Voices of Radical Feminism

Petition! (is only the beginning)

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:23:09 GMT

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/rogersnoporn/

me starting a campaign to try and get roger's communications from selling porn--porn that is overtly racist, misogynist, pedophilic, rapist, etc.

please sign and spread the word!

in the case of pro-porners and/or pro-sadopatriarchs (pro-"bdsmers") finding this, read: http://community.livejournal.com/_feminism/59030.html, before commenting. chances are, it's already been addressed. let's save each other the hassle.

Young radical feminists (35 or younger)

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:38:26 GMT

I'm going to compile an informal listing of radfems under 35 (born post-1970) because academia (or as Mary Daly would say: academentia) thinks or hopes us folk are going the way of the dinosaur.

So if you're a rad fem born 1970 or later, could I get a comment? Just give your username, or a nickname, or your real name. And if you know any authors, singers, activists, etc. who are radfem and under 35, could you give us their name. And maybe a little bio for both categories if you like, or a wee manifesto or whatnot. And do you/your rad fems you list identify as 2nd or 3rd wave?

This is not meant to belittle older radfems in any wany, shape, or form. They're more than welcome to comment too, but please state you're older than 35, so i don't count you as a "young" rad fem.

Also, please post this other rad fem/feminist communities, blogs, etc. Let's get this thang going!

X-POSTED LIKE I'M DRINKING JUICE

South Dakota

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 04:54:25 GMT

What really frightens me is all of the convergence or what looks like convergence. Everyday I hear lesbians talking about media pressure to become pregnant. I fear I'm not very mainstream but I do listen to my adult rock station and sure enough, it's absolutely full of IVF adds. Babies, babbies, babies. Right after that is a comedy spot which says that "Beltway" is latin for Parking Lot. I can't help but think how babies are part of the grand design to have larger traffic jams so we can tear up existing interstates and build newer larger ones to accomodate new Babies.

We know that the sexual revolution didn't work out to the benefit of women. Women still bore huge responsibilities which men never really participated in. There was increased sexual avaialbility for men and increased risks for women and the double standard has been truly resistant. Slowly but sure, many modes of birth control are being withdrawn and abortion are becoming felonies. The shrinking number of alternatives are truly frightening. Child care where I live costs $1200.00/month. It cost me $200.00/semester to be a full time maticulating student at a state university.

It's difficult to see but there's quiet silent, relentless pressure to return back to where we were in the fifties. In the last 30 years we've been positioned relative to men in a slightly more favorable light. I do not think that can maintain itself at all it there is widepsread state withdrawal of women's autonomy over our bodies. It is this pressure that I am referring to a convergence. There are increases increments in essentialism. On my radio station, gender role dimorphism is pronounce. "Girlie" is in and is being glorified by female DJs.

As much as I hate to say it, post reagan feminism seems far more moderate and less examined than the second wave.

I started to pat outselves on the back but then I take a hard look at what we accomplished. We di accomplish amazing things in the areas of rape, violence against women and especially among ourselves. We came together collectively and I believe that because of the way women are situated and positioned in this society that collectivism is a total necessity. We came together but how much did we really move society? At least where I was, Roe was a shock. It was not expected but once we recovered from the shock, it was really quite the motivator. Had we looked closer, we might have noticed that the decision had been reached by an all male court in a patriarchal system of law based in 'power-over'. What happened then and what is occurring now is exactly why radical feminists reject reform. In a system based in power-over, whatever can be reformed can also be de-reformed. In looked as if we get the ERA through. That was our bright light on the horizon but it sputtered and failed. In fact, I know of no-basic an funamental changes that we have made.

It's always easy to point at a problem an dispense a uni-dimenisonal attribution characterizing what the problems in is. It may be an incredibly neat thing to hear what women on this list would attribute to the lack of success to.

Very often my views are seen as being way out in left field and I see this as a good thing because if a radical feminist is going to be anywhere, she's going to appear to be way out in left field, so don't mind how I'm seen.

In my analysis, beyond the backlash, patriarchy has left us ideological and contexual or epistemological poison pills in the form of individualism and materialism. Individualism is exactly the opposite of what feminism needs to flourish. All individualism can do is to keep us fragmented and apart. A few miles from where I live is a Women's collective market Farmers Market. It must be 35 years old and is in an old wooden building that truly contrasts with all the glass and chrome that surround it. It has held together because it is a COLLECTIVE. Individualism did not build it and hold it together - collectivism did. I think that for us to be successful, there needs to be a re-revolution centered around women coming together again because the collectivity of Sisterhood really is powerful. Anyway.... that's my perspective.

The Radical/Liberal Split?

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 03:38:40 GMT

Recently in a formal paper Allison Jaegger (WHOSE POLITICS? WHO’S CORRECT?), referring to gender described it as a “distinctive conceptual innovations of second wave Western feminism, which drew a theoretical distinction between sex, a set of physiological characteristics relating to biological reproduction, and gender, a variable collection of normative social identities assigned to sexed individuals.”

The early 1950s were heavily laden with both significant and non-significant events. An insignificant event was that in 1953 I began the first grade. A significant event was that the year before, John Money published his earth shifting paper on intersexed people referred to as hermaphrodites at the time. As a point of origin, I wanted to write contextually of the period between the Money’s publication and of the lessons I learned in the fourth grade. The world is full of new curiosities for fourth graders because everything is so new. We were in “language” class and our teacher was discussing nouns and verbs and she happened to mention a new word that we had never heard: Gender. In the early fifties, the word did not apply to human beings at all. It was only applied to nouns and sometimes verbs. “Goodness”, I thought… “so there are girl” nouns and verbs and boy nouns and verbs. With that brief mention of the word, the word disappear never to me be mention gain for another thirty years.

I related this to establish the ground in which Money did his research. At the time, people were thought of and categorized only in terms of their sex. But Money was researching people who were seen to have the properties of both sexes. Ostensibly his findings were that genitals didn’t establish or determine how someone manifested themselves. It was something else.

At this juncture I’d like to step back sharply and NOT consider Money’s findings. I think it’s important to look at the context in which he made his findings. Socially, this was a period of strong role dimorphism. Women were women and men were men. It was, one hand a sexless and puritanical period that had plenty of sex, it was just very much under the covers, under the covers enough that I sister and I had no idea what it was until the sixth grade. We would go to the movies and see a preview and hear the phrase, “the battle of the sexes”. We didn’t know what that meant but men and women seemed to be fighting a lot too.

The phenomenology of the time was that girls were girls and boys were boys and it wasn’t even questioned. We were girls because we were girls and boys were boys because they were. The ground for that was an assumed conservative essentialism. We are objects of nature and nature hath made us this way. That was simple enough. But deep in his laboratory, John Money was questioning all of this. Again, I want to pull away even from his questions and peer squarely at his starting point, his apriories. His research began with the assumption of differences, differences that patriarchy had constructed both socially an conceptually. Questions had always been asked about the differences between women and men and there was always the cutch and glue of essentialism to fall back on. Notice even here, there is the apriori assumption of differences. So in his figurative laboratory the neither good, nor evil doctor began his research where sex was assumed to be all determining and where this subject’s objects were anatomically ambiguous an interesting, little known and tragically stigmatized population, a human locus where essentialism would be confused and perhaps we could learn from them in this period of Joseph McCarthy, where only nouns and verbs and not people had gender.

Differences. Everyone was sure there were differences. No one questioned their origin so Money’s research was going to be interesting because he would learn about those differences, the differences that were assumed to be there, where his apriories were overlooked. What he learned was that behavior didn’t necessarily follow anatomy or biology. But he assumed, ever so important differences were there. Maintaining the idea of differences, Money ensconced in differences had to have a name for a new fragment or nosology. He must have been friends with my language teacher because he named this quality “gender” borrowing from nouns and verbs. In terms of process, assuming that there were differences but having detached them from biology he formalized a construct (noun) based upon the work of the social construction (verb) of life in gendered classes.

