Gender studies

...this can happen. It's a truly disturbing story. Horrifying.

This is a cautionary tale for the so-called "pro-life" movement, which has been clamoring for government control of family planning as well. The only difference is that the "pro-life" folks want the government to force pregnancy, while the Chinese government is forcing abortion of pregnancy.

Either way, the government decides and the woman, the family, the people directly involved have no say in the matter.

As Ann says at Feministing:

Bottom line? Despite what U.S. anti-choicers say, no one who is pro-choice is pro-forced abortion. We are against government intervention in personal reproductive decisions -- whether it be by the U.S. Congress in banning abortion or by the Chinese government in forcing it.

The issue is this: Who decides?

Our country has an unfortunate history. When the state and federal governments have meddled in human reproduction, horrors have resulted, including forced sterilization of women and men deemed undesirable by the government. That was plenty bad enough.

Imagine now an officially sanctioned governmental policy to control human reproduction in America. If the government can force a pregnancy, it can force an abortion. Family planning in all its subtleties and considerations becomes the government's decision. In fact, it's a mockery to even call it "family planning" anymore since, in effect, family planning is taken out of the family and placed in the smoke-filled rooms of the legislatures and Congress.

Is family planning really something we want the government controlling?

Really?

Pam Spaulding finds a doosie coming from the poor, insecure conservative sex activists who still seem to be wrestling with their choice to be all-American heterosexuals -- being an orientation-optional bisexual heterosexual (dammit!) and socially conservative role model must be a terrible cross to bear for these folks -- because they're trying to project their own sexual orientation arbitrariness on the rest of the population, this time in an indictment against tolerance programs that undercut macho bullying.

Talk about ass-backwards thinking. Teaching tolerance, according to the doyenne of Columbus, Ohio-based Mission[ary Position] America, Linda Harvey, is turning male students into stone cold killers and stressed-out neurotics. She’s obsessed with Homosexual Agenda infiltrating the school system, and this freakout is par for the course.

Read on.

There is an argument that goes that we should vote for the person. A person's qualifications are more important than their race, their ethnic/religious affiliation, national origin, or anything else. It should be based on qualifications ... that is, unless it's a woman and then all that goes out the window.

Feminists used to whistle past the graveyard and came up with snappy one-liners such as "the best man for the job might be a woman."

I happen to remember how the term, "glass ceiling" was coined. During an informal meeting in 1978 of a group of Hewlett-Packard (HP) female middle managers, they collectively observed that while on paper, and in the policy manual, women were in the running for the top jobs, the trajectories were all out of whack.

Fresh graduates, men and women, started in roughly the same entry-level jobs and the first two promotions came along, until the title "manager." Men continued to progress, but none of the women had; not the fresh group nor the ones who had been at HP for a decade, could break past that. Men increased their area of responsibility. For the women it was a lateral series of jobs: manager, manager, manager, manager.

"It's like we're hitting a ceiling that no one seems to see - because it's made of glass ... a glass ceiling ..." It was the image of a balloon going up and hitting some unseen barrier, then skittering along.

Another woman at the meeting said that when she had been at the pharmaceutical giant, Merck, that she was a Manager, and she was invited to an annual meeting. There were about 20 men and two women and they broke for lunch. One of the more senior men said to her, "now you two women ... now don't sit together."

She gave him a warm grin. "We won't, if you men don't."

To many, this will sound like ancient history. Someone under 30 wasn't even born yet, yet something has happened and I think Penny Wit gave us some statistics that that are a touchstone to what has happened since the Women's Movement.

Penny Wit presents some data in his comment titled, It's already changing .... where he points to the gains women have made. This is encouraging.

In the mid-1970s, the top law schools were predominantly male. Depending on the exact school and exact year, women made up 15-25% of the enrollment. The number has moved up steadily until today the ratio is 50:50. In other professions, such as medicine, the number of female physicians has also followed this same trajectory.

It doesn't work to parachute a woman figurehead into a top slot. Carly Fiorina, whatever people might think over her decisions, was more or less accepted. She got a shot because people like Mary Cunningham paved the way and got crucified. Had a man been offered the same job and with credentials similar to Cunningham's, there would have been no flap.

