Helene Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa

Helene Cixous's feminist work is strongly in, the mode of French post- structuralism. One sees in her language the words of Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes (the last two perhaps through the first), whose notion of dissemination Cixous appropriates to her idea of "libidinal feminist" writing. The history of writing, the history of reason, the phallocentric tradition, the dominating syntax and grammar-all these form a chain of relationships that suppress the feminine. The feminine is therefore impossible to define, for definition captures the feminine in the masculine phallocentric order. Cixous acknowledges the impossibility of complete escape: "A little bit of phallus" must remain. But her work deliberately seeks to overthrow the prevailing mode of writing, whether the writing is literary criticism (as in her later essay on Joyce) or a feminist "tract," as in the immensely influential "Laugh of the Medusa," presented here, in which she urges woman to "write herself." This writing is a political act, a writing through the body that would sweep away syntax.

But the "libidinal feminine" is not to be regarded as belonging to women, nor is the libidinal masculine the sole property of men. Cixous finds Heinrich Kleist, the eighteenth-century German poet, and Clarice Lispector, the modern Brazilian writer, both of whom she has studied in her seminar at the University of Paris Vill, feminine in this sense. A feminine libidinal economy is flexible toward the concept of property, tolerates separation, the otherness of the other, and difference; that is to say, it is conducive to freedom. For Cixous, this is not a matter of taking a position between the masculine and the feminine. Rather, it is to be always "on the side with" and on the side of movement. The literary text of the libidinal feminine must tolerate freedom from self-limitation and from neat borders, from beginnings, middles, and ends, from chapters. Such texts will be disquieting. Clearly Joyce's texts interest Cixous by belonging to this class or, as she would surely insist, anticlass.

Cixous strives to go beyond the initial feminist questions of equal rights to radical questions involving deep cultural change. In a recent interview she asks: "Are we going to be the equal of men, are we going to be as phallic as they are? Or do we want to save something else, something more positive, more archaic, much more on the side of jouissance, of pleasure, less socializable? If so, how and at what price?" Of her own writing, she asserts, it is useful only if there is a women's movement.

Several of Cixous's works have been translated into English, including The Exile of James Joyce or the Art of Replacement (1968, trans. 1972) and La Jeune Nee (1975, trans. 1985). See also Boundary 2 I2 (Summer 1984) and Verena Andermatt Conley, Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine (1984).


credit:
Helene Cixous
Critical Theory Since 1965.
Florida: Florida State University Press. 1986.

read the online text here

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Pearl S. Buck's Critique of the Cold War

Women and International Relations

When Pearl S. Buck addressed an alumnae gathering of her alma mater, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in June 1933, she began somewhat wistfully that she would have liked to discuss "Women and International Relations." She lamented, however, that she knew too little about this topic, and so the author of The Good Earth, for which she won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize, proceeded to talk about "the writing of novels."(1) Over the course of the next thirty-five years, Buck pursued the theme of women and international relations in her fiction, speeches, articles, and organizational work. She became a prominent activist on global issues, and she identified and analyzed the gendered nature of world affairs. An exploration of Buck's opposition beginning in the 1940s to the Cold War illuminates an issue that historians have only recently begun to examine from the perspective of women's attitudes and the importance of gender.(2) This exploration also gives depth to arguments that feminist political scientists have advanced in their pleas for consideration of women's voices and interests in studies of international relations.(3)


That Buck's best-selling novels from the 1930s through the 1950s played an important role in shaping a sympathetic American perception of the Chinese has long been recognized. As Harold R. Isaacs wrote in 1958: "It can almost be said that for a whole generation of Americans she `created' the Chinese, in the same sense that Dickens `created' for so many of us the people who lived in the slums of Victorian England." While The Good Earth was Buck's most significant contribution to Americans' images of the Chinese, she wrote fifteen other books on Asia that made the bestseller lists from 1933 to 1968. These included Dragon Seed, on China's war of resistance to Japan; Kinfolk, which discussed conditions in post-World War II China; Come, My Beloved, on American missionaries in India; The Living Reed, an epic novel of Korean history; and her 1954 autobiography, My Several Worlds.(4)

