Archive for the 'Global Feminism' Category

Ten Firsts for Feminism in 2009

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 18, 2009
in Global Feminism
. 20 Comments

For the second straight year, let me offer my own entirely unofficial “ten great firsts for feminism in 2009″ list. (Last year’s list is here.) These come in no particular order, and you’re welcome to add your own in the comments section (or at your own blogs).

In 2009:

Charles Darwin’s great-great granddaughter, Ruth Padel, becomes the first woman to hold the Oxford chair in poetry, perhaps the most important public position in the world of English-speaking poetry; Carol Ann Duffy takes the second-most prestigious position, becoming England’s first female poet laureate.

Jennifer Figge, a 56 year-old Coloradan, becomes the first woman to swim all the way across the Atlantic becomes the first woman to swim, in stages, from the Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad.

President Obama names Harvard’s Elena Kagan to be America’s first female Solicitor General; the president also nominates Sonia Sotomayor to be only the third woman — and the first Latina — to sit on the nation’s highest court.

The first International Conference for Women in Trade Unions is held in Brussels in November, recognizing the growing importance of women in labor organizing across the globe.

Elinor Ostrom of Arizona State University becomes the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics.

Annise Parker becomes the first lesbian elected mayor of a major US city (Houston); Mary Glasspool becomes the Anglican Communion’s first openly lesbian bishop when she’s elected in the Los Angeles diocese.

For the first time, women voted — and entered parliament — in Kuwait; in India, the parliament in the world’s largest democracy elected its first woman speaker. Botswana’s parliament also elected its first female speaker.

Australia won the first-ever Rugby Sevens Women’s World Cup, held in Dubai.

President Obama creates the first White House Council on Women and Girls, and signs the Ledbetter Act, a major (if incomplete) step forward in the battle against wage discrimination.

Abby Marshall wins the Denker Prize as America’s top high school chess player, the first woman ever to claim that title.

Dreams for Women Calendar

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 08, 2009
in Global Feminism and Sports
. 1 Comment

A quick and worthy commercial plug:

The good folks at Antigone Magazine (a Canadian feminist magazine based at the University of British Columbia, where my littlest sister studied for a year) have put out a calendar honoring some of the North American women athletes competing in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics — which get underway in just over two months!

No, it’s not that kind of calendar. The “Dreams for Women” calendar features female athletes from Canada, the USA, and First Nations. Each woman is depicted competing, along with an inspiring snippet of her personal dream. Proceeds benefit the Antigone Foundation, which aims to empower young women (aged 10-35) to become engaged politically. You can check out a PDF here.

Men killing women: maternal mortality, heterosexual desire, and the work of male transformation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 30, 2009
in Birth control and contraception, Desire and objectification, Global Feminism, Health Care, Parenting and Science
. 53 Comments

Back to school with much work to be done.

After Friday’s post (immediately below) about male sexuality and its perceived dangers, I got an interesting email from blogger Erin Solaro. She wrote:

The reason male sexuality has been viewed as dangerous and yet at the same time men are supposed to push women has a great deal to do with biology, and no, I don’t mean that men have a higher sex drive than women…

…I mean that 1940 was the first time in America that the mythical average woman’s chance of dying in childbirth dipped below 1 in 100. (For black women, it was higher, about 3 times as high.) In modern Afghanistan, it’s about 1 in 7, which may be pretty close to the historic norm.

Until we understand that, we aren’t really going to understand why we think about men, women and sexuality the way we do.

It’s an interesting point. Any women’s history class must take into account the history of birth-related maternal and infant mortality. While it’s difficult to get accurate historic statistics, the 1 in 7 figure that Solaro cites for contemporary Afghanistan is probably lower than it was in many other time periods. It is generally assumed that until the 20th century, childbirth was the leading cause of death for all women of childbearing years; in some societies that maternal mortality rate may have reached 40%, while other medical historians prefer a lower figure of 1 in 4 or 1 in 5. Given that many women in the developing world still have half a dozen children or more, as they did in previous centuries, the overall risk is compounded by the sheer number of pregnancies carried to term.

