feminism

Today is the 4^th of July, Independence Day. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.“

These stirring words, drafted in June 1776 by Thomas Jefferson, the principal writer of a committee of five— John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman were the others—have inspired Americans for more than 200 years. Most people today assume the term ’men’ means all citizens. “Most” apparently doesn’t include five of the male members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Their June 30^th majority opinion gave many  U. S. companies the right to dictate, based on the religious beliefs of their owners, the types of contraceptive coverage female employees can access under their health insurance.  The dissenting minority included the three female members of the court as well as Justice Stephen Bryer. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a forceful, thirty five-page dissent calling the decision one “of startling breadth”. As Virginia Rutter wrote here at Girl W/Pen, June 30^th was “a terrible, horrible, lousy day.”

Things haven’t gotten any better. Yesterday Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a blistering dissent to the Court’s temporary order allowing Wheaton College a religious exemption to filing a required form under the Affordable Care Act.  Women, who understand the role of reproductive rights, including the right to use the method of contraception they and their physicians consider best for them as individuals, see through the careless reasoning of the five conservative male members of the Court. Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Justice Sotomayor who wrote that the order was at odds with the June 30^th Hobby Lobby decision. “Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today. After expressly relying on the availability of the religious-nonprofit accommodation, ….the Court now, as the dissent in Hobby Lobby feared it might, retreats from that position.”

Clearly if women thought we had gained full equality, the Supreme Court decisions of the last few days have put that fantasy to rest.

Political historians have long pointed out that the terms ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ were often considered synonymous, meaning, in fact, only men and only certain men. In the newly formed United States, women were citizens, but citizens who could not vote and whose first loyalties were not to the nation or the community, but to their husbands and fathers. Abigail Adams’ plea to her husband John in March 1776 as he worked to shape the new government, “…remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could” fell on deaf ears . Historian Linda Kerber has pointed out that the “revolutionary generation of men who so radically transgressed inherited understandings of the relationship between kings and men, fathers and sons, nevertheless refused to revise inherited understandings of the relationship between men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and children. They continued to assert patriarchal privilege as heads of households and as civic actors” (Kerber, 1998, No Constitutional right to be Ladies).

Women eventually organized, just as Abigail Adams had warned her husband. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have not voice, or Representation.” It took another 140 years before the 19^th Amendment guaranteed women’s right to vote in 1920; but the women and men who fought for women’s suffrage eventually won the battle. In 1923 Alice Paul, a leader of the suffrage movement, drafted the Equal Rights Amendment.  She saw the ERA as another step necessary to assure equal justice under the law for all citizens. The wording is brief, clear: “Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

In 1876, referring to the U. S. Constitution, signed only a few months after the July 4^th Declaration, Susan B. Anthony noted “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet, we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.”

It’s an old feminist adage that ‘feminism is the radical notion that women are people.’ (see here and here)  Fighting for the passage of the ERA, ratified by only 35 of the 38 states needed before the 1982 deadline imposed by Congress, may seem far too quixotic an undertaking in the current political climate. But let’s remember the long battles for the right to vote, the continuing struggle for racial equality, the ongoing battle for equal rights for members of the LGBT community. The struggle for human rights and dignity takes lifetimes, set backs hit hard. But human rights are truly lost only when we give up, give in, surrender.

Sometimes I’m tempted. But not today, not on the 4^th of July, not with Abigail Adams and those who followed in her footsteps to inspire us.

This guest post is brought to you by Mary Kay Devine, a Chicago-based feminist and mother of four.  Mary Kay’s day job is the Director of Community Initiatives at Women Employed, a nonprofit that mobilizes people and organizations to expand educational and employment opportunities for America’s working women. Founded in 1973, WE has a 40-year track record of opening doors, breaking barriers, and creating fairer workplaces for women.  For more information, visit www.womenemployed.org. PS. I love this org! – Deborah

March is Women’s History Month – a month when the American public honors women and their voices. But even in 2014, we’re not hearing enough of those voices. The Women’s Media Center recently released their annual report on the state of women in the media, and the numbers were grim. Male front-page bylines in print media outnumber female front-page bylines by 3 to 1. Only 25% of guests on Sunday talk shows are women. Men write the majority of newspaper op-eds. And all-too-often, women reporters are still consigned to writing about “pink topics” like food and fashion.

Women Employed, an organization that has spent the last four decades opening doors, breaking barriers, and creating fairer workplaces for women, recently brought two prominent journalists together to discuss the ongoing problem of gender discrimination. They talked about gender bias in newsrooms, and also in other workplaces, as well as what women can do about it.

“We loved Newsweek! We just wanted Newsweek to be better for women.” That’s what author and trailblazing journalist Lynn Povich told the sold-out crowd at The Newsweek case that changed the workplace…or did it?  Povich shared the story of how she and her female colleagues confronted blatant sexism at Newsweek in the 1960s. In an era when female employees were told that “women don’t write at Newsweek,” they refused to accept it. She and 45 of her female colleagues brought a landmark lawsuit against the magazine in 1970—and won! Povich eventually became not only a writer for Newsweek, but also their first female senior editor.

