tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-181543472024-03-12T23:17:05.593-07:00Frieda's Feminist Book BlogReviews of new and older books written by women, from a feminist and a literary perspective.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger74125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-28013570482669766842016-03-13T15:38:00.000-07:002016-03-14T11:45:36.041-07:00<b>The Gift in the Heart of Language: the Maternal Source of Meaning</b> by Genevieve Vaughan (Mimesis International 2015)<br />
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Reviewed by Kaarina Kailo<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qgF7QFoxdbQ/VuXrghWG-II/AAAAAAAABSg/Me9gmBiBh4k8fvW9tQyP0RGvaedNPf2TQ/s1600/Gift%2Bin%2Bthe%2Bheart%2Bof%2Blanguage%2Bcover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qgF7QFoxdbQ/VuXrghWG-II/AAAAAAAABSg/Me9gmBiBh4k8fvW9tQyP0RGvaedNPf2TQ/s320/Gift%2Bin%2Bthe%2Bheart%2Bof%2Blanguage%2Bcover.jpg" /></a></div>Genevieve Vaughan has published her third book regarding the transformative potential of the gift economy, a logic and matrix of practices that imply the liberation of both men and women. The new theory provides solutions to the most urgent need in neoliberal capitalist societies: to overturn the civilizational crises that capitalism and patriarchy have caused with the distortion and appropriation of the Gift. The Gift in the Heart of Language provides sobering and mind-altering care-rational perspectives on the gift economy in all of its manifestations. <br />
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Vaughan’s comprehensive re-interpretation of patriarchal science as itself expressing the exchange paradigm is of profound and timely relevance to gender studies. Her theoretical contribution consists in tackling the blind spots not only of gender studies but all patriarchal scientific fields from linguistics, Marxist theory, child development studies to semiotics and economics at large. Vaughan exposes all the fields which have built their methods and research processes subconsciously on the biased model of exchange and masculated perspectives represented as “neutral” and “natural”. The Rome-based American philosopher points out that thanks to feminism, the LGBT and the men’s movement, many are already questioning the prevailing gender stereotypes. Vaughan’s theories move beyond the second and third waves of feminism to create a wave of its own—beyond performative gender, the misnomer called “essentialism” and the disastrous impact of postmodern and neoliberal feminism. Vaughan is right to stress that we will not solve the crises of this era (increasing encroachment of neoliberal predatory patriarchy, capitalism and the financial powers on what remains of democracy and welfare societies) unless we recognize the important economic aspects of mothering. Beyond any biological or cultural essentialism, she refers to the gendered dimension of epistemology rather than reducing it ideologically to “biological nature.” Neither eliminating Capitalism while maintaining Patriarchy, nor eliminating Patriarchy while maintaining Capitalism will change the situation, Vaughan points out.<br />
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Vaughan argues that the liberation of the gift model requires an end to the market and to patriarchy. This is necessary in order to create an egalitarian society that will function according to the human values based on the maternal logic that have for long been appropriated and redirected to serve exchange, ego-oriented homo economicus and capitalistic accumulation. Gifting within the model of competition, domination and patriarchal power- over is a contradiction in terms and it can never bring about a peaceful society. <br />
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One main aim of the book is to help women and men respect their own maternal origins and throw off the parasite of the exchange economy. Vaughan reveals the numerous ways in which humans receive gifts from their environmental niche. We are in receivership of endless perceptual gifts. Our eyes are continually exploring our environment even if we don’t realize it, finding the gifts, the “affordances”. We breathe in gifts of air and breathe out carbon dioxide which is a gift for plants. Our hearts pump oxygenated blood out to nurture our cells, and back to be replenished. <br />
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The market economy is according to Vaughan composed of private property owners or would-be owners and exchangers in the midst of a sea of gifts we do not recognize as such. We do not recognize them until we find ways of turning the gifts into commodities, as our corporations have done recently with water, seeds, genes and language itself, which has been commodified even before we knew it was a gift made of gifts.<br />
The virtual abundance that there is now online is like the virtual abundance in language and is conducive to gift giving and to the positive human relations carried by the gift economy. Vaughan claims that we have distorted our concepts of who we are and what we should do by superimposing an alienated economy of exchange on a human communicative economy of the gift. Recognizing this is the first step in making the change towards an economy based on free material and linguistic communication and the elaboration of the altercentric mother-child relation.<br />
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If we conceive altercentric mothering-being-mothered as gift giving and receiving, if we recognize the very positive maternal gift character of indigenous matriarchal gift economies, of the ancient virtual invention of language itself and of social incarnations of linguistic giving in symbolic gift exchange, and most recently in the maternal and linguistic aspects of the modern internet wiki economy, of volunteering, of social experiments in gifting communities, of ecological initiatives like permaculture, we will find the way to a positive material economy of abundance and a culture of peace.<br />
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More specifically, Vaughan theorizes, providing convincing evidence from recent infant psychology (Braten, Meltzoff, Trevarthen and others), that children are born prosocial and they elicit interaction with motherer (whether female or male, mother, father, sibling or aunt). This challenges the widely-spread previous claim regarding infants believed by Freud and Piaget and Skinner to be passive and solipsistic.<br />
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Language, by repeating mothering at another level, maintains the altercentric giving/receiving capacity for children who later engage in the many variations on mothering that make up social life. By re-enacting the maternal model in language, people’s unilateral gift capacity is maintained after childhood, ready to be used in their own practice of mothering. Thus language would have a selective advantage in that more of the children of speaking mothers would survive, grow up and have children who would survive. Language functions as a kind of refrigerator, storing the altercentric nurturing capacity in the child as s:he becomes an adult, keeping it fresh for later use. Thus contrary to the commonplace ideas of the maternal instinct and the ‘language instinct’ (Pinker 1995), verbal giving as a social transposition of mothering, would function to offset the lack of maternal instinct, especially after the initial hormonal drives of the birth mother are terminated. Vaughan replaces he and she by s:he to draw attention, on the level of the word-gift itself, to the nurturing logic of maternal nipples, reflected now in the gender-inclusive pronoun. <br />
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Vaughan’s theory of giving has radical positive consequences for social change and the demise of the nefarious logic of exchange. Giving is not moral or ethical, but simply the normal propensity of humans to create bonds and ensure collective survival. Receiving likewise is freed of any false projections of shame, dependency or debt as receiving is simply the required natural correspondent of giving as human capacity. Relationships of giving have maternal nurturance as their root but are repeated on all levels from language to communication and ecosocially sustainable economics. Quid pro quo exchange, in contrast, denies the mother while abusing women’s and other groups’ gifts to make profit and benefit the ego. <br />
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Vaughan’s contribution is remarkable also in taking on the sociological and anthropological studies on the Gift from Mauss to Derrida, Bataille and Bourdieu, revealing the extent to which they fail to see and consider the obvious: maternal giving. Vaughan’s book deserves to be required reading also in this field as it masterfully exposes the lacunae and masculated biases of the “mauss traps”. Vaughan’s book merits to be placed in the lineage of the queen bees of women’s studies from Helene Cixous (also a theorist of the Gift), Luce Irigaray, Nel Noddings, Judith Butler and Monique Wittig to name just a few theorists who have radically altered our conceptions of gender and power. Her courageous, far-reaching acts of Gift giving to bring about social change make her theories all the more convincing. She walks her talk and rolemodels gift circulation through the foundations and networks she has founded in North America and Europe. <br />
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She does not for all that idealize charity but the importance of the fact that mothers give unilaterally as a precondition for the infant’s survival. Giving here is not tied with being good but with being human, recognizing that humans cannot survive without giving. Her radical message to the men’s and women’s movement is this: the norm of the human must change, men and women need to adopt the maternal logic as their common humanity, or else the very planet will be destroyed. <br />
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Vaughan discusses the particular capacity of the gifts in language to be expanded and generalized, functioning also when we use it for nurturing each other individually and collectively and when we care for Mother Nature. Even though our society is going mad, we maintain our capacity for altercentrism intact through language. On the other hand Vaughan sees money as a drastically altered rematerialized word-gift, which is used to mediate relations of distrust and not-giving. Money broadcasts a figure of one over many which has merged with one over many patriarchal standards. This creates the patriarchal capitalist economy, which is motivated by the false masculated drives of competition, accumulation, domination and the need to be the standard, the one at the top.<br />
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Vaughan’s book is a gift also for social change activists. After the highly sophisticated theoretical part, it includes concrete suggestions for gift work. Among the most important of Vaughan’s insights are that the gift paradigm allows us to see mothering as economic, and communication as turntaking unilateral gift giving. Furthermore, by positing the mother¨child dyad as involving two creative, active parties, she changes our perspective on where language comes into being. Language is a satisfaction of cognitive and communicatory needs and serves as the metaform on which all relations are based to be functional and life-promoting. Anyone who buys into the neoliberal view of the human as an autonomous, atomistic, competitive and individualistic creature alienated from Nature and the realm of mothers would do well to consider Vaughan’s sobering, rational and mind-lifting alternative, homo donans. <br />
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Dr. Kaarina Kailo is a municipal councillor in Finland is a former professor/associate professor of Women's Studies (Oulu University, Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Montreal). She has published extensively on the gift economy and gift imaginary and a wide range of other gender studies topics (www.kaarinakailo.info). Her main research covers postcolonial perspectives on the Sami, Finno-Ugric deities and folklore, the bear ceremonial, gendered violence and healing, the gender impact of globalization and the Finnish welfare state.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-35865772319236743602012-07-29T22:29:00.000-07:002012-07-29T22:29:45.531-07:00Living my Life, by Emma Goldman<i>"<i><b>Living my Life</b><i></i></i> by Emma Goldman (1869-1940) is a work begging for a review by someone knowledgeable in the history of the workers' uprisings of the late 19th and early 20th century and the anarchist and socialist movements in the United States," writes Jo Ellen Hirsch. Hirsch is not such an historian, but she is an avid reader, and she has made her comments available to this blog: </i><br />
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Although I was not familiar with the many persons and events Goldman described, I was struck by her feminist perspective. Here are some of my observations - based on the first volume of this two volume work.<br />
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1) EG was Russian - and Russian culture just wasn't as sexually uptight as that of the US (my favorite Russian ruler being Catherine the Great)<br />
2) She had a uterine ailment which she was told would keep her from getting pregnant so she chose not to have it fixed<br />
3) She really was torn as she got a little older between domestic life and her career<br />
4) Having gone abroad to train as a nurse and working as a midwife she had a good grasp of what too many childbirths can do and advocated for birth control (and would have liked to advocate for abortion)<br />
5) She resented the way women were treated in the anarchist movement in the US<br />
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Regarding the history of the period, it's easier to understand EG's anarchism knowing how much she was inspired by indignation over the Haymarket affair (7 anarchists were sentenced to death over a bombing that none of them had been responsible for - the 3 that weren't actually killed were subsequently pardoned). Also the government went to rather ridiculous lengths in preventing anarchists from meeting and speaking. She remarked how much more free speech there was under various monarchies.<br />
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"Red Emma" was demonized and persecuted, at one point even denied lawful entry back into the United States. It is refreshing to hear her story in her own voice.<br />
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<i>Living My Life</i> (in two volumes) was reissued in 2011 by Penguin Classics.<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-48855514191265099962012-05-24T09:41:00.000-07:002012-05-24T09:49:28.730-07:00The Descent of Religion: Its evolution from nurturing to bullying...and back!<b>Cultural Motherhood: Nurturing Human Maturation as a Way of Life</b><br />
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A talk presented by Frieda Werden, at Women's Worlds, Ottawa, July 7, 2011, on a panel titled <a href="http://gift-economy.com/articlesAndEssays/womenworldindex.html">Shifting the Paradigm to a Maternal Gift Economy</a> <br />
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Liz Carr-Harris, was a woman I knew slightly. She spent a lot of time homesteading in the wilderness in northern BC, and she spent most of her time up there reading. She had a master’s degree in experimental psychology, but her strongest interests became archaeology and evolutionary science. Around 2002 she started writing a book based on all she had read and absorbed, and that book just came out. It’s called The Descent of Religion: Its evolution from nurturing to bullying...and back!<br />
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Unfortunately, Liz died a few months ago and never got to see her book in print. My partner volunteered me to Liz’s partner, as a proofreader for the book, so I had to read every word. I thought it would be a chore, but it was gripping!<br />
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She writes a story that started hundreds of millions of years ago with unicellular life - some of which evolved into something more complicated. And the more complicated a life form got, the more problems it had to try to solve. And the more it solved problems, the more complicated the organism got and then the more new problems it needed to solve, in order to survive, and to reproduce and to continue.<br />
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One of the first really major complications was the division into two sexes; and the next wrinkle on that was an unequal division of labour between the sexes. By the time some life forms developed gestation in a maternal womb , the females were starting to need some help just to eat and be safe during a vulnerable time, so social grouping became really important. <br />
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Well, having so much family around to coordinate meant there had to be some communication between members of the group, and furthermore some ways of keeping behaviours on the useful side. And the more learning these organisms needed to continue to live, the more brain development they needed. <br />
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Well, once the brains reached a certain size, it became impossible for a female to give birth to a fully-developed organism; and thus, infancy and childhood started to be a solution, and to also cause their own problems.<br />
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I won’t spoil the story by telling you how patriarchy came to be invented and take over the gifts from highly developed matrifocal and child-oriented societies. But I will tell you that Liz-Carr-Harris was convinced, based on humans’ whole evolutionary experience, that patriarchy is an aberration that’s against our nature, and so it really cannot last. I found that very refreshing!<br />
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But, back to the problem of the increasingly slow maturation of the life form that we now call homo sapiens - or, the new preferred term, homo donans. [smile] We don’t just pop out of the womb like kittens, ready in a few months to begin assuming adult roles. We have really big brains that require a lot of software development - and I mean, really soft - maybe we should call it “squishy ware.” <br />
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What do we do with all that squishy ware? We learn. And as we learn, we create structures and understandings, we lay down pathways for future activities and future thoughts. As the great playwright Carolyn Gage says in one of her Lesbian Tent Revival sermons, when our human synapses get activated, then “What fires together, wires together.” We have experiences, both physical and virtual, and we learn.<br />
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Anyone who has ever spent time with an infant learns pretty quickly that learning is the most powerful human drive. <br />
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There’s a fabulous short novel by the American author Tillie Olsen, it’s called Yonnondio: From the Thirties. It’s a record of life under crushing poverty - but on the last page, the baby stands up at the table and triumphantly demonstrates its learning: “I can do!”<br />
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This isn’t memorized learning. It’s learning about how to interact with the environment, how to use oneself, how to understand action and reaction, and how to make things happen. There are so many places you can go with a will to learn like that. <br />
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My mother is a music teacher. She is 85 years old, and still teaching music, because she loves the process of teaching people how to use themselves - their voices, their breath, their fingers, their energy and their minds - in a process that both allows them to be expressive and embeds them in a culture of cooperation, precision, persistence, listening, pleasure-giving, and respect. She doesn’t think it’s any less rewarding to teach an elderly woman with Parkinson’s how to sing without quavering than to teach musical theatre techniques to a budding young star. What she loves most is not their perfection, but their growth. It makes her very happy to see the successful experience of music carry over into other parts of their lives.<br />
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I visited my mother for a long time at the end of May. She is newly widowed, but she does have many friendships and many projects in the community, mostly around music. She still marvels that she never succeeded in interesting me in studying music; but what I did learn from her is the recognition, and some of the skill, of doing cultural mothering.<br />
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Cultural Mothering is done in all kinds of settings. I get to do it at the campus and community radio station where I show people how to use radio to explore their communities and the world, and how to deal lovingly with others and share their enthusiasms with others. My partner and other women do it as frontline workers at the rape relief and women’s shelter. They listen intelligently and compassionately; they offer knowledge about options and often material help; sometimes they say, “All right; but let this be the worst day of your life; I know you will find the strength in yourself not to be crushed by this, and to move on.”<br />
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Often cultural mothering is something done just in passing. You throw a toonie in a busker’s violin case and you make the OK sign with your fingers and smile. You share valuable informative links with your friends on Facebook . [pause for laughter]. You strike up a respectful conversation with someone on a bus whom other people are ignoring or looking askance at, and get them to enjoying experiencing themselves again as an interesting and knowledgeable person, while the people around change their idea of what they see.<br />
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You do this stuff all the time; you wouldn’t be here at this session if you didn’t, I think.<br />
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This is the daily stuff of the gift economy: consciously and unconsciously, we are teaching each other. And, making use of what we’ve been taught - by learning, growing, and maturing. We apply ourselves to the good of our community and environment, through Cultural Motherhood.<br />
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Is this enough?<br />
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It is possible to teach, or let us say to inculcate, ideas and experiences that are harmful. The pride and joy of a young soldier learning to kill people can be badly misplaced. The pseudo-learning of a lot of mass entertainment will do little or nothing for the survival of community. Bad attitudes of the uncomfortable, selfish and unfulfilled do proliferate and reproduce themselves.<br />
