Filed under: flowers by Amy's Brain Today at 8:22 pm ~  No Comments »

So Margaret and I started a little exchange about capitalism buried in a thread at her blog and I think it’s a really interesting topic for a couple of reasons. For one, I’ve heard it said from lefties and such types that the end of capitalism means the end of sexism, so it’s not necessary to work on sexism specifically. I’ve also heard it said that radical feminism doesn’t pay enough attention to the economics of women’s exploitation. And recently I had occasion* to explore the supposedly opposing schools of materialism and idealism, which, in humanspeak, means the academically competing theories that 1) material conditions or events (war, poverty, plagues, etc.) cause social change versus 2) ideologies cause social change. While I don’t think it has to be one or the other, when I think about it for a while I realize that I fall a bit more on the materialist side — so it seems important to me to work harder, in my own work, to address the material conditions of women’s oppression than perhaps I have done until now.

Hence my interest in opening discussion specifically on this topic. Margaret opines that capitalism is based on the exploitation of women and therefore the two are inseparable. I never thought of it that way, since I know of societies that were not capitalist (though were perhaps hierarchical and/or class-stratified) but were sexist. I don’t know of any that were nonsexist but capitalist — perhaps because I don’t really know of any nonsexist societies! But I think her argument makes sense, certainly insofar as things stand right now, with corporate capitalism poised to take over the planet if it hasn’t done so already.

Here’s what’s been said so far, and I’d really like to hear what you think about it.

Margaret:
I just wanted to elaborate on one of your parentheticals, Amy:

We’re also, BTW, interested in ending all forms of capitalist exploitation, including factory work and agricultural labor as they are currently organized. Anyone not on board with this is NOT a radical feminist — SATSUMA.

This doesn’t mean that radical feminists are interested in freeing men from capitalist exploitation. What it means is that the entire system of capitalism is based on the sexual/reproductive/domestic enslavement and exploitation of female human beings. It means that freeing women from this slavery would cause the simultaneous collapse of the system.

But it does not mean that men would benefit from this. They wouldn’t. They benefit from the way things are now. They *would* be free from capitalism, assuming they’re there , but it wouldn’t be to their benefit. Just wanted to clarify that for me anyway Amy’s statement isn’t some “free all the men and the women from capitalism, yay!” equality feminist bullshit. I’m thinking it’s not for her either.

Amy’s Brain Today:
Yeah, Betsy Brown, in this article, says:

I’m a lesbian separatist. That means I work for autonomous lesbian alternatives to patriarchal society. It doesn’t bother me if the work I do for lesbians also benefits non-lesbian wimmin. If the work I am doing has some side-effect that benefits men without hurting wimmin, I don’t even mind that.

That’s kind of how I feel about it. Capitalist exploitation hurts women first and most, globally speaking. That’s why it’s unbelievably hypocritical for some women to speak of themselves as “feminists” when they remain willfully ignorant about the global exploitation of (mostly not-white) women in the service of their privileged western lifestyles.

And the only reason I brought it up in the first place was because the pro-prostitution crowd loves to talk about how prostitution isn’t any worse than factory work etc., as evidenced in one of Daisy’s posts linked to from the post I linked to above (if that makes any sense). I just wanted it to be clear that my/our opposition to prostitution has nothing to do with thinking that other forms of the exploitation of labor are fine and dandy.

Margaret:
Oh, see, I think what I’m saying is different from what you’re quoting. I mean, if I thought ending capitalism would benefit men even indirectly, I guess I wouldn’t mind that. But, the fact of the matter is that I *don’t* think it would benefit men – who would lose women as mothers, wives, and prostitutes, which is the basis of male supremacy.

Have at it wimmin!
_________________
*Because I’m trying to read Christine Delphy’s Close to Home: A materialist analysis of women’s oppression.

