feminism

On the heels of Gwen and Tonni’s awesomely informative post-inaugural post on religion, I’m thrilled to bring you this Q&A by GWP reader-now-contributor Allison McCarthy, a graduate of Goucher College who was recently accepted into the Master of Professional Writing program at Chatham University.  Allison’s work has previously been published or is forthcoming in magazines such as The Baltimore Review, JMWW, Girlistic, Scribble, Dark Sky, and The Write-Side Up.  Winner of the 2007 Maryland Writers Association Short Works Contest, she is currently a features and profiles writer for ColorsNW.  Here she is!  -Deborah

Susan Campbell, 49, is a journalist for the Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the U.S. and author of Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl.  The book, published by Beacon Press in January 2009, uses humor, history, and memory to great effect in relating the author’s personal evolution of faith and politics.  She currently lives in Connecticut with her family and sometimes feels mortified that she wrote a memoir, which she says is a “vain thing to do,” and then has to talk about the memoir, thus rendering her “doubly-vain.”  Campbell recently spoke to Girl With Pen about her experiences with writing, feminism, and her ever-contentious relationship with Christianity.

GWP: How did you come up with the title Dating Jesus?  Were there other working titles attached to this project?

SC: It went for a long time without a title at all – I’ve never been able to write a headline and I suck at titles.  I don’t get a lot of great thoughts in the middle of the night, but I woke up laughing because it was almost like I was dating a boyfriend that I didn’t like very much.  The Jesus I was introduced to as a girl wasn’t very human; he was very judgmental and unhappy, fairly sanitized, and in retrospect he mimicked a lot of the adults around me.  He wasn’t very radical at all and this is not a person I would get along with much as a friend, let alone a boyfriend or someone I would worship.  But I tried to hammer myself into that box, anyway.

GWP: You include a lot of footnotes, which seems to be very popular among post-modern memoirists.  What was the significance of this literary device in your novel?

SC: As a trained fundamentalist, you have to back up everything you say with Scripture.  You have to have supporting documentation.  I knew this was going to be read by people like me who want proof.  It became a verbal tic and I couldn’t quit doing it!  I thought I stole this technique from a memoir about the family who came up with Sweet and Low.  The footnotes in that book were often as funny as was what came in the text.  Originally, my intent was pure, but I found it was great fun to put these irreverent footnotes in.  I don’t think of myself as irreverent, but that’s what I’ve been told it is, so I’m going to stick with that.

GWP: In the book, you mention the role of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in criticizing the gendered roles of contemporary Christianity.  What other feminists influenced your eventual shift from fundamentalism?  Do you currently identify with any communities of feminism?

SC: When I was growing up, the only feminist I knew was Gloria Steinem and I only knew what I read in the media.  I was a fairly wide reader.  I eventually met her and tried on her aviator glasses.  I read Betty Freidan and as a young woman, I thought she made a lot of sense.  I knew enough at that age not to identify myself as a feminist because it was a dirty word.  The stereotype is so silly.  I studied Womanism at Hartford Seminary.  I think that some critics of mainstream feminists complained that it’s a movement for white, middle-class women and it overlooks the challenges faced by other demographics.  That’s a valid critique and I think even the early feminists who sprang from the abolitionist movement were women of leisure who had the time and money to devote to this very important cause, but were also looking particularly at their own lives and not necessarily to women on a different socioeconomic rung.  At this point, I don’t know what school of feminism I would say I belong to.  I’m a feminist, but I’m uniquely aware that the movement as a whole has sometimes not paid enough attention to everybody.  I think there have been time periods where a lot of people left off the bus.

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First, thanks to Aviva over at Fourth Wave for posting a roundup of links to the Great Ms. Cover Debate of 2009 (“Super-Feminist Obama to the Rescue!“), and to Yondalla, who writes in reference to the image of Obama as Super-Feminist-Man in comments here at GWP, “A man who is a feminist would not be someone who would rescue us. It would be someone who walks beside us.”

Having read the critiques, I get it now.  And I respect the dissent.  But I stand behind my original praise of the cover.  I agree with Jill over at Feministe, who writes,

“Obama has reportedly self-identified as a feminist, and has the legislative record to back it up. Is he a perfect feminist, or a perfect progressive? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Is he going to disappoint us over and over? Yeah, he’s already started. But he’s still pretty damned good, especially for a mainstream, center-left politician elected to the highest office, and I don’t really see the point in kicking him out of the club just yet.”

