it’s time to talk about women I chose to put at the top of the site. I was going to begin chronologically with Victoria Woodhull but today is Shirley Chisholm’s birthday, so it’s only appropriate to start with her. She was born on this day in 1924.  She passed away January 1, 2005.
I chose to honor women who are personally significant to me. Shirley Chisholm is widely known for being the first African-American congresswoman. She served for seven terms from 1968-1983 representing a New York district. But one of her most influential moves was becoming a founding member of Congressional Black Caucus in 1969. Here is a list of their priorities from their website:

* CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT AND OPPORTUNITY GAPS IN EDUCATION
* ASSURING QUALITY HEALTH CARE FOR EVERY AMERICAN
* FOCUSING ON EMPLOYMENT AND ECONOMIC SECURITY, BUILDING WEALTH AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
* ENSURING JUSTICE FOR ALL
* GUARANTEEING RETIREMENT SECURITY FOR ALL AMERICANS
* INCREASING EQUITY IN FOREIGN POLICY

When the CBC started in 1969 it had nine members as of 2005 it had over 40 members. In 2000-1, the CBC provided one of the lonely voices of dissent from the American government about the way in which the US presidential election results were being resolved. In the January 6, 2001 CBC press conference/ event in which  presided over, Representative Hastings of Florida said:

I would have said to Vice President Gore that Harry Truman once said that what is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular. What we were doing here today is right… we stand proudly to say that we did what was right.” (Click here for full transcript.)

What Rep. Hastings is referring to is the CBC’s protest of the electoral vote count. While many private citizens were expressing dismay as to the way the process was unfolding, the CBC was the only political group to abandon concerns about their image and made their voice heard loud and clear.

The CBC only exists because of Shirley Chisholm and the other cofounders.  She helped create a space for politicians to speak up and take “unpopular” positions.  Similar to Virgina Woolf stating that women needed a room of their own to write, Shirley Chisholm was allowing politicians to have their own space to safely express their views in hopes that some voters felt that they and their beliefs were being properly represented.

Happy Birthday Shirley!  

Is Wal-Mart in danger of falling into the Radical Homosexual agenda?

This website thinks so.

• Wal-Mart is still a “corporate member” of the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, and will continue a financial stake in promoting the radical homosexual agenda.
• Wal-Mart still dispenses the “Plan B” abortion pill that kills unborn children.
• Wal-Mart has not issued an apology for its actions.
• Wal-Mart has not fired its homosexual marketing agency.
• Wal-Mart has not removed the many filthy books for sale on its website.

After taking a quick look around the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce site, I found nothing that really supported a radical agenda.

The NGLCC has quickly moved to become the LGBT business voice in Washington, on Wall Street, and down Main Street USA. We feel it’s imperative to the advancement of equality and prosperity for the LGBT community that we function as a unified economic force through our advocacy effort.

Meanwhilethe only thing on the Wal-Mart site is their “low, low” savings!

(1) All My Children, the soap opera is going to feature a transgendered character.

The show will feature a character making the transition from male to female. The last time a transgered character was featured on a soap oper was in 1996 on the short lived show the City, a spinoff of Loving. All My Children claims they aren’t just grabbing this storyline for shock value appeal to gain viewership.

The show wasn’t interested in doing something just to be sensational…GLAAD and some transgenders were brought in as consultants in shaping the character, teaching the producers when it is appropriate to call a character “she” even before surgery….from article

Hopefully, All My Children will stand by its word and deliver a thoughtful storyline just as they did a few years earlier with the “coming out of the closet” storyline with the character Bianca.

(2) Lesbian jailed for “crying rape”. The most astonishing aspect of this article is the use of language from the title “Fake rape lesbian” to the comparison to crying wolf.

This BBC article offers a much more straightforward telling.

However, both articles find it necessary to identify the woman as a lesbian which sets her a part from the mainstream heterosexual population. It is another example of a woman’s sexuality being placed in the spotlight.

(3) Polygamist wives speak out in defense of polygamy.

The day after Thanksgiving. Turned on CNN and watched the same news stories over and over: Russian spy dies, shoppers line up at 5 AM to get good deals, and bloodiest day in Iraq since the US led invasion.

