This summer, Hanna Rosin warned readers of The Atlantic that the apocalypse was nigh — for boys, at least. In an article provocatively titled The End Of Men, Rosin used the increasing preponderance of women in higher education and the low rungs of our recession-impacted workforce (as well as their somewhat disproportionate success at elementary and secondary schools) to argue that feminism had failed boys, who would eventually find themselves the second sex. And it wasn’t hard to find plenty of people who agreed with her.

But, then, it wouldn’t be: a recent flip through literature shows that she has lots of fellow travelers. From Christina Hoff Summers to Kathleen Parker, around talk radio and into the blogosphere, statistics showing that boys aren’t competing as well in schools as their female counterparts have led to much soul-searching and many calls for school reforms to take into account boys’ delicate constitutions, development inferiorities and special natures to make sure they don’t continue to fall so far behind the hearty, mature and overachieving female counterparts.

The way people have been going on of late about how everything from schools to colleges to the modern workforce is failing men, one would almost think they were about to be prohibited from the majority of colleges, provided an inferior education before that, barred from most work environments, encouraged (to put it nicely) to keep a nice home for their wives and stay home with children to the detriment of their careers.

Sad Plight of Male Subordination

In fact, you’d think they were being taught to make themselves inoffensive and pretty in order to attract the best wife to take care of them, to not speak before being spoken to and to never dream any further than their front doors and a bright future for the daughters they would deliver unto a society awaiting a new generation of leaders. In the dark corners of the blogosphere even those men in this dark age of an encroaching matriarchy who have achieved a modicum of political or economic power are subject to disparaging comments about their looks (and how either the lack or preponderance thereof makes them unfit to wield power), speculation about the lineage of their apparent progeny and accusations that their feeble minds either leave them too open to feminine influence or simply don’t prepare them to wield power.

Oh, wait. While science fiction has given us books like that before — Turning on the Girls by Cheryl Benard springs to mind — but then it’s only 2010 and doesn’t resemble the gender status quo into which I was born.

It’s hardly a difficult environment for men to gain money, power or status (let alone at greater rates than women). Last I checked – and I’ve checked a lot — while the numbers of men and women in the labor force are about to reach parity and the unemployment rate among women is lower than men, the overall participation rates remain vastly dissimilar. That is to say, in June 2010, 73 percent of men 20 years and older were considered part of the labor market, and only 60.3 percent of women

There’s still a decent-sized pay gap – both in terms of current pay and especially with regard to lifetime earnings — between men and women. To say that women are woefully underrepresented in elected political office in the United States is to laughably underestimate how far behind they are compared to the rest of the world.

And taking race and sexual orientation and gender identity into account only adds to the difference, making it ever more clear that our society’s most powerful people are disproportionately white, male, straight, cisgender and, of course, already wealthy.

Paying a Terrible Price for Nondiscrimination

Almost 40 years ago, Congress passed Title IX to eliminate discrimination in educational institutions based on sex — although it’s now better known for its role on gendered athletics (a development that emerged as part of the regulatory process and then was enshrined in law due to NCAA attempts to try to get its members out of the regulation), Title IX is technically the law that protects women and men from discrimination in schools.

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…

Heady stuff — as was the fact that such a law was necessary in 1972, only five years before I was born.

Of course, it was also passed seven years after my mother, now a computer programmer, graduated from high school. In those days, my mother — who loved math — was overtly told by her high school guidance counselor that she’d never succeed and faced teachers more concerned with keeping her down than helping her learn.

In those days, no one talked of reforming the ways that schools operated, writ large, to help women; they talked of eliminating both overt, personal discrimination against women and girls, and of eliminating institutional discrimination, such as guidance counselors whose mandates helped steer men to Harvard and women to Vassar. The idea behind Title IX was that, absent overt discrimination or practices that innately privileged men, women could succeed at higher rates.

And, whoa, could they ever. Less than 40 years in, and women make up almost two-thirds of this country’s college students; they are rapidly taking over medical and law schools; they seemingly love to get professional degrees. Colleges are stuck practically giving high school boys points in the admissions process just for being boys in order to prevent a wholesale takeover of the university system by women. Absent discrimination, the age-old triumvirate of grades-SATs-extracurriculars that privileged men four (and three, and two,) decades ago now works in women’s favor.

Then, of course, the hue and cry! Boys aren’t ready for the rigors of school! They need time! They need special attention! Boys need to be boys, the critics of feminine hegemony say, and the matriarchy makes them just sit there for hours trying to learn things as women raise their hands and — gasp — get called on in equal numbers! Why, the new SATs – now somewhat more rigorously redesigned to try to remove traces of class and gender privilege — are just too hard! Why, it looks just like when you take out the discrimination from the system in large part, girls do better! It’s time for reform! Or else women might take over the world!

And yet, primary and secondary education has been stultifying since its introduction. Rows of students made to sit for hours on end, lectures, memorization, regurgitation, quiet contemplation — for years, boys were able to make the most of it and come out lionized as Great Men. Now that women have mastered the formula and law has stamped out the most overt forms of discrimination, the rapid rise of women seemingly puts the defenders of men ill at ease.

And the First Shall be Last?

What is it, really, that’s so bothersome? For generations, women’s lack of advancement in post-secondary education and the workplace bothered few people, in large part because women’s intellectual and professional achievements were secondary to their agreed-upon roles in society: wife and mother. Getting and using education were nice things, and helped garner a higher-status marriage partner, but it was secondary to a woman’s real role in society. Not having an education didn’t make one a lesser wife or mother — and readers of The Feminine Mystique might venture to guess that it, in fact, had the potential to cause less dissatisfaction.

But, when it comes to men having less educational attainment than women — due to supposed "natural" factors like boisterousness or an inability to focus in school — it’s a national crisis worthy of serious consideration. Why? Because, of course, men aren’t expected to stay home with children and keep homes for their wives. Men aren’t expected to sacrifice their educational or professional achievements on the altars of their wives’ careers. Men aren’t expected to compete for powerful women’s affections on the basis of their external attractiveness (for all that there are cougars in pop culture, there are rarely trophy husbands) or suitableness to the spouse role.

In fact, all of this hue and cry about how hard it is for men to keep up reveals that the expected roles of men and women outside the labor force haven’t really changed … and that few people want them to. Adults expect that girls will want equally hard-charging partners in their own adulthood, and that things like childcare and high-powered career maintenance — despite all the evidence that many CEO-like careers all but still require a career spouse — will work themselves out later (and, in all likelihood, still fall to the woman — or to lower-status women of color). And if boys can’t keep up, and gender roles outside the workplace remain stagnant, both those boys and girls will suffer.

I’ll give the critics like Rosin and Parker, who see female educational and professional achievement coming solely at the expense of the men who seemingly deserve it, one thing: it is probably easier to remake the public educational system of the United States from one based on equality of opportunity to one based on the equality of outcomes than it is to change society’s ingrained views that women need men of equal or better educational attainment and earning power to be happy.

But let’s no longer pretend that it’s for the sake of women’s emotional happiness: critics are doing it for the boys, and to regain the status quo in which men just don’t have to work as hard as women to get ahead. Given equal opportunities, it seems, women do better than men quite often: rather than letting men learn to compete, runs the argument, we ought to change the rules of the game to let them win more. That sounds a lot like the discriminatory system we worked to change, actually.

–

Megan Carpentier is an Associate Editor at Talking Points Memo and freelance writer whose work has been published by The Guardian, Bitch, RHRealityCheck.com, Women’s eNews, the Women’s Media Center and Ms. Magazine, among other places. She was previously the editor of news and politics at Air America and an editor at Jezebel.com

Photo credits: TOP – TOO Left by Roz Dimon; BOTTOM  left Kathleen Migliore-Newton

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Perhaps one of the biggest impediments to women’s equality in the United States is a pervasive, persistent and too-common myth: it’s all been done. It’s a cruel trick, as if the exhortation to girls that they can do anything is turned on its head into a "fait accompli" by mere affirmation and repetition. The struggle for women’s equality, we are somehow led to believe, is all but passé, as unnecessary as a typewriter, as "dead" as feminism, even when evidence to the contrary is right in front of us.

There is certainly still work to do. You’re still in a situation where women make 77 cents on the dollar, where any review of EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) charges or any scan through Westlaw (legal research service) would show you that there continues to be discrimination at work, at school. We still have work to be done to assure equality," said Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington D.C. "Whether they are able to label it as discrimination or not, most people are able to identify inequities at school, at work."

Yet, the overt may be easier to pinpoint than the subtle. In testimony in July to support the nomination of Elena Kagan to the U. S. Supreme Court, Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president and co-founder of the National Women’s Law Center, recounted the case of a 13-year old girl who was strip searched at school to see if she was hiding ibuprofen, a matter that came before the Supreme Court in 2009: "At oral argument, Justice Ginsburg, then the sole woman on the Court, described the humiliation and indignity a teenaged girl would have suffered by being forced to strip and even shake out her underwear in front of school officials. A number of male Justices questioned why it was so traumatic — one thinking back, for example, to experiences in locker rooms as a 13-year-old male." The court ultimately ruled in favor of the girl, noted Greenberger, due "at least in part to the perspective that Justice Ginsburg brought."

