Look at the freedom we’ve brought! January 31, 2008

An Afghan journalism student has been sentenced to death for downloading a report on women’s rights. What a fabulous democracy we’ve brought the Afghan people.

The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.

Mr Kambaksh, 23, distributed the tract to fellow students and teachers at Balkh University with the aim, he said, of provoking a debate on the matter. But a complaint was made against him and he was arrested, tried by religious judges without – say his friends and family – being allowed legal representation and sentenced to death.

The Independent has a petition you can sign here. It’s a petition to the UK foreign office, but anyone can sign it, and non-UK pressure can make a difference.

Women In Media & News January 31, 2008

I first learned of the organization, Women in Media and News, this morning through The Huffington Post.  Then, within an hour, an email mentioned their blog, WIMN Voices.  Stranger still, the email was forwarding a letter in which the reference to the blog was quite possibly accidental, the product of someone’s forgetting to change all the entries in a form  letter.

So, putting aside the unphilosophical sense of receiving a HINT, I still think it’s worth drawing our readers attention to WIMN. Their mission:

WIMN works to increase women’s presence in the public debate, emphasizing those who are least often heard, including women of color, low-income women, lesbians, youth and older women.

WIMN analyzes representations of women in media; trains women’s and social justice groups to hold media outlets accountable to the public interest; advocates for policy reform and structural change; and works with journalists to broaden the quantity and diversity of women’s voices appearing in the media.

WIMN promotes equity for women as subjects, sources and producers because accurate, diverse news and entertainment media are essential to a vibrant democracy and an informed public.

They provide classes, based on a sliding scale of fees (if I’ve read them correctly), to train women to become more visible and more capable presences in the media. They also help college groups.

There’s a lot to the site worth looking at, and don’t miss the blog!

“The Sex of Your Surgeon May Matter” January 30, 2008

The NY Times reports on a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute by researchers at Columbia University.  The question they address concerned why the treatment of women similarly affected by breast cancer varied.   In particular, they looked after radiation treatment after lumpectomy, which is documented to be the better course of treatment. 

The researchers analyzed data on nearly 30,000 women aged 65 and older who were diagnosed with breast cancer between 1991 and 2002 and who received lumpectomy. They also analyzed data on the 4,453 surgeons who operated on the women.

About 25% of women do not get the preferred treatment.  There were two sets of facts that made a difference:

1.  As earlier studies indicated, demographic factors mattered:  Older women, black women, unmarried women and those living outside urban areas were less likely to receive radiation.

But the new report looks at doctors behind the treatment, and it found:

2.  Women who received radiation were more likely to have a female surgeon. Women who were treated by more experienced surgeons were also more likely to receive radiation treatment, as were women treated by doctors trained in the United States. (Note: the study was of women treated in the US; it is not a comparison among countries.)

The article states,

Dr. Dawn L. Hershman, co-director of the breast program at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University, said … “There are many fantastic male surgeons….It shouldn’t be taken that every woman should be seen by a woman, but there are some contributing factors to this difference that we need to investigate further.’’

It seems important to know also whether the influence was evenly distributed over those with the unfortunate demographics.

And finally the article reveals a small tension between the author and the person doing the titles; while the title has the term ’sex,’ the article uses ‘gender.’

National NOW is much better than NY-NOW January 30, 2008

This is the right way for NOW to respond to Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama: 

Statement of NOW President Kim Gandy, January 28, 2008: The National Organization for Women has enormous respect and admiration for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D- Mass.). For decades Sen. Kennedy has been a friend of NOW, and a leader and fighter for women’s civil and reproductive rights, and his record shows that.Though the National Organization for Women Political Action Committee has proudly endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton for president, we respect Sen. Kennedy’s endorsement. We continue to encourage women everywhere to express their opinions and exercise their right to vote. 

