Two women are being considered for Larry Summers’ old job at Harvard.
Domestic Violence Drops
The rate of domestic violence dropped, in half, between 1993 and 2004. Everything you’d expect is still true, however: women who own homes are less likely to be beaten than those with low annual incomes; black women are more likely than white women to be beaten, and domestic violence against men is dropping faster than violence against women.
Analysts speculate that the lower rate of intimate violence may be linked to better police training and more funding for prosecution as a result of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act or the declining violent crime rate in general (it reached its lowest recorded level in 2005).
From the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
& She’s Not Alone
In addition to Nancy Pelosi breaking “the marble ceiling” for women in US government, there are a few other women who were recently elected to history-making positions:
- May Eljeribi was elected in late December to lead Tunisia’s Progressive Democratic Party, the principal opposition party in the North African country. She is the first woman party leader in Tunisia.
- In Iran, Mehrnoush Najafi, a lawyer, women’s rights activist, and blogger, recently won a seat in the Hamedan City Council Elections.
- Finally, in the United Arab Emirates, one woman was elected to office in the country’s first ever national election. Amal Abdullah al-Kubaissi, an architect, was elected to serve on the Federal National Council.
Cool Editor
My fantastic editor, Brooke Warner, just posted a short piece about feminist anthologies – and on young women and feminism in general – over at Feministing.
UNICEF Reports: Equal Women Raise Better Children
Okay, that’s not exactly what they reported, but to my mind, it pretty much is:
“Gender equality and the well-being of children are inextricably linked,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “When women are empowered to lead full and productive lives, children and families prosper.”
For some people I guess the idea that women need to be equals and to make important decisions about family resources still needs to be made, and for them, UNICEF has created a report that delineates exactly how and why:
The State of the World’s Children 2007 report finds that equality of women produces a “double dividend,” allowing empowered and healthy women to have empowered and healthy children, according to the report (PDF).
I think I can safely add that the opposite is also true: people who prefer women not to be equal are not “pro child.” Somewhere in here I think I can also conclude: feminists are actually the real “family values” set!
Your Cyber-Signature Needed
Sign a petition to get New York State to add the ERA to the state constitution.
7th Preview of She’s Not the Man I Married
Excerpt from the last chapter, Chapter 7 – Love Is a Many Gendered Thing:
Too often, I’ve tried to predict the future. I’ve tried to understand “transsexualism†as if it were a monolithic thing, but it’s very subjective, and it’s described by good writers who happen to be transsexual in very different ways. Jenny Boylan calls it “a knife woundâ€; Dallas Denny describes it as a pebble in her shoe.[19] Another friend once remarked glibly that for her it was just like wearing the wrong shoes, so she got new ones. So which is it? I can’t figure out how all of these can be true, or which is most accurate in describing Betty’s feelings about her own transness. Clearly, different people experience transness differently and the same person may experience it in different ways at different times in his or her life. The standard notion of a “man trapped in a woman’s body/woman trapped in a man’s body†strikes me as the most simplistic explanation ever. That shorthand might be useful for people who need to know only a little, just in case their good manners fail them and they decide to treat a trans person they work with like a nonentity. People who don’t have a personal relationship with someone trans don’t need to know much more than “you knew her as Laura, and now you can call him Larry†and move on. But people have all sorts of moral indignations and crazy beliefs that what they think about something gives them the right to treat other people like crap. But in a world where it seems more important to self-righteous types that foster children go without homes than to let gay people rear them, I really shouldn’t be that surprised.
Still, people do think they need to know what causes transsexualism—what it is, whether there’s a genetic determination or a hormonal one, whether trans people are just messed up. I’ve always been partial to Dr. Harry Benjamin’s[20] take on it; he didn’t know the cause, but he figured out that the brain and the body didn’t always match, even if he didn’t know why. Looking a little into the way trans people had already been treated by previous psychiatrists, he realized that the only way to ease their suffering was to change their bodies, since decades of trying to change their brains hadn’t worked. That was all. There is something practical-minded and humanitarian in his thinking that people could learn a lot from, and not just medical professionals who deal with trans people.
