Wither Feminism?

We are a group of professionals from various disciplines who study women's place in the economy. We are collecting signatures to a letter to President-Elect Obama concerning jobs for women at the following site. Please go there to sign and forward it to people who would like to join in the effort. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/genderequity

A while ago I was invited by a colleague to be on a panel discussing "Feminist BS." I did my research and, armed with the latest data on discrimination, sex segregation in the labor force, and male-female wage gaps, sallied forth to enter the fray.

The venue, as I discovered, was a small theater with black walls and various avantgarde accoutrements. The panel consisted of me and another female academic, an extremely tribal gay guy and the drama critic of the local PBS radio station who was dressed in a witchy/ethnic outfit I suspect she ordered from the Pyramid Collection. The topic, it turned out, was whether feminism as a theatrical style was out-dated. My data fell flat and I felt like a fool.

I never realized that feminism was a "theatrical style" in the first place. I thought it was all about sex segregation in the labor force, male-female wage gaps and, more generally, eliminating gender-based constraints, restrictions and expectations that limit the choices of both men and women. I thought it was about removing unnecessary restrictions and providing more real options for everyone.

Feminism as a theatrical style is certainly bs and so, I believe is feminism as the ethic of care, the exultation of the Eternally Feminism, and Goddess worship, feminism as the Battle of the Sexes and feminism as the Solidarity of the Oppressed. Feminism is about jobs, wages and opportunities.

That is what this petition is about. Please sign at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/genderequity. Here is the text:

To President-Elect Obama:

We applaud your intention to establish a sizeable and productive program that will help to stimulate the economy, and that will provide improved infrastructure for the country. However, we are concerned that, unless specific steps are taken, your program will provide jobs almost exclusively for men. Women are 46 percent of the labor force. Their unemployment rate is rising with that of men. Moreover, many millions of women are raising children without a husband or partner, and unemployment for them will mean great deprivation, and possible homelessness, for them and their children.

We suggest three lines of action that will insure that women get a fair
share of the benefits from your program:

1. Revive and enforce the Labor Department regulations that require government contractors to institute affirmative action plans that provide a share of the jobs for women and minorities. Closely monitor the contractors for compliance.

2. In connection with the infrastructure projects, institute apprenticeships, and insure that at least one third of the positions go to women.

3. Add projects in health, child care, education, social service that will both provide jobs to women, and also provide needed services to them.

As a Worldwide Schism Lurks, the Church of England Endorses Women as Bishops - NYTimes.com

The governing body of the Anglican Church in Britain voted on Monday to approve the appointment of women as bishops, a step that appeared to risk a schism in the church in its historic homeland as the Anglican church worldwide faces one of the most serious threats to its unity in its history, over the ordination of gay clergy members.

Why is this man tearing his hair?

This is the Most Rev. John Sentamu, Archbishop of York and Primate of England, Second Among Equals, exhibiting existential angst about the proposal to ordain women to the episcopate of the CofE. Less reverend (and of course flat-out irreverent) folk will wonder why he and his fellow conservatives are so upset. After all, women are now political leaders, military officers and dentists--whatever is the problem?

Part of it is the failure of the less reverend to recognize that, from the theological point of view, there is a problem--in particular that priesthood is not simply a job, which women or anyone with the appropriate skills and credentials can do, or that conservatives' refusal to recognize women's ordination is more than resistance to admitting women to an Old Boys' Club. The NYTimes doesn't quite get it:

[T]raditionalists unreconciled to the end of the male monopoly within the clergy revived the battle over the issue of approving women as bishops, warning that it could lead to a breakup of the church in Britain.

Some conservatives are offended by the failure of almost everyone but themselves to recognize that secular competence and qualifications are just not what is at issue. The question is whether women can be a vehicle for the supernatural charismata constitutive of priesthood: whether they have the appropriate metaphysical status and can do the spooky stuff.

I used to think that this was the whole of it, but now see that it's only the smallest part because most conservatives in the Church, like their liberal opponents, identify religion with social arrangements and "values," and are not very interested in metaphysics or mysticism at all. For them, women's ordination is a symbol and symptom of a world gone to the dogs: the breakdown of the family, the rejection of objective moral standards, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, political correctness and social chaos. Personally, I am firmly committed to objective moral standards, detest political correctness and think social chaos would be a bad thing but am otherwise on the side of the dogs. I don't know any beings short of the angels who do better on objective moral standards than retrievers, like my chocolate lab, Ducati: herein is love.

