From LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU Tue Feb 12 16:32:27 2002 Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 17:48:13 -0600 From: "L-Soft list server at UIC (1.8d)" To: Laura Q Subject: File: "FEMINISTSF LOG0111A" ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2001 11:32:51 -0700 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Mellen Subject: BDG - Nov Comments: To: feministsf-lit@uic.edu, feministsf@uic.edu Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Dear Discussion Groupers; This month of November wešre discussing; The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Discussion starts on the 5th. Do remember to order your books in plenty of time for the next selections. Illicit Passage can only, as far as I know, be obtained from the author, via Mysterious Galaxy. Thanks to Mary Elizabeth of Mysterious Galaxy for making that so easy & giving us a discount on most books. mgbooks@mystgalaxy.com, or orders@mystgalaxy.com Blessings - Mellen For the BDG Volunteers Upcoming Books- 3 Dec. War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull 7 Jan. A Women's Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women, edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams 4 Feb. Illicit Passage, by Alice Nunn *************************************************************************** The BDG provides a forum for focusing discussion on a particular book during a one month period. The books discussed are nominated and chosen in advance by a vote of all members of the FSFFU-L list serve who choose to vote. Start thinking about your nominations now. To quote our list-mistress, "This does not prohibit discussion of the BDG books at other times; nor does it prohibit discussion of non-BDG books." If you have any other questions about the Book Discussion Group (BDG), it's selections, previous discussions or the Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy and Utopias Literature List Serve (FSFFU-L), you can start with the BDG website at; http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Comet/1304, or the FSFFU-L website at; http://www.feministsf.org/femsf/listserv/index.html -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 11:26:57 EST Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Handmaid's Tale Comments: To: divadiane9@compuserve.de Comments: cc: davebelden@earthlink.net, feministsf-lit@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit It's been a while since I've read the Handmaid's Tale. Very interesting that Atwood wrote it after a visit to Afghanistan. I'm not sure of the time frame, when the Taliban came to power visavis when Atwood visited. My understanding is that in preTaliban Afghanistan, women were significantly represented in the ranks of the educated middle class, in the cities at least. I'm currently reading a book by Jason Elliot, 'An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan", which gives some insight into the preTaliban, Soviet and post Soviet era. The Soviet invasion spurred the rise of fundamentalism in what was (and is) a very diverse culture. In terms of Islam, the following quotes are interesting (these are fairly long, so I beg your indulgence): Stopping in a mud-walled 'serai' for the evening with his guide Ali, Jason Elliot (the author) became, as always, the object of utmost curiosity. This exchange occurred (now the quote begins): "the old man wheezed a question...'Where in this world is your friend from?' 'Ha! You would never believe where he is from.' [Ali] enjoyed this little tease; he too got weary of the inevitable questioning and, I noticed, at each stop, a little more protective of me. I heard two men speak among themselves in the shadows. 'Is he a believer?' 'Not a chance,' said the other, 'he's a foreigner and a kafir.' 'By Allah, he is NOT!' Ali...shot back; overhearing them. And then, almost coyly, he said:'Everywhere we go people think he is a Moslem.' ...[paragraph] ...I was touched by his defence, which expressed a wonderful ambiguity. It did not matter that I might not be a Moslem: it was enough that people thought I was. In a country where a man's integrity is judged by his adherence to the multiplicitous regulations of religion, the distinction between believer and unbeliever is bound to be fierce. Yet in Afghanistan, where of all Islamic nations you might least expect to find such a softening at the edges, the natural sense of moderation of the people has always kept extremes of religious behaviour in check. Only under the cataclysmic influence of the Soviets were religious leaders able to gain exceptional power...The vast majority of Afghans are deeply observant ...but are no purists... What you hear, when a person's behaviour can't be measured by the traditional criteria, is whether a thing is 'close to Islam' or 'far from Islam'...Afghans, who have never enjoyed being told too much how to behave, make frequent use of the expression." The second quote is this: "Ali...would often ask me if I was tired. I said...that I was only sometimes tired, 'like in life', I said, and recited my old couplet from Hafez:'Though the way is full of perils, and the goal far out of sight...' 'Hah! Bravo!' he chuckled. 'Do people read Hafez in England?' 'A few. And they have heard of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, too.' 'Master Rumi? In England? Well I never...You must make a translation, so that everyone in England can read him,' he said, and began to spout couplets, which I endeavoured to match but quickly exhausted my supply. I told him that when I was younger I had visited Turkey and paid my respects at the tomb of the saint himself. 