I am stuffed with CNN and food so I turn to the RSS feeds turning up on my computer. “Body Politik: Exploring the new monogamy” by Denie Brunsdon in the McGill Daily caught my eye. She refers to this new monogamy that “focuses on the understanding that openness, honesty, discussion, and flexibility are far greater assets in a successful long-term partnership than a hard and fast rule against all hanky-panky.”

What the new monogamy means to the younger college crowd and people in their early 20s is an “open relationship.” During college, I always had a friend of a friend who was trying to encourage his or her partner to have an open relationship, get out of an open relationship or had just broken up because of an open relationship. I wonder how these women in open relationships look to the world. Brunsdon refers to being weary of “the saintly-wife or sinning-slut spectrum.” How long will we continue to relegate women to these two opposite, polarizing categories?

A few posts about I referred to slut being a new power term. The word is being thrown around all over the place a lot more than even a few years ago. One question I have is do open relationships make women come across as sluts?

One of Women’s History’s most beloved figures Amelia Earhart wrote this note to her husband before their marriage “I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly.” Clearly, Earhart wasn’t the first woman to suggest an open marriage. It is because women like Earhart that scholars became interested in the private lives of public women and in turn we were able to learn about their family, marriages, relationships, friendships, hobbies, and, of course, sexuality. And no one would ever suggest that Earhart was a slut because she had an extramarital affair. But everyone was out to blame Angelina Jolie for breaking up the golden Pitt-Aniston partnership. Everything from her sexual past was brought to light.

My main concern is not how Jolie is written up today but how will she be written up in the history books. I know there are much more complicated histories of Earhart written beyond what is recorded in our textbooks. What Earhart has done with her life is much more admirable than Jolie. Even Jolie said on the June 20th show of Anderson Cooper 360
“JOLIE: Yes. Well, I have a stupid income for what I do for a living.”

There have been rumors circulating for a long time that Jolie preferred an open relationship while married to Billy Bob Thornton. Is it because Earhart lived a more visibly admirable life than Jolie that she does not deserve outward criticism for an open marriage?

I don’t think either women deserved or deserved such criticism. But I know it will be included in Jolie’s biography as it is included more and more in biographies about Earhart. We can only wait to see how both women are written up in the history books in regards to their sexuality and personal relationships.

Well, kind of.

According to this article Name changes on campuses stir feminism debate:

The University of Waterloo student association changed the spelling of its Womyn’s Centre to the ordinary spelling of women.

However, on a more postive note,  the University of Guelph changed the name of Women’s Resource Centre to the Guelph Resource Centre for Gender Empowerment and Diversity.  While the second name encourages celebration it also replaces women with the word gender.  There is the idea that Universities say they have a Gender Studies program instead of a Women’s Studies program because it is more inclusive of men.  However, others argue that men have been in the scholastic spotlight for years and women deserve their own space.

Professor Judith McKenzie admits that feminism “has a long way to go.”

I thought I would take a look through some university and college newspapers in New York state to get a look at what’s going on campuses these days. Next time, I’ll pick a different state or region to focus on.

(1) At SUNY Binghamton, female students are receiveing threatening phone calls from an unknown male voice.

“I’m gonna stick it in you so far that I will be riding you till it’s bleeding,” said the perverted, mysterious caller on the other end of the phone.

The article went on to report that students were urged to report any mysterious phone calls to the university police. There is also discussion of making phone numbers unavailable to the public.

Sound like some dude needs to get a life or at least call a 1900 number.

(2) Union College’s newspaper Concordiensis reports that hundreds of Union students against intolerance and bigotry.

(3) An opinion piece in University of Rochester’s newspaper encourages students to move beyond their cliques and embrace the diversity on campus.

(4) St. John University in Jamaica, NY celebrates the winning combination of Kia Wright and Angela Clark on the women’s basketball team.

And one for the holidays:

In Salem Oregon, this Statesman article reveals how one resident Rachel Greco considers herself a “quilt historian.”

“Early in the history of this country,” she said, “women were not allowed to vote, form an opinion, own property or even have the rights to their children. The only thing they could own were things they made themselves, so quilts became a form of inheritance that could be passed down from generation to generation.”