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But Cultural Mothering is offering genuine gifts. As Genevieve Vaughan says, it’s only a gift if the receiver can use it. When you get a gift that you can receive with your body, your spirit, and your way of life, that is a gift that will keep on giving. Cultural Mothering is constructive love. It’s in our DNA. It’s what we evolved for. It’s the basis of our survival and our joy. What we’re up against is not as strong as that!<br />
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This book is available only through Amazon.com or Amazon.ca <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/The-Descent-Religion-Evolution-Bullying/dp/0986729205">http://www.amazon.ca/The-Descent-Religion-Evolution-Bullying/dp/0986729205</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-90333479459706324932011-12-16T20:42:00.000-08:002011-12-16T20:47:24.693-08:00Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC"Women Were In It From the Beginning"<br />Guest review by Jo Freeman (full review with additional links at <a href="http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/book-review-hands-on-the-plow">http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/book-review-hands-on-the-plow</a><br /> <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br />by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young and Dorothy M. Zellner,<br />Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010, 616 pp.<br /> <br />Of all the Sixties civil rights organizations, the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee was the one which most inspired young people all over the country. SNCC – pronounced snick – grew out of the sit-ins that started in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, and rapidly spread throughout the South to protest race discrimination.<br /> <br />Women were in it from the beginning. Ella Baker, an experienced activist in her fifties, had had a heavy taste of male chauvinism in her three years with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When she invited the student protestors to come together at her alma mater, Shaw University, in April, to co-ordinate their actions, she did not want them to follow the same path.<br /> <br />During the next few years SNCC expanded from protesting segregation to organizing communities. Staff went farm to farm and door to door persuading some of the most oppressed people in the U.S. that the time had come to throw off their shackles. For this they were beaten, jailed, and sometimes killed. The risks they took created a camaraderie which has remained to this day.<br /> <br />In this book 52 women who worked in SNCC in the 1960s tell their stories. They come from many walks of life: black and white, North and South, farm and city. They organized in the field and worked in the office. They demonstrated in the streets and went to jail. Some came and went, some stayed for years. Their stories flesh out a civil rights history which has emphasized the heroics of men.<br /> <br />Those who contributed to this book chose what to write about. The editors organized their recollections into ten sections, each with a preface. Geography and chronology roughly structure the book, but only roughly.<br /> <br />While the common theme is that all the authors are women, this is not a book about women. We don’t learn much about women as a group and only a little about them compared to men – not even the ratio of males to females, or the gender dimensions of work. There is no discussion of "the role of women in SNCC" or any attempt at feminist analysis. It is, as the subtitle says, accounts by women in SNCC.<br />Nonetheless, there are enough paragraphs on women to fill about six of the 616 pages.<br /> <br />Women were a major presence in the local communities in which SNCC worked. One of them, Victoria Gray Adams of Hattiesburg,* Mississippi, wrote that "Women were out front as a survival tactic. Men could not function in high-visibility, high-profile roles where we come from, because they would be plucked off.... The white folks didn’t see the women as that much of a threat.... They didn’t know the power of women, especially black women."<br /> <br />Annie Pearl Avery of Birmingham,** Alabama, writes: "In the South, black women were more able to exercise their rightful privileges than black men. On SNCC projects there was sexism toward women, because this was a way of life for all women. Sometimes I felt limited because we weren’t allowed to drive the cars.... The male chauvinism was there, but I don’t think it was intentional. It wasn’t as dominant in SNCC as it was in SCLC, which Miss Baker told us about."<br /> <br />Historians see SNCC as a seedbed of the women’s liberation movement, but the women in this book remember SNCC as a nurturing family which taught them skills and gave them a breadth of experience that they had not found elsewhere. "[W]orking with SNCC was an empowering and egalitarian experience." No one has memories of being demeaned and only a few of being restricted in any way because of their sex. One wishes they could compare their experiences to those of SNCC men to see if there was any difference.<br /> <br />For example, Dottie Zellner writes that when she first met Jim Forman, executive director of SNCC, he asked her "Can you type?" Not in this book is the question Forman first asked of Julian Bond, which was "What can you do?" (I heard Bond tell that story at Forman’s memorial service). At the time, the different assumptions about male and female capabilities captured in these different questions was so embedded in the culture that no one questioned them, and, years later, apparently they still don’t. Instead Dottie recounts that Forman’s "greatest gift was the ability to immediately match each person’s skills to the organization’s needs."<br /> <br />Forman put Bond in charge of SNCC communications. After Dottie (not yet married to Zellner) earned her stripes as a typist, Forman realized that she could also write and let her assist Bond. Indeed Forman assigned several women to the communications office, with the result that this book has excellent descriptions of how SNCC got the word out to the press about what the movement was doing.<br /> <br />The belief that the women’s liberation movement was rooted in SNCC dates from a paper on "Women in the movement" presented at a SNCC conference in the fall of 1964. One of 30 to 40 papers submitted for discussion, it was authored anonymously. Two of the authors – Mary King and Casey Hayden – later became known when they published a somewhat different version. Two more – Elaine DeLott Baker and Emmie Schrader Adams – acknowledge their authorship in this book. According to the editors, the women who submitted this paper were all white, though we don’t know how many there were.<br /> <br />The paper began with a list of "gender inequalities ... all concerning black women," derived from observation and informal discussions among women after several "demonstrated in the office, protesting the expectation that women would always perform certain secretarial tasks." Hayden and Adams insist that the paper really wasn’t about women in SNCC but about the larger culture. "The openness of SNCC, ... the invitation to critique the organization ... provided the arena."<br /> <br />The abundance of first-person stories make this a very valuable book from which future historians of the civil rights movement will learn much. But someone still needs to explain what was it about SNCC that fostered a feminist perspective.<br />___________________<br />* The current Mayor of Hattiesburg is Johnny Dupree, an African-American who was also the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of Mississippi in 2011. He received 39 percent of the vote. A prior poll showed that there was a 3 percent gender gap, with women favoring Dupree. Blacks favored Dupree by a ratio of four to one.<br />** Birmingham has only had black mayors since 1979. All were male except for Carole<br />Smitherman who was Acting Mayor for two months in 2009.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-88649383481824188572011-11-11T21:05:00.000-08:002011-11-11T21:53:46.339-08:00Larry's Party, by Carol Shields<span style="font-weight:bold;">Larry's Party<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span>, by Carol Shields (Random House first Canadian edition, 1997, 339 pp.)<br /><br />Carol Shields (1935-2003) is a prominent member of the canon of Canadian writers. Although she is originally from the US and once won a Pulitzer prize (for <span style="font-style:italic;">The Stone Diaries</span>), I had never heard of her until I moved to Canada. After finding out about her, I happened to read something of hers that I didn't care for, and so a second book of hers, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Box Garden</span>, languished on my dresser unread for several years until I finally got around to giving it a try. I thought it was fairly original and nicely written, so I looked for something else by Shields in the public library, and the only thing they had on the shelf that day was <span style="font-weight:bold;">Larry's Party<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span>.<br /><br />A good book is always better, I'd say, if you expect nothing much of it in advance, so I don't want to overpraise it. Not much that is exciting happens, really, in <span style="font-style:italic;">Larry's Party</span>. It covers twenty years of a man's life, from his twenties to his forties, 1977 to 1997; and during that time Larry learns a pretty interesting profession, marries twice, has one child, gets sick and recovers, lives in two countries, and slowly goes through a process of maturing.<br /><br />What makes the book especially exciting to me, really, is its apparently unique structure. It's not chronological internally, and yet its overall motion is a chronology. At one point, Larry has a body scan for medical reasons, and the way the scan slices the body into segments seems to be related to the way Shields slices Larry into different views that can be put together to make a whole picture of the man.<br /><br />Each chapter is focused on a specific aspect of Larry, and similar events are repeated in different chapters, through the lens of this different focus. The fifteen chapters include Larry's Love, 1978; Larry's folks, 1980; Larry's Work, 1981; Larry's Words, 1983; Larry's Penis, 1986; Larry's Search for the Wonderful and Good, 1992; Larry's Threads, 1993-4; Larry's Living Tissues, 1996.... By the end of the book, we know Larry quite intimately, as a person, similarly complex to ourselves. <br /><br />There's a story about Shaw, that he was asked how he wrote such interesting women characters. He is said to have replied: "I imagine that a woman is a person like myself, and that is how the trick is done." In <span style="font-style:italic;">Larry's Party</span>, Shields has reversed that gaze. In the last scene, the women in Larry's life have quite a discussion about gender and the role of men, which at this point we can consider from inside the persona of a pretty decent man, who is able to hear it without discomfort.<br /><br />In my experience it is fairly rare for a novel to have an original structure that is both very evident and very functional. The great exemplar that comes to mind is Doris Lessing's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Golden Notebook</span>. Larry's Party is nothing so monumental, but it stands out as being constructed with mastery of the craft. The research Shields did into garden mazes is also very gratifying.<br /><br />-FWUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-64848048842793129582011-09-10T06:04:00.000-07:002011-09-10T06:08:07.590-07:00Ms. Magazine Library<a href="https://www.facebook.com/wingsradio#!/media/set/?set=a.10150312289568540.360163.15914543539&type=1">https://www.facebook.com/wingsradio#!/media/set/?set=a.10150312289568540.360163.15914543539&type=1</a><br /><br />Ms. Magazine is re-organizing its library. The pictures show quite a few covers of books a lot of us must have read.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-69709593172411688632011-05-08T21:24:00.000-07:002011-05-08T21:36:13.636-07:00CowCow by Susan Hawthorne (Spinifex 2011), 166 pages, trade paperback<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SHY4eJF6YZk/TcdvKrKaGWI/AAAAAAAAASs/JEyR-jGsPhE/s1600/cow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 82px; height: 110px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SHY4eJF6YZk/TcdvKrKaGWI/AAAAAAAAASs/JEyR-jGsPhE/s400/cow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5604570490461624674" /></a>Susan sent me a copy of <span style="font-style:italic;">Cow</span> and I find it fascinating but difficult to explain. There are all these different cows with different names of goddesses and mythical and historical figures, references I vaguely recognize in many cases, but they also have viewpoints and voices that are credible as those of cows in some ways, and as tale-tellers in others. There are a few marginal notes, which are great, but if there were as many marginal notes as I really needed, they would be longer than the poems. That said, the stories and scenes in the poems seemed to just whisk me along through the book even though I didn't know how I got there exactly or where we were going. It has an airy quality, like being out in a meadow or riding on a magic carpet or something. I recommend the trip.<br /><br />Here's a review Susan linked to from her FaceBook page, written by someone who has gotten a bit more handle on the structure than I:<br /><br /><a href="http://medusacoils.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-cow-by-susan-hawthorne.html">http://medusacoils.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-cow-by-susan-hawthorne.html</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-26984956440878490632011-02-28T16:16:00.000-08:002011-02-28T16:33:44.704-08:00Letters from Egypt<span style="font-style:italic;">This is a guest review of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Letters from Egypt</span> by Lucy Duff Gordon. This book has gone through many editions since it was first printed in 1865. The most recent edition is a <a href="http://www.virago.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780860684558&sf1=keyword&st1=letters+from+egypt&y=7&sort=sort_date%2Fd&x=22&m=1&dc=1">paperback released by Virago Press in 2007</a>. Virago is a publisher specifically for books written by women. There is also an <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17816">online version</a> for e-readers. Here, by permission from the blog <a href="http://thegreatreturning.org/content/?p=217">Isis Unveiled</a>, is Leona Graham's review. - FW</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Isis Unveiled: Letters from Egypt, The Freedom March & The Shared Pain of Revolution</span><br /><br />by Leona Graham on 28 February, 2011 (in Anthropocene Diary)<br /><br />Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt (1st edition, 1865) reveal a woman in love with her adopted country, an Egypt that has changed in many ways since the 1860′s when she was writing to her husband Alick (Sir Alexander Duff Gordon) and her mother, Sarah Austin. In many others, it is the same, ancient land where injustice has reigned for centuries. The impact of Lucie’s letters, even after 146 years, is still profound. The first batch were reprinted three times in the first year of their publication (1865). Two more editions were published in 1875 and 1902, and a centenary edition in 1969. My (appropriately) well-worn ‘Virago Travellers’ copy is a 1986 reprint of the 1983 publication. The Letters‘ long-lasting, continuing popularity is justified, for despite my initial skepticism (having been put off by Frank’s biography and a fictional account of Lucie’s English lady’s maid Sally, Mistress of Nothing) because of her ‘upper class point of view’, I quite soon put aside my judgments of Lucie’s class and privilege as I drank in her absolute love of Egypt and its suffering people. The Egypt of Tuesday, November 11, 1862 (the date of the first letter in the 1983 edition) is one under the Pashas’ malign power. Egypt was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. The first ‘modern’ viceroy of Egypt was Muhammad Ali, followed by Said and then, Ali’s nephew Ismail (from 1863). British rule was yet to come; in fact, Lucie avers that many Egyptians (of several classes) were asking for British intervention, to help them out of their desperate plight.<br /><br />Lucie’s picture of the brutal misery of the people, over taxed and forced into labor (the corvee--building the Suez Canal and other projects at the whim of the Pasha) is painful, even now, or especially now, in light of recent events and the peoples’ suffering under the Mubarak dictatorship. Then the French were hated as they were the financiers and builders of the canal. In her ‘new’ 1983 Introduction to the Letters, (the original introduction that of the famous English doyen of letters and family friend, George Meredith), Sarah Searight refers to the ‘unveiling of modern Egypt’ (to ‘the west’) as stemming from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798; the accompanying French artist Dominique Vivant Denon provided extraordinary images; access to Egypt was largely unavailable till then due to the ‘prevailing anarchy’ of the Ottoman Empire.<br /><br />I leave you to discover the fascinating details of Lucie’s journeys up and down the Nile, her stays in Luxor where she endeared the people to her by becoming their healer, her trials and tribulations, and her special devotion to her servant, Omar, the paramour of Sally (by whom she became pregnant), whose dismissal and disappearance is not remarked on; one supposes the daughter (Janet Ross) edited out any (?) references to the ‘scandal’.<br /><br />Lucie’s Egyptian adventures all came about because she was forced to travel abroad to a warm country (in truth, a very hot one) to relieve the symptoms of TB, made worse by wet and cold British weather. It now seems an accident of sweet fate that she found herself and gained literary fame through her love of Egypt and its people. In today’s Egypt, she would may have had to evacuate, like my resident pal finally had to–but today she returns on the first flight back to Luxor, to the land she too has fallen in love with, that she has adopted and it, her. During the time of her brief exile we have seen events unfold, the powerful virus of revolution spread–The Freedom March across North Africa and into the Gulf states–and beyond, strangely reflected by the battle in Wisconsin USA to hold onto western democratic rights (“Our turn will come”, my husband says, ominously), to gather as a body to demand workers’ rights over capitalistic chicanery by big, brutal moneyed forces. We call these gatherings ‘unions’. The Misguided Right, funded by predatory corporations and bad governments, has attempted to turn the word ‘union’ into a bad word.<br /><br />Words are such powerful tools; we have to constantly be on our guard to protect them, and those who dare to speak them. Free speech has been won at great cost by our ancestors; it is our duty to protect what they lived and in many cases, died for.<br /><br />Each day, as The Freedom March has proceeded across North Africa and our TV and computer screens, I have been viscerally impacted. When they were battling for their rights in Tahrir Square in Cairo, I felt as if I were there with them, as a woman, beside the other women. In Libya, where I have never visited, it was at first harder to envision myself (unlike Tunisia and Egypt where I have spent time) and thus the despair, rage and pain I felt seemed at first not to be able to find a place to concretely ‘link to’. And then suddenly it happened: I was inside the houses with the women (there have been few images of women seen outside in the crowds, but some have been); I was one of them too, as they bravely opened their doors to let in and look after wounded strangers, the ‘pro-democracy protesters’, boys and men who could be their fathers, brothers, sons. And sometimes I went out with them, carefully. Many householders had (according to some reports) been gathering supplies, as they foresaw some of what was to come with the Egyptian uprising and revolution. They were somewhat prepared. Their sacrifice, both men and women, adults and children, is great. The fear is palpable; the determination even greater. They speak of a revolution that is about honour, the honour of the individual’s role in the state, of remaking the state with the blood and bodies and minds of the protesters. As their mangled bodies pile up in hospitals and morgues, are buried in hasty graves, some dug by Gaddafi forces to hide massacres, our common sense of Power to the People takes on a new note of urgency. And finally in the last few days and hours, ‘the international community’ through the United Nations has started to make its voice heard–our unified planetary human voice in fact as represented by the UN, an institution that many retrograde people (especially in the USA) have been trying to diminish and even destroy. Individual states have also raised their voices and imposed sanctions that hopefully will curtail the remains of the Gaddafi regime (and not the Libyan people at large). We can only hope that these diehards finally will see the writing on the wall and disperse, leaving Gaddafi and his ever declining circle of thugs isolated and ultimately available for the international justice for war crimes. That China and Russia (and Iran, as it was unanimous) also agreed to the UN statement is hypocritical but rather useful for future finger-pointing when their own peoples demand change.<br /><br />The shared pain so many of us feel with regard to the uprisings and revolutions for democracy in Tunisia and Egypt (still very much ‘a work in process’ as we’ve seen in the last few days) and now Libya, as well as Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and most recently Oman, is salutary. For many of us in the ‘democratic west’, our heroic ancestors won the rights of democracy long ago; we are watching the future heroic ancestors for those in North Africa and the Gulf States (and beyond). We don’t honour our ancestors sufficiently for the deeds of bringing us freedom from despotic rulers and regimes. By honouring the present democracy freedom fighters (and they all avow that aim for a civil society, one with democratic institutions) we help to rectify our remissness as it it brings the shock of recognition: it brings the world closer, and in particular it brings those of differing cultures and religions, especially Christians and Muslims, closer. Those on the far right (and far left although the latter doesn’t really exist any more in the west) who try to undermine democratic human rights, who for the sake of personal and corporate greed try to wrest those rights from ‘we the people’ (selling off public utilities and woodlands to the highest bidder for example) or want to have the advantage of crimepetitive capitalism (as my cousin Gary calls it) need to think again, look back in respect and renew their commitment to what makes life ‘in the west’ free–relatively speaking that is. There’s a level at which such a selfish citizen or entity is a little Ben Ali, Mubarak or Gaddafi: that member ‘of the public’ who wants the advantages that democratic taxation gives without paying for them or lazy types who want it all without putting in honest labour to deserve them; they end up being the same crazy selfish entity. The ‘democratic body politic’ will survive despite a certain number of aberrants, but when the boat tips with too many on board, we could drown in the open seas of crass materialism, gross, untrammeled uncontrolled capitalism and selfishness, so we’d best rethink nasty prejudices, all sides, as we watch the Freedom March across North Africa.