'By Allah!' he beamed, 'There's no difference between your religion and mine after all!" (Sufism is widespread in Afghanistan, and famous Sufis include women. One I've just learned of in Elliot's book is Rabi'a of Balkh, a 9th century woman and Afghanistan's earliest Sufi poet. Her tomb is one of many Sufi shrines in Balkh, near Mazar-e-Sharif, if I've gotten the geography straight. I'm thinking of trying to find some of her poetry. ) The picture I have gained so far of Afghanistan is a very diverse culture, with incredible history as the crossroads of Asia, which has suffered huge setbacks directly related to the Soviet invasion there, American fostering of the Taliban as an antiSoviet force, and now American reaction to the results of that. My memories of the Handmaid's Tale right now,however, are of its consonance with my deepest fears about the present war, which are not fears of foreign terrorism but of fears of a decided right wing drift in our own country. Conspiracy theorists on the internet paint an equally unsettling picture of the current war as part of what could be described as a coup d'etat, using a terrorist attack as a pretext. Certainly we've seen enough attempts to wrap rightwing agenda items in the flag to give that theory some resonance. I myself am not a fan of conspiracy theories, because ultimately they come full circle, it seems to me, and explain nothing. But in terms of the book, and fears, those are the connections that current events inspire. I think we're doing a pretty good job at scaring ourselves right now, so when I say this, I am not advocating these theories, just commenting on the emotional connections to Atwood's work and current events. However, I do not think one can be overly complacent about the robustness of women's rights under capitalism. The rise of fascism in Germany, one of the most cosmopolitan of European states in the prefascist period, belies that idea. Capitalism is the current force pushing the history of the world in all its aspects. Some of the results are much less benign than others. In fact, I think the current elevation of capitalism as the end all and be all theory of everything amounts to a secular religion. History did not stop with the fall of the Berlin wall, capitalism still depends on expanding markets in its current forms, and expanding markets adhered to as a blind principle is bound to bring conflicts with unforeseen outcomes. That unfortunately isn't conspiracy theory, and what I see almost everywhere in the socalled intelligentsia of the first world, is a hidebound refusal to see that capitalism is a historical phenomenon which is no more permanent than any other economic/ideological system in history. The question is, what's next? -Joy Martin -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 11:47:35 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Dave Belden Subject: FW: Atwood Comments: To: feministsf@uic.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I guess I should have sent this to both listserves. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Dave Belden [mailto:davebelden@earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 10:39 AM To: feministsf-lit@listserv.uic.edu Subject: Atwood On October 28 (i.e. a week ago) Margaret Atwood wrote an article in the color magazine of the New York Times about her visit to Afghanistan in 1978 with her husband and young daughter. She said that visit became the main inspiration for writing The Handmaid's Tale. That helped to make more sense of the book to me: it was prophetic more about Afghan society than North American society. Looked at like this, the book becomes a way that we can feel with Afghani women the horror of their situation. When I read the book at first publication I thought that it was well written, but its power was drained away by its implausibility. There was no convincing explanation in the novel (for me anyway) of how the fundamentalists had managed to take power. As a sociologist I see that the basic trends of the modern economy are going in the other direction, towards more power for women. It is intriguing to me how feminism was a cry in the wilderness (Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot) until the modern economy brought wages, education, professional careers to women. I learned my feminism in England in the 1970s from women who were socialists; but clearly it is capitalism, or at least the industrial economy, that brought women off the isolation of the farm and into modern cities, employment, education and this enabled them to organize, think together, turn the isolated feminist cry into a mass movement. Likewise, the best hope for women in poor countries today is to modernize their economies. (And one of the best ways to modernize the economy it's now agreed by most economists is to empower and educate women). The future of North America is all bound up with the 'knowledge economy' and women have an equal, if not better than equal, chance of getting good employment within it: women's strength is only going to grow as heavy industry follows farming into an almost insignificant proportion of the working population. It is amazing how fundamentalism has survived in the midst of all this: people basically believing in the equivalent of a flat earth while flying around it in airplanes. But it's just not the kind of threat Atwood envisaged. So I saw the novel as a bad dream that need not disrupt my waking hours, because it's so unlikely. But a well written and creepy bad dream. Terrific imagery. Dave Belden (of www.davidbelden.com) -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 13:24:57 -0700 