>With regard to the cheery, "everything is getting better" attitude of your
>students: I have mixed feelings. After all, if one is speaking of gender
>inequity in this particular culture, everything *is* getting better. It
>still has a long, long way to go, of course. But maybe you could ask them to
>put themselves in the shoes of, say, a modern American woman who goes to
>Saudi Arabia and finds she can't drive, vote, etc. etc; ask them to imagine
>they are stuck there forever, and imagine how angry they'd be.
This is an interesting point. I, too, have mixed feelings. I am an
Extremely Positive person, but I balance my idealism with huge doses of
reality, which, actually, are pretty damn unavoidable!
However, there's some danger in pointing the finger at other cultures to
show how bad things still are _elsewhere_. In my mind, the only difference
between the experience of an American woman and that of a Saudi woman is
the matter of _degree_ of oppression. I'm always stunned to hear Americans
go on and on about the atrocities of female genital mutilation rituals in
Muslim cultures, while remaining blind to the fact that the American
proclivity towards breast enlargement and liposuction is pretty much the
same thing - body mutilation to meet a perceived societal standard. This
is not to minimize the horrors of the experience of women in some countries
by any means.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, as lucky as I feel to live in what
is probably the most progressive society for women, I am not satisfied with
conditions here by any stretch of the imagination.
Laura "I'll Never Shut Up Until Everything's Alright" Wigod
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:18 PDT