<br /><br />May the March proceed as the Ides of March approach….<br /><br />Caesar, then Anthony after him will fall, when and who and what will replace them? Another tyrant like Augustus? Or a new body politic informed with wisdom born of the pain of revolution?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-53119904930754267272011-02-21T09:38:00.000-08:002011-02-21T09:41:12.463-08:00Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960sThanks to Jo Freeman for sharing her many interesting feminist book reviews. Please also follow her columns at <a href="http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/strange-stirring">SeniorWomen Web</a> - Frieda<br /><br />Betty Friedan’s Book<br /><br /> by Jo Freeman<br /><br />A review of<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Strange Stirring:<br />The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s</span><br />by Stephanie Coontz<br />Basic Books, 2011, xxiii, 222<br /><br /> When Coontz’ editor asked her to write about the impact of The Feminine Mystique she sat down to re-read a book she thought she knew well, but in fact, had never read. She had heard and read so much about it over the years, that she had absorbed its message without having read it at all.<br /><br /> It was her mother who told Coontz, a child of the Sixties, about the 1963 book, and her mother’s generation that had been excited by it. When Coontz assigned it to her own students, they found it “boring and dated.” So much had changed since 1963, that the book that stirred a generation of women didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.<br /><br /> Her students had no idea how much their grandmothers had to learn about their own unhappiness, let alone why they had to learn it. So Coontz set out to write about a generation of intelligent, well-educated women who had been marginalized by their own society. She wanted to understand how being confined to the home had undermined their sense of self and self-worth, until Friedan told them about “the problem that has no name.”<br /><br /> She began by reading the numerous letters Friedan received after publication of her book, and some that Friedan wrote herself. She also went through oral histories and did interviews of women who had read and been moved by the book. The bulk of her book is based on this research, as she relates the stories of women whose lives were changed by reading Friedan’s book. Some of them thought that Friedan had literally saved their lives.<br /><br /> The women who paid the “price of privilege” were mostly white and middle-class, but Coontz devotes a chapter to African-American and working class women. She criticizes Friedan for ignoring the African-American experience, but acknowledges that it was a different experience. She points out that overall, black women faced different problems and had different priorities; only a few found that Friedan’s book had something to say to them.<br /><br /> Working class women were also left out of the book; Coontz reviews the many studies done on such women to explain why. Essentially, less education led to lower expectations and lower expectations led to greater satisfaction with what they had. The college-educated women that Friedan wrote for – and about – expected more out of life; society’s insistence that such expectations were unhealthy created its own social pathology.<br /><br /> Betty Friedan’s book was successful because it explained something than needed explaining, and did so in compelling language. “The book was a journalistic tour de force,” Coontz, concludes, “combining scholarship, investigative reporting, and a compelling personal voice.” It was also well promoted by its publisher.<br /><br /> The book’s success generated many myths, some fostered by right-wingers and some by Friedan herself. Among these, that Fridan was herself “just another unhappy housewife” when in fact she was a successful free-lance writer, who got her start working for labor and left-wing publications. Coontz argues that Friedan hid her past in order to avoid being discredited by professional anti-communists looking for red influence behind every dissident idea.<br /><br /> While The Feminine Mystique certainly didn’t jump-start the women’s movement, it was able to ride the wave of female discontent that jelled into organizational protest in the mid-1960s. The book’s success and Friedan’s celebrity made it easier for the nascent movement to attract press attention and thus attract members. The movement would have happened without Betty Friedan’s book, but it happened faster with it. For that Coontz and every other feminist is grateful.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />_______________________________________________<br />JoFreeman mailing list<br />JoFreeman@jofreeman.com<br /><a href="http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/jofreeman">http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/jofreeman</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-18139644927297077172011-02-03T22:12:00.000-08:002011-02-03T22:13:33.588-08:00You Came Here to Die, Didn’t You? Registering Black Voters One Soul at a Time, South Carolina, 1965The Second Freedom Summer<br /><br /> By Jo Freeman<br /><br />A review of<br />You Came Here to Die, Didn’t You?<br />Registering Black Voters One Soul at a Time, South Carolina, 1965<br />by Sherie Holbrook Labedis<br />Roseville, CA: Smokey Hill Books, 2011, xviii, 187 pp.<br />You can buy this book directly from the author, through her webpage at <a href="You Came Here to Die, Didn’t You? Registering Black Voters One Soul at a Time, South Carolina, 1965">www.sherielabedis.com</a>.<br /><br /> Most people have heard of Freedom Summer, when a few hundred mostly white college students went to Mississippi in 1964 to try to break white opposition to local blacks becoming voters, to run freedom schools, and generally to defy Southern racial practices.<br /><br /> Few know that there was a second freedom summer in 1965. The first Freedom Summer was run by a confederation of civil rights organizations, though SNCC took the lead. The organizations went their separate ways in 1965, dividing up the states so they didn’t overlap or compete.<br /><br /> The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, best known as Dr. King’s organization, brought between three and four hundred young people to six Southern states for a project called SCOPE – Southern Community Organization for Political Education. Expecting the Voting Rights Act to pass in June, its purpose was to get local blacks registered to vote.<br /><br /> However, the VRA didn’t become law until August 6, so the young volunteers had to deal with numerous county boards of registrars, some more willing than others to process long lines of aspiring voters, and various state laws limiting who could register.<br /><br /> Sherie Holbrook was in her freshman year at Berkeley when the march on Selma caught her attention (and that of a lot of others). She signed up with SCOPE and in June went from Berkeley, California, to Berkeley County, South Carolina. Her book is about that summer, based on a journal she kept, her memories, interviews with people she worked with, and photographs.<br /><br /> It was like going to a foreign country. Local blacks spoke a Gullah dialect – a patois of English and West African languages handed down over time – which she didn’t understand. She hadn’t known any black people in the rural California town she was raised in and had never seen the poverty and sheer neglect of people’s needs that she saw in South Carolina.<br /><br /> There were lots of new experiences she had to adjust to: sharing a bed, eating fatback, being stared at as she walked down the street, children who wanted to feel her blond hair, watching a hog killed for dinner, and white Southern hostility.<br /><br /> Being a civil rights worker sounds glamorous, but it’s mostly drudgery punctuated by fear. Most days were rather routine – going door to door in oppressive heat and humidity talking to people “one soul at a time.”<br /><br /> Many people were afraid to register; standing in line at the courthouse is a public act; a list of registered voters is a public list. A lot were apathetic; they’d been told so long that voting wasn’t for them that registering just didn’t seem like something they needed to do. Some were illiterate and couldn’t meet the minimal requirements to register.<br /><br /> Then there’s the fear. The black elementary school down the block from the Freedom House where Sherie and her project workers lived was set on fire; a fire truck came but no water was available to put out the flames. Less than two weeks later, a black church only a little farther away was firebombed by two white men in a truck. The message was clear: GET OUT.<br /><br /> One day two different groups tried to integrate local eateries in the county seat. The one Sherie entered was immediately closed and everyone told to leave. As she drove off with her co-workers two cars followed and eventually ran her off of the road. The whites in those cars got out, smashed the windows of her car, dragged two black guys out of the project car and beat them up.<br /><br /> The other group at a different restaurant was ignored by the management when they occupied two tables, but not by the patrons, or one particular patron, who was big enough and strong enough to throw each of them out the door as they endeavored to stay non-violent. One white, female civil rights worker was thrown through the plate glass door, ripping open the skin of her thigh. At the local hospital the white doctor stitched her up, then yelled at her to get out and never come back.<br /><br /> It’s always easier to write about the causes of fear than every-day drudgery, and the author’s descriptions of these scares and others make her summer sound exciting – in both senses of the word. She does this as though she’s writing a novel; her account of these events is gripping. But in the long run it’s the drudge work that counts.<br /><br /> That drudge work produced some sweet moments. One that Sherie cherishes still was when Rebecca Crawford learned how to write her name. Another was taking 150 people to the courthouse to register to vote on the only registration day in July. Or when local blacks packed the courtroom to see that one of them got a fair trial, before being thrown out by the magistrate who didn’t want to be part of “a show.”<br /><br /> There were also some comic moments, such as when the FBI showed up to investigate the church burning, and the South Carolina police asked the project workers what they did to cause someone to burn down a church and a school. Or when the sheriff arranged for them to be served in one of the restaurants they had been thrown out of to avoid a threatened lawsuit.<br /><br /> At the end of the summer she left wondering if she had accomplished anything. The obvious success of taking several hundred people to be registered that summer was outweighed by her guilt over the church and school burnings. That summer had left a permanent impact on her life; what had it done for the people she worked with? These questions were on her mind when she returned to South Carolina a few years ago to talk to the people she had worked with (some of whom she had stayed in touch with over the years) and find out what they had done with their lives.<br /><br /> She came away reassured that the summer project had made a difference. At the very least it gave local blacks a sense of hope, a feeling that others cared about them, and a belief that change was possible. “Once we got the votin’ fever” one said, things just had to change.<br /><br /><br /><br />_______________________________________________<br />JoFreeman mailing list<br />JoFreeman@jofreeman.com<br /><a href="http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/jofreeman">http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/jofreeman</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-3599185756383574212010-12-06T11:18:00.000-08:002010-12-06T14:52:04.036-08:00She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Workerby Brigid O'Farrell, Cornell University Press, 2010, 304 pp.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TP1nd8T1HkI/AAAAAAAAASU/DnrBWtux-m8/s1600/ofarrell.she.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 131px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TP1nd8T1HkI/AAAAAAAAASU/DnrBWtux-m8/s400/ofarrell.she.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547704080093486658" /></a>On December 10, 2010, World Human Rights Day, the AFL-CIO is hosting an event at its headquarters in Washington DC to honour Eleanor Roosevelt. The speakers are Liz Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and Julie Kushner, director of Region 9A of the United Auto Workers, and, Brigid O'Farrell, the author of this book.<br /><br />Human Rights Day is an appropriate date because of Roosevelt's prominent and pivotal work in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, has now been <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/SearchByLang.aspx"><span style="font-weight:bold;">translated into 375 languages</span></a>, and counting. <br /><br />Especially pertinent to workers and the labour movement are these three articles of the Declaration:<br /><blockquote><br />Article 23<br /><br /> 1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.<br /> 2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.<br /> 3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.<br /> 4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests. <br /><br />Article 24<br /><br />Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.<br /><br />Article 25<br /><br /> 1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.<br /> 2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=eng">--from The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, official English translation.</a><br /></blockquote> <br /><br /><a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/chr/complaints.htm"><span style="font-weight:bold;">It is noteworthy that the recently created United Nations Human Rights Council is developing a method for reviewing and delivering opinions on human rights complaints on a regular basis.</span></a> <br /><br />According to the unions organizing the Friday, December 10, event, Eleanor Roosevelt "was born to privilege and married a U.S. President, but Eleanor Roosevelt was a committed, lifelong advocate for workers and a proud union member for more than 25 years. <span style="font-weight:bold;">She Was One of Us<span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span></span> reveals—for the first time—the story of our greatest First Lady’s deep ties to the American Labor movement."<br /><br />The Cornell University Press <a href="http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=6009"><span style="font-weight:bold;">webpage for the book</span></a> is more explicit about Roosevelt's union membership, in the AFL-CIO's Newspaper Guild. I have not yet seen the book, but here is the remainder of the description from the publisher's site:<br /><blockquote><br />Brigid O'Farrell follows Roosevelt—one of the most admired and, in her time, controversial women in the world—from the tenements of New York City to the White House, from local union halls to the convention floor of the AFL-CIO, from coal mines to political rallies to the United Nations.<br /><br />Roosevelt worked with activists around the world to develop a shared vision of labor rights as human rights, which are central to democracy. In her view, everyone had the right to a decent job, fair working conditions, a living wage, and a voice at work. She Was One of Us provides a fresh and compelling account of her activities on behalf of workers, her guiding principles, her circle of friends—including Rose Schneiderman of the Women's Trade Union League and the garment unions and Walter Reuther, "the most dangerous man in Detroit"—and her adversaries, such as the influential journalist Westbrook Pegler, who attacked her as a dilettante and her labor allies as "thugs and extortioners." As O'Farrell makes clear, Roosevelt was not afraid to take on opponents of workers' rights or to criticize labor leaders if they abused their power; she never wavered in her support for the rank and file.<br /><br />Today, union membership has declined to levels not seen since the Great Depression, and the silencing of American workers has contributed to rising inequality. In She Was One of Us, Eleanor Roosevelt's voice can once again be heard by those still working for social justice and human rights.</blockquote> <br /><br />This event and book came to my attention through the US <a href="http://www.womensorganizations.org/"><span style="font-weight:bold;">National Council of Women's Organizations</span></a>. Brigid O'Farrell is a member of NCWO, and she researched labor issues at NCWO and at the <a href="http://www.wrei.org/"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Women’s Research and Education Institute (WREI)</span></a>. She is now affiliated with the <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University.</span></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-17341106142945618472010-12-05T17:31:00.000-08:002010-12-05T20:08:16.261-08:00Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson's first ladiesby Kristie Miller.<br />Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010<br /><br />Guest review by Jo Freeman. This review has been reposted by permission of the author, from Senior Women's Web at <a href="http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/woodrow-wilson-s-women">http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/woodrow-wilson-s-women</a><br /><br /><br />Woodrow Wilson's Women<br /><br /> More than most men, Woodrow Wilson needed women. He needed their love, their support and their companionship. In the confines of his home, he surrounded himself with women. He had two wives (sequentially), one mistress, and three daughters.<br /><br /> Theirs is a complex story of love and politics. In this book, Ellen and Edith come alive as real persons and not just appendages to their famous husband, even though they eagerly took on the job of helpmate as their major role in life. The author tells their story in an engaging manner while opening a new window on the character of our 28th President and the entire Wilson presidency.<br /><br /> Born in Savannah, Georgia on May 15, 1860, Ellen Axson met Woodrow Wilson in Rome, Georgia when she was 23. A talented artist, she was convinced that no man was good enough for her. Both were the children of Presbyterian ministers with strong allegiances to the Confederacy, though her Southern roots were deeper.<br /><br /> Woodrow was on his way to an academic career. Ellen quickly set aside whatever ambitions she had to become a model faculty wife. She translated scholarly articles from German and digested other material to save him time. She studied home economics so she could better manage her household and entertain his colleagues. In her spare time she reared and home-schooled their daughters.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TPxgr2-SJ_I/AAAAAAAAASE/jeNEI6PGjso/s1600/Ellen%2BWilson.jpeg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 141px; height: 196px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TPxgr2-SJ_I/AAAAAAAAASE/jeNEI6PGjso/s320/Ellen%2BWilson.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547415147621001202" /></a><br /><br /> After Woodrow became President of Princeton University in 1902 her responsibilities increased. She had to entertain constantly, relieving her husband of a responsibility he did not like. She became his advisor on the intricacies of academic politics. All this was good training for her two years as wife of the Governor of New Jersey and then first lady. As Woodrow moved into electoral politics, she helped shape his ideas and write his speeches. Indeed many thought that she was the better politician of the two.<br /><br /> Woodrow and Ellen were a devoted couple, writing intimate and passionate letters to each other whenever they were apart more than a few days. This did not prevent him from establishing an intense friendship with Mary Allen Hulbert Peck, a married woman he met in Bermuda in 1907. Woodrow had been ordered to take a rest for his health; Ellen had stayed behind to care for an ill daughter. Wilson continued his relationship with Mary, writing and visiting her for years. Ellen was wounded, but the only change it made in their life was that she made more time for her own painting.<br /><br /> Ellen was just as ambitious for Woodrow as he was. She wanted to be the wife of a great man. When he became President she continued to be his sounding board and chief advisor, sitting in on meetings and helping with his correspondence. She also lent her name and prestige to various charitable endeavors in addition to her own projects, one of which was designing the White House rose garden.<br /><br /> Ellen died of kidney failure on August 6, 1914. Woodrow wept profusely; her death left him totally depressed and despondent. Friends wondered if he could carry on as President. Seven months later he found a balm for his pain.<br /><br /> Edith Bolling had also married at 23, to Norman Galt in 1896. Born in a small town in Virginia, her formal education was spotty as her family was large and her brothers got preference. She married the son of a jewelry store owner in Washington, D.C., and herself became the owner in 1908 after the men died. Her only child was born prematurely, living just three days.<br /><br /> Her route to the grieving widower was through Woodrow’s friend and personal physician, who was dating a friend of Edith’s. One contact led to another until Edith had her first dinner with Woodrow in the White House on March 23, 1915. Within a few weeks he had professed his love and was writing her daily.<br /><br /> They married on December 18, 1915, later than Woodrow wished but still close enough to Ellen’s death to provoke some unseemly gossip.<br /><br /> Before marrying Edith, Woodrow had to extricate himself from his relationship with Mary, who had divorced her husband in 1912. It’s unclear whether Woodrow was no longer emotionally attached to Mary at the time Ellen died, or whether he did not think she would make a suitable first lady.