The brouhaha over this cover is not generational, nor is it necessarily PUMA-related (as Megan at Jezebel snarkily and dismissively asserts). The controversy is over the rescue narrative, and how one reads visual imagery, which is often more polyglot than it seems.

Looking at the current cover next to the famous 1973 cover featuring Wonder Woman, a bunch of questions come up for me.  First, wasn’t this cover perhaps intended as satire?  Because next to the cartoonish Wonder Woman cover, the current one certainly strikes me as having an element of fantasy to it too.

Second, Ms. is a magazine that has tried to reinvent itself over and over again.  Its current readership skews older, and I imagine engaging younger readers is now key.  In putting Obama on the cover in this way, are the publishers sending a message that the feminism of Ms. is big-tent enough to encompass younger Obama-supporting feminists?  Was this a move to get beyond the stereotype of Ms. as “your mother’s magazine” that some younger women continue to hold?  If so, I laud the extending of this generational olive branch.

In the end, I get the critiques about how men can’t save feminism.  I really do.  But bottom line over here: I like the playful, subversive idea that inside the most prominent man in the world right nows lies a feminist ready to more publicly engage.  Time will tell whether or not it’s true.

(Paging Marco, my laid-off graphic designer husband who thinks a lot about superheros and blogs about the narratives behind images!  Weigh in, my dear Clark Kent?!)

Hells yeah!  It’s high time we include worthy men in the visual iconography of feminism.  The question of whether Pres-Elect Obama is such a man remains, fully, to be seen.  But I’m banking that he is.  And if he’s not, then I’m banking on Michelle and Hillary–and all the rest of us–to keep him in line.  More than any president in our past, this man has got serious feminist potential.

But apparently, the cover of the special inaugural issue of Ms. magazine is generating a whole lot of buzz. In a HuffPo piece yesterday, publisher Eleanor Smeal stands by the magazine’s choice, noting:

“It’s not every day Ms. puts a man on its cover. In choosing the cover for this special Inaugural issue, Ms. wanted to capture both the national and feminist mood of high expectations and hope as the 44th President of the United States takes the oath of office.”

She adds,

“But we are not giving President-Elect Obama a blank check. For our hopes to be achieved, we must speak out and organize, organize, organize to enable our new president’s team to achieve our common goals. Ultimately, we must hold our leaders’ feet to the fire or, to put it more positively, uplift them when they are caught in the crosscurrents of competing interests.”

Personally, I think the cover is FAB.  I haven’t yet read the commentary by those who find it–what, offensive, I guess?  Have you?  Is this a generational thing?  A Hillary thing?  And regardless, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

And GWP just became a media partner! What’s Fem2.0, you ask? Check it out, at their blog!

Some preliminaries:

Feminism 2.0–a conference slated for February 2, 2009 at George Washington University in Washington, DC–will bring together the leadership of major women’s advocacy organizations and online women’s communities, to “further the connection between the experience, knowledge, formidable real-world grassroots networks and online advocacy tools of women’s advocacy organizations with the powerful and growing communities of women online.”  How cool is that?

Among this gathering’s goals:

• To harness the power of women on the Internet to promote women’s issues.

• To create a forum – starting with the Fem2.0 website and continuing through the event – for women to discuss the issues that are of most concern to them today, and to encourage them to use the Internet to learn more, express their opinions about them and advocate for policies that benefit women and families.

• To create an opportunity for a “meeting of minds” across generations and media platforms.

• To unite women’s voices behind the issues that the vast majority of women support, such as education, healthcare, workplace fairness and economic security.

• To position women’s issues and their advocates for the incoming administration.

• To draw new audiences to women’s issues, especially those who are Internet-focused and can cross-pollinate to increase activism.

• Expand the audience of women engaged in online media activity and activism.

For more info, check out the Fem2.0 blog, email Gloria@fem2pt0.com, or call 703.304.5859.

We’ve been marinating on 2008; what an incredible year! Turbulent, exciting and really most of our wishes seemed to be granted in one fell swoop with the outcome of the US election.

There was China’s Olympic moment of glory, the first female Mayor in Egypt and of course the highs and lows of the U.S. election and then the same sex marriage Proposition in California. For all the leaps forward there is still more to be done for gender equality globally. Next year we want more inclusion! We wanted to share our top 5 wishes en route to inclusion. Enjoy and add your own in comments.

Our Top 5:
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On the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage in Britain, Observer reporter Rachel Cooke asks how far have we come in a thoughtful article titled “Post-feminist backlash – or new dawn for equal rights?” Read up on the latest around Amy Winehouse, Georgina Baillie, politics, wages, the sex industry, much more…

I’m quoted!

