I strongly disagree with this. The end result of this approach is that feminists have to fix everything. Rather, feminists as individuals should be broadly interested in oppression in general and make cause with other groups who are disadvantagedWait, so middle-class women are women, full stop, and working-class women are "another group"? The feminist movement made that mistake for a long time, and it's not anything I want any part of. If feminism treats privileged women as generic women and all other women as belonging to "other groups," then feminism participates in oppression. We need to center all kinds of gender oppression, not just the kind that happen to privileged women and aren't interwoven with other forms of oppression.
No, I see the purpose of feminism is to deal with issues of equality for women, and demanding that it also deal with all other forms of oppression as part of its central mission because "women are everywhere" makes it very easy to brand feminism a failure.You can't achieve equality for women unless you achieve equality for all women. If white, middle-class, able-bodied, straight women are equal to white, middle-class, able-bodied, straight, etc. men, that's not equality for women. Other women are also women. You can't so "oh, well, working-class women can't take maternity leave, but that's a class issue, rather than a women's issue." Working-class women aren't any less women for being working-class. And if the only way to get maternity leave for working-class women is to address class inequality, then that means that class inequality is a feminist issue. You can't bracket off oppressions, because they overlap and intersect. Any feminism that insists on separating oppressions will, in the end, only address the issues of women who are privileged on every single axis other than gender.
Feminism is more or less specifically about the gender axisOk, so working-class women not having maternity leave isn't "the gender axis." Rich women not having maternity leave is "the gender axis," and once that's solved, the "gender axis" is out of it. What kind of problem, then, is the lack of maternity leave for working-class women? It's not a class issue, because just as the only gender issues are those that confront women who face no forms of oppression other than gendered oppression, the only class issues are those that face white, male, straight, etc. working-class men. Anything else isn't class, it's gender, race, etc.
Yeah, because classism and racism also affect men.But they effect women in different ways than they affect men. Why would movements for class and race equality pay any attention to the ways those issues affect women, if feminism doesn't pay any attention to the ways that gender oppression affect anyone but infinitely privileged women? Why shouldn't racial and class-justice movement bracket off gender, in exactly the way that you think feminism should bracket off race and class?
Additionally, as I pointed out above, it's important for people to take the lead in battling their own oppression -- women should form alliances across gender and class boundaries, but the people with the most stake in, say, race issues should be leading the way on those issues or there is a very real danger of paternalism (maternalism, in this case, perhaps) marring the results.Wait, so are you assuming that the leadership of the feminist movement can only be comprised of infinitely privileged women? If feminism takes up the intersections of race and gender oppression, it must be maternalistic, because women of color can't be involved in feminist decision making?
Since the article was about privileged-in-all-but-gender women not addressing class (and race) issues, suddenly asking where the women of color are in the decision making process is... well, not well matched to the original scenario.It didn't just happen that feminism became a movement of and for women who were privileged in every way but gender. Privileged feminists made certain decisions and deployed their power to define their issues as women's issues and other women's issues as something else, to exclude women who disagreed with them from positions of leadership, and to limit the participation of non-privileged women in the movement. Alice Paul chose to forbid African-American women from marching in the 1913 Women's Suffrage Parade in Washington, on the grounds that they clouded the issue because they were disenfranchised because of race as well as gender. Betty Friedan chose to say that lesbian groups couldn't participate in NOW-sponsored events because lesbians constituted a "lavender menace" who would discredit feminism. A certain very narrow form of liberal feminism became the mainstream face of the movement in the US, crowding out other voices, but it didn't have to be that way. Feminists with power made choices that made it that way. And now it's really hard to know how to fix it, because it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If most women are convinced that the feminist movement doesn't give a damn about them or their issues, then it's hard to know how to convince them to get involved in the movement so that they can ensure it does address their concerns.
I think one possible solution would be to value caregiving the way we do healthcareThere's a metric crap-ton of gendered class oppression involved in healthcare, though, if you think about all the home health aids and nursing assistants and other working-class women who do much of the scut work.
The first indignant denunciation was 5 minutes after it was posted.The New York Times is not exactly an obscure publication. I think it's safe to assume that anytime you post something from the NYT, some folks here will already have read it.
I don't think it's the case that men are excused of exploiting other men's labour, but because there isn't any necessity for a feminism-corollary "masculism," that conversation is not in terms of gender but instead exclusively in terms of class, i.e "the 1%" etc.Hmmm. To me, the question isn't really why aren't men condemned for hiring gardeners, although I agree that's a good question. It's why aren't men condemned for hiring poorly-paid, no-benefits-having cleaners or nannies. The way this article is worded, it completely lets middle-class men off the hook for domestic labor. Middle-class mothers used to do that labor, and now they also work. A number of strategies have allowed them to do that: taking maternity leave; scaling back their hours until their kids start pre-school; hiring domestic workers; etc. But totally absent from this discussion is one obvious strategy, which is "fathers could take equal responsibility for housework and child care." If they did, then hiring domestic labor might be seen as class exploitation, but it wouldn't be seen as a failure of sisterhood. The "failure of sisterhood" rhetoric, I think, starts from the basically sexist assumption that housework is inherently the job of women.
About one-quarter (27%) of all offenders were family members of their victims (table 6). The offenders of young victims were more likely than the offenders of older victims to be family members. Almost half (49%) of the offenders of victims under age 6 were family members, compared with 42% of the offenders who sexually assaulted youth ages 6 through 11, and 24% of offenders who sexually assaulted juveniles ages 12 through 17. Overall, just 12% of the offenders who sexually assaulted adults were family members of the victims, compared with 34% of the offenders of juvenile victims.
Except for victims under age 6, most sexual assault offenders were not family members but were otherwise known to the victim. Sixty percent of all sexual assault offenders were classified by law enforcement as acquaintances of the victim. Just 14% of offenders were strangers to their victims. Strangers were a greater proportion of the offenders of adult victims (27%) than juvenile victims (7%). The youngest juveniles were least likely to have an offender who was a stranger. Just 3% of the offenders in the sexual assaults of children under age 6 were strangers, compared with 5% of the offenders of youth ages 6 through 12, and 10% of offenders of juveniles ages 12 through 17.
Using NIBRS data, it is possible to develop probability statements about the characteristics of the offenders given certain characteristics of the incident (table 8). For example, knowing that a victim under age 6 was assaulted in a residence, the NIBRS data indicate that the most likely offender was a juvenile acquaintance age 12 through 17 probability 15.2%) or a family member age 25 through 34 (probability 15.0%). When a very young victim was assaulted some place other than a residence, the probability that the offender was an adult family member declines, while the probability that the offender was a juvenile acquaintance under age 12 increases substantially. When the victim was a little older (ages 6 through 11) and assaulted in some place other than a residence, the likelihood that the offender was a juvenile acquaintance increases even more (probability 41.0%).
In general, the victim-offender relationships were similar for male and female victims; however, there were differences in the offender profiles for victims under age 12 (table 7). Compared with young male victims, a greater proportion of female victims under age 12 was assaulted by family members. For male victims under age 12, 40% of offenders were family members compared with 47% of the offenders of females under age 12.
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posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:51 AM on December 29, 2011 [63 favorites]