TBF: Feminism (Part 2)
...04/12/07
[Taken from Echoes: Gun Politics:
"I HEARBY ISSUSE AN OPEN CHALLENGE.. OF SORTS.
I'M LOOKING FOR A WOMAN, ANY WOMAN WHO CAN WRITE ABOUT FEMINISM AND REALLY GIVE IT THE JUSTICE IT NEEDS.
THIS IS OPEN TO ANYONE (EVEN YOU MARIE) ALL I ASK IS THAT YOU GIVE IT YOUR BEST. I AM BASICALLY SAYING I WANT YOU TO WRITE FOR THE BRIAN FACTOR. THE POSTING DATE DEADLINE I AM AIMING FOR IS JUNE 15TH."]
...June 11th, 2007
A few names both new and familiar to TBF showed interest, but in the end there are simply two...
...June 13, 2007
Two choices.. Two voices.. Two ideas.. Two beliefs..
So who do I choose?
Both are strong, even, well researched and offer great visions of Feminism.
Also just to add more fuel to this fire.. One voice belongs to a woman and the other.. a man.
So before me are representatives for both genders... That's a tricky one.
Originally I had envisioned a woman, but a pure voice that speaks nothing but truth has no real identity except for truth. it isn't about Men vs. Women it is simply the truth.. nothing more.
Yet I couldn't pick one, so this week keeping in tradition of the controversy we so love to give here at TBF, we are hereby proud to present:
Jacob "Cerebral Cortex"
and
Harlean Carpenter
IN
"He Said/ She Said"
As they team up to tackle this week on The Brian Factor: Feminism
SHE SAID:
Women's Liberation, Feminism, the Women's Movement; words that to many minds are associated with the 1970's. After all, isn't that when we most loudly heard the voice of Gloria Steinem and her ilk proclaiming those of us not in possession of a penis to be considered second-class citizens? Isn't that when women were first truly madly deeply angry about the lives they were leading and the restrictions being placed upon them simply because of their sex and, with the aid of the then recently formed National Organization for Women, decided to speak up about it? An understandable association, but the true beginning of what would become the Women's Movement dates back slightly further than that.
"As an organized force, feminism dates from abolitionism in the early 1830s. Abolitionism was the radical anti-slavery movement which demanded the immediate cessation of slavery on the grounds that every man was a self-owner; that is, every human being has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body." -Wendy McElroy, "The Roots of Individualist Feminism"
Women back then were every bit as intelligent as women today, even if they didn't have the same level of education or the same freedom of opportunity to express their intelligence that vagina-bearing persons now enjoy. But these women were smart enough to put two and two together and realize that they too fell into the category of "human beings."
"We have good cause to be grateful to the slave, for the benefit we have received to ourselves, in working for him. In striving to strike his irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves." -Abbie Kelley
The newly founded feminist movement ran into a rather substantial roadblock when male abolitionists insisted that the rights of slaves and the rights of women be maintained as two separate issues. The women argued that they were close enough to one and the same that they could be argued concurrently and identically; it was a human issue, not an issue of color or sex. The men, even the men who were in support of women's rights, argued that one issue should not be allowed to dilute the impact of the other, and that by arguing both at the same time, the chances were increased that both would be lost.
To make a long story slightly shorter, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870 and secured that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" with no reference made to sex anywhere to be found. And then, the Women's Movement got a little ugly.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and a number of the more radical feminists of the day turned their backs on the very thing they had fought so hard for so many years to secure, the rights of slaves, in favor of securing these same rights for themselves. And in the midst of the heat of the battle for women's rights, a rift was created in the feminist movement. On one side was The National Woman Suffrage Association, a group not above aligning themselves
with what Susan B. Anthony referred to as "rabid pro-slavery Democrats" as long as they were willing to support the cause both politically and financially. On the other side was The American Woman Suffrage Association, who didn't make such public political alliances but was not above using arguments along the lines of:
"If you are to share the future government of your states with a race you deem naturally and hopelessly inferior, avert the social chaos, which seems to you so imminent, by utilizing the intelligence and patriotism of the wives and daughters of the South." -Henry Blackwell
These two groups maintained their separate but similar identities for 20 years before merging to become The National American Woman's Suffrage Association, which would become The League of Women Voters after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. For those of you not familiar with the Nineteenth Amendment, it reads as follows: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."