I very much hope that NOW will do something about the person writing press releases in NY. I should say that I find the NY-NOW comments especially disturbing since what I’ve read suggests that the reason Kennedy decided not to remain neutral was that he was offended by the Clinton campaign’s race-baiting tactics. I’d like to see NOW speaking out against these tactics as well. Here’s hoping NOW does both of these things. Update:  In fact, let’s do more than just hope.  I’ve written to NOW, and you can, too.  Just go here. 

Equal opportunity smearing vs. Post-racism. January 29, 2008

We’ve called our readers’ attention to the media treatment of Hillary Clinton as she  has been denigrated in ways feminists at least could easily predict; we tend to be all too aware of the sexist cliches being worked through by the press.

What racist cliches are showing up in opposition to Obama’s campaign?  Or has the United States entered the period of post-racism, as Daniel Shore was considering yesterday on NPR?  Might racial lines at least be getting blurry, as he suggests?

Well maybe, but not always perhaps quite as one might like.  At least one blurring is done by the cliche of the secretative, mysterious, dangerous and dark outsider, a  trope apparently applicable both to Arabs and African Americans.  And so the picture of  the dangerous Obama as the secret Muslim plotting against America from the inside has been seized upon.

An excellent post on a Religion, Philosophy and Ethics course blog draws our attention to the viral email about Obama that is going around and to the conservative US network that appears to helping it along.  Don’t miss their  link to a full report  here.

So Very, Very Not What We Need January 29, 2008

NOW-NY has just issued an appalling press release.

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, and the Family and Medical Leave Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). “They” are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women’s money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future.

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation- to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who “know what’s best for us.

This is not how anyone should argue. And it’s especially appalling coming from a large state chapter of a major feminist organisation. I will be so very, very happy if somebody reveals this to be a hoax. Please? Anybody?

CFP: Gender, Inequality, and Social Justice. January 28, 2008

This society provides a congenial venue for feminist scholars, we are told.

_______________________________________________
The 25^th Annual International
Social Philosophy Conference
Sponsored by the
North American Society for Social Philosophy
July 17-19, 2008
at the University of Portland (Oregon) 
 
Special attention will be devoted to the theme
Gender, Inequality, and Social Justice
 
but proposals in all areas of social philosophy are welcome 
 
The Program Committee will be chaired by:
Professor Jordy Rocheleau
of Austin Peay State University and
Professor Richard Buck
of Mount Saint Mary’s University
 
A 300-500 word abstract should be sent to the program chairs.  Individuals who wish to be considered for the award for best graduate student paper should submit their entire paper and abstract. Electronic Submissions welcomed and encouraged.

Jordy Rocheleau
Department of Philosophy
Austin Peay State University
Box 4486
Clarksville, TN 37044
tel. 931-221-7925
rocheleauj@apsu.edu
 
Richard Buck
Department of Philosophy
Mount Saint Mary’s University
16300 Old Emmitsburg Rd
Emmitsburg, MD 21727
tel. 301-447-5368
buck@msmary.edu
 
The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2008
or, for those living outside the
 United States and Canada, January 15, 2008
_________________________________________________________________

A New Carnival January 28, 2008

And by ‘new’, I mean it’s the first ever Carnival Against Pornography and Prostitution.  We here at Feminist Philosophers have a diverse range of views on these issues, and we know our readers do, too.  So, some of you will be fans of this carnival and others not so much.  But we thought we’d let you know about it, not least because our very own Monkey has something in it.  Congratulations, Monkey!

Global Voices January 27, 2008

Bideshi blue makes me aware that yesterday was the Global Day of Action, and the entry for Jan 26th is full of links to important information and events.   The post also has links to dsicussions about the World Social Forum, a significant event to many women in other countries, though its covereage in the US and UK seems slight to non-existent.  (I would love to be wrong about this!)