Filed under: feminist economics by Amy's Brain Today at 8:04 pm ~  8 Comments »

I had been on the magazine [as a typist] for a number of weeks when I summoned up enough courage to request the Book Review Editor for permission to review a book myself. I saw many books passing through his hands to others. The book I asked to review dealt with the American Indian. It was small and not of great importance, and because of this the editor finally agreed to let me try. I read and re-read the book, then wrote to the Secretary of an association of American Indians, about whose work I had read, telling him what I thought of it and asking him if I was right in opposing it. His reply supported me, and he gave me much information against the Indian Bureau in Washington, sending me also the magazines of his association. I read the magazines and incorporated his views and my new knowledge in the review. Then I gave it to the editor. He was opposed to it from the first, for he was one of those liberals who instinctively support an institution or a thing just because it exists, perhaps desiring to patch it up here and there. He challenged my statements, and only when I had shown the letter and magazines I had used, was he willing to publish what I had written–but with sweeping deletions.

This incident deepened my antagonism. Later I hesitatingly suggested that he have someone review two new books that had come, one on the history of the nationalist movement in India, one an economic study showing what England had gained from India in wealth during the past two centuries. He refused with devastating finality, saying: “The titles alone are sufficient to show that they are of no value and deserve no mention.”

“I live with a friend who is a teacher in the high schools, and she says they are very valuable,” I argued.

“The titles alone show that they are not scientific,” he replied coldly.

“Scientific…what is scientific?” I protested. “You have not even looked at the books. You get books with all kinds of strange titles.”

He turned his swivel chair until his back was to me, and said: “Please have my letters here by four this afternoon.”

I went back to my room where dozens of stenographers did their work without question, without presuming to think that they knew what a magazine should contain. For a long time I sat at my desk, humiliated and resentful, hating my work, hating the necessity of spending my days taking down the thoughts of such a man when I wished to learn to have and express thoughts of my own. I glanced about at the girls working in the din of typewriters–efficient, seemingly contented girls earning their twenty to twenty-five dollars a week as I was doing, year in and year out taking down the thoughts of men and then typing them on pages. Why could I not be happy and contented with such an existence — why did I resent girls who accepted it — why did I wish the Book Review Editor would suddenly fall dead in his office?

“For a long time I sat at my desk, humiliated and resentful, hating my work, hating the necessity of spending my days taking down the thoughts of such a man when I wished to learn to have and express thoughts of my own.”

Oh, Agnes, I hear you girlfriend.

_______
Quote from Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley (The Feminist Press, 1987).

*Title from the Indigo Girls song “Virginia Woolf”:
“They published your diary
And that’s how I got to know you
The key to the room of your own and a mind without end
And here’s a young girl
On a kind of a telephone line through time
And the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend
So I know I’m all right
Life will come and life will go
Still I feel it’s all right
Cause I just got a letter to my soul”

Filed under: words from women, work by Amy's Brain Today at 9:25 am ~  No Comments »

Perhaps most powerful and fundamental in the education of Marie Rogers, the name Agnes Smedley gives her fictional self, is the emotional lesson she learned early in childhood: Love expressed in sex enslaves and humiliates married women. It is the toll men exact for giving economic protection to their wives. This perception punctuates the book like the refrain in a sad folk song: “The weeping of women who are wives–what is more bitter?” Sleeping in the same room as her parents, Marie is filled with “terror and revulsion” at the sounds from their bed; she learns as well that male animals cost more than female animals, that her father pays to bring a huge black stallion briefly to the field where the other horses run loose, that her father can beat her mother and desert her because she refuses to tell him how she will vote, and that he can beat her sister and threaten her aunt on a suspicion that they are “carryin’ on with men.” But the incident that reveals most viscerally the political economy of marriage to the young Marie occurs in the family of a newly married couple to whom she is hired out as a maid. After lying around the house, the wife, Gladys, wants to return to work, but her husband sees his ability to support her as a symbol of his manhood; she is his possession to keep idle at home. Once she is “expectin’,” their fights grow more bitter. The following exchange strips bare the marriage contract. “‘Give me back the clothes I bought you,’ he bellowed at her one day. ‘Damn it, kid, you know I love you!’ she begged through her tears–for now she could not go back to work even if she wished.”