Povich was joined by Jesse Ellison, a recent Newsweek writer who, forty years after the original lawsuit, came to realize that she and the other women around her were still experiencing gender discrimination.  “The young men around us were getting much better story assignments, they were getting raises and promotions much more easily… We were each having to work much harder than our male peers to get to the same end.” So in 2010, she banded together with her female colleagues to co-author a Newsweek article on the 40th anniversary of the landmark lawsuit questioning how much has actually changed for working women.

These two women highlighted the similarities and the differences in their struggles, pointing out that women today don’t suffer the overt workplace discrimination that Mad Men-era women had to endure. However, they still face obstacles. It’s just that those obstacles are so much more subtle and harder to identify. For working women today, one of the biggest challenges is never being sure if their inability to advance is a personal failure or a result of gender bias.

That makes it in some ways a much harder battle. But as Ellison’s experiences show, it’s not an impossible fight. Both Povich and Ellison stressed that if you are a woman who has been frustrated in her attempts to succeed at work, it’s vital that you not be afraid to speak to your colleagues, both female and male, to determine if what you’re experiencing could be a systemic problem. And then you should act. The experiences of both women show that change can happen, and it can happen from within. When people band together for change, they are powerful, and they can make a positive difference.

Hear what Povich and Ellison have to say about their experiences at Newsweek, about fighting gender discrimination in the Mad Men era and the modern era, and about what still needs to change:

And see their message for working women:

And then go out, make change, and help ensure that more women’s voices are heard, not just this month, but in EVERY month!   Here are some ways you can help: http://womenemployed.org/act

Today’s guest post from Christine Gallagher Kearney was originally published here. Christine Gallagher Kearney is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, member of the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago Board of Ambassador Council, co-founder of ChiFems Action Network and past president of DePaul University’s Women’s Network. She has published in places like ForbesWoman, Women’s eNews and Girl w/Pen! (now a part of The Society Pages).

Sheryl Sandberg and her Lean In organization are still trending, and while I’m not excited about everything she and her organization are doing for women — see bell hooks’ critique — the new Lean In Collection with Getty Images, “a library of images devoted to the powerful depiction of women, girls and the people who support them,” is heartening, especially in the face of recent female disembodiment in the news media.

TIME didn’t start the disembodiment, but they did name it. In a rundown of recent visual advertisements depicting “headless women,” writer Laura Stampler describes and calls the occurrence of headless women a “trend,” reducing women’s bodies to objects for consumption.

To be sure, “headless women” in advertising is not new. Take for example a 1990s ad for BodySlimmers that depicts a woman standing provocatively in what looks like a black swimming suit. Her head is not visible in the image. Or think back to an advertisement by Axe for shower gel that depicts a woman’s body covered in mud, with “wash me” written with a finger across her stomach, her head is not visible in the image.

However, announcing a “headless woman” trend in 2014 is as absurd as it is dangerous. Picture all the female contestants on “The Bachelor” without heads. Imagine female models on catwalks without heads. Now picture your female coworker without a head, or prominent female leaders — Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton or Janet Yellen — without heads.

“By cutting out the head you are immediately saying her personality and brains aren’t important in the slightest. We are just interested in her body. It doesn’t matter who she is,” said Lauren Rosewarne a professor at The University of Melbourne who writes, researches and comments on sexuality, gender, feminism, the media, pop culture, public policy and politics.

In effect, choosing to describe this disconcerting development as a “trend” belies the seriousness of the injustices being perpetrated and further demeans the individuals or groups who are being treated with contempt. Women are reduced to objects for consumption, to be used and thrown away. more...

If you care about smart toys or if you don’t live under a media rock, then by now you’ve heard about GoldieBlox, the girls engineering toy. Maybe you read about it here at Girl w/Pen. Maybe you saw the viral video about the toy that parodied the Beastie Boys song, “Girls.” In the video, three girls set off a Rube Goldberg machine and aim to take over the world. The only problem was that the Beastie Boys said thank you by suing GoldieBlox. Then the toy got critiqued left and right—too pink, too princessy, too wrong for “stealing” a Beastie Boys song. Well now, no matter how you felt about the toy, you likely saw their new ad while inhaling nachos during the Super Bowl. GoldieBlox won Intuit’s small business Super Bowl commercial competition which means they essentially won 4 million dollars, the amount equivalent to make and then screen a commercial during the Super Bowl.

And that means that GoldieBlox really just became a household name.

This commercial puts GoldieBlox, a small start-up toy company that wants to, as they say, “disrupt the pink aisle,” at your local toy store, back on top. And to make matters even better, days ago GoldieBlox’s “Spinning Machine” won the People’s Choice and Educational Toy award of the year at the 14^th annual Toy Industry Association (TIA) Awards. Debbie Sterling, GoldieBlox CEO, invented one of the first engineering toys for girls. She shares her challenges in her TEDX talk: her path as a female minority in a Stanford engineering program, a woman inventor in the big business androcentric toy industry, and as a female entrepreneur in booming Silicon Valley. Sterling’s vision as an entrepreneur, and the ideological work of the toy, are the reasons we wanted her to help us open a new gender center, the Cassandra Voss Center, on our campus. So this Fall, we became the “Midwest launch” of GoldieBlox.

What did that mean? Debbie Sterling and VP, Lindsey Shepard, spoke on our campus and taught us how to engage hundreds of kids with GoldieBlox when we created a toy zone in our Center. St. Norbert College was also among the first colleges to include the toy in their curriculum. As Assistant Professor of Education, Chris Meidl, said when he introduced the toy in his class on “Play,” “No matter any other criticisms about the toy itself, the clear message delivered is that girls can build too. And that is a message worth being heard, for girls and boys, for women and most importantly for men.”