This, to me, was the crowning achievement of the Women's Movement. Decades before anyone reading this was likely even born, we won our battle. We secured for ourselves the most powerful weapon anyone could ever hope to have in their equality arsenal. We won the vote.
Next up on the Women's Movement agenda was the Equal Rights Amendment, drafted in 1923. It read quite simply; "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." A valid proposal considering the climate of the time that it was drafted, when a woman could not own property, keep any money she might inherit from her family, have any legal say in what went on with her children, and was basically completely at the mercy of first her father and later her husband.
Between 1923 and 1970, not much happened with the ERA. It was far from forgotten, but it was never ratified. I could be wrong, but I suspect its very simplicity might have had something to do with that. It didn't spell out exactly what its proponents were looking for. Had it been a bit more specific, something along the lines of "rights under the law with regard to ownership of money and/or property and dominion over one's offspring" it might have gotten further than it did.
But instead of the ratification of the ERA, we got WWII. Society suddenly had no choice but to let women work outside of the home because work needed to be done and there weren't enough men around to do it. Women had to have control over the finances of their families because men weren't around to deal with them. No Constitutional Amendment was involved; necessity became, as she is wont to do, the mother of invention, the invention being the more active role of women in the workplace and the world of finance.
Similar to the abolitionist feminists of the previous century, who started out fighting for one thing and continued to win another, the women of the 1940's started out fighting for nothing more than the support of their country and the preservation of their lifestyle in the absence of their men, and ended up, however inadvertently, winning another battle entirely. The practical, hands-on efforts of these women did more in the battle for equality than a thousand ratifications of the ERA ever could have. They were forced into proving that they were capable of handling anything a man could handle, and they proved it admirably.
So, at this point in our story, we have the vote, we have the right to money and property, we have legal rights with regard to our children, and we have, to a large degree, society's acceptance of our working outside of the home. All of that without the ratification of the ERA.
When the National Organization for Women was founded in 1966, the ERA found its voice again, louder than ever before, and in 1970, NOW began its campaign to do whatever whenever wherever to RATIFY THE ERA! To this day, it has yet to happen. But they're still trying.
Why have they yet to succeed?
By the time NOW got hold of the ERA, we had everything that I mentioned in the above "at this point in our story" paragraph. All of this was true prior to 1970 and is still true today. So what exactly is it that would satisfy NOW with regard to women being considered "equal" in the eyes of the law? Yes, the LAW. There will always be men who don't like women and don't want to work with them. Guess what? That's not against the law. And contrary to what so much feminist literature would have you believe, there really were men who were willing to give women good jobs back in the 70's, if the women were qualified to do those jobs, willing to work hard at doing them well, AND didn't expect any preferential treatment simply because they were women. There will always be men who want their wives to stay home and have children and do laundry and bake cookies. That, oddly enough, is not against the law either. On the flip side, there will always be women who don't want to work with men, or who frankly don't want to work at ALL outside of the home, and I'm pretty fed up with hearing that they're intentionally casting themselves in the role of a "second-class citizen" and should immediately be taken out and shot. This country is about choice. And when I say "choice" I do NOT mean the popular definition of "the right to safe and legal abortion." I mean choice in every aspect of our lives. If I demand that, I must expect to give it in return. That means accepting the fact that there might be people in the world who don't like me just because I'm a woman, might not want to give me a job because I'm a woman, might not what to let me into their super secret guys only clubs because I'm a woman, and that's THEIR choice. It's also their loss, but that's not my problem.