Last week I sat down with a group of journalism students and they asked what we can do to make math cool for girls. “We simply need to make math cool in general, not just for girls,” I replied. The same goes for science. Science is portrayed as the only field that uses big words (it’s not like law is any better—have you ever tried to read the terms & conditions for Facebook?) and thus intimidates many to think one needs to be a rocket scientist to be well, a scientist. So when scientific studies are printed in the media that “prove” that working moms are happier than stay-at-home ones, or vice versa, or that feminism is to blame for the rise in women alcoholics, most people are unprepared to question the findings.

This lack of skepticism is scientists’ fault. Far too often we, (even though I haven’t been a practicing scientist in over a decade, I’ll lump myself in), don’t explain things in a simple way. It takes a long time to tackle those big words and we need to use them…when we talk to each other. But basic knowledge of science is a must in today’s society. Scientific literacy should be just as important to our education as knowing how to read and add together two numbers.

More and more I find that this scientific literacy is a must for women and girls in particular. As we have seen in the eight long years of the Bush administration women and girls health care has been politicized. Yes, most of the Bush administration has been politicized, but health care is especially touchy. I just heard a story of a friend whose pregnancy was going badly and instead of offering a termination immediately her doctor referred her to labor & delivery to birth the dying fetus. She said she couldn’t believe that she had the will to stand up at the time and tell the doctor he had better find someone to perform an abortion. This friend is one of the most vocal feminists I know and yet she knows that she almost folded under the cloak of “Doctor Knows Best.”

When the Bush administration says that climate change has nothing to do with polar bears dying, we have photos of dead polar bears. When the Bush administration says that the morning after pill is an abortificant we don’t have a photos to counter. That’s the tricky thing with science and health care.

Our only defense is to educate ourselves. We should know how to spot when the science is bad or when the reporting is bad. Debunking is a science and often our bodies are a battlefield. Ladies, suit up.

Image Credit.

This morning I heard the most inspiring talk from one of the most inspiring women I know, Miss Jacki Zehner. The talk was sponsored by 85 Broads, an organization of power women set up to educate, empower and connect talented women across industries, generations, and geographies, and the room was filled with said women — including author Leslie Bennetts, SheSpot guru Lisa Witter, and NCRW leader Linda Basch. When I got up to circulate, I heard three women say, “I wish I had given that speech.” It was just that kind of speech. The title? “Are YOU Ready for a Revolution?”

This here’s a pic of Jacki climbing a chair as she takes off her power jacket to unveil the Wonder Woman girl power t-shirt she’s wearing underneath. And that was only the start. I mean, that was the end of the striptease, but the beginning of a speech on making the personal political–a favorite theme of mine–in which she urged us all to push past our comfort zones. Jacki did, when she took on Goldman Sachs, where she was formerly a partner, in her ballsy (female anatomy equivalent here) post at HuffPo last month, called “Why Are Goldman’s Women Invisible?”.

Jacki blogs at 85 Broads, and at her own blog PursePundit, at HuffPo, and is soon to be a media star, I just know it. Look out world, cause Purse Pundit is on the LOOSE. The woman walks her talk, bringing the message to a sector where revolution is not exactly water cooler conversation: the corporate sphere.

So she got me thinking, where are the edges of my comfort zone? Where are yours?

Big news. Feminist media are covering unions. Thanks to a report from GWP friend John Schmitt over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the feminist blogosphere is on the case–at Ms, at Feministing, at Feminist Majority. There’s also an excellent editorial in the San Diego Union Tribune.

The CEPR report, “Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers,” identifies what’s in the union movement for women. Schmitt reports that women in unions make 11.2 percent more than their non union peers. What’s the value of that? “All else equal, joining a union raises a woman’s wage as much as a full-year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree,” reports Schmitt in a press release.

GWP talked with Schmitt about the report, to explore whether it is relevant to think of unions as a feminist institution, and here are a few thoughts he had for GWP:

GWP: What has changed for women in unions?
Schmitt: Women are now 45 percent of all unionized workers, up from 35 percent in 1983. If the trend holds,  women will be the majority of unionized workers by 2020.