Ms. Greco owns Grandma’s Attic Sewing Emporium where she holds meetings for her quilting group “Grandma’s $5 Quilt Club.” Member work on a different quilt block during the twice monthly meetings. past quilts have included themes like “Stories My Grandma Told Me” and”Northwest Women of Influence.” Several grandmothers, mothers and daughters attend the meetings together to pass down the fmaily tradition of quilting

Greco said she is dedicated to the “gospel of quilting.”

Slut doesn’t mean who you sleep with anymore

I learned what the word slut was when I was 11 years old.  I was explaining the intricacies of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield’s love lives in Sweet Valley High to a babysitter.  She said they sounded like sluts.  I asked my mom later what the word meant.  She explained to me it meant ‘women who slept with my many partners’ then she asked me how I found out about the word.  Needless to say, that babysitter didn’t watch me that much anymore.

The word was mentioned here and there in the media while I was in high school and the beginning of college.  But it was around 2001 with the onset of the Hilton sisters and Tara Reid that I heard the word thrown around a lot more.

We all know that Paris Hilton became a household name when her sex tape with an ex was released to the media around the time her show The Simple Life debuted.  The world was quick to diagnose her as a promiscuous, attention-seeking slut.   I wondered how she could be branded as a slut when she made the tape with a boyfriend.  I am sure Ms. Hilton has had her share of one-night stands, but I wondered why she was being attacked for having consensual sex with a partner.  What wasn’t under as much of an attack was her misinformed decision to leave such a private tape in unreliable hands.  Of course, she could have wanted the video to be released.  However, the fact is the media narrowly focused on her sexuality and proclaimed her a slut but no one ever paid much attention to actions that led to the release of the tape.

Now we have Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie and a slew of other young women who wear provocative clothing, party all night long, dance on table tops with a bottle of tequila, have a cute boy or much older man on their arms, and some sort of tiny dog that accompanies them everywhere.   The terms media slut and attention whore have been used to describe each of these young women more than once.  But what struck me about these descriptions is that many of these women have been in long-term relationships.  Whenever they are caught kissing someone at a party it is written up in Us and People.  This behavior is described as risqué, unrespectable, and nothing a “good girl” would do.  But what twenty something year old woman hasn’t kissed a boy at a party?

Slut no longer just means how many people you sleep with.  It means you enjoy life with abandon and don’t really give a flying f*** about what people think.  It’s a power statement for some people; the young women being described as sluts own millions of dollars, are successful business entrepreneurs, and seem to live satisfying if drama filled lives.  Of course, these standards don’t determine happiness for everyone.  Standards of success have changed in the last decade from having a law degree equaling success to a reality TV show meaning “you’ve made in life.”  With our revised priorities, our language has adjusted itself.

Our sluts today are not the sluts of yesterday who thrived on men’s attention and sexual dalliances, today’s so-called sluts treat men as an accessory.  Of course, the term is still used to explain women’s relationship to men and their sexual behavior.  How do we move away from explaining women in direct relationship to men?  Of course, we can’t get anywhere with that unless we take women out of the sexual microscope.  Once that is accomplished, our priorities will focus on talent and intelligence as main indicators of success.  Sexuality will always be a part of the picture but not the central determining factor toward a woman’s identity.

I always wondered what the difference between autobiography and memoir was.  I have read both of each and have never noticed a huge difference.  So I decided to thumb through my copy of the Oxford American Dictionary and look it up:

autobiography |ˌôtəbīˈägrəfē| noun ( pl. -phies) an account of a person’s life written by that person : he gives a vivid description of his childhood in his autobiography.

memoir |ˈmemˌwär; -ˌwôr| noun 1 a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources : in 1924 she published a short memoir of her husband. • ( memoirs) an autobiography or a written account of one’s memory of certain events or people. 2 an essay on a learned subject : an important memoir on Carboniferous crustacea. • ( memoirs) the proceedings or transactions of a learned society : Memoirs of the Horticultural Society.

So a memoir has a more of a historical basis.  Now whenever I pick up a book labeled as an autobiography or a memoir, I am going to see if they correctly meet these standards.  I am going to assume a lot of the more recently published ones will not.  I’ll keep track in here.