We are coming along, and maybe one day we'll have more women on the Supreme Court. Maybe one day a woman who has, say, the qualifications of Clarence Thomas, will get a shot.

Until that day, we'll keep working our way up.

Amanda I think nails it with her post today, Women are like sheep: cuddly, easily led:

Lopez’s assumption that girls won’t talk to their parents unless it’s required by law speaks volumes about her beliefs that women are just dumb ass sheep who can’t make the proper decision unless pushed in the right direction. But of course, the assumption is that once pushed, said women will comply without resistance, so there’s no reason not to have such a law because there will be no negative side effects, like girls getting back alley abortions or girls who have good reasons not to tell their parents. (Such as Daddy will beat her.) Women are sheep–push ‘em, they go in the right direction, and all women have exactly the same needs.

Knowing that conservatives have such a low view of women’s agency is key to understanding the video that Digby posted where various protesters were asked what the punishment should be for women who obtain illegal abortions. Most of them are absolutely floored at the very idea that women’s decisions should be examined at all–to them, only the doctor who performed it is morally accountable because he had the job to direct the amoral sheep-like woman towards the “correct� decision of not aborting and he fell down on his job of providing guidance. That women are willful, that they might decide they want to terminate even in the face of everyone telling them to have the baby, just doesn’t even register.

That said, I do think there’s two views on the right of women’s morality, one that casts women as evil sluts who must be controlled at all costs and one that casts women as dumb sheep that need just a little guidance to get it “right�.
We've seen manifestations of both here, from MRA-types who, in their paranoid fantasy worlds, seem convinced that we evil feminists are secretly running the world -- you know, like your worst nightmare Illuminati -- and forced pregnancy is only our just due; and the Pollyannas, who believe that all you have to is outlaw something to make it go away. (It worked really well with drugs, right? And Prohibition was a thrilling success!)

I expect the Pollyannas are in for a rude awakening. Many of their supporters are, too, because, as any clinic worker will tell you, a significant percentage of women who abort pregnancies are staunchly "pro-life" -- "But this is an exception!" Women have used what lore they had to control their own bodies to what extent possible for thousands of years, and modern-day abortion prohibitions aren't going to stop that.

The punishment fantasists, though, will never be appeased. Bullies and abusers never are. My suspicion is that those folks secretly want women to die in illegal abortions. Such is their vision of "life."

So between malice and naïveté, the right-wing has quite a political force mounted against women. Count this as year one of the Modern Dark Ages.

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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ...

Men? All men are created equal? What about women?

In elementary school we learned that "men" meant "both men and women," and for a while we bought that ... until the Women's Movement. Unexamined sexism allowed us to say "doctor, he" and "nurse, she," and how language became a tool of control. A lot of time was spent in the 1970s removing sexist preconceptions from the language. The language lost some poetry as a result, but women gained some rights.

But are the high flowing words of the American Declaration of Independence only an ideal? The Soviets came to that conclusion about their own system. Pure Communism was an ideal, but practicality prevented it and The USSR renounced Communism ... at least officially and in large part.

Perhaps the struggle of the last 30 years in the Women's Movement has led us in the United States to the same de facto conclusion about principles alluded to in the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps most people - rightly or wrongly - believe that the biological difference between men and women are so different, that there never can be true equality. And men, who on the surface would seem to gain most from keeping women "not equal," are not the only culprits. Perhaps the majority of women agree.

And yet all around, people want to have their cake and it it too. On the one hand, women are told in some states that once they are impregnated, they must carry the baby to term - as we saw in the recent publicity over the South Dakota Law. A woman does not have the right to choose.

In another case, one in the UK, a man has asked that the eggs he fertilized be destroyed. The woman wants to bear the children, but the man - claiming "choice" - is asserting his right to choose. Judges will eventually decide.

Indeed, these are different legal jurisdictions, but the unspoken assumption is so very much ingrained that it is never debated or discussed. People believe there are two categories of people ... despite the Declaration and elementary school English ... that say that men and women are not equal.

Men are equal as a class. Women are equal as a class. People will subscribe to that and the courts can thrash that out when one group of men gains at the expense of another. Same with women. But, what happens tacitly is that men and women are not equal and society seems to run on that assumption.