I agree with Allison Jaegger, that this was the cornerstone of second wave feminism and many feminists attributed this to John Money, while overlooking the work of Simone De Beauvior who published five years prior to Money but whose book did not fall on these shores in English until 1954 two years after Money’s paper. Feminism took this split and ran with it and it WAS the cornerstone of second wave feminism.

But feminists didn’t talk about gender per se. We borrowed from Marx and spoke of classes: T-Grace Atkinson’s words from 1969 stood out in bas relief:

“The analysis begins with the feminist raison d'etre that women are a class, that this class is political in nature, and that this political class is oppressed. From this point on, radical feminism separates from traditional feminism.”

Words… radical words… no words, talking alluding to difference, for radical feminists did not buy into the apriories of difference and rejected them. So yes, I want to align with Allison’s comment to the extent that rejection of essentialism was revolutionary and an absolute political necessity (I’m impressed because although there were a few older women, most of the radical thinkers of the second wave were in our twenties) The mucilage of this essentialism is the very glue which holds patriarchy together as a dynamic.

Feminism did reject the idea of inherent differences. BUT, what I must question is the statement about the “split between sex and gender” as I believe such a statement grants too credence to gender as a construct, a construct what in this we almost had a chance to watch unfold before our very eyes.

I have questions about gender. My sex used to be female but when I took my licensing exam, the application no longer had checkboxes for sex. Now we are of the female and male genders? Where did that come from? What does it mean? Where sex used to be seen as something that’s concrete…. is gender coming to be concretized? I’m openly asking here because I can’t see any purpose for this, politically or otherwise. My thinking aligns with the following two MacKinnon quotes:

“Much has been made of a supposed distinction between sex and gender. Sex is thought to be the more biological, gender the more social; the relation of each to sexuality varies. I see sexuality as fundamental to gender and as fundamentally social. Biology becomes the social meaning of biology within the system of sex inequality much as race becomes ethnicity within a system of racial inequality. Both are social and political in a system that does not rest indepen¬dently on biological differences in any respect. In this light, the sex/gender distinction looks like a nature/culture distinction in the sense criticized by Sherry Ortner in "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" Feminist Studies 8 (Fall 1982). I use sex and gender relatively interchangeably.”

I think it’s far more complex than you suggest. There is agreement here in part with what you say:

“The person in radical feminist thought is necessarily socially constituted, affirmatively so through an active yet critical embrace of womanhood as identity. Naturalism is at base an epistemological posture growing out of the search for a ground on which to found true reality perception, a location of constancy, a bedrock beneath social shifts, variance, and relativity. Nature is a fixed, certain, and ultimately knowable reality to which there is tangible demonstrable truth, intersubjectively communicable, regardless of perspective. The idea of naturalism, in fact, is that nature is not an idea, but an object reality, meaning that it is thing. Sex as biology, gender as physical body, occupies this place in liberal feminism. In this view, body originates independently of society or mind; then, to varying degrees but invariably and immu¬tably, it undergirds social relations, limiting change. In radical feminism, the condition of the sexes and the relevant definition of women as a group is conceived as social down to the somatic level. Only incidentally, perhaps even consequentially, is it biological.”

Towards a feminist theory of the state – p 46

Allison, I don’t know what schools of feminism you align yourself with. But that definition appeared to be liberal feminist to me.

I’m writing about this because somehow there seems to be a message here, having been born at a time when gender literally did not exist and was not distinct. For feminism to recognize a split between sex and gender seems far too generous to gender for me. Yesterday, Iris was kind enough to mention gender and the queer movement. I suggested I would not have many warm things to say about the queer movement and I really don’t.

The Queer/trans movements come from distinctively a distinctively male standpoint and a relatively privileged standpoint at that. While Butler has made her reluctance to be included by that movement clear, it’s almost devoid of a woman’s standpoint and is extraordinarily underrepresented by women.

When I observe the standpoint of the queer movement and what appears to be visible to its observers, again I am certain that it’s basically a male movement. Allison, I was also glad to see you discuss how women internalize male values and I believe that’s occurred with the women who support the queer. I’m sure they “question gender”. I’m not sure Iris, why a find that phrase so offensive. After all, gender kills. People die because of gender. Doesn’t it seem just a little effete and HIGHLY privileged to utter the statement, “I question gender?” Radical feminists want to eradicate gender. As far as I know, only the freedom of male privilege could “question gender”. In reality, I believe only can have either that privilege or luxury. As women, it’s in our faces all the time.

For women, patriarchy is a wearying dynamic full of double binds. The topic of “difference” is illustrative about how women loose either way with issues of gender. Considering the question of “Equity” when women claim there is no difference, the metaphor of resulting allotments would be razor blades and not tampons because of the implicit male standard. When women say we are different, in order to have our needs met, those differences are hierarchicalized against a male standard and we’re seen as second class. Indeed patriarchy is a two way sword which always finds ways to undermine us.

I see the same, coming from the queer movement with it’s male perspective and lack of woman-identification. Every single queer position on gender rolls downhill and onto the backs of women. “Gender is a play toy”, except for those that are dead and mutilated, that is. What was suffrage and the Salemn witch trails about if not for gender and how much of a play toy were they for women? It might be a play toy for men and radical feairies who cross dress on a weekend, go ‘gender slumming’ but will return to work on Monday morning in their coats and ties and freshly pressed shirts. But what about those who are never so situated and positioned? What respite do we have? We are the gender slum you visit. I do not believe that queer is a friend of women until it does not just question gender. I think it has to do two things. I think it must confront gender because gender has been the handle for the oppression of women. Queer has never acknowledged this because it’s been too busy abstracting women’s lives out of existence and abstractions sounding as detached from women’s lives as does “questioning gender”. Part of the friction between lesbian feminists has been where queer has discouraged the existence and integrity of women spaces.

Radical Feminism, queer and trans abstract women’s lives to varying extents. Certainly T-Grace Atkinson’s statement about women being a political category was an abstraction but at the same time, I’ve never seen a radical feminist deny that women’s lives have contents, indeed our lives have highly constructing (verb) contents. In post modernism, we become but narratives and in queer we’re a category again but seen through male lenses. The queer identity has subsumed the lesbian identity.

My Radical Feminist Conscience and $$$Money$$$

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:07:18 GMT

My Radical Feminist Conscience and $$$Money$$$

I just received what almost seems like a Jimminy Crickett note from someone I love and respect an awful lot. She wasn’t the least bit chastising but she was pointing out things about my finances etc.

She said wise things as she always does. She said, “Let’s face it, it’s not attractive to lesbians or anyone else to be 50+ and burdened with debt.”

I’m sure this is true and I don’t have any argument with that. But being attractive isn’t the issue for me.

Are radical feminist’s allowed to have heroes? Is it ok to really admire a man or a character? Yes, Annie was my heroine in the fifties and Annie only ran for about ran years. So who was left? Well, there was Bob Denver as Manard G. Krebbs – a Beatnik! He was so atraditional! I internalized those ideas.

I’ve always believed that money was dirty. I don’t feel good about money. I don’t crave it. Actually I wish with all my heart that it didn’t exist – because money coerces. If life is precious, when we have money, we immediately have to watch out for it. That consumes life and our freedom. I believe this so strongly that in the late seventies I blew out of a human potential training on Abundance and Prosperity when then were pinning dollars bill to a woman’s dress and singing, “Money, Money, money” I just about exploded through the door.

I have no doubt that my friend is right. It is unattractive to be old and poor. But I look at the alternative. If I had had money, how would it have been? It could only have been through pouring over stocks and having budgets and making financial plans etc. In other words I would have paid for that money in terms of my life – time spent.