Bideshi Blue is connected to the Nari Jibon website , an initiative of Rising Voices, which seeks to redress the representative inbalance in the online world:

“..certain regions of the world and certain demographics within those regions have benefited from the boom in citizen media more than others. Most bloggers and podcasters still tend to be middle or upper-middle class. Most have a college-level education. Most live in large cities. And of the 70 million weblogs now tracked by Technorati, 95% of them are written in just 10 languages. The truth is, what we often call the ‘global conversation,’ is a privileged discussion among global elites.”

Rising Voices in turn is an initiative of Global Voices Online, which is currently linking to the www.youtube.com project to provide input to the World Economic Forum from ordinary people.

These online voices are an enriching source for Western feminists. And after Jender mentioned Nari Jibon in her edition of the Carnival, we have had several vaued communications with its Executive Director, Kathy Ward. Thanks, Kathy!

Addition:  The Nari Jibon project is much bigger than its website; to quote from the  calendar Kathy so kindly sent:

Nari Jibon Project provides alternative skills and training for women workers in a safe space and then connecting them with employers. Nari Jibon has established a blog in English, titled “Bangladesh from Our View” http://narijibon.blogspot.com and Bangla “Amader Galpa (Our Stories)” http://banglablog-narijibon.blogspot.com to increase students’ & staffs’ creativity on different areas.

NOT a Sunday Cat Break II January 27, 2008

Just a reminder of what is out there.  Curious cats are not enough!

Sunday Cat Break (With Relevance to Feminism!) January 27, 2008

Via Feministe.

The Election: What Do Black Women Think? January 26, 2008

When faced with a choice between Clinton and Obama, what do black women do?  Do they vote their race? Do they vote their gender?  All the reporters want to know…. 

So what are African-American women talking about when the cameras aren’t watching or, more importantly, what are we telling the media that is not being fairly reported? African-American women are talking about the issues!  

We talk about the vision that each candidate has for leading this country. We enthusiastically discuss the possibility that real, positive change will come from this election. We even parse the policy distinctions in the candidates’ positions on education, creating jobs and ending the war in Iraq.

Sometimes, the issues we talk about do deal with aspects of gender and racial identity. We debated Sen. Hillary Clinton’s statement implying that Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement did not fulfill its promise until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. We argue and marvel at the significant generational divide in the African-American community that is being exposed by this election process.

If you listen closely to the women in the news features at the beauty shops, they are commenting on these issues, even when the voice-over in the same feature is telling you that the women are discussing whether it’s more important to have the first woman or the first black president. 

What? Huh? They talk about the issues? If only somebody would listen. (For more, see Danielle Holley-Walker’s column here. Thanks, Jender-Parents, the for the link!)

Anonymous refereeing: some evidence January 25, 2008

I’ve argued before that philosophy journals should all take up fully anonymous refereeing.  (Actually, I’ve argued that papers’ authors should also be unknown to the editor, but this doesn’t address that.) Here’s some evidence that this is a good idea.  (Via The F-Word.)  It seems anonymous reviewing is only rarely practised in ecology and evolution journals.  But Behavioural Ecology recently decided to take it up.  They found a significant increase in acceptance of papers by women after the change, and there were apparently no negative effects.  (The article uses the widely employed term ‘double-blind’.  If you want to know the reasons I am now using ‘anonymous’ instead, check out the discussion in the comments here.) 

Strange and Disturbing Statistics January 25, 2008

From an improbable source (a NYRB article  on global warming), I’ve learned:

that between 1992 and 2004, the percentage of Americans who agreed with the statement “The father of the family must be the master in his own house” went from 42 to 52 percent. But at the same time, the percentage who agreed that “taking care of the home and kids is as much a man’s work as women’s work” rose from 86 percent in 1992 to 89 percent in 2004.   

What did I find so striking about this? Well, if I’d only seem the second set of figures, I might well have thought that 89% of Americans in 2004 had abandoned the idea of traditional gender roles within the family– it sounds great that 89% think “taking care of the home and kids is as much a man’s work as women’s”. And it is great. But the shocking thing is that at the very same time 52% still think the man must be “master in his own house”. If I’d read this one alone, I would have thought over half of Americans supported traditional gender roles in the family. So I found this quite an important lesson regarding how crucial it is not to just look at one set of figures and think we have the full picture. (In fact, it makes me want to go look at the rest of the study– who knows what might be in there?– but I haven’t had the chance.)

