The Care Crisis

Excellent article about The Care Crisis by the lovely Ruth Rosen over at The Nation.

Carnival of Feminists

The latest Carnival of Feminists is up at Bumblebee Sweet Potato! Some interesting posts...including my own about midwifery. So far my favorites have been:
Raising Feminist Daughters (reminds me that I have been wanting to blog on this for the past three months)
Tennessee Representative Proposes Death Certificates for Abortion

Wimbledon gives equal prizes to women and men

For the first time women tennis players will receive prize amounts equal to their male colleagues. That's right, baby!! Read more.

Judaism and Feminism: A guest post

Readers,

One of my dearest friends has written this beautiful piece for Lilith, an Orthodox Jewish Feminist publication here in the US on the complexities and contradictions of feminism and her religious practice. Please enjoy!

Congratulations Dr. Faust! Now the real work begins...

On Sunday, Harvard made history (well, it's own history anyway) by electing Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust as the first female president the institution has had. Having passed my undergraduate career there, I couldn't be happier for Dr. Faust, and for Harvard for finally, it seems, catching up at least a bit with the rest of the world/ivy league at least.

With all this exciting news though, the real challenge for Dr. Faust will come now. Harvard, despite all of the myriad of opportunities it gave me, and the overall happiness of my experience there, is not a woman friendly institution. The Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS) Studies program (known simply as Women's Studies while I attended), for example, is not a full department - thus, WGS instructors cannot receive tenure in Women's Studies, they have to do so through their secondary focus (economics, literature, what have you). In my time there we lost several phenomenal professors who were offered fantastic tenure packages in Women's Studies (their PRIMARY focus) at other universities. The department suffered for this, and continues to suffer. While I don't claim to know all the machinations behind these decisions, I do know that it shows a lack of symbolic institutional support for the program. How will Dr. Faust, who herself is on the degree granting committee, deal with this issue? How will she handle the extreme inequality between men and women in the social scene?

Dr. Faust has many, many challenges ahead - I wish her the best of luck and encourage her to be vocal about women's rights at an institution where women are desperately in need of a voice. And then who knows - I may send the college some alumni money this year after all!

Lay Midwives bad for women?

Wasn't sure whether I should post this on my mommy blog or here. Ended up here. Pennsylvania is trying to outlaw lay-midwives (i.e. mid-wives who don't have nursing degrees and learn through apprenticeship instead). Now, on reading this my initial reaction was "here we go again..." but then when I read further down the article I was surprised by a quote by Sarah Kilpatrick, head of ob-gyn at the University of Illinois and vice chair of The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologist's obstetric practice committee, who said "Why don't we have direct-entry doctors who don't want to go to medical school? We wouldn't tolerate that for physician basic care. Our standards for care for women should be the same,". She preempted this statement by saying that she was a "big fan" of nurse-midwives, it's just the lay-midwives she was concerned about.

I thought her statement was interesting. The problem is two-fold though: a) she assumes in her statement that women (in particular pregnant women) receive the same care that men do. Well, as my law professor used to chant at us "reverse the sexes and compare!"- unfortunately there is no comparable situation here for male patients, so in the case of pregnant women v. men, we can't see a comparison. But it is clear that pregnant women often do not receive care that is of an acceptable standard. Furthermore there is no similar history either of how women's bodies have been medicalized, especially in terms of the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth. And b) she assumes that the medicalization of chidbirth (which is clear in her comparison of mid-wive care with physician care) is always the best option.

But nonetheless by stating that standards of care should be the same for women as they are for men she is highlighting that at the moment they are not!

AnyBody

Susie Orbach has co-founded AnyBody, "a website giving women a voice to challenge the limited physical representation of females in contemporary society". They will be holding a flash protest in London today (corner of Cromwell Rd and Exhibition Rd, 2pm) against the London Fashion Week.

Susie Orbach's 'Fat is Feminist Issue' was one of the first books (published in 1978) to draw a relationship between self-worth, weight and power. Since them many other feminist have made this relationship and it may seem obvious now that women (and men) equate body size with self-worth, but in the late70s, this was a controversial idea. Fat is Feminist Issue is often described as the antithesis to diet books.

London Fashion Week has caused controversy by NOT following in the footsteps of Spain's and Italy's fashion bodies who have banned ultra-skinny models from their catwalks (i.e. models have to have a BMI of 18 or above - the World Health Organisation has deemed a BMI of 16 to mean starvation). Concern over the ultra-skinny/size zero phenomena escalated last year when two models, Ana Carolina Reston and Luisel Ramos, died as a result of their anorexia/bulimia.