So I’m loyal-it’s true. I know the founders personally and heard them speak passionately about their dream of the toy and for girls globally. The toy, though, has come under a lot of critique. When Slate’s holiday gift guide tagline read “Forget GoldieBlox. Buy a Birdfeeder Instead,” I wanted to throw a birdfeeder at my computer screen. The holiday season is, of course, the biggest commercial moment in the toy company year. Slate just kept going with, “First Everyone Loved GoldieBlox. Now Everyone Hates GoldieBlox.” Hate is a strong word and I guess Slate figured that out since at this writing, they removed the above title and have given GoldieBlox a second look under the article, “GoldieBlox: Great for Girls? Terrible for Girls? Or Just Selling Toys?” Well good for you Slate for modifying your backlash after the fact. Sigh. Then when Jezebel recently wrote, “GoldieBlox Means Well But Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype,” I had to weigh in.

I’ve been in Women’s and Gender Studies since I was 19 years old. On the one hand, I welcome and get the onslaught of feminist critique of GoldieBlox that is now coming to a blog near you. On the other hand, I am no ideological purist and I wonder the degree to which critics grasp what it takes to break gender barriers in all these fields—STEM, toy industry, start-up/Silicon Valley culture—and make a toy that has mass appeal. I repeat—mass appeal.

My supportive response really comes from watching the toy work on the ground. I saw hundreds of girls play with GoldieBlox for an entire day. I watched as girl after girl mastered a “basic belt drive,” the first engineering challenge of the game and saw how they interacted with the “bill of materials” that is designed to be especially welcoming to girls—girls who rarely play with construction toys. Debbie made the wheels look like thread spools, the axles resemble crayons, and the belt mimic a thick hair ribbon. A hair ribbon is stereotypically feminine, but it’s likely a girl has seen one, unlike other construction toy parts that can appear off limits in gender-segregated toy aisles. Debbie conducted research for her start-up toy and discovered that girls would frequently turn her prototypes into non-competitive games. In other words, girls needed all the adorable animal characters to spin on the spinning machine or ride the float. Everyone needed to win. So Debbie redesigned the game.

Now as a gender critic, I know that girls are socialized into these sensibilities rather than born into them, but that fact does not make their gender socialization any less real. When my three year old picked up the toy, she gravitated first to the character animals just as GoldieBlox VP Lindsey Shepard had predicted. “The character animals are the way for girls to feel invited into engineering,” said Lindsey who urged us to reach out a hand with, say, Katinka the dolphin, and welcome a girl into play. The GoldieBlox mission is to make engineering as appealing a job for a girl as the pink-collar work that so many girls are still ushered into. Debbie’s basic gender critique in her Kickstarter video asserts a claim in Gender Studies about inequity and representation—engineering is still 89% male, women make up half the population, women and girls need to be building for a better, more inclusive future. Few toys offer such a gender critique which is why GoldieBlox had an initial feminist appeal.

Critics say about the toy: it has pink on it. And the second game is called “GoldieBlox and the Parade Float” where girls partake in dreaded “princess culture” and help build a parade float. It’s all true. The toy has pink on it, but is mostly yellow. Debbie talked about how using some pink was intentional. She aimed for girls to “want to pick the toy up,” in the first place. Debbie said recently to the New York Times, “It’s OK to be a princess. We just think girls can build their own castles too.” The deeper story of the princess float—and I loathe princess culture…I avoid saying the word out loud in my house—is that Goldie’s best friend, Ruby, who is African-American, is actually the winner of the pageant. This fact prizes afro-centric beauty in a racist culture that makes beauty synonymous with whiteness. Now it is certainly more troubling that Ruby is the best friend of Goldie and not Goldie herself. Goldie of the Blox is a white protagonist, a central critique that is rarely mentioned in the feminist response. Though I wonder if Goldie is “Golda,” an homage to Debbie’s Jewish foremothers. The Jewish cultural allowance for smart girls is something Debbie mentions in her TEDX talk. On the ground, watching girls play with the toy, they actually play with the animals in the set which are not necessarily racialized. The question remains: can a toy ever be designed (add books, movies, etc.) with a girl of color at the center? Girls and women are barely represented authentically in mass culture at all, let alone women of color. We know something will have shifted with a girl-of-color is at the center of a story.

So the answers to the GoldieBlox critiques are a bit more complicated. I appreciate critic Deborah Siegel’s more balanced provocatively titled piece, “Is GoldieBlox Trojan Princess, or Trojan Feminism?” I think it’s both. Which brings me back to my point about ideological purity. Why do we keep asking this binary question of “is it or isn’t it” feminist? Let’s step back and take the long view. The truth is I want GoldieBlox to have the same appeal as Bob the Builder or Lego dudes because girls still get nada in girl toy world. Like I teach my students—you can hold conflicting ideas simultaneously and still make a commitment. GoldieBlox is listening. Let’s commit to help them navigate the hyper-stereotyped toy world many of us are resisting by giving them some advice as The Brave Girls Alliance is doing with Lego when asking them to make smart girl Minifigs. I appreciate that GoldieBlox is trying to meet girls where they are. We can find the common ground between these worlds intellectually and maybe we can even find it around play. And even if we can’t, GoldieBlox is about to change play nationally regardless.

