party queen, if you want to be seen

[asimplechord]

Dear AP,

Crap like this is why independent media gets my attention and my business.

How is that important? HOW?

No love and no respect,
Me


Also? I love KPFT and Democracy Now, but primary season isn't even over yet, and I am already tired of electioneering and such. Still. So much love for Gloria Steinem debating gender and race issues. Because instead of devolving into petty bickering, the participants actually, you know, communicated. I can't think any new dialogue between the two camps will make a difference in terms of the Obama/Clinton dynamic - there seems to be too much acrimony between them for them to make good running mates - but still, it was nice to hear. Instead of mudslinging, y'know?

Comments

[asimplechord.livejournal.com]

She and a Princeton professor (of politics and African American Studies, I think) discussed the way gender and race are playing out even though the campaigns are consciously not using them as issues. It was interesting to hear the prof point out the subversion of gender issues to advance racial ones that were espoused by the civil rights movement. Modern history is not my thing, so I know less than nothing about that.

Transcript (http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/14/race_and_gender_in_presidential_politics).

[glendaglamazon.livejournal.com]

It was interesting to hear the prof point out the subversion of gender issues to advance racial ones that were espoused by the civil rights movement.

That wasn't new with the civil rights movement. It actually started with the abolition movement and the first women's movement in the 1850s, which set that pattern in place. Women who were seeking to advance the state of women in the US turned their attention to stopping slavery (at the request of white, male abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's husband, Henry Stanton), which was obviously the more pressing issue. They promised that once slavery was abolished, those men would push for women to get the vote along with black men. That didn't happen, and was a major sore spot for the early women's movement. They wound up fracturing into two separate organizations, so that what began in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, at the first Women's Rights Convention saw no fruition until 1920 and the passage of the 19th Amendment.

When the same thing happened with the second wave women's movement and the civil rights movement in the 1960s, women got seriously pissed off, which is why the "women's lib" movement of the 1970s was pretty vitriolic, and led a lot of women today still having a hard time calling themselves feminists. In a nutshell. ;)

I look forward to reading the debate. Thanks!

[asimplechord.livejournal.com]

It's weird: I remember learning some of that in a Women's History class in college, but there was no mention of tension between the two issues: it was all "Look, women were fighting for abolition and emancipation before most men cared - we're so progressive, yay!" without acknowledging that one ended up taking precedence.

[glendaglamazon.livejournal.com]

Huh. You didn't go to Maryland, did you? There, in our Women's Studies department (at least in the late '80s and early '90s), the tensions were pretty clearly discussed. God, what a radical time and place the UMCP Women's Studies dept. around 1990 was. Frankly, it led me to make up and espouse my Glamazon credo--I am no less a feminist because I like to paint my nails and fuck men! ;)

[asimplechord.livejournal.com]

No, I went to Salisbury. There was no Women's Studies dept. There were two classes, one semester each, taught by the spouse of the history dept chair. I only took the first one, which covered pre-industrial stuff and went up to the ECS, Jane Addams Hull House progressive era movement without getting to the modern stuff. The second semester conflicted with a class that was required for chemistry majors, so I never took it.

I don't get some of the hardcore points of feminism at all. If we enjoy being women, why shouldn't we enjoy everything about it? There's enough crappy stuff that comes with the girl parts, so I'm making the most of the fun stuff.