Final Topic Two

            History is constantly being made around the world. There are men and women everywhere that come from vast amounts of differing backgrounds. Either way, we were all put on this earth one way or another to live together. The question is, if we are here together, then why are men and women not seen as equals? This is a question that has been raised several times throughout history and continues to be unanswered today. Feminism is the constant struggle to maintain social, political, and economic equality between the different sexes that live on this earth.

            The idea of feminism came about in the young part of the twentieth century when women began joining forces to gain the right to vote. Suffrage was the biggest issue of the first wave feminists because they saw that they needed to have full rights under the law. At this time, women and African Americans were in the same unlawful boat, although the fifteenth amendment came giving racial minorities the right to vote but still excluding women.

            Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, author of The F Word: Feminism in Jeopardy, and the movie Iron Jawed Angels both speak about the unequal political opportunity of voting in the early twentieth century. Both the movie and the book highlight the work of Alice Paul, a feminist and suffragist who founded the National Women’s Party. Paul led many women, African American and white, to protest outside the white house.  The protests and parades that Alice Paul headed portrayed the beauty of women, but most importantly the intelligence of women. Rowe-Finkbeiner says in the chapter of her book, “A Tsunami in History,” that “the vote didn’t come easy,” for it took forty consecutive years of voting on the issue to finally get it passed after it was first defeated from the first introduction in 1878 (22). When the suffrage movement finally made its mark, the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the United States Constitution; although, the amendment still had some kinks. According to Rowe-Finkbeiner, the first wave feminists were not only significant because they fought and earned the right to vote, “but because their work helped change the perception of women from voiceless dependents to independent thinkers with a valid voice in shaping the country” (23).

            Now that women had a strong base under them, they took the right to vote and continued fighting for equality between the sexes. This is where the second feminist wave came into light, because there was still a lot of work to do when the suffrage movement ended. The second wave mainly worked on issues such as equality in the workplace, reproductive rights, and discrimination based on sex and race. This fight occurred during the 1960s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s. One major leap the second wave made was the enforcing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). These women earned “the election of more women to public office, legal abortions, and a ban on discrimination in schools and lending, among other things” that many take advantage of today (26).

            One of the most significant cases during this era was Roe v. Wade. This court case gave women the right of abortion up until a certain point of fetal growth. Reproductive rights were very controversial and unfair to women. Men were allowed to get contraceptives for a long time, but women were not. The second wave brought on options for women and feminists continued fighting for these options and more, while becoming more and more focused on their sexuality and individuality.

            The focus on sexuality and individuality led to the contemporary, or third wave, of feminism. Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner wrote in the chapter, “Signs of the Times: Defining the Third Wave,” that “the third wave has worked hard to incorporate the voices of many different women” (104). She explains that this is necessary in contemporary times, but it can also be a danger because women will focus more on individual needs, “thus diluting the political strength that comes from mass numbers” (104). She raises the question, “are we post feminist,” because the focus on female votes is declining, although more women are getting higher degrees and better careers (107).

Surprisingly, fashion was one of the biggest feminist issues in the workplace next to the wage gap for past feminists. The book Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by Bell Hooks describes in “Beauty Within and Without,” how the past feminists movements have pushed the idea of self-love that we have today in the workplace because “women had to demand that the fashion industry (which was totally male-dominated in those days) create diverse styles of clothing” (32). This was important because women needed to be equal in the work force and not be seen as objects of male desire with their beauty at the office. Women needed to feel comfortable and at ease just like men. Sexual harassment in the workplace has and will continue to be an issue in the workplace. Yes, it does go both ways male to female and female to male, but it used to happen to females by males more. Now, there are laws against sexual harassment as well. It’s important that women have confidence to work with men, while maintaining their sexuality (in this case with fashion) and individuality.

            We are not post feminists. We’re still thinking in the contemporary ways, but through a different angle. We have reproductive rights, so now people are looking towards getting more education and information that go along with those rights. The professional opportunities, as already pointed out, are greater but there is still a wage gap that is being fought against. Most importantly, there are more life choices for females that have never been thought about before. Bell Hook describes the economic struggles in the “Women at Work” section of her book. She says that more than half of American women are in the work force, and that many white feminists argue that this is a sign of liberation. According to Hooks, the white feminists would say that feminism isn’t for those who are already in the work force. Being from a working-class African American background, Hooks says, “Most importantly I knew firsthand that working for low wages did not liberate poor and working-class women from male domination” (48).  Yes, there are more rights to economics, but gender discrimination has not been fully eliminated.