Greenberger has been at this work of trying to secure women’s rights as long as the existence of Title IX, the 1972 law that said educational institutions could not discriminate by gender. As a young lawyer she accepted a short-term assignment with the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) in D.C. to analyze whether there would be enough work for a women’s rights lawyer. Yes, she reported, and soon, she was heading the Women’s Rights Project, which, in turn, evolved into the National Women’s Law Center. It now has a staff of 60, an annual budget of $7.5 million … and the calls keep coming in.

"Our intake volume is high. There is no way that we can represent all of the people. We’re not sitting around fiddling our thumbs," said Graves.

Staff members monitor government policy, testify to Congress, issue public alerts,
lobby and litigate for the advancement of women and girls and working families in four core areas — employment, education, family economic security, and health and reproductive rights. "There are a lot of laws in place, and the question is how they are applied," said Graves.

Bush Fights for 1930s

Unfortunately, the George W. Bush administration answered that
question by trying to squeeze the life out of women’s equality in a thousand shreddings and shroudings, refusing to enforce existing laws, failing to staff women’s policy programs, removing information from public access, selecting judges indifferent or hostile to women’s equal rights. Efforts to conceal the shifts were often obscured, as well: one slap down of women’s athletic opportunities was announced late on a Friday evening after the news cycle had slowed to a dribble for the weekend.

"We saw a pretty serious rollback on equality in the Bush administration. We slid back during those years. There was a series of steady attacks and they continued," said Graves.

After only four years of the Bush presidency, the organization released a 77-page 
 report: Slip-Sliding Away. It details some of the most egregious assaults on the laws meant to protect women against discrimination.

Such as? The Department of Education suddenly archived its guidelines on sexual harassment. The Department of Labor removed materials on narrowing the wage gap from its website. The Department of Justice dropped cases challenging sex discrimination in employment. The Labor Department repealed a rule to help employees obtain paid leave for childbirth or adoption. The Department of Education refused to investigate the exclusion of women from math and science programs. Women’s Educational Equity, which helped schools comply with equal opportunities, was eliminated, even though funded by Congress. Emergency contraception was shoved into a stalled approval process, despite support of scientific panels. Low and moderate-income women didn’t stand a chance of benefiting from tax cuts, but did felt the resulting slash of social service programs.

"Actions with harsh effects on women are occurring almost completely ‘under the
radar,’" the report said. "And their low profile is no accident: these initiatives and positions are so out of touch with the views and aspirations of most American women – and men – that they would never be tolerated if subjected to public scrutiny."

One debacle offers a vivid example of regulatory dirty tricks. In 2002, Bush’s Secretary of Education, Rod Page, set up a commission to reevaluate Title IX rules, with the seeming intention of weakening women’s athletic opportunities and shifting the funding to men’s sports. ("Since Title IX was passed in 1972, it has been a source of extraordinary opposition and resistance by many," said Greenberger.) The commission made damaging recommendations that could have resulted in annual losses of 50,000 athletic participation opportunities and $122 million in scholarships for women, according to the law center.

One devious recommendation was to change the way that women’s athletic
participation is measured in colleges so that instead of using the campus population as a guide to divide up sports programs, women’s sports opportunities would be determined by the number of women (but not men) who responded to an email survey. Women who failed to reply – and email response is generally low — would be deemed uninterested, and the funds could be shifted to men’s athletic programming. Objections by two commissioners who supported women’s opportunities, soccer star Julie Foudy and swimmer Donna DeVarona, were drowned out, and Page would not even include their protestations in a minority report.

Public objections still arose against this loopy loophole, stopping Page – but only temporarily. He backed down. Then, after the mid-term elections in 2005 the rule was quietly put into place by Page in form of a regulatory "clarification." The public and the media were blindsided. Not until April 2010 could the standard be returned to its pre-Bush formulation when the Obama administration finally reversed it.

The Girls Are Not All Right

The devil really is in the details, as the cliché goes. These fiddly regulations, arcane language, collection and analysis of statistics are boring compared to the energizing movement moments: marching side-by-side under banners for liberation or even zipping email petitions to some member of Congress. "The conversation about data might not be a very exciting part of civil rights. But it really matters. It determines who gets paid attention to," said Graves.

Or, more clearly, who does not get attention. This is precisely, she said, how the skewed idea that girls are doing better than boys has been allowed to gain currency.

"There is a misperception that all girls are doing fine in school," says Graves, "but the
data doesn’t support that — especially when you look at race and gender together. Forty-nine percent of Native American girls, 43 percent of African-American and 41 percent of Latinas fail to graduate with their peers. There are very high pregnancy rates. We know that the treatment of pregnant and parenting girls is inconsistent, that there are schools that refuse to allow them to participate. When an article says "boys only"or "girls only," it misses the point – that lots of girls are not succeeding. You need to take a more nuanced look at girls and subgroups of girls, and then success by gender is limited. You can’t buy into ‘girls are doing fine,’ and move on. You need to look at the data."

Looking at the data, women’s advocates are pursuing concrete changes. Some are successful. In 2009 "gender" was included in a new federal hate crimes law; in 2010 the White House announced a multi-agency equal pay task force. Graves hails a provision in the 2010 health care reform that, for the first time, prohibits sex discrimination in health insurance. Left out of the mix, however, is abortion, which was, for all practical purposes, nixed from the legislation by creating convoluted provisions about how consumers must pay for abortion coverage, and closing off aid for the economically strapped and, in July, for patients in high-risk pools.

EQUALITY UNDER THE LAW

No single law prohibits gender discrimination in the United Staes. Women were not mentioned at all in the U.S. Constitution by the founding fathers and first became part of it in 1920 when the 19th Amendment gave women suffrage. For the first century or two of the nation’s history, the all-male justices on the Supreme Court upheld laws and practices that flatly discriminated against women – and there were many, including laws preventing women from practicing law, using birth control, serving on juries and being the executor of an estate.

Nondiscrimination against women began to gain new currency in the 1960s. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically prohibiting sex discrimination in certain employment under Title VII. The Supreme Court began to apply the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to sex bias, striking down laws that discriminated against women without a reasonable basis, a lighter touch than the strict scrutiny applied to race-based challenges. The Supreme Court also recognized a zone of privacy in the Constitution and struck down laws that rendered contraception illegal and made abortion a crime in all circumstances.

An Equal Rights Amendment, while proposed, was never added to the U.S. Constitution. Instead, a patchwork of other laws was passed to address women’s equality, most notably, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex discrimination in education, including in athletic opportunities. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 was passed after disastrous decisions from the Supreme Court, and Congress adopted Equal Credit, Fair Housing and Equal Pay laws, and states also passed laws, some more expansive, against gender discrimination. At the same time, Congress allowed loopholes – for example, limiting employment claims to firms of 15 employees or more, and excluding religious institutions from compliance with non-discrimination laws.

-Cindy Cooper

Just as there is no single law on gender discrimination in the U.S. (see sidebar), there is no single measure of success. Problems persist. Pregnancy discrimination claims continue to rise. There are issues about securing equal and equitable pay, ending sexual harassment on the job, stopping gender violence in homes and on the street, securing paid family leave, dealing with cyber-snooping and bullying, safeguarding the jobs of breast-feeding mothers, securing access to abortion and contraception, redressing changes that lead to unacceptable stereotyping in single-sex schooling, ending the poverty that disproportionately harms women.

Hard to envision is the opposition to women’s equality: "There is not one set of groups. There are those that have an interest in maintaining the status quo. But not one group," said Graves, adding lightly, "If so, it might make it easier."

For whatever reason, the U.S. is well behind other industrialized countries in policies that support parents and working families. And, Graves noted, while 185 nations have ratified CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women), the U.S. stands with Iran, Sudan and a small minority of countries that hasn’t.

The reality is that it may take another spate of 38 years, and others after that, to reach gender equality or to secure full human rights for women. Although the road to equality turned out to be longer than most imagined and the surfaces more rocky to navigate, it will take the constancy of pragmatists and strategists to make truisms of the mantras of girls and the dreams for a just society. "I don’t think ‘equality’ is separate or apart from ‘human rights,’" said Graves. "Language matters a lot less than the critical outcomes."

Cindy Cooper, managing editor, is an independent journalist in New York and has a background as a lawyer. 

Photo credits: By Marjorie Price 

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Political feminism barely exists in corporate mainstream media. Shows like “Oprah” and “Tyra” – boasting female audiences in the tens of millions – owe their existence to space opened up by the feminist movement, but rarely, if ever, acknowledge that such a movement has existed and is responsible for vast changes in the lives of women. When this is referenced at all, it is usually in the context of a backlash attack against feminism — of the “Has Feminism Made It Harder to Find a Man?” variety. The lack of historical consciousness, sensationalism, the emphasis on “individual therapeutic solutions” to social problems and the continual channeling of women’s anxieties into the search for the “perfect look” make these shows in many ways worse than useless to women.

All of this underlines the case for feminist media of the non-corporate variety. Radio, especially with its low cost accessibility, can create a mass sense of “community” when large numbers of people tune to the same show at the same time.

