On Oct 14, 2006, at 1:23 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
That said, you evade the question of why socialist states and movements have had only a few women leaders, fewer than one would expect, when women have managed to rise to the top in a number of capitalist states, even ones that are poor or on the Right where one might not have expected them to do so.
Might be because, contrary to some essentialist feminist thinkers, capitalism undermines patriarchy over the long term, by competing away gender distinctions in favor of a purer individualism; because socialism arose in many highly patriarchal cultures, and didn't last long enough to undermine the received system; and because formerly existing socialism was already in decay as women were rising in capitalist societies. How many women were in Western boardrooms and parliaments in the 1970s? Doug
