Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

I recently readthis interesting article on American teaching, which touches on its genderedness among other things. at center is the following conception of the teacher:

Indeed, the biggest insult to the intelligence of American teachers is the idea that their intelligence doesn’t matter. “The teaching of A, B, C, and the multiplication table has no quality of sacredness in it,” Horace Mann said in 1839. Instead of focusing on students’ mental skills, Mann urged, teachers should promote “good-will towards men” and “reverence to God.” Teachers need to be good, more than they need to be smart; their job is to nurture souls, not minds. So Garret Keizer’s first supervisor worried that he might have too many grades of A on his college transcript to succeed as a high school teacher, and Elizabeth Green concludes her otherwise skeptical book with the much-heard platitude that teachers need to “love” their students.

I wonder if American perceptions of woman faculty at American universities is shaped in reaction to American students' experiences with primary & secondary ed teachers who model that conception: shaped by a sense that there must be some reason there are a lot of men teaching at the university level but not at the primary & secondary levels, and that whatever that reason is, it entails that women university teachers are worse than men. if so, then as with many problems with American university learning, the source of the problem is in American attitudes toward primary & secondary ed.

Also American attitudes toward gender and gender roles.

good, that's one of the roots of American attitudes toward (esp) primary ed

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/44-prostitute-laundry/

10 min podcast about two women who write via tinyletter

Charlotte Shane is pretty cool in general.

http://savedbythe-bellhooks.tumblr.com

so that's what a podcast sounds like

i'd put this in the right-wingery thread, but nobody reads it

http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/a-cause-lost-and-forgotten/

conservative writer considers the forgotten female anti-suffragists (while rerehearsing a bunch of their arguments, and airing out some dirty suffragette laundry [like the one who became a fascist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norah_Elam seriously the 20th cent was so fucked up]). she's right about one thing: i'd never heard of any of these people.

really tho it's an explicit warning to the anti-gay-marriage crowd (see the closing). it's a weird phenomenon now to hear your NOM types speak in full knowledge they are destined for oblivion.

That essay was gross.

However, you will never be able to see these women clearly if you insist, anachronistically, on seeing suffrage as a fundamental human right. ... No one was having their humanity denied—not £7 householders in 1866, not women in 1914. If you do not understand that, you will never understand women like Mary Ward.

A loss I can live with.

And wow it only gets more gross from there.

amen

We so rarely hear from those who really choose to be childless, and there are few essays from women who don’t regret having had an abortion, who wouldn’t have been “ready” at a later age, who had the money for IVF and childcare but who chose not to go there. The mainstream conversation is colored by if-arguments, eerily reminiscent of the 1950s, when women without children were pitied (and, possibly, pitied themselves). If I had found the right partner… If I had had enough money… If my childhood hadn’t been so bad… Whatever the reasons, they all suggest that something went wrong.

I don’t have any if-arguments (which doesn’t mean that things don’t go wrong in my life). I simply never wanted to have children. Not when I was 20, not when I was 30 and not today.

I didn't read the whole thing but this part sums up my feelings so well that i just wanted to put it somewhere http://blog.longreads.com/2015/04/02/the-answer-is-never/

yep.

good piece!

i should really read more simone de beauvoir. what a writer.

she is my very favorite of the old school anarchists, especially search her pieces in the Mother Earth anthology called "Anarchy!"

https://libcom.org/history/anarchy-anthology-emma-goldmans-mother-earth

argh so sorry I thought you meant Voltairine De Cleyre

I also need to read more SDB

i am looking at facebook's live feed of people sharing the report on the rolling stone's retracted campus rape story, and it's incredibly disheartening

the report itself, the article, the things people say about it ("why does no one talk about the war on men on our nation's campuses" oh god)

the retraction article is pretty excellent i think? i mean what people are going to say about it is still gonna be terrible but as far as case studies in how journalism goes wrong it seems like it really is something people can read and learn from.

idk im at the bit where the authors claim erdedy should have shared all the details of her investigation with phi kappa psi because she had no reason to believe they would not have acted in good faith and ... really?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/books/review/selfish-shallow-and-self-absorbed-sixteen-writers-on-the-decision-not-to-have-kids.html?smid=tw-share

" a morass of resentment, insecurity, longing and disappointment for those who don’t find the right man in time to mate (the terms “childless by circumstance” and “social infertility” have been coined to describe this group); an ungovernable tangle of anxiety, confusion and exhaustion for those who combat infertility issues with costly and invasive assisted reproductive technologies; and a pervasive fog of self-recrimination and angst for those who simply don’t know what they want. "

skim-reading this I initially mistook it for a description of those who do have kids; obv I am projecting a hell of a lot bc I read blogs about how parents find themselves feeling 'not cut out for this'

i got an email from statewide library org with this:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y153/struggin/l1.jpg

immediately started writing a response to the guy who sent it, a reference librarian for the LDS church btw, pointing out that it was sexist ageist and disrespectful etc. then revised to say how it "could" be read the wrong way. now i feel like there's probably nothing worthwhile about pointing out possible negative interpretations in a dumb email instigated because i was offended by some typically tone-deaf thing sent from someone who works for the stupid church i hate so fn much. two hours gone. blechhhhhhhhhh. is it even objectionable in any way? i can't trust myself tbh.

