Archive: 2013

Christine Gallagher Kearney is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project and President of DePaul University’s Women’s Network and the Business Manager for the Office of Public Relations and Communications.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a woman leader in the 21^st century in the context of the 50^th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique as two women leaders left the spotlight during these past few weeks while a third prepares to instruct others to Lean In.

Within days of each other Pauline Phillips, the Dear Abby columnist, passed away in Minneapolis at age 94, Hillary Clinton prepared to step down as Secretary of State, and Sheryl Sandberg moved onto the public stage ahead of the release of her new book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. On the surface, these three women have little in common, one the doyenne of advice, another the doyenne of diplomacy, the third a corporate female success story. But all three negotiate their femininity as prominent women leaders to varying effect.

Phillips and Clinton held, and still hold, a unique place as leaders in American culture. They are both role models to women across the country and both women played the femininity game, leaning in and out of stereotypical feminine traits to get the job done. Phillips was trusted with intimate details of American lives. She trucked in the personal, but she also acknowledged the political. Clinton demonstrated a full spectrum of strengths during her tenure as Secretary of State, most recently at the Benghazi defense hearing, where she showcased her power, knowledge and authority in addition to her compassion and sensitivity.

As a society, we still expect women to abide by classical feminine traits and some women leaders are accepted as more feminine than others. There are those—Michele Obama, Sarah Palin—who are acceptably feminine; there are those—Margaret Thatcher, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor—who are not. This isn’t new, and some women are making gains in the workplace, regardless. more...

By Roxana Cazan*

When the Russian court rejected Pussy Riot member, Maria Alyokhina’s request for a deferral in her prison term so that she can raise her son, I was shocked. Alyokhina pleaded that her son is too young for her to be removed from his side at this point, and that a sentence of years in prison would destroy the mother/son bond. She asked the court to defer her term until her son turns 14. The Pussy Riot punk team was arrested as a result of disseminating anti-establishment and feminist slogans and performing their politics in a Moscow cathedral. What drew my attention was the way in which the state handled Aliokhina’s request to mother, especially in a country where motherhood was upheld as one of women’s most important duties via Soviet propaganda.

This ideological and geographical site extends to Russia’s neighboring country, Romania, where the Communist regime that ended its totalitarian rule in 1989, imposed an intensive politics of reproduction to the detriment of women. Particularly during the last decade of Communism in Romania, the pro-natalist political program prohibited birth control, required women to procreate within patriarchal family structures, and employed women to labor outside the home, as Gail Kligman deftly argues in her 1998 book The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania.

The Pussy Riot court case received great attention in the US as did the Romanian rejection of Ceausescu’s pro-reproductive ideology right after 1989. In a way, this attention projected the two moments as standing in stark opposition. more...

Americans have rejected most of the stereotypes and double standards that prevailed 50 years ago when The Feminine Mystique was published. Very few relationships today are organized on the principle that men and women are opposites, with totally different capabilities, needs, and duties. We no longer believe that a happy marriage requires a man to be the breadwinner and decision-maker and a woman to take care of all the emotional and nurturing work. (Read more on the new mystiques at the Council on Contemporary Families.)

But the last bastion of the feminine mystique may be a sexual mystique. Like the feminine mystique before it, the sexual mystique relies on the fantasy that men and women live in different worlds, and that these differences must be maintained for everyone to be turned on and sexually satisfied. According to this mystique a happy sex life requires a macho man who is in control and a woman who is charged up with desire, yet submissive and teachable.

Think about the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey, seen by many as a daring exploration of up-to-date, high risk sex. In fact, the domination/submission theme in the book not only misrepresents BDSM (bondage, discipline/dominance, submission/sadism, masochism) communities, but is based on a very traditional sexual script: man in charge, woman submitting. The protagonist’s turn-on is that the bright, feisty, but innocent young heroine submits to him; hers is that this dangerous, powerful, commanding man will eventually take care of her. From the sexual mystique point of view, Fifty Shades isn’t kinky or risky at all. Instead Fifty Shades’ link to sexual fantasies is safe, familiar territory, catering to very old fashioned anxieties and desires.