Joy of Resistance: Multicultural Feminist Radio, which I co-host with Maretta Short, on WBAI in New York City (99.5 FM) has been airing for almost eight years with the mission to cover, as we describe it, “the ongoing and world-wide struggle for the full liberation of women as it continues to unfold dynamically in every country and culture on the planet." I describe our on-air feminism being “radical” in the sense of the original meaning of the word: “going to the root” of thing–which we try to do in all of our shows.

WBAI’s signal reaches three states–making it an important vehicle for bringing feminism to a large number of women, including those who the movement has not previously reached. Shows also reach audiences across the globe through Internet streaming and 90-day archiving. WBAI is part of Pacifica, a five-station network that is the largest non-commercial radio network in the U.S, and because it is funded by its listeners it does not have to dance to the tune of corporate commercial sponsors.

Sisters, Can You Hear Me?

My tale of being active in such media starts with a particular memory: I’m sitting alone in my apartment on the Lower East Side sometime in the 1970s, the radio is tuned to WBAI, and I’m hearing women talking passionately about their lives. It’s only a few years since the “big bang” of the beginning of the Women’s Liberation Movement (as it was then known) and the waves are still spreading outward at a fast rate. At that time there were at least five different shows on WBAI that could be described as feminist, lesbian-feminist or woman-identified.

The station had a “Women’s Department,” and “consciousness raising” was regularly broadcast live and uncensored. It felt like a cork had been popped and the anger women had suppressed for a very long time–anger at men and sexist institutions, anger at the demeaning ways that women were treated–was flowing freely.
I had not known that women were “allowed” to think these things,–much less say them on the public airwaves. These shows helped give me the courage and support to form a conceptual framework for thinking about and classifying the sexism I was experiencing as a young woman. To this day the exciting “shock” of these radio experiences inspires me to want to be that kind of voice for some woman “out there” who may be struggling and isolated and needs to know that there are other feminists around (and how she can find them).

Jump ahead from the ’70s to the ’90s. By this time I’m a “seasoned” feminist – and have become involved in saving my neighborhood from gentrification. I’m working in an anarchist-inspired “squatting” movement that is occupying and rehabilitating abandoned buildings to challenge an inadequate housing system. This movement is dominated by men with construction skills, and macho posturing abounds. Squatter women keep the homesteads going on a day-to-day basis, but stay in the background when it comes to making speeches, talking to press and other public aspects of the movement. (Sound familiar?) I am shocked that, after 30 years of feminism, young women “on the left” are still enduring the kind of sexism I had to put up with as a “hippie chick.” When squatter men start a “pirate” radio station, I get myself a program and fight back with a weekly feminist radio show.

The program was called: “Out of the Shadows: Radical Feminist Radio with Pirate Jenny” and aired on “Steal This Radio” from 1995-1999. Every week I was able to explore and express whatever was on my feminist mind – very little was off limits. Once a group of women came to the studio and talked about their experiences of rape – and “forgot” that they were on the air. Feelings and memories that were excruciatingly painful were aired without censorship. At other times we explored political topics such as women in post-revolutionary societies or women in Anarchist Spain. A regular feature was a faux "Science Report" satirizing sexism in the movement. For instance, annoyed by the tendency of squatter men to let their attention wander whenever women spoke at our weekly “soap-boxes,” I announced the discovery of a new “disease”: “Male Attention-to-Women Deficit Disorder” and described it in great detail to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” With the signal covering only a few square miles, we had a small but dedicated audience – including some of the men who told me they learned a lot from the show.

The “pirate radio movement” was begun in the 1980s after activists spread information about how to build a radio transmitter for under $500. In short, other people throughout the country were setting up unlicensed stations and broadcasting to their immediate vicinities. This was a direct challenge to corporate ownership of the media. By the 1990s there were over 1,000 such stations.

In 1998 at an “East Coast Pirate Radio Conference” in Philadelphia more than 40 women attended a women-only workshop. In consciousness-raising style, the women shared information about the sexism they were experiencing at their respective stations. It became clear from their testimonies that “he” who controlled the technology controlled the radio. One woman told of a station shut down at the whim of the guy who had built the transmitter–and was the only one who knew how to operate it.

It was obvious that women needed to master this technology to be equal in pirate radio; we started planning apprenticeship programs where women with these skills could teach others. Unfortunately the plans never came to fruition because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched a systematic attack on the pirate radio movement in the late ’90s. By 1999 our station had been driven off the air by threats of huge fines and possible jail sentences (although it proved impossible to wipe out “pirates” completely and many still exist).

The creation by the FCC of a new class of legal low power radio station licenses (LPFM) in 2000 was a limited victory that took place because of the pirate radio movement; the government needed to make a concession to head off another grassroots radio uprising. Women had used this pirate technology in many creative ways; one group actually set up a mobile transmitter and toured the country jamming the signals of Christian Right radio stations with pro-abortion rights programming (while moving too fast for their location to be pinpointed by the FCC).

Meanwhile, in 2001, Pacifica underwent a major upheaval and the ensuing reorganization at WBAI brought with it openings for new programs. There had been no dedicated feminist program at WBAI for at least five years. The once flourishing feminist environment had collapsed in stages during the ’80s – in tandem with what the radical feminist group Redstockings described as “the liberal takeover of the feminist movement.”

Rocking New Air Waves

Building on four years of pirate radio broadcasting, I organized feminists Manijeh Saba and Byllye Avery to join me in proposing a weekly feminist show. We were given a once-a-month “tryout” slot. We took the name “Joy of Resistance,” inspired by Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy, a novel in which the main character, when asked how there can be any joy in a world filled with oppression, replies: “The secret of joy is resistance.”

We began each show with a “worldwide feminist news” segment, providing a broader context for each featured topic. We covered the Bush Administration’s misuse of feminism to promote Middle East wars; the issues dividing Black and white feminists; secular feminists in the Middle East fighting both Islamic theocracy and U.S. occupation. We did consciousness-raising on the air, investigating “looks pressure” and “the real working conditions of motherhood.” We incorporated a wide array of feminist music, from folk (Sandy Rapp) to rock’n’roll (Anne Feeney) to grrrrlpunk (Le Tigre), as well as producing live theater, such as an in-studio production of Words of Choice, a pro-choice theater company.

We were determined to go beyond mere reporting. Taking seriously Santayana’s injunction to know your history, lest you be forced to repeat it, we wanted to place a historical “floor” under each issue so that its roots and underlying causes would be exposed. I had been influenced by Kathie Sarachild’s essay, “The Power of History,” originally published in Redstockings’ Feminist Revolution, which traced how the erasure of feminist history had been an intrinsic part of subduing the radical feminist movement.

The historical approach led to exciting radio of the kind that the corporate media with its a historical attitude was not going to provide. For instance, we interspersed actual recordings from the 1969 speakout where women risked arrest to speak publicly of their then-illegal abortions with reports from the front lines of contemporary abortion-rights struggles. In our coverage of the recent healthcare bill fight, we contextualized the Obama Administration’s bargaining away abortion access by looking at the Democratic Party’s 2004 decision to back anti-choice candidates, as well as the 1976 Hyde Amendment. In an oral history project we interviewed women who had been in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and found many of the roots of modern feminism in the Civil Rights Movement. More than anything, we wanted to cover events so that women listening would realize that feminist history was still unfolding – and that they, too, could be part of it.

We’ve gotten many gratifying responses from listeners: from appreciative phone calls after the show on “beauty pressures” to a report by a feminist group — New York Women’s Liberation — that it had gained active members because we announced their meetings.

Yet, even at WBAI – home of the political Left – all was not as we might have wished. Repeated attempts to gain more airtime were refused for years with the explanation that feminism was only a “specialty interest”of a small group and could not “build a large audience.” Only recently, after protracted struggle and a change of management, has our broadcast time doubled to twice a month.

In the early ’70s, feminist utopians dreamed of a day when we would control our own mass media a la the iconic woman-in-headphones in Lizzie Borden’s 1983 post-revolutionary fantasy Born in Flames. In today’s increasingly privatized neo-liberal environment, radical feminists must fight hard to maintain even the small amount of public media space that we have. Alternative networks such as Pacifica, imperfect as they are, can be platforms for feminist media, even as they also are endangered due to lack of financial resources.

The takeaway message is that the existence of feminist media is precarious, even on the left – and can be held hostage to a host of material conditions. It must be supported – including financially – by feminists if it is to continue to exist and to fulfill its function of helping to grow the movement.

Fran Luck is the founder and Executive Producer of Joy of Resistance: Multicultural Feminist Radio @ WBAI, which airs on 99.5 FM on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month, at 11am to noon (and streams live on the web at www/wbai.org. Fran can be reached at joyofresistance@wbai.org. She asks that feminists support Joy of Resistance by supporting WBAI during its fund drives and pledging during the show’s time slot. 

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When my parents instilled in me the belief that I could do anything a boy could do, I’m not sure they really knew what they were going to get. They probably pictured me playing baseball (I turned to ballet) and taking calculus (I chose car repair), but what they got was a hard-cursing, Feminine Mystique-reading, hyper-independent, precociously-sexual hellion who set off a pitched battle at the age of 16 when she announced she was refusing confirmation into the Catholic Church on the basis of its opposition to abortion and birth control and its 2,000-year-old refusal to allow women into leadership roles. In other words, they’d raised a feminist.