I’d prefer to be unattractive. I’ve met “unattractive” who live in vas at festival. Yes, they are a little crazier, and more of their own woman than me.

I’m sorry, I absolutely despise money. Work is, OK. But I totally believe money is filthy because of the parts of your life that you trade of in order to have money. I never want to have a “portfolio”. Pardon me, but I’ pooh all myself. Often I consult, and men come for computer consultations. (Keep in mind that my basement is one room and my bed is in it.) I consult on software problems and when the men leave, they lay down a fifty dollar bill. I feel like I’ve been prostituted. I feel ill. I feel soiled. As a matter of fact, I have been prostituted. I have men in my home. I don’t want men in my home. I have to talk to them. I have to take directions from them.

That’s really unattractive to me. Money is unattractive to me. Them I think about “well-to-do” lesbians and I ask, “Are they attractive to me?” The answer is, no they aren’t. I know what they had to do to be well to do. They had to have portfolios. They had to pay attention to money. They had to take precious hours of their lives any be coerced and they had to talk to REALLY dull men.

What is more valuable to me? The approval of well to do lesbians or precious moments in my life that I have no spent worrying about term life insurance? ***Sigh*** this is what I mean about capitalism. It coerces, enslaves, prostitutes. It robs us of the time in our lives.

Yeah… I hope I’m unattractive to “well to do lesbians” because I’m sure they are not attractive to me. I don’t think they’ve done much thinking about this. They were too busy checking to see if their term life insurance had expired or not. Would I want to be in a relationship with someone like that? I’m afraid I wouldn’t. I also fear that we wouldn’t have much to talk about. It’s a little bit like the “alliance” between lesbian and gay men which has sounded pretty stupid to me. What do I have in common with gay men? Next to nothing as far I am concerned. He prefers to be with men and I prefer to be with women. Fine, now that we’ve established that, what else is there to talk about? But isn’t the same thing true for well to do Lesbians? They prefer women. Ok Good. They have portfolios, term life, mortgages, financial advisors and cell phones and Godiva Chocolates. How exciting are these women to talk to? They aren’t interesting to me. How many do you see clamoring to get on this list? None.

Ooooh I’m in tears because this isn’t why I’ve spent thirty five years of my life for women. I didn’t do it so we could have term life and portfolios.

I did it so we could be FREE. AS far as I can see the well to do are and have been anything but free and it is with sadness, no tears in my eyes, that I register how uninteresting I find them to be. I’m sorry I missed the latest Olivia Cruise… well sort of, well to be honest no I’m not. I’m sort of glad I missed it because that just isn’t on my list of aspirations and I’m especially not interested in paying the costs.

To the woman who wrote me, I think you are so wonderful. It’s just that…well here I see you as … moderate in this area. Are you going to radically reject this stuff, or is it your goal to be comfortable in a corrupt society? I could never do that. I’ve been there. I’ve owned homes and was a solid citizen…..and

I HATED myself. I HATED myself for participating in this oh so fucked up society. I felt like I do when those men lay down their fifty dollars bills because backing my respectable care out of my long respectable asphalt wasn’t me. It wasn’t me at all. I felt renewed when I shed that dead skin.

I don’t like sounding like a reactionary but a couple of weeks ago I talked to the woman who brought me out. She had $145.00 to her name. NOW…. That’s MY KIND OF WOMAN and I’m really serious. What holds patriarchy together is HOW we participate. I’m poor and I hurt. But I have a good radical feminist report card.

Please know Jimminy cricket that I really do cherish you. But I feel almost haughty at the observation that I’m not attractive to well to do lesbians because I believe they’ve sold out. They’ve deserted the movement. It rather makes me question “the community” that I though so beautiful. Where are the women who spoke so eloquently? Kate Millet won’t even touch feminism these days from what I understand. How many of us really cared?

Like TruthSayer, I long for the seventies because we were real an we cared and we hadn’t sold out. I’m so tired of shutting down my conscience and not listening to my own body.

I can’t do “business”. My head just doesn’t work that way. I can do ‘technical’. That’s ok. Just not money… no, keep me away from it.

Renee

Interesting observation

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 03:34:44 GMT

I made an interesting observation today. I thought I might share it.

I have a firm belief in knowing all I can about a subject, if I am going to speak about it. This means I have to educate myself about things that are important to me. This often includes what I like to call "knowing thine enemy", as in knowing what is being said by people of opposing viewpoints about a subject. I am also aware that on the internet, one must be very careful about the quality of where they get their information. That being said, I went on a little hunt this evening to see some of the herstory of radical feminism. Mostly so that some of what we are talking about here makes more sense. As an anthropologist, knowing the background and how something came to be is a very important element to understanding your subject. So tonite, some of the basic information that I came away with was something that connected to an event earlier in the evening.

After work, I went to a local used bookstore that we have here in town. For those of you who don't know me, I am from Iowa City, Iowa, which is home to the University of Iowa. I wanted to take women's studies electives when I was a student here, and found a few that were combined with anthropology classes, but my main focus was physical(archaeology)and not cultural. Iowa City is about the most liberal city in Iowa and has a rich herstory and links to feminists ("Common Lives, Lesbian Lives", a strong GLBT presence, civil rights protections within city limits for GLBT people for over 20 years now).

So I am in this little used bookstore that I love, and I am perusing the women's studies section, searching for some of the author's I have seen here, for which I am not finding any. There was one book in particular, and I did not buy it, nor do I remember it's title or author, but I may have to go back tomorrow to get it. This book, on the back cover, summarized that as women develop, there is a time between age (don't quote me on this) approximately 2nd and 6th grade where they are heavily influenced by what they are seeing and being exposed to around them, and then this stops and they don't get to a true place of understanding this stuff they had been exposed to until they are adults. Like for a short time it makes sense in a big picture sort of way that we really don't have vocabulary for, and then we lose it and then get it back later in life.

One thing that I noted from my little herstory search tonite was that the most active time so far for radical feminism was in the late 60's into the mid-70's. I was born in 1969 to a mother who was 26 years old in 1969 and who was heavily influenced as a woman at Indiana University in the 60's by feminism and the women's movement. I was raised with "Free to Be, You and Me", Helen Reddy's "I am Woman" and Sesame Street). My mother was an art teacher, and always worked outside the home, but was free during summers in which we traveled all over the United States. My mother always travelled alone with us. To the outside world, she wanted people to see a strong independent woman who could take care of herself and her own. I don't think my mother has ever really sat down and analyzed feminist theory, but her sisters who wrote the famous writings and did the protesting, made it a safer world for her to do these things and she appreciated that. To me, she has always been the embodiment of feminism, because she lives a very free life, with as much equality as she can find. She surrounds herself with like-minded people and she makes decisions for herself. She has never allowed her husbands (my father and step-father) to ever demonstrate that they thought they had any control or power over her. She did not do any of these things in a threatening way. She was always loving, but insistent on her independence.

So, when I was in approximately 2nd through 6th grade, I was exposed to my mother's interest in the women's movement and my parent's support of ERA. It may not have made any sense to me at the time, but now as I am 36, I find that my desire to learn about feminism and cultural diversity is a value I hold very dear. It is something I am passionate about. So I guess now I have to go back tomorrow and find the book and buy it and read it so that I can actually post something meaningful from this interesting observation that went off like a lightbulb in my head tonite.

I will let you guys know the title and author of that book when I go back tomorrow, if I can find it again and someone hasn't bought it. I was disapointed to not find any MacKinnon, which was my ultimate goal in going in the first place, but they are going to keep eyes open for me for her books (people take books in to them and they buy them and then re-sell them. I collect antique books and have found quite a few gems there for about $4-$5 each. I want to find some of the lesbian pulp novels from the 50's but have had no luck yet.

Ok, so I will shut up now and wait for all of your wonderful responses to my meandering thought processes and look forward to seeing what you all make of this.