This revelation, that women become powerless as wives and mothers, that they must produce care in exchange for food and clothes, that they must take orders and obey as a condition of the contract, forms for Marie, although at this early stage she is unaware of it, the kernel of her politics. For the same domination she hates in marriage she comes to hate in class relations, in party politics, in western and Japanese imperialism; but first she must experience–a key word for this novel–woman’s struggle to live independently. Like most women, her guides in this endeavor are few (two), and both have their independence still in relation to men. The mythic figure of her great-aunt dominates Marie’s imagination–the tall, strong tyrant with the body and mind of a man, the woman who not only controlled her children’s love affairs but took a lover as well. But it is Marie’s beloved aunt Helen, a prostitute, who teaches Marie the depths of society’s hypocrisy about women. Despised and abused by Marie’s father, Helen turns the tables on marriage, and exposes the inequalities of the institution. Helen is, in a sense, her own husband; she receives money herself, buys her own clothes, has “nice things,” as she calls them. But although Helen can order a man out of her house and has more rights over her body than most women, to Marie she still lives out women’s destiny in service to men. when she loses her sexual attractiveness, she loses her livelihood. Encountering her again as an older woman, now working in a factory, and learning to shake dice, Marie feels the awfulness of her brief existence: “Such useless pain…so useless…so useless.”

Among the strongest feminist scenes in literature, a series of events seal Marie’s pact with herself to avoid the misery of women who are wives. On three separate occasions after her mother dies, Marie chooses to leave her drunken, brutal father and young, vulnerable brothers alone, rather than assume responsibility for their care. Here the refusal to serve, obey, and care for anyone–family, father, brothers–comes to the severest test, and one about which many readers of this book have felt profoundly ambivalent. How are we to understand a passage in which the protagonist reasons that her family is no more to her than any other people; who says, “so deeply did I love them that I even forgot them…”; who chooses to study rather than protect and care for; who separates from a comrade and husband because he orders her, weak from an abortion, to “sit up” on a city bus; who becomes a wanderer with the world for her home and the wind for her companion? For a woman, such choices are a form of heroism, uncompromising decisions never to allow love and servitude to be linked, and yet these are choices that repel. May women not love and care for without losing their autonomy? If the first two sections of the novel prepare us to believe that women must reject marriage and the economic dependency it brings, the final third of the novel reintroduces the quest for love. Indeed, the intellectual and emotional task that Marie Rogers sets for herself might be characterized as an attempt to resolve the contradiction between love and autonomy, the theme of much of women’s recent fiction…

The themes she treats–class conflict, the strait jacket of gender expectation, liberated sexual relations, the pain of childbearing, the search for work, the development of revolutionary politics–appear in the novels of her immediate contemporaries. Indeed, Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart (1932), Josephine Herbst’s Rope of Gold (1939), and Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), three novels recently published in The Feminist Press’s Novels of the Thirties series, explore these themes. But even among her sisters in this special circle, Smedley presents the most radical and daring “reading” of childbearing: It must not happen. While other novelists present pregnancy, childbirth, and childbearing as inevitable dilemmas complicating the lives of their protagonists and exposing the sex/gender system, Smedley’s protagonist aborts two pregnancies. Babies with their dependency arouse her horror, not her longing to nurture. Living in a world where women support children alone, she recognizes that only unencumbered might she seek work and demand equality in love.

_______________
From “Afterword” by Nancy Hoffman in Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley (The Feminist Press, 1987).

Filed under: words from women by Amy's Brain Today at 12:51 pm ~  3 Comments »

This is a zucchini that Kya grew. It got lost in the foliage and we missed picking it at its proper time, because yes, that is a US 25-cent piece in the photograph with it. It is humungous. It is like a cudgel. It is going to be grated up for zucchini bread.

Filed under: fluff and musings by Amy's Brain Today at 11:46 pm ~  Comments Off

I was watching some dumb sitcom rerun yesterday and I incidentally gleaned the greatest comeback! A snotty woman is being condescending to a fat woman by saying, “Well, I watch what I eat.” And the fat woman says, “Going in or coming out?”

Yeah, that one is going into the files for later reuse.

Filed under: fat politics by Amy's Brain Today at 10:53 am ~  2 Comments »

From The Revenge of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist by Diane DiMassa (1995, Cleis Press), p. 104.

