Category Archives: women in the news

WHY SOME WOMEN HATE SARAH PALIN

Put her out of her misery, please

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Lynette Long: WHY SOME WOMEN HATE SARAH PALIN.

This post by Belinda Luscombe was pretty enlightening for me in an unfortunate way.  I have been wondering why a number of women I know and respect get apoplectic at the mention of Sarah Palin.  You can almost see sparks shooting from their hair.  When I try to say “A lot of women are not so much for Sarah Palin as they are against the media riculing her or the talking heads disparaging her” ( because someday we really would like a woman vice president or, better yet, president).  The response I often get, after a rolling of the eyes upward is “No one is disparaging her.  Or at least they’re not disparaging women in general.” I see.  Well, actually, I don’t.  But after reading Belinda Luscombe’s post, I’m beginning to.

Some polls are suggesting that after gaining an initial bump, McCain‘s campaign is being hobbled by Sarah Palin‘s vice-presidential candidacy. The voters who are deserting her fastest, some of whom are even calling on her to withdraw, are mostly women.

Ah, women, the consistently, tragically underestimated constituency. What the Democrats learned during the primaries and the Republicans might now be finding out the hard way, I learned at my very academic, well-regarded all-girls high school: that is never to discount the ability of women to open a robust, committed, well-thought-out vat of hatred for another girl.

It’s a simple three-point pass-fail exam: Will the other girls like her?

Here’s why Palin doesn’t make the grade:

1. She’s too pretty. This is very bad news. At school, pretty girls tend to be liked only by other pretty girls. The rest of us, whose looks hover somewhere around underwhelming, resent them and whisper archly of their “unearned attention.” So, if everyone calls your candidate “hot,” you’re in a whole mess of trouble. If the Pakistani head-of-state more or less hits on her, well, yes, she’ll get a sympathy vote, but we’re in Dukakis-in-the-tank territory. It’s an admiration vaporizer. (Of course a candidate can’t be too ugly, or it will scare the men, who are clearly shallow as a gender.)

2. She’s too confident. This also bodes ill. Women have self-esteem issues. But they also have other-women’s-esteem issues. As almost any woman – from the head of the Budgerigar Breeders association to Queen Elizabeth – can attest, it’s almost impossible to get confidence right. Too timid and you’re a pushover. Too self-aggrandizing and you’re a bad word unless it’s about a dog, or Project Runway‘s Kenley. Or Michelle, my best friend until 9th grade, after she won that debating prize and got cocky.

3. She could embarrass us. History is not on Palin’s side. Every time a woman gets a plum job, be she Hewlett-Packard‘s ex-boss, Carly Fiorina, or CBS‘s Katie Couric, there’s always that whispery fear that people will think she got the job just because she’s a woman. So if things don’t go well – and a couple of YouTube clips have suggested that they’re certainly not going well for Palin – women are the first to turn on her for making it harder for the rest of us to louse up at work.”

The fact of the matter is once a female decides it’s over with another female, it’s like an end-stage marriage. No matter how seemingly benign, every attribute becomes an affront: the hair, the voice, the husband, the moose-shooting, the glasses, the big family, the making rape victims pay for their own rape test kits.

I know, I know. With all this extra baggage a female candidate has to bear, the chances of finding a woman whom other women won’t hate seem skinnier than last year’s jeans. But don’t despair, if all else fails, we could just do what we always do and just vote in some guy. It’s worked so well for us in the past.”

Fo the entire post go to Lynette Long: WHY SOME WOMEN HATE SARAH PALIN.

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Two Women, Great Legacies

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Two Women, Great Legacies -Concurring Opinions.

posted by Danielle Citron

AdvancingWomen.com would like to pay tribute to two women pioneers in journalism.  We hope their values will inspire others to “make a difference”, as these two women did.

“This week marked the passing of two women journalists who pioneered great change in their times. According to The New York Times obituaries section, Nancy Hicks Maynard, the first black woman to be a reporter at the New York Times, died at 61. Ms. Maynard joined the New York Times in 1968 where she stayed until 1974. At the Times, she reported on race riots, student takeovers at Columbia and Cornell, and the death of Robert F. Kennedy. She also wrote for the paper’s education and science news departments. She founded the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, which has trained hundreds of minority journalists in the past 31 years. Ms. Maynard and her husband, Robert C. Maynard, a columnist for the Washington Post, bought the financially-ailing Oakland Tribune in 1983. The Times reports that her interest in journalism was sparked after a fire destroyed her former elementary school in Harlem. Outraged by the way her community was described in the press, she “decided she could make a difference.” Indeed, she did.