:-)
Gina

Patriarchy is Alive and Well

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 10:56:41 GMT

Given the chance, most people wouldn't choose the sex of their baby before conception, a new survey shows. (The survey was done by Harris Interactive in September 2004. )

The study, published in Fertility and Sterility, is based on an Internet survey of 1,197 men and women aged 18-45 years old. The survey has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percent.

Between 8 percent and 18 percent of participants stated that they would use medical technology described in the survey to choose whether to have a boy or girl.

"Perhaps this speaks to the fact that people still want to leave things up to chance and not rely on science for everything," researcher Tarun Jain, MD, says in a news release from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Jain works.

Boy-Girl Preference

The survey also gauged preferences for baby boys or girls.

Participants were asked if they would rather have a boy or girl as their first child. Their answers:
• No preference: 42 percent
• Boy: 39 percent
• Girl: 19 percent

The Outskirts of feminism......

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 07:20:39 GMT

FishyFem: Would you be interested in starting a post regarding what you would like the younger generation to know? Or just describing your experience of the second wave? I actually never quite caught onto what you were saying about the metaphorical bookshelf so if you want to go over that again that'd be great!

The latter is far more concrete and communicable in a short period of time than the former which needs to wait until I can dedicate quality time to a meaningful response including thinking about it.

Sometimes I am a little embarrassed by my early experience because I went to school in the South plus we were students and pretty much followers.

My initial experiences came from a concentration of about four places:

• The first was a series of WS courses and all that occurred in relation to them.

• The second was in the construction of a Lesbian Commune near the school – well within 40 miles.

• The third was a single evening at a gay and lesbian party before there was a significant lesbian culture.

• Later, in the early eighties after coming out…. Life in a local NOW chapter. They are all connected temporally and related to one another if through nothing else - contrasts.

The other thing that’s interesting is they were non-overlapping and isolated segments which speaks to the diversity of early feminist groups in the South.

At risk of being repetitious but toward putting this in a consolidated place I’ll begin again.

I was waiting for a movement like Feminism. I didn’t know what it would be but I knew of the evils of male dominance through the violence against us at home. I knew it wasn’t “natural” as it was seen then and I was waiting for something to come along to confront that.

One early evening, just as I was finishing undergraduate school, during Walter Cronkite, there was a film clip of women in jeans, tennis shoes and sweatshirts confronting men on in suits on Madison Ave.

This was so anomalous that I sat up and took instant notice. It was something called feminism. But this was the South and there was noting visible like that here. I just stored it away and this was about 1968.
Btw, I should note that I grew up in a conservative environment. Both of my sisters are Republicans. One is anti-abortion. I love them very much but there are topics we have to avoid or upset will occur. In 1968 Nixon ran against Humphrey and had I voted I would have voted for Nixon. I was “apolitical” which is really quite political because there’s not such thing as apolitical. I was also poor and lived on a porch and paid $5.00/week for rent.

Just before grad school, there was a life changing event for me called Kent State.

I was walking across campus and it changed my life forever, but it wasn’t over night. We can call it “process”. When I arrived at grad school, I was in a lab full of Californians. As soon as I settled in, since I had gone further South I sought out feminists. There were no WS departments at the time, but feminists could be found around t Psych of Women’s courses and I made that my minor.

One the first day, there were two men in the course and they immediately began talking about how patriarchy hurt them. The prof cut them off and said, “I’m sure that’s very important, but this course of about women and is for women and we need to listen to women.” You could have heard a pin drop because this was the first time I ever heard that and I LOVED it. I knew I was in the right place and I understood, we all did and we relaxed and marveled at this space – the kind of space that we’ never known in the presence of men. It’s important to understand just how gigantic this was. It was so new and the incident was so informing. It told volumes. Btw, there was little feminist literature at the time. We had the brand new edition of OBOS. I still have a copy like it. It was printed on acidic recycled paper and they are all brown now and my copy is much thinner than the version now.

**** Violence described in next paragraph***

We were eager to learn about this new way of BEING. We never challenged the prof until the end of the course and I’ll get that. We had a CR and that was wonderful. During the class, I sat across from an Back woman. She was the first lesbian I’d ever met. She wore coveralls, was big, angry and scary because of that anger but we supported her. She and I formed a gentle comfortable friendship. It was a little distant. I was white and straight. But we used to walk to school together. How bold it was to announce that she was a lesbian. During that quarter, a man blew her lover’s head off with a shot gun. We supported her through that.

We loved the course and lived for course days because it was the only place that felt safe. Through CR, I was converting to a feminist. Oddly enough, I couldn’t interest the other women in the lab into these courses. Somehow they seemed threatened. That’s always been around.

We also went to the First AWP meeting in Carbondale, Illinois, in a caravan. I think all of use slept in a Red Rooster Inn – together. The meetings were exhausting. We didn’t stay up and talk. I guess I need to talk about that.

Feminism was pretty geographical. It felt to us as if it were being run from the North – Chicago and Columbia, SUNY and NEW, Columbus and in the West it was Berkley. We definitely felt as if we were followers. This meeting was interesting because the pros came down from the North. They were solemn and serious. I made my only faux paus at this meeting. In a workshop on gender, there was the statement of NO DIFFERENCE and I piped up and said, “But there are brain differences” and the big dykes scowled at me. “We don’t talk about that.” “Oooh…….” But through these experiences, our class became cohesive. We stuck together for years. It was a time for reflection also.

There were several times that I realized that we were standing on the edge of time. We didn’t know where this was going. Roe had just been decided and it was unexpected and a shock. It took a long time to realize exactly what this meant. You see, this was a freedom we had never known. What did this freedom mean, exactly? How did it translate from gavel to our day to day lives? How could not know this was coming?

While speaking of the edge of time, I clearly remember being at an AWP meeting and talking to a woman with the most beautiful blue eyes. So many thoughts. There was the realization that we were isolated and how important these meeting were. The was the realization that we didn’t know where we were going or where this would take us and most of all there was the realization that we were doing this for our daughters. I was sure the volumes that we were writing about women and about our insights and discoveries would be our legacies and our daughter’s treasures through which they could understand us and the times. Ours was somehow a well educated generation and we were prolific analysts and writers of every aspect of women’s experiences. I was sure this would be a wide bridge across the generations and a vehicle through which we would be able to talk to each other. Few things could be further from the truth. Temporality.

There was no differentiation between liberal and radical feminists. My training seemed to be in the vein of liberal feminist.

Thread II – The Lesbian Commune

One day a tall skinny gentle man came into the lab and announced that he was a new Computer Science Prof and that he wanted to help us with our research needs. We became friends and I met his wife. They were from Columbus a hot bed of radicalism. They were Quaker and different. The made homemade butter biscuits with hand utensils and used natural honey as a sweetener and had a honey ladle. She canned. K, had a HUGE wooden bookcase, full of books on women. Where did they come from? I’d never seen so many books on women. I didn’t know they’d been written. They were all paperback, a reflection of our economic status. I spent time with them and got to know them well. At that time all middle class and college educated lesbians had big homemade books full women’s literature. It was almost automatic. We didn’t have a Womyn’s Bookstore but larger cities did. Columbus did. All lesbians were automatically feminists except butches in many parts of the country. Often they weren’t accepted by feminists.

One day, M announced that his wife had discovered she was a lesbian. They were going to separate but before they did, he would help them identify land and build a commune. GOODNESS. This was all coming so fast and furious. My head was spinning. I’d never heard of anything like this. But I helped them too. We ran land tests and “percolated” the land to see if it would drain and was suitable for sewage. They were afraid of flash floods and actually built the house on trees as pillars. There was space for grape arbors and running streams through the land. And there were BIG DYKES now in coveralls. Some had hair on their chins. They had their own culture so there were three cultures. His, mine and the lesbian culture which I had to grope my way around. I was afraid of offending as I respected the culture but did not know it.