These mystiques linger in real life as well. On the one hand, research shows that men and women are much more likely to share housework than in the past and that sharing makes their marriages happier. But a new study from Julie Brines and colleagues looked at what kind of housework couples share, in terms of “feminine” or “masculine” tasks (think doing the dishes versus mowing the lawn). They found that men and women who share housework in more traditional ways seem to have more sex than those who share housework without regard to traditional notions of what are men’s versus women’s tasks. In other words, these new-school housework-sharing couples found that following old-school gender scripts fueled their old-school sexual scripts.

Other social science research tells us the same story. Despite the significant decline in the double standard about the desirability of virginity for women over the past 50 years, Paula England and colleagues found that among college students, there is an orgasm double standard. Men have more orgasms than women in straight couples, and this is especially true early on in the relationship.

Pepper Schwartz and her colleagues surveyed 70,000 people about their relationships for their just-released book, The Normal Bar . They found that although the sexual fantasies of men and women were more similar to each other than in the past, men still reported more active fantasy lives, with a third more men than women imagined seeking another partner if they could. Times have changed since the 1980s, when Schwartz found that men were threatened when women initiated sex “too much.” But even today, sexual fantasies of freedom and pleasure still bear traces of traditional gender stereotypes.

The old feminine mystique has been banished from most homes and workplaces. But it still remains in the bedroom. People should not be judged for their sexual fantasies, but if we could bring our sexual desires more in line with the equality and flexibility we now expect in other aspects of our relationships, we might reduce some of the frustrations and misunderstandings in contemporary relationships.

–Virginia Rutter

On the 50^th Anniversary of The Feminine Mystique, Council on Contemporary Families Scholars identify what’s changed—and what hasn’t.

In 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, “most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or even desirable,” according to Stephanie Coontz, Council on Contemporary Families Co-Chair and author of A Strange Stirring, a study of why so many women responded to Friedan’s book.  Nowadays most people believe in gender equality, but stereotypes still get in the way of acting on those beliefs, as a panel of experts on sex, African American women, marriage, housework, Latina youth, motherhood, and lesbians document in a new online symposium for the Council on Contemporary Families marking the 50^th anniversary of the book.

Coontz opens the symposium with four myths about Betty Friedan and feminism:

• THE ANTI-MALE MYTH: Betty Friedan was not a man-hater, and The Feminine Mystique was not anti-marriage. In fact Friedan believed that dispelling the feminine mystique would make marriages happier – and, Coontz claims, she was right.
• THE ANTI-HOMEMAKER MYTH: Feminism has not hurt homemakers. Half century ago, stay-at-home wives had no claim on their husband’s income, no protection against marital rape, and even no right to their own credit card.
• THE CAREER WOMAN MYTH: The entry of women into the workforce and their growing educational advantage over men has not destabilized marriage. Coontz notes that divorce rates have declined since 1980, especially for educated women, who are now more likely than any others to be married at age 40.
• THE POST-FEMINIST MYTH: Women are not yet equal to or ahead of men, so gender equity continues to be an issue. Women still earn less than men with the same educational credentials in every occupation, and more women than men live below the poverty level. In addition, Coontz explains “‘the hottie mystique’ that has led to a sexualization of young girls that can distract them from exploring their new options.”

Additional brief essays offer original perspectives on youth, sex, African American women, lesbians, Latinas, and motherhood.

“The Youth and Beauty Mystique: Its Costs for Women and Men” by Paula England notes that as men age, they have a wider choice of marriage partners, but this can backfire even for men because the younger spouse—whether a man or a woman—is more likely to seek a divorce.

“Sexual Mystiques: Do we still like it old school?” by Virginia Rutter points out that when it comes to sexual fantasies, people continue to be more old-fashioned than they claim to be.

“The UNFEMININE Mystique: Stereotypes about African-American Women” by Shirley Hill argues that black women are subject to an “‘unfeminine mystique’ – the idea that they have characteristics and embrace lifestyles that are outside the boundaries of ‘real’ womanhood.”