Buck--who was raised in China by missionary parents--did more than get Americans to see the Chinese as hardworking but long-suffering farmers. She participated from a left-wing but noncommunist perspective in the debate about U.S. policy toward China, opposing U.S. aid to the Nationalist government during the civil war, and urging recognition of the new communist-led government. Buck's concerns also reached beyond China; she spoke out strongly opposing American Cold War policy in general. Buck believed that the fundamental global divisions at the end of World War II were between the Western imperialist nations and the colonized and recently decolonized Asian countries, rather than between "communism" and "democracy." The United States, she feared, placed itself on the side of the Western imperialists. As a result, the United States could not hope to win the friendship or loyalty of the people of what later became known as the Third World.

Buck grounded her ideas about China and her opposition to the Cold War in her rejection of imperialism and racism. Her outlook had been formed by looking at Western society with the sensibility of a people who were the victims of these ideologic twin evils. As the Times Literary Supplement (London) put it in 1942: "In a strange way Miss Buck has been fitted by the architecture of her life to be a critic of her own race; brought up in a typically American home in China she got an insight into two worlds, and it was not until she reached adult life that she lived in America, bringing to it that sense of wonder and discovery which is the finest basis for criticism." Thus, in "walking the borders" between the United States and China, Buck elaborated a worldview that was quite different from the dominant views in American society.(5)

At the same time, Buck provided a gendered critique of Cold War policy. She decried the glorification of militarism as a masculine value the Cold War required and which itself became a major source of conflict between Americans and Asians. She also opposed the Cold War because her analysis of the problems and oppression of women in the United States prevented her from adopting an ideology of national unity against a supposed foreign threat. Thus, Buck shared many aspects of the ideology of the women's peace movement, which, according to historian Harriet Hyman Alonso, emphasized the links between institutionalized violence and violence against women, the added burdens war placed upon women, the special interest in peace that women have as a result of their role as child bearers, and the necessity for women to become active in public affairs. Buck's self-defined focus on furthering "people-to-people" relations, involving ordinary people in foreign affairs rather than leaving diplomacy to government officials, exemplified what scholar Emily Rosenberg has called "women's work" in foreign relations.(6)

Nonetheless, Buck at times challenged the idea, central to women's peace activism, that women were more opposed to war than were men, either by nature or social role. She identified and tried to explain a pattern of women's thinking that some recent feminist analysts of women and war have also examined.(7) Thus, Buck's efforts to categorize women's relations to militarism and U.S. foreign policy indicated a nuanced picture of these relationships.

While she continually referred to herself as nonpolitical, Buck engaged in a dizzying array of political activities from the 1930s to the early 1950s. She first gained widespread attention for her social views, apart from the success of her novels, in her caustic critique of American missionary work overseas.(8) Buck worked closely with her second husband, Richard J. Walsh, to publish numerous books and articles on Asia through the John Day Company, which Walsh headed, and Asia magazine, which he edited from 1933 to 1946. Buck founded and led the East and West Association from 1940 to 1950 to educate Americans about the heritage and aspirations of Asians and to encourage people-to-people relations. During this decade, she was also the major spokesperson for the Citizen's Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, the American Civil Liberties Union's Committee against Racial Discrimination, and the India League of America, which championed the nationalist cause. Always in great demand as a speaker, Buck also expressed her political views in a wide range of journals, from Foreign Affairs to Better Homes and Gardens, from the New York Times Magazine to the Christian Century.(9)

Until the 1996 publication of literary critic Peter Conn's biography, historians tended to neglect or dismiss Buck's political work.(10) Feminist scholar Jane Rabb has noted that in literary criticism sexism has led to an undervaluing of Buck's work, similar to the process in the historical field.(11) It is true that Buck's later writing, after the mid-1950s, often included Cold War phrasing and romanticized Confucian conceptions, so that historians who knew her writings from the 1960s until her death in 1973 may not have realized the importance and radicalism of her earlier work, from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. Chinese communists' attacks on her work in the 1960s--one article was entitled "Pearl Buck: A Vanguard of United States Imperialist Cultural Aggression"--perhaps led scholars influenced by the New Left to downgrade her work. Buck's later writing, some of it opposing premarital sex and abortion, may also have led feminist historians to ignore her earlier feminist activities.(12)