I was concerned about their safety in this little Christian backwoods part of the world. They said they were valued members of the community and as long as they didn’t cause any problems the town folks accepted them as they were. That was the seventies.

We did get the commune together. It actually had a composting toilet, the only one I’ve ever seen and it was “loud” in announcing its presence in the summer. It was far worse than the porta-Janes at festival. I did manage to offend the lesbians once. One night I was going out on date and got dressed and put on makeup. That’ all it took. They never said anything but I could see the look on their faces. I wanted to shrink.

Thread III – A Lesbian and Gay Party

In and of itself this may not be interesting except it is. I was invited to a GLF party and I went. It was in a house and as rather amazing because it was completely gender separated. When I arrived the host hugged me hello and said, “The women are out there on the porch”, and after that we never saw the men after that. But here is where it becomes interesting.

At that time, in the South there was no shared lesbian culture. Yes, there was “Beebo Brinker”, perhaps Jane Rule and The Well of Loneliness by RadClyffe Hall. But that was it. This wasn’t true nationally. Larger cities did have a common shared lesbian culture. But I wanted to talk about us. What did I encounter at the GLF party? Perhaps the very opposite from the dykes at the commune. Everyone, including me was in skirts, everyday school attire. We weren’t, or they weren’t distinctive as lesbians, perhaps they could ill afford to be at school. Given that there was no common culture, we had to fumble to find commonalities and we discussed our studies and what departments we were in. I mention because only a few years later I would come out in the very early eighties after Olivia Records had given us Womyn’s Music. The two periods contrasted like day and night. Rita Mae Brown had published Rubyfruit Jungle, standard training for any lesbian.

There was this tiny point in time when I came out. There were two artists on Olivia. Meg Christian and Cris Williamson. They gave us our culture, two Olivia Artists and staff and Holly Near. By the time I came out we had a language. You could ask a woman if she ever heard of Meg Christian and if she said yes, you’d know she was a sister and she’d know you were one. It was a horribly white period which may not have been apparent at the time. As a separatist community the lesbian community was strong and had our own stores and events. DC had a two days Womyns Music Festival Called SisterFire which died in the mid-eighties. Gone. We had bookstores. Gone. And we had the GWA, a weekly gathering of 100 lesbians which for two dollars an evening served wine and cheese and had speakers like Sonja Jonson. It was wonderful. It was powerful and it’s disintegrated.

Just before I came out, we lost the ERA. I broke up with the man I was with and swore off men. I had succumbed to heteronormativity. But I didn’t think I was a lesbian. After all, I couldn’t see myself in coveralls, picking up women in a bar. But again there was another life event where I met this wonderful woman and we had the most beautiful summer of my life. She was patient with me and taught me so much and took me to my first Womyn’s books stores. We slept in each other’s arms all summer and were never lovers. “Never bring a woman out was one of her maxim’s”. But it was a beautiful summer of snuggling and white gowns and close friendships, champagne, Meg Christian, Holly Near, and Cris Williamson. She didn’t stay in town and parting hurt so bad…but I was soon in a long term relationship for the next eight years with a wonderful but tough lesbian and we co-mommed raising her daughter.

During that time we joined NOW, which was really disappointing. I understand why but, it was a horrible experience. The chapter was totally hierarchical and there were no open chapter business meetings. Essentially members came and heard a presentation often given by men and then we went home but not before telling us where the next abortion protest would be. Oooh, we face lots of angry male anti-abortionists and I learned early that there was no discussing these issues with them. It was IN YOUR FACE SHOUTING AND SCREAMING as were surrounded by pictures of meaty, bloody fetuses marching hour after hour.

Other than that the NOW experience had no intensity to it. The board was clustered as they were because they feared chapter takeovers by pro-lifers. Even in 1984 that struggle was going on. I have never been able to find a group of intense feminists like we had in grad school.

But my partner and I had our own wooden bookcase and our prized book was Rita Mae Brown’s Plain Brown Wrapper. By that time you could call me a Lesbian Feminist.

Thread V – Radicalizing - a Postlog

I wouldn’t have called myself an acutely schooled feminist. I came up at a time that there just wasn’t feminist literature and reading feminism wasn’t something that was a part of me. BUT, my instincts were good.

In the early nineties, I began to encounter “feminists” who condoned prostitution and pornography. All my instincts said that these hurt women but here were feminists around me advocating it. I went into crisis. If this was feminism, I had to consider saying goodbye because this just wasn’t tolerable. I knew somewhere there were feminists making good arguments who knew what they were taking about and I sought them on the net. Finally I found one. I asked her what she read and she said MacKinnon. The rest is herstory.

It’s rare that really young women become radical feminists. Normally there’s usually a bit a path. The young feminist begins liberal but then encounters issues in her own life and if she cares she begins to re-evaluate and re-evaluate. After I devoured everything of MacKinnon’s and went into standpoint theories and feminist epistemologies. I love those. They are rich in insights.

There’s more but it occurred in the last ten years and can be separated from your questions on the second wave.

But what I’m becoming aware of is how time and society reality change. Patriarchy propagates itself not through a single point in time but across generations. We lose what we learn. As individuals we come into ongoing patriarchy as a point in time. I want to begin looking at that along with other feminist philosophers because I think there’s a lot there that can’t be seen until there is a herstorical perspective in place.

Introduction

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 02:14:29 GMT

Hello, I thought it would be nice to introduce ourselves. I am new to this group but have known Radfeminista for along time. I am 36, identify as a lesbian. I live in Iowa. I hold a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Iowa in Anthropology. My background in in Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology of North American Indians. I am currently working on a M.A. in Secondary Education - Social Studies as a back injury from a horseback riding accident keeps me from doing the archaeological work that I love so much. I am learning about radical feminism and have learned a lot from Radfeminista. I am starting to read and want to read some of the great authors. A good starting point would be appreciated. I have only read one book that Radfeminista bought me and I cannot remember the title and can't find it right now, I think I loaned it to another womyn. I am kind of flaky and just starting to put some of this stuff together, so bear with me and let me learn from you. I may not post much, but I read and take all of it in and think about it a lot!

:-)
Wyndchaiser

Men in Feminism?

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:31:53 GMT

I’ve been asked for my pov on men in feminism. I can only respond with a personal perspective. Interaction and commentary from the community is invited and encouraged.

When we ask what feminism is grounded in, the first answer is, feminism is grounded in feminism. I know that sounds circular but let’s look at the alternative which is: feminism would be grounded in patriarchy because anything that isn’t feminism, is patriarchy. This is also why radical feminists question the ideologies of liberal feminism. Liberalism has central conceptual cardinals which are patriarchal. Having visited here, I turn and ask again, what is feminism grounded in? The answer is women’s experience.

I believe some of the most interesting differences (post-social in origin) between men and women are what men DO NOT SEE that women do see. Within feminism, this is understood as epistemological privilege. In other words, oppressed people are able to see differential outcomes that privileged people cannot and do not see. I think the things that men don’t see are truly remarkable.

There are more aspects of privilege that we often do not see. When you look at the work done, one of the things that women are invisibly charged with, is to do both the emotional work for men and to do the socially educate, guide and steer them. This is role related and is a universal tax placed upon women in relation to men. In a very real way, this often continues in feminism because of what feminism is. IF feminism is grounded in the material experiences of women – men have nothing to add, but still require educating, the traditional role. Feminisms rather mandates that men educate themselves and on of the primary roles for men in feminism is to educate other men. Feminism is a movement for women to obtain full access to socio-political rewards of society, and the only way we will ever do this will be to radically change society. It will be ours to unravel society down to the fundamental oppression which is gender. When we are finished a side product will be that men are liberated too. It must be remembered that the liberation of men is a side product of feminist pursuits. Feminism is not for the liberation of all people, but it will liberate all people because it is ours to eliminate the fundamental oppression. There is sort of a quandry or koan in all of this. As soon feminism is made about the liberation of all people, it becomes – NOT Feminism and cannot and will not accomplish it’s goals.