I suppose I qualified as a third-wave feminist, not that I knew what that was when I was a teenager. I was shocked to find out the Equal Rights Amendment hadn’t ever passed, pissed that I could expect to be out-earned by my male peers (even the ones I was beating at academics), fired up about domestic violence in my school and even more about the importance of Roe v. Wade.

I also coped with a less-than-thorough schooling about my body at home by educating myself as best I could about what my body was doing (and would do). I expected the few boys I dated to treat me as an equal (and acted like I was) and I refused to buy into the virginity-equals-wholesomeness message.

I also got into what I later learned was called the intersectionality between women’s rights and other social justice issues but saw as an important part of the equality my parents taught me was important: standing up for my friends who were out or who coped, as best they could, with being people of color in a very majority-white and sometimes unfriendly environment. I tried hard to incorporate the messages my parents taught me about how everyone is equal into the way I treated people and the politics I supported, trying out that whole personal-is-political thing before anyone told me what it was.

Of course, the girl whose friends would get her a vibrator and a copy of Backlash for her Sweet Sixteen — let alone the one who goes on a lobbying day in her state capital with the League of Women Voters — is going to end up taking women’s studies classes in college, and so it went with me, once I’d disposed of prerequisites, distribution requirements and the move from the English department to the sociology department. But my semester stuck in “Introduction to Women’s Studies” came at a price: the cost of my overt feminism.

It wasn’t like it disappeared all at once. It was more like it came off the way you put weight on, pound by ignored pound, until you look at yourself in the mirror one day and no longer recognize the person in it.

First, the requirement that we keep a daily personal journal to be reviewed for its feministiness by the professor inspired a resurgence in teenage-style eye rolls and series of faux-incidents with which to populate it. A rigorous introduction to feminist theory — where was Friedan? Steinem? Even Paglia? — was replaced by rambling lectures about personal experience from the professor and books about “Important Women”(mostly white) that ran counter to my academic experiences with structural history in the history department and my increasing interest in stratification theory — and the intersection of race, class and gender in society — that I found so fascinating in the sociology department.

Oh, we learned about Dworkin, but there was no discussion about sex-positive feminism. We learned about rape culture in a mandatory group discussion of our experiences with sexual assault that didn’t take into account that the survivors in the group might not be ready, willing or able to relate to a group of students and a professor those experiences. We learned about gender pay equity in one class, and the problems faced by women of color in another — and the idea that race and gender are both part of the kyriarchy that oppresses everyone but straight, white men remained unexplored.

Losing the Faith

But it was when the professor told us that, one day, when sexism is over, the government could make abortion illegal again, that I truly lost it — both my patience and, as it turns out, the A that I’d been biting my tongue to earn. She presented this nugget of information not as an idiosyncratic view of her feelings about abortion, but as a tenet of feminist thinking about abortion, and it was one that stood in opposition to everything I understood about abortion and its importance to the feminist movement

I asked questions. Who would get to decide that sexism is over — a majority vote of the still mostly-white and mostly-male Congress? A national plebiscite? Does the end of sexism mean that no one is ever raped again, even by the emotionally disturbed? Do feminists really concede that abortion is wrong-but-necessary, and isn’t that just feeding into the stigma attached to it? It’s hard to ignore a raised hand in a room of 12 students, and harder when the student isn’t going to be ignored — and the sheer stupidity of the idea that abortion policy should be based on a political decree that sexism is “over” was just too much for me to bear.

Shutting up was a lesson my parents hadn’t managed to instill in me.For my professor, the challenge seemed to be more than she was willing to take. There was no Socratic give-and-take that I’d come to love about my other classes; I was supposed to accept that she was right, I was wrong and that what she said was feminist gospel.

Shutting up was a lesson that my parents hadn’t quite managed to instill in me, but if my professor’s word was Feminist Gospel, then I wasn’t sure where I belonged any longer. I was just sure that, if she was the Perfect Feminist, then I wasn’t willing to sacrifice what I thought about women’s equality to be one.

It was a disheartening experience. I supported pro-choice politicians with my votes and my voice, but it never crossed my mind to support women’s groups with my (admittedly limited) money. I eventually became a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and lived the dreaded gender wage gap and had the joyful experience of informing no less than two bosses about the sexual harassment I was experiencing from politicians, it never occurred to me that this is part of what galvanized a generation of feminists before me.

But then two friends of mine who worked on reproductive justice issues asked me to join them for the March for Women’s Lives in 2004, and we hopped on a train full of women and went down to the National Mall. We ended up standing, briefly, by a booth staffed by NARAL volunteers who were overwhelmed with stickers and buttons to hand out and questions to answer. They asked me if I could take a few and hand them.

Streaming Crowds, Streaming Words

For two hours, as the crowds streamed past me, I handed out 20,000 stickers to the people marching. I handed them to women and men; to young people and old. I gave them to lesbian couples with children and straight couples with dogs; I stuck them to strollers and toddlers’ cheeks; I pulled off five at a time for teenagers to bring back to their classmates and ten at a go for women who were my mom’s age to give out to their friends. And I just looked at the faces as they all marched past me, and the metaphor got to be too obvious, even to me. Feminism wasn’t the Rich White Lady version presented by my college professor; it wasn’t a fait accompli; and there were plenty of people that didn’t view abortion access as a stopgap measure on the road to equality, but as a piece of the equality for which we were all still fighting.

And while I still had to get up and go to work the following Monday, I decided I didn’t have to wait around for my company to pay me at a rate equal to my male colleagues. I started reading again; I started getting more active in politics.

The discussions I’d missed in women’s studies, I found on the Internet.Eventually, I started writing and then blogging; first for myself, and eventually for others, but always under a pseudonym. My sex-positivity in a column for the once-female headed Wonkette caused commenters to speculate that I wasn’t actually a woman — a comment that amused my father to no end.

The more I wrote, and thought, and read and shook off years of ignoring everything that had initially interested me in politics, the more untenable my career path in lobbying became.

Flash forward to 2007, when I was laid off from my latest lobbying gig. With time on my hands in a suddenly iffy economy, I published my first piece on Jezebel.com, a relatively new women’s website: it was a satire of the breathless celebrity interview, a staple of women’s magazines, but the “celebrity” was a foreign policy analyst. A couple more pieces led to a guest-blogging spot, where I wrote about everything from my search for a contraceptive that worked with my body to a host of other subjects: statutory rape laws, how they are disproportionately applied and have negative effects on young women’s access to reproductive health services; abortion; circumcision; pornography; evil health insurance companies, and workplace issues. I engaged with a commenting community, with editors, with critics and fans, and, best of all, with other feminists writers who were mostly my age and younger.

The discussions I’d missed in my women’s studies class, I found on the Internet; the conversations that I’d needed to make me think harder, better and more critically about gender equity, intersectionality, the personal and the political, I found ten years later outside of the classroom and in the company of strangers I might never actually meet. Writing about women’s issues made me learn more about those issues and the feminist theories about them than hours in a classroom ever did, and allowed me to finally feel right reclaiming the word “feminist” for myself.

Check out the latest edition of On The Issues Magazine, The Feminist Mind.

Megan Carpentier is a freelance writer whose work has been published by RHRealityCheck.com, the Women’s Media Center, Jezebel.com, The Guardian, Alternet and Ms. Magazine, among other places. She was previously the editor of news and politics at the now-defunct Air America.

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Sustaining a progressive movement based on shared politics requires not only unification on positive values, but an understanding of the opposition and their tactics. Analysis of the various elements of opposition can do much to improve our own eyesight and path forward.

“Birthers" may be the newest manifestation of right-leaning conspiracy theorists. It is unlikely that most of the “birthers" who believe that President Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen belong to the John Birch Society (JBS). But I believe they are at least sympathizers with the nativist, racist tendencies of the John Birch Society, which has been stirring animosity and paranoia, often with coded language and convoluted theories, for over 50 years.

What unites the “birthers” and the Birchers on a single trajectory is well worth understanding. Progressives should not ignore the people who share this particular worldview: it’s easy to dismiss them as nutters and whackos enlarging the far right. Yes, they are the “angry white people” who foment trouble at townhalls and seek to torpedo all efforts to achieve full human rights in the United States, including health care reform.

But the real threat, especially in today’s rapid-fire headline rotation, is that their opinions from the netherworld of reasonable debate re-circulate and dominate mainstream news, filling the airwaves with the sensationalistic biases of these flat-earthers. Through time and repetition, the views of the far right have a distressing tendency to become mainstream. Absurd myths of reverse discrimination that surfaced during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor threatened to derail the rise of the first Latina to the nation’s highest court.

John Birchers Hide Behind Flag

The John Birch Society has its roots in the 1950s when it opposed the U.S.’s affirming the human rights principles of the United Nations. It was used as a grassroots corollary to McCarthyism, insisting that imagined Communists were standing behind every light pole, ready to end the world as we know it. It still sees itself as fighting Communism, as well as the New World Order (whatever that is!), big government, the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, wealth redistribution and more. You are not likely to hear the John Birch Society using epithets or spewing base language; its values are more carefully hidden behind flag-waving and obscure and irrelevant legal principles. Its words are cloaked in concern for the “direction of the nation.”