Maybe, in addition to the somewhat damning simplicity of its verbiage, another reason that the ERA has never been ratified has a little something to do with the FIRST Amendment, which makes mention of more than just freedom of speech. It's also about freedom of assembly, which more than one Constitutional scholar has interpreted to include freedom of association, which basically means, you can't make a law saying that you have to like somebody. And if you don't like them, you don't have to associate with them. Oddly enough, it's the same set of rules that gives NOW the right to keep people like Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt from sitting on their board, but NOW doesn't want to talk about that.
(Oh, and in their time off from trying to ratify the ERA, they're supporting Affirmative Action. Am I the only one who has to pause a moment to ponder that one? You're demanding "equality"? in the eyes of the law in the same breath that you ask for benefits based on sex and race? Um, ok)
I make a lot more money than a lot of men I know. I make a lot less money than a lot of women I know. I get to keep my money. I get to vote. All of this would have been true even if I had been born 30 years earlier than I was. To quote Mark Twain, "The world owes you nothing; it was here first." Nobody owes me anything that I'm not willing to prove that I deserve. And I may very well have to earn the opportunity just to prove that I deserve it. Guess what? MEN have to prove that, too. The possession of a penis is not the guarantee of an easy life. Men have to go on job interviews and prove themselves and be nice to people they may not like and all the rest of it. That is not strictly the Female Condition. My ancestors knew that. My Great-Aunt Elizabeth marched up and down the East Coast in the early 1900's to win the vote. She had a war to fight, she fought it and she succeeded. My Great-Aunt Mary Ethel was one of the first female sports reporters in the country back in the 1950's. She knew what it meant to fight for a job that you loved, work hard at it and not give a damn what anyone thought of you, and she succeeded. My mother found herself suddenly and unexpectedly cast in the role of primary breadwinner when my father was diagnosed with cancer back in 1978. Years ago, she related one particularly memorable job interview to me. At this interview, she told her potential employer that she had been a housewife up until that point. The interviewer asked her, in all seriousness, to explain exactly what being a housewife entailed. She did so, and at the end of the interview, this man said to her, again in all seriousness, that she was OVERQUALIFIED, that anyone who could juggle schedules and balance a budget and oversee so many people and run an operation like she had been running would do far better to find a job that would challenge her more and make better use of the skills she had acquired. She took his advice, looked for a better job, and got it.
These, and countless other women like them, are to me the true role models of what the feminist movement was supposed to be about. It wasn't ever supposed to be about anyone handing us anything simply because we're women. It was about getting out there and proving yourself, holding your ground, disregarding your sex and anyone who paid attention to it, and just doing what you needed to do.
(Oh, and after decades of disparaging the institution of marriage, likening it to death and swearing she would never have anything to do with it because it was so demeaning to women, guess what Gloria Steinem did on September 3, 2000? I guess after all those decades of making all that noise, even she was finally forced to admit that the world of women really has changed for the better..)
[Brian: Thank you and Great Job Harlean]
[Taken from Echoes: Gun Politics:
"I HEARBY ISSUSE AN OPEN CHALLENGE.. OF SORTS.
I'M LOOKING FOR A WOMAN, ANY WOMAN WHO CAN WRITE ABOUT FEMINISM AND REALLY GIVE IT THE JUSTICE IT NEEDS.
THIS IS OPEN TO ANYONE (EVEN YOU MARIE) ALL I ASK IS THAT YOU GIVE IT YOUR BEST. I AM BASICALLY SAYING I WANT YOU TO WRITE FOR THE BRIAN FACTOR. THE POSTING DATE DEADLINE I AM AIMING FOR IS JUNE 15TH."]
...June 11th, 2007
A few names both new and familiar to TBF showed interest, but in the end there are simply two...
...June 13, 2007
Two choices.. Two voices.. Two ideas.. Two beliefs..
So who do I choose?
Both are strong, even, well researched and offer great visions of Feminism.
Also just to add more fuel to this fire.. One voice belongs to a woman and the other.. a man.
So before me are representatives for both genders... That's a tricky one.
Originally I had envisioned a woman, but a pure voice that speaks nothing but truth has no real identity except for truth. it isn't about Men vs. Women it is simply the truth.. nothing more.