USA and Britain's fashion councils have decided not to ban ultra-skinny models from their fashion weeks. Stuart Rose, chief executive of M&S and part time chairman of the British Fashion Council, was quoted as saying "Are we going to ask people to walk through detectors for body mass index and say 'I'm sorry you're rejected'. Outright bans and indeed legislation is definitely not a route we want to go down."- I'm sorry....doesn't that imply that models aren't being told they are too fat? As if models aren't weighed and measured and told they must loose weight? WHAT! Such hypocrisy.

Do you want to hear what your doctor has to say?

Rachel over at Women's Health News posted this yesterday about physician's opinions on disclosure about "legal by morally controversial medical procedures" to patients. Really interesting read. Here are just a few of the stats that came out of the research (please read her post of the actual report for more details):

- 52% of the physicians had objections to abortions that were a result of failed contraception and 42% objected to contraception for adolescents without parental consent.

- "Physicians who were more religious...were more likely to report that doctors may describe their objections to patients, and they were less likely to report that physicians must present all options and refer patients to someone who does not object to the requested procedure"

Besides the procedures that are brought up in this report, it bears significance in terms of the medicalization of women's bodies. Catherine Kohler Riessman argues medicalization theory is in fact quite gendered and influenced by class. While men's bodies have also experienced medicalization, women are more likely undergo medical scrutiny, especially in terms of their reproductive system. Furthermore, women make more visits to doctors than men do. So what does this mean in terms of the above study? Are women more influenced by the personal opinions of their physicians? What is the repercussion of physicians giving their personal opinion?

Republican poster

Oh Gee, of course! Now it all makes sense....
Found at Reclusive Leftist.

Ultrasounds before abortions

Rep. James Mill has put forward a bill requiring doctors to offer ultrasounds to women before they have abortions. Apparently it is to help them "make a critical decision" and provide them with all the information. Rep. Nikki Randall eloquently pointed out that "it's insulting to think that they [women] don't have all of the right information. Believe it or not, we know what's going on with us. We live with it." - Well said.

Provide them with all the information? Really I had three ultrasounds throughout my pregnancy - and they were purely for the doctor's benefit. I didn't 'learn' anything. It was amazing and beautiful and all the appropriate reactions when seeing your unborn child (that you are want to keep). But I didn't learn anything that the doctors couldn't have just told me without me seeing the scan.

New York Times picks up Edwards blog story

I can't believe that the Edward's feminist blog story has been covered by the New York Times. I'm also glad that the Edward's campaign is sticking by their guns and didn't co-op. They said that it was impossible to read every word written by two very prolific bloggers. The point being that they weren't hired for their journalistic method. Blogging is supposed to be personal and one of the reasons that Amanada and Melissa are popular bloggers is because they can be so scathing and opinionated - which is exactly what you want to read! Not marshmallow, fluffy, sitting on the fence behaviour or obvious towing the party line rhetoric that we are used to in mainstream political commentary.

Walmart - sexist!? Really!?

Guardian article about Walmart's attempt to challenge sex discrimination ruling.

Feminist bloggers and election campaigns

I LOVE that John Edwards has hired Amanda Marcotte as his blogmaster and Melissa McEwan as the netroots communicator. Marcotte has received some serious blogger bashing over the past few days about her current blogging antics - but it looks more like jealousy than anything substantial. Seems like the angry right-wingers are more concerned about how Marcotteposting ablities than how she might be contributing to the Edwards campaign.

I'm quite surprised that Edwards has taken these two feminist writers on board. I think it will be great to see what they bring to the limelight. As Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors points out, hopefully this means that Edwards will be discussing Clinton beyond her hair-do's and dress sense.

Rape is sooo easy

Julie Bindel on the major, major flaws in the oh-so-great-woman-hating British judicial system that make rape the easiest crime. I especially like the comment on how alcohol is the new 'mini-skirt' excuse for blaming women. There has been a growing obssesion with women drinking over the past few years - lots of references in the media to drinking being the 'real' date-rape drug etc, lots of concern about how drinking increases your chance of sexual assault. You know what else increases your chances of rape? RAPISTS!!

Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

Molly Ivins died on January 31st 2007, after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. Her columns can be read at Alternet, Creators and several other places on the net.

Things I loved about Molly Ivins:
a) she was a unapologetic feminist
b) she unashamedly got up Right wing noses (see Steve Anderson's tribute at The Huffington Post)
c) she named her dog Shit....