John Birchers opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying it violates the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and overstepped the rights of individual states to enact laws regarding civil rights. On its website, the John Birch Society complains that “President Obama — the man who got fawning media treatment for no reason, was elected with a thin resume and exalted without even being a king — has now been given the Noble Peace Prize.” The John Birch Society also opposes health care reform, gun control, public schools and a host of other progressive causes.

The Right-wing “watch” group, Public Research Associates, notes: “(T)he Birch society pioneered the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric White racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism rather than relying on the White supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII. Throughout its existence, however, the Society has promoted open homophobia and sexism.”

Because it is more “libertarian" than openly racist, anti-Semitic and sexist, the John Birch Society is often not characterized as a hate group like the Ku Klux Klan or the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), at least as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center. One way the John Birch Society escapes that designation is because it receives support from prominent politicians and elected officials. Birchers work hard to mask the anti-human rights beliefs that underlie their opinions.

This may be where their similarity to the “birthers” begins.

“Birthers” Find Support for Absurdisms

The birthers so resent the election of an African American president that they are willing to support and reiterate debunked claims that President Obama is nota U.S. citizen. They have even introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act (HR 1503), a bill that would challenge the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that prohibits slavery and affirms citizenship rights to everyone born in the U.S. Their arguments are laughably farfetched – as if some prophetic conspiracy occurred in the 1960s to forge a birth certificate for President Obama in Hawaii in case this bi-racial child ever ran for president.

The fact that these extremely marginal people and their claims are endorsed by Republican elected officials like U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) or U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), or racist demagogues masquerading as news analysts like Glenn Beck or Patrick Buchanan, gives them a veneer of credibility and respectability, just like the John Birch Society enjoys.

And it’s not just President Obama’s birth the Birthers question. They also oppose same-sex marriage, immigrants’ rights, “socialism,” abortion rights, and – of course – health care reform. Their website features American eagles and emulates the print of the U.S. Constitution, claiming as their goal: “We seek strict adherence to the Constitution of the United States of America, regardless to the momentary passions of the body politic,” and using the motto, “Dedicated to the rebirth of our Constitutional Republic.”

Claiming that the name “birthers" was first applied to mock them, they write: "We accept their name, the Birthers, for wanting to give rebirth to that which we as Americans hold dear. To return the favor of giving us a name in which we can find a common identity, we in turn give them a name that must be our polarizing opposites, ‘the O-Borters,’ for they are seeking to abort the fabric that has held America together, the Constitution of the United States of America." The irony that they are seeking to undo the 14th Amendment to that same Constitution (and for which the Civil War was fought) seems to escape them.

The obvious goal of the Birthers is to thwart President Obama and create a Republican resurgence for the 2010 mid-term elections, the same tactics employed in 1994 when the ultraconservative Newt Gingrich, as Speaker of the House, led his minions to oppose everything that the Clinton Administration proposed. The idea now is the same – to force Congress to oppose everything the President supports.

As noted anti-fascist researcher Leonard Zeskind writes, “The psychological, social and political space between conspiracy minded whizbangs outside the beltway, and the anti-immigrant congressmen supporting the Birther Bill then shrinks to invisibility. They are distinct without a difference that matters. The nuttiness of the conspiracy mongers becomes less salient than their search for a brighter, whiter tomorrow.”

While white supremacist notions date to the founding of the nation, this bleak outlook does not have to be our future. The challenge is not to casually dismiss the Birthers and the Birchers as irrelevant. Progressives need to call out their racism, sexism and homophobia. But, more importantly, we need to build a united human rights movement that won’t allow wedge politics to divide us.

And regarding President Obama, we need to avoid becoming a circular firing squad aiming at other progressives and liberals, rather than keeping our eyes on our true opponents – those who want to reverse our progress towards freedom and human rights.

Check out the latest edition of On The Issues Magazine, Race, Feminism, Our Future.

Loretta J. Ross is National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a Consulting Editor on this edition of On The Issues Magazine.

Photo credits: TOP – Masks II by Helene Ruiz; BOTTOM – Licker by Gloria Holwerda-Williams

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*Note from Fem2.0: Did you catch NWLC’s November 4 carnival for healthcare reform? Check out their widgets, donate to get t-shirts and bumper stickers and tell Congress to pass healthcare legislation that respects women’s and families’ needs. For more, check out the #whc Twitterstream here.

Why care about women’s health in health care reform? I think it’s critical for reproductive justice advocates to also become health care advocates in today’s world, but the reasons why were best captured by the 19th century Swiss poet and philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel. He wrote: “In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.”

Reproductive justice advocates have a unique opportunity to bring together disparate social justice movements to forge a compelling case for health care reform that meets women’s needs.

This is a tall order. Health care is a matter of life and death, especially for our most marginalized communities. The U.S. health system is broken. It is hard to access, it is expensive to use, it is profit driven, it leaves vulnerable communities without a safety net. It will take quite a lot to get it where it needs to be, but without the voices of reproductive justice advocates, it will never fulfill its promise: to keep us healthy.

Adversaries Play With Women’s Health

When I heard President Obama’s call to action on healthcare in February 2009, I thought about what true health care reform would mean for the communities that I live in, work in and advocate for. The potential, of true reform, seemed limitless.

The discussion over health care began with five reform plans, each emerging from a relevant U.S. House or Senate committee that has jurisdiction over health care in some way. These will be drawn down into one bill from each house and then, ultimately, one bill from all of Congress that the president will either sign or veto. In this entire process of bill writing, there is only one health care service, deemed both safe and legal, that is being targeted for explicit exclusion in some of the bills. That is, of course, abortion.

Since this debate began, an onslaught of opposition to reform has emerged. Opponents have made a clear target out of women’s reproductive health care needs.

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) says, “Abortion is not health care. Any health care plan which includes coverage for elective abortion should be rejected. This includes abortion referral, payment for abortion, or the training of medical personnel for abortion practices.”

Furthermore, the NAE battle lines extend to any reproductive health care. It writes: “Persons who engage in behavior which adversely affects their health, such as smoking, drug and alcohol abuse, promiscuity and over-eating, should be responsible for the additional medical liability.”

Yet again, the politics of exclusion are masquerading as the ethic of personal responsibility. The behaviors noted by NAE are a means of differentiating between those communities that “deserve” health care and those that do not. This pattern has occurred before — in the “War on Drugs,” in “Welfare Reform,” and in countless other efforts to paint low income people, people of color and poor people as not deserving of social services through some fault of their own. It should not taint the effort for health care reform.

Health and Justice

What does it mean to be healthy? Why is it, as Amiel asserted, “the first liberty?”

A measureof health is often made by assessing physical needs. This is central and inexorable. But, as reproductive justice advocates know, it is more, as well.

A woman’s ability to control her body and its reproductive capacity is central to securing overall health. Access to abortion and contraception are the tip of a very large iceberg of needs.

Acknowledging a history of eugenics and population control, the reproductive justice approach aims to ensure that women have all the medical and social resources they need to have children, or not, as well as the right to control if, when and how they become mothers. This awareness, while including access to abortion and contraception, extends to other needs, as well:

1. Maternity care, including pre- and post-natal care and infertility treatment;
2. A range of birthing options including midwives, doulas and alternative care providers;
3. Mental health services;
4. Preventative care, including but not limited to, Pap smears, vaccinations (such as HPV), childbirth education and mammograms;
5. Services that are ethnically and culturally competent;
6. Care that is sensitive to people of all different genders and sexual orientations and addresses their unique concerns;
7. Health care services that are economically and physically accessible to women and their families.

The reproductive justice movement thinks more broadly about the political, cultural, economic, racial, institutional and environmental factors that pertain to bodily health. A reproductive justice-based approach considers not only what illness a woman might have, but also the social factors (environmental toxins, access to preventative care, community health education, and so on) that make her more or less prone to getting sick and more or less able to afford treatment.

This comprehensive approach changes the meaning of “health” rather dramatically. “Health” no longer simply refers to whether or not a person is sick or whether or not a woman can get reproductive health care. Instead, it diagnoses the factors that contribute to, or detract from, overall wellbeing, not merely for a single woman, but also for her family and the community in which she lives. This is what Amiel means, I believe, when he says that in health there is freedom.

Reaching Out to Social Justice Partners

A vision of women’s health that utilizes the reproductive justice framework incorporates the leadership of women of color, poor women and young women who can determine their own needs and decipher a course of action based on their lived experiences.

Strategic considerations mean advocating for health care that is not exclusionary on the basis of race, gender, age, sexuality, ability or citizenship. Expanding the current healthcare systems will not be sufficient — we must acknowledge and actively address the disparities that exist, mobilizing people from allied social justice and human rights organizations to think of “health” as expansively as possible. Finally, we must integrate broad-based grassroots organizing into advocacy and use it to inform our legal strategies.

The past eight years have been tough, and reproductive justice advocates have been stemming the tide of anti-women legislation, holding back the onslaught of regressive policies.

Looking ahead requires a shift in perspective, one that I am just beginning to make myself. It is a shift from defense to offense, from protection to progress.

I consider that we have an opportunity to be visionaries. To actually make changes in the service of our vision. To hold our legislators accountable to our needs. To secure health care as the first of all liberties.

