Feminism

Ellen T

Ellen T — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:07:30 -0400

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Flippants

James Clarke — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:52:59 -0400

According to The New York Times, a recent Republican fund raising reception managed to suck more than a million dollars out of the hands of hundreds of Hillary Clinton’s fair-weather supporters, some of whom traitorously contributed more than twenty five thousand dollars of their blood money to John McCain.

This disgusting display of misplaced activism is evident that there continues to be a serious problem with self-professed Hillary Clinton “supporters” naively backstabbing her and her feminist values in order to support Sarah Palin.

In flocking to Sarah Palin, they seem unable to imagine what rights women would have achieved had the womens’ suffrage movement had been led by a beauty pageant contestant instead of Susan B. Anthony.

They also seem unable to see see how this same standard applies to modern feminism. They are convinced that a woman whom John McCain chose as his running mate solely for her beauty is more qualified to carry the Feminist Torch than women who have dedicated their entire lives to advancing women’s rights.

Many of these women chose to betray Hillary Clinton because Barack Obama, the candidate she has endorsed and who most closely supports her legacy, defeated her in the Democratic Primary race.

In a spiteful and naive attempt to hurt Barack Obama, these women are putting their energy and resources behind a candidate with a legacy of regressing, not advancing, womens’ rights.

If women take offense to their gender being the butt of jokes, then I am saddened that the profound irony of their stupidity is lost on these women.

Carolyn Jackson

Yourstruly — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:06:19 -0400

Matt Leger

Matt Leger — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:18:11 -0400

Born in Lafayette, LA in May 1963, 2nd of three brothers. Parents divorced circa age 6, both remarried; mother died in 1995 of cancer at 56. Raised Roman Catholic, currently agnostic and non-practicing. Registered Democratic Party member since 1988. Lifelong liberal and feminist. BFA in graphic design from LSU in 1985. Worked as designer or production artist in five major metropolitan areas (New Orleans, Washington, New York, Philadelphia and currently Atlanta) for over two decades. Son and brother of two union firefighters (Lafayette Consolidated Govt. Fire Dept., IAFF Local 619) and member of Specialties & Paper Products Union (Local 527-S, AFL/CIO, Atlanta).

Charles Knight

Charles Knight — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:49:22 -0400

Charles Knight is co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives. He also serves as the President of the Commonwealth Institute which he helped found in 1987. In 1989 he founded the Ground Force Alternatives Project at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, where he was a Research Fellow. As a follow-on to that project, in 1991 he co-founded the Project on Defense Alternatives.

Mr Knight also serves on the board of directors of the Conservation Services Group, an energy conservation services company with over a hundred employees.

In his work at the Project on Defense Alternatives he has authored seventeen publications and co-authored another thirty. These have been published by the Commonwealth Institute and have also appeared in such publications as Defense News, American Sentinel, Boston Review, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Social Policy, Boston Globe, International Security, and Dissent.

Mr Knight also edits the Defense Strategy Review Webpage. He has made numerous presentations on peace and security issues at governmental and non-governmental institutions, and during the 1994-1996 period had the honor to consult on stability-oriented security options for southern Africa with the African National Congress and South African Ministry of Defense.

Formerly Mr Knight was a fellow at the Institute for Peace and International Security in Cambridge, Massachusetts; publisher of Working Papers magazine; administrator of the Pequod Counseling Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a research associate at the Cambridge Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

HELLO TO ALL THIS: A Feminist Response to Robin Morgan

Robert McElvaine — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:05:20 -0500

I have long been proud to call myself a feminist. Robin Morgan is among my heroes. Her justly famous 1970 essay “Goodbye to All That” is a wonderful, powerful statement that I have quoted in my writings and use in classes. At the beginning of February, Ms. Morgan wrote a new piece titled “Goodbye to All That (#2)." This article, which has been widely circulated via email, is an attempt to convince feminists that they must support Hillary Clinton.

Not content to offer positive reasons for supporting Hillary Clinton, Ms. Morgan attacks Barack Obama. Beginning a piece by referring to Obama by the initials “BO” is, it seems to me, not the best way to win friends and influence people.

Let me stipulate that it is clearly the case that sexism is much deeper and much more entrenched than racism. Indeed, sexism is the model upon which racism and all other forms of domination/subordination are based. That is the essence of the argument I make in my book Eve’s Seed and one that I continue in my forthcoming book, Grand Theft Jesus. It is also certainly true, as Ms. Morgan says, that more women than men are enslaved today and that women in general have, over the course of history, suffered even more than racial minorities. In principle, then, I would prefer the more radical step of electing a woman as United States president to that of electing an African American.

But I would hope that this principle doesn’t mean, as Morgan comes very close to saying, that we, as feminists, should vote for ANY woman and that any woman is preferable to any man. She does note that it was not proper to support Elizabeth Dole’s presidential aspirations and by implication she also indicates that she would not favor electing someone like Margaret Thatcher. But what, after all, does her clever closing line—“I'm voting for Hillary not because she's a woman—but because I am”—mean?

It is also true that in many quarters sexist comments continue to be more acceptable than racist comments. Morgan, however, manipulates that fact by hiding in the passive voice to say, “When a sexist idiot screamed ‘Iron my shirt!’ at HRC, it was considered amusing.” By whom? Certainly not by me. And I heard a good deal of outrage expressed by television commentators about the idiot’s outburst.