<br /><br /> Whatever the reason, he did not call her to his side, though she seems to have expected as much. After he became engaged to Edith, he sent Mary a “Dear John” letter. He also sent her several sizable checks as she was in financial straits. Despite rumors that Mary might publish some of Woodrow’s letters to her, there was no scandal.<br /><br /> Once married, Woodrow could seldom bear to be away from Edith, sharing his work as well as his leisure with her. She would often read dispatches to him from abroad, or decode messages and code his to be sent oversees. She made phone calls for him, reviewed his speeches and generally acted like an extension of his own self.<br /><br /> Although Edith had long tasted independence, she devoted her life to a man who, according to her social secretary, “needs love and care more than any I have ever seen.” She rose with him at 5:00 a.m. to make him breakfast in order not to disturb the servants. She watched over his diet and his exercise, and made sure that his work was interspersed with some fun.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TPxf_NnDFWI/AAAAAAAAAR8/OzLS0AVk2hs/s1600/edith_wilson_1916_n067053.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 316px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TPxf_NnDFWI/AAAAAAAAAR8/OzLS0AVk2hs/s320/edith_wilson_1916_n067053.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547414380603446626" /></a><br /><br /> In the Spring of 1919 Woodrow suffered what in retrospect look like a series of small strokes. At the time they were attributed to various causes, particularly overwork. They presaged the major stroke he suffered in October, which paralyzed his left side. In between he had more bouts of disability, especially on a September tour through the US to sell the League of Nations to the public. The tour was cut short in Utah after what would be his last speech. As their train rushed the ailing President home, Edith wrote that their life was “in ruins.”<br /><br /> The extent of Woodrow’s disability was not disclosed to the public, though there was much speculation that he had suffered a stroke. Even when word leaked out after four months of dissimulation, it was still unclear how ill he was. Woodrow had long suffered from high blood pressure, but at the time the only treatment was rest – which became impossible during the treaty negotiations in Europe and the fight for the League. Now Edith made sure he got plenty of rest, mostly by not letting anyone with official business see him at all.<br /><br /> When Woodrow’s mind was able to function some of the time, Edith took over the task of deciding what matters should be brought to his attention and what should be delegated to others in the Administration, or simply ignored. She thought work would help restore him to heath if it wasn’t too strenuous or upsetting.<br /><br /> Edith watched closely over her husband, acting as his gatekeeper, determining which public business was important enough to take up his limited time and energy. She spoke with the officials who wanted to talk to Woodrow and decided whom to allow into his sick room. Decisions on appointments and other matters were announced by her. All this led to speculation that she had become the first woman President. While it’s unlikely that she made any decisions, she gave the impression that she was more than her husband’s amanuensis.<br /><br /> There was little pressure for Woodrow to resign, partially because no one knew how much or how soon he would recover. Vice President Thomas Marshall made no effort to take over. He had been kept out of the loop since taking office in 1913, tasked solely with presiding over the Senate. Edith knew more about the affairs of state – thanks to four years of Woodrow’s tutelage – than the Vice President did.<br /><br /> After his Presidency ended, the Wilsons moved into a newly purchased house in Washington. Woodrow did some writing, but he was very frail, dying on February 23, 1924. Edith lived there another forty years, sharing the house with one or more siblings until her death on December 28 (Woodrow’s birthday), 1961. She spent these decades promoting her husband’s legacy, controlling access to his papers, and generally being the dean of all First Ladies. Others may have thought that she was the woman who would be President, but she never did.<br /><br />Jo<br />www.jofreeman.com<br />http://www.seniorwomen.com/authors/authorpageFreeman.html<br /><br />I asked the reviewer: I wonder how much she influenced his decision in January 1918 to support women's suffrage "as a war measure." He had been busting the picketers outside the White house the year before, but somehow he met with Carrie Chapman Catt and they exchanged causes - she backed the war, and he backed suffrage. <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/portrait/wp_suffrage.html">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/portrait/wp_suffrage.html </a> - FW<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TPxhbDxfMiI/AAAAAAAAASM/HGVM66c2TOA/s1600/woodrow%2Bwilson%2Band%2Bhis%2Bdaughters.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TPxhbDxfMiI/AAAAAAAAASM/HGVM66c2TOA/s320/woodrow%2Bwilson%2Band%2Bhis%2Bdaughters.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547415958510842402" /></a><br />Answer: "Edith appears to have had no interest in Suffrage one way or the other. Woodrow moved gradually from opposition to support. One of his daughters was a suffrage supporter; she may have had some influence on her father. Read my review of the Alice Paul book [ <a href="http://feministbook.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html">http://feministbook.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html</a> ], or better yet, read the book." -JFUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-41437171867567569162010-11-05T23:15:00.000-07:002010-11-05T23:27:23.383-07:00A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot, by Mary WaltonGuest review by Jo Freeman:<br />"Persistence Pays"<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TNT036psmzI/AAAAAAAAAR0/8Qnjkb44PWM/s1600/Alice+Paul1920.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 228px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TNT036psmzI/AAAAAAAAAR0/8Qnjkb44PWM/s320/Alice+Paul1920.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5536319083419310898" /></a><br />A review of<br />A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot<br />by Mary Walton<br />New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, xi, 284 pp.<br /><br /><br /> One hundred years ago, a fragile looking young woman disembarked from an ocean liner in Philadelphia to be greeted by her mother and a handful of reporters. During her two years of work for woman suffrage in Great Britain with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), headed by the controversial Emmeline Pankhurst, Alice Paul had become hot copy in her own country. In the next decade she would become even more so as she led the militant wing of the suffrage movement to victory in 1920.<br /><br /> This book chronicles her life through that momentous achievement, with a short Epilogue for the rest of her 92 years. The middle portion of her life was lived in relative obscurity, but before she died on July 9, 1977 she was celebrated widely for the cause she led after she returned to the US in 1910.<br /><br /> At that time the US suffrage movement was just beginning to emerge from years of “the doldrums” after gaining equal suffrage for women in four states in the 1890s. A victory in Washington State in November of 1910 brought the number to five. While the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was focused on attaining suffrage state by state, Alice Paul resolved to do it by Constitutional amendment.<br /><br /> Initially she persuaded NAWSA to make her the head of its Congressional Committee. In that capacity she staged a pageant on March 3, as Woodrow Wilson arrived in Washington for his inauguration the next day. Walton describes what happened in a chapter aptly entitled “I did not know men could be such Fiends.”<br /><br /> She also addresses the matter of why the parade had a separate section for black women, a matter that has haunted feminists down to the present day. Turns out that who marched where was much more complicated than the decision of one woman to conform the public procession to the cultural norms of a Southern city, and it wasn’t all that segregated.<br /><br /> Paul soon formed her own organization, the Congressional Union, to push for a federal amendment. She started her own newspaper and raised her own funds. She did not consult with NAWSA on any of this, or even report on the activities of its Congressional Committee which she still headed. Not surprisingly, NAWSA’s leadership was not happy at this, and the two groups soon went their separate ways.<br /><br /> While Walton’s biography includes much on the organizations Paul headed and the women she worked with, NAWSA is mentioned mostly as an impediment to Paul’s work. One would never know that the women who worked on Carrie Chapman Catt’s winning plan were much of a factor in gaining the 19th Amendment.<br /><br /> Woodrow Wilson, however, gets his own chapter. A good deal of Paul’s activity was focused on him, and not on the Members of Congress who had to pass a Constitutional Amendment. Wilson was, as Walton points out, “a complex man.” He preferred the company of women to men, but saw them only as homemakers whose God-given job was to make men comfortable.<br /><br /> Although Wilson personally did not believe in woman suffrage, he tried to keep it out of his 1912 campaign. Nonetheless he was willing to meet with suffragists – both NAWSA and Paul’s – many times. In 1914, after seven meetings with suffragists in almost two years, he announced that he would vote “yes” in the New Jersey referendum on suffrage (it lost). This was a major shift in his personal views, but did not mean he was for a federal amendment.<br /><br /> Paul was already racheting up the pressure by sending her women to campaign against all Democrats – even those who supported suffrage – in the Western states where women could vote. She borrowed from the British suffragists the idea that it was necessary to hold the party in power responsible for all policy positions, and to punish all candidates who were members of that party regardless of their personal views or votes on suffrage.<br /><br /> The 1914 campaign was a trial run for that of 1916, when a new organization – the National Woman’s Party – was formed to inflict on the Democrats the wrath of the women. This campaign, which was much publicized at the time, gets surprisingly little attention in this book.<br /><br /> The author devotes considerable pages to the “Silent Sentinels” outside the White House. Under Alice Paul’s command they took up their places in January of 1917 and stayed for over a year. Initially they were ignored by the White House, though certainly not by the press which showered them with disdain and ridicule.<br /><br /> Their banners often contained Wilson’s own stirring words about democracy, especially after he asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2. But in June, they told a visiting Russian delegation that AMERICA IS NOT A DEMOCRACY ... TELL OUR GOVERNMENT THAT IT MUST LIBERATE THE PEOPLE BEFORE IT CAN CLAIM FREE RUSSIA AS AN ALLY. Russia had just recently overthrown the Czar and was in the midst of a revolution.<br /><br /> This banner enraged not just the President but the American people, some of whom physically attacked the sentinels and ripped up their banners. Official tolerance of the pickets ended and arrests began. Over the next two years over 500 women were arrested and 168 served time in jail.<br /><br /> Some of that time was served in the Occoquan Workhouse, whose superintendent took great pleasure in giving the women a hard time. When they refused to eat the worm-filled food, he had them force fed. The stories they told the press about this experience made them martyrs.<br /><br /> A year after the silent sentinels raised their banners and two months after New York joined the growing number of states to enfranchise women, Wilson asked Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment granting women suffrage as a war measure. It still took another eighteen months and a new Congress before the requisite two-thirds of both houses voted to do so.<br /><br /> Even then victory was not certain. In fact the 36th State barely ratified it in time for most, but not all, women to vote in the 1920 general election. It was an exciting time. Walton tells this story in a compelling style that lets you live the experience.<br /><br />Reprinted, courtesy of the author, from <a href="http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/alice-paul-and-the-battle-for-the-ballot">http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/alice-paul-and-the-battle-for-the-ballot</a><br /><br />See also: <a href="http://www.jofreeman.com">www.jofreeman.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-86335564895950964662010-09-20T12:10:00.000-07:002010-09-20T13:00:56.730-07:00Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquityby Marguerite Rigoglioso. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I have not yet seen this book, it's coming out at the end of September 2010. It's the second book by this author, who also wrote <span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece</span></span>. My interview with her about Virgin Birth can be heard at <a href="http://www.wings.org/ftp/Lo-bandwidth%20transfers/lo-2007/%2335-07VirginBirth29_38.mp3">http://www.wings.org/ftp/Lo-bandwidth%20transfers/lo-2007/%2335-07VirginBirth29_38.mp3</a>. <br />There's another podcast about her new book at <a href="http://gnosticmedia.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-09-05T21_52_45-07_00">http://gnosticmedia.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-09-05T21_52_45-07_00</a>. <br />Marguerite has forwarded a press release and the table of contents for the new book. - FW</span><br /><br />=========================<br /><br />FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 16, 2010<br /><br />NEW BOOK ILLUMINATES ANCIENT GODDESSES, ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES, and THESMOPHORIA <br /><br />Palgrave Macmillan announces the release of the pioneering new book Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquity by Marguerite Rigoglioso. <br /><br />Various goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean world were once understood to be Virgin Mothers––creators who birthed the entire cosmos without need of a male consort. This is the first book to explore evidence of the original parthenogenetic power of deities such as Athena, Hera, Artemis, Gaia, Demeter, Persephone, and the Gnostic Sophia. It provides stunning feminist insights about the deeper meaning of related stories, such as the judgment of Paris, the labors of Heracles, and the exploits of the Amazons. It also roots the Thesmophoria and Eleusinian Mysteries in female parthenogenetic power, thereby providing what is at long last a coherent understanding of these mysterious rites.<br /><blockquote>"An original piece of scholarship that dares to imagine traditions at the foundation of Western culture in an entirely new light."<br />–– Gregory Shaw, author of Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus</blockquote><br /><br />Marguerite Rigoglioso, Ph.D., is a member of the faculties of Dominican University of California, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where she teaches courses on women and religion. Her pioneering research on female deities and women’s religious leadership in the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including Feminist Theology, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Societies of Peace, She Is Everywhere, Trivia, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, where her paper on the cult of Demeter and Persephone in Sicily received an honorable mention for the New Scholar Award. She is also the editor of Where to Publish Articles on Women’s Studies, Feminist Religious Studies, and Feminist/Womanist Topics.<br /><br />A detailed table of contents follows:<br /><br />INTRODUCTION<br /><br />CHAPTER 1<br />In the Beginning: Chaos, Nyx, and Ge/Gaia<br /><br />CHAPTER 2<br />Athena/Neith/Metis: Primordial Creatrix of Self-Replication<br />Metis<br />Neith<br />Neith as an Autogenetic Deity<br />Identification of Metis and Neith<br />The Greek Athena's Roots in North Africa<br />The Relationship of Neith/Metis/Athena to the Libyan Amazons<br />The Grecization of Neith/Athena and Her Cult<br /><br />CHAPTER 3<br />Artemis: Virgin Mother of the Wild, Patron of Amazons<br />Artemis as Creatrix<br />Artemis and Her Mother, Leto<br />Artemis's Connection with Athena/Neith<br />Artemis and the Amazons<br />Artemis as Parthenos<br /><br />CHAPTER 4<br />Hera: Virgin Queen of Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld<br />Mythological Evidence for Hera as a Great Goddess<br />Evidence at Samos for Hera as a Virgin Mother<br />Evidence at Argos for Hera as a Virgin Mother<br />Hera's Parthenogenetic Birth of Ares, Hephaestus, and Typhon<br />Hera as Guardian of Parthenogenetic Secrets<br />Hera, the Hesperides, and the Apples of Parthenogenesis<br />"Judgment of Paris" as Loss of Parthenogenetic Power<br />Heracles as Foe of Parthenogenesis<br />The Lernaean Hydra<br />The Nemean Lion<br />The Ceryneian Stag<br />The Oxen of Geryones and Stymphalian Birds<br />The Belt of Hippolyte<br />The Apples of the Hesperides<br /><br />CHAPTER 5<br />Demeter and Persephone: Double Goddesses of Parthenogenesis<br />Older Roots for Demeter as Great Goddess<br />Who Was Persephone?<br />Signs of Parthenogenesis in the Demeter/Persephone Mythologem<br />Reconstruction of the Demeter/Persephone Mythologem: Pure Parthenogenesis Interrupted<br />Persephone as Holy Parthenos<br />Persephone's Connection with Virgin Mother Goddesses<br />Persephone's Connection with Weaving<br />Persephone's Connection with the Bee<br />Persephone's Connection with the Pomegranate<br />Persephone's Connection with Flower Gathering<br />Persephone's Parthenogenetically Related Title<br />Persephone as Paradigmatic Raped Virgin Mother<br />Persephone as Virgin Mother of the God's "Double"<br />Persephone as Virgin Mother of (the) Aeon<br />As Above, So Below: The Appropriation of Divine Birth Priestesshoods<br />Daughters of Danaus as Divine Birth Priestesses<br />The Melissai of Paros as Divine Birth Priestesses<br />Metanaera of Eleusis as a Basilinna<br />Metanaera's Daughters as Divine Birth Priestesses<br />Divine Genealogies of Legendary Founders: <br />The Advent of Dionysus and Hieros Gamos in the Eleusinian Tradition<br />Degeneration of Esoteric Knowledge: Demophoön's Failed Immortalization<br />The Great Beneficence of Demeter: Making the Best of a Patriarchal Situation<br />The Thesmophoria: Known Fragments<br />Thesmophoria as Commemoration of Pure Parthenogenesis<br />Matriarchal, Amazonian Elements in the Rite<br />The Centrality of Chastity/Virginity<br />Bawdy Joking and Inner Tantra<br />Friendliness Toward the Pomegranate<br />Entering an Altered State of Consciousness<br />Altered-State Ascents and Descents<br />Pursuit, Penalty, and Beautiful Birth<br />The Eleusinian Mysteries: Known Fragments<br />The Lesser Mysteries<br />The Greater Mysteries<br />The Eleusinian Mysteries as Cosmic Rape and Birth of the God<br />Female Origins of the Rite<br />Entering Altered-State Reality<br />Being Raped: The Dildo of Descent<br />Baubo as Dildo<br />Grieving for the Matriarchy<br />Witnessing the Divine Birth<br />Uniting (with) the Ineffable<br /><br />CHAPTER 6 by Angeleen Campra<br />Sophia: Divine Generative Virgin<br />Sophia as Bridge to an Older Paradigm<br />Sophia of the Valentinian Cosmogony<br />Summary of the Valentianian Creation Story<br />Parthenogenesis in Sophia's Story<br />Sophia in The Thunder: Perfect Mind<br />Parthenogenetic References in Thunder<br />Parthenogenetic References in Other Gnostic Texts<br />Wisdom as the Ability to Generate Life –– Parthenogenetically<br />The Legacy of the Loss of Female Parthenogenetic Power<br /><br />For more about the author and her works, check this site: <a href="http://cultofdivinebirth.com">http://cultofdivinebirth.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-64817171202373647042010-09-19T18:43:00.000-07:002010-09-19T19:25:14.059-07:00Rupert Murdoch vs. feminist writing: Vicki Noble<span style="font-style:italic;">The following statement by Vicki Noble was written in the context of a discussion about how it has come to be that right-wing women in the US have appropriated the term "feminist." She gives a chilling insight into the difficulty of disseminating radical feminist writings and voices today. - FW</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TJbEg3F5qWI/AAAAAAAAARs/TPk66k0Bmos/s1600/magician.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 185px; height: 185px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TJbEg3F5qWI/AAAAAAAAARs/TPk66k0Bmos/s320/magician.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518814462212680034" /></a>Yes, all wonderful questions—why indeed are there apparently no radical feminists speaking out these days in America, speaking to the younger women, writing books and communicating? I believe my personal experience almost certainly serves to generalize about the process by which our voices have been eliminated from the larger public discourse in this country.<br /><br />In 1994, Rupert Murdoch bought HarperSanFrancisco, thus temporarily ending the long publishing careers of many early Bay Area feminist authors and creative artists (myself, Judy Grahn, Starhawk, for example). At that moment, all our most well-known classic books began, unceremoniously, to be put out of print. It’s not that we didn’t fight this, but I’m afraid it was a done deal. (Each of us has resurrected over the years, so I’m not whining, we’re all continuing to do our work—I’m just telling you the history, which for many people is unknown.) An excellent article in [The Nation] Magazine in the late 1990s, called “The Corporatization of Publishing,”* articulated the widespread negative effects of this phenomenon on a much larger (global) scale. (Independent bookstores, distributors, and publishers went out of business, along with individual artists.)<br /><br />In case you might think this was subtle or negotiable in any way, or that I’m overstating the case, I’ll give you a blatant example of how direct the message was to us: In 1997, an editor at Three Rivers Press (an offshoot of Random House) told me, after publishing a book on <a href="http://www.motherpeace.com/">Motherpeace</a> and in response to a subsequent book proposal, “If you take the Goddess and the kundalini out of it, we might be able to publish it.” Since it was a book on ecstatic healing in the Goddess tradition, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that could have even been possible for me to do (had I been interested in selling my soul so directly to the corporation).