I am not an overall Daly fan because of her essentialism, but she has taught us many wonderful things. Men in feminist spaces generally divert the space. IF men say patriarchy hurts men too (PHMT), the proper feminist response is, “We’re really sorry. Go out there and change it.” What we don’t do is to enable patriarchy by making the traditional response, “Oh you poor baby.” You always have to look whether men are in feminism because the want to benefit women or themselves. Within feminism, we shouldn’t be hearing much from men. They should be out holding anti-rape seminars, repairing domestic violence clinics and working on their own issues, instead of making their issues – ours, yet another function of privilege.

I think there are other questions that I’ve always had. What happens when push comes to shove? (The only value in feminism for hypothetical is to illustrate). But suppose, suddenly feminist were in the verge of a major victory say of the magnitude of Roe. One has to remember that ROE didn’t cost men anything. What happens when a gain does cost men? Are they going to work against themselves? Did we not receive an answer to this in terms of the ERA? What I am positing is that relying on the support of men.

For all of these reasons, I question men being in feminism in any other capacity than I’ve described.

I have a married feminist friend and over the years, she has trained her husband (let’s not make that transparent) to the point that he is a pleasure to be around. I believe he does understand what feminists need from men and I believe that’s the proper question to ask.

There’s one more really unusual narrative. There was an ostensible man on a major feminist board and then a second, third and fouth. This individual had a masculine user name, but few took him to be male. Further more, the person over time showed clearly that they were woman-centered. I became friends with him. And we really, really curious at where this person was centered. “There is at least one good man”, I decided. But then other things began to really puzzle me. After really watching this person and how they approached the world and solved problems, I thought, “this person is not epistemologically male” and I watched other board members be absolutely astounded that this was a man even with the very male username. This person went through a period of avoiding me for months. When we did interact on MSN, there was ‘hint dropping and flight’. Finally it was shared, this person was changing class and would no longer be in class man but class woman. In a way, that was really disappointing. I have yet to find my one good man…….

A quote for the Day......

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 02:24:35 GMT

"Radical feminists are always nice. Provoked to the point of madness, but remaining, at heart, nice."

- Andrea Dworkin

What's your favorite feminist quote?

Radical feminism: A call to action?

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:02:29 GMT

I am in the midst of reading bell hooks’ From Margin to Center. I am sorry I haven’t read it before now as she gives me great pause for thought. I am not finished with it yet (much to my dismay because, for some reason, it is very slow going), so I’m sure other things will come up for me but what her words are sparking for me now is the great avoidance and/or dismissal the feminist movement has given issues surrounding class, race and motherhood. I’ll get to all of this in a minute and I assure you there is a method to my madness.

I just perused the NOW website for fun, simply to see where liberal feminism stands and what issues they consider important. NOW’s “Top Priority Issues” are abortion, lesbian rights, violence against women, constitutional equality, economic justice and promoting diversity. I find this list illustrative of why so many women do not connect with NOW in any meaningful way. Economic Justice was simply about pay equity. Of course I support this but have to wonder why it’s considered a “top priority” issue when the majority of women work in the pink collar ghetto where pay equity isn’t on anyone’s radar. In other words, this is a class issue. In Promoting Diversity/Ending Racism, most of the action items have to do with Katrina and/or women of color conferences and get-togethers. There is so much more that could be done on this topic! Family– arguably the top topic that impacts the most women in this country – and Welfare are relegated to “Other Important Issues” status. The Family area is concentrating on family medical leave with one line from 2005 and then you have to go back to 2003 to even see something on it. Welfare is hardly better with 4 lines from 2004 where they advertise disseminating information about poverty. This is pathetic. You may wonder why I even brought NOW up on a radical feminist blog because they clearly do not and should not consider themselves radical. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I consider them somewhat irrelevant. Perhaps I am wrong (and really, I would love to be), but I do not see them having any influence or impact on policy, young feminists or the national conversation on women’s issues. But I bring them up because (a) Betty Friedan’s death has given them a lot of play; and (b) they are one of the few women’s groups out there who get any kind of coverage at all. And they all but ignore issues that go straight to the heart of most women’s lives.

If you want to really take a look at why radical feminism is necessary in this country (and the world but I will confine myself to the US for now), you have only to look at mothers and poor women who are, a lot of the time, the same group. Let me back up a moment and say that I am not an essentialist. From Anne Fausto-Sterling’s work and others, we know that gender is a continuum. There are people who are born with female genitalia, male genitalia, no genitalia, and people born with both forms. Sex is simply not binary and I think this fact is slowly infiltrating the public consciousness. Similarly, hormones are not static or evenly distributed so that some women have more “male” hormones than men and vice versa. Finally, exhaustive research on sex differences has found that there are more within sex differences (e.g., more differences among women as a group than between women and men) than between sex differences. People don’t want to admit this because it would have huge ramifications for society (for one thing, if there is no longer a binary classification of gender, then who you love becomes more a matter of personality than biology). For me, what this means is that so-called gender differences are because socialization makes it so. There can be no blanket statement that “women do this because they are biologically female” – it’s way too complicated for that.

However, when reproduction is thrown into the mix, it all changes. When you’re talking about women who mother, you’re a lot of the time talking about virtual second-class citizens. Pregnant women are infantilized and frequently are not allowed to control even the way they give birth. Mothers are considered unintelligent as a group, especially if they do not work for pay. Mothers who do work for pay frequently are discriminated against either through refusal to hire them, unreasonable demands of the workplace, low-paying positions with little chance of advancement, and the inability to find or pay for adequate childcare. Unless you’re well-off financially and/or have a job with benefits, adequate healthcare is a pipe dream. If their male partners leave them, mothers often find themselves living in poverty (2/3 of the people living below the poverty line – people who are basically living on no money at all – are women and children). And heaven help you if you qualify for and accept welfare because then you are just lazy and must be subject to the demands of the unkind state. A lot of mothers suffer from physical illness and emotional distress. In fact, married women with children are the group mostly likely to be depressed. How many women in this country are mothers? Yet the feminist movement (and yes, even sometimes radical feminists) acts like they are invisible. Poor women are also nowhere to be found and women of color often are left out as well.

While I believe that theory is necessary in order to crystallize beliefs, it can only take you so far. I will admit that I am impatient but the crux of the matter for me is action. I was listening to NPR’s oral history of Nelson Mandela today and was struck by some of their comments about how battling apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s was such an uphill struggle. Indeed, they didn’t succeed in ending it until some 30 years later. It all started with a solid plan to resist and raise awareness, a charismatic leader, hard work and much sacrifice. Listening to this very moving story I thought, “Damn! The feminist movement will never succeed in our goals because we don’t have this kind of commitment or, as of now, a charismatic leader.” Part of this is because feminist leaders had little experience in being leaders, in defining issues correctly (read: abortion), in having a bold, creative vision or in working out details of a plan, any plan. The best that liberal feminists could do was to try to be like men. Radical feminists are better in a lot of ways but don’t get the publicity or the inspiration that is necessary to catch on. I’m sorry, MacKinnon is brilliant and we need many more people just like her, but she is absolutely incomprehensible to some. I can understand her points but I am impatient; I want to know the bottom line. What is it we need to do? And here is where it gets tricky. If we ever want to see a post-patriarchy or even the path toward it, we have to involve men. There is just no other way around it. Bell hooks (see, I told you I would get back to her) recognizes this and even wrote a book about it (Feminism is for Everyone, a book I have yet to read). While some women can and do separate themselves from men, the majority cannot and probably do not wish to do so even if they could. Hooks makes the point that, especially for women of color and poor women, men are their partners in life’s struggles. They do not view them as the enemy. As long as any kind of feminist movement advocates or even hints at men being the enemy, it will not succeed. For example, I have a son and cannot even imagine myself in a struggle where he is excluded. I want him with me. The same can be said of my male partner. Does this mean that I don’t want or value women-only places? No. Does it mean that I am oblivious to the impact of male privilege? No. Does it mean that I don’t want to challenge men to refuse male privilege? No. But if you turn this issue on its head, I don’t want my racial, class and sexual privilege to prevent me from struggling with others. I want people to help me change, so I, in turn, must try to help others. I think the bottom line is that feminists must figure out a way to include men in our struggle or nothing will ever change. And yes, I do believe that men are hurt by patriarchy, not as much as women, but it definitely hurts them. If we focus on a different distribution and enacting of power (as hooks suggests), then I think we really have something. So, the question then becomes: how do we do this? What is our first step?