Text below the fold for those who can’t see the images:
(more…)

Filed under: fluff and musings, words from women by Amy's Brain Today at 10:50 am ~  14 Comments »

Oh no, I guess I’m gay, ’cause I didn’t read it. NOW maybe I’m really a lesbian.

Filed under: photographic mischief, satire by Amy's Brain Today at 12:08 pm ~  Comments Off

This is a repost from 11/23/2006. Seems relevant.

*********************
I’ve noticed I use the word “crazy” a lot. Despite my attempts to use language precisely, that’s one imprecision that’s stuck with me. I was called on it a couple months ago and I’ve been paying attention my fairly frequent automatic use of it since then. Even though I’ve been aware of the way it’s used to stigmatize women with “mental illness,” I haven’t taken the time to think about how else I might express myself. So I’m pledging to watch it, and to think up more accurate terminology to express what I really mean–which usually has nothing to do with sanity (see below).

In return, I want to ask my sister bloggers (and anybody else, really) to rethink your use of the word “lame” as a synonym for bad, stupid, loserish, etc. I loved someone who couldn’t walk; her legs not working did not change the fact that she was an amazing person, and every time I read or hear the word “lame” used as an epithet–when what is meant has nothing to do with mobility impairment–I just cringe all over. So please. Help me out here.

Words to use instead of “crazy”

wild
unusual
unreasonable
odd
illogical

Words to use instead of “lame”

cheesy
obnoxious
bogus
loserish
pathetic

Oh, I know there are more, but I’m tired.

What do you think?

Filed under: ability, language by Amy's Brain Today at 9:27 am ~  18 Comments »

SARK:

Men are not the problem. I see men’s shoulders come down about a foot when I say that. As a woman who has been sexually and physically abused by men, I continue now to find safety and understanding with men who do not hurt women–and there are so many more of these.

Men are also yearning for succulence. They are crying, fumbling, dreaming, seeking, and healing too.

They are releasing their neckties and refusing to leave their children and families for work.

Men are blooming, changing, and growing into more self-love.

I used to dream about a society with no men.

Now I dream about the loving men and women who dare to cross long places of misunderstanding to meet gratefully in the middle.

Gee, SARK, I have to wonder how it would feel to come across this as a woman struggling with a recent sexual assault — you know, that thing you yourself want so bad to heal from? — rather than just random little ol’ me who’s trying to be open to new sources of comfort and thought the book colors looked pretty in the 50¢ bin at the used bookstore? If it pisses ME off enough to call you a cocksucker in public, what kind of trauma echoes is it going to create for someone recently “physically and sexually abused by men”?

Oh, but I forgot, relaxing the shoulders of your exceptional men and patting them on the back for babysitting their own kids is more important than making sure women find unadulterated solace in your work. Certainly more important than, I don’t know, checking that the trend of (white) (creative class) men staying home with their families is matched by an equal and opposite trend towards increasing the meaningful participation of women in public life. (Clue: It isn’t.)

If these bad woman-hurting men are such rare birds, then who exactly is hurting all the hurt women I know? A few men must be very, very busy whipping up all that “misunderstanding” — with their fists, their guns, their jackboots, their dicks, their tanks and cruise missiles, their courts and laws and medical procedures, their sex-segregated workforces and exploitive economies.

Frankly I haven’t noticed men lacking in self-love, since they’ve made an entire world in their image, foregrounding their experiences, interests, desires, and values as if they were the same as women’s — which they aren’t — and stealing women’s resources to maintain the whole horrific mess. So I’d just like to know what evidence you got, SARK, that these men you’re so anxious to comfort AREN’T in fact rapists, batterers, child molesters, and war criminals. (And FYI, “I Just Know He Would Never Do Such A Thing!”^TM doesn’t cut the mustard.) While I wait for you to come up with that info, I’ll leave you to your richly deserved fate at the hands of some radfem separatist commenters.

________
From the bodacious book of succulence: daring to live your succulent wild life by SARK (1998, Fireside). Strongly Not Recommended For Feminists

Filed under: big fat lies, cranky, manhating by Amy's Brain Today at 8:21 am ~  18 Comments »