Buck's opposition to the Cold War developed from her firsthand analyses of Chinese politics in the 1920s and 1930s, but especially from her outspoken criticisms of the failure of the Allied powers during World War II to wage a principled war that rejected imperialist and racist ideologies. As she prophetically wrote soon after the war ended: "Peace is shaped by war. The leaders in the war, and these were Churchill and Roosevelt more than any others, early planned a war which, while it would be successful in a military sense, would ignore every other aspect.... The war ends, then, with mankind holding the atomic bomb in one hand and in the other imperialism, domination over colonial peoples and the colored races, prejudice and distrust. We cannot believe in a long peace ahead."(13)

Buck hoped to bring people of different backgrounds and cultures together, and to pierce American parochialism so that U.S. citizens could see others as equal human beings with worthy cultures and desires. Such an understanding would provide the only basis for a lasting peace. To that end, Buck's East and West Association during and after World War II produced an array of popular literature on other societies, especially China, India, and the Soviet Union, and prepared book lists, study guides, and exhibits for libraries and schools. Six hundred librarians at the 1945 conference of the association heard, among other speakers, activist Eslanda Goode Robeson, wife of singer Paul Robeson, describe her trip to Africa; and writer Richard Lauterbach criticize recent anti-Soviet books.(14) The association held classes, lectures, and cultural events in over 150 cities in 1947-1948, with speakers and performers from China, Korea, India, and Haiti.(15)

Mobilizing public opinion was not limited in appeal only to women, and it did not necessarily represent a gendered approach to foreign relations. But it was one of the few means in the postwar years of bringing women's voices to bear on foreign policy issues. Buck at times contrasted a "women's" approach to foreign relations, based on understanding among people, with the traditional "male" approach based on the nation-state and threats of violence. For example, at a 1946 East and West Association event billed as "Women Face World Issues," Buck urged the American people to force the U.S. government to approve a large-scale program of people-to-people visits between the Soviet Union and the United States. The purpose of these visits would be to convince ordinary Russian citizens who feared U.S. threats about using the atomic bomb that we were just as war weary as they were. As Buck said: "`Only those Americans who have no understanding of psychological forces applaud our State Department's present big-stick policy toward Russia.'"(16) Buck's approach here confirms the pattern historian Joan Hoff-Wilson identified in her analysis of women foreign policy activists; they "stressed cultural values, rhetoric, and persuasion through candid negotiation ... in preference to the use of military or economic force in foreign relations."(17)

As a novelist who made her reputation by interpreting for Americans the everyday thoughts and feelings of people from another culture, Buck had a certain legitimacy in the U.S. public eye in claiming that she knew

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Literary Women of the Left Bank

On-line magazine on early Modernism, especially women in Paris, 1900-1940, but with broader coverage than the title suggests.

First Quarter, 1999: Volume 2
Dorothy Parker (American 1893 - 1967)

Dorothy Rothschild was born in West End, New Jersey, to a Jewish father and a Scottish mother. Her mother died less than one year later. This ancestory would, three decades later, provide an opening for one of George Kaufman's better moments. Feigning anger at an anti-Semitic remark, Kaufman threatened to abandon the assembled company, then added: "And I'll expect Mrs. Parker to accompany me halfway."

Dorothy would later mine the misery of her adolescence spent with her detested stepmother and her uncaring father in numerous poems and stories. Here is one of her most quoted examples:

Guns aren't lawful
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful
You might as well live

In 1916, after an education absorbed at a convent boarding school, she landed her first job, writing captions for Vogue. A year later she was taken on as a drama critic at Vanity Fair , where she shared an office with the humorist Robert Benchley and the playwright-to-be Robert Sherwood, two charter members of the midtown Manhattan Hotel Algonquin's legendary Round Table. The Round Table was a daily lunch time exercise in one-upmanship whose off-and-on participants included Kaufman, Frank Crowninshield, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Franklin P. Adams (F.P.A.), George Jean Nathan, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner and William Faulkner.