The loss of Betty Freidan

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 22:59:41 GMT

This has been a heavy week as we have embraced the loss of two pioneering women: Corretta Scott King and Betty Friedan. I'm supplying supporting information on her.

Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.

Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.

Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.

The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.

"That book changed women's lives," Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, which Friedan co-founded, said Saturday. "It opened women's minds to the idea that there actually might be something more. And for the women who secretly harbored such unpopular thoughts, it told them that there were other women out there like them who thought there might be something more to life."

In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.

As the first president of NOW in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.

But at the same time, Friedan insisted that the women's movement had to remain in the American mainstream, that men had to be accepted as allies and that the family should not be rejected.

"Don't get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics-of-orgasm school," Friedan told a college audience in 1970.

To more radical and lesbian feminists, Friedan was "hopelessly bourgeois," Susan Brownmiller wrote at the time.

Friedan, deeply opposed to "equating feminism with lesbianism," conceded later that she had been "very square" and uncomfortable about homosexuality.

"I wrote a whole book objecting to the definition of women only in sexual relation to men. I would not exchange that for a definition of women only in sexual relation to women," she said.

Nonetheless she was a seconder for a resolution on protecting lesbian rights at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977.

"For a great many women, choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice," she told an interviewer two decades later. But she added that this should not be a reason for conflict with "other feminists who are maybe more austere, or choose to seek their partners among other women."

By then in her 70s, Friedan had moved on to the issue of how society views and treats its elderly.

She said that while researching her last book, "The Fountain of Age," published in 1993, she found those who dealt with old people "talk about the aged with the same patronizing, `compassionate' denial of their personhood that was heard when the experts talked about women 20 years ago."

She had not stopped being a feminist, she said, "but women as a special separate interest group are not my concern any more."

Friedan, born February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, was a high achieving Jewish outsider growing up in middle America. Her father, Harry Goldstein, owned a jewelry store; her mother, Miriam, quit a job as a newspaper women's page editor to become a housewife.

As a girl, Friedan watched her mother "cut down my father because she had no place to channel her terrific energies, a typical female disorder that I call impotent rage," she said.

From high school valedictorian in 1938 to summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1942, "I was that girl with all A's and I wanted boys worse than anything," she said.

She won a fellowship in psychology to the University of California, Berkeley, but turned down a bigger fellowship there so as not to outdo a boyfriend.

The romance broke up anyway and Friedan moved to Greenwich Village in New York and became a labor reporter.

She lost one job to a returning World War II veteran but found another before marrying Carl Friedan, a summer-stock producer and later an advertising executive, in 1947. The marriage, which produced three children, ended in divorce 22 years later.

Friedan got a maternity leave to have her first child in 1949, but was fired and replaced by a man when she asked for another leave to have the second child five years later.

The family had moved to a big Victorian house in the suburban Rockland County village of Grandview-on-the-Hudson, New York, where Friedan cranked out freelance magazine articles while bringing up her brood.

Hoping to get a magazine piece out of a Smith College 15-year reunion, Friedan prepared an in-depth survey of her classmates.

What she found was that these well-educated women of the class of 1942, now largely suburban housewives, were asking, in effect, "Is this all?"

Friedan couldn't get the article published in a magazine, but five years of more research and writing turned it into "The Feminine Mystique."

If some women read it as a call to arms, others were outraged, Friedan recalled. Dinner invitations stopped; she was out of the school car pool.

But the first printing of 3,000 eventually grew to 600,000 copies hardcover and more than 2 million in paperback. The book was listed at No. 37 on a 1999 New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.

In 1964, the family moved back to Manhattan in 1964 and Friedan began working to have the federal government enforce the Civil Rights Act as it applied to sex and not only to race, religion and national origin.

Founding NOW was a response to federal inaction. The finale of Friedan's presidency was the national women's strike of August 1970, which brought women out across the country on the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage.

She also was a founder in 1968 of the National Conference for Repeal of Abortion Laws, which became the National Abortion Rights Action League, and of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.

During the following decade she taught and lectured, and her 1981 book, "The Second Stage," was seen by many as a public break with the feminist leadership that had succeeded her. She said they had pursued "sexual politics that distorted the sense of priorities of the women's movement during the 1970s," and had opened the way for conservatives and reactionaries to occupy the center on family issues.

In "The Second Stage," Friedan also appeared to accept criticism from some women that "The Feminine Mystique" was too dismissive of domestic life. "Our failure was our blind spot about the family," she wrote.

Friedan taught on both coasts, at New York University and the University of Southern California, lecturing widely and traveling to women's conferences around the globe.

She helped persuade the Democratic Party to give women half the delegate strength at its nominating convention and was herself a delegate when Geraldine Ferraro was nominated for vice president in 1984.

She lived in New York City and Washington, D.C., and had a summer house in Sag Harbor, New York.

Survivors include her sons, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, New Jersey, and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia, and daughter Emily Friedan of Buffalo, New York; nine grandchildren; a sister, Amy Adams of New York; and a brother, Harry Goldstein of Palm Springs, California.

Carl Friedan died in December, according to Bazelon.

She said the funeral will be Monday at Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York.

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 02:02:09 GMT

January 20, 2006

BALTIMORE - A Maryland circuit court ruled today that it is a violation of the state constitution to deny same-sex couples the numerous protections provided to married couples. The American Civil Liberties Union and Equality Maryland hail the decision as an historic step toward the ability of same-sex couples to legally marry in the state.

”This is such an exciting moment,” said Lisa Polyak, who with her partner, Gita Deane, is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed by the ACLU. “Our participation in this lawsuit has always been about family protections for our children. Tonight, we will rest a little easier knowing that those protections are within reach.”

In a way, this is the most wonderful thing. But there is a flip side that LGB has overlooked which is the larger picture for heterosexual women.

Marriage as an institution is seen by many feminists as the basic social unit of patriarchy. Many Radical Feminists seeking to address fundamental ills of society for all women see the basic structures in marriage as needing to be abolished. Where LGB desires to have the privileges and protections afforded by marriage available to LGB relationships, it has never addressed the assimilationist aspect of this desire. People who do not want to marry are denied the privileges of those who have it etc.

Where this is a wonderful victory for LGB, it's still an assimilationist move and one that will remove a good portion of poltical dissenters. When heteronormativity becomes the standard, it's only some of the standards of heteronormativity that are challenged and fundamental ills of society which oppress women, remain unaddressed.

Where I am really glad to see this happen, it's also a loss as far as addressing those deeper more fundamental ills. I totally agree with Marilyn French, that assimilation IS DEATH. Prior to the abandonment of this vision our community was cohesive and strong (although a limitation was that it was awfully white). In many places in this countr we have been assimilated and as a result we are no longer as united and cohesive and that one factor really hurts us as much or more than any other factor.

This is one step in fighting heteronormativity and I was sure that Maryland was going to do this, it's that kind of state. It's going to be interesting to see what happens now.