Yet I couldn't pick one, so this week keeping in tradition of the controversy we so love to give here at TBF, we are hereby proud to present:
and
Harlean Carpenter
IN
"He Said/ She Said"
As they team up to tackle this week on The Brian Factor: Feminism
SHE SAID:
Women's Liberation, Feminism, the Women's Movement; words that to many minds are associated with the 1970's. After all, isn't that when we most loudly heard the voice of Gloria Steinem and her ilk proclaiming those of us not in possession of a penis to be considered second-class citizens? Isn't that when women were first truly madly deeply angry about the lives they were leading and the restrictions being placed upon them simply because of their sex and, with the aid of the then recently formed National Organization for Women, decided to speak up about it? An understandable association, but the true beginning of what would become the Women's Movement dates back slightly further than that.
"As an organized force, feminism dates from abolitionism in the early 1830s. Abolitionism was the radical anti-slavery movement which demanded the immediate cessation of slavery on the grounds that every man was a self-owner; that is, every human being has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body." -Wendy McElroy, "The Roots of Individualist Feminism"
Women back then were every bit as intelligent as women today, even if they didn't have the same level of education or the same freedom of opportunity to express their intelligence that vagina-bearing persons now enjoy. But these women were smart enough to put two and two together and realize that they too fell into the category of "human beings."
"We have good cause to be grateful to the slave, for the benefit we have received to ourselves, in working for him. In striving to strike his irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves." -Abbie Kelley
The newly founded feminist movement ran into a rather substantial roadblock when male abolitionists insisted that the rights of slaves and the rights of women be maintained as two separate issues. The women argued that they were close enough to one and the same that they could be argued concurrently and identically; it was a human issue, not an issue of color or sex. The men, even the men who were in support of women's rights, argued that one issue should not be allowed to dilute the impact of the other, and that by arguing both at the same time, the chances were increased that both would be lost.
To make a long story slightly shorter, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870 and secured that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" with no reference made to sex anywhere to be found. And then, the Women's Movement got a little ugly.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and a number of the more radical feminists of the day turned their backs on the very thing they had fought so hard for so many years to secure, the rights of slaves, in favor of securing these same rights for themselves. And in the midst of the heat of the battle for women's rights, a rift was created in the feminist movement. On one side was The National Woman Suffrage Association, a group not above aligning themselves
with what Susan B. Anthony referred to as "rabid pro-slavery Democrats" as long as they were willing to support the cause both politically and financially. On the other side was The American Woman Suffrage Association, who didn't make such public political alliances but was not above using arguments along the lines of:
"If you are to share the future government of your states with a race you deem naturally and hopelessly inferior, avert the social chaos, which seems to you so imminent, by utilizing the intelligence and patriotism of the wives and daughters of the South." -Henry Blackwell
These two groups maintained their separate but similar identities for 20 years before merging to become The National American Woman's Suffrage Association, which would become The League of Women Voters after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. For those of you not familiar with the Nineteenth Amendment, it reads as follows: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."
This, to me, was the crowning achievement of the Women's Movement. Decades before anyone reading this was likely even born, we won our battle. We secured for ourselves the most powerful weapon anyone could ever hope to have in their equality arsenal. We won the vote.
Next up on the Women's Movement agenda was the Equal Rights Amendment, drafted in 1923. It read quite simply; "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." A valid proposal considering the climate of the time that it was drafted, when a woman could not own property, keep any money she might inherit from her family, have any legal say in what went on with her children, and was basically completely at the mercy of first her father and later her husband.
Between 1923 and 1970, not much happened with the ERA. It was far from forgotten, but it was never ratified. I could be wrong, but I suspect its very simplicity might have had something to do with that. It didn't spell out exactly what its proponents were looking for. Had it been a bit more specific, something along the lines of "rights under the law with regard to ownership of money and/or property and dominion over one's offspring" it might have gotten further than it did.