            Education is the key to gender discrimination elimination. Hooks says in the “Feminist Education for Critical Consciousness” section of her book that, “The formation of women’s studies programs in colleges and universities provided institutional legitimation for academic focus on work by women” (20).  This marked the stepping-stone for learning about feminism in an unbiased atmosphere. Later, feminists went on to critique sexist thinking in children’s books and other areas. It’s important to start young, because society and elders are the cause people accepting the patriarchal way of thinking. Sexist thinking is a learned behavior, which is why feminism goes along with women’s studies. If people are not educated in an unbiased atmosphere they remain unaware of the problems in society because they are never taught differently.

            In 2003, Lisa Belkin wrote “The Opt-Out Revolution” for The New York Times, which follows the patriarchal way of thinking with feminism. She makes a very controversial argument that so many intelligent women these days are slipping back into the ways of patriarchal thinking because they are taking the “mommy track.” This mommy track is the trend of women opting-out of the workforce to stay home with their children. The women she interviewed had law degrees from Harvard and Columbia, yet “they chose husbands who could keep up with them, not simply support them,” which was great, until they decided to opt-out and live off of their husband’s salary.

            Belkin argues that this “mommy track” is not how the feminist movement was intended to evolve. Belkin states, “women—specifically, educated professional women – were supposed to achieve like men,” and yes, barriers from long ago are down, but there is still work to be done. This opt-out revolution is, in a way, undoing the work of the women getting through to the mass media by ways of the fashion industry and undoing the work of feminists that have critiqued children’s books because they are teaching their little girls that they do not need to work and make something of themselves. Women’s studies follows the feminist movements to make sure that people are aware what is going on currently, so issues don’t slip back to the way they were and to show people that feminists are only here to fight against the inequalities between the sexist and that they are not man hating lesbians.

            I am a feminist. I’m not a lesbian and I like men. I believe that women and men were put on this earth as equals, but because society has been shaped in a patriarchal way of thinking, people do not realized that. We need gender studies programs to help raise awareness of this issue and continue to thrive in this struggle toward equality of the sexes. The women of the first and second feminist movements did not fight hard so that women today could opt-out of the work force giving people an excuse to say that women should be in the homes and not use their intelligent minds. Women and men alike need to continue the feminist movement and fight toward the equality of the sexes around the world, for we were put on this earth to work in unity. 

Final Topic One

            Race, gender, and class are three issues that have been controversial topics in society since the beginning of time. They will never be separate issues because they are simply layers of the same theme. One cannot be spoken about without another one coming into light. Like wheat grains and bread, they come hand in hand. Now try throwing feminism into the mix and the issues get intensified. 

            There are feminists of all kinds; many colors, shapes, sizes, genders, etc. A feminist is one who wants equal rights between men and women; therefore, they are not just stereotypical bellicose females who argue and fight their way into equality. In contemporary society a feminist encompasses genders, multiple generations and varied socioeconomic groups.

            There are four literary resources, and one movie that specifically discuss feminism and the effects that race, gender and class portray on the struggle to gain equality between men and women in society. One particular author, Bell Hooks, focuses on race, gender, and class in many of her works. Her book, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics,” goes in depth with all of these issues and explains the simultaneous struggles that they have with feminism and the road to equality among genders.

            In chapter three, “Sisterhood is Still Powerful,” Hooks describes an anecdotal experience that shaped the beginning of her feminist thinking. She realized after transferring to Stanford University from an all-girls school that men and women are looked upon very differently. She saw that there was a significant difference in female self-esteem and self-assertion when males were present in the classroom with females.

This is where her knowledge of feminism came about and the idea that women have to work together if they are going to achieve the task of gender equality. She said, “In order for women to change job discrimination we needed to lobby as a group to change public policy,” so people could eventually change the sexist thinking that women are not equally as intelligent as men (15).

