Ten Most Important Reading Pieces

Where We Stand, bell hooks

Through the Lens of Race:  Black and White Women's Perception of Womanhood, by Isis H. Settles, Jennifer S. Pratt-Hyatt, Nicole T. Buchanan

White Privilege and Male Privilege, by Peggy McIntosh

Beating Anorexia and Gaining Feminism, by Marni Grossman

Romance: Sweet Love, bell hooks

What We Do for Love, Rose Weitz

Dismantling Heirarchy, Queering Society, by Andrea Smith

The Way it Was, by Eleanor Clooney

If Men Could Menstruate, by Gloria Steinem

My Fight for Birth Control, Margaret Sanger

  

The National Museum of Women in the Arts

I introduced The Guerilla Girls, a group of Feminists who travel around the world espousing feminism and their support of women in the arts, in my first journal in this blog.  The arts, which includes not only exhibited artwork, but also in film and other forms of entertainment media.  Art is an area which is frequently overlooked when studying women in the workforce and, by all accounts and statistics, representation of women is truly lacking.  For example, fifty one percent of visual artists today are women, yet only five percent of the art on display in U. S. Museums is by female artists.  In addition, women artists only earn two thirds of what male artists earn for their work.  Is the work of male artists more valuable than that of female artists?  Comparable worth, also known as pay equity, as read in our text Chapter 8, Women's Work Inside and Outside the Home, as well as Gender Wage Gap applies here.


I recently became aware of The National Museum of Women in the Arts [NMWA], whose mission is to recognize women artists around the world by preserving, researching and exhibiting their work. The NMWA is little known, yet about to celebrate its twenty fifth anniversary, and it is the world's first and only museum dedicated to women's contribution in the arts.
  
The National Museum of Women in the Arts opened in Washington, D.C. in 1987 after starting six years prior as a small museum in Wilhelmina Cole Holladay's Georgetown home.  Holladay, along with her husband, both of whom are avid art collectors, founded NMWA after they realized art's missing link, the absence of work by women artists in most of the world's great art museums.  Their personal collection of some 500 works by women artist became the nucleus for the museum. NMWA boasts 20,000 members today, holding rank as one of the largest museums in the world when measured by membership.  The Library and Reserach Center has 185,000 files on women artists; and, NMWA is the only museum doing archival work on women artists.  The collection has grown to an amazing number, more than 4,000 works and which 2.5 million people have visited.


I was excited to learn about this museum and hope it will prove to be an inspiration recognizing women's artistic efforts that will eventually result in economic equality for women.

  

Mommy Wars

Among other issues in the forefront of the race for Republican Presidential Candidate nominee that concern women, is the subject of Mothers, and if they should be part of the work force or stay at home to raise their children.  As if this, or any of the other 'pelvic politics' topics is anyone's business besides the woman involved making that decision, we are faced with the Mommy Wars, which have become another item for debate.  

Recently,  Ann Romney was called on the carpet by Democratic Strategist, Hilary Rosen, who accused Mrs. Romney being a stay-at-home-mom who had never worked a day in her life.  Ms. Rosen, stated, "She's never dealt with the economic issue that a majority of women in the U.S. are facing."  In response, Mrs. Romney said, "My career choice was to be a mother.  Other women make other choices.  We have to respect women in all their choices."


Statistics show, as this debate does, that as a society and as individuals, we are conflicted about what is the best role for moms. And while many women don't have the luxury of being a stay-at-home-mom such as Ann Romney has, the important point here is her last statement:  to respect women in all their choices.  The Obama camp, who will probably be running against her husband, stuck up for stay-at-home-mom Romney.  Mrs. Obama [who is in Pittsburgh today] commented, "Every woman works hard, and every woman deserves to be respected."   That should be the bottom line with this and the other female-related issues gone public, like birth control and abortion.


Leslie Bennetts, on The Feminine Mistake in Don't Give Up Your Day Job, cites many reasons that make sense for women to continue their careers throughout motherhood. She says, "if you look at women in midlife, the ones who are really happy and excited about the future are the ones who have their own careers.  They pay for it with a certain amount of stress early on, when their kids are young and they're juggling like mad, but as the years go on the benefits increase exponentially for working women, and the penalties increase exponentially for women who have given up their careers."  Personally, I think it sets a positive example for the children and helps them to establish their  independence and self-sufficiency as individuals. 