Heteronormativity is smotheringly oppressive but I rather agree with Rita Mae Brown "Until every woman is free - no woman is free", and those are my larger and greater concerns.

Time

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:08:18 GMT

This is a private thread and everyone is invited to participate.

Time. I've been thinking about time. High School had a woman valedictorian who spoke of our values in 1965. She observed, "It's easy to have our values now, but the real challenge will be to have them ten, twenty and thirty years out. I just realized that this is the fortieth year. Perhaps she never counted on us being in our fifties. I didn't and I think that's what i wanted to write about.

I believed all the things that we learned in the seventies and they were good things, solid things and then the world changed. It wasn't as if I didn't notice because I did. Clearly it was in 1980 as I saw a man with short hair. Instantly I recognized what I was seeing, he was a harbinger of things to come. Somehow, I knew and I sensed it. That was at the same time Reagan was elected. Then we lost the Era. What a staggering setupback that was. I was heterosexual then and living with a nicce enough man. That was a problem for me, he was incredibly straight and apple pie and he said things I've heard people articulate, "I like to live on the surace. That way, I don't have to look at things." He was partnered with, one of the most skeptical women in the world. I swore men off. It was only a few weeks later that that I encountered a woman who was new at work. We went out for the obligatory dinner and it lasted for fours months. What a surprise! She left town and I then partnered with a woman for eight years and we co-mommed her daughter. We joined NOW which wasn't a great fit. That Now chapter was almost more oppressive than patriarchy. They conducted no business on the floor. We went there are heard talks and marched in abortion lines.

The eighties grew worse. Business became central in this county where it had been people quiet friend in the past and there was "me-ism". Me-ism has become par for the course now nd is another word for individualism which is another word for "dissolution of community" Yes, there was a magic moment in 84 when Ferraro was nominated. We had our first woman Vice Presidentail candidate, who was immediately eaten alive by the press amidst nightly editions of Rush Limbaugh which seemed to be a mix of the horrid and the horridly surreal. Not much seemed to happen in the late eighties.

The nineties were or a while. We had Clinton but then there was Newt Gingrich who seems to be Rush's clone to me.

In the seventies I went to work for the second largest computer company in the world. It made a bad decision in the seventies, it decided that PCs would never fly. Oh well. With a company that large these errors don't manifest themselves for a decade or more. The animal does a long slow horrid death where people are put under pressure and either leave or fall apart. I left to go back to school the company was sold shortly afterwards. In the seventies and eighties, I could have never have anticipated the demise of this company. None of us could.

This company was fairly egalitarian. I was hired by a woman manager. I worked for women manager's for years. And this company advanced women too. I ended up working for my secretary which really didnt work out. She wanted software people to dresss well. There was a lesbian there and she was aspiing to management. I was so sorry to see her showing up to work in dresses because I knew how much she hated them. There was a complicated case of harrassment. A high level black male mananger was accused of harassing a woman and he was fired. On an away trip a male VP called all the women together and told us the company had zero tolerance for harassment. I was curious, ncause I knew this manager was not popular so I sat down with my boss and asked her if his numbers were good, would he have been fired? "No", the answer came quickly. But overall, compared to other companies it was enlightened as far as women were concerned. On that away trip, married women articulated that they they didn't like leaving home overnight because of childcare. The company never had another overnighter after that. The was in 1984 when Ferrao was Nominated.

Somehow, I'm fumbling for a way to say that I had never dreamed of the social conditions that exist today. Hmmmm. There needs to be a Part II to this. :)

What is Radical Feminism, Any?

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 18:39:54 GMT

What is “Radical”, anyway?

Normally, my impulse would be to begin talking about Radical Feminisms herstory and to draw upon papers written by the original thinking women. Perhaps it’s not wanted but it is needed and it’s going to have to wait.

When people ask me about my politics I respond by saying, “I’m a Radical feminist.”

“What does that mean?”, they ask almost apprehensively. So then I respond….. “I don’t blow up buildings or advocate that”, and there is a palpable, sigh. I must be harmless. But no, I’m not harmless because I’m Radical. But what does that mean? It means so many things that they all won’t fit here and that’s clear . There are some things that are endemic for Radical Feminists.

• It is Woman-Centered and emphasizes bonding between women.

• Non-violence is a guiding way. We engage peacefully.

• We look toward social revolution, a revolution towards a society that will affirm and empower women AS women and a society in which women have full access to it’s rewards.

• We reject paradigms of power over and that’s why radical feminism speaks of revolution. This government is based in power-over and a reformed power-over system stills relies upon power-over to get it's business.

• Radical Feminism sees that people are classed in one of two classes and one of those classes as a whole is valued much more highly than the others. It is the goal of radical feminism to dissolve that classing.

• It is certainly recognized that there are other oppressions. Radical feminism see gendered oppression as being the chronically primary oppression, that is to say that women were the first political party as an oppressed minority. It is clear that societies have organized around the oppression of as a subordinated class.

• Part of the radical feminist analysis is the rejection of essentialism, the idea that there are presocially-determined differences between the classes in either mind, ability or proclivity.

• These classes are arbitrary and significances and differences seen between these gendered classes are epistemological as constructed by power. Gender is a power structure.

• How did all of this come about? How did men end up on top? I like the post-structuralist feminist answer to this question. First there was agriculture and next there was horticulture. For a while a man had to work continuously because production efficiency was low but then production efficiencies grew and men invented capitalism as a way of profiting. The led to leisure for men but women had been relegated to the home the private sector. Over time, two languages emerged, the language of the private sector and the language of the public sector. Those who spoke the language of the public sector came to have more value.

This is a personal note and I may or may not be speaking to the center of radical feminism. The above item suggests to me that part of what we’ve learned from patriarchy is that post-patriarchy should not have an analogue to capitalism. It is my view that capitalism is a set of socially male and male-defined solutions which is oppressive in nature and at best capitalism is a form of Social Darwinism.

• Men: I think it’s important to be clear how radical feminism sees men. We see that we are members of a subordinated class and that men gain and profit from that subordination.

• It is also clear to Radical Feminists that there is a default male standard in place where the standard for what is desirable has been determined by men and for their benefit. There is a standard business resume it describes a man’s career mode and his way of defining himself.

• It doesn’t go without saying, in fact it must be said that radical feminists demand sovereignty over our own bodies. We recognize that men still don’t participate in child-care so to large extent child-care positioned as “women’s work” because men have the privilege of not participating in it. We seek compensation and support for that work as well as inducing men to participate.

When I look at what radical feminism is, it’s not this big horrible thing which is made to be. Instead it is a politic that works toward the dignity of women and our access to the full rewards of society. Notice, that I did not say "equality", because something cannot be equal to something else in the absense of a standard for it to be equal to. Equality, is yet another large topic in radical feminism.

• We recognize that we live in a rape culture which is a puzzle piece of male dominance.

• We recognize that violence against women must stop. We recognize that violence is employed as a solution by men to various problems they perceive. It is a radical feminist position that violence in never a solution be it against a person, persons or a country.

• Within radical feminisn there are concerns on all levels for the well being of the mother earth and we work toward her nurturance.

Also I’m very aware that everything I’ve said has a huge amount behind each item and that they are topics in themselves. I hope this is the first of many.

Welcome to this Community.

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 02:05:26 GMT

Welcome to Voices of Radical Feminism.

The purpose of this community is to give voice to Radical Feminists and to provide a space for contemporary radical feminist writing. We notice that many sources speak of radical feminism with their impressions, where Radical Feminism is often misrepresented. It is our intention to foster and empower radical feminists. Voices of Radical Feminism is a Woman-Only, membership-based community with three simple guidelines.

Where a diversity of views is welcomed, members voice their positions in ways that respect other members.

What's public is public and what private within the community is private.

There is zero tolerance for misogynism.