In her mid-twenties Dorothy Rothschild married a man named Edward Pond Parker II, from whom she was divorced several years later. During this period of her life, she drank excessively and contemplated suicide. "What fresh hell is this?" she asked in one famous poem. In the mid-1930's, Parker married again, this time to Alan Campbell with whom she collaborated on the 1937 script for A Star is Born. Parker and Campbell divorced, remarried, separated, and then lived together until his death in 1963.

In a way, Dorothy Parker epitomized the transition between the Twenties and the Thirties, between romanticism and reality, between boom and bust. Her best work incorporates the sentimentality of the Twenties and the rude awakening in the Thirties, a decade when the world was willing to forego the beau geste for tangible assets.

A single flow'r he sent me,
since we met.
All tenderly his messenger
he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew
still wet--
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine,
do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck
to get
One perfect rose.

During the Forties she was an ardent supporter of left-wing causes, and in the Fifties was blacklisted as a Communist supporter. Her last project, The Ladies of the Corridor (1964) is a play about the loneliness of female hotel residents. Dorothy Parker died in a New York hotel in 1967. She left her estate to the civil rights leader, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.



Works by Dorothy Parker: Portable Dorothy Parker, Not Much Fun : The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories, The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker

Works about Dorothy Parker: Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography, Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell Is This?, You Might As Well Live : The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

Online Review of Not Much Fun

Information compiled from Women of Words: A Personal Introduction to Thirty-Five Important Writers and The American Heritage History of the 1920's and 1930's; article written by Paula DiTallo

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Third World" Feminism?

The term feminism has been defined, analyzed, reviewed, criticized, redefined, de-constructed, revisited or in other words has been pulled and stretched from so many directions for so long that sometimes writing about it feels like dragging a dead horse even beyond the outer limits. This is no way to mean that feminism itself is a dead subject. On the contrary, given the rapidly changing geo-political scenario in this era of Globalization (and/or post-modernism), feminism now functions as more of a foundational basis for many activists, policymakers and academicians than as an epistemological framework only at the theoretical level. Hardly even any mainstream "development" planning is formulated now a days without considering the gender variable, let alone grassroots mobilization or any social activism. But like liberalism, Marxism, environmentalism or many other such "ism"s, feminism has been a controversial one and an intensely debated upon ideology from the very beginning of its introduction and acceptance in the sphere of public knowledge. As can be the case for any such engaging and pervading issue, feminism has been approached from different and sometimes contrasting view points by the proponents of it. In its early days feminism was primarily focused on inclusion of "women". That is, women as a category was brought into attention against the backdrop of absence of formal recognition and awareness. Feminists started voicing the fact that the contribution of women in the Gross National Product (GNP) or their involvement in the informal workforce has been largely ignored and uncounted. The necessity of assessing the opportunity cost of household works done by women, the social value of childbearing and motherhood, the economic value of generating human capital became unavoidable. Impact on women of various national and international policies like discriminatory civil and judicial laws, privatization, structural adjustment etc. along with existing patriarchal social and cultural norms that reinforced the very process of discrimination were formally acknowledged and documented. Feminists came a long way in protesting - and to quite an extent producing practical results for - violence against women both at the private and public spheres.



