On 9/2/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
BTW, you don't have to do research it and post it to pen-l if you don't want to. It seems that you _volunteer_ to be exploited.
I actually care about and am interested in topics under discussion, such as Iran, feminism, women in Muslim societies, etc., unlike men who have taken no such interest in them -- hence their lack of knowledge and willingness to volunteer to look for information on their own. I have already done my homework, and I have thousands of relevant articles at hand.
> That said, here's another useful article: > Louise Halper, "Law and Women's Agency in Post-Revolutionary Iran"... I read the conclusion of that article. It fits with what I said. Women won some good things in Iran only _by fighting for them_.
That's precisely what I have always said. Why do you think that you know that and I don't? Because you are a man, I assume.
> So, what are you doing to win it here? Only women are supposed to > struggle for it? no. But women know what's best for women better than men do. They must be organized for themselves -- and be supported by men, in a non-paternalistic way.
The way you talk to me is quite paternalistic, IMHO: "Yes, I must tell her that women won some good things in Iran only _by fighting for them_. Otherwise, she, an ignoramus, wouldn't know!" But I suppose you can't hear how you sound yourself.
> Why do you assume that the maternity leave in Iran was -- > automatically? -- handed down from above to women rather than women > winning it, since you say that nothing happens automatically? It's an > interesting contradiction in your thought. I never said that "nothing happens automatically"! Market-like processes are pretty automatic. (It's like the Invisible Hand, but is often disastrous, in unlike Smith's presumption). Market-like processes can undermine traditional institutions (like the patriarchal family, when young women are pulled into factories). However, this doesn't lead to _liberation_ in an automatic way.
That's what I pointed out to begin with: an increasing entry of women into wage labor in Iran. So, we are back to square one, after your gratuitous lectures.
Yoshie: > What's missing in your account is women in welfare rights > organizations, trade unions, etc. actively fighting to shape the > welfare system, the sort of women's struggles that Mimi Abramowitz, > Jill Quadagno, etc. have written about. what was I talking about when I referred to "popular struggle" above?
The term popular struggles suggests as if men and women participated equally in welfare rights struggles, which has not been the case. That's probably why the struggles have been defeated, since men, as well as better-off women, did not participate and did not make them popular struggles.
Yoshie: > Again, you are assuming lack of power without bothering to prove it. Nothing in the empirical world can really be "proved." However, the Halper article fits with what I said.
I don't think so. Halper actually takes careful note of what women actually did to change the laws and practice of marriage and divorce, whereas what you suggested initially said nothing of the sort, giving a static picture of women as passive victims.
> Islam has male as well as female codes of modesty, and codes differ > from one society to another (e.g., beards were de rigeur in > Afghanistan under the Taliban). but the beard thing was imposed using male-on-male violence. It wasn't a female-on-male thing.
In a lot of cases, dress codes and other discriminations are imposed by women on women. There is a good film titled Moolaadé, which focuses on a conflict over genital cutting in Senegal, and the film makes clear that cutting is actually done by women who have had it done to them when they were young and swear by it as a tradition, as is the case in most societies that practice it. A feminist struggle is seldom as simple as conservative men vs. progressive women -- quite often, it's a struggle among women first and foremost.
(patriarchy also foists itself on powerless men.)
That's the difference between patriarchy and sexism. The former works by patriarchs (sometimes mediated by matriarchs) subordinating younger men as well as women.
> As a matter of fact, all societies have gender-differentiated dress > codes. You can transgress them, but only at your cost. right, but in the "West" such codes have started to break down. Even men in skirts have begun to achieve some acceptance. Weirdly, women seem to have more choice about clothing than men do. Women can wear slacks _or_ skirts.
Yes. That is because skirts are mainly worn by women whose status is lower than men, while pants are regarded either as masculine or unisex. So, men who wear skirts lose a lot of male privilege and sometimes are treated as worse than women, for they get reduced to women's status or below it, being "unnatural women."
> Well, the fact remains that American women do not have the right to > paid maternity leaves that almost all other women in the world have, > and American male leftists are too busy looking at veiled women in the > Middle East to help American women get what they need. I don't care what people wear. The issue is the _imposition_ of dress codes.
Here, imposition of dress codes is mainly done by companies; in Iran, it is done by the state. That's because this is more a market society than Iran is.
Opposition to imposed dress codes seems to mesh well with other defenses of people's rights, such as pushing for maternity leave.
At work, neither men nor women in the USA have no right to wear what they want to wear if bosses say no and aren't covered by union contracts, unless the item in question has to do with a requirement of religious faith.
> It seems to me that, on a list like this, the necessity of both > changes in larger political economic conditions and self organizing by > women (or any other group) ought to be a given, rather than stated in > each posting. After all, I'm not writing a primer to Marxism and > feminism here! that's right. You don't have to prove the veracity of your perspective if you don't want to. to my mind, one of the things that distinguishes leftist from liberal thinking is the effort to put everything into historical and social context.
First, you have to learn about historical and social contexts in question before you put anything, which also has to be studied as well, in them.
I also think that there are a lot of folks on the left who don't believe in the socialism-from-below perspective (self-organization by the oppressed).
Self-organization of the oppressed is necessary (and you don't have to be a socialist to believe that it is either), but saying that it is is neither here not there. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