But instead of the ratification of the ERA, we got WWII. Society suddenly had no choice but to let women work outside of the home because work needed to be done and there weren't enough men around to do it. Women had to have control over the finances of their families because men weren't around to deal with them. No Constitutional Amendment was involved; necessity became, as she is wont to do, the mother of invention, the invention being the more active role of women in the workplace and the world of finance.
Similar to the abolitionist feminists of the previous century, who started out fighting for one thing and continued to win another, the women of the 1940's started out fighting for nothing more than the support of their country and the preservation of their lifestyle in the absence of their men, and ended up, however inadvertently, winning another battle entirely. The practical, hands-on efforts of these women did more in the battle for equality than a thousand ratifications of the ERA ever could have. They were forced into proving that they were capable of handling anything a man could handle, and they proved it admirably.
So, at this point in our story, we have the vote, we have the right to money and property, we have legal rights with regard to our children, and we have, to a large degree, society's acceptance of our working outside of the home. All of that without the ratification of the ERA.
When the National Organization for Women was founded in 1966, the ERA found its voice again, louder than ever before, and in 1970, NOW began its campaign to do whatever whenever wherever to RATIFY THE ERA! To this day, it has yet to happen. But they're still trying.
Why have they yet to succeed?
By the time NOW got hold of the ERA, we had everything that I mentioned in the above "at this point in our story" paragraph. All of this was true prior to 1970 and is still true today. So what exactly is it that would satisfy NOW with regard to women being considered "equal" in the eyes of the law? Yes, the LAW. There will always be men who don't like women and don't want to work with them. Guess what? That's not against the law. And contrary to what so much feminist literature would have you believe, there really were men who were willing to give women good jobs back in the 70's, if the women were qualified to do those jobs, willing to work hard at doing them well, AND didn't expect any preferential treatment simply because they were women. There will always be men who want their wives to stay home and have children and do laundry and bake cookies. That, oddly enough, is not against the law either. On the flip side, there will always be women who don't want to work with men, or who frankly don't want to work at ALL outside of the home, and I'm pretty fed up with hearing that they're intentionally casting themselves in the role of a "second-class citizen" and should immediately be taken out and shot. This country is about choice. And when I say "choice" I do NOT mean the popular definition of "the right to safe and legal abortion." I mean choice in every aspect of our lives. If I demand that, I must expect to give it in return. That means accepting the fact that there might be people in the world who don't like me just because I'm a woman, might not want to give me a job because I'm a woman, might not what to let me into their super secret guys only clubs because I'm a woman, and that's THEIR choice. It's also their loss, but that's not my problem.
Maybe, in addition to the somewhat damning simplicity of its verbiage, another reason that the ERA has never been ratified has a little something to do with the FIRST Amendment, which makes mention of more than just freedom of speech. It's also about freedom of assembly, which more than one Constitutional scholar has interpreted to include freedom of association, which basically means, you can't make a law saying that you have to like somebody. And if you don't like them, you don't have to associate with them. Oddly enough, it's the same set of rules that gives NOW the right to keep people like Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt from sitting on their board, but NOW doesn't want to talk about that.