Our cultural memory of this devastating toll is limited. We have a Mother’s Day, of course, but we have no public rituals to honor our countless female ancestors who died — quite literally — so that we could live. There is no Tomb of the Unknown Mother in Arlington, though more American women died from childbirth than male soldiers did in war for the first century and a half of our republic’s history. This legacy lives on best in fairy tales, replete with stories of single fathers (Beauty and the Beast) or wicked step-mothers (take your pick). When I ask my students what happened to Cinderella’s birth mother, it drives the point about maternal mortality home.

Whatever the exact figures, childbirth has probably killed more women than any other single cause in human history. Until very recently (a miracle two millenia ago in Palestine notwithstanding), the only possible cause for pregnancy was heterosexual intercourse. So if childbirth kills women, and sex causes pregnancy, then by the logical transitive property, heterosexual intercourse has been, not so indirectly, the most lethal of all human activities for one-half of the population. To put it even more bluntly, men have killed far more women by ejaculating inside of them than they have by any other method. Semen has killed more people than any other body fluid (and yet it is menstrual blood that is considered far more “unclean” in many Western traditions.) (This, by the way, is a good moment to note how absurd the argument is about AIDS being “God’s punishment for homosexuality.” Even if we were to assume that AIDS was primarily transmitted through same-sex sexual activity, the number of deaths globally from AIDS has not yet risen to the historic levels of those from childbirth. If God punishes by death those who engage in forbidden sexual activity, how then to explain that the leading cause of death for women for centuries was having intercourse with their own husbands?)

Very few, if any, men ever presumably sought to kill their wives or lovers through intercourse. But men did devise patriarchal power structures that forbade women from using contraception or from refusing sex to their husbands. From both a moral and a statistical standpoint, cultures that don’t allow women access to contraception — as well as the right to say “no” after marriage as well as before — are complicit in the death of countless millions of women. Of course, many women surely enjoyed sex despite the risks; many women surely longed for children even in the face of the grave dangers that attended pregnancy, labor, and delivery. All the more reason to honor the bravery and the sacrifice of those who fought for life against death on a battlefield far more lethal than those on which their husbands, fathers, and brothers struggled. Continue reading ‘Men killing women: maternal mortality, heterosexual desire, and the work of male transformation’

Jimmy Carter, personal autonomy, and defending progressive faith

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 27, 2009
in Body, Christianity and Global Feminism
. 4 Comments

In the current media age, articles and videos go “viral” almost instantly. I got a good glimpse of that phenomenon a week or so ago, when friends and students emailed me or “Facebooked” me with links to Jimmy Carter’s brief op-ed, Losing my Religion for Equality. No other modern president has talked about faith more, or made it clear that his Christianity is central to his worldview, than has Carter. A lifelong member of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, Carter has watched with sadness as the church he has known all of his adult life has moved further and further to the right. (It’s a long story, but the conservative coup d’etat within the SBC began right around the time of Carter’s own presidency; moderates were forced out of seminary positions and the denomination’s traditional tolerance for divergent views –a tolerance for which the Baptists were once rightly famed and praised — began to disappear.)

In any case, the article, which ran first in Australia’s The Age newspaper, is a powerful and simple indictment of the way in which traditional religion is so often used to oppress women. This is, Carter suggests, not only tragic, but it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the teachings of the great religions. The former president writes:

The carefully selected verses found in the Holy Scriptures to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place - and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence - than eternal truths.

Those of us who hold deep spiritual convictions and strong egalitarian values are often accused of cherry-picking quotes from our holy books in order to construct an argument that God really intended radical equality between men and women. But as Carter suggests, it’s the conservatives who are perhaps even guiltier of this, particularly around issues of gender justice. (My favorite example, of course, is the steadfast refusal of many evangelicals to acknowledge the overwhelming textual evidence that Ephesians 5:21 is the controlling purpose for Ephesians 5:22; Paul’s intent is clearly mutual rather than unilateral wifely submission.) It is not we progressives who have let the values of a secular world distort our faith.