But that was before. Since the decades of the 90s - i.e. the height of post-modernism - more and more (primarily post-colonial) feminist scholars[1] are arguing to avoid universalist claims about "women" and situate feminism in a specific social, economic, cultural, historical and political context for analysis, especially when discussing the Third World. Third World societies are mostly post-colonial, developing (economically speaking) countries and they are situated at a juncture where legacies of old traditions and influences of Western ways of life create fusion that continually shapes the structure of the societies. Each Third World society is distinct and is shaped by its cultural tradition, religion, social norms as well as the position of the particular nation-state in the world system. As the sovereignty of the nation-states have been compromised under globalization national policies are greatly influenced by international politics, affecting in turn, the citizens within each national territory. One example of such a phenomenon would be how structural adjustment policies adopted by Third World countries - pushed by the World bank and the IMF - have restructured the economic and social conditions and impacted the citizens overall and women in particular. But one has to be cautious here. When considering how structural adjustment or any policy so to speak or any social parameter is affecting women, one has to be careful to distinguish among women from different socio-economic backgrounds even within a country or a region. Just because women from one country are being impacted does not mean that all women in that same country are affected at the same extent if all are affected at all. In Bangladesh, the opportunity to work at the garments industries comes as an alternative survival strategy for working women from the lower economic class (whether that particular strategy is more exploitative or not is another issue), but for middle class women the same thing translates into a lack of supply of domestic help. What rural women face when indicted with Fatwas following dire physical and social repercussions and what urban women face realizing that Islamic rules are being imposed to further strengthen the existing patriarchal structure - are very different experiences. This is not to say that there should not be a term "Third World" when talking about feminism. The factors along which the world has been categorized as First and Third contribute to the differences of experiences that women face in the First and the Third worlds. But appropriate consideration has to be paid to the specificity of the context. Very often Third World women have been presented as the "oppressed" without any attempt of further analysis of the form and extent of the process of oppression. Upholding women's problems in mainstream development planning or policy making conferences, or even at women's summits - where women meant White, middle class, Western women vis a vis uneducated, ignorant, Third World women - has been widely criticized. In other words, positing "women" as an analytical category has been problematized. Women as a group/ social category is not a homogeneous collectivity. Term like "women's problem/s" often hides the fact that women from different class, culture, race and religion face very different challenges and can experience even contrasting outcomes of the same social phenomenon.




At the same time, the feminists themselves have not been spared either. Any researcher is to be subject to the same kind of deconstruction as the research work itself to take into account the particular position or standing of the researcher. Along with this line of argument which states the importance of multi-leveled and detailed attention to the context, also came out the issue of "agency". The term agency implies the existence of a conscious awareness by women of their conditions who are marginalized, oppressed, subverted etc. Meaning, if feminists harbor a thought of "liberating" illiterate, impoverished, suppressed women they are denying or undermining the ability of those who they want to liberate. Coming from outside with whatever amount of knowledge or other resources and having the benevolent idea of "doing good" to the women of a community, is not only patronizing on their part it is also a misconstrued reality to begin with. A Feminist or any researcher or activist so to speak, has to work with the women and not on them. This is particularly important for Action Research. Action Researchers focus on the agency of people and they believe that any pursuit of social change has to be a team effort. It will be a mutually learning process where trained researcher/s and the community women will benefit and learn from each other's experiences. This is very useful in lessening the bias that is inherently associated with any research or knowledge production. How an individual views an ideology or even a trivial issue in daily life reflects not only that individual's preferences and values but also the socio-economic status (i.e indicating a particular environment) of her/his that has constructed and shaped the structure of her/his preferences and values. That is, whichever stand we take regarding any matter we usually come carrying our baggage of who we are and where we belong in the social hierarchal system. The same goes for me as well. I write as a sociologist who does research on women and socio-economic-political issues, who has been formally trained to do research in the First world but who comes from the Third World with a middle class background. Unknowingly or not, my views and my analyses are shaped by my identity as a woman, as an individual (regardless any gender identity), as a housewife, as a student, as a researcher from the Third World and above all as someone - who has been privileged enough to not face the struggles and oppression that women from lower economic class have to endure and has the luxury to think and write about feminism.



At the end of 2003 I did some data collection in couple of villages in Bangladesh. I approached PROSHIKA and hired an enumerator to get me access to the village women who I wanted to interview. As part of my research interest I wanted to interview Fatwa victims. The closest I could get to that was that I was able to interview some of the relatives of two Fatwa victims. In a village, called village X, a couple had recently committed suicide after they were indicted by a village shalish. The woman was guilty of falling for her brother -in-law and leaving her husband who was mentally challenged. Ironically even though the husband and the in-laws accepted the u incident, the village shalish wanted to set a precedence through it. As PROSHIKA was active in that area they pressured the police to enforce legal action against the preachers. As a result the police - failing to arrest the escaped shalish leaders - captured as many male members of the village as they could. I was told that even twelve years boys had to hide not to get arrested. The police wanted to know the whereabouts of the shalish leaders from the villagers which they did not or could not divulge. This whole ordeal went for a month as the media covered this incident and the police was forced further not to just let that go. When I wanted to interview the female relatives I could not go to the village as the frustrated villagers did not allow any outsider and especially any PROSHIKA member enter the village. PROSHIKA has been working in that area for years and does extensive works for women and yet