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.  

Father Knows Best: Betty, Girl Engineer

According to Andrea Smith’s article, Dismantling Hierarchy, Queering Society, she defines heteropatriarchy as the way our society is fundamentally based on male dominance.  The title, Father Knows Best, is the first clue to the patriarchal household created in this series. 

The father’s character, Jim, is that of a traditional father who offers sage advice that is accepted as fact whenever one or more of his children has a problem.  He is the head of the house and he knows best.  Although the mother’s character, Margaret, has a reasonable voice, she always submissively defers to Jim.  The Andersons are an idealized family, the sort that viewers of the era could relate to and emulate.  The series had become ingrained into American pop culture as its idyllic presentation of family life in the 1950’s.

In the episode, Betty, Girl Engineer, it is interesting to note that when Betty comes home from school excited to tell her family about her desire to pursue engineering, a male-dominated career choice, not only is she not taken seriously, she is ignored and interrupted by everyone else who enters the scene.  Margaret continues to show Betty a dress she recently purchased for her while Betty continues to ignore her mother; neither wants to hear the other’s point of view.  Margaret wants her daughter to fulfill her own expectations of the female binary, while Betty seeks to override them.  Jim and Margaret desperately try to talk Betty out of her career choice, claiming it is not for a girl; a girl should be interested in ballet, music and literature.


In The Social Construction of Gender, Judith Lober writes, “as a process, gender creates the social differences that define woman and man.  In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn what is expected, act and react in expected ways and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order.”  Betty rebels against the standards as she attempts, through a school sponsored work-study program, to pursue her dream of entering the male-dominated profession of engineering.  In order to do this, however, she changes her name to BJ and changes her gender expression for the part by dressing like a boy and hopes no one will notice she’s a ‘girl’.  

As hard as she may try, when the site supervisor, Doyle Hobbs, realizes BJ is a female, he admonishes her, telling her this is no place for a girl and to go home where little girls belong, that a man has his job and a woman has hers. 

In the final scene, we find Doyle Hobbs dressed in a suit, carrying a box of chocolates, and ringing the Anderson’s doorbell in search of Betty.  He offers his opinion of how he likes someone in a pretty dress and believes a man should come home after work to a nice pretty wife, something to look forward to after a long day of work.  The next thing we see is Betty in her new dress, demure and flirtatious, hoping for a Saturday night date with Hobbs.
  

Ultimately, gender expectations win and Betty trades her thoughts of becoming an engineer for the role of girlie girl.  Betty was her own hero until she fell into the boy meets girl trap.  It would have been refreshing to see her follow through on her dreams but that is not how this story ends.  It would have pleased feminist ideals if Betty would have followed her dreams but that was not the way it was back then.  

Designer Vaginas

Designer Vaginas by Simone Weil Davis is a reading that opened my eyes to "the newest trend in surgically enhanced body beautification:  Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery". This was a reading that was not only interesting, but enlightening.

It appears that women are no longer just injecting Botox, getting liposuction or turning to silicon to acquire a more perfect body. These newer surgeries now also allow them to tighten vaginal muscles, trim or plump their labia and make cosmetic changes to their most intimate body parts in what some pundits have referred to as the 'making of designer vaginas'.

There are a variety of reasons listed for women wanting this type of cosmetic surgery.  Some women claim it's for a more aesthetically pleasing look [as compared to those found in pornographic publications]; some say they want the ability to exercise without discomfort; while others are simply looking for higher levels of sexual gratification [perhaps another response to media hype].  

However, the question remains, do women decide to have these procedures for their own benefit for do they choose to do it to please men?  Soraya Mire, a Somali filmmaker, quoted in Designer Vaginas, believes that ...'in America, women pay money to go to a doctor who cuts them up so they can create or sustain an image men want.  Men are the mirror.'  Mire continues, 'consent to genital surgery does not okay it so much as it marks the degrading depths of women's oppression.'

Bearing that in mind, this is one more far-reaching example of how we strive to be perfect to please men; and, that is due to the fact that we are not taught to recognize the value and importance of our own selves.  

    

Window Dressing

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It seems to me, so often these days, women have been relegated to window dressing.  I was appalled and embarrassed at the blatant objectification and sexualization of this image of a woman displayed in a shoe store window at street level. I had to take a picture and report back on this disconcerting example of window dressing.  


It is interesting to note that the window display appears to target a younger population, although the store is located in a high-end, upscale area where mostly the rich and, often, the famous, do their shopping.  It is not where, for the most part, younger people could afford to shop.  After all, who, other than youth, can wear four to five inch stiletto heels, while at the same time I have to ask, could they afford these?  So, I thought, perhaps, the window dressing is meant to target wealthy men who may buy articles of clothing as gifts with which to dress their young ladies. You can envision the scenario where the model, from her subservient position, looks up in deference to a man; her subservient pose satisfies the male gaze.


Much has been discussed about The Beauty Ideal with which we have been inundated through television commercials, programs, print advertising, cinema, and the internet. This window dressing is simply another way in which women are influenced to seek the notions of body perfection that we are force-fed on a daily basis, and, through which we are being oppressed by the Dominant Culture.  In this way, we are like pawns in the White Supremist Capitalist Patriarchal game to promote their enterprises.    