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Patricia Mathews Subject: Re: FW: Atwood Comments: To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit --On Tuesday, November 06, 2001 11:47 AM -0500 Dave Belden wrote: > > When I read the book at first publication I thought that it was well > written, but its power was drained away by its implausibility. There was > no convincing explanation in the novel (for me anyway) of how the > fundamentalists had managed to take power. Heinlein, Robert, THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW, and/or REVOLT IN 2100. Same culture, different ends of the arc, and Heinlein's novel was written in the late 40s. As a sociologist I see that the > basic trends of the modern economy are going in the other direction, > towards more power for women. It is intriguing to me how feminism was a > cry in the wilderness (Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot) until the > modern economy brought wages, education, professional careers to women. Yes. I > learned my feminism in England in the 1970s from women who were > socialists; but clearly it is capitalism, or at least the industrial > economy, that brought women off the isolation of the farm and into modern > cities, employment, education and this enabled them to organize, think > together, turn the isolated feminist cry into a mass movement. Likewise, > the best hope for women in poor countries today is to modernize their > economies. (And one of the best ways to modernize the economy it's now > agreed by most economists is to empower and educate women). The future of > North America is all bound up with the 'knowledge economy' and women have > an equal, if not better than equal, chance of getting good employment > within it: women's strength is only going to grow as heavy industry > follows farming into an almost insignificant proportion of the working > population. I fully agree. > > So I saw the novel as a bad dream that need not disrupt my waking hours, > because it's so unlikely. But a well written and creepy bad dream. As the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan said..... > Dave Belden > > (of www.davidbelden.com) > > -------------------------------------------------- > This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for > discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To > unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to > LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: > unsubscribe feministsf > > Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. Pat -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 08:34:58 +0100 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Diana Lago Subject: Re: FW: Atwood Comments: To: feministsf@uic.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Hi to everyone, i would like to add just a little comment: >I >>learned my feminism in England in the 1970s from women who were >>socialists; but clearly it is capitalism, or at least the industrial >>economy, that brought women off the isolation of the farm and into modern >>cities, employment, education and this enabled them to organize, think >>together, turn the isolated feminist cry into a mass movement. Likewise, >>the best hope for women in poor countries today is to modernize their >>economies. (And one of the best ways to modernize the economy it's now >>agreed by most economists is to empower and educate women). The future of >>North America is all bound up with the 'knowledge economy' and women have >>an equal, if not better than equal, chance of getting good employment >>within it: women's strength is only going to grow as heavy industry >>follows farming into an almost insignificant proportion of the working >>population. > > I fully agree. And however I disagree with both you. I mean that yes, it may be true that capitalism, or at least the industrialeconomy, that brought women off the isolation of the farm and into modern cities, employment, education but there were 'dark' reasons: farms, capitalism generally speaking needed more employees, and the next ones were women. For example, the civil war in United States between noth and south, supposedly to make black people free: here again there is a theory that says that capitalism needed employees and also purcharses, but slaves were not allow to purchase. And capitalism needed to make them free. I hope I'm making sense because the English thing forces me to explain things too plain, too simple but I hope I have introduced the idea: we have nothing to thank to capitalism: they began to make woman free when they began to needed us as part of the system. Of course we are taking advantage of it, i will never deny that. But we must not forget that women have always worked, always, since the very beginning, and it was during the Victorian years that men succeded in enclosed women into the domestic area. Best Nuria _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 08:37:01 -0700 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Patricia Mathews Subject: Re: FW: Atwood Comments: To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit --On Wednesday, November 07, 2001 8:34 AM +0100 Diana Lago wrote: > Hi to everyone, i would like to add just a little comment: > > But we must not forget that women have always worked, always, since the > very beginning, and it was during the Victorian years that men succeded in > enclosed women into the domestic area. > > Best > Nuria Even in Victorian times, women worked - it's only middle-class women and above who didn't. I know a man who told me that in his childhood,women didn't work - and his mother even had a maid. He was very annoyed when I answered "So - what was the maid? An android?" But hey, she was working, wasn't she? Pat -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 13:01:08 EST Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Joy Martin Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] Atwood Comments: To: daohuis@wmis.