            It’s been seen throughout history, that it takes many active voices to change societal thinking, and even then, not every person is going to change. It’s apparent today, as Hooks states, that “as long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized,” but rather women have to come together for a common goal (16).

            In the beginning of the feminist movement for suffrage, race and class were major issues holding women back from achieving their goals. This theme is apparent in the movie Iron Jawed Angels, when American women gathered together while risking their lives to reach out against male politicians in Washington. The movie portrays the struggles of women to overcome class issues when Alice Paul and her crew are gathering women to have a parade showing the intelligence and beauty of women and why they deserve to vote. There is one particular scene where Alice Paul is getting ready to gather working-class women and she tells her cohorts to dress down so that they do not look over-privileged, but rather demonstrate they are trying to help women of all backgrounds.

            There are two particular ongoing themes of race and class in the movie that are predominant. The one on class is when a politician’s wife secretly begins to help Paul but her husband finds out and gets very angry because it could jeopardize his career. Finally, after his wife is thrown into jail for protesting, he gains respect for struggling women and begins helping them because is able to see the issue from a personal level. The other scene, dealing with race, came about when Alice Paul was planning the march in Washington. The organizers were desperate for African American women to help with the parade, but Alice Paul was worried that the white politicians would not listen to them if black women marched. Mirroring what Bell Hooks said, the black women came back to Paul and said it’s all or nothing. They wanted to march alongside the white women, because they wanted help as well and they knew if they were going to get it that all women had to come together.

Although women ultimately came together for suffrage, they demobilized after reaching that goal and did not continue working together for future feminist ideals. Addressing this in chapter four, “Feminists Education for Critical Consciousness,” of Hooks’s book, it explains that women began to learn about feminism through informal social groups. The movie and the book both speak about the evolution of these informal groups that were necessary to inform women of feminist thought before literature and educational courses were created on the subject (19). This is the same idea as in the movie, but with a different but quite similar issue.

Society and elders have socialized sexist thinking, making the idea more acceptable to many. According to Bell Hooks, feminist thinking and theory encouraged women to look at the roots of these perceptions through word of mouth until the ideas became published and taught in schools (19). This traditional way of thinking was difficult to change after generations of imbedded patriarchal thought. When these feminist theories came to the classrooms in the turn of the century, they caught the eye of many who wanted to learn them and help women as a whole; although, this new way of viewing women was becoming popular, there were still struggles among classes and races within the movement.

An important theme of Bell Hooks’ articles is that, just like class and racial issues, “simply being the victim of an exploitative or oppressive system and even resisting it does not mean we understand why it’s in place or how to change it” (21). Although people could not quite understand why things were the way they were, institutionalizing the feminist theories made these doctrines and women’s literature more legitimate.

One problem that arose with the incorporation of feminist theory was that it changed the audience from the masses to a sort of niche within the educated. According to Hooks, the “feminist thinking and theory were no longer tied to feminist movement,” because people outside of the academic domain did not have as much access because the “academic politics and careerism overshadowed feminist politics” (22).

The contemporary feminist movement began critiquing children’s books for sexist thinking, because the theory was that people’s minds are shaped as they are aging from the time they are young. Again, problems arose because many people these days are consumers of mass media, which is where most of the feminist ideas are seen today. Today’s feminist ideas are very negative in the mass media and follow a patriarchal way of thinking about feminism.

In 2003, Lisa Belkin wrote “The Opt-Out Revolution” for The New York Times, which follows the patriarchal way of thinking with feminism. She makes a very controversial argument that so many intelligent women these days are slipping back into the ways of patriarchal thinking because they are taking the “mommy track.” This mommy track is the trend of women opting-out of the workforce to stay home with their children. The women she interviewed had law degrees from Harvard and Columbia, yet “they chose husbands who could keep up with them, not simply support them,” which was great, until they decided to opt-out and live off of their husband’s salary.