But here’s my favorite part of the 39th president’s brief missive. Carter writes:

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

Too often, “autonomy” and “control over the body” are seen as ideals of the secular Enlightenment, in opposition to the so-called spiritual virtue of allowing one’s body to be a vessel for others to fill. Christian women are offered the example of Mary, mother of Jesus, who is traditionally depicted as willingly — even blindly — submitting to God. Mary does submit to God, as all Christians are called to do. But what she doesn’t do is submit to any man. According to Luke, when Gabriel, God’s angel, comes to tell her that she is to carry a child, Mary is already engaged to Joseph. When the young virgin learns she will carry Jesus, the Son of the Most High, she doesn’t say, “Um, let me check with my fiance first to make sure this is okay with him.” She doesn’t ask for Joseph’s permission because she doesn’t need it. Her body is hers, and she offers it freely to God. That’s autonomy in action.

My life is defined by my faith, as Jimmy Carter’s is by his. As his example shows, faith and feminism do not need to exist in uneasy tension; it does not require cognitive dissonance or Jesuitical gymnastics to reconcile principles of individual liberty and women’s body integrity with a devout commitment to the Creator. We progressive believers need to do as Jimmy Carter has done, and speak more forcefully about the ways in which our faith informs our politics, particularly the politics of the body, of sexuality, and of personal autonomy.

More on Christian feminism here and here.

The road out of serfdom: gender roles and social democracy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2009
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Feminism, Global Feminism, Money and Politics
. 55 Comments

Charles Murray, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the infamous “Bell Curve” study from a few years back, weighs in with this month’s load of good old-fashioned hooey: The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. Murray makes his living from an organization devoted to the defense of the indefensible: that unbridled American capitalism, married to conservative Protestant religious values, is the last best hope for humankind. He does his wealthy patrons proud in this essay and lecture, attacking the Obama Administration for its apparent zeal to remake the USA in the image of Western European-style social democracies.

Would that it were true; as fond as I am of our new lad in the White House, I doubt even he can move this country that far to the left in the short time he has been given. I’m certainly fond of Western European style social democracy; I hold an EU passport as well as an American one, and have close family scattered across half a dozen nations of that splendid continent. I’ve seen the strengths and weaknesses of the systems in Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom in particular and have found much that is enviable. But I’m not a political scientist nor an economist, and will leave the arguments over the specifics of the welfare state to those better equipped to defend them.

There’s much that is risible in Murray’s defense of the American “free enterprise system”, but nothing so jaw-dropping as his thesis that working class males need weak public institutions in order to feel like, well, real men:

When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.” If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t.

To paraphrase a line from a fine old Guns n’ Roses song, “You’d better start sniffing your rank condescension, Chuck.” Murray, probably intentionally, is repeating one of the Great Lies of Masculinity: men — particularly working-class men — only feel useful and valued when the women in their lives are weak and dependent. In other words, Murray is peddling the myth that male responsibility is inextricably linked to female vulnerability. Provide a social safety net that permits women to survive on their own, that allows them to raise their children without the “good provision” of a hard-working man, and all sense of purpose magically vanishes from the lives of these lads, or so he argues. Continue reading ‘The road out of serfdom: gender roles and social democracy’

Babies, family planning, environmental stewardship and the needs of the preborn: the real roots of the culture war

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 05, 2009
in Birth control and contraception, Christianity, Environmentalism, Faith, Favorite Posts 2009, Feminism, Global Feminism, Kabbalah and Science
. 82 Comments

Regular readers know that I tend to discourage my conservative commenters from derailing threads by questioning the very suppositions on which this blog is based. This is a feminist blog, for example, and one which seeks to explore various things from a feminist perspective. This is not a place to question whether the feminist lens is an appropriate one through which to see the world; similarly, a Calvinist blog which seeks to offer a Calvinist perspective on current events is not the place to question the essential tenets of Calvinism. This is why I read quite a few very conservative blogs, but rarely — if ever — comment there. I’m interested in what is said, but since I reject the fundamental premises on which their worldview is based, I don’t think I have much to offer to the conversation. It would be like insisting on speaking Finnish to a group which prefers to dialogue in Thai.