<br /><br />During the same period of time (late 1990s), I stopped being invited to teach at places like Omega Institute in New York, I think because my radical feminist message is too “confrontational” in comparison to some of the new mainstream and corporate women who jumped on the Goddess bandwagon and began to produce and attend workshops and conferences for women (Women of Power; Women, Money, and Power; etc.). Groups like “Gather the Women” emerged with conferences on what they publicized as the brand new notion of women coming together to make changes in the world. Now the public commercial centers for growth and “new age” teachings can offer events for women without rocking the boat, offending anyone, or requiring any profound transformation or change (especially to social structures or capitalism). It was an effective marketing strategy. The success of this overall strategy can be seen in the emerging numbers of women who are excited, apparently, about having discovered that their gender gives them a step up the ladder right now—-while working actively in support of patriarchal corporate, capitalist and mainstream religious values and goals (i.e. They work against reproductive rights and threaten the gains we made three decades ago, they cut social services and gut social programs that feminists established in the 1970s, and they keep their eye on the money).<br /><br />Even NPR (National Public Radio) has recently admitted that it no longer ascribes to its original mission of providing alternative programming to the mainstream. They have their marketing strategy too! <span style="font-style:italic;">Yoga Journal</span> went mainstream in the last decade, changing its look and shortening its articles to please some imagined public that no longer has the attention span to read something thought-provoking.<br /><br />We’re simply watching global capitalism do what capitalism has always done: It rapaciously sucks up everything interesting or profitable, turns it inside-out in the usual patriarchal mode of colonization and appropriation, and then spews it back out at us in a pseudo form that we can buy. Anything that holds to its original purpose or integrity is relentlessly denied or viciously stamped out, erased, made invisible. Anyone who can’t be bought just disappears from the public arena.<br /><br />So—-where did all the feminists go? Well, I’d say we’re all still here, getting older but holding our own, disseminating our wisdom where we can, rocking the boat whenever possible, passing on our genes and our ideas, and always, ALWAYS, creating new forms that respond to the real needs of our communities.<br /><br />A great and positive example of this creative feminist work behind the scenes is the steady building of the <a href="http://www.second-congress-matriarchal-studies.com/goettnerabendroth.html">Matriarchal Studies</a> and <a href="http://www.gift-economy.com/">Gift Economy</a> movements in the last decade. This creative international coalition of feminist activists, Goddess scholars, and indigenous healers, elders, and leaders who come together periodically to discuss, analyze, distill, and refine the discourse on Matriarchal Studies (thanks to Gen and Heide** and their pioneering leadership) is thrilling. It is one of the obvious places where the unstoppable underground stream of female intelligence is again springing up to the surface and taking form.<br /><br />Perhaps we can begin to take some actions and make some international headway by speaking back (organizationally) to some of these emerging mainstream pseudo-feminists and celebrity political women who are being thrust in our face by the media. I’m up for it. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TJbCz3gaJdI/AAAAAAAAARc/6NxJ_v4y8RM/s1600/v-noble.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 271px; height: 181px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TJbCz3gaJdI/AAAAAAAAARc/6NxJ_v4y8RM/s320/v-noble.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518812589718119890" /></a><br /><br />Love, Vicki<br /><br />=========author note============<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">A bibliography of works by Vicki Noble appears with her Wikipedia entry at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicki_Noble">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicki_Noble</a> . Note that the article on her is currently rather slight - perhaps those who know her work would like to add to it. - FW</span><br /><br />============footnotes=========<br /><br />*The article appeared in The Nation June 3, 1996, and its author, publishing veteran André Schiffrin, also published a related memoir: <span style="font-style:italic;">The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read</span> (2000).<br /><br />** <a href="http://feministbook.blogspot.com/2008/11/giving-for-giving-video.html">Genevieve Vaughan</a>; and Dr. Heide Göttner-Abendroth, Director of <a href="http://www.hagia.de/en/index.php">International Academy HAGIA</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-13920259494484366202010-09-12T07:25:00.000-07:002010-09-12T08:05:40.501-07:00On The Farm, Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women<span style="font-weight:bold;">by Stevie Cameron (Knopf Canada, August 20, 2010: 768 pages)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">With the Pickton serial murder case no longer under appeal, the publication ban is off, and Knopf Canada has released Stevie Cameron's book about the case. A government investigation of the handling of the case has now been promised. Cameron is best known for her investigative books about political corruption in Canada. One of the first to read and review</span> On the Farm <span style="font-style:italic;">is Lee Lakeman. Here is her review:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">In <span style="font-style:italic;">On The Farm, Robert Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing and Murdered Women</span></span>, Stevie Cameron relays many details of the conviction of Robert Pickton for murdering and butchering six women and the likelihood that he killed fifty: poor, mostly prostituted, women, one third of whom were Aboriginal. She catalogues a decade of data into one readable narrative that some will see as encyclopedic, though it relies almost totally on the official versions, constructed by the police, the courts, the commercial media, local governments and the harm reduction networks involved. <br /><br />Cameron includes simple biographies from the hierarchy of characters who usually define these issues and authorize these versions: mostly johns, pimps, wife beaters, boyfriends, sugar daddies, rapists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, handlers, reporters, police and politicians and those charged by the state or community services as ‘victim assistance’ or ‘harm reduction” workers to destitute women. Of Pickton, we get the cliché: he had a horrible mother and childhood and he is motivated by revenge against a prostitute he described as thieving and dangerous. Cameron seems not to notice the sex bias. She contradicts no authority. <br /><br />Some compassion for individuals at risk or under pressure warms the bare facts but chafes against her over abundant regard for the professional (class) credentials of the hundreds activated after women are harmed or dead. We get many of their cv’s. But their credentials would not have saved us. Throughout, she seems to accept the current social relations that lead us to this colossal legal and social failure. No substantial investigative reporting here only those admissions that authorities have already packaged into their next demand (as in the 2005 Vancouver Police Review that insists it would all be over if we had a regional police force and a nicer attitude to “sex workers”). It is as though the material racism, class biases and sex discrimination are solved. <br /><br />She reminds us that the murdered women were trapped but she understands that trap as the personal mistake they made of choosing boyfriends and husbands that introduced them to vicious drugs and the mistake they made of getting into the killer’s car. The violence, poverty and racism they suffered previously, the refusal of authorities to interfere with the men who preceded him or with Pickton’s pre murderous activity goes unconnected. She concludes only that “we do not know if women are safer”. <br /><br />Women suffer hideous abuse including prostitution, disappear and die at the hands of men every year in every major city in Canada. Aboriginal women remain especially vulnerable. Women live without adequate incomes, social services or advocacy. The criminal law is applied in a discriminatory fashion that sustains male violence. The statistics are not even disputed anymore. But that hierarchical status quo maintains hundreds if not thousands of women in prostituted squalor and binds together three groups of women: Pickton’s dead, those still prostituted, and millions of other women in Canada. They are bound into a disadvantaged class that lacks adequate social and legal intervention, documentation or protection from violence against women. Cameron’s narrative, absent as it is of any other stated intention, upholds an unacceptable status quo in which fifty women or more went to their deaths. <br /><br />No experts on the equality obligations of states to women, no police civilian oversight experts or media monitors or Aboriginal women or anti-violence feminists are consulted interviewed or quoted for expertise. Is there no need to change that hierarchy? <br /><br />Nor did Stevie Cameron give voice to a single escaped victim although she does relay two second hand stories of the anonymous women she calls Jane Doe and Sandra Gail Ringwald. The first is a name given to half a skull found in a local slough in 1995 that leaves us to worry how long ago Pickton began killing. The second is the story of a woman who survived in 1997, reported Pickton to authorities, but was left to protect herself from further violence. Case dismissed. The attempt to murder her never did result in a case, even of solicitation. Eliminating her evidence from the Pickton murder case accounting for the missing women prevented his conviction of first degree murder by blinding the court to the extent of his evil planning. <br /><br />The book confirms the mind-numbing bigotry and ignorance of individuals with the criminal justice system but more importantly, the common ideology underpinning our institutions and their functionaries: women are not trusted as victims or witnesses, are deemed unreliable, exaggerating their plight and in themselves dangerous, unworthy of the protection of law. Poverty is constructed as individual responsibility separate from race and sex. In praising tiny accommodations and kindnesses (like the lunch passes for those at court or the tent supplied by the police so the families could see the killing fields) and in refusing to rage against the status quo, the book seems to accept the steady application of social and legal policy that replicates these deadly horrors over and over again. <br /><br />Prostitution remains unchallenged as an activity of men as though women don’t mind and are not at risk or harmed. Like most women’s legal and social complaints of men’s sexual violence, prostitution is not treated like a serious crime. Only weeks after an apologetic review of police failures in the Pickton case, the new police chief, challenged to explain a 20% increase in sexual assault cases excused his force by saying the cases were not “aggravated by violence” as though he didn’t know that all sexual assault was against the law and a serious transgression of the collective rights of women. <br /><br />Almost all the women victimized by Pickton first suffered criminal beatings, assaults and sexual exploitation at the hands of other men, assaults either from fathers or step- fathers, husbands, boyfriends, or pimps, assaults that should have been prevented and went unpunished, that rendered the women broken and vulnerable to this deadly predator. To three women he was a “sugar daddy” who paid for wife-like duties then threatened with violence if not obeyed. Those women entered Wish Drop In and “low barrier shelters” where prostitution is talked about as a job and successfully they solicited more vulnerable women to “service” Pickton. Of these, many were disabled physically and mentally. Some were not in a state to give consent to anything. <br /><br />Uncontested too is that he was known as an “ordinary john”. In spite of the law, unimpeded by police, social workers or hotel staff, Pickton solicited women on the street, in the bars where he was known and through pimps in the downtown eastside ghetto. It is likely he solicited too for the men around him at his brother’s Piggy’s Palace, in the butchery, for the truckers he employed, for the Hells Angels across the street. Such facts should give chills to those promoting a laissez fair attitude to the sex industry. <br /><br />Virtually all workers against violence against women know the ongoing systemic failure to protect women from the men who abuse them including those women who offer themselves as complainants and witnesses. The failure to properly investigate, prosecute and convict, insulated Pickton in the 1997 events that Cameron tells of Ringwald. That woman, whose consent was impaired by drugs, was solicited in Vancouver, confined in Pickton’s house in Coquitlam, sexually assaulted if not raped, beaten and threatened with death. She was stabbed when she defended herself with a knife from his kitchen and although badly bleeding managed to run across the street nearly nude and still in a handcuff. She was rescued by a passing couple and hospitalized. She told. Police retrieved the key to the handcuffs from his pocket. Those in the criminal justice system judged her inadequate and themselves as helpless. They abandoned her and the case. Pickton disintegrated over the decade into his life as serial killer convicted of murdering six women, confessing to killing 49 and dreaming of killing 75. #<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Lee Lakeman is a longtime Canadian frontline worker<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TIzpZ5is8oI/AAAAAAAAARU/FUtLJfqNHao/s1600/Lee+Lakeman.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/TIzpZ5is8oI/AAAAAAAAARU/FUtLJfqNHao/s400/Lee+Lakeman.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516040274774389378" /></a> and activist, best known for her work with the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres and Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter.</span><br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-91141574966160225972010-09-09T20:13:00.000-07:002010-09-09T20:24:24.872-07:00Max Dashu reviews Agora, the movieI did not go see the film <span style="font-weight:bold;">Agora<span style="font-style:italic;"></span> </span> - about the revered ancient female philosopher and scientist Hypatia - during its short stay in Vancouver; I was put off by the <a href=" Trailer: http://www.agorathemovie.com/">trailer</a>, which looked artificial and pompous to me. Nevertheless, quite a few women I know did go see it in theatres. One of those is the remarkable Max Dashu, whose review (link <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/mythandtheatre/Home/cfp-vol-1-5-theatre-and-the-polis/film-review-agora">here</a>) goes into far more and more accurate background and detail about Hypatia than the film did. Be sure to visit and read the review and look around her website.<br /><br />Quoting Max's biography from the review page:<br /><br /><blockquote>Max Dashú is known for her expertise on ancient female iconography in world archaeology, goddess traditions, and women shamans. In 1970 she founded the Suppressed Histories Archives to research mother-right cultures, female spheres of power, and the history of their repression. Drawing on her collection of over 15,000 slides, she uses images to teach global womens' history and cultural heritages. Her critique of Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (2000) has been influential in opening up space for consideration of egalitarian matrilineages. (“Knocking Down Straw Dolls" (2000) republished in Feminist Theology 13.2 (2005), Sage Publications, UK)</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-35334581122603444642010-07-02T10:42:00.000-07:002010-07-02T10:45:00.273-07:00The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the Stateby Lee Ann Banaszak<br />New York: Cambridge, 2010, xv, 247 pp.<br /><br />Guest review by Jo Freeman - original at <a href="http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/the-feminist-moles-in-the-federal-government-1?page=2">http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/the-feminist-moles-in-the-federal-government-1?page=2</a><br /><br />========================================================================<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"> The Feminist Moles in the Federal Government<span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span><br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;"> by Jo Freeman<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br /><br /><br />The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State<br />by Lee Ann Banaszak<br />New York: Cambridge, 2010, xv, 247 pp.<br /><br /> When I was in college long ago there was an ongoing debate on working inside the system vs outside of the system. To those who wanted to change society, working outside the system was pure; working inside was a form of corruption.<br /><br /> As I watched the women’s liberation movement emerge and unfold in the late 1960s and 1970s, and read more deeply in US history, I realized that this was a false dichotomy. The “system” was bigger than the government and other institutions. Indeed the best way to bring about change was a two-pronged approach, with people “inside” and “outside” the government working for the same goal, if not necessarily with the same methods.<br /><br /> I wrote a bit about that in my first book, The Politics of Women’s Liberation. In her new book Lee Ann Banaszak has proven it.<br /><br /> A major reason so much new law benefitting women was passed in the early 1970s was because insider feminists came out of the woodwork after the women’s liberation movement became public in 1970. Once outsider feminists created a visible demand, the insider feminists used their positions and their knowledge to write the laws and regulations implementing those laws which outsider feminists and Members of Congress (another type of insider) promoted.<br /><br /> Using snowball sampling, Banaszak tracked down women who worked for the federal government and were also involved in the early women’s liberation movement. She relied on oral histories of those who were dead and interviewed those who were living. She put together the story of those who pushed the feminist agenda inside the agencies they worked for and fed crucial information to women outside who could mobilize press attention and constituency pressure on government decision makers.<br /><br /> Banaszak tells us that her 40 informants were highly educated (63% had a post-graduate degree), mostly from middle to upper-middle-class parents, and ten percent non-white. While some of the insiders were men, Banaszak doesn’t say if any of her informants were male. Nor is there a list of interviewees anyplace, though the oral histories are listed.<br /><br /> Some of these people were already working inside the government when the feminist movement erupted in the late 1960s and some joined it later. Some were true moles – keeping quiet about their own policy preferences while arranging for key decision makers to hear feminist views on crucial issues or even sneaking in a few changes in rules and regulations to benefit women. Others were advocates within the government, especially after agencies set up women’s programs in response to the women’s movement. Banaszak found that two-thirds of the feminist insiders worked in “women’s policy offices” at some point in their governmental career.<br /><br /> The range of insider views on what needed to be done was similar to that of feminist outsiders. Some insiders believed that extensive social, political and economic changes were necessary for women’s liberation, and others that women could take care of themselves if they only had an equal chance with men.<br /><br /> The range of their actions was different, largely because the opportunity structure was different. Crucial insiders, especially in the early years, initiated litigation. They could not be the attorneys of record, but they could identify areas for action, refer plaintiffs and write the briefs. A lot of the early court decisions interpreting employment discrimination law were shaped by feminists inside the government who had to stay in the shadows because of their jobs.<br /><br /> Many also participated in feminist marches, though not in “zap actions” or guerilla theater. Occasionally government appointees were speakers at the rallies. At other times insider feminists arranged to have protests directed at their own agencies when they thought it necessary. Working for the federal government was not a serious detriment to protest, at least as private persons.<br /><br /> The insider feminists worked on many issues besides employment discrimination though that got the bulk of their attention. Banaszak identifies educational equity, development, childcare, abortion and violence against women as the major arenas. She provides a of couple quick case studies to show how they did it.<br /><br /> Most of these goals were achieved before Reagan became President in 1981 – under administrations that were supportive or at least benign. While the conservatives did toss a lot of insider feminists out of the government and limit what others could do, Banaszak shows that opportunities for action still existed even in a hostile environment.<br /><br /> A lot depended on where feminists were located in the bureaucracy and who were their supervisors. Basically, they slipped back under the radar, becoming moles more like the early 1960s feminist insiders. In that capacity they could still feed information where it could do the most good, award grants and improve policies around the edges. Banaszak concludes that the sympathy of the Administration matters, but not as much as scholars have said it does. Insider feminists were quite creative in slipping through the cracks.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-56142058401978287982009-12-06T11:05:00.000-08:002009-12-06T11:08:07.996-08:00A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway 1904-1953My review of<br /><em><strong>A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway 1904-1953</strong></em><br />edited by Kristie Miller and Robert H. McGinnis<br />Preface by Blanche Wiesen Cook<br />Tucson, AZ: Arizona Historical Society, 2009, xvi, 325 pp.<br /><br />has just been posted to SeniorWomen Web at<br /><a href="http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/freeman/articlesFreemanLettersRooseveltGreenway.html">http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/freeman/articlesFreemanLettersRooseveltGreenway.html</a><br />You can read it at that link or posted below my name.