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 11/7/01 8:02:05 AM Central Standard Time, daohuis@WMIS.NET writes: << how the fundamentalists came into power. The whole way in which it happened struck me far more than it did the first time that I read it, because of the recent events. On p. 225 of my paperback edition, She says that "they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time." I think that's one of the things that I find most troubling about the way our world is shaping up at this time, that it really would be easy enough for someone within our own country to carry out something like this and blame it on someone from the outside and no one (or very few anyway) would question it. Already there are polls asking questions about national ID cards and setting up interment camps, and quite a few of those polled already think such things are a good idea -- as if those are really effective means of keeping us "secure" (whatever that means). I do like to think that we're not yet at >> I don't like to fan the conspiracy theory flames, but there is stuff to think about in it all, and since the civil liberties issues right now are worrisome, I'm making mention of it. One of the most complete sites is the www.whatreallyhappened.com site. You have to sift through it carefully, because factual is intermixed quite a lot with pure editorial and speculation. Or, maybe I should say, he does pretty much let you know what his references are, and you can tell what's his editorializing, but the mixture can still get your bloodpressure going, if it doesn't turn you off totally from the getgo. After you read a lot of this stuff, you feel like a coup d'etat is lots more likely than one would think. So I'd say- if interested, check it out, but read it with a highly critical eye, as if it was the worst science fiction you ever read (except, some of it isn't fiction).It certainly isn't in the language of Margaret Atwood, but because of current events, it's pretty scary. Occasionally I take URL's off this site (of Congressional testimony and other things where there's a story that could be verified) and send them to my local paper, asking them what's going on ?, to check it out. That's their job, and it doesn't hurt to encourage them to do it. And any decent newspaper is interested in a story, despite the travails and consolidations in the press over the last couple of decades.-Joy Martin -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 19:17:25 +0100 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Diana Lago Subject: Re: FW: Atwood Comments: To: feministsf@UIC.EDU Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Hello > >>Hi to everyone, i would like to add just a little comment: >> >>But we must not forget that women have always worked, always, since the >>very beginning, and it was during the Victorian years that men succeded in >>enclosed women into the domestic area. >> >>Best >>Nuria > > Even in Victorian times, women worked - it's only middle-class >women and >above who didn't. I know a man who told me that in his childhood,women >didn't work - and his mother even had a maid. He was very annoyed when I >answered "So - what was the maid? An android?" But hey, she was working, >wasn't she? > >Pat > Yes, Pat, you're right, i should have been more concrete. And you comment was just brilliant! Well done. Best Nuria _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 13:27:17 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Frances Subject: Re: FW: Atwood/OT Comments: To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > > Even in Victorian times, women worked - it's only middle-class women and > above who didn't. I know a man who told me that in his childhood,women > didn't work - and his mother even had a maid. He was very annoyed when I > answered "So - what was the maid? An android?" But hey, she was working, > wasn't she? > > Pat > And I'm constantly astonished at how apparently impoverished families, like the Prices in Mansfiled Park and the hard-luck clergyman's (forgotten names) in Last Chronicles of Barchester still managed at least a skivvy! Frances (wistfully contemplating the Hobbs Land Gods these days) -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 14:17:36 -0500 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Dave Belden Subject: Re: FW: Atwood Comments: To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Women have always held up more than half the sky in terms of work. The point for feminism is whether that work in the particular economy could be translated into women's power and status. Farming in a feudal economy seems to have been the low point for women - men having too much power as warriors, stock breeders, plowmen, and thereby landowners and owners of all property and ideology. Capitalism, surely through no good intentions but only to serve its bottom line, has created an urban society where women get wages which gives them independence undreamed of on farms, and where they get education. Being self-respecting, uppity creatures, they then use those things for their own purposes, create their own ideologies (feminisms). No wonder there are horrible backlashes against women's power, in the form of fundamentalisms all over the world, but I only think these will take serious power in farming