of no use to anyone to replace patriarchy with matriarchy, that is, a social system where women are the primary authority figures and men don't have power. Really, patriarchy needs to be replaced with equality. So it's the system that needs to be defeated. (Recall the dialog from Scene 3 of Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Dennis the peasant seeks to reject Arthur as his king. Although farcical, Dennis' view is a feminist one.) To sum up, the only way to not be a good feminist is by maintaining status quo social roles or imposing new ones that limit self-determination. This is not done by defining what "real" feminism looks like and staking out territory, but by finding allies and making changes that benefit men and women equally.

If a revolution were organized by women...

New York Times Magazine had an amazing article this week,
The New Abortion Providers, by Emily Bazelon. It talks about efforts over the last thirty years to make abortions a part of mainstream medical practice.

This approach reminded me of a discussion that I had with a couple of ladies at church. Despite their age (or because of it), they were die-hard feminists and progressive Christians. They talked about how their grandmothers were also feminists, but in a quiet way, behind the scenes. They opined that behind any social movement that was successful had women doing the cooking and organizing while the men were doing the blustering. But at the same time, they didn't embrace the dominant narrative of feminism. Jo Cranson mentioned Ashley Montague interviewing a grandmother who ask why she should settle for equality when it's less than what I had before. Robinmarie McClement cited Susan B. Anthony being very concerned about women losing their quiet power behind the throne, if they pursued feminism as a public battle.

Protests and gauntlets in front of free-standing clinics are effective because abortions are a marginalized medical practice. If more doctors performed abortions in their offices or in a hospital, it would make it much more difficult for protesters to single out patients. This change would involve making abortion a standard procedure in the practice of family doctors, internists, and OB/GYN.

In 1995, Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education made abortion training a requirement for all OB/GYN residency programs, meaning that medical students would be receiving mandated hours of lecture on how to perform abortion. This motivation behind this move was to make abortion part of the professional qualifications of a doctor. Even if the student never performs an abortion, they needed to be educated about it.

The next step was to make in-roads into academic medicine by establishing fellowships to provide advanced training and to support research.

"A physician at the U.C.S.F. medical school set up the Family Planning Fellowship, a two-year stint following residency that pays doctors to sharpen their skills in abortion and contraception, to venture into research and to do international work. In recent years, the fellowship has expanded to 21 universities, including the usual liberal-turf suspects — Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, U.C.L.A. — but also schools in more conservative states, like the University of Utah, the University of Colorado and Emory University in Georgia."


International work was an important component because it exposed the fellows to countries where back alley abortions were still common. Another side effect of the residencies is that the physicians need to perform enough abortions to "train to competency." In other words, they need to do enough procedures to be able to handle complications. This process often involves performing many, many abortions in a hospital setting, because the complication rates for first-trimester abortions are so low (about 1%). This training usually occurs in hospitals, which means greater, safe access for women. Coming out of these fellowships, residents are equipped to make decisions about the place of abortion in their own practice. The decision whether or not to offer thee treatment is not necessarily a simple yes or no, but possibly choosing a cut-off, such as 7, 9, or 13 weeks.

These small changes are brilliant, because they don't involve direct confrontation with the protesters on the front lines. They make abortion more available by changing the context. If physicians could bring the simple procedure into the medical fold, it would reduce the need for free-standing clinics and the vulnerability of their patients. (An abortion at 9 weeks gestation produces no recognizes fetal parts and takes less than five minutes by a skilled provider, using device that is "about 10 inches long, costs only $30 and looks like the kind of appliance you might find in a kitchen drawer.")

There are still other obstacles in the way, such as hospitals being squeamish about associated with abortion and the cost of extra medical insurance, but change is afoot. Moreover, this is a change brought about largely by women for women, with the support of male colleagues, away from the glare of publicity and politics.

Many of the protégées Grimes is talking about are women. In the first generation after Roe, abortion providers were mostly men because doctors were mostly men. Since then, women have streamed into the ranks of OB-GYN and family medicine. They are now the main force behind providing abortion.


Let's hear it for social revolutions organized by women.

Natalie Dee Blogs about her premature baby

I read a story today on Natalie Dee's blog about her really awful pregnancy and delivery. She had developed pre-eclampsia at 33 weeks and was induced a week later. There's a fair bit of cursing in the post, so those with tender eyes should avert their gazes.

My favourite part of the post is the following paragraph and the accompanying photo:

"Yes, they decided it would be OK to give me a 4 pound baby to take care of. Pretty terrifying. Try to get any sleep at all when you have a baby smaller than a mens' tennis shoe making snorting noises next to you all night. I challenge you to not freak out and have to check every ten seconds that she has not died of smallness."

Sarkozy irks female MPs with gift

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Sarkozy irks female MPs with gift

The French president includes a grey silk tie in a present to all the country's MPs, prompting calls of sexism.

On the one hand, Nicolas Sarkozy named an unusually number of women to his cabinet. On the other hand, he sent all the Members of Parliament in France a black case and gray silk tie. What's a gal to do with a tie? Some wore the tie around their necks, others wore it as a headband, while yet others brandished it as a symbol of chauvinism in politics. So many options, so little time.

If you put a positive spin on it, all the MPs were treated exactly the same, and are all able to do an equally good job. If you put a negative spin on it, it was pretty inconsiderate to not find a suitable gift for the recipient.

Sworn to virginity and living as men in Albania - International Herald Tribune

Sworn to virginity and living as men in Albania - International Herald Tribune




Under the Kanun code of conduct, women can become sworn virgins who take on men's roles in society. They are literally trading their sexuality for social power. It's amazing that this cultural arrangement exists and how effective it is-- every one treats sworn virgins as if they were men, even other women are shy with them.

A Woman Bouncer in India

The BBC's Geeta Pandey reports from Chandigarh, Punjab, on a woman bouncer, a rare breed in India


Despite facing much initial resistance, patrons of the exclusive night club, Score, seem to like having Amandeep Kaur at the door.

UN classifies rape as a war tactic

BBC NEWS | Americas | UN classifies rape a 'war tactic'

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said violence against women had reached "unspeakable proportions" in some societies recovering from conflict.


Susan Brownmiller wrote about rape being more about power than sex in 1975 in "Against Our Will". Sexual assault (of both genders) as a war tactic or war crime has long been understood by feminist scholars.

Part of the reason that rape is an effective war tactic is the decreased status of women who have been raped, especially in societies where women are chattel. There are reports of rape victims in Congo who are rejected by their families. These practices in turn lead a further weakening of the society.

Maybe rape as a war tactic would decrease if victims were viewed as the same as those who have suffered a violent crime.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Cattle farms lure Australia women

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Cattle farms lure Australia women: "Ranch owners are facing acute recruitment problems because so many young men are being lured into the booming mining industry."

An increasing number of farm hands in the Australian outback are women (a.k.a. jillaroos). The manager of the world's largest cattle station had these compliments to share:

"The hormones are not playing up with them and they're more gentle and steady with cattle and look after your machinery and motorbikes and stuff and generally are much better than fellas.

"And I'm not knocking the fellas, they do a great job too. The world's changing, the women are getting tougher than blokes, mate, hey?"