Just when I manage to climb out of the depressing pit so much of the news plunges me into these days, some new outrageous incident pushes me back down.  My latest ‘back in the dumps’ experience is the news coverage of the young mother fired by Whole Foods in Chicago.  Rhiannon Broschat didn’t come in to work because city schools were closed due to frigid temperatures and she could not find care for her special needs son.  She called in ahead of her shift to alert the store management.

My reaction to the first news about Rhiannon was disbelief.  There had to be more to the story.  Whole Foods cultivates such a wholesome, ‘we-care- about-your-health-and-well-being’ corporate image. They tout their charitable contributions. They refer to their workforce as ‘team members’. Why would they jeopardize their brand  so cavalierly?

I looked for other new coverage, for statements from company officials. Perhaps Rhiannon had been a problem employee? Perhaps the termination had nothing to do with this particular absence? Maybe there were other, more serious offenses?

The answer?  “Well, not really.”

Whole Foods has a point system at stores in the Midwest. An employee is allowed to accumulate five points every six months. ‘Unexcused absences’, (a slippery term at Whole foods, it seems), equal a point and incidences of tardiness equate to varying fractions of a point.  Anyone accumulating more than five points within a six-month period is fired. Rhiannon had accumulated five points prior to the closing of schools that exceptionally cold day. According to Whole Foods they simply followed the policy.  Rhiannon and her supporters insist her shift manager told her she understood Rhiannon’s situation and that the young mother should stay home with her son. Rhiannon assumed her situation fit the definition of ‘excused absence’.

But the real issue is not who said what, but the policy itself and the appalling lack of security and flexibility low income workers confront in the workplace.

Feminists have fought for decades for family friendly policies that reflect the realities of women’s lives. But success in areas of paid family and medical leave is dismal. Two thirds of workers receiving the minimum wage are women, but  is rare for such jobs to offer a even a single paid sick day.  Only three states, Rhode Island, New Jersey and California have legislated paid leave policies. Of course, the higher your salary, the greater your chances of working in a setting where paid leave for family emergencies is employer-provided or negotiable. Rhiannon’s story is illustrative of the larger issue. No wonder over 60,000 people across the country signed a petition demanding that Whole Foods reconsider their decision to terminate her employment.

Last December Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro introduced the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act. The legislation would set up a national paid leave insurance program funded by contributions from both workers and employers—each contributing 0.2 percent of wages. It is legislation that ought to command enthusiastic, bipartisan support. As numerous studies have shown, family friendly policies are not only good for workers, they can have positive effects for employers and the economy. For example, see here,  here,  here and here.

Women are the vast majority of primary caregivers for families and children. Thus it is women who pay the highest price when forced to choose between a paycheck and people we love who need our care. Whether through lost income, or fewer promotions or increased stress, women experience a large proportion of the negative effects a lack of family friendly policies produces. None of this is new news.

The United States is the only nation in the developed world that does not guarantee any type of paid leave. It is also a nation where ‘family values’ receive lots of airtime and political spin. There is no spin that can hide the reality: either many of those in positions of power are terribly ignorant of how the majority of Americans live or they simply don’t care about anyone outside their immediate social circle. Either way, it’s pretty discouraging.  But action can be a good antidote for discouragement. To use language Whole Foods is comfortable with, let’s get on the team—the one working for passage of the FAMILY Act.

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The other week, Girl w/Pen bloggers and masculinity studies scholars Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe called us to pause the war on pink and take a look at boys’ toys, prompting a response from media studies scholar Rebecca Hains (author of the forthcoming The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years) and a reflection from me on feminist history and popular feminist debate.

This week, I invited Rebecca to dialogue with me. Here is our exchange. And keep an eye out for some thoughts on it all coming soon from Girl w/Pen blogger Susan Bailey, too! You can learn more about Rebecca’s work here.

Deborah: In my post the other week (“Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink?”) I looked back at the history of arguing “enough about girls, let’s focus on boys,” to mixed effect. You make the thoughtful point that the ploy is not merely a harmless rhetorical effect. Can you elaborate?

Rebecca: In all honesty, the argument that we need to stop (“or at least pause”) the war on pink didn’t even come off as a rhetorical device to me. I’m sad to say that it just came across as ill-informed. There isn’t a war on pink; there’s a thoughtful, measured argument that while pink isn’t inherently bad, it’s limiting the play worlds and imaginations of boys and girls alike. So “Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink” reads, to me and my colleagues, like a straw man argument. The authors were conjuring up a nonexistent epidemic of myopic thinking, instead of engaging with anyone’s actual writing on the subject of girl culture and the rise of pink. I expect better from our esteemed colleagues in masculinity studies: if they would like to engage with those of us working in girlhood studies, and perhaps learn from our successes (we’re happy to share what we’ve learned), that would be terrific–they just need to demonstrate that they’ve read at least some of our work so that we can have a meaningful conversation.

Besides, straw-man arguments strike me as more problematic coming from a feminist academic blog like Girl w/Pen than, say, an anti-feminist source like Christina Hoff Sommers. (A case of “the medium is the message,” perhaps?)