economies (like Afghanistan); or in industrial ones that have come under huge stress from very major catastrophes like complete economic collapse, nuclear war, major plague (the kind that kills a fifth of the population or more). If that happens, my optimism is called off for a few centuries. But short of that, capitalism itself is surprisingly tolerant of feminism, and gays, and the rule of law, and the ballot box - all of which curiously help its agenda in various ways. Business does not benefit from excluding talent and consumers by allowing racism and sexism, even if it is taking ongoing major campaigns to convince businessmen of that fact. Have courage! The sons of 1970s feminists are now of age. Most of them will march with their mothers and sisters if there's a serious rightwing string of victories. Even Reagan, the highpoint of the rightwing backlash, didn't overturn Roe v Wade. Even Maggie Thatcher didn't get rid of the National Health Service. Let's keep nightmare scenarios like Atwood's in mind, and struggle continually to preserve and extend our rights and freedoms, but let's also be grateful that for once the underlying economic forces are actually helping women's power more than hindering it in advanced economies. If we don't celebrate the good things the modern economy has made possible for us (at the same time as struggling with the bad), then we are lying to ourselves and descending into some weird fundamentalisms of our own. Dave -----Original Message----- From: For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature [mailto:feministsf@UIC.EDU]On Behalf Of Diana Lago Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 1:17 PM To: feministsf@UIC.EDU Subject: Re: [*FSFFU*] FW: Atwood Hello > >>Hi to everyone, i would like to add just a little comment: >> >>But we must not forget that women have always worked, always, since the >>very beginning, and it was during the Victorian years that men succeded in >>enclosed women into the domestic area. >> >>Best >>Nuria > > Even in Victorian times, women worked - it's only middle-class >women and >above who didn't. I know a man who told me that in his childhood,women >didn't work - and his mother even had a maid. He was very annoyed when I >answered "So - what was the maid? An android?" But hey, she was working, >wasn't she? > >Pat > Yes, Pat, you're right, i should have been more concrete. And you comment was just brilliant! Well done. Best Nuria _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 12:15:35 -0800 Reply-To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" Sender: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" From: Jo Ann Rangel Subject: Re: FW:Article about the role of women in Islamic societies Comments: To: "For discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit .November 4, 2001 Living in a World Without Women By BARBARA CROSSETTE N the war of militant Islam against the infidel West, there is a chilling paradox. Nowhere - not on protesters' banners, pre-suicide videos or posters of the most wanted - is there a woman's face. These martyrs and radicals call themselves the purifiers of society and the saviors of the poor, yet everything the world has learned in the last decade about why some countries develop and others stay mired in poverty shows that women can make all the difference. National standards of living improve - family income, education, nutrition and life expectancy all rise, and birthrates fall - as women move toward equality, said Jennifer Seymour Whitaker, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies how investing in women can help increase economic development and stability. She cites as an example a statistical model of Egypt showing that if mothers with no education had completed at least primary school, the population below the poverty line would have been reduced by one-third. United Nations agencies produced similar findings in other countries. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has emphasized this repeatedly. When women's influence increases, these experts explain, it strengthens the moderate center, bolstering economic stability and democratic order. Women might serve as powerful assets in the West's attempt to counter Islamic radicalism. The results of Iran's last two presidential elections reveal the moderating power of women - their covered heads and bodies notwithstanding. President Mohammed Khatami, a moderate by current Iranian standards, was elected twice over the wishes of Islamic conservatives because of the pivotal support of women. But for the last 30 years, Islamic extremism has flourished throughout the Middle East. As women have been pushed out of the political and economic spheres, their traditional moderating role has declined. "This is the warriors' time," said Fouad Ajami, director of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. "The warriors, the martyrs - they're all men. In this moment of history, with the world of the Arabs and the larger world of Islam on the boil, the whole question of women and women's progress is shelved." Indeed, in societies where women did gain footholds, that power may have prompted a backlash - among lower middle class men in particular - that helped militants. Women often look like competitors for jobs and a better life in countries where half or more of the population is under 25. Angry young men, many of them unemployed, have seized the public arena from Algeria to South Asia and filled it with hate, intolerance and the abuse of women, Mr. Ajami said. He and other scholars of Muslim societies say these men are from the lower middle class, where expectations were