That said, reading all these blogs, I’m increasingly convinced that the core of the split between social conservatives and progressives in this country revolves around not abortion or gay marriage, but a more fundamental disagreement: population. Religious conservatives have become increasingly vocal about their desire to see larger and larger families; indeed, their arguments against abortion and gay marriage seem less couched these days in an assumption that these are intrinsic evils, and more in the language of concern that these practices pose a threat to the large families which the right venerates above all else. Hostility to feminism is surely a sine qua non of contemporary social conservatism, but reading what the pundits on the other side have to say, it seems more and more obvious that their hatred of feminism is rooted in the recognition that increased sovereignty for women over their own bodies is inextricably linked with the reasonable desire to not have, in Amanda Marcotte’s happy phrase, their “vaginas turn into clown cars.”

Feminists and environmentalists have formed common cause over the vital issue of family planning. Those who believe that the world’s resources are already over-taxed by humans whose behavior is frequently parasitic have allies in those who believe that women can and should be encouraged to find fulfillment in pursuits other than motherhood. The longer women wait to marry or reproduce, the less likely they are to have large families; the more opportunities we can create for women to pursue happiness outside the home, the greater the likelihood they will delay marriage and childbirth. The intersection of sound environmental policy and the campaign to give women the precious right of personal autonomy is a fortuitous one indeed! And almost to a man and woman, social conservatives despise this alliance, one which is changing family structures across the western world — and increasing the possibility for greater happiness for the earth and its creatures.

Here, replete with grammatical error on top of grammatical error, is a piece by David Goldman in First Things: What Should Conservatives do about Obamanomics? It takes the “we must have big families” argument to a new level, by suggesting that the collapse of the real estate bubble is due — wait for it, can you guess? — to, yes, birth control:

The first thing that conservatives have to tell Americans is: “You are poorer because you failed to bring up enough children. The decline of the traditional family is undermining the American economy.”

Right. Apparently, that’s why the countries with the highest birth rates, like Sierra Leone and Chad are so rich, and countries with among the lowest, like Sweden and Switzerland, are so desperately poor?

This isn’t the place to point out the risible foundations of the “we must have more babies or the world will collapse” argument. Plenty of economists have pointed out that the “growth” model can be replaced by a healthy “sustainability” model. The transition may be wrenching, but far less so than the apocalyptic impact on our planet of ever-growing voracious human appetites.

What I’m wondering — to get to the point of this post — is why religious conservatives are so eager to have large families? I get the economic argument (we need more future workers to maintain retired ones), but the churches were urging their flocks to “be fruitful and multiply” long before anyone thought up modern pension schemes, or modern feminism. Beyond the instinct to reproduce and survive, what are the theological roots of this obsession with making babies?

I know my Mormon friends believe, or so they tell me, that there are countless billions of “pre-born souls” wandering around up in the ether, each longing to be born. Thus, having a large family is an act not of irresponsibility but of self-sacrifice: parents give up their freedom in exchange for the satisfaction of helping as many of these pre-born souls as possible become incarnate. (My LDS friends, please tell me if I’ve misrepresented the idea.) Some of my friends in the Kabbalah Centre believe that in the Beginning, God created a “vessel” which then shattered into trillions of tiny sparks. Each of these sparks is a sentient soul, and each longs to be born into human flesh for the sake of reassembling the broken vessel and completing what in Hebrew is called tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Thus for Mormons and Kabbalists, family size limitation is selfish on an eschatalogical level — it delays the final redemption and robs the “pre-born” (the term sends chills down my spine) of their shot at participating in the glories of incarnation. Continue reading ‘Babies, family planning, environmental stewardship and the needs of the preborn: the real roots of the culture war’

Top Ten Feminist Achievements, 2008

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 17, 2008
in Global Feminism
. 7 Comments

Jen Nedeau posts today the Top Ten Moments in Feminism of 2008. Many good things, but I’m especially fond of her #4, which notes that unmarried women went for Obama by a staggering 70-29 margin, in some states tipping the election to the Democrat.

Of course, I like me my top ten lists too, and Jen invited others to join the fun. Here are my “Top Ten Moments in Feminism of 2008″. I could have included several things from Jen’s excellent list, but in the interest of breadth of responses, here goes.

1. Electoral gains for women across the country, including the New Hampshire senate, where for the first time in American history, a state legislature now has a majority of women.

2. The Church of England, the mother church of the Anglican Communion, endorsed the idea of women bishops for the first time this summer.