Deborah: Tell us a bit about your book that’s coming out next fall, The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years (Source Books, 2014). Is there any way in which you think girls can be active agents in princess play? In what ways do you hope your book will steer popular debate? And what do you most want to change?

Rebecca: Thanks for asking. The Princess Problem is really a handbook for parents to raise media-literate daughters–girls who are able to think critically about marketing, the beauty ideal, gender stereotypes, and race representation. This is an important task for 21st-century parents: We must coach our children, guiding them to become critical viewers of media culture in general. And yet media literacy is not something that’s a mainstream concept yet in the U.S.; many other countries include media literacy in their K-12 curricula, but that’s not the case here. I’d like that to change.

I focus in my book on princess culture in particular because “princess” is so pervasive–it’s THE defining pop culture phenomenon in early girlhood. And it’s the perfect example to use in a text on raising media literate girls because the issues we need to discuss with our daughters so often differ from than the issues we would discuss with our sons. (For example, body image issues are a very different beast when it comes to girls and boys.) But the principles I teach in The Princess Problem could easily be extrapolated to raising media-literate sons, too.

And yes, I absolutely believe girls can be active agents in princess play. Kids are not passive victims of media and toys; they’re active consumers who regularly defy our assumptions. That’s a position I’ve espoused in some of my earlier work–for example, my study of girls and Bratz dolls.

It’s important to note, then, that in The Princess Problem, my goal is not to persuade girls that princesses are bad or to “de-princess” them; rather, it is to help parents help their girls reason become critical viewers who can see that there are many, many ways to be a girl.

Deborah: I loved your recent post at Sociological Images (“When Cowboys Wore Pink”), where you concluded, “Monochromatic girlhood drives a wedge between boys and girls — separating their spheres during a time when cross-sex play is healthy and desirable, and when their imaginations should run free.” Some of our Brave Girls Alliance colleagues have created incredible alternatives. From where you stand, what do you see as some of the most exciting challenges to the children’s industrial complex as we know it?

Rebecca: The Let Toys Be Toys movement is doing terrific work challenging the status quo in the UK. By calling for toys to be desegregated–grouped by theme or interest type, rather than by gender—they’re empowering parents and children to think outside of the pink and blue boxes that marketers have been placing children into. I’d really love to see a comparable movement here in the U.S. and Canada. With folks like Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals, Michele Yulo of Princess Free Zone, and Ines Almeida of Toward the Stars raising so much consciousness about the limitations that today’s marketing foists upon kids of both sexes, it’s the right time.

I’d like to see a movement that goes one step further, too, and challenges marketers to put an end to the incessant pink-washing. By “pink-washing,” I’m specifically referring to the instances where marketers or toy makers create a product that is pink for no reason other than to make it as girly as possible. After all, there’s nothing wrong with pink–it’s a perfectly nice color–but there IS something wrong when it’s a) promoting sex role stereotypes and b) basically the only color found in little girls’ worlds. They deserve a full rainbow of colors.

Pink-washing is unfair to our boys, as well: I just heard from a mom the other day whose two-year-old son wanted a toy shopping cart for his third birthday.  All she could find at her local Toys R Us was a pink cart. She bought it anyway–but she knows that the adult men in her family are likely to think it’s weird (which is a shame). But, come on; have you ever seen a real shopping cart in pink? I haven’t. I doubt they exist. Pink-washing toys that have no good reason to be pink–that would be considered gender-neutral if they were not–perpetuates so many retrograde stereotypes about sex roles, it’s offensive.

Deborah: When GoldieBlox, a company initially celebrated for its creation of a toy designed to foster girls’ interest in engineering, ultimately disappointed many of us by slapping a princess narrative on it, it seemed challenging, at the time, to articulate a position that both acknowledged the step in the right direction and pushed for more.  (My feeble attempt posted here.) In the war between industry and better alternatives, is it always necessary, do you think, to choose sides? How do we measure progress in a world half-transformed?

Rebecca: I prefer to think of it as a dialogue rather than a war. I don’t want to fight companies; I want to hold them accountable and ask them to do better. Companies have so many stakeholders to work with that they often don’t realize that they are perpetuating gender biases. If they receive constructive criticism from enough parents and advocates, though, they can create better offerings.

Unfortunately, the world is indeed half-transformed in these matters, and it’s often a case of one step forward, two steps back. For example, we can look at Disney’s films and see that slowly but surely, their representations of race and gender have been improving with time. I believe that their efforts at racial inclusivity and empowered female characters signal that they’ve been paying attention to their critics over the years. The problem is that in a behemoth company like Disney, change comes very slowly; and their own Consumer Products Division isn’t keeping pace with the positive changes within the Studios division.

So when it comes to the toys, we’re seeing the same old stale ideas about what’s “princessly,” or stereotypically feminine–even when the products are based on innovative new on-screen characters. That was certainly the case with Disney’s Consumer Products Division’s horrible redesign of Merida last year: she was strong on screen, per Pixar’s wishes; but as her look didn’t “fit” with the existing high-glamour Disney Princess brand, Disney’s Consumer Products Division made several changes to Merida’s looks (see posts here, here and here), undercutting everything parents and kids loved about Merida. What a conundrum.

Deborah: It’s a conundrum indeed. Frozen, anyone? I’m already wondering how princessly those Anna and Elsa action figures will be.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter @deborahgirlwpen, join me on Facebook, and subscribe to my quarterly newsletter to keep posted on my coaching workshops and offerings, writings, and talks.

