Yeah, Faith and Carol, I have wondered about the Ms/Mrs usage especially
when it comes to referring to women in high places -- business or
politics. I am sure everyone has noticed how the first lady is always
referred to as
Mrs Clinton. Same with Mrs Thatcher, etc. Now, I am not sure if it is
the media that has "respectfully" decided to use this term, or if it is
the women themselves who have stated preference for the term, or if it is
the bureaucrats surrounding these people that make this decision. It
seems to me that Ms is just another form of Miss, and has not been used
to refer to woman, married or unmarried... What do people think?
Kami Pothukuchi
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Mon, 20 Mar 1995, Kylie Matthews wrote:
> > Hi Faith:
> >
> > Here in Florida, where linguistic consciousness evolves slowly, I
> > still get startled looks when I insist that, "I ain't nobody's
> > missus" after taking care of myself and my kids for 15 years! The
> > term Ms. is not used here voluntarily by anyone. Has it fallen
> > out of favor in the rest of the world too? Or never caught on?
>
> Carol, I can sympathise with you. I have been fighting for years to get
> the banks I have accounts with to send my account to Ms ... Not Miss. Yet
> they insist. At first I thought - oh well, who cares. But then I thought
> - why are they so stubborn - its one of the options on their list of
> titles. So everytime I have to go into the bank to change address (fairly
> often) I complain about my title. I feel that being called Miss gives out
> the message 'available'. I find this distasteful.
>
> Also though I think the use of Ms has not really caught on in west aus.
> People don't seem to see language as import. I do, as most of you know by
> now.
>
> Yours Feministically
> Ms Kylie.
>
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> The thing women have got to learn is that nobody gives you power. You just
> take it. -- Roseanne Arnold.
>
>
>
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Mar 30 07:27:10 MST 1995
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 1995 09:28 EST
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: animal vs. plant food discussion
I find myself in agreement with many of the
ecologically-based points that have been made about the
impact of eating plants (at the base of the trophic
pyramid) as opposed to animals (somewhere higher in the
pyramid, depending on the animal: cows [herbivores] are
low; tuna [top carnivores] are VERY high -- raising different
types of concerns about pesticide bioaccumulation, energy
loss through the pyramid, etc.).
I'd like to point out, however, that plant foods are
not uniform in terms of the relative degree to which their
eploitation by people impacts on the rest of the biological world.
Take orange juice, for example: because of our voracious appetite
for this commodity (including consumption by many vagans??), more
than 90% of all the xeric scrub habitat in Florida has been
obliterated in just the last 50 years -- including destruction by
individual owners of "mom 'n' pop" groves, as well as corporations.
This has resulted in the extinction or endangerment of many
organisms endemic (unique to) the scrub ecosystem -- the biologically
richest community, in terms of including organisms found nowhere
else on the planet, in the lower 48 states outside of California.
IMHO, the root problem, ultimately, is too many people, period.
Ecologists estimate that we ALREADY consume close to 25% of all the
biological productivity (i.e., biologically collected solar energy)
over the entire planet. If our population continues to grow
exponentially, no shift in our diet from animal to plant will reduce
this impact -- it could only slow the rate of further devastation
(obviously better than no change from the status quo, but not
sufficient in the long run to prevent the current wave of
anthropogenic extinction).
-- R L Curry
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Mar 30 07:56:46 MST 1995
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 1995 09:46:40 -0500
From: Deborah Rudacille <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Eat plants or animals? -Reply
>>> Wainwright Joel David <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 3/29/95,
09:52pm >>>
Plants, I suspect are more sensitive than rocks, and therefore if
I could live on rocks, I would be a geoterian. For this reason I
consider becoming a fruititarian (eat only fruits which can be
picked and eaten without killing the plants, e.g. apples and pears
but not potatoes, etc.) a logical next step which I have considered
for myself. But I am hesitant because, in whatever ethical calculus
I employ in my head, I feel the violence-to-self of trying to live
on such a diet would be greater than the gain to the plant world.
Joel raises an interesting point here. At what point do ideals of
non-violence result in violence-to-self ? Lately, I have been
thinking about Carol Gilligan's "ethic of care" --what she and other
researchers in this area describe as the characteristically female
mode of moral development in which decisions are based on the impact
they will have on others (rather than on ethical codes, as in typical
theories of moral development). It seems to me that this theory
illuminates a characteristically female "sin" which we have discussed
tangentially in the "earth as mother" thread--inability or
unwillingness to advance one's own interests when they conflict with
the interests of significant others and difficulty setting limits on
the extent to which one permits other's needs to take precedence over
one's own legitimate needs. It seems to me (and I'm just beginning
to work out the implications of this idea) that the more extreme
variants of animal rights philosophy and praxis are examples of this
characteristically female behavior. In effect such behavior may
constitute the mirror image of the behavior it is struggling to
overcome--the (shall I call it "male") assumption that my needs are
the only ones which matter and to hell with everyone else's, codified
in a moral & social theory which emphasizes individualism at the
expense of community & ecological health and well-being.
It seems to me that it is a great struggle for most of the women of
my acquaintance to accept that there are times when satisfying their
own needs will necessarily involve a certain degree of discomfort to
others--that others will not like and may in fact intensely dislike
and feel harmed by our self-assertion. Yet as someone (I can't
remember who) pointed out on this list recently, all our goddesses
are not nurturers. Kali, Hecate and Lilith represent the dark,
oftentimes destructive, force of self-assertion and other-negation.
I think that if this potent force is consciously denied, in an
individual, a group or a philosophy--it will resurface in another
form, usually as self-flagellation of some sort. Food for thought.
Deborah
