Feminist
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Wordless Memeday
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My Trip to Washington D.C., Day 2
As if it weren’t emotional enough to honor my dad at the Grant Writers’ Association conference, we also honored my step-mom’s first husband, Bruce, who died early in the Vietnam War. She was married while in college, and he left soon after their wedding to go to Vietnam, so they did not have a lot of time together. They did spend some time in Hawaii once when he was on leave. His death broke her heart and changed her life. She left college and travelled in Europe for awhile, and when she came home, discovered she could not bear to live in California anymore, there were too many memories. So…
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Harriet
Harriet Tubman has been my hero for as long as I can remember. When Maya was little and they were talking about heroes at school, I told her about Harriet, and several years later she told me that at the time, she had pictured her with a cape, flying down like Superman, rescuing slaves from the south and spiriting them north to safety and freedom. I love that idea, but of course, if she had been able to fly, she would not be proven to be as brave as she was in real life. Putting herself into harm’s way, again and again, So, a few months ago when we first…
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Women’s March
As the Women’s March came nearer, I felt more sure that I wanted to participate. But which one? We live in a small city (bigger than a town! Pop around 60k) in a very densely populated area, and there were two fairly large ones just a short BART (our local transit) ride away. So, Oakland or San Francisco? Both would be great. I still hadn’t decided, when Ted’s mom called and asked if we wanted to go to the one right here in our town. OK, I’m in. Easier than getting on BART even, and a shorter walk (Ted’s mom had hip surgery this summer, and I have arthritis that…
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Bitter
These were supposed to be our victory cookies, based on a recipe from the 1992 Presidential election, when Hillary Clinton made a comment on the Today show that she supposed she could have stayed home and baked cookies, but instead she continued her law career. She was slammed, with the assumption being that she held contempt for stay-at-home moms, that she thought their life was simply baking cookies and drinking tea. She quickly fell in line, doing the politically expedient thing and entering a cookie recipe in the Family Circle baking contest, a First Lady challange that survives to this day. I decided it would be symbolic of how far we’ve…
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Harriet Tubman ~ Abolition Princess
Maya and I were talking about Disney the other night, and how, while the princesses are generally funny and clever and increasingly independent, the happy ending of most Disney movies is the ‘Happily Ever After’ wedding. When the protagonist of a Disney movie is female, the end is almost always a wedding. When the protagonist of a Disney movie is male (wait, are there any with a male protagonists in Disney movies, or are they mainly Pixar these days?), the happy ending is the success of whatever adventure or mission they have just experienced. They save the day, the end. Mulan saves the entire nation of China, but the end…
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The Right to Choose
(image found here) So there’s all of this fuss right now about Todd Akin’s asinine comment about how if a woman were ‘legitimately raped’ (vs. what, date raped? Raped by her husband? Asshat.), her body would put up its defenses, making pregnancy impossible, and thus, no need to feel badly for the poor woman who might be coming in for an abortion, because, clearly, she is a slut and needs to honor the life of the unborn child before her own. She was not raped. At least, not legitimately. This is a strawman that covers the main issue. The main issue is, can I get an abortion if I want…
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Body Image for Girls
Starshine wrote a post a little while ago about the hyper-sexualized advertising she sees at the local mall, and brought up her concerns about raising her sons to be respectful of women and not objectify them, when they are surrounded by these images. She brings up a good point, and it’s important to raise our boys to understand that this is just advertising, and that the majority of women and girls do not go around in their underwear, with ‘come get me’ looks permanently on their faces, bent into unnatural positions. It’s a fantasy, and not even one that’s very interesting or original. As the mother of a daughter, my…
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What’s Wrong in this Marriage?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9bsu5CqMBY[/youtube] I saw this video the other day, and I was horrified. Here’s the story: A family with a husband, wife, and daughter. The husband was laid off, and hasn’t been able to find work. His wife increased her hours at work to compensate for their lost income. So he’s staying home and caring for the home and their child, and she’s working. Guess what? They both resent the hell out of each other. She has lost respect for him, because he’s not working, and because she doesn’t feel like a woman in this roll. He doesn’t feel like she respects what he does around the house, and wants to…
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Personhood vs. Parenthood
I heard the other day about an amendment on the Colorado ballot that would define Personhood as beginning at the moment of conception. This is clearly a pro-life effort, working to determine a concrete definition of when life begins, which would eventually lead to outlawing abortion by defining abortion as the murder of an unborn child. I’m not willing to go so far as to use the word murder, but at the same time, I’m not willing to say that a fetus isn’t a living being either. And really, what this all comes down to is parsing words in a battle over rights. The rights of the unborn child vs.…
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Vote Early, Vote Often
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dPF0SGh_PQ[/youtube] I kid! Only vote once. But some of you can vote early if you want to. Long lines and long waits are predicted on election day, so if you have the option to vote early, you might want to think about it. Could save you time, and take a bit of the crunch off of the poll workers on November 4th. Also, less chance of any shenanigans occurring with your ballot. 😉 The video is for the ladies, and a reminder to all of us that we should never take any of our rights for granted. They can all be taken away. Fight for them, and get out and…
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HPV for Boys
We’ve all seen the commercials, right? The ones that say, “I want to be one less”, the girls who don’t want to become a statistic, to get cervical cancer. The HPV vaccine prevents a few varieties of the virus that causes cervical cancer, so while it isn’t a cure, it could be a step in the right direction. Well, Maya is 12 now, and not really acting interested in boys. We’ve been deciding whether to vaccinate her now or later. It’s not a matter of whether to vaccinate her or not…if we can protect her from the possibility of dying from cancer, wouldn’t we want to do so? And HPV…
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This Is What a Feminist Looks Like
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YA13GNT8Mc[/youtube] I saw this over at Salon, and thought it was worth sharing.
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Blog for Choice Day
Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the 3rd annual ‘Blog for Choice Day’. I participated last year, when the writing prompt was, “Why you’re pro choice“, as well as in 2006, when I declared that I think that the rights of the pregnant woman supersede those of the unborn child, and that the answer to the abortion question shouldn’t be to outlaw it, but rather, to improve medical care, education, and family planning access so that fewer and fewer women find themselves having to make this difficult decision. The writing prompt this year is ‘why it’s important to vote pro-choice’. In an election year, especially an…
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Hold the Door…
This post, by Deb over at Punctuality Rules!, has had me thinking for a few weeks about holding the door. Back in July, I wrote a post about women who eschew the term feminist, because to them it divides us as women, or because they don’t like the stereotype of women who are unfeminine man haters, and wish to distance themselves from that idea altogether. I’m not sure why Deb’s post got me thinking again about my previous post, and the comments in that post, but it did. Whenever the issue of feminism comes up, the issue of holding the door open comes up. Some men were raised to believe…