3. FIFA held the first-ever U-17 Women’s World Cup in New Zealand; North Korea brought home the coveted trophy. At last in 2008, women and men now have complete age-group championship parity through the international FIFA structure.

4. Linda Sanchez, Democrat of Orange County, California, becomes the first “unwed mother” to serve in Congress. (The baby won’t be born until 2009, but the 39 year-old Sanchez won re-election after her “out-of-wedlock” pregnancy became public knowledge.)

5. For all you crazy Anabaptists out there, 2008 saw the first woman ordained as pastor in the Lancaster Mennonite Conference, perhaps the most important regional conference in the Mennonite Church USA (of which I was once a member).

6. The reviews on Babeland’s new “Sasi” vibrator suggest that, well, something very special has arrived in the world of what used to be called “marital aids.” No one needs to hear this old boy’s opinion, but my “better-informed sources” tell me marvelous things.

7. Danica Patrick won her first Indy Car race, becoming the first woman to win on that prestigious motor racing tour.

8. The two biggest cooking shows on American television, “Top Chef” and “Hell’s Kitchen”, each had female winners for the first time.

9. In both Rwanda and Spain, women moved into the majority of cabinet positions in government — the first time women had held the majority of cabinet positions in any democracy.

10. Rachel Maddow (whom I adore) becomes the first openly lesbian host of a prime-time television news program.

Feel free to do your own top tens!

American foreign policy, still a potential force for good: in support of I-VAWA

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 06, 2008
in Foreign Policy, Global Feminism and Rape, aggression and violence
. 2 Comments

McKenzie at Women Thrive writes to alert me about the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA), introduced in the House just last Thursday by Southern California’s own Howard Berman (D-Panorama City). A similar proposal was introduced in the senate last year by Joe Biden (D-Del.) and Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), showing bipartisan support.

The good news is that violence against women is preventable and that there are proven solutions that work. The International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA), if passed, would, for the first time, comprehensively incorporate these solutions into all U.S. foreign assistance programs - solutions such as promoting women’s economic opportunity, addressing violence against girls in school, and working to change public attitudes. Among other things, the IVAWA would make ending violence against women a diplomatic priority for the first time in U.S. history. It would require the U.S. government to respond to critical outbreaks of gender-based violence in armed conflict - such as the mass rapes now occuring in the Democratic Republic of Congo - within two months. And by investing in local women’s organizations overseas that are succesfully working to reduce violence in their communities, the IVAWA would have a huge impact on reducing poverty - freeing millions of women in poor countries to lift themselves, their families, and their communities out of poverty.

Find out more here. (PDF-file)

I haven’t yet read any criticism from the left of IVAWA (and yes, I’ve done a google blogsearch.) There are those in lefty circles who are profoundly suspicious of the idea of utilizing the State Department — and, potentially, the Defense Department — to advance women’s rights. Laura Bush’s claims that the USA liberated Afghan women have begun to ring hollow with the retrenchment of conservative forces in that country, and it’s clear that talk of “letting girls go to school” was part of a very effective pro-war propaganda strategy. One reason why progressives were generally so much more supportive of the Afghan war than the Iraq adventure had to do, I think, with a sense that Afghan women desperately needed liberation from the Taliban in a way that Iraqi women did not need freeing from the far more enlightened, albeit still-thuggish Baathists.

I would not like to think that IVAWA would give cover to more internationalist adventurism. As satisfying an idea as it is to send the 101st Airborne ’round the globe to liberate women from oppression, the well-documented result is that the “liberators” usually replace one form of violence (often familial) with another (military). Freeing a woman from an abusive husband by turning her into a widow is hardly the best way to promote global justice.

Of course, I agree with groups like Women Thrive that part of progressive action is shaping and directing American foreign policy. Global change cannot come through the churches and NGOs alone. Protecting women and girls from violence ought to be a stated U.S. interest, and I like the idea of tying aid directly to measurable improvements in women’s living conditions. Without resorting to military action, there is much that the USA can do to transform the lives of the oppressed and marginalized for the better. For those who despair about the foreign policy of our country, I-VAWA is a reminder that there is much good that we can yet do collectively, as a people and a nation. I’m glad that the bill has bipartisan backing, and urge folks to write or call their elected representatives in support.