Check out the latest edition of On The Issues Magazine, Race, Feminism, Our Future.

Eesha Pandit is currently Director of Advocacy at The MergerWatch Project in New York. She is active in MergerWatch’s work with Raising Women’s Voices, a national initiative working to make sure women’s voices are heard in the health reform debate. She has been a regular contributor to RH Reality Check and previously served as Associate Director of Programs at the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program. She has also worked with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and Amnesty International USA’s Women’s Rights Program. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the University of Chicago.

Photo credits: TOP – The Cost of Fittin In 2009 by Helene Ruiz; BOTTOM: From OTI Archives, Spring 1994

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It’s been a surprise to find out what a sexist I really am. I’ve been calling myself a feminist for two decades, and surely was one for the two decades before that.

I’m a woman who found myself with a female husband – the man I married is trans and currently transitioning to living as female in the world. She has been doing so socially for some time and only now has decided to make it official with a name change and all the legal ballyhoo. I’ve been surprised by a lot of aspects of this process, not least of which is our relationship surviving it.

People can’t and don’t just change their sexual orientation because they want or need to, and partners of transgender people are no exception. I can’t magically become a lesbian, no matter how useful that would be. I am seen as one by most other people when I am holding my female spouse’s hand.

If I were categorically heterosexual I wouldn’t have managed this transition at all, which is one of many reasons I think of myself as simply queer.

I never played a heterosexual woman very convincingly, but I tried. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t expect any sexism in my own attitudes about gender in relationships. I was a tomboy growing up. As an adult, I was always a little too forthright and ungiggly for most straight guys. I preferred buying my own dinner and drinks in order to avoid any expectations later in the evening. I didn’t play along, reflecting them at twice their natural size, as Virginia Woolf once so famously put it in A Room of One’s Own. That said, as the woman in a straight relationship, you’re assumed to be the more feminine of the two of you – even if you aren’t.

What has surprised me the most are the expectations I had first of a male husband – and what the loss of “him” meant – as well as my more recent expectations of having a female wife. I use both husband and wife because both are true: legally, she is my husband, but socially, people see her as my wife. It is one thing for someone to become “not man,” which is more like subtracting visible markers of masculinity, both physical and social. And it is quite different for someone to become a “woman” – which involves something far trickier.

When it came down to it, I feared my partner’s transition because I expected her to become a woman, but what I didn’t expect was how differently I would see certain things she did.

It wasn’t about her femininity. As I noted, she was always more feminine than me, even when she lived in the world as male. My own gender, and our relationship, makes a lot more sense to people – what the gender theorist Judith Butler would call "cultural intelligibility" – now that we live in the world as a lesbian couple. Because I’m a tomboy, mentioning a boyfriend meant conversations would grind to a halt while I waited for people to make sense of what I’d just said. Now, when I mention a female partner, people just keep on talking, underwhelmed by the detail.

I’m sure that there are plenty of women like me, who are regularly surprised by the subtle ways our culture has of telling women to take it down a notch. A friend of mine had someone chide her about how openly she tells her husband how much money he can spend on drinks when they’re out. A few years ago a bunch of college guys said they didn’t want to marry women who had more money or more impressive jobs than they did, and women who make a lot of money or who have a lot of authority in the world have found that being in relationships with men who don’t wear the pants in the relationship still want to be treated as if they do,  as Carrie Fisher once pointed out to Maureen Dowd.

But at home, I wanted her to stop doing Lewis Black impersonations and playing air guitar. At the time I’d convinced myself I was just trying to help her fit in – something some transgender people value very much. In other ways, I was shielding her from the kind of admonishment any tomboy is sensitive to. I didn’t want her to hear the snide comments I’d heard as a kid, and as a teenager: you’re too angry, you don’t smile enough, or, why don’t you wear heels or dresses or more makeup.

She was – due to the demands of her own internal sense of gender – a tomboy too, but the kind who wears heels and beats everyone at pool. I found myself discouraging her from being the kind of woman who kicks ass and takes names, all for fear she might be clocked as trans.

What’s funny is that I never shielded her from the jokes about how "whipped" she was. She heard these regularly when she was my boyfriend. But that was about my gender and my feminism. It was okay for her to call and see if I was cool with her hanging out with co-workers when she was a guy, because that was considerate. As a woman, I found myself embarrassed by her being so considerate because it seemed "clingy" instead.

It astonishes me that that was all it took: same person, same decision, same expression of her love for me, but my own sexism kept me from seeing how much the same it was.

When “he” used to get us both drinks, it was gentlemanly; but once she became female, it was hard not to see it as subservient. “His” humility can look more like a lack of confidence; “his” graciousness can be read instead as self-sacrificing.

All of what she does looks like something else because she’s a woman.

I should have known better. My own decision to stay with her as she transitioned to a woman has been categorized as either the worst kind of self-effacing, "stand by your man," doormat codependency, or as evidence of my own radicalized choice to reject gendered expectations.

Feminism is in the eye of the beholder, apparently. I just never expected my husband to be the one whose gender would let me know I needed an optometrist.

Excerpt from She’s Not the Man I Married by Helen Boyd

It’s almost as if, as a culture, we’ve chosen to ignore how many ways gender shapes our lives. One night I caught one of those now-myriad home makeover shows on television. The family in question had suffered because the husband and father, a firefighter, had been injured in the line of duty. He was wheelchair-bound and on disability. While casting around for an alternate career, his wife had gone back to work full-time and was feeling the pressure of being the sole breadwinner. When she talked about the loss she felt—of how her husband, once a big, strong, and brave man, had become dependent on her—she expressed a kind of embarrassment. Not just of him, or for him; she seemed embarrassed by her own feelings, as well. The sorrow she felt seemed outweighed by her struggle to respect her husband now that he couldn’t “do” anything.

As I watched the show I thought, this is about gender but they’re not going to say that. And they didn’t.

Before anyone gets up in arms that I’m conflating disability with woman-ness, hear me out: I knew the wife was talking about gender because she talked about her husband the same way I talk about mine, in a voice tinged with deep love and sadness, anger and embarrassment. She sounded a lot like other partners of trans people I’ve talked to over the years, and she sounded a lot like a woman I know whose boyfriend was traumatized by a car accident he was in. In other words, she sounded like a woman who was exhausted with wishing that things could go back to the way they were. I know the sound of that wish too well, because it’s the sound of my own.

I’m sure that firefighter’s wife was as surprised as I was to find herself reaching to respect her husband—and just as surprised, too, to discover how out of reach it sometimes felt. Granted, Betty wasn’t ever the strapping, heroic firefighter type, but he certainly could play one on stage, and did play something like one in his day to day life when he was passing as a “regular guy,” before anyone knew he was trans. The firefighter’s wife wasn’t under the illusion that women can’t be the breadwinners, and neither am I. She was proving she could be because she had to, and I had a lifetime of paying my own bills before I met Betty. But our partners’ changes revealed something we’d formerly been unaware of: our expectations of what a husband is and does. For more traditional people, this might be a no-brainer because they think a woman needs a big strong man by her side, a man’s job is to bring home the bacon, and other Cleaver-era family values. But many of us—I’d even guess most of us—believe that feminism helped change those old-fashioned ideas. Those changes in our gender roles have been incremental, however, and the modifications made somewhat slowly, and over time. Sometimes those changes seem to be more public than personal, too.

Helen Boyd is the author of  My Husband Betty (Seal Press, 2004) and She’s Not the Man I Married (2007). She was an honored finalist for a Room of Her Own Foundation grant and recently published "A Cat of Nine Tale" in Global City Review. Her blog (en)gender can be found at www.myhusbandbetty.com.

Check out the latest edition of On The Issues Magazine, Our Genders, Our Rights.

Photo credits (first two): Gavin Rouille

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There is one place where the definition of gender remains binary – in the womb. When it comes to sonograms, amniocentesis and standard pre-natal testing, there are no nuances. Here, the pronouncement, “It’s a girl,” can translate into fierce and instant parental rejection. The fact is that when the issue is “sex selection abortion,” the same sex is always being selected — female.

Abortion has been regularly used as a method of sex selection in certain regions of the world, particularly China and India, where sons are more highly prized than daughters. But it was something of a surprise to doctors in Sweden. When the mother of two daughters arrived at Mälaren Hospital, seeking tests to determine the sex of her fetus. If female, she declared, she intended to abort.

The doctors were concerned enough to bring the issue to the National Board of Health and Welfare, inquiring how to handle requests where they felt "pressured to examine the fetus’s gender" without a clinical diagnosis. The Board came back and said that requests for abortions based on a child’s gender cannot be refused.

Here in the U.S. a recent New York Times article reported slight statistical variations among Americans of Chinese, Korean or Indian descent, suggesting that the cultural preference for boys in these societies is continuing in this country.

The story reported on research conducted by Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers’ say their analysis of the 2000 Census shows that the odds increase beyond what is standard for a third child to be a boy in Asian-American families from China, Korea and India if the family did not already have a son. The data "suggest that in a sub-population with a traditional son preference, the technologies are being used to generate male births when preceding births are female," they wrote in the paper.

Even though sex selection is illegal in India, and China has been struggling with this issue for years, Edlund, a professor in the Department of Economics at Columbia University, told the Times, "That this is going on in the United States — people were blown away by this."