Not A Passing Grade
The US was ranked 66th in women’s political empowerment, of 115 countries, because we’ve never had a female president and because only 15% of congressional positions are held by women.
Overall we were ranked 22nd, and we were 65th on educational attainment:
While fewer girls are enrolled in elementary school in the US, women far outnumber men in enrollment at the secondary and tertiary levels.
I’m sure it’s not a big surprise to anyone that the Nordic countries scored best, but considering recent news from Darfur and Afghanistan, I’ll stay put, thanks.
The World Economic Forum has the report available in .pdf format.
Why Women Can’t Jump:
In a nutshell, because the International Olympic Committee won’t let them. They ruled on 12/5 not to allow the Women’s Ski Jumping Event from the 2010 Winter Olympics. They’ve cited the paucity of competitors, but other events, with even fewer competitors, have not been cut.
“The recent IOC decision to block women ski jumpers from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics is blatant discrimination and a stunning move that harkens back to the Dark Ages,” according to Deedee Corradini, the former Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah and President of Women’s Ski Jumping USA.
You can can more information at the Women’s Ski Jumping USA site:http://www.wsjusa.com.
When I’m Not a Feminist
We all read a lot about women having babies and not having careers as a result, and some feminists tend to present women’s inability to have a career and have children as a form of gender discrimination.
But you know, I don’t think it is. I thought that was the point of choice – that women who choose to have babies can, and women who don’t choose to have babies, don’t. The women without babies are then able to work the ungodly hours required of the top strata of high power jobs, and the women with them aren’t.
& I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but I thought that was the whole “revolution” birth control brought with it: that women can CHOOSE whether to have children or not. I wonder often if this assumption – that women need to have babies – isn’t a result of all that “women are nurturing” bullshit. I don’t know. I’ve wanted to be childfree my whole life, and what I see are a lot of women in my life who wanted children – wanted them more than their careers – and made that choice. So why the bellyaching? We all make decisions, and we all have to live with them. To me it’s such a fantastic thing that women have been freed from having to have babies, that there are healthy ways to prevent pregnancy and plan to have a family (or plan not to have one).
I have a funny feeling there’s a privilege thing in here somewhere that might blind me some. I just can’t imagine walking into the universe expecting the world to allow me everything I wanted. I mean, imagine if I wrote an article claiming that it was “discrimination” because I can’t hold a high power job *and* write novels – which I can’t, because of the time required of both. I’d be laughed right off my blog, and well I should be if I made that argument. But some feminists portray having a baby as some requirement of woman-ness, and I thought the whole point was – it’s not. We’ve freed women up to have careers if they want. Or to have babies if they want. & That’s all cool.
I mean, if women want babies and don’t want to give up their careers, adopt and marry a house-husband father type.
Of course it is expected that women raise their children once they have them, & that’s the problem, as far as I’m concerned. The expected gender roles are unfair, because fathers are and can be parents as much as women can be mothers. Is it “fair” that men can have children and expect their wives to take care of them? No. But I don’t see why women can’t decide to have children and expect their husbands to take care of them – especially if the women is the one making the higher salary.
But in speaking to a feminist friend recently, she told me she’s having an absolute blast raising her son and not working so much – but still somehow sees it as “wrong” that she can’t be a litigator at the same time. I just don’t get it. She not only chose to have a baby but to raise the baby; she could have gotten a nanny and gone back to work at that high-powered job. She didn’t. And again, that’s all good. But I don’t see it as discrimination; I see it as a decision. Would she catch some flak if she went back to her fulltime job and left a nanny and her husband to raise her child? Sure. But she could do that, if she wanted.
It’s not like those of us who are childfree don’t catch flak. Or that those who decide to stay home with their kids don’t catch flak. The thing about being a woman is that nothing you do is right: someone, somewhere, will have a problem with whatever choice you make. But for me, being a feminist is in supporting any woman in her choices, and that includes calling her out when she’s complaining about having to make them. Having a choice doesn’t mean you get everything; it means you get one thing & you have to live without the other.
But then again, I was raised by Devo.