GWP: What’s the significance–besides the increased wages you report?
Schmitt: There is a perception that unions are about white guys in their fifties who work in manufacturing and live in Michigan and Ohio. But, our study, which is one in a series focusing on different kinds of workers, shows that increasingly unions are about men and women. Union men and women are Latino, African American, white, Asian, and from other racial and ethnic groups, and more than ever union workers are in the service sector. I think the facts help to counteract some of our old-fashioned preconceptions of unions as not being representative of the workforce as a whole. For women today, unions have the potential to be a freestanding institution of the larger feminist agenda.

GWP: How are unions doing on health insurance?
Schmitt: Health insurance and pensions were two of the areas we examined. Part of the current health insurance “system” in the United States has been that marriage and jobs are gateways to health insurance, and this so-called system has the disadvantages of often making women dependent on their partner status for health insurance. In our study, we found that while 51 percent of non union women had health insurance, 75 percent of union women did. For low wage workers, the benefits were even more striking–union membership doubled a woman’s odds of having health insurance. Without a union, 26 percent of low-wage working women have health insurance. With a union, 59 percent of low-wage working women have health insurance. These large union advantages remained large even after we controlled for a host of demographic factors such as age and education levels.

GWP: What about women’s pensions?
Schmitt: Our retirement system has historically counted on women’s relying on their husband’s pensions–another case of dependence. Unions change that, nearly tripling the likelihood that low-wage women in unions have some kind of pension. While 21 percent of non union, low-wage women workers have a pension, 58 percent of these women do if they are in a union. For women workers overall, the pattern is similar: 43% of women workers without a union have a pension, while 76 percent of women workers with a union do. Again, the union effect holds even after we control for demographic differences between the union and non union groups.

GWP: What’s up ahead?
Schmitt: One of the key drivers of second-wave feminism was the incorporation of women into the workforce. But getting to work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for advancing the cause of women–and everybody, for that matter. What is happening today is that unions are increasingly acting to defend the interests of working women of all social classes and backgrounds, over issues such as flexible work schedules, extending the Family Medical Leave Act, and improving access to paid sick days and paid vacation.

–Virginia Rutter

GWP’s Gwendolyn Beetham (coauthor with Tonni Brodber of our Global Exchange column) attended the Association for Women in Development Forum this month, in Cape Town.  Here’s her report.  And do note the contrast between Gwen’s sentiment and the findings of the Daily Beast report this week.  Feminism, alive and well. Not dead. Copy that, America?  -Deborah

November 20, 2008

I just got back from Cape Town, South Africa, where I was lucky enough to attend the 2008 AWID Forum, aptly titled The Power of Movements. While networking, learning and listening to fabulous feminists from around the world, I was inspired, moved, and most of all energized by the power of feminists! Do check out the website, they are in the process of posting summaries of the panel discussions, as well as videos and photos from the conference. I’ve listed some personal highlights below.

One of my favorite videos was done by the Young Women’s Caucus, younger feminists who also went around the conference passing around pink scarves to conference-goers to symbolize intergenerational collaboration among feminists and asking people how they define feminism. Although the video isn’t available online yet, I can tell you that many participants said that feminism is a way of life – love it!  For more on young feminist action at the conference, you can check out the Young Feminists at the AWID Forum blog, as well as AWID’s Feminist Tech Exchange (I must admit however, that some of the comments from the younger feminists really saddened me – it seems as if much of the “intergenerational” discussion hasn’t changed much from the point where it was five years ago when I was heavily involved in the young feminist movement here in the States.)

One of the best panels that I attended was hosted by the Third Wave Foundation, Ms. Foundation, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, along with some of their partner organizations. During the discussion, Rickke Mananzala, of the NYC-based organization Fierce, raised a really important point on the success of Prop 8 in California and similar bills in Arkansas and Florida.  He suggested that not only do these victories (for the right) point to the amount of funding that went into the promotion of these bills, but to the lack of an intersectional perspective in our own social justice movements. Makes me wonder what would have happened if youth organizations, children’s organizations and LGBT organizations would have come together to oppose the ban on unmarried couples adopting in Arkansas, or if organizations working for people of color and other marginalized groups would have come together to oppose Prop 8 in California. Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of great organizations (including Fierce!) who do a great job of working collaboratively. But I do think that may organizations – especially those in the women’s movement, with which I’m most familiar – have really had problems incorporating both perspectives and actions which truly recognize the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion and age.

I would be happy to chat with folks in comments about the rest of the conference. And kudos to AWID for organizing such an amazing event!

And stay tuned for next week, when Tonni & I resume our Global Exchange. This time we’ll be talking about the impact of the global financial crisis on women internationally.  Stay tuned!

–Gwendolyn Beetham