Heather Hewett’s December 5^th blog post on Girl w/Pen, “What’s a Good Mother?” hit a nerve. My daughter Amy was born in 1970, the same year Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Robin Morgan’s anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful were published.  Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique had already become part of my daily conversation. I read Firestone, Morgan, Germaine Greer, Our Bodies, Ourselves—everything I could find on ‘women’s liberation’.  It all made so much sense.  My husband and I agreed; we would share parenting. Our family wouldn’t follow the usual gender patterns, we’d be equal partners and we’d steer our daughter clear of sex stereotyped toys, clothes, and expectations.  A huge cultural shift was underway; we’d be part of it.

We have been; but not in the ways I anticipated forty years ago.  Children complicate lives in unexpected ways. Amy was born with a variety of disabilities, some immediately evident, others less so. She tested our facile feminism; we chose different answers. I am a single parent.

Parenting a child with physical and developmental challenges is a politicizing activity. Mothering such a child alone is a radicalizing one. Mothering a child with disabilities requires not only the culturally sanctified female roles of caregiving and ‘traditional good mothering’, but aggressive independent action. You must lobby the legislature, pressure the school board, argue with the doctor and defy the teacher. And, oddly, while these ‘unfeminine’ behaviors might, in other contexts, be deemed deviant or too aggressive, performed in the context of mothering a child with special needs they are considered appropriate, even laudable.

But for a single mother, even this culturally permissible deviance is insufficient. My life with Amy is different from the lives of most of my colleagues and friends. I could not provide emotional, physical and financial support for Amy without re-envisioning motherhood. Amy and I  have lived with a shifting assortment of male and female students, single women as well as married women with children. Work for me is not possible without round the clock care for Amy. This is true for all mothers and children, but it is a need that is normally outgrown. Not so in our case. Amy fuels my passion for feminist solutions; not simply for childcare, but for policy issues across the board. I know first hand too many of the dilemmas confronting women, from the mostly invisible, predominately female workers who care for others in exchange for poverty level wages to successful business women struggling to be perfect mothers, perfect wives and powerfully perfect CEOs.

While there may be no individual solutions, there are individual decisions. As a mother and a feminist, I long ago made the decision to work toward a society in which power and responsibility as well as independence and dependence are equally available to women and men.

But it’s a lovely winter day, snow is sparkling on the pine trees, and across the street children are sledding. To talk of the challenges of motherhood without sharing the lessons in joy Amy offers is only a part of the story.

My particular good fortune is in Amy’s special way of seeing the world. Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat writes about people he calls ‘simple’. “If we are to use single word here, it would have to be ‘concreteness’ — their world is vivid, intense, detailed, yet simple, precisely because it is concrete, nether complicated, diluted nor unified by abstraction.”  Amy never misses a sunset, a baby or a bird. She notices and she insists that others notice.

“Mother, come here! Now!”

“Amy, I’m busy, I’ll be there in a minute, OK?”

“No, not OK, red bird will fly away, come NOW!”

I hurry to see red bird.  What kind of silly person would think it reasonable to miss a cardinal in the snow?

This is only one of many joys my daughter has taught me.

It’s the Christmas season, a time of hope. Lately life has begun to look bleaker each day as we  move further  toward a nation of haves and have nots; but today I choose to believe in hope. Someday, not so far away, women and men working together will beat the odds. We will succeed in creating a more just and equal world.

Let’s face it. It’s hard not to jump on the gratitude wagon this time of year.  Research, we know, supports it. But research aside, I’m feeling it. And thought I’d share.

Between latkes and turkey leftovers, please join me in a collective shout out to ten feminist thought leaders in our midst. They are PhDs, soon-to-be PhDs, and/or serious mavens, all with a keen eye for popular debate, and they’re the current crew of active bloggers here on Girl w/Pen. Check out their latest, read all about them, and post a note here or at my FB page about who you’re feeling particularly grateful for in this realm. I’m always searching for models of thoughtful thought leaders, particularly in the zone of feminist public conversation. And additionally, we are always happy to induct new Penners into our crew.

So here we go. For their mind-bending, evidence-based, eloquent, witty, and pithy feminist dazzlery, I’m thankful for:

Veronica Arreola, who is currently pursuing her Ph.D., directs an academic support program for women majoring in STEM and is a longtime mover and shaker in the Chicago feminist community and nationally. Veronica taught me how to blog and is now my terrific colleague in my new hometown, where we frequently find ourselves sharing a stage. Veronica pens Science Grrl, a column exploring the latest research and press on girls and women in science & engineering.

Susan Bailey, who served as Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) and a Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Education at Wellesley College for 25 years, and as principal author of the 1992 AAUW Report: How Schools Shortchange Girls, is a thought leader whose insights fostered national public dialog on gender in K-12 education and someone I’ve long admired. She pens the column Second Look, offering her reflections of where we’ve been and where we need to go. Take a second look with her at the work unfinished in the realm of girls and sports.

Kyla Bender-Baird, author of Transgender Employment Experiences: Gendered Perceptions and the Law, is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and GWP’s fearless Managing Editor. Kyla pens The Next Generation, a column featuring young feminists under the age of 30 who are not yet established in an academic career. Kyla and I met when she was my intern at the National Council for Research on Women—and now, like so many former interns, I learn from her.