Blown away indeed. Most people find the idea of sex selection abortion unacceptable, and a Zogby Interactive poll taken in March 2006 found that 86 percent of Americans supported a prohibition on the practice.  Sex-selection abortion has been banned in Illinois, Pennsylvanian and most recently in Oklahoma. Representative Trent Franks– a pro-life member of Congress from Arizona — introduced  the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2009, a bill that would ban sex-selection or race-based abortions.

In an op-ed in The Washington Times, Trent wrote,"Regardless of one’s position on abortion, this form of discrimination should horrify every American. The idea of killing a baby simply because she is a girl is reprehensible."

Posing the Right Question

While sex selection abortion allows women to make what is, in a sense, the ultimate in supposedly informed consumerism, it also can work to create a world where being female is viewed as the primary and most terminal of birth defects.

News reports describe a new test being marketed that can determine the sex of a fetus after only 10 weeks, rather than the 20 weeks of the traditional sonogram. In light of these developments, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby asked, "What kind of feminist would it be who could contemplate the use of abortion to eliminate ever-greater numbers of girls, and not cry out in horror?"

Good question. And one that I personally asked myself in 1991 when I counseled a Hindu woman who was 18 weeks pregnant, married with two sons and wanted the abortion because the sonogram showed the fetus she was carrying was female.

This is the place where my feminism and pro-choice philosophies collided violently. I sat across from her and thought of her fetus and the “primal birth defect” it carried and felt rage and despair, as if it were me she would be negating.

I so much wanted to say: ”No. STOP! You should not.” Not “You cannot,” but “You should not.” Yes, this feminist makes judgments — value judgments — and, sometimes, I disagree profoundly with some women’s choices.

I would not personally make a decision to abort on that basis — or for some of the other reasons that women present themselves for abortions.

But I have spent the better part of my life defending the principle of reproductive freedom and have provided the service to thousands of women for over 38 years because, ultimately, women do and should have the right to make what may be to others the wrong choice.

It’s about separating the chooser from the choice.

The Random House Webster College Dictionary defines choice as the right, power or opportunity to choose.

When an individual makes a choice, it is the act of “the making,” the active will and power of choosing itself that has unconditional value, not the result of the choosing. The only absolute in this equation is the one who chooses, that is, it is the individual woman who is the active moral agent in the decision-making process and not the state, the court or any political body.

The choice can be morally good, or not. This, of course, brings into view the nature of morality. If an individual has an absolutist value that all abortions, for whatever reason, are evil, then there is no further discussion. The raped nine-year-old, the incested 10-year-old, whomever-under-whatever circumstances: all are committing an evil act. There can be no possibility of choice because a woman choosing an abortion is a generic evil which should preclude the choice itself.

Interestingly enough, with Roe v. Wade in the background giving women the opportunity not to be pregnant, the act of continuing a pregnancy is more of a “choice” than it ever was historically. Each time a woman actively continues with her pregnancy, the ”wantedness” of every child increases.

Some believe that the choice of abortion is wrong in all places for all time. But attitudes about abortion are situational, historic and geographic.

My work to open Choices East, a satellite of Choices Women’s Medical Center in New York, in the former Soviet Union was inspired by a 35-year-old woman who came to our medical center for her 36th abortion. Like so many other Russian émigré women living in New York, she was violently opposed to using birth control because her Russian doctor taught her that "the Pill" was far more dangerous than repeat abortions. This misinformation benefited Russian physicians because they could earn extra money doing abortions on women in their homes to supplement their three dollars a month salary. Other forms of contraception were unavailable for all practical purposes. For these women, the "issue" of abortion posed no questions of morality, ethics, or women’s rights versus fetal life. There was only the harsh reality that sex rarely came without anxiety and that the price one often paid for it was high and dangerous.

Are these women who have no other choice continually making the wrong one?

Are the women of China and India who are so much a product of their paternalistic and misogynistic cultures making the wrong choice when they want a child who will not join their husband’s families after marriage or when they want sons to take care of parents as they age, as are the practices in their societies?

Are they making a wrong choice if the results of their choice determine their ability and their family’s ability to survive? When and where is a choice right or wrong? And, according to whose dictates?

If we, in fact, say “trust women,” then we are assuming that we should also trust them when we feel that the choice they are making is wrong for us personally, or wrong in our view of general ethical principles.

The issue of sex selection abortion is difficult because it is a place where the rights and values of the chooser clash violently with the nature of the choice.

Morality and Human Rights

Long time colleague  Frances Kissling, writing in Salon describes a hypothetical scenario that she was presented with at a Planned Parenthood conference 15 years ago. Asked whether or not, if she were a doctor, she would provide a sex selection abortion, she said. "I wouldn’t do it," but thought a policy should be implemented that was "open to referring women to providers who do."

She goes on to say, “Just because something is legal — and should be legal — does not mean it is always ethical….If pro-choice advocates follow the example of those opposed to abortion and present only one value — a women’s right to make this decision — as the only ethical consideration worth discussing in difficult cases, do we not become as extremist as we say they are?”

Kissling compresses all the myriad pro-choice thinking into one collective body with the same interests that arbitrate morality. By implying that defending a woman’s fundamental right to choose is a potentially extremist position, and calling choice "single value ethics," as she does in the article, Kissling both diminishes and disregards individual women’s ethical decisions and presents values in the collective absolute. There is no conceptual or philosophical equality here. To accept the language of the opposition is to cede our moral compass.

Unlike Kissling who believes that "there is a point where our respect for potential life, for that individual fetus, should outweigh a woman’s desire, even need, not to be pregnant," Marianne Mollmann of Human Rights Watch offers a different perspective: "The solution to the prevalence of sex-selective abortion is to remove the motivation (emotional or real) behind the procedure by advancing women’s human rights and their economic and social equality," she wrote in a June commentary.

Yes, the solution to the dilemma of the chooser and the choice is to create a world where women truly have both equal and human rights. The solution is to focus on changing the need for the choice of abortion, not to criminalize the chooser.

Every day at Choices, women go into the counseling sessions and answer the question, “Why are you having this abortion?” Not infrequently, they answer with a statement like “Oh I’m not at all like all the others in the waiting room, I really wanted to keep this pregnancy, but…”

It’s in the but that the reality of abortion lies.

Practitioners who counsel women seeking abortions do an exercise called "the last abortion." The participants choose one woman among six who will be allowed to receive the last abortion on earth. It is an exercise in individual ethics and forces one to confront her own prejudices. There is an orphaned teenager, a victim of rape, a woman carrying a medically deformed fetus, a 46-year-old woman with HIV, a 12-year-old, and a graduate student who wants to finish her Ph.D. They all have good reasons, because all the reasons are theirs. And in the end, that is the answer: All the reasons are theirs.

If you were the chooser — what would be your choice?

What’s your answer? Click here.

Check out the latest edition of On The Issues Magazine, Our Genders, Our Rights.

Merle Hoffman is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of On The Issues Magazine. She is the Founder, President and CEO of CHOICES Women’s Medical Center.

Photo credits (top to bottom): Fran Forman – Blue Egg, Sisters, Fig-17

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from On The Issues Magazine

Were you thinking we were done with elections and could take a few minutes to celebrate a pro-woman administration and a Democratically-controlled Congress that appears ready to embrace pro-choice and pro-equality measures? Sorry, my Sisters. Elections are never over when they are over.

Candidates are already gearing up for 2010 and 2012. It’s critically important that feminists review the lessons of 1992 and its parallels to 2008 so we can avoid repeating mistakes—and more urgently, so we can charge ahead with strategies that advance a bold vision of gender equality and justice.

After all, men have been making America’s political decisions for over 200 years now, and I don’t need to tell you it’s not a pretty picture. Women, especially those not afraid to identify themselves with the F-word, are the change we need. But whether women will be the change we get depends on whether we use the power we have.

For the one constant in politics is that every victory sows the seeds of the next defeat and every defeat sows the seeds of the next victory, unless eternal vigilance is applied. This means using a movement mentality that continually advances bold new ideas and keeps its grassroots watered.

Ideological Whiplash Sneaks Up

A quick look back: 1992’s “Year of the Woman” was deemed a transformational moment similar to 2008. The nation was ready for change, tired of Republican presidents who took us into war while taking the economy downhill, and disgusted with wedge-issue politics that kept the country fighting about abortion and homosexuality when people were hurting from bread-and-butter woes. Women voters were especially outraged (read that, “activated”) over the Senate’s treatment of Anita Hill after she accused the eminently unqualified conservative Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

Then, Boom! In 1994, the right came roaring back with the Gingrich Revolution and ultra-conservative “Contract for America,” (or as I prefer, a “Contract on America”). Republicans, mostly of the hard right variety, grabbed a net gain of eight Senate and 54 House seats.

Karan English, a pro-choice Democrat supported by Emily’s List, typifies what happened. English was elected to Congress from Northern Arizona’s swing District 6 in 1992. Though backed even by “Mr. Conservative,” the late Senator Barry Goldwater (who in his inimitable way said that “all good Christians should kick Jerry Falwell in the ass”), she was defeated in 1994 by Limbaugh-like Republican J.D. Hayworth.