Belkin argues that this “mommy track” is not how the feminist movement was intended to evolve. Belkin states, “women—specifically, educated professional women – were supposed to achieve like men,” and yes, barriers from long ago are down, but there is still work to be done. While women are choosing to opt-out more often, it’s giving anti-feminists and neutral thinkers a way to lean towards anti-feminists thinking because women are taking household roles again. She makes this point more acceptable by saying the issue “…is a continuing conversation, and a surprising amount of the talk is not about how the workplace is unfair to women, but about how the relationship between work and life is different for women than for men.” This

Belkin states in her article that she knows she is getting herself in a pickle with her argument, but she doesn’t stay solely on this track. Belkin tackles the class issue as well. She was on The Today Show with other women, some with varying ideas and some with similar ideas debating the issue of leaving the workplace at the height of their career. A lot of the contention within this article boils down to the issue that women need to have the opportunity to opt-out. Most American women, especially with the current recession, need to work and don’t have the choice to opt-out or they will not be able to feed their families.

This allows race into the issue because the media is always showing minority families with lower income, which again, with the recession, more people of all races and classes are not getting the choice to opt-out currently. There are fewer jobs in contemporary society with these prevailing financial and political issues that, and because women have opted-out, they are having a harder time getting back into the work place. Once these mothers do re-enter, they have been out of practice and may not be as strong as they once were because the workplace is always evolving, as are the issues of race, class, gender, and feminism.

As Bell Hooks describes, “the issues that were most relevant to working women or masses of women were never highlighted by mainstream mass media,” but now that is one part of these controversial issues that is changing. We’ve seen this change in Belkin’s article that subtly covers some debates about class. All of the articles cited above have, in some way or another, simultaneously dealt with at least two of the highlighted issues of race, class, gender, and feminism. There are very few, if any, conversations where only one of the issues stands alone because, although they are diverse issues, they have become interwoven over time. Yes they are controversial, but if people such as Lisa Belkin and Bell Hooks, along with movie producers, etc. aren’t speaking about these topics then education only goes so far. It is important to start educating children on these issues so they are socialized to have an open anti-sexist mind. The less education involved causes for an ignorant society that will never gain a greater understanding of how race, class, gender, and feminism coincide. 

Belkin

Many people that disagree with Belkin's "The Opt-Out Revolution" article say that motherhood is important and it's the time while your child is young that the mothers need to be spending time with their children. I really agree with Belkin in the fact that women are, in a way, hurting some of the feminist movement because they are taking intelligent, capable women out of the work force, so men can dominate it. I do think that it is a choice, but you have to be able to have that choice financially. Going back to the workforce is always a problem as well. I think that women become dependent on men when they opt out, but I will say now, there are more men staying out of the work force to stay home and that is a good change.

Readings:
I think that Bell Hooks made a good argument in saying that yes more than half of the women in the United States work and it was liberating for some women because they shared the workplace, but because of the wage gap (especially for minorities) it really wasn't liberating. Poverty is a central women's issue.

The F-Word states that today women are getting a wake up call when they leave college and don't see much success in the workplace at all. I believe that there are many ways women can have success and that everyones definition of success is different because people want and need different things to achieve their own success. Going to college and graduating is a success in my eyes, but women are going to have to work at finding a career and not settle.

Activism

The Project to End Human Trafficing (PEHT) is a nonprofit organization that educates people about human slavery. The provide prevention lectures across the U.S. and internationally. They mainly focus on the sexual exploitation on women and children and bring the issue into the public eye.

Their company offers volunteer opportunities, internships, etc. PEHT is located in Pittsburgh, PA, but they have staff around the world as well. Their website is endhumantrafficing.org and provides tons of information on how to get involved and the resources that they use. In the future, I could help them by volunteering or using their provided resources to help educate people in Oklahoma on the issue.

This is an issue that occurs in many movies, such as the recently aired Taken about a girl from the states that goes on a trip and is put into human trafficing. Movies like this help raise awareness of the issue along with different nonprofits and other activists.

Readings:
FIFE Chapter 18 is very interesting. Religion is always a touchy subject among large diverse groups of people. I didn't know that it had an effect with femism, but after reading this chapter it makes sense. I like that it explains how fundamentalism "perpetuates the notion that control of the female body is necessary" in patriarchal situations (109).

The visionary was a great ending to have in FIFE. I like that it goes against what the mass media says about feminism being dead and explains that now, more men and women of all ages are participating in this movement to equality. It's nice to see the encouragement of bringing everyone together with race, clas, and other biases aside.