“Lesbian Mystiques” by Judith A. Howard recognizes the remarkable change in the status of gays and lesbians in the past 50 years. Once invisible —or even condemned, including by Friedan—lesbians have not only won new public acceptance but have broadened their own self-images and definitions.

“Latinas’ Mystique” by Lorena Garcia, explains her study of Mexican American and Puerto Rican adolescents, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity, and the distorted image of how much impact culture influences girls’ lives.

“The Rise of the Motherhood Mystique” by Cameron Macdonald draws upon her research for Shadow Mothers; Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering to explain “Today women’s work outside of the home is often necessary and desirable. But we are a long way from the gender equity Friedan advocated. A new Motherhood Mystique has replaced the Feminine Mystique. Where the marital relationship was the core of the family unit in the 1950s and 1960s, today the mother-child bond is primary.”

Two years ago, when Stephanie Coontz’s A Strange Stirring–a biography of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique–was released, Girl with Pen posted an online, week-long symposium looking back at Friedan and looking forward to the status of gender equality today, as guided by Coontz. We invite you to these pieces for background and reflections on Coontz and Friedan:

First, I asked two dear friends, one born in 1935, the other born in 1940, to tell me their experiences around the publication of Friedan’s TFM in 1963. The kicker: they’re both men.

Fueled by Coontz’s analysis, GWP cleared up some myths about TFM and encouraged readers to Test Your Feminine Mystique Cliche Quotient. In a Review of ‘Stirring’ Reviews, I summarized a reading of the initial reviews of Coontz’s book appearing in in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, Salon, Ms., Bitch, and feministing.

Natalie Wilson (POP GOES FEMINISM) asked whether “Housewives” today are just as “Desperate” as in the era documented by Friedan and offers up pop-culture infused Thoughts on Coontz’s A Strange Stirring.

Finally, Deborah Siegel (MAMA W/PEN) waxed intergenerational and mused on How the Choices of Our Generation Are Shaped By the Last.

Happy reading!

-Virginia Rutter

What’s the big deal about uptalk? In The College of William & Mary’s Tom Linneman took a look at how women and men both use uptalk in his new study, “Gender in Jeopardy! Intonation Variation on a Television Game Show” in Gender & Society. The punchline? Women use uptalk more frequently, but men use it as well. For men, however, uptalk signals something completely different.

What is uptalk? “Uptalk is the use of a rising, questioning intonation when making a statement, which has become quite prevalent in contemporary American speech,” explains Linneman. Uptalk in the U.S. is reported to have emerged in the 1980s among adolescent women in California, aka “Valley Girls,” and it has become more widely used by men and women since then. Uptalk has been associated with a way of talking that makes women sound less confident Or is it makes people sound more like a girl?

Jeopardy! was Linneman’s clever setting for observing how women and men use the speech pattern. The associate professor of sociology analyzed the use of uptalk by carefully coding 5,500 responses from 300 contestants in 100 episodes of the popular game show. He looked at what happened to speech patterns when contestants – from a variety of backgrounds – gave their answers to host Alex Trebek.  Although the contestants were asked to phrase their response in the form of a question, they used uptalk just over a third of the time.

How do men use uptalk? Linneman found that men use uptalk as a way to signal uncertainty.   Linneman explained, “On average, women used uptalk nearly twice as often as men. However, if men responded incorrectly, their intonation betrayed their uncertainty: Their use of uptalk shot up dramatically.”  On average, men who answered correctly used uptalk only 27 percent of the time. Among incorrect responses, men used uptalk 57 percent of the time.  In contrast, a woman who answered correctly used uptalk 48 percent of the time, nearly as often as an incorrect man.

Men’s uptalk increased when they were less confident, and also when they were correcting women—but not men. When a man corrected another man—that is, following a man’s incorrect answer with a correct one—he used uptalk 22 percent of the time. When a man corrected another woman, though, he used uptalk 53 percent of the time. Linneman speculates that men are engaging in a kind of chivalry: men can be blunt with another man in public, but feel obliged to use a softer edge with a woman.