it seems objectionable to me; my sister is a librarian... think I'll share with her.

thanks. this is what i'm considering sending in response but i'll have to sleep on it.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about this presentation. I just wanted to let you know that the promotional image in your email could be interpreted in an unfortunate way: the words could be read as a comment on the women in the photograph, not just the card catalog. I am sure that is not what you intended. I just wanted to pass this information along to you in the hope that you’ll consider it as you plan announcements in the future.

my thirtysomething librarian sister just wrote back "yeah, this is tone deaf" so there you go

Maybe if it were indicated that it's the librarians in the photo speaking, sharing the sentiment that they want/need better resources too? Could be like Married to the Sea speech bubbles or something.

agreed; the "we" doesn't read as the librarians, they read as "old resources"

yes. i asked a colleague and she also said it could have been intended that the pictured librarians are "tired of the same old resources". i think tone-deaf is the accurate read then.

i'm going to rewrite this imagining myself as a friend pointing out someone's innocent faux pas.

^did that as briefly as i could, he responded that it hadn't even crossed his mind, thanked me, nbd.

I feel like I've seen dozens of things like that in the library world--especially because young digital folks are always finding lol old photos whiles scanning images

yeah i feel like it's been a pretty common angle on the "web" in library world ... for 20 years. he's asking for new web resources but afaict the best "new" content out there is digitized old stuff. using the "old is tired" angle prob. not the best way to reach the special collections / archives people.

http://tableflip.club/

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/14/study-suggests-stem-faculty-hiring-favors-women-over-men

has this been posted?
http://www.laweekly.com/news/how-hollywood-keeps-out-women-5525034

She was struck by how Johnston "would just happen to be at lunch with one of the guys that was hanging out with guys, and [they] would all get to know one another and all of a sudden they're making Cedar Rapids" — a movie written by a man, edited by a man, directed by a man and produced by five men, including The Descendants director Alexander Payne.

While not criticizing the industry's propensity for male bonding, Lee said that for women, "It's much tougher to fall into those casual relationships that lead to something."
…
"People hate risking anything, and they think it's doing something wild and crazy to hire a woman," says one female director. She asked to remain anonymous, saying that if she were identified by name, "I have a feeling that all the companies that I've been dealing with will be really evil to me."

'Where's My Cut?': On Unpaid Emotional Labor

look at this bullshit

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opinion/sunday/you-go-guy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

"opinion"

But emotional labor? Offering advice, listening to woes, dispensing care and attention? That’s not supposed to be transactional. People are disturbed by the very notion that someone would charge, or pay, for friendly support.

wait, what? this is why a lot of people pay therapists.

Yeah I don't get that opinion at all.

that's just one line, the rest of the thing makes a lot of sense
(although i can't say i love the hashtag)

not sure where to post it but i thought this article on spinsters was great

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/on-spinsters

These many magnificent spinsters and their unnamed sisters expand the range of femininity far beyond the familiar territory of the cute, cool, or easily commodified, and ignoring or shunning almost all of this classic spinster pantheon — as Bolick does — has political consequences. Above all, it domesticates the threat that the spinster poses to normative systems of love, sex, and power. There is a reason the word “spinster” has long been a queer-tinged insult with a straight-slicing edge — a reason why Katharine Hepburn, one of cinema’s great spinsters (Summertime! Desk Set! The African Queen!), was devastated in The Philadelphia Story when her ex-husband called her a “married maiden” and her estranged father called her a “perennial spinster.” Historically, spinsterhood has meant a kind of radical unavailability to straight men, implying either rejection of them or rejection by them or both.

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/happens-talk-salaries-google/

4 days ago
6
@EricaJoy's salary transparency experiment at Google

But emotional labor? Offering advice, listening to woes, dispensing care and attention? That’s not supposed to be transactional. People are disturbed by the very notion that someone would charge, or pay, for friendly support.

In context she's offering up that viewpoint as being RONG, if u read it.

lol

@ no one reading that but still having opinions on it

I love Herland, but my own favorite spinster manifesto (which doesn’t appear in Spinster) was written almost half a century earlier, in 1869. It’s a chapter in Louisa May Alcott’s misleadingly titled An Old-Fashioned Girl, a novel about being a youngish woman in Boston (which Bolick once was, but there the resemblance ends). Polly is an unmarried music teacher struggling with loneliness and depression; her friend Fan is an unmarried lady of leisure also struggling with loneliness and depression. When Polly suddenly becomes happier, Fan assumes her good mood must be because she’s falling in love with a man, but Polly corrects her: “No; friendship and good works.” Polly takes Fan to see her new spinster friends, whom she describes as “lively, odd, and pleasant,” and the young women share an improvised indoor picnic (“it’s so much jollier to eat in sisterhood”) and a riotous feminist discussion at the home of Becky and Bess, both artists, who are partners in a Boston marriage. As Polly explains, Becky and Bess

...live together, and take care of one another in true Damon and Pythias style. This studio is their home,— they work, eat, sleep, and live here, going halves in everything. They are all alone in the world, but as happy and independent as birds; real friends, whom nothing will part.

I love LOVE that book and that exact passage!!! Oh bless, bless her.