Shocking Shopping

Toxic chemicals linked to the rising rates of endocrine disruption related diseases were recently found in a broad array of consumer products.  The Silent Spring Institute tested 213 consumer products which included cleaning products, cosmetics, sunscreens, air fresheners, and other household items made by  ubiquitous household brands, namely, Colgate, Procter & Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, and Seventh Generation. Test results revealed toxic chemicals in conventional and 'green' products, not listed on their labels; therefore, consumers have no way of knowing their contents.   Alexandra Scranton, from Women's Voices for the Earth, who recently conducted their own tests for hidden toxic chemicals in brand name cleaning products stated, "Companies need to phase out these harmful chemicals, and we need a policy that standardized labeling guidelines for cleaning products, so companies can't keep these toxic chemicals a secret."


Environmental health advocates recognize these new studies confirm the fact that chemical exposure is playing a role in adverse health impacts and this has become an environmental concern. As we read in Chapter 6, Health and Reproductive Rights of our text, breast cancer is one important health issue closely tied to environmental problems.  Exnoestrogens, or environmental estrogens, may play a role in the increasing incidence of breast cancer as well as testicular and other types of cancer.  BPA, Bisphenal A, found in the lining of canned goods, is problematic as a carcinogen, and the list goes on and on.

Besides products that fall into the cosmetic category and are used by women, many items are cleaning products. There is additional reason for concern for women's health since women generally do the majority of the housework.  As we further read our text in Chapter 8, Women's Work Inside and Outside the Home, we see that gender norms that associate women, the home, and domesticity reinforce the assumption that housework and childcare are women's work.

Children are not without risk to exposure to other harmful toxic chemicals.  "Phthalates, found in toys,  have been linked to asthma, adverse impacts on brain development, and reproductive health problems in baby boys, have been banned in toys but are still prevalent in other products children come in contact with in schools and at home.








  

Barbie Goes Bald

This is a new spin on Barbie Dolls. Throughout her existence, Barbie has been an iconic, although often damaging, figure to little girls.   This new image may actually help the audience it is designed to target:  kids who have cancer or have lost their hair for medical reasons.  It is the hope that Bald Barbie will make female baldness more acceptable.  


Kudos to Mattel Toy Company who decided to make this doll after a campaign by Jane Bingham, a survivor of non-hodgkins lymphoma, started a Facebook group called "Beautiful and Bald Barbie".  She was inspired to start the campaign after she lost her own hair during chemotherapy last year.  She felt she was able to handle it as an adult but that children would have a harder time.  Ms. Bingham wanted to reduce the stigma for women and children who have sustained hair loss to be able to go out in public without having to wear a wig or scarf to cover their heads.  She wanted them to know that "Their beauty and their self-worth is not dependent upon their hair." 


Rose Weitz explains In What We Do for Love, how our hair does affect our feelings of self-worth, and, beginning with Rapunzel, how hair plays a central role in romantic relationships.  And, in addition, we read how having long, flippable hair is one of the standards of The Beauty Ideal.


How wonderful it would be if Mattel would come full circle and start working on A Realistic Body Type Barbie Doll collection.

If Men Could Menstruate

I personally like this essay for several reasons.  First, I have always admired Gloria Steinem as an icon of women's rights, and over the years I have embraced many of her ideals.  Second, her expression of a this issue through her comically sarcastic approach resonates for me.  Who could disagree that males have built whole cultures around the idea that all women have penis-envy; Sigmund Freud took that theory to new heights by claiming women are victims of penis-envy.  Essentialism teaches us our biology, makes us ‘less than’.

  

I agree with Ms. Steinem’s theory that the power we have to give birth makes womb-envy just as logical, and she says, “the characteristics of the powerful [men] are thought to be better than the characteristics of the powerless [women], and logic has nothing to do with it.”  Women own menstruation, therefore, it is perceived as a negative event. If men owned menstruation, it would be a positive event worthy of glorious celebration.  Like most other traits masculine, it would be a cause to celebrate rather than dread. 

The metaphors she creates about men menstruating are brilliant and funny.  The word menstruation itself carries the male gender in the name. If men did menstruate, they would brag about how long their periods last and how much blood they lost; tampons and sanitary napkins would be federally funded; and they would be labeld with appropriate masculine names, such as, John Wayne Tampons, Muhammed Ali’s Rope-a-Dope pads, and Joe Namath Jock Shields.  Men would brag, “I’m a three-pad man”, as they would attempt to convince women that sex is better during their periods; lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore life itself, that what they need is a good menstruating man; and women would be missing the ability to measure time and space without a monthly cycle, a built-in gift for measuring the cycle of the moon and the planets.  She says the power justifications could go on forever.  “If we let them.”

Because women menstruate, they have been considered unclean, smelly, on the rag, and moody.  Ms. Steinem’s approach highlights the negative, irrational approach women have been subject to that has gone on with regard to menstruation since time began.  This essay can make women laugh at the ridicule they have dealt with because of their biology and because of the oppression our patriarchal society has imposed on them.