Other examples of disgusting misogyny that Morgan cites are just that. But does the fact that idiots say horrible things about Hillary and that those horrible things are usually in fact anti-woman, not just anti-Clinton, mean that we must vote for her regardless of the situation or who the other candidate is?

For anyone to call Hillary-supporting black feminists “race traitors” is despicable. But isn’t Morgan coming close to calling feminists who support Obama “sex traitors”?

And then, in the midst of some comments that are largely justified, Morgan essentially equates Barack Obama with George W. Bush! Linking him with W is a far greater insult than referring to him as BO. “Goodbye,” she writes, “to the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.” Need we remind her that the destruction was brought on not simply by the cocky, arrogant president who bellowed, “Bring it on!” but by precisely the most experienced and supposedly knowledgeable people—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et. al.—and that, between the two finalists for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, it was the inexperienced one who opposed that path into destruction while the experienced one was giving that same George W. Bush the authority to proceed on the path to destruction?

The question we ought to be debating is who is the better person for the job. In order to do so, we need to say goodbye to several of the tactics Morgan employs in her new essay:

Goodbye to using “Duh” as sufficient means of concluding one’s case [“She’s better qualified. (D'uh.)”].

Goodbye to arguing, in so many words, that your candidate is astute and then degrading the candidate you oppose because he is astute.

Goodbye to guilt by association (some of the Kennedys and Ted Sorensen).

Goodbye to guilt without association (Roger Stone, Carl Bernstein, John McCain, South Park writers, misogynist pigs with OJ tee shirts, etc.) None of that is connected with Barack Obama or those who support him.

Goodbye to such ageist arguments (while condemning ageism of the opposite sort) as saying that the “vision and spirit” of someone in his mid-40s need to be “seasoned by practical know-how” before he should try to change the world. Does Ms. Morgan forget how effectively she and others were working at changing the world when they were in their 20s? Is it not usually the case that one’s vision and spirit are clouded and beaten down by years of “seasoning” in Washington? When did “Don’t trust anyone over 30” become “Don’t trust anyone under 50”? What has become of the wonderful young radical Robin Morgan used to be?

Goodbye to feminists stooping to the divide and deride tactics that have been used against us and against women in general for millennia.

Hello to all this: Feminists being free to support whichever candidate they believe is best for the nation and the world at a given time. We can debate who that candidate is without belittling each other or either candidate, both of whom have significant strengths for progressives and feminists.

{Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters and Professor of History at Millsaps College. His latest book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, will be published by Crown in March.}

Robert McElvaine

Robert McElvaine — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:51:20 -0500

Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters and Chair of the Department of History at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he has taught for more than thirty years. He is the author of seven books and the editor of three: Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man" (North Carolina, 1983, 25th anniversary edition, 2008); The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Times Books, 1984, 1993; 25th anniversary edition: Three Rivers, forthcoming, 2009)); The End of the Conservative Era: Liberalism After Reagan (Arbor House, 1987); Mario Cuomo: A Biography (Scribners, 1988); What's Left?: A New Democratic Vision for America (Adams, 1996); The Great Depression: A History in Documents, (Oxford University Press, 2000); Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (McGraw-Hill, 2001, paper, 2002), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (CQ Press, 2002), editor-in-chief of the two-volume Encyclopedia of the Great Depression (Macmillan Reference, 2004) and Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown, 2008). His essay, “One Depression, Two Remedies,” serves as the introduction to the chapter on the 1930s in Life: Our Century in Pictures (Little-Brown, 1999). His two early books on the Depression era have become standards in the field, acclaimed by historians and general readers alike. Two of his books have been named among the “Notable Books of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review, and three have been listed as Editor’s Choice “Bear in Mind” books in that publication.

McElvaine's articles and opinion pieces appear frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Boston Globe, and Newsweek. More than 100 of his articles have been published, some 60 of them in major national publications. He has been a guest on approximately 60 television and radio programs, including NBC's Today, ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, NBC Nightly News, National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, and BBC television and radio.

Professor McElvaine has served as historical consultant for several television programs, including the seven-episode PBS series The Great Depression. He has received many awards for his teaching, including a silver medal in the national Professor of the Year program of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and being named Millsaps College’s Distinguished Professor in 2001. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching named him the State Professor of the Year for Mississippi in 2002. He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in New Zealand in 2007.

McElvaine spent more than a decade developing a new expertise in several fields, including anthropology, human evolution, ancient history, and women's history, in order to put himself in a position to offer a reinterpretation of the significance of sex in the unfolding of human history. He has lectured to enthusiastic audiences around the United States and in Russia, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, South Africa, and Papua New Guinea on his ideas about the central influence on human history of various misconceptions and metaphors about sex that form the basis of Eve’s Seed. The book has received glowing comments from both general readers and academics, including a starred review in Publishers’ Weekly. Joyce Appleby’s review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review begins: "Eve's Seed is a bestseller waiting to be discovered: a package of sex, science and species' vanity nicely wrapped in sparkling prose.” His ideas were also featured in an article in the Arts & Ideas section of the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times Book Review named Eve’s Seed one of the “Best Books of 2001.” A Chinese edition of the book was published in 2004.

McElvaine’s latest book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, a passionate rejoinder to the purveyors of what he calls “ChristianityLite,” is being published by Crown in March 2008. He is currently completing a book on America in the 1960s, Oh Freedom!, which is under contract with Norton, and a novel.

Margie Bernard

Margie Bernard — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:31:22 -0500

See my blog: http://margiesnotes.blogspot.com/