<br /><br />Jo<br /><a href="http://www.JoFreeman.com">http://www.JoFreeman.com</a><br /><a href="http://www.seniorwomen.com/authors/authorpageFreeman.html">http://www.seniorwomen.com/authors/authorpageFreeman.html</a><br /><br /><strong> The Private Lives of Two Public Women</strong><br /><br /> Long after her death in 1962, readers remain fascinated by Eleanor Roosevelt – her life, her comments, her views. Isabella Greenway is barely known outside of Arizona – the state she represented in Congress from 1933 to 1937 – but her fifty-year friendship with ER was longer than that of any other of ERs many acquaintances.<br /><br /> Both came from privileged backgrounds, they met in New York as debutantes and stayed in close contact until Isabella's death in 1953. They both married in 1905; the couples spent part of their honeymoons together in Europe. Isabella was two years younger but in her 67 years she had the more challenging life, which Miller detailed in her 2004 biography. [http://www.seniorwomen.com/ca/cw/04/cult121404.html]<br /><br /> Isabella married three times, was widowed twice and had three children. ER was married once, widowed once, and had six children, of whom one died in infancy. Isabella moved to New Mexico with her older first husband in 1910 after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Expected to die in a few years, the family lived in a tent with their two children for four years before building a home. A year after Bob Ferguson died in 1922 Isabella married his best friend, John Greenway. A little over two years later her second husband died on an operating table in New York.<br /><br /> In the wilds of New Mexico Isabella had to nurse her husband and home school her kids. ER also had to nurse her husband after he contracted polio in 1921, but she had a broader support system and more ready access to medical assistance. Nonetheless, her life, like Isabella's, was punctuated repeatedly by illnesses, accidents and death.<br /><br /> Indeed, if these letters have a major theme, that is it. These privileged women and their families spent much of their lives – especially their early adulthood – coping with physical ailments. Presumably they had the best medical care money could buy, but to judge by their letters, major portions of their lives were spent coping with suffering, their own and that of their families and close friends. TB, whooping cough, polio and infections consumed a lot of their time and thoughts.<br /><br /> Illness also meant travel. I was struck by the number of times Isabella and her family took the train to New York to see doctors. She sent her children to California for high school, but there is no mention of seeing any doctors in L.A.<br /><br /> Except for the election of 1912 when both women supported the candidacy of ER's uncle Teddy, neither paid much attention to politics before 1920 (or if they did they didn't write about it). They weren't involved in woman suffrage or any of the other Progressive movements of the era.<br /><br /> ER plunged into political work in the twenties, initially to serve the career aspirations of her invalid husband. She and some of her New York friends organized women into the Democratic Party in upstate New York, the value of which became readily apparent when her husband ran for Governor in 1928.<br /><br /> John Greenway took his new bride to Arizona where he owned copper mines. He was planning to retire from business and go into politics when he died. In a sense Isabella fulfilled his ambitions, becoming a civic activist and Arizona's Democratic National Committeewoman. After ER's husband was elected President he brought Arizona's sole Member of Congress into his administration and Isabella easily won election to replace him.<br /><br /> During FDR's first term, ER and Isabella could see each other frequently because they were both in D.C. There are fewer letters, but enough to know that Isabella didn't always see eye-to-eye with FDR. Nor did she like being in Congress; she chose to not run for re-election in 1936.<br /><br /> Back in Arizona she pursued her civic and business interests. In 1940 she supported Wendell Wilkie for President, which caused a temporary breech in her friendship with ER. Nonetheless, their relationship survived and the two women worked together again during and after World War II.<br /><br /> While it might sound simple to compile a book of letters, especially of two women who were public figures, an enormous amount of work went into this book. Tracking down the letters, deciphering the handwriting, identifying the people, places and events and generally making sense of private communications is no small task.<br /><br /> One can see the dedication and the scholarship of Miller and McGinnis in the numerous explanatory paragraphs interspersed between the letters and in the extensive footnotes which are fortunately printed at the bottom of each page. There is as much authorship as editing in this book. We should be grateful to them for giving us this portrait of an enduring friendship and a peek into the private lives of two public women.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-2487113254092607522009-11-29T15:59:00.000-08:002009-11-29T16:18:35.209-08:00THE WOMAN BEHIND THE NEW DEAL<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/SxMNKky-HhI/AAAAAAAAAP4/gftwIJwbGOY/s1600/2046728904-250x250-0-0_Book_The_Woman_Behind_the_New_Deal_The_Life_of_Fra.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 250px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/SxMNKky-HhI/AAAAAAAAAP4/gftwIJwbGOY/s400/2046728904-250x250-0-0_Book_The_Woman_Behind_the_New_Deal_The_Life_of_Fra.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409682052729413138" /></a><br /><strong>THE WOMAN BEHIND THE NEW DEAL: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience </strong><br /><br />By Kirstin Downey<br /><br />NY: Nan A. Talese Books <em>[a subdivision of Knopf/Doubleday - all of which now belong to Random House - just like all your favourite brands of dessert now belong to Nestle- FW</em>], 2009. 480 pp. <br /><br /><br />Reviewed by <strong>Jane Woodward Elioseff</strong> <em>(Guest review reprinted from <a href="http://www.internetreviewofbooks.com">www.internetreviewofbooks.com</a> by permission of the author)</em> <br /> <br /><br /><br /><strong>Frances Perkins </strong>(1880 –1965), suffragist and labor advocate, destroyed many of her letters and papers before she died, with the result that only archivists and historians and a few former students still remember her. Even so, Kirstin Downey, a former <em>Washington Post</em> reporter, has written an entirely credible biography of Perkins based on the public record, on Downey’s productive searches in various neglected archives and private collections of Frances’s letters, and on interviews with her daughter and those of her colleagues and friends who are still living. <em><strong>The Woman Behind the New Deal</strong></em> describes not only Frances’s political career, but also her marriage and her close friendships with reform-minded, socially prominent women, as well as her relationships with suffragists, settlement house reformers, socialists, unionists, combative labor leaders, Tammany Hall toughs, and such major figures as Winston Churchill, Al Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. <br /><br /><br />In February 1933, at the start of FDR’s first term as US president, Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, strongly recommended to her husband that his secretary of labor should be Frances Perkins, whom Franklin had known for twenty years, the past four working side by side with her while he was governor of New York. He appreciated Perkins’s intelligence, energy, and political savvy. Most importantly, he trusted her. When Frances met with Franklin in New York City to discuss the appointment, she arrived with a paper in her hand listing what she wanted to accomplish if she accepted his offer: <br /><br /><br />The scope of her list was breathtaking. She was proposing a fundamental and radical restructuring of American society, with enactment of historic social welfare and labor laws. To succeed, she would have to overcome opposition from the courts, business, labor unions, conservatives. <br /><br /><br />Perkins asked FDR to approve her legislative agenda: a forty-hour work week, a minimum wage, worker’s compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and national health insurance. Perkins and her determined political allies achieved it all--except for health insurance. Opposition by the American Medical Association was too strong. <br /><br /><br />Few people rise to high office in Washington, D.C. without thick skins and hard work in the political trenches. It is difficult to imagine the heartless animosity and unjust criticism Perkins experienced as a woman in public life. Her views were so progressive that conservative members of the House of Representatives tried to impeach her in 1939 for failing to enforce US immigration laws, a move by the House that the Supreme Court disallowed. The unhappy congressmen wanted Frances out for refusing to deport suspected Communists and for doing her best to help the thousands in Europe fleeing the Nazis. She was single-handedly responsible for saving the Geneva staff of the International Labor Organization by persuading Canada to admit them when the state department denied them entry to the US. The ILO became the only League of Nations entity to survive the war. <br /><br /><br />Perkins served twelve years as our fourth secretary of labor (1933-1945). She did not engage in self promotion, did not hold press conferences, but was loved and admired by those who knew her well. She never forgot or neglected a friend, high or low, and her dedication to the common good was unflagging. When the political tide was against her, she accepted what progress could be made and tried again the next year. In 1946, she published The Roosevelt I Knew, a biography of FDR. Her close friendship with Franklin was not romantic--it was a meeting of minds and spirits. She was the first person he wanted to see when he started his Washington workday and often the last person he talked with in the evening. <br /><br /><br />Fannie Coralie Perkins had studied physics and chemistry at Mount Holyoke College, and in 1904, after two years back home with her family, she answered an advertisement for a science teacher at a small women’s college in wealthy Lake Forest, near Chicago. Downey writes that immediately upon arriving Fannie reinvented herself. “She changed her birth name, her faith, and her political persuasion.” She left the Congregationalist Church and became a high-church Episcopalian. Joining the Episcopal Church, “placed Frances in the most upscale milieu in tiny Lake Forest . . . gave her a ready social stepladder.” <br /><br /><br />While she was teaching in Lake Forest, she also volunteered at Hull House, which gave her the social work training she had been lacking and introduced her to a large national circle of social activists, including the writer Upton Sinclair. After three years, she heard about a job in Philadelphia Talking with factory girls earning $6 a week who lived in basements and survived on bread and bananas, Frances learned, Downey says, that women were barred by their gender from union participation. Frances decided that she needed to go back to school to be able to debate economic and labor issues more effectively. “Studying alongside men for the first time [at The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania], she realized the depth of her own intelligence.” <br /><br /><br />One of Frances’s professors at Wharton, impressed by her aptitude, helped her arrange a fellowship at Columbia University. In 1910, she earned a master’s degree in political science and then took a job heading the New York office of the National Consumer’s League. She moved to Greenwich Village, “a center of intellectual ferment.” Sinclair Lewis fell in love with her and regularly proposed marriage until she wed government reformer Paul Caldwell Wilson in 1913. <br /><br /><br />Frances attended church every morning of the week while she was working in Washington. Three or four times a year, she made a silent retreat at a Maryland convent where the mother superior was her spiritual advisor. Frances could see auras, and this was an aid in assessing character and recognizing talent. Downey writes that Perkins worried about the growing secularization of America. It was incomprehensible to Frances to think of excluding religion from public life altogether, for it was her religious motivation--to do what Jesus would want one to do--that drove her and fueled all that she had done.<br /><br /> <br /><br />This book is beautifully organized, with helpful chapter titles, footnotes divided and renumbered by chapter, a strong bibliography, a good index, and many interesting black and white photographs, though I would wish for more photos of union leaders and suffragists.<br /><br />_____________________________________________________________________________________<br /><br />Other Frances Perkins books (from <a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/frances-perkins">Wikipedia</a>):<br /><br />Keller, Emily. <em><strong>Frances Perkins: First Woman Cabinet Member</strong></em>. Greensboro: Morgan Reynolds Publishing, 2006. ISBN 978193179891.<br />Martin, George Whitney. <strong><em>Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins</em></strong>. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976. ISBN 0395242932.<br />Pasachoff, Naomi. <em><strong>Frances Perkins: Champion of the New Deal</strong></em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0195122224.<br /><strong>Perkins, Frances. <em>The Roosevelt I Knew</em>.</strong> New York: Penguin Group, 1946. ISBN 0670607371.<br />Severn, Bill. <em><strong>Frances Perkins: A Member of the Cabinet</strong></em>. New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1976. ISBN 080152816X.<em></em>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-62904493310420615252009-11-17T08:20:00.000-08:002009-11-17T08:48:38.303-08:00The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical AthensKate Gilhuly, <strong>The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens.</strong><br />Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 208. ISBN<br />9780521899987. $80.00. <br /><br />_____ <br /><br />Reviewed by S. Larson, Bucknell University <br /><br /><br /><<a href="http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b">http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=a069fbbc73&e=a74ab719fa</a>> <br /><br /><br />In this volume, Kate Gilhuly presents a number of case studies helpful in understanding the various roles assigned to females in the Athenian imagination. This matrix, as she calls it, centers upon three categories of the feminine: the prostitute, the wife, and the ritual agent. In varying manifestations, hierarchies and conflations, this structure not only informs our understanding of how the Athenians envisioned the female but also directly pertains to issues of Athenian civic identities and attitudes toward sexuality, exchange, and female performance. Additionally, it is by examining the constantly contested and negotiated roles of the female in literary production that we can better explicate evolving Athenian<br />constructions of masculine subjectivity; it is in this focus that Gilhuly's book excels.<br /><br />Gilhuly's Introduction contains a notable although brief tracing of classical scholarship on women to date. She deftly discusses the interplay between these works and concomitant and recent trends in studies of ancient pederasty, homosexuality, and sexuality; here she stresses the importance of the often ignored discourse of heterosexuality and rightly categorizes her own work as an all-encompassing study both in constructions of gender and in the history of sexuality. Her work concentrates not on the reality of ancient sexualities as much as on the imagination of social reality and the construction and maintenance of it through the malleable categories and performance of these three female roles. Here Gilhuly also demonstrates the polysemy involved in each role. She notes broad contexts in which each wide-ranging category served a useful function: e.g., the prostitute in<br />conversations about conflict and instability; the ritual performer in contexts of historical upheaval between elite and demos; the wife in the middle as the seeming lack between both these public roles.<br /><br />Gilhuly's Introduction is the weakest section of the book. Here some of Gilhuly's attempts at theorizing these three female roles fall into what seem like already well-understood categories. After discussing the varied roles that both the prostitute and the ritual performer enact, for example, Gilhuly states "both the prostitute and the ritual agent played a public role and could therefore signify different facets of public feminine performance" (19). It is not clear why this relatively obvious conclusion needed so much background comment, except to serve as a possible foil to Gilhuly's next point about the wife envisioned as the female occupying the space between these two more public roles. Gilhuly's Introduction also<br />suffers from a problem common enough in preludes to more complicated accounts: condensed versions of upcoming chapters often fail to convince because they must omit so much of the real core of the argument; the supporting details fall through the cracks and the conclusions begin to sound like assumptions. <br /><br />Gilhuly's chapters are stronger individually. In Chapter Two she discusses pseudo-Demosthenes' Against Neaira and demonstrates how the speech regulates masculine identity and its associations with various types of transactions through the lens of the "tripartitite discourse of the feminine." Gilhuly opens by noting that the same three divisions of the feminine outlined in her Introduction also operate within the Athenian penalty of atimia, the very charge which the accused Stephanos tried to impose upon Apollodoros, the prosecutor of the speech. That this evidence comes from outside the literary works that Gilhuly discusses in this book adds credence to her<br />argument; she could have emphasized this point more strongly.<br /><br />In this chapter Gilhuly also notes the synchronicity between Apollodoros's portrayal of Stephanos's dealings with women and each of the three spheres of the feminine. She argues that through consistent portrayals of Stephanos's exchanges of women as short-term transactions, the prosecution essentially accuses Stephanos of disregarding Athenian social ideals of exchange and democratic citizenship. Apollodoros establishes both his own and Stephanos's masculine subjectivity through lengthy analysis of the kind of transactions of women both men make; this focus helps explain the speech's obsessively detailed narration of the story of Neaira and Phano.<br /><br />Gilhuly also finally and persuasively contextualizes Apollodoros's description of Pausanias, the infamous Spartan king, who appears in this speech linked to Plataia, the Boiotian city-state allied to Athens that received harsh treatment at Theban and Spartan hands both in Apollodoros's narrative and in Thucydides (although the two accounts differ on noteworthy points). Gilhuly argues that Pausanias's appearance in the speech, juxtaposed with the emphasis on Plataian loyalty to Athens, historically<br />grounds the present opposition between Apollodoros and Stephanos; the insane medizer Pausanias corresponds to Stephanos in terms of his extremism and his threat to the stable order of civic life; Plataia, Athens' faithful friend since the late sixth century, mirrors Apollodoros's character as a victim of aggression still loyal to the long-term goals of the Athenian community.<br /><br />Gilhuly's reading provides a coherent and meaningful way in which to read the speech as a whole and those parts of it that have troubled previous commentators in terms of their length and relevance to the charge.<br /><br />In her third chapter Gilhuly turns to Plato's Symposium, a work so overanalyzed that taking it on here voluntarily makes a bold statement in itself. Gilhuly concentrates, however, not only on Diotima, whose identity has encouraged countless speculations, but also on the other women in the text. To Gilhuly the auletris, the women inside the house (but outside the symposium), and Diotima herself offer a structural continuum of the feminine that simultaneously informs Plato's model of pederasty. Gilhuly's Introduction to this chapter, much like her Introduction to the work as a whole, foreshadows her upcoming conclusions too briefly; this reviewer would have rather seen less a general prelude than an immediate beginning to the<br />argument, which Gilhuly takes up only after nearly ten pages of introductory<br />comment.<br /><br />Gilhuly ultimately observes that by structuring the masculine identities of the Symposium against this feminine matrix (which includes the present but absent Diotima), Plato's Socrates offers a more complex image of masculinity than merely the binary opposition often found in analyses of this dialogue. She nicely explicates the first triad of speeches (of Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachos) as ultimately espousing a negative, often hostile attitude toward women and a binary understanding of female sexuality in opposition to the purest expression of physical eros through homosexuality. The speeches of Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, however, are shown to offer a more nuanced approach to eros by complicating the canonical gender categories in the first triad of speeches. After persuasively problematizing the case for modern positivistic acceptance of Aristophanes' famous speech, Gilhuly argues that, by speaking through Diotima, Socrates presents the feminine matrix in the service of defining the eros of the philosopher, an eros which<br />should be seen as the transcendent apex of metaphysical contemplation, much as Diotima's role as female ritual agent symbolizes the topmost position in the feminine matrix imagined in the Symposium. Further, Diotima's status in this speech as a "discursive absence," rather than as a person imagined as attending this gathering, emphasizes the absent (but also formulaically real) realm of philosophic eros which Socrates espouses. This vertical hierarchy of the feminine also informs the model of pederasty, which should thus be seen as more of a mutual path of ascent toward what is philosophically beautiful and beyond the polis as opposed to a more<br />canonically interpreted binary power relationship. The chapter as a whole is<br />undoubtedly interesting, but to this reviewer at times the conclusions did<br />not seem fully proven but rather more suggested by the discussion offered.