The abortion debate at one moment runs on the argument of equality, then on the argument of inequality - each side using both arguments to make its point. The Women's Rights Movement has been marginalized and maneuvered into the Reproductive Rights Movement - a long way away from what the women of the Women's Liberation Movement were talking about in the 1960s and 1970s.

Feminists of the 1960s and 1970s almost managed to get the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed. This would have made our elementary school English teachers' assertions correct; that the word "men" means "men and women" in the context of rights.

However, as we left the barricades and entered corporate and marital life and a host of 30-something realities, equality suddenly did not look the same as it did when we were idealistic students and fresh graduates. Maybe our mothers knew something we didn't. Maybe institutionalized sexism was so pervasive and the institutions so fundamentally "male," that we really did not want that sort of equality. A law, even a Constitutional Amendment, was not going to get us into the Old Boys Network, nor were we going to let men into the International Women's Grapevine. In fact, what would that look like? We were stumped.

At we hit 30-something, we started to get serious about having babies. Even lesbians were having children, and Reproductive Rights trumped most of the other demands, and maybe an Equal Rights Amendment wasn't such a good idea - not after Prince Charming proved not-charming, and possibly ran off with someone else, leaving us with the pregnancies and the brood. Shouting out "equality," he demanded alimony, or at least insisted he did not have to pay much in child support since we women now had access to cool careers and could make do - never mind we put off childbearing for some additional years - until maybe we could no longer conceive.

The differences between men and women became more clear as time wore on and we wondered if our mothers hadn't gotten it "right," after all, and suddenly Phyllis Schlafly, for all her insipid rhetoric and hypocrisy, began to make a sort of perverse sense. Sexism was so ingrained in the culture that if the ERA got passed, men would use it when it suited them, while maintaining business-as-usual the rest of the time.

We saw it with our husbands. We both had power careers, but guess who always ended up doing the dishes? Well, it wasn't him. Granted, men got better at helping around the house and in a number of other realms, but men did not change at a fundamental level nor has including women markedly changed institutions. Most of the women who have made it have not transformed the institution. The institution has transformed them, and it is hardly something most of us envisioned, nor would we have wanted to become like them.

People despise Hillary and/or Condi, yet they are the blue and red exponents of the 1960s/1970s and are not what we had in mind when we asked for Constitutionally guaranteed equality.

The gains made by the Second Wave of Feminism have been masterfully utilized by these young women - and fact boys have been raised (by us!) to be less overtly sexist has helped - and things have gotten better in one sense, so much so that Women's Rights have fallen of the radar, altogether. They're in there with "save the Spotted Owls" on the list of the social agenda.

But it is not the fault of the men or even the women. Women have defected from the Progressives and the Progressives have returned the favor and dropped much of the pro-woman and pro-choice language from their platforms.

Some of the political bloggers say we should vote Democrat, regardless. Some say that a third party is a pipe dream.

As for me, I'm going to vote for every woman I can. If there are two women in the race, I'll vote for the more Progressive one.

Is this a flawed concept? No more flawed than voting for a Democrat, just because he is a Democrat.

Right now, women are in largely male governing institutions such as government and large corporations. There are a few who have risen to the top - Hillary and Condi, as stated earlier - but they are products of institutions shaped primarily by men and whose male traditions are longstanding. What woman can stand in the face of that? Second Wave Feminists know all about being the only-woman-in-the-group. We recall how isolating it was and that there were no role models.

Later, younger women came in and they did not experience this same isolation, nor did they go through quite the trial by fire - and that is good they were spared that. And yet, if there were more women - red, blue, green, whatever - the women would start to think about what it would mean to be equal and to restructure institutions that are not based on the Old Boys Network.

I can't hate or blame Hillary or Condi for who and what they are having emerged from that morass. They have survived in a world which thinks (right down to the grass roots - blue grass and red grass) that men and women are simply not equal.

However, if there were more women in all positions of leadership, over time the women would get it right - just as we do when we meet as women in our own gatherings. We have divisions and don't all speak with the same voice, but when we don't have men looking over our shoulders and there aren't men to have to cater to, the dynamic is different - even in the face of differences.

So that is why in the next election, I will vote for the women, then for progressives. Finally Democrats.

Equality will not happen until women are represented in half the institutions - and then they will work their magic.

My only regret is that it may take another century.

But it has, at least, begun.