rising fastest. "This is the class that is most hostile to women," Mr. Ajami said. "If this class dominates the Islamists, feminism and modernity are doomed." Since 1979, radical Islamic movements have toppled or challenged governments from Iran to Egypt to Pakistan. Their growing popularity has many causes: poverty, the dissatisfaction with regimes viewed as corrupt and irreligious, the dislocation of modernity and unease with women's independence. Azar Nafisi, an Iranian scholar now at Johns Hopkins, said recruitment of militants is strong among low-paid workers or the lower middle classes. In recent decades, the media and the Internet have made images of Western life omnipresent. And what it looks like frightens this segment of the population. "If Western culture, if democratic culture, is spread to their countries, there will be no room for them," Ms. Nafisi said. "Women become the most obvious symbols of this change that seems threatening." That backlash takes place even in less radical societies. In Kuwait, Mr. Ajami noted, the emir's efforts to bring women into politics has met a wall of resistance, and an Islamist backlash forced a vote in Parliament against coeducational universities. Not all women oppose extremism. Some women aligned with extremists because they believed in the cause and were also disturbed by what seemed a Western-inspired cultural assault on traditional ways. Some thought they would improve their status by joining a revolutionary movement. Others choose to cover their heads or faces out of piety. Many initially rallied around militants for some of the same reasons as men - distaste for corrupt secular rulers, frustration over poverty. In Iran in the 1970's, Mr. Ajami said, educated women donned the chador to protest the rule of Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlavi - and walked into a trap. For a generation, he said, they have paid for the mistake with a loss of many freedoms and rights. It could be that women are less inclined to support radicalism now. Ms. Nafisi, who was a professor of English literature in Teheran, explained, "They saw what happened in the Iranian revolution, the Algerian revolution, the Palestinian struggle and many other places." WHILE these militants are fighting secularism or the West, "they need women, they use women," she said. But even women who have risked their lives, she said, then find they are little more than advertisements. When the battle is won, she said, "they put the women aside." What is happening now, Mr. Ajami said, is "the break of the compact with modernity" throughout the Arab and wider Islamic world. "The issue of gender is so crucial to progress and modernity," he said, "But if the cult of the martyr and the children of the stones on the West Bank, if that's the dominant cult, then what little place there was for women is shrinking." The sense that the place of women is regressing under Islamic militancy is widely acknowledged. But in the history of Muslim movements, even violent uprisings, it was not always so. A woman, Cut Nyak Dhien, led the nationalists of Indonesia's deeply Islamic region of Aceh in rebellion against the Dutch in the 19th century. Egyptian and Turkish women were in the forefront of modernizing, secularist movements in the 1920's. In the 1970's, Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked planes. Benazir Bhutto marched through the streets of Pakistan in the 1980's to demand a return to democracy. By the 1990's, some Muslim women seemed to be on the verge of success in the professions, scholarship and public life. Educational levels and opportunities were rising in many Islamic countries. "Some of these networks we thought we were building don't seem to have survived," said Mahnaz Afkhami, who has worked with Islamic women around the world for decades. Ms. Afkhami founded the Women's Learning Partnership in Washington, which aids grass- roots women's groups in many Muslim countries. She calls them an invisible majority not noticed by the West. In Malaysia, for example, an anthropologist, Norani Othman, formed a movement to reinterpret Islamic law and strip it of centuries of accretions that discriminate against women. In Bangladesh, Yasmeen Murshed founded one of several organizations that teach women how to run for political office. >From North Africa to Pakistan and Indonesia, women have demanded the right to study theology along with men, breaking their monopoly of the Koran. Rounaq Jahan, a political scientist from Bangladesh at Columbia University's School of Public and International Affairs, said it is often forgotten that "more than half of the billion Muslims in the world live in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India - more than 500 million in just these four countries." Many are moderates if not secularists, she said, and how they have dealt with militancy could be instructive elsewhere. Afghanistan has shown a world of Muslim women just how bad things can get. Ms. Nafisi said the West's promises that Afghan women will have choices in a post-Taliban era should be part of the antiterrorism campaign. "When reconstruction in Afghanistan begins," she said, "the U.N. will find their most ardent supporters will be women." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information -------------------------------------------------- This is the feministsf listserve, intended only for discussion of feminism and Speculative Fiction. To unsubscribe from this listserve, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and in the body of the message say: unsubscribe feministsf Contact feministsf-request@UIC.EDU if there are problems.