Tristan Bridges, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York, book review editor at Men & Masculinities, and editorial board member of both Gender & Society and Men & Masculinities, pens the column Many Musings, with CJ Pascoe, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, and chair of the American Sociological Associations section on Sex and Gender. Together, they share thoughts on masculinity, inequality, and everyday life. They’re our newest addition, and I’m beyond grateful to have them with us. Check out their recent post on bro-porn (think: naked rowers) and the heterosexualization of straight men’s anti-homophobia.

Heather Hewett, who writes about women, feminism, and culture in the U.S. and globally for both academic and mainstream publications (including The Washington Post, CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, Brain, Child, and The Motherlode at the New York Times) and numerous anthologies, is an Associate Professor at SUNY New Paltz and a dear old friend without whom I would have probably given up writing a long time ago. Heather pens the Women Across Borders column, offering us a transnational perspective on women and girls. Read what she has to say about the complications, and the promise, of the global girls movement, and what she did on the International Day of the Girl this year.

Elline Lipkin, a scholar, poet, and nonfiction writer who has also worked as an editor for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and journals, is a girls’ studies guru who explores the state of contemporary girlhood in the United States and how gender is imprinted from birth forward.  Her book, Girls Studies, is a guidepost in the field. She pens the Off the Shelf column, offering book reviews and news, and more. Read her latest (and we mean latest) on the GoldieBlox controversy.

Dara Persis Murray, who writes about the intersections of beauty and feminism as they occur online and in consumer culture (branding campaigns, advertisements, television programs) and whose work has appeared in the academic journals Feminist Media Studies and Celebrity Studies, and in edited collections, pens the Mediating Beauty column, where she muses on the intersections of beauty and feminism as they appear in consumer culture and digital culture. Dara and I met when she was my intern at the National Council for Research on Women; she then became my research assistant, and now I, too, learn from her. Read Dara’s take on Miley’s embrace of the f-word.

Adina Nack, who has been researching and writing about health, sexuality and stigma since 1994 (and winning myriad awards as she goes!), is author of the book Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable STDs and has covered topics including STD stigma, sex education, and HIV/AIDS in venues including Ms. Magazine, academic journalis, and anthologies. Adina is largely responsible for getting us over here to The Society Pages, where we are so happily at home. Adina pens Bedside Manners, in which she applies the sociological imagination to medical topics, with a special focus on sexual and reproductive health. Check out what Adina recently had to say about Miley Cyrus, sexuality, and her alma mater.

Virginia Rutter, who has been working at the intersection of academia and media for two decades: first in DC in Congress and at a mental health organization, and (during and after her PhD at the University of Washington), is a sociologist translating academic ideas to general audiences. The author of two books (The Gender of Sexuality and The Love Test, both with Pepper Schwartz) and numerous articles for Psychology Today, Virginia has written on topics including divorce, marriage, gender, sexuality, stepfamilies, adolescence, infidelity, depression, women in science, psychotherapy research, couples therapy, and domestic violence. Virginia is mentor and guiding light to many (including me). She pens the column Nice Work, sharing insights on social science in the real world.

Natalie Wilson, who is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author who teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, militarism, body studies, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of Seduced by Twilight and Theorizing Twilight and is currently co-authoring a book examining contemporary representations of zombies, witches, and ghosts in popular culture. She also regularly writes film reviews for Ms. Magazine and pens our Pop Goes Feminism column, where she ponders all things popular culture from a feminist perspective. Read her take on the feminist pull of Gravity.

I am also ridiculously grateful for GWP bloggers emeritus currently on hiatus or who have blogged with us in the past: Avory Faucette, Alison Piepmeier, Allison Kimmich, Gwendolyn Beetham, Shira Tarrant, Leslie Heywood, and others, who we welcome back anytime – once a Penner, always a Penner, they say.

Thank you, all, for sharing your minds, passions, and words–you all utterly make my day.

Follow Deborah on Twitter @deborahgirlwpen,“like” her page on Facebook, and subscribe to her quarterly newsletter to keep posted on workshops, offerings, writings, and talks.

Thanksgiving is a week away.  The holiday is uniquely American, grounded in our history rather than our various religions, in a sense of family and community rather than military victories. Increasingly, commercial aspects have intruded on family priorities, but it remains a time when we gather to give thanks for what we have, and hopefully, to recognize and support those less fortunate. I wish it could also be a time for many of us to do more than feel good about spending a few hours serving turkey dinners at a shelter for battered women or homeless families. I wish it could be a time to consider the steps needed to eliminate the poverty, violence and hopelessness that create the need for such places.

But as the holiday approaches our nation confronts the largest levels of income inequality in close to a century. A college education remains a key to economic success but is less affordable every year. These realities are coupled with unrelenting, well-funded efforts that disproportionately effect the poorest among us: women and children; the elderly; those with disabilities.

Attacks against health care reform and the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), fierce opposition to an increase in the minimum wage, measures to cut off access to safe abortion, are all in the news and on the political playing field. And for some it appears that is exactly what these critical issues are—political play things. Play it right; insure your privileged position.  The idea that actual individuals—mothers, grandparents, children, war veterans, caregivers—will suffer and that those most affected are powerless to change the dynamics of the political game seem lost in allegiance to one’s group or one’s ambition, or both.