<br /><br />Gilhuly follows her interpretation of Plato by resuscitating Xenophon's Symposium, a work which has historically suffered in comparison (Chapter Four). Here Gilhuly argues that the feminine continuum, moving from the prostitute to the priestess, structures Socrates' argument for improved relations between the demos and the elite of the polis. In doing so she details how aristocratic masculine identity is figured in the text as a spectacle with both public and private viewing in mind. Gilhuly's<br />descriptions of the characters involved and each spectacle make this chapter a good candidate as a reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. In her first section and through direct reading of the text, Gilhuly nicely explicates the latent (and historical) hostility between Socrates, Kallias, and various other guests at the party; she deftly illustrates Xenophon's creation of the erotic spectacle and the symposiasts as objects of the text's gaze; and she contextualizes the difficult position of Autolykos, the eroticized performer who both needs to exhibit elite decorum as a passive recipient of the symposiasts' gaze but also to display his individual prowess as an athletic victor and thus as a visible actor in<br />his own right. Throughout Gilhuly pays close attention to scholarship on civic viewing in other works by Xenophon, in other genres, and also in an Athenian context generally. She argues that Xenophon objectifies the symposium itself as a means of allowing this elite gathering to function comfortably within the now democratic civic gaze.<br /><br />Working off of Kurke (1999),1 <> Gilhuly returns to the categories of the feminine by arguing that Xenophon uses the three levels of the feminine matrix to delineate the Athenian demos. She makes a particularly nice point about the demos (who historically judged Socrates) cast as the hired entertainment (read: prostitutes) and thus as a malleable group interested in furthering its own interest with the elite; the entire trial and condemnation of Socrates is thus subtly called into question. Moreover, she suggests that the entertainers embody the full range of the female continuum: from the porne as acrobat to the ritual agent as wife, seen in<br />the basilinna-like re-creation of the marriage between Dionysos and Ariadne.<br /><br />Gilhuly thus also suggests that the troupe, in playing the role of the demos, offers a image of itself as hetairai in relation to the elite, a still-restricted status which limits any true reciprocity between the two.<br /><br />In the end, however, to Gilhuly Socrates constructs a new vision of the proper relationship between the demos and the elite in his concluding speech (and here I do a disservice to the complexity of Gilhuly's argument): the philosopher becomes the erastes of the city itself, and the demos becomes a subject desiring elite culture. Complementing Socrates' redefinition of the city into a pederastic polis, at the same time Xenophon offers a speech in which the female entertainer is transformed into the quasi-ritual agent (as wife of Dionysos), thereby emphasizing the importance of heterosexual norms on which the citizenry is based.<br /><br />Gilhuly's final and most convincing chapter treats Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Gilhuly nicely historicizes the play as she unpacks the multiplicity of meanings behind its display of cultic and erotic roles for women; she rightly often sees both roles as embodied within one character, such as Myrrhine. Elaborating on the work of Stroup and Faraone, Gilhuly suggests that the play's confusion of female categories, such as the cultic figure and the prostitute, leads to their convergence via complementary sacrificial and symposiastic imagery. Further, in interpreting female ritual practice in terms of potential political implications, Gilhuly argues that the ritual agents Lysistrata (as Eteoboutad Lysimache) and Myrrhine (associated with Athena Nike, chosen by lot) present an Aristophanic model of successful interaction between the elite and demos respectively. Lysistrata controls Myrrhine much as the elite ought to direct the demos; here Gilhuly draws the reader to Aristophanes' Frogs where the poet may be espousing a similar view of an inclusive demos with elite leadership. Further, Gilhuly reads Lysistrata's weaving metaphor both as evidence for the conflation of different roles of women through habitual engagement in the same pastime and also as a positive political prescription for inclusivity. <br /><br />This reviewer would have liked to hear more on the weaving metaphor, as the brevity of Gilhuly's account did not answer a niggling concern I have always had with its appearance: how might the Athenian audience have perceived a feminine weaving metaphor applied to the demos in 411? Could a positive message from Aristophanes about inclusivity (via imagery of female weaving) really have resonated at this time?<br /><br />Gilhuly's historical analysis of the Lysistrata, however, remains impressively convincing. The convergence between ritual and sexual agents, together with Gilhuly's plausible identification of Lampito as an allegory for Sparta (through the very real Agis II) also suggests to Gilhuly that the women from Sparta, Boiotia, and Corinth introduced in the beginning of the play represent Athens' main enemies at the time of the play's production. This supposition is nothing new, but Gilhuly's reading of these historical enemies through the lens of the sacrificial imagery that is involved in the language of relevant passages as well as through the identities of<br />Lysistrata and other Athenian characters as ritual agents, underscores a dark yet simultaneously comic brutality against Athens' enemies inherent in Aristophanes' presentation. Likewise the language denoting the Spartan, Boiotian and Corinthian women transforms from hetairai-like descriptions to their literal embodiment at the end of the play as Diallage, an anatomically and geographically-divided porne and thus as a "sacrificial surrogate" for the earlier women; the end result of these embodied women is a complete physical objectification and thus metaphorical subjugation of Athens' traditional enemies. On the basis of these and other details of the play, then, Gilhuly concludes that the while the women of Greece presented in the Lysistrata are overtly involved in suggesting peace with Sparta, in a less obvious but deeper way, the women at the same time present a dark critique of the enemy in terms of ritual sacrifice and subjugation.<br /><br />In this chapter Gilhuly also details the various animals with which women are associated and explicates the sacrificial and sexualized imagery that each animal evokes in the play: the heifer, the Boiotian eel, and the white horse. By unpacking various references to the eel in both the play and other literature, Gilhuly argues for the eel as symbol of the female as a sexualized ritual victim. Gilhuly also nicely contextualizes Lysistrata's joking about acquiring a white horse as a reference to Spartan women: not only to the Leukippides but also to the white horse involved in Tyndareus' oath before marrying Helen, as described by Pausanias. <br /><br />Aside from matters of content, at times Gilhuly's writing confuses the issues. Occasionally she seems not to return to themes promised in the beginnings of chapters or describes them obliquely with a confusing result. In discussing Xenophon, for example, Gilhuly spends many pages dealing with issues not directly related to this matrix of sex and gender, at least on the surface. In setting up her argument (Chapter Four, pp. 100-10), then, it would have been nice for her to reassure her reader how these larger issues would bear more directly on the themes of the book, since it is not always clear where the argument is heading. At times this chapter reads more like a series of erudite discussions than complementary parts of a coherent picture. The middle sections of Chapter Two in particular would benefit from reminding the reader how the discussion pertains to the strands of argument that Gilhuly identifies as her goal in each subsection (pp. 100-19). Such confusion could have easily been cleared up by adding incisive concluding commentary at the end of each internal chapter division instead of immediately turning to the next subsection. <br /><br />Minor typographical errors are minimal (p. 102, fortitude, in quotation at top of page; p. 119, problem in printing elision in the first line of the Greek text; p. 130 aspazomenon printed with a grave accent instead of a smooth breathing). Certain more substantive errors occur in bibliography and citation. Kurke is incorrectly cited on p. 112 by both date of publication and page number for a quote of huge length (footnote 41; the proper citation should be Kurke 1999, 219). Moreover, at the footnote's end Gilhuly shortly adds that Xenophon actually inverts the paradigm Kurke outlines in the quote. To this reader an explanation of this assertion would have been preferable . In terms of the symposium (not to mention Aristophanes), Gilhuly is also missing the work of Nick Fisher from Harvey and Wilkins' collection The Rivals of Aristophanes (London 2000; Chapter 22: "Symposiasts, fish-eaters and flatterers: social mobility and moral concerns"), in which Fisher argues that the symposium of the late fifth century, precisely the time in which both Plato's and Xenophon's works are set, was not at all an elite event. More also could be made, particularly in Gilhuly's discussion of Xenophon, of the historical distinctions between the terms polis and demos, which are not synonyms. Less important but also<br />missing from the bibliography is my own article on the anonymity of respectable women in Herodotus (CJ 101.3, 1-20), which, although not entirely relevant to any of the authors Gilhuly treats per se, would have strengthened Gilhuly's tangential remarks, made repeatedly throughout the book, about the general tendency of fifth and fourth-century Athenians to refrain from naming citizen wives in public.2 <> <br /><br />Gilhuly's work concentrates on four pieces of literature dating from 411 to 343, but she treats them in a confusing chronological order: Demosthenes first; followed by Plato; then Xenophon; with Aristophanes last. This order was not satisfactorily explained, particularly in light of the focus of Chapters One, Three, and Four on the feminine continuum in relation to themes of long-term civic order. Chapter Two on Plato's Symposium understandably rather more concerns the world beyond the polis. The reader would have liked more of a stated rationale for this thematic and chronological scheme.<br /><br />Whatever the weaknesses of the book, however, Gilhuly has written an admirable study of the interplay between the three female roles of prostitute, the wife, and the ritual agent in late fifth and fourth-century Athenian literature. The implications of the combination and conflation of these roles in the works she has selected should have far-reaching effects on how we read additional texts that depend on these roles as part of their cultural code in defining both the female and also the masculine subject constructed upon it.<br /><br />Table of Contents<br /><br />1 Introduction<br />2 Collapsing Order: Typologies of Women in the Speech "Against Neaira"<br />3 Was Diotima a Priestess? The Feminine Continuum in Plato's Symposium<br />4 Bringing the Polis Home: Private Performance and the Civic Gaze in<br />Xenophon's Symposium<br />5 Sex and Sacrifice in Aristophanes' Lysistrata<br />6 Conclusion<br /><br />_____ <br /><br />Notes: <br /><br />1. <> L. Kurke 1999, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece, Princeton. <br />2. <> Cp., D. Schaps 1977, "The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women's Names," CQ 27, 323-331. <br /><br />Comment<br /><http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=8e940e776a&e=a74ab719fa> on this review in the BMCR blog<br /><br />Read<br /><http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=2397e77193&e=a74ab719fa> Latest<br /><br />Index<br /><http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=cb379a4cb6&e=a74ab719fa> for 2009<br /><br />Change<br /><http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=5f48fbf93c&e=a74ab719fa> Greek Display<br /><br />Archives<br /><http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=78c8e0911c&e=a74ab719fa> <br /><br />Books<br /><http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=4d36483ae1&e=a74ab719fa> Available for Review<br /><br />BMCR<br /><http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=cadbdf41a8&e=a74ab719fa> Home<br /><br />Bryn<br /><http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b<br />&id=fa5dbfea41&e=a74ab719fa> Mawr Classical Commentaries<br /><br />BMCR, Bryn Mawr College, 101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010<br />__._,_.___<br /><br />================================<br /><em>Permission to reprint courtesy of</em><br /><br />Stephanie Larson<br />Associate Professor of Classics and Department Chair<br />NEH Chair in the Humanities 2009-2012<br />Bucknell University<br />http://www.steiner-verlag.de/titel/56209.html<br /><br /><br />-- Creatures of a day! What is a man? What is he not? Man is a dream of a shadow.<br /> epameroi: ti de tis; ti d'ou tis; skias onar anthropos.<br />-- Pindar, Pythian 8, 95-6.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-1616245194355116402009-09-04T21:11:00.000-07:002009-09-04T21:12:18.878-07:00Mythogyny: Canadian women elders' stories<strong>Mythogyny: <br />real lives far more impressive <br />than myth could ever be<br /> <br />An anthology of personal stories and lessons learned by women elders in BC<br />Oral histories produced by the Women Elders in Action </strong> <br /><br /> <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yBBhfEFJGAk/SqHhUQ7TS2I/AAAAAAAAAE0/ggAli3r6MHk/s1600-h/weact.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 90px; height: 75px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yBBhfEFJGAk/SqHhUQ7TS2I/AAAAAAAAAE0/ggAli3r6MHk/s400/weact.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377827168314411874" /></a><br /> <br /> * I watched my mother be abused, psychologically, and saw her lack of choices in life and how everything was based on my father’s life. I was conscious of that but I didn’t really see it in my life – I lived it – and while I was living it, feminism arose. And so the words started being there…—Marjorie Drayton<br /> <br /> * I’ve had everything done to me imaginable and I’m not an abuser and I’m not an alcoholic and I’m not a drug addict. You don’t have to be what social workers tell you you’re going to be.—Sheila Baxter <br /> <br /> *I walked out of the marriage with nothing, he owned everything. But I didn’t have to write him out a cheque at the end of every month.—Colleen Carroll<br /> <br />Available September 15, 2009 from Women Elders in Action (WE*ACT) with financial assistance from the Women’s Program, Status of Women Canada and 411 Seniors Centre Society. To pre-order: call 604-684-8171 x 228 or email: jwestlund@411seniors.bc.ca <br /> <br />Read more on Mythogyny. Click on the link below.<br /> <br /> <br /><a href="http://www.en.wordpress.com/tag/mythogyny/">http://www.en.wordpress.com/tag/mythogyny/</a><br /><br /> <br />Jan Westlund, Coordinator<br />Women Elders in Action (WE*ACT)<br />411 Dunsmuir Street<br />Vancouver V6B 1X4<br />p: 604-684-8171 ext 228<br />f: 604-681-3589<br /><br /><br />HOW MYTHOGYNY WAS BORN:<br /><br />Seventy-eight low-income women elders of BC’s lower mainland have oral histories in the new anthology Mythogyny. Thanks to a project by WE*ACT (Women Elders in Action), these women relived dramatic experiences of the 1920s through to the present day.<br /><br />Senior women who underwent extensive training in interview techniques helped choose the subjects, record and transcribe their stories, and then edit them into a book that had cohesion and nothing unnecessary in it.<br /><br /><blockquote>What turned out as a predominant theme are the myths they grew up with, especially in marriage, the realities they faced and how in debunking and surviving the falsity of myths, these women lived lives more impressive in their reality than myth could ever be. </blockquote><br />The myths uncovered included the shocking discover that marriage is not happily ever after, the idea that $9 an hour is a living wage, fighting myths of racism and that women can't drive forklifts. Also, bomb shelters can be a good place to party.<br /><br /><blockquote>A number of the storytellers recall “patches of Eden” in places they grew up as they moved in BC like the Doukhobor communities. Some poignant events have also turned up like a woman finding her biological mother who, it turned out, was the caregiver her adopted parents had hired for her as a baby. </blockquote><br /><br /><blockquote>Most of the storytellers are now in their seventies, a few in their sixties and four in their nineties. In the course of the book’s production, two have died.<br /><br />Most turn out to be immigrants from Europe, and England, a few from the US, four from Asia including three from the Philippines. A lot of them live in Vancouver, a number in Abbotsford, Burnaby, Langley, Maple Ridge, Nelson, and Smithers. One or two come from Delta, Grand Forks, Nanaimo, Port Moody, Sooke, and Telkwa.</blockquote><br /><br />Mythogyny is the output from a story gathering project called “Lessons Learned: the Lives and Times of Women Elders in BC”, which Women Elders in Action (WE*ACT) undertook with financial assistance from the Women’s Program, Status of Women Canada and 411 Senior Centre Society in Vancouver. WE*ACT is an initiative of 411 Senior Centre. The book will be available in late September. <br /><br />For more information, call Jan Westlund at 604-684-8171 local 228 or email jwestlund@411seniors.bc.ca.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-26553556477360315212009-07-27T10:45:00.000-07:002009-07-27T17:51:49.246-07:00Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Developmentby Wendy Harcourt (London: Zed Books, 2009)<br /><br />This is a new book that just came out in June of this year. The UK ordering site is here: <a href="http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=4301">http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=4301</a> - it's available in both hardback and paperback.<br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/Sm3tO1wajUI/AAAAAAAAALw/vpPs5mKlLhA/s1600-h/Harcourt9781842779354.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 100px; height: 156px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/Sm3tO1wajUI/AAAAAAAAALw/vpPs5mKlLhA/s400/Harcourt9781842779354.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363203570472226114" /></a><br />Zed summarizes the book thus:<br /><br /><blockquote><em><strong>Body Politics in Development</strong></em> sets out to define body politics as a key political and mobilizing force for human rights in the last two decades. This passionate and engagingly written book reveals how once tabooed issues such as rape, gender based violence, sexual and reproductive rights have emerged fully fledged into the public arena as critical grounds of contention and struggle. Engaging in the latest feminist thinking and action, the book covers a broad range of key gender and development issues, including women's human rights, fundamentalism, sexualities and new technologies. It describes the struggles around body politics for people living in economic and socially vulnerable communities. The viewpoints are diverse - from the self, family and community to the public at national and international levels. The book's originality comes through the author's rich personal insights, her own engagement in feminist activism, global body politics, women¹s movements, and gender and development policy debates.</blockquote><br />The book has been blurbed by Cynthia Enloe, Gita Sen, and Peggy Antrobus among others - all revered authors in the study of women and development. <br /><br />Thanks to Bernedette Muthien in South Africa for sending out a review of the book from the AWID website, which I quote extensively below. AWID is the Association for Women's Rights in Development <a href="http://www.awid.org">www.awid.org</a>. Please also visit the review on the AWID website. There, you will find links to most of the organizations that are listed in this review, and a question and answer session with the author. - FW<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Issues-and-Analysis/What-have-we-done-to-Bodies-Wendy-Harcourt-s-Reflections-on-Body-Politics ">http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Issues-and-Analysis/What-have-we-done-to-Bodies-Wendy-Harcourt-s-Reflections-on-Body-Politics </a><br /><br /><strong>What have we done to Bodies? Wendy Harcourt’s Reflections on Body Politics</strong><br /><br /><em><strong>AWID shares highlights from Wendy Harcourt’s new book Body Politics in Development and speaks with the author about the implications of her arguments for women’s rights activists, advocates, academics and development practitioners.</strong></em><br /><br /><strong>by Masum Momaya</strong> <br />[Masum Moyama is the curator of the International Museum of Women <a href="http://www.imow.org">www.imow.org</a>]<br /><br />In <em>Body Politics in Development</em>, Wendy Harcourt re-centers what has become invisible through processes of advocacy and action: bodies. Bodies that are reproductive, productive and caring, violated, sexualized and rendered through technologies.<br /><br />As Harcourt points out, historically, women’s experiences of their bodies, whether violated, exploited or commodified, have long catalyzed their political engagement; and, in aggregate, “body politics [has been] a key mobilizing force for human rights over the last few decades” (p. 24). <br /><br />Harcourt argues that unpacking and understanding body politics is particularly important because, in the process of bringing women’s multiple needs and concerns into the development discourse, female bodies have often been essentialized and robbed of their agency - even within the global women’s movement. <br /><br />To curtail this in the future, Harcourt takes both a retrospective and prospective look at how bodies are taken up in gender and development discourses and practices - and suggests self-reflective, alternate approaches that seek to re-center embodied experiences in development processes and policymaking, without essentializing them.<br /><br />In <em>Body Politics in Development</em>, the author organizes her discussions of how the female body has been and is positioned in gender and development discourses into five categories of bodies: reproductive bodies, productive bodies, violated bodies, sexualized bodies and techno-bodies. For each category, she traces both how the body is positioned and what this means for activists and advocates working on various issues.<br /><br />Below are highlights of Harcourt’s arguments for each of the five categories, accompanied by a partial list of organizations** that are working with alternate approaches.