And so did Mary Garber, a journalist who first began covering athletics more than 60 years ago when female sportwriters were barred from press boxes and locker-room interviews, who passed away on Sunday. When Ms. Garber began her career as a sportswriter, the craft was dominated by men. Coaches treated her badly, her fellow sportswriters ignored her, and professional associations excluded her. But she perservered, first covering high school sports and then on college athletics. She also highlighted the acheivements of black athletes in the 1950s, in particular at Winston-Salem State, a time when “news about black people ended up on the Sunday newspaper’s ‘colored page.’” The Hall of Fame basketball coach Clarence Gaines told a reporter in 1990 that “We had outstanding athletes . . . and Mary came to write about them when no one else cared. Mary was always trying to help the underdog.” She later wrote for The Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem and The Winston-Salem Journal. In 2005, at 89, she became the first woman to receive the Associated Press Sports Editors’ Red Smith Award, presented annually for major contributions to sports journalism.”

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Where Feminism, Copyright Law and This Interminable Election Intersect

2004 cover with dandy Eustace Tilley, created ...

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Feminist Law Professors » Blog Archive » Where Feminism, Copyright Law and This Interminable Election Intersect.

AdvancingWomen.com thinks the point the original New Yorker cover meant to make was that even sophisticated, urbane and worldly New Yorkers….. or particularly sophisticated, urbane and worldly New Yorkers…. could be insular and parochial when it comes to viewing the rest of the country.  The so called “fly over” area of middle America..states like Kansas and Nebraska, are often heaped with particular scorn. And if the elite, entrenched establishment of the Eastern seaboard think of Kansas City as out of the hub bub, bright lights, fashion forward, deep thinking, heavy weight pontificating and intellectual clarity of the East, what then of Alaska?  Must be a wolverine and moose infested, vast frozen tundra of backwoodsmen and women, “clinging to their guns and religion”, and as Al Gore has demonstrated in his slides and film, about to slip into the watery nether world of the Bering Straits, that slim sliver of maritime border between the Arctic Ocean and the Pacific, between the U.S. and Russia, which Palin can see from her window.

One has to wonder if that same parochial, condescending perspective doesn’t affect some of the media and the talking heads who appear to view Sarah Palin as a “country bumpkin”, illiterate about global geo-politics and not nearly savvy enough to climb on to the world stage.  One has to wonder how all these brainy, politically savvy, white male politicians, who definitely fit into Washington D.C., managed to get us into two simultaneous wars, a financial and credit meltdown and mortgage crisis all of which are rattling the world markets.  It doesn’t seem the bar is set that high that Sarah Palin should be viewed quite so harshly.  Perhaps if she has less hubris she would do less and therefore foul up less than some who have been in power for decades, if not generations.

Where Feminism, Copyright Law and This Interminable Election Intersect

Above is a recent New Yorker cover mocking Sarah Palin. The drawing is a parody of one of the New Yorker’s most famous covers:

It was drawn by the late Saul Steinberg, and titled “View of the World from 9th Avenue, 1976“:

For more posts go to Feminist Law Professors

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“Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”

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Feminist Law Professors » Blog Archive » Inverview With Congressional Rep. Carolyn Maloney About Her New Book, “Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”.

This is exactly the kind of coming together and collaboration of women’s communities of interest that AdvancingWomen.com has been talking about and, hopefully, encouraging.

Part one here. Part two here.

In this instance, Feminist Law Professors and The New Agenda are focusing on the same themes found in “Rumours of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated” and reflected in this Interview With Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney by MadamaB, Crossposted at The Confluence and MadamaB’s own blog

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney is described by author, MadamaB, as a “gracious, intelligent, fiery and fabulous feminist.” Among the many points Congressman Maloney makes is that real progress will come “when there is a critical mass of women in government. Once 30% of our representatives are women ( Ed. some say 50%) , women’s issues begin to be addressed. The United States is nowhere near that critical mass yet.”

What is important, in the context of women’s emerging communities on the Net, is not the specific point a women’s activist makes, but the fact that she is taking a pro-woman stand in a society where there is a systemic bias which diminishes women and results in limiting their progress.  What is significant in this instance is that Feminist Law Professors , The New Agenda, The Confluence and MadamaB’s own blog have all come together on the Net to reinforce each other’s perspective on the themes in Maloney’s book.