The root problem is that after the Enlightenment the Church lost its nerve. Kant persuaded most educated people, for a time, that metaphysics was not intellectually respectable. What was the Church, the West's chief purveyor of metaphysics, to do? Presumably, get into another line of business--or make a minor sideline, the ethics business, its major enterprise. And that is what happened. By the 18th century the empirical sciences, mathematics and logic had been captured as secular enterprises; the social sciences and much of philosophy would soon follow. Ethics was still up for grabs so the Church made a play to capture it because, unlike metaphysics, in the wake of Kant's First Critique, it was respectable. Like Hope in Pandora's box, it was all that was left.

But not for long, because ethics soon became a secular enterprise and the Church soon enough became embroiled in the same losing battles it had fought over cosmology, astronomy, biology and history.

So now we see the Church digging in its heels to fight the Last Battle--which it will inevitably lose. Conservative clergy represent themselves as champions of objective ethics and decency pump out the doctrine that the only alternative to the code of conduct they promote is no code of conduct at all but self-destructive confusion, chaos and violence leading to social meltdown. On the ground, their followers conceive of religion is little more than an instrument of social control, ironically, very much like my mother who despised religious belief but hand that it was a good thing because it "kept uneducated people in line."

So now we see the likes of Archbishop Sentamu pissing in their purple knickers because they're convinced that the ordination of women symbolizes the rejection of all objective moral standards and means the end of civilization as we know it, while conservative Christians in the US and abroad are convinced that only the Old Time Religion will keep violence and chaos at bay. They are of course dead wrong--and that is an empirical fact. But there's a point to their worry that progressives don't recognize: for the lower classes, their best shot at living decent lives, given the gross defects of our current social arrangement, is to get strong religion or join the military. For them, this is the royal road to social mobility and the Good Life.

As to the Church, it will certainly collapse, though not in my lifetime, because both liberals and conservatives have given up on religion, which is its only legitimate business.

No Free Ride

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=bumpy_ride

Clark, Morgan Steiner, and others are telling women on the playground that they won't get trapped staying home and can always go back to work. Such good news -- if only it were true. In the only actual quantitative study (meaning the kind of data collected according to generally accepted scientific methods from a statistically meaningful set of subjects), Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Center for Work-Life Policy found recently that just a little more than half of women who wanted to return to full-time work ever found full time work at all. And these weren't just any potential re-employees. The women in the center's study were "highly qualified," meaning they had earned nothing less than bachelors' degrees with honors or professional or graduate degrees...Not only do highly qualified, eager women not always get full time work, other studies have shown that the women never get back full time jobs comparable to the ones they left. Hewlett's data shows that you lose 37 percent of your earning power if you're off more than three years. Morgan Steiner's article places the point of no return at ten years.

I figured that out when I was 17--why is it so hard? Working as a clerk-typist at a bus company it was pretty obvious that the only alternative to a career was a job. My co-workers were young women, trying desperately to get pregnant so that they could quit and middle-aged women, forced back to work when their kids were grown. I went to college, and grad school, and made a career for myself, to avoid ever, ever having to to a job again.

How can any woman smart enough to get a good BA or graduate degree imagine, in the teeth of all empirical evidence, that after ten years off she will be able to hop back onto the fast track, into an interesting, well-paid career? It's hard enough to get interesting work even if you're right out of school pushing full steam ahead. After ten years out, the luckiest women, who've managed to snag high-yielding husbands (and avoided divorce), will spend the rest of their lives assing around, selling real estate part time. Most though will end up doing boring, dead-end, pink-collar drudge jobs for the rest of their working lives. Most people, women and men, spend their lives doing rotten, boring drudge work--and the only way to avoid that is to fight like a demon for a career.

Maybe what bothers me even more than the idiocy of this fantasy is the sense of entitlement that of women who imagine that they can pick up where they left off--the implicit assumption that the rules are different, and should be different for women. No one imagines that a man who dropped out to bum around at 30 should be able to take up where he left off ten years later. There aren't enough good jobs or good lives to go around, and if you want one of those very few good jobs you have to fight for all you're worth and sacrifice. If you choose to take ten years off, you pay for it--and that is as it should be, whether you're male or female, whether you spend those ten years traveling around the world, chaffeuring the kiddies to soccer practice, or lying on the street in a drunken stupor.