How do women use uptalk? As Linneman explains, “One of the most interesting findings coming out of the project is that success has an opposite effect on men and women on the show.”  Linneman measured success in two ways: He compared challengers to returning champions, and he tracked how far ahead or behind contestants were when they responded.  Linneman found that, “The more successful a man is on the show, the less he uses uptalk. The opposite is true for women…the more successful a woman is on the show, the more she uses uptalk.” Linneman suspects that this is “because women continue to feel they must apologize for their success.”

-Virginia Rutter

Can we end rape?

It seems impossible, and yet many activists are urging us to imagine a world without rape and sexualized violence. Now. Today. 2013.

February 14 marks One Billion Rising, the fifteenth anniversary of V-Day, which urges “ONE BILLION women and those who love them to WALK OUT, DANCE, RISE UP, and DEMAND an end to this violence.” In a similar vein, Women Under Siege director Lauren Wolfe issued a call to action in a recent OpEd: “Let’s declare 2013 The Year to End Rape.” Women Under Siege is having its own anniversary: February 8 marks the first year of this project, which was launched by the Women’s Media Center and has been documenting rape and sexualized violence in conflicts around the world. For example, Women Under Siege is using crowd sourcing to document and map the violence in Syria. One year ago, Wolfe and Steinem explained the goals of this project as follows:

Naming sexualized violence as a weapon of war makes it visible—and once visible, prosecutable. What happened to men in the past was political, but what happened to women was cultural. The political was public and could be changed; the other was private—even sacred—and could not or even should not be changed.

Making clear that sexualized violence is political and public breaks down that wall. It acknowledges that sexualized violence does not need to happen. When masculinity is no longer defined by the possession and domination of women, when femininity is no longer about the absence of sexual experience or being owned, then we will have begun.

Women Under Siege strives to name and analyze sexualized violence in several conflicts, including those in Burma, Mexico, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As Wolfe and Steinem argue, “we must understand how sexualized violence is being used. We must understand in order to stop it.” Their analysis not only spans the globe but also looks back at history to include the Holocaust, based on research from the 2010 book Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel.

The essays in Hedgepeth and Saidel’s book reframe the Holocaust to include a range of violent acts perpetrated against Jewish women. I haven’t read their book, but I have read At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Danielle McGuire’s remarkable account that places sexual violence towards black women—and their resistance—at its center. McGuire’s focus on sexual violence in the Jim Crow South requires us to shift how we understand the entire civil rights movement. By the end, we’re left with a very different story.

The groundbreaking research undertaken by McGuire, Hedgepeth and Saidel, and Women Under Siege allow us to ask some powerful questions. Did sexual violence in the Jim Crow South manifest similar or different patterns than those in conflicts in Libya, Sierra Leone, or Bangladesh? What might we learn from a comparative analysis of different kinds of conflict situations and the sexualized violence that accompanies them? How might we then use this information to prevent more human beings from being raped and killed?

What’s inspiring about Women Under Siege is that they’re asking us not just to look at awful things that are happening, but to understand precisely what’s going on in different contexts—and to refuse to accept any of it as natural or inevitable.

If we refuse to accept the violence, then maybe 2013 can become the year when we end rape.

By Dairanys Grullon-Virgil*

While reading Paulo Coelho’s novel Aleph over the semester break, a passage jumped out to me.  Coelho, the main character, sees Hilda, his love interest, naked and notices her shaved genitals: “When I met her in her past life, when I first saw her naked she had pubic hair. Today the woman in front of me has shaved all of it, something that I think is abominable, like if all man are looking for a infant to have sex with. I ask her to never do that again.”

What? He is actually fine with her having pubic hair and begging her not to shave it all ever again?! That is certainly not the message I’ve gotten as a young woman. Then thinking about it he makes a very important point. Pubic hair on a woman or a man is the symbol of becoming, growing, age. However, thanks to the media and social norms, we often feel repulsed or embarrassed by having pubic hair. Especially for women, we are constantly targeted with messages on how our vagina should look when we wearing a bikini or before having sex. I am not saying that all women feel this way, but many of us have felt that that way including myself. more...