Another surprise: if I’d been told that there was a big difference in answer to the two questions, I would have guessed that more people would be willing to say that taking care of children is women’s work than would be willing to say that a man should be “master in his home”. After all, the first fits well with rather widely accepted claims about innate differences between men and women, and the second sounds (to me anyway) like a very obvious endorsement of male dominance. I would have expected the latter to be less socially acceptable and so less likely to be agreed to.

The final surprise: the number assenting to the “master of his house” claim went UP. Eek.

More on feminism and economics January 24, 2008

Further to points raised in JJ’s post, below: in the field of economic development, theorists have been looking at the relationship between gender inequality and economic growth. Stephanie Seguino argues, in a paper that looks at economic growth in Asian economies between 1975 and 1995, that (amongst other factors) gender inequality had a key role in boosting economic growth (this view is apparently at odds with research else where which suggests equality is good for growth).

(The reference is
Seguino, S. (2000) ‘Accounting for Gender in Asian Economic Growth’, Feminist Economics, 6 (3) pp. 27-58, but I’m afraid subscriptions are required).

The claim is that gendered economic structures, in which women receive lower pay, or perform unpaid domestic work, and accept a lower social and economic status, boost growth due to a number of factors:

• women’s lower wages lowers unit labour costs (how much per product), so makes for good foreign exchange relations
• women’s acceptance of lower status means risk of labour strife is lower (reassuring for investors)
• women’s lower wages mean they have reduced bargaining status – with employers, husbands – so traditional family structures and hierarchies are maintained, control over women’s labour is sustained.

So, when it comes to economic growth, not exactly great motivation to address issues of gender equality, then. I’m not familiar with much of the literature or issues in this realm. Any one else?(thanks to .h. for passing this on)

Grace Lee Boggs January 23, 2008

 

 As Amy Goodman of Democracy Now tells us, 

Grace Lee Boggs, the legendary 92-year-old civil rights activist, who has been pivotally involved with the civil rights, black power, labor, peace, environmental justice, Asian American and feminist movements.

And from Bill Moyer’s site:

Born in 1915 to Chinese immigrant parents, Boggs received her BA from Barnard College in 1935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940.

Boggs’ comments on Democracy now can be seen as continuing discussions about racism and sexism that have been occurring on this blog, perhaps particularly in the observations and references made in comments on an earlier post about Bob Herbert on misogyny. Violence toward women is not likely to be an isolatable problem, one whose causes reflect just what happens between individuals. How deeply does it reside in our values and practices? And what today is holding that in place?

 One can see Boggs as calling a discussion of just such issues:

And we don’t see how what we have done and the way that we have tried to be robust in our economic growth has created all these crises for the world. That’s why I like to start looking at the economy. How can we take advantage of this opportunity, this crisis, to reorder our priorities?

And it is clear that her conception of “reordering priorities” is not a trivial idea, for it is to be done in terms of Martin Luther King’s insights

what people don’t realize is at the end of his life, King was looking at our crisis, a profound spiritual and material crisis, and he said that we had advanced economic growth at the expense of community and of participation, that our works had become larger and we ourselves had become smaller.

Asked if she is worried that the US will increase its military activities because of concerns about the economy, she remarked:

this is a question of choice, we are not at the mercy of circumstances. We are human beings. We can become more purposeful. We can choose. We don’t have to go the way of empires. Or, going the way of empires, we don’t have to continue to go that way.

Of course the causes of violence against women have ancient roots, but it seems very likely that the crisis MLK saw also does.
Boggs says that she is optimistic. I’m less sure. I am not confident, for example, that our society, or at least the US, is prepared to address the issues. Nor does there seem to be a clear way to get us to do so.