Political differences are important ingredients in any democracy, but robust measures of compassion and compromise are required as well.  Empathy for those living in less fortunate circumstances appears missing from the calculations of some of the most powerful players–those inside as well as outside political office.

How can this be?

Two recent studies offer clues. Research conducted at the University of California, Berkeley revealed that the economically advantaged are less likely to express compassion for others than are people with lower incomes. Jennifer Stellar, the lead author of the study said, “It’s not that the upper classes are cold hearted. They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of the suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives.”

A second study by Canadian researchers found that a sense of power can influence how people respond to others by changing the way the brain functions. Feeling powerful tends to diminish brain signals that foster empathy.

Yet obviously many powerful, affluent people are deeply compassionate and emphatic. These research studies are not about inevitable outcomes, they simply point to danger signals.

We live in a country where economic disparities foster experiences that enhance a sense of power among the affluent. These same economic divisions result in communities segregated by income, communities where few personal encounters of any depth take place across socio-economic lines. Understanding the circumstances of others becomes more difficult for everyone.

My wish this Thanksgiving is for time to consider the dangers extreme income inequality, an absence of empathy and failures of compassion pose for our country.  Feminists have long pointed out that there are no individual solutions to society-wide problems. Every one of us, politicians included, must find ways to work together if democracy is to flourish.

Terms like “empowerment” have flooded popular culture for quite some time, often in relation to promoting consumerism as well as hypersexual self-presentation. Of late, though, a rather unlikely source employed the word “feminist” to describe herself. Last week, media sensation Miley Cyrus stated: “I’m one of the biggest feminists in the world because I tell women not to be scared of anything.”

Central to Miley’s values of “not being scared of anything” is her embrace of shock value, especially as related to seemingly self-assured hypersexual posturing. As consumers of popular culture are likely familiar, she exhibited her self-confidence at the August 2013 VMAS, in which she performed a raunchy rendition of “Blurred Lines” with Robin Thicke. She continued her domination of the headlines by appearing nude (save for some boots) in the music video for her song “Wrecking Ball.” This sort of “empowerment” has underscored Miley’s rebranding effort from Hannah Montana to…something else more…well, “adult.”

Given that Miley’s brand of feminism feels more like Girls Gone Wild than a feminist figurehead, it’s quite interesting that she uses “feminist” as a self-descriptor. It’s notable, too, since many female celebrities, especially her contemporaries, have distanced themselves from identifying as a feminist. For example:

Katy Perry: “I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women.”

Carrie Underwood: “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am a feminist, that can come off as a negative connotation. But I am a strong female.”

Beyoncé: “That word [feminist] can be very extreme … I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality … Why do you have to choose what type of woman you are? Why do you have to label yourself anything? I’m just a woman, and I love being a woman.”

The qualifications in Katy, Carrie, and Beyoncé’s communication about employing the word “feminist” reflects a longstanding conversation in feminist scholarship about why feminist has become a label that is fraught with contention. Part of the reason seems to be the history of generational conflict associated with women’s efforts to fulfill feminist aims. Along these lines, women seem to want to assert that their view of feminism is not that of their mothers or grandmothers. They want to own their feminism.

In addition, female celebrities’ ambivalence towards the term “feminist” is perhaps based on the ways in which notions of feminism have been communicated through mass media outlets over almost fifty years. As many scholars of consumer culture have identified, feminist discourse has been employed in advertisements and other media products to create a positive association between goods and the values we associate with them. This, in turn, has led to a devaluing of the language of feminism in popular culture, particularly in relation to feeling good through self-beautification. So, for instance, even though most people are aware that it’s simplistic to equate an experience of empowerment with nail polish, the constant presence of manufactured visual/verbal associations reinforces the desired meaning of the message, as in this advertisement:

While it is unlikely that wearing a nail polish called “Empowerment” will actually lead a woman to feel empowered when she wears it, it is possible that her act of carving out a space in her busy day to take care of herself and exercise an aesthetic pleasure will constitute a meaningful assertion of her power. The trouble here is that it’s not just one nail polish advertisement that links meanings of empowerment with a beauty product. The messages in this advert connect to those in other types of media texts (films, tv shows, ads/branding campaigns, celebrity images) as well as to cultural values that equate women’s work on their beauty/bodies with self-improvement. This sort of messaging about “empowerment” reinforces the idea that beauty routines are a necessity for presenting ourselves as socially acceptable and transform the pursuit of beauty into an oppressive journey of conformity.

Although feminism and feminist may currently be nebulous terms, there exists nonetheless an understanding among the public about what feminism, in essence, means. A poll conducted on People Magazine‘s website found that 92% of those who responded did not think that “Miley is, as she claims, one of the world’s biggest feminists.”

In early twenty-first century Western culture, it’s not a leap to argue that meanings and practices of feminism have become distorted and distant from their origins or that they have come to be associated with beauty-related goods and issues in consumer culture. Feminism is not a catch all for anything that involves a woman feeling good about herself, nor is it an excuse for a woman’s bad behavior. There is much feminist work to be done (see, for instance, recent studies on gender pay gaps here and here). As a culture and as individuals, we need to start thinking more about what we want feminism to be and do for women and society. Miley’s brand of feminism opened up a conversation. Let’s continue it.