New York is a city free of inhibition.  Walking down the street, you hear snippets of people’s discussions with friends, words from cell phone conversations, men and women muttering angrily to themselves. ( This NYTimes piece discusses personal space issues in NYC.)

It is also full of confrontation.  Cab drivers will furiously flag their middle at offending drivers and pedestrians.  People will ask complete strangers questions like “how much did you pay for your shoes?”

The subway commute during the morning rush hour produces a sizeable number of confrontations.   People are in a rush.  Some are trying to balance a hot latte, newspaper, bag and ipod as they cling to the poles.  Others take up too much room.  Several women attempt to apply makeup to their face as the 1-train rushes between 50th and 42nd streets.

And people bumping into each other continuously.   Having lived in the city for more than fifteen years, I have seen my fair share of verbal sparrings over people bumping into each other, hogging seats, and dirty looks. Unfortunately, homeless people are sometimes the object of these attacks.  I’ve heard the every day commuter tell them “to get out of my face,” “go get a job,” or even “get a life” when homeless people approach them for money.

I honestly thought I heard the worst until my husband told me an atrocious tale of one of his daily commutes.  A young homeless woman came onto the subway holding a two-year-old child.  She then proceeded to ask for money as she explained the circumstances that led to her becoming destitute at 17 years old.  Several people in the subway card handed her money or food.

Suddenly a nicely dressed, middle-aged woman asked the homeless teenager a question:

Woman: Why did you get pregnant?

Girl: I don’t know.  It just happened.

Woman: Why didn’t you have an abortion?

Girl: I believe abortion is murder.

Woman: Well, there is a time and place for it.

It was then when my husband’s stop came and he got off the train.  The next day before he told me about this exchange, he prefaced it by saying it was the most “outrageous” thing he had ever seen or heard on the subway.  From a regular New York City commuter that is saying a lot.

What he told me immediately had my mind wondering.  Here are two women– one is presumably not homeless and makes a decent amount of money to live in NYC while the other one is apparently lacking shelter, a regular income, and access to food. Did the seemingly more privileged woman believe she could question the teenage mother because she was in fact more privileged?   Because the young woman announced to the subway car that she needed food make her more susceptible and deserving of a public ridicule?  Or was the older woman just having a bad day?

I believe this older woman crossed a horrible line.  We live in a city where we are always in each other’s faces.  By living in this city, we are relinquishing the choice to live completely private lives.  Levels of privacy are possible but in one simple second this can all fall a part. A spill of a purse or briefcase can result in a whole subway car of people knowing you carry around a pill bottle of Valium and a twelze pack of condoms.

Clearly, this homeless woman was taking a risk in not having anyone offer her any sort of food or money.  I am going to go out on a limb and that this woman was not expecting  that her choice to have a child was going to be up for discussion.  I could be wrong.  She could be completely used to this routine .  But as my husband pointed out, while women are adamantly fighting for their right to choose why should it be deemed “OK” to interrogate a needy women about her choice to have a child.   It was perhaps the only choice she felt grateful to be able to make.

At the end of the day, the subway is a public place shared by many people treating it as their private space.  Maybe neither of these women are that affected by their clash in the subway car.   However, based on their “conversation,” it is obvious that New Yorkers are not about to stop publicly airing their opinions no matter how rudely ithey are stated.

(1) Be foreward feminism leads to bad religion the new book Evangelical feminism new path to liberalism claims. Evangelical feminism is a hazard to true evangelical Christianity, a certain guy named, Wayne Grudem, argues. The method of interpreting Scripture that the envangelical feminists use treats homosexuality as a natural practice. Oh dear. Oh my.

(2) Seniors at Merrimack High School in New Hampshire succed in fight to keep the Women’s Studies curriculum from being another budget casualty.

(3) A student at the University of Northern Iowa likens being popularity to be a “social slut.”

(4) “Pollitt criticized the Bush administration for ignoring the real needs of working women - especially poor mothers - in favor of ideology by spending welfare dollars to push marriage as a solution to poverty.” The Emory Wheel on Katha Pollitt’s visit to their campus.
(3) This Aussies newspaper calls new Bond film feminist because the secret agent “falls in love and has his heart broken” and he “is less of a chauvinist. “

Great to see the media has such high standards in describing feminism.