(Oh, and in their time off from trying to ratify the ERA, they're supporting Affirmative Action. Am I the only one who has to pause a moment to ponder that one? You're demanding "equality"? in the eyes of the law in the same breath that you ask for benefits based on sex and race? Um, ok)
I make a lot more money than a lot of men I know. I make a lot less money than a lot of women I know. I get to keep my money. I get to vote. All of this would have been true even if I had been born 30 years earlier than I was. To quote Mark Twain, "The world owes you nothing; it was here first." Nobody owes me anything that I'm not willing to prove that I deserve. And I may very well have to earn the opportunity just to prove that I deserve it. Guess what? MEN have to prove that, too. The possession of a penis is not the guarantee of an easy life. Men have to go on job interviews and prove themselves and be nice to people they may not like and all the rest of it. That is not strictly the Female Condition. My ancestors knew that. My Great-Aunt Elizabeth marched up and down the East Coast in the early 1900's to win the vote. She had a war to fight, she fought it and she succeeded. My Great-Aunt Mary Ethel was one of the first female sports reporters in the country back in the 1950's. She knew what it meant to fight for a job that you loved, work hard at it and not give a damn what anyone thought of you, and she succeeded. My mother found herself suddenly and unexpectedly cast in the role of primary breadwinner when my father was diagnosed with cancer back in 1978. Years ago, she related one particularly memorable job interview to me. At this interview, she told her potential employer that she had been a housewife up until that point. The interviewer asked her, in all seriousness, to explain exactly what being a housewife entailed. She did so, and at the end of the interview, this man said to her, again in all seriousness, that she was OVERQUALIFIED, that anyone who could juggle schedules and balance a budget and oversee so many people and run an operation like she had been running would do far better to find a job that would challenge her more and make better use of the skills she had acquired. She took his advice, looked for a better job, and got it.
These, and countless other women like them, are to me the true role models of what the feminist movement was supposed to be about. It wasn't ever supposed to be about anyone handing us anything simply because we're women. It was about getting out there and proving yourself, holding your ground, disregarding your sex and anyone who paid attention to it, and just doing what you needed to do.
(Oh, and after decades of disparaging the institution of marriage, likening it to death and swearing she would never have anything to do with it because it was so demeaning to women, guess what Gloria Steinem did on September 3, 2000? I guess after all those decades of making all that noise, even she was finally forced to admit that the world of women really has changed for the better..)
[Brian: Thank you and Great Job Harlean]
Labels: TBF
posted by Marie at 11:37 PM
3 Comments:
Er, just a bit of a typo, I think. I assume when you write, "After all, isn't that when we most loudly heard the voice of Gloria Steinem and her ilk proclaiming those of us not in possession of a penis to be considered second-class citizens?," that you actually mean, "After all, isn't that when we most loudly heard the voice of Gloria Steinem and her ilk proclaiming those of us not in possession of a penis not to be considered second-class citizens?" (or some similar inverted phrasing), correct?
Also, one amusing note: Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, et al. -- while being decried by some feminists (and embraced by others) -- are more liberal than even most of the liberal politicians. In fact, both of them (I believe; I'm dead certain about Hef, at least), are major supporters of "pro choice" and other women's organizations, and have wielded some large amounts of their considerable assets towards helping them out. It's unlikely that you'll ever see, "Sponsored by Hustler Magazine!" on the front page of Planned Parenthood, but it is an amusing anecdote to make a personal mental note of who one of the biggest men behind the curtain is (no pun about Flynt intended).
Also, nice essay. Interesting history, some good points, and clever narrative. God job, wot wot, and not really in opposition to my own, no matter how Brian would like to cast it that way. ;)
That is to say, "Good job."
Good observation, and I can see how the "second-class citizen" line could be interpreted as having contained a typo, but in fact I did mean it exactly the way it was written. That was a big part of the reason why the Feminist Movement of the 70's got as loud and ugly as it did, the fact that women were suddenly being told that the world thought of them as second-class citizens, and they should be grateful to NOW for bringing this to their attention because God knows all of that decent happy living they were doing, and focusing on the good of their families and not having to haul their asses out of bed to catch the morning train to a job that probably wasn't half as rewarding as hearing a child say "Mommy look what I made for you in school today!" could be, well, all of that had done terribly misleading things to the minds of so many women who up until that point had probably been thinking they were living pretty good lives. So the Steinems and Freidans of the world were kind enough to let them know that their lives did, in fact, totally suck because they weren't as good as any man in the eyes of the people who really mattered, those people being, um, well, complete strangers for the most part, but you know, those people's opinions matter FAR more than the opinions of the people who live with and love you, don't they?!
And yes, I agree with your take on the whole He Said She Said thing, since you and I are basically presenting two angles of the same story, that story being that the "feminists" of today are sadly lacking in both definition and direction.
And now I will sign off before I end up writing another 3000 words... ;)
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