Far from being passé, conservative political strength regained its headlock on Congress and the national psyche. This scared the bejeezus out of Bill Clinton’s still wet-behind-the-ears administration. In Texas, George W. Bush defeated Governor Ann Richards that same year, setting the stage for his 2000 presidential win, which by any measure has been devastating to 20th century advances in civil rights, women’s rights and reproductive justice.

It’s tempting to credit the likes of Gingrich and Bush’s spinmeister Karl Rove with right wing resurgence. But this ideological whiplash could have been prevented if only the women who turned out to vote in droves in 1992 had returned to the polls in 1994. Instead, women demonstrated voting power, and then too many vanished from the political firmament. The right, on the other hand, never, ever goes away.

In 2008, Ann Kirkpatrick reclaimed English’s district (now redrawn Dist. 1) for the Democrats by beating extreme right-wing incumbent Rick Renzi, again securing even some conservative endorsements. But will she keep the seat in 2010?

Get Serious About Gender Parity

Power unused is power useless. It takes sustained ethical use of power to get and secure liberty. Yes, women friends, we must understand that power is not inherently bad; it’s our responsibility to use power in the service of feminist values both in political office and in influencing policy decisions. Feminists must get a bigger vision for feminist and female equality in making public policy, and mean business about achieving it by date certain. NOW has begun to identify what that agenda includes. My take is that we all know it when we see it, so don’t let the lack of a document agreed to by every women’s group keep us from taking action without delay.

It’s true that gender politics has become more nuanced, as the paradox of faux feminist Sarah Palin illustrates. But that makes it even more important to support women (and men–see below) who explicitly and publicly support feminist values and policies. That’s not necessarily partisan, incidentally, since the Republican party was first to support the ERA. it’s all about who wields voting power most effectively, and the Republicans’ shift to the right because of right-wing organizing precinct by precinct is yet one more cautionary tale.

Deal A Three-Handed Strategy

This three-point strategy will get us our rightful half of the policy-making pie: 1) elect women with feminist values; 2) promote women for appointive office, and 3) mobilize movement and grassroots support for policies that will secure equality and justice for women.

1. Elect women (and men) with feminist values

Women make up only 17 percent of the U.S. Senate and 16 percent of the House. At the current rate of increase, it will take 70 years to reach parity. Personally, I can’t wait that long. It’s well past time for women to have parity in all decision making bodies, especially the reins of political power. So let’s set specific goals and hold ourselves accountable to reach them:

2. Promote women for appointive office

Essentially the same commitments apply as in the electoral strategy. Think about the judiciary, for example. Dahlia Lithwick speculates on what we mean when we say there should be more female judges and why it matters. But suffice it to remember how Sandra Day O’Connor cobbled together majorities to hold onto Roe v Wade’s ever-diminishing thread during her tenure. Multiply this by cabinet posts, and local, state and federal commissions, and the impact is exponential.

Go for it. Seek out an appointment. It’s also a good way to get your feet wet and prepare to run for office yourself.

3. Mobilize movement and grassroots support for women’s equality and justice

We need to dramatically beef up support and encouragement for women officials at all levels of government through a strategic coalition of the burgeoning existing organizations dedicated to recruiting and training women to run for office. The infrastructure is there, but could easily be leveraged with some forward looking leadership.

In regard to taking on issues, here’s a reproductive justice example that applies, too, and to any measure. In 1992, a raft of state anti-choice ballot initiatives were soundly defeated. One I had to contend with in Arizona as CEO of Planned Parenthood was rejected by a whopping 67 per cent to 33 per cent, causing pundits and pro-choicers alike to declare that the nation had decided, once and for all, that abortion should be legal (as if once-and-for-all could ever be in a democracy). Well, in 2008, South Dakotans faced and defeated a ballot measure almost identical to the one rejected in Arizona in 1992. Now, several states are mounting draconian egg-as-persons initiatives for 2010.

We should change the dynamic by mobilizing supporters around initiatives like the Prevention First Act and the Freedom of Choice Act at state and federal levels.

Activists need to act, so let’s act from the power of setting our own agenda rather than reacting to attacks from the other side.

Hard Times Make Good Chances

Gender parity won’t solve all problems, but women’s lives will be significantly better and our laws more just if we commit to carrying out these three strategies.

The current economic mess is the best opportunity we will ever have to hasten the pace of change toward gender parity, since people are more open to breaking boundaries during chaotic times. But like any profound change, it won’t just happen. It’s up to women to elect, promote, and mobilize our way to equality and justice.

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Gloria Feldt is the author of “The War on Choice: the Right-Wing Attack on Women’s Lives” and “How to Fight Back,” and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its political arm, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. She’s currently working on a book about women’s relationship with power. Her blog is Heartfeldt Politics. Reach her at Gloria@gloriafeldt.com or Twitter @Heartfeldt. See more at GloriaFeldt.com.

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from On The Issues Magazine

As a person who feels that war should be the strategy of last resort, I still like to read military history. I find myself going back to the wisdom of Sun Tzu who wrote in “The Art of War” in the 6th century BC: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”

As feminists who fight battles against those who would deny women’s freedom and equality, we know the mettle of our enemies. They are relentless, committed beyond secular principles, willing to look at things in the very long term, absolutely sure of their righteousness and totally determined.

They have one solid line, which they define and defend. Those who stand on their side are with the angels; those who stand on the other are misguided, at best, and sinners, at worst.

One battle or many do not determine who will ultimately triumph in any war. From the civil war in the U.S., the suffragist struggle for the vote, the ongoing battle for reproductive rights and all other revolutionary movements in the world, history shows that nothing is achieved once and for all.

Movements are not static, formal things — freedom and justice are generational struggles that are passed down and through the ages. The movement for women’s liberation is a Protean force that contracts, expands and expresses itself, directly and, at times, in camouflage, depending on the current theater of struggle.

The strength of the movement is that it can shape-shift—situationally compromise, accept new technologies, ways of communicating and influence– all in service of a vision. The vision itself remains universal — beyond cultures and national boundaries.

Feminists may need to practice realpolitik to get the “least bad” candidate elected and the needed bills vetoed or passed. The ideologist asks the question: “Is it good for women?” The politician asks: “Is this the best we can do for women now?” The visionary holds to a higher standard, and takes the longer view.

Because strategies and tactics change in response to the political and historical moment, those who view feminism’s existence purely in terms of realpolitik sometimes wonder if the movement still exists – and, if so, to what end.

For instance, the present public discussion of the need for “common ground” in the abortion debate is a reflection of the Obama Administration’s attempted conciliation or reconciliation between adversarial parties. So far, the discussion has talked about reducing the need for abortion.

Our Bodies on the Line

Pro-choice advocates cannot enter this process in a political vacuum that discounts the deep antipathy anti-choice forces have towards women’s power and sexuality. I firmly believe that there can be no common ground with those who consider the Pill to be “chemical warfare,” and abortion to be a moral sin greater than the rape of a nine-year old.

These discussions place the pro-choice movement more on the verge of capitulation than conciliation.

But this does not argue for the demise of the vision of reproductive justice. Indeed, reproductive freedom is the front line, the bottom line and the everlasting line in the sand of any definition of women’s transcendent rights that must be continually defended.

All rights start with the body. We are embodied creatures — and women far more than men because our reproductive abilities are the source, the core, the prime objective of society’s control and oppression of us.

Theory must become practice at one point in time. Our bodies are the place where the power structures make their marks with their laws, their religions, traditions and their prejudices.

Our bodies are lines in the sand. Each one of us proclaims that the power of the state stops at our skin when we lay our bodies down for an abortion, saying, with that action, that it is we who will decide when and whether to bear children. Or when we leave a violent relationship. Or when we resist and when we take the right to sexual pleasure. And when we declare that we must live in freedom.

When you draw a line in the sand, you have got to be prepared to defend it, to take risks and embrace challenges. That, too, calls upon the body, as well as the body politick.

Here We Stand

Rosa Parks and Alice Paul put their bodies on the line, saying, “This much injustice and no more.” So did all of the providers of abortion services who risked their lives and freedom before abortion was legal, and those who continue to risk their lives by just doing their work on a daily basis.

Perhaps Martin Luther expressed this perspective best after he nailed his 95 Theses on the doors at Wittenberg in 1517: “Here I stand; I can do no other.”

That act was an inspiration 20 years ago when I led the first pro-choice civil disobedience at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on April 29, 1989. Pro-choice activists were arrested for the first time in the movement’s history. We declared that “women’s rights are in a state of emergency,” and we held our petition at the cathedral door.

The petition’s words carry a message today for those stepping onto the shaky sand of common ground. It said:

I am convinced that the seeds for an unapologetic women’s movement are in the bones and the blood of all of us. It should come alive every time one of us is raped, one of us is stoned, burned alive, killed by a loved one, forced to give birth or to kill our female offspring.

That is what we must know about ourselves — that each of us holds that power. We may have to e-mail each other on the nature and location of the battle, but in the end, we know that we all must put our real bodies on the line and reject common ground in order to reach the higher ground of our vision.

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Merle Hoffman is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of On The Issues Magazine. She is the Founder, President and CEO of CHOICES Women’s Medical Center.

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