AdvancingWomen.com‘s position is that “it is important that a meaningful part of content on the Net be shaped and produced by women and offer new paradigms to support women’s advancement…. Our first task is to foster a sense of inclusive community among women’s groups with many different agendas and ideologies because that is the catalyst which will drive open communication among them and form the foundation for both networking, and its further evolution into a support system….
To achieve women’s advancement in many areas – business, law, politics, academia –  we need a critical mass of women and women’s organizations to share their knowledge and strategies.”

When AdvancingWomen.com sees women’s groups like Feminist Law Professors , The New Agenda, The Confluence and MadamaB come together to share their knowledge and strategy, we feel very encouraged that the first steps towards that synergistic nexus of women’s communities on the Net has been taken and its evolution in growth and influence has begun.

When we look at the tools women have created or managed on the Net, a common theme runs through them: “Tina Sharkey at Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) BabyCenter ( networking and sharing information about child care and child raising); Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr (photo sharing); Mena Trott, co-founder and president of blogging powerhouse Six Apart ( connecting and communication through blogging); and Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, which lets users build their own social networks ( do it yourself, customized social networking)”.  In one way or another, all these women have addressed the technical “how to” part of the equation of women’s communicating and networking on the Net.  Other groups, many just now forming, are driven by the need to fill this new engine for thought and dialogue with their own passion, to level the playing field for themselves and other women.

In the beginning,  many purposeful and committed women may have found themselves a bit put off by the jarring disconnect of the techie culture, in contrast with their own more reflective styles. Very young men in tight T shirts with screaming logos or rebellious, clever or obscure quotations, slumped in bean bag chairs for an all night “hackathon” until some got leg burns from their lap tops, amid crumpled, empty pizza boxes, crushed Red Bull cans and blaring music pulsating through a giant open space, frequently a loft or run down office. Was there a flash of genius there?  Definitely, sometimes.  Mostly they could have produced the same work from 9 to 5 but the crazy hours and adrenalin high were all part of the exuberant experience for them.

For equally driven women, either in their corner office, having fought tooth and nail to get there, or who might have met at Starbucks for a latte or a caramel frappe, or be sipping oolong tea on their deck or multi-tasking in their home office, Blackberry in one hand, baby on a hip, stepping over the tennis shoes of their son, roughly the same age as the founders of some of the new Net companies like Facebook….there may have been a sense that they didn’t belong in this new Net frontier.  Not that the wonderboys were swinging open any doors for them.  But women have long ago learned no one is swinging open any doors for them.  If women want to walk into the tech scene and become powerhouses on the Net, we have to step up, open our own doors and “make the path by walking on it.”

AdvancingWomen.com has no doubt that women will go for it and stake our own claim to our sphere in the Networked world, particularly now that the social networking era with all of its new, automated tools is upon us. We have a hunch that “our” Net, the “women’s communities’ Net” will be different.  It will be less about technical wizardry…..not that we don’t appreciate every ounce of that as it makes our work easier….give us those WordPress plug ins by the barrel full; it will be more about solving deep rooted problems woman have faced.  It will be less about reaching out for new Net frontiers to conquer, than working together to reshape attitudes and stereotypes from the past that have prevented us from crossing old frontiers.

This time, we don’t have to ask permission to join the “old boys’ game”.  ( Many of the old boys got “kicked under the bus” by the wonderboys anyway.)  This time we have the tools and the ability to use the Net to route around the existing power structure, bypass the gate keepers, and ignore the often condescening “talking heads”  to speak directly to each other, each from our own community of interest reaching out to like-minded others.

Also see:

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley

South Carolinian Mary Jackson, Fiber Artist, Wins “Genius” Award

Mary Jackson – MacArthur Foundation.

South Carolinian wins “genius” award.

from Feminist Law Professors by Ann Bartow

Mary Jackson is a fiber artist whose intricately coiled vessels preserve the centuries-old craft of sweetgrass basketry and push the tradition in stunning new directions. A descendent of the Gullah community of coastal South Carolina, Jackson learned to make baskets at the age of four from her mother and grandmother, who passed on skills brought to the United States by their West African ancestors.

Read more here.

Below are photos of two of her sweetgrass baskets copied from this website:

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