Jarrah Hodge, the woman behind the Canadian feminist blog Gender Focus, has started a new video series called Feminism F.A.Q.s. They’re short videos aimed at addressing myths about gender inequality and the people who care about it. She’s already got 10 videos up, but here are a couple of my favs.
What Have Women Been Told They Can’t Do?
Ride bicycles (’cause of “bicycle face”), get a credit card, run marathons, and much more.
Did Feminists Burn Bras?
Answer: Nope!
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 11
Jarrah Hodge — September 16, 2012
Thanks for sharing these - love Sociological Images and hope some readers find the videos useful.
LynneShapiro — September 16, 2012
Ms. Hodges is not telling it like it is about how the Miss America pageant demonstrators--that also included many from the National Organization for Women--ended up having the feminist movement trivialized because of the "freedom trash can" and the "bra-burner" label. If the publicity for the event did not mention the possibility of bra burning, no press would have shown up. Instead they did in droves to put women's liberation and the sea changes it brought about in a very short amount of time into the Zeitgeist. None of the 1970's changes we made were at all trivial and few have been made for women so quickly before or since. It is generally subsequent groups of feminists who trivialize the "freedom trash can' as something that seems as extreme as suffragists chaining themselves to the White House did to us in 1970.
LynneShapiro — September 16, 2012
I want to add to my comment that I feel totally and complete insulted as a very active 1970's feminist (as an after work volunteer consicousness-raising group and conference organizer for New York Radical Feminists) at the time by Ms. Hodge's arrogating an explanation of our history without all the facts like public opinion polls in the early 1970's that show how widely women's liberationists and our ideas were accepted and not seen as trivial at all. Title IX, Roe vs. Wade, revised laws about rape and child sex abuse, the end of separate help want ads for women and men, the closing of the wage gap from 59 cents to 77 cents were not trivial changes and on and on were not trivial.
LynneShapiro — September 19, 2012
What's ultimately bothering me is that I see SI--who posted one of my transit bus stop in a lousy place photographs--as a place for scholarship excellence I find lacking in Ms. Hodge's videos. No where did I hear that she had talked with the Miss America Pageant organizers still very much alive and available for contact on FB. Nor did she show awareness of the many credible random sample public opinion polls available from 1972 and beyond that "the average Joe and Jane" did not trivialize anything about the women's liberation movement. Actually, from what I've seen--and I do admit I would need to do some solid research about this-- the only people who go on and on calling us in the 1970's women's liberation movement "bra-burners" and talking about such are women who came after us.