<br /><br /><strong>Reproductive Bodies</strong><br /><br />Historically, policymakers and practitioners have tied the agency, experiences and needs of women to their biological abilities to give birth and their social roles as mothers. In the developing world, women have been targeted as sites of medical and social intervention in policies aimed at curbing population growth. <br /><br />After decades of lobbying by feminist activists, the 1975 Cairo Programme of Action represented a shift from a longstanding paradigm focused on population control to one that emphasized reproductive rights. Gains were made in terms of reproductive rights agendas, which viewed women as subjects with agency rather than simply as sites of intervention, but social and economic inequities related to reproductive rights and health remained unchallenged and unaddressed.<br /><br />By the 1980s, neoliberal policies were undermining the reproductive health agenda. Pressured to invest more in growing their economies by international lending institutions, governments in developing countries cut back on spending for social welfare, including health and education. Resources for ensuring reproductive health diminished.<br /><br />In the late 1990s, women’s rights activists were, for the most part, left out of the construction of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of priorities adopted by United Nations member states to spur development. The Cairo language, based in autonomy and rights, was replaced by technocratic language focused on service provision. An example of this is the emphasis on reducing maternal mortality.<br />Currently, given the paucity of government money available for service provision almost everywhere in the world, most services have been privatized, opening up a commercial market for biomedical goods and services and potential exploitation of women’s bodies. This includes, for example, the provision of health-related information by corporations rather than governments or civil society organizations and the testing and “dumping” of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines for disease prevention and treatment.<br /><br />Some feminist and women’s rights organizations are fighting for an approach based in autonomy and rights in which structural inequities, as well as legacies of racism, homophobia, fundamentalism and militarism are considered and addressed.<br /><br /><em><strong>Examples of Organizations Working From Alternate Approaches</strong></em><br /><blockquote>African Partnership for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women and Girls (AMANITARE)<br />Articulacion Feminista Marcosur<br />Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW)<br />Catholics for Choice<br />Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR)<br />Engender Health<br />International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)<br />International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)<br />International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC)<br />Ipas<br />Isis International<br />Reproductive Health Outlook (RHO)<br />SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective</blockquote><br /><br /><strong>Productive Bodies</strong><br /><br />Historically, development practitioners and policymakers highlighted women’s economic contributions in order to position them as agentic subjects in development processes rather than simply as passive recipients of aid. International lending institutions such as International Monetary Fund and World Bank began to view making “investing in women” as important to furthering development and achieving returns on loans and investments. Interestingly, recent language from the United Nations, governments and even NGOs has paralleled this, emphasizing that women are “good investments” in business, government and development projects.<br /><br />In some cases, this rhetoric reaffirms that “poor women from the South are a source of globally flexible, docile and cheap labor” (p. 69) and that women are valuable as sources of free labor and producers of goods that bring money into economies - but not necessarily as human beings, in and of themselves, with human rights.<br /><br />Alternatives to this rhetoric include a rights-based approach, in which women and all people are seen as bearers of rights with intrinsic value. Also, community economies, whereby producers and consumers are local and means of exchange can be more closely monitored, provide alternatives to exploitative global production chains where women are trapped in a “race to the bottom.” Furthermore, transnational feminist solidarities, especially amongst workers organizing across borders and economies, serve to resist this rhetoric and its accompanying exploitative practices.<br /><br /><em><strong>Examples of Organizations Providing Alternatives to the “Investing in Women” Rhetoric</strong></em><br /><blockquote>Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)<br />Feminist Dialogues at the World Social Forum<br />Global Women’s Strike<br />International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE)<br />WIDE Europe<br /></blockquote><br /><br /><strong>Violated Bodies</strong><br /><br />Over the last half-century, sexual and gender-based violence has been mainstreamed into gender and development discourse through its framing as a health issue, causing organizations such as the World Health Organization and government ministries of health to pay attention to it as part of achieving health outcomes. <br /><br />This framing raised the visibility of multiple forms sexual and gender-based violence, including domestic violence, rape, femicide and honor killings, amongst organizations and the general public, sometimes through shock. It also catalyzed a charity approach, in which people acted and donated to “help poor, pitiful victims over there in that remote, primitive part of the world.” This approach often supplanted an approach that holds perpetrators, governments and legal systems accountable for human rights violations or allows or recognizes agency for those who have been violated.<br /><br />Furthermore, celebrities made the issue visible via films and campaigns for NGOs. In considering these campaigns, Harcourt wonders if there is a “risk of confusing real life misery and tragedy with the glamour and fictional lives of the stars? (p. 103) And, she asks, “are we just adding one more story to a billion dollar industry based on violence and sexism?” (p. 106)<br /><br />Moreover, recently, military aggression has been justified in the “guise of protecting subjugated women and bringing civilization and prosperity to natives who are unable to govern autonomously” (p. 115) as is the case of the United States’ military intervention in Afghanistan.<br /><br />Alternatives to solely health-based, celebrity-driven, charity-oriented approaches to sexual and gender-based violence include rights-based approaches that recognize longstanding legacies of power and domination across lines of gender, socioeconomic status, membership in religious communities, nationality and global positioning.<br /><br /><em><strong>Examples of Organizations Employing a Rights-Based Approach to Counter Gender-Based Violence</strong></em><br /><blockquote>African Partnership for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women and Girls (AMANITARE)<br />Articulacion Feminista Marcosur<br />Breakthrough<br />INCITE Women of Color Against Violence<br />MenEngage<br />Pathways of Women’s Empowerment<br />Shirkat Gah<br />Women Living Under Muslim Laws</blockquote><br /><br /><strong>Sexualized Bodies</strong><br /><br />Within development discourse, black and brown bodies are sexualized and characterized as needing to be saved, rescued and re-educated, e.g. in discussions around FGM and prostitution. Sex, particularly amongst those in the Global South, has been articulated as problematic, i.e. “people are having too much sex,” “people are having unprotected sex,” and “people are engaging in nonconformative sexual practices.” These opinions have validated and legitimated intensified regulation of bodies and sexual practices and harnessed anxieties about sex. <br /><br />Some governments and NGOs based in the Global North, sometimes in conjunction with some religious institutions in the Global South, have pushed to enact policies that, according to Harcourt, “further advance imperialist ambitions,” for example the George W. Bush administration’s Global Gag rule.<br /><br />Activists have been working to reclaim the subjectivity of their own sexuality. For example, sex worker rights movements speak of “selling sex as a livelihood choice through which people have agency, including the right to self-determination, to work and to self-express” (p. 141). Some of them fight for erotic justice. According to Harcourt, erotic justice “recasts sexual pleasure as a source of physical, psychological, intellectual and spiritual well-being; instead of othering traditional practices or sexual minorities, [it] conceptualizes everyone as having potential for diversity in sexual desire, including same-sex desire” (p. 154)<br /><br /><em><strong>Examples of Organizations Employing a Sexual Rights and/or Erotic Justice Framework</strong></em><br /><blockquote>BAYSWAN<br />CREA <br />Naripokkho<br />Network of Sex Workers Project<br />The Pleasure Project<br />Sexual Policy Watch</blockquote><br /><br /><strong>Techno-Bodies</strong><br /><br />Through technologies, bodies are fragmented and commodified. The process of development often entails delivering technologies in ways that are racist, gendered and heteronormative. An underlying assumption is that if money and skills are available, inserting high-tech solutions into the mix is the best option to address any problem, regardless of ethical and environmental consequences. In most cases, given global power inequities, developing countries have no choice but to embrace these technologies if they want to build successful economies.<br /><br />With the advent of new methods of research and intellectual property laws, life and life forms (e.g. seeds, genes, etc.) are privatized and can be owned. Common heritage is no longer off-limits to either commercial or scientific interests seeking exclusive control.<br /><br />Moreover, biotechnology has made the entire notion of the body more fluid. A new eugenics and enabling of building the perfect self, body and abilities labels any deviations as deficient. Further research is needed to unpack the gendered dimensions of rapidly developing technologies.<br /><br />Harcourt asks, “what are the responsibilities of companies, scientists, policymakers and the public in the global north towards poor women and men in the global south who are bearing the brunt of the unregulated and unethical practices of biotech research and industry?” (p. 188-189)<br /><br /><em><strong>Examples Organizations Monitoring the Technologization of Bodies through a Feminist Lens</strong></em><br /><blockquote>Center for Genetics and Society<br />Committee on Women, Population and the Environment<br />The Corner House<br />Generations Ahead<br />Navdanya<br />Population and Development Program at Hampshire College <br />Related AWID Resources<br />Factsheet on Why New Technology is a Women’s Rights Issue <br />Factsheet on Facing the Challenges of New Reproductive Technologies<br />Factsheet on Nanotechnology<br />Factsheet on Gender Equality and New Technologies </blockquote><br /><br /><strong>In conversation with AWID, Wendy Harcourt reflects on what her analysis means in practice for women’s rights advocates.</strong> [Please visit the AWID weblink to read the interview portion of this review, as well as to find links to the organizations listed above - the original site is: <br /><br /><a href="http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Issues-and-Analysis/What-have-we-done-to-Bodies-Wendy-Harcourt-s-Reflections-on-Body-Politics ">http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Issues-and-Analysis/What-have-we-done-to-Bodies-Wendy-Harcourt-s-Reflections-on-Body-Politics </a> ]<br /><br />For more information about <em><strong>Body Politics in Development</strong></em>, see Wendy Harcourt’s website.<a href="http://www.wendyharcourt.net/Body_Politics_in_Development.html">http://www.wendyharcourt.net/Body_Politics_in_Development.html</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-61016864185732155262009-06-28T01:05:00.000-07:002009-06-28T18:54:11.280-07:00Dahlia Cassidyby Anne Cameron (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2004)<br /><br />This book is highly unusual, and the picture on the cover (left) has absolutely nothing to do with its content. <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/Skcn4HfLr2I/AAAAAAAAAKA/-AgyH2tyWUs/s1600-h/Dahlia+Cassidy+Cover.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 77px; height: 115px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/Skcn4HfLr2I/AAAAAAAAAKA/-AgyH2tyWUs/s320/Dahlia+Cassidy+Cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5352290527189118818" /></a> <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/SkcoptdoACI/AAAAAAAAAKI/KZguCLBdyww/s1600-h/AnneCameron.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 147px; height: 235px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rUFIDX7M6FU/SkcoptdoACI/AAAAAAAAAKI/KZguCLBdyww/s320/AnneCameron.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5352291379196723234" /></a><br />There's not one word about lipstick in the book. It's actually all about work. I imagine the heroine, Dahlia Cassidy, as looking a lot like the author, Anne Cameron (right) only really tall and strapping, as she would have to be to do so much, so much, so much work.<br /><br />For one thing, Dahlia is a single mother of a vast brood of bastards (they use the term themselves) by various fathers, plus she's the primary support at least part of the time for some of her sisters' kids as well. As best I could count them, there were 9 children living in her house by the end of the story. <br /><br />When we first meet Dahlia, she's just had a pretty horrendous sexual experience with a "Frenchman" and more or less decides to just give up on sex and concentrate on making a living for everybody. She plays music in a bar, but also does "fungus plucking" (wild mushroom harvesting) and tree-planting, each in their season. Luckily she has a childless, child-loving sister who stays home with the kids while Dahlia goes out for weeks and maybe months of tree-planting under the most grueling conditions of labour and weather. Later in the story, the family ends up on a farm, and ex-farm-girl Dahlia gets to show her chops doing a remarkable roster of grueling chores including cleaning out a cow barn and a chicken shed and harvesting hay (2 crops per year) on a miserably uncomfortable tractor, and in the off-season has a job clearing brush. I'm reminded of a saying the old folks used to use: "It's a great life if you don't weaken."<br /><br />Reading all these descriptions of how hard and rather painfully but pretty much uncomplainingly Dahlia works to support her family was really interesting, but it left me feeling very uncomfortable about myself and my capacity for lying around reading books. The very gratification I felt reading about the work felt vaguely like reading pornography, my body living vicariously through the descriptions. <br />The work descriptions were longer and more realistic than the descriptions of the child-rearing. Maybe because the children grow up quite a few years' worth in just 264 pages, their personalities, while distinct from one another, are pretty much sketched in. Their behaviour problems are also almost nonexistent, and that was to me the part that was hardest to believe. Nevertheless, tales about large families are enjoyable. I did find the book hard to put down.<br /><br />Anne Cameron has written lots of books - you can find a list of them on Wikipedia. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Cameron"></a> Her most famous was apparently <em>Daughters of Copper Woman</em> (1981), which according to her current <a href="http://www.harbourpublishing.com/author.php?id=28">publisher</a> has sold over 200,000 copies. Harbour Publishing's website also gives this generic author description: <br /><blockquote>Anne Cameron was born in Nanaimo, BC. She began writing at an early age, starting with theatre scripts and screenplays. In 1979, her film <em>Dreamspeaker</em>, directed by Claude Jutra, won seven Canadian Film Awards, including best script. After being published as a novel, <em>Dreamspeaker</em> went on to win the Gibson Award for Literature. She has published more than 30 books, including the underground classic <em>Daughters of Copper Woman</em>, its sequel, <em>Dzelarhons</em>, novels, stories, poems and legends - for adults and children. Her most recent novels are <em>Family Resemblances</em>, <em>Hardscratch Row</em>, and a new, revised edition of <em>Daughters of Copper Woman</em>. She lives in Tahsis, BC</blockquote><br /><br />I didn't mention yet that Anne Cameron is a lesbian. In Dahlia Cassidy, there is some lesbian interest, but it's really rather slight; as mentioned, it's the work - low-paying intensely physical labour - and the very successful fulfillment of family responsibilities - that occupies most of the space.<br /><br />One final note about publishers. Harbour Publishing is "an award-winning independent book publisher owned and operated by Howard and Mary White. The company was established in 1974 and is based on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast." They are not the original publisher of all Anne Cameron's works, although they seem to be trying to get all her books under one roof now. <em>Daughters of Copper Woman</em> was originally published by the feminist-operated Press Gang in Vancouver - a press that survived in various conformations until 2003. <a href="http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/women/002026-285-e.html">http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/women/002026-285-e.html</a><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Gang_Publishers">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Gang_Publishers</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18154347.post-88697464833243532712009-06-24T09:39:00.000-07:002009-06-24T09:46:01.217-07:00Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin Americaby Jane S.Jaquette (Editor, Contributor), Marcela Ríos Tobar (Contributor), Jutta Marx (Contributor), Jutta Borner (Contributor), Mariana Caminotti (Contributor), Gioconda Espina (Contributor), Beatriz Kohen (Contributor), Flávia Piovesan (Contributor), Julissa Mantilla Falcón (Contributor), Virginia Vargas (Contributor), Teresa Valdés (Contributor), Alina Donoso (Contributor), Gabriela Montoya (Contributor) <br /><br /><em>This book is coming out July 1. Maria Suarez forwarded the link to advance ordering on Amazon.com - I find it very interesting that Amazon tends not to list the publishers of books it is selling. Perhaps this is to keep you from ordering directly from the publisher? By googling, I was able to discover it's from Duke University Press. <br /><br />Here's the blurb from the Duke catalog </em><br /><br />Latin American women’s movements played important roles in the democratic transitions in South America during the 1980s and in Central America during the 1990s. However, very little has been written on what has become of these movements and their agendas since the return to democracy. This timely collection examines how women’s movements have responded to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes of the last twenty years. In these essays, leading scholar-activists focus on the various strategies women’s movements have adopted and assess their successes and failures.<br /><br />The book is organized around three broad topics. The first, women’s access to political power at the national level, is addressed by essays on the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile, gender quotas in Argentina and Brazil, and the responses of the women’s movement to the “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. The second topic, the use of legal strategies, is taken up in essays on women’s rights across the board in Argentina, violence against women in Brazil, and gender in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. Finally, the international impact of Latin American feminists is explored through an account of their participation in the World Social Forum, an assessment of a Chilean-led project carried out by women’s organizations in several countries to hold governments to the promises they made at international conferences in Cairo and Beijing, and an account of cross-border organizing to address femicides and domestic abuse in the Juárez-El Paso border region. Jane S. Jaquette provides the historical and political context of women’s movement activism in her introduction, and concludes the volume by engaging contemporary debates about feminism, civil society, and democracy.<br /><br />Contributors. Jutta Borner, Mariana Caminotti, Alina Donoso, Gioconda Espina, Jane S. Jaquette, Beatriz Kohen, Julissa Mantilla Falcón, Jutta Marx, Gabriela L. Montoya, Flávia Piovesan, Marcela Ríos Tobar, Kathleen Staudt, Teresa Valdés, Virginia Vargas <br /><br />“This is an important, timely, and fascinating examination of women, feminism, and democratization in Latin America. It is also a terrific read and another major contribution by Jane S. Jaquette, who has brought together a first-rate team of authors with extensive knowledge of the countries about which they write.”—Valentine M. Moghadam, author of Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks <br /><br />“Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America gives one a sense of the dynamism of feminist thinking in Latin America. The essays address national and regional women’s movements’ significant yet partial successes over the past twenty years as well as the ways that the movements have more recently confronted urgent political strategy choices such as whether to rely on judicial solutions or to engage with the World Social Forum.”—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire <br /><br />“Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America is a timely intervention in debates that should matter to feminists everywhere. Using freshly collected data, the authors evaluate questions like the impact of gender quotas on politics, the relationship between global feminism and national policies, and the impact of neoliberal restructuring and democratic transition on specific women’s movements. Engaging and clear, the essays offer new insights into issues that demand our attention.”—Gay W. Seidman, author of Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism <br /><br />Jane S. Jaquette is Bertha Harton Orr Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of Politics, Emerita at Occidental College in Los Angeles. A past president of both the Association for Women and Development and the Latin American Studies Association, she is the editor of Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and Practice (also published by Duke University Press), Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe (with Sharon Wolchik), and The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition to DemocracyUnknownnoreply@blogger.com1