President Obama’s inaugural address captured in one ringing phrase–‘Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall’–the progress this nation has made toward an America where equality and justice for all are realities, not simply pretty words.  This year and the next few will all mark milestone anniversaries of events, laws and court decisions that have moved us along a path toward greater individual freedom and equality. It is a legacy most can rejoice in.  It is also a legacy that is challenged at every turn, as it always has been.

Those who fear change, seeing it as a threat to the status quo with which they are comfortable, continue to fight against greater acceptance of differences. For this group, the equation is too often one of absolutes, of winners and losers, of either/or opposites that leave no room for win/win outcomes.   Speaking forcefully of rights they ignore responsibilities—unless it is to accuse others of ‘lacking initiative and responsibility’. On issues ranging from women’s health to gun control, the rhetoric of individual rights is twisted to deny rights to vast numbers of citizens. Many of these arguments are irrational or without factual evidence; but they reflect a reality within which too many seem to operate.

As someone who has worked for greater opportunities for women and girls for more than four decades, I am both encouraged by our clear, undeniable progress and concerned about the dangers ahead. Change is not a one way street. We have moved backwards or stalled on a variety of rights once thought fully secured.  Voting rights, access to  safe and legal abortion, sane, sensible responses to rape are all examples of this.  In Mississippi, anti choice advocates may soon succeed in drastically limiting access to abortion by closing the last Mississippi clinic providing safe abortions. Women who can afford to travel out of state may have options, low income women will not.  The latest and most absurd example of anti choice thinking is a bill introduced in New Mexico. It would  charge any rape victim who ends a resulting pregnancy with a third degree felony for ‘tampering with evidence’. The bill is unlikely to pass; but even its introduction boggles the mind.

President Obama spoke eloquently on the work still to ahead to fulfill the vision of the pioneers of Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall. His address was moving, inspiring and invigorating.  But neither an election won, nor the President’s unequivocal  support for human rights equals a guarantee of progress. The guarantee resides in each  of us as we support national efforts and work in our individual communities, families and workplaces.

Sometimes the hardest work is the work with those closest to us. Clarifying half truths, dispelling disinformation and entering into civilized discussions of issues with those  who hold different views is difficult in today’s highly partisan environment. Too often the tone turns ugly before any thoughtful conversation can take place. Differing with the perspectives of family, friends, and colleagues is dangerous to our own status quo, our own comfort. There are times when I find it almost impossible to do. Nevertheless, we must all learn to do it and to do it effectively.  If we don’t, if we ‘let it go’ too often, or give up when it gets ‘too hard’ we become, in the old fashioned words of the 1960’s, a part of the problem, rather than a piece of the solution.

With this coming Tuesday marking the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I’m inspired to post this month’s column early.

I encourage readers to check out the work of ANSIRH (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health), a UCSF research program “dedicated to ensuring that reproductive health care and policy are grounded in evidence.” So, rather than cover the breadth of political and social dynamics related to abortion policies, I’m focusing on one specific new study which has important implications for protecting women’s health:

A newly published landmark study by ANSIRH demonstrates that trained nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants match physicians in the safety of aspiration abortions they provide. We hope that these results will give policymakers the evidence they need to move beyond physician-only restrictions in order to enable more women to have their reproductive health care needs met in their local communities by health care providers they know and trust.

The results of this study are significant because PAs, NPs and CNMs have been shown to be important and accessible health care providers for rural and low-income women. ANSIRH’s new findings support policies which would reduce health care disparities and increase continuity of care because a larger group of health care providers would be able to offer early abortion care. For more on this topic, read the latest post by Tracy Weitz, Director of ANSIRH.  This research should inform health policy across the U.S.

For more on the realities of abortion in the U.S., watch Abortion in the United States, a short video from the Guttmacher Institute.