According to the Pew Research Center, three quarters of American adults say the trend toward more women in the workforce is a change for the better, and 62 percent believe that a marriage where both partners have jobs and share the housework is more satisfying than the old separate spheres model of the husband working outside the house and the wife taking care of the home.  Other polls indicate only 21 percent of adults say society has benefited by the trend of more mothers of young children working outside the home.  Like the others, the debate will most likely go on and on.

The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood

In May of 1955,  Housekeeping Monthly,  a magazine geared to housewives,ran an article called The Good Wife's Guide. The magazine cover depicts a cheerful woman in high heels and pearls taking cookies out of the oven while her husband, in a pin-striped suit, comes home from work looking for a friendly greeting. In 1957, the article was re-published in a male oriented magazine appropriately entitled, John Bull, with the same picture displayed on its cover.  The article consisted of a lengthy list of what the good wife needs to do to please her husband, and, just a few of the numerous suggestions:  

• Have dinner ready.  This is a way of letting him know  that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. 
• Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and Be happy to see him.  Be loving and attentive.  He's had a hard day.
• A good wife knows her place.

When I first saw this, it seemed like a joke, but then I realized these were the gold standards, the expectations of the Dominant Culture/Patriarchal household of the 1950's, not so different from The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood, written over 100 years earlier.  The doctrines of that era suggest:  piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.  Fast forward to today, when I found an cleverly updated parody posted on the internet with suggestions for husbands, and appropriately named, The Good Husband's Guide.  Here are a few of those ideas: 

• Always make getting and keeping a full-time job with regular raises, benefits, bonuses and the potential for prestigious advancement your number one priority in life.  You have a family to take care of.  
• Always arrive home refreshed and happy - put your bad day or your confrontation with your boss, the traffic, or your exhaustion aside and try to arrive home as cheery as you possibly can.  Your wife has been struggling with the children and housework all day and does not need to hear how bad your day was.
• Be prepared to help with household chores when you get home - let your wife relax or talk on the phone since she has been dealing with these problems all day.

Barbara Erenreich, in Maid to Order, resonates..."the feminist perception of housework as one more way by which men exploit women or, more neutrally stated, as a 'symbolic enactment of gender relations'."

The visual brings to mind an excerpt from The Politics of Housework, where Pat Mainardi says, "women have been brainwashed more than even we can imagine. Probably too many years of seeing television women in ecstacy over their shiny waxed floors or breaking down over their dirty shirt collars.  Men have no such conditioning.  They recognize the essential fact of housework right from the very beginning.  Which is that it stinks."  

The Stepford Wives

According to bell hooks, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and oppression.  The movie, The Stepford Wives, presents to us a life of sexism, sexual exploitation and oppression of women via an exaggerated portrayal of a 1975 patriarchal fantasy. 

Through the characters of Joanna and Bobbi we see realistic second wave feminists who make an attempt to use their educations, talents, and even their ‘maiden’ names to express themselves as individuals before they were turned into robots like the other Stepford Wives.  Although hooks says she likes her definition of feminism because it doesn’t imply men are the enemy, the men in The Stepford Wives are the enemy.  They represent patriarchy, the Dominant Culture, that by which men have the control and the power; and who, because they can, appropriate their command to the fullest by making their wives into their polite, domestic, sexual robots, keeping them as subservient as possible in every aspect of their existence.

When Joanna expresses her unhappiness with life in Stepford, Walter urges her to see a psychiatrist, a typical male response to female melancholy and despair.   Essentialism and the male/female binary system play into the notion that if a woman is not happy, she has innate psychological issues for which she needs treatment.  This is her biology; she is weak, emotional, and irrational, among other unfavorable ‘less than’ traits.

One important scene in the movie is where Joanna is objectified by ‘the gaze’, where the camera holds your eye and gives power to the viewer.  The gaze is an incredibly strong satiric image of a suburban housewife, and that which satisfies patriarchal desire.  Joanna is refracted three times in the shot, encompassing three versions in competing roles.  We see two portraits, one, who she is momentarily and the other, who she will become when robotized.

I know that feminists did not receive this move warmly, and at first, I didn’t understand why, since the movie portrays men at their most insidious, taking the notion of white privilege and male privilege to the extreme, thereby demonstrating the challenges women need to overcome.  However, after giving this some further thought, I realized that, if somehow Joanna had been able  to escape her oppressive situation  to claim her own life as a photographer or whatever she chose to do, it would have been considered a feminist success.  She wasn’t able to save herself or her children, thus the men won.  The ideas sound simple but they are grossly complex.