Vote Pro-Reproductive Justice January 22, 2008

Feminist philosopher Laurie Shrage has posted an online version of a 35th anniversary lecture on Roe. It’s well worth checking out. One thing that’s very important about it is that she makes it very clear that one can be staunchly in favour of reproductive justice (she gives good reasons for preferring this formulation to ‘pro-choice’) without being an enormous fan of the details of the Roe V Wade decision. Her work is extremely thought-provoking, and I highly recommend it.  Even if you don’t end up agreeing, you will have been given much to think about.  There are many ways to vote, and be, in favour of reproductive rights.  And it’s worth thinking very hard about how best to accomplish the goal.

Vote Pro-Choice III January 22, 2008

  ‘Blog for Choice Day provides us with an opportunity to raise the profile of reproductive rights in the blogosphere and the media, while celebrating Roe’s 35th anniversary’, say the folks at Blog for Choice.

The film industry has recently been doing its bit with regards raising the profile of reproductive rights, with the newly released (in the UK) 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. Reviews here and here. A horrifying tale of illegal abortion, in Ceausescu’s Romania, and its repercussions, which brings to the fore the grim and potentially brutal options that face women who are denied the right to reproductive control.

Go see it! (and try to find some pro-lifers or fence-sitters to see it with you!)

Vote pro-choice II January 22, 2008

 An embryo is not a baby and it is wrong to force a pregnant woman to treat hers as though it is.

Whether or when the fetus becomes the moral equivalent of a baby is only one of the issues involved in the debate over freedom of choice, but it’s a big one.  Michael Gazzaniga, in The Ethical Brain, looks carefully at the stages of fetal development to  consider when and how characteristically human capacities  develop.  The scientific facts are  enlightening.  For example, a  fetus looks human quite far in advance of its having a capacity for any consciousness of anything, pain included. Those pictures of those very tiny fetuses blown up in a way that disguises the fact that one of them would fit on the head of a pin?  They’re also misleading about the stage at which one has anything that is more than superficially like a baby.

This is not to say that Gazzaniga’s book gets an honorable mention in feminist literature, and his views about the extent to which “neuro-logic” can issue the right decisions may strike one as misguided at some important points.  Ditto for his convictions about the lack of  value of thousands of years of  philosophical thought.  At the same time, he has the facts and he uses them to take on some of the biggest bioethical issues of our times.  

The book is also a document about an important period in America’s history.  One can get from it a picture of the debates that informed the commission on bioethics that Bush convened, of which Gazzaniga was a member.  He leaves us with the sense he was appalled by what sort of view dominated in decisions, and rightly so.  The book is disturbing in its picture of the extent to which, under the guidance of the current president,  government laws and practices are driven by conservative religious values.

We have to stop this.  

Vote pro-choice. Or else. January 22, 2008

 When I read about Blog for Choice Day, I thought “of course Feminist Philosophers must be a part of this!”.  Then I read that to do this I had to answer the question “Why Vote Pro-Choice?”.  And writers’ block set in, as I utterly failed to come up with a new reason.  Then I saw this sculpture of Anita Garibaldi by Emilio Galloni (late 19th C), and found a new reason.  If you don’t, legions of gun-toting women, mothers or not, will hunt you down.  (While sitting side-saddle on a leaping horse, gun in one hand and baby in the other!  Don’t mess with us.)Seriously, though, voting pro-choice is no laughing matter. We have a chance to elect a President who can begin to reverse the horrendous damage that’s been done to reproductive freedom in America. The alternative is one who will continue and heighten that damage. That is an unimaginably bleak thought. So get yourselves registered if you’re not. If you’re an ex-pat like me, go here. And don’t just vote pro-choice; tell others to do it. And, if you can, spend some time or money working for candidates who oppose forced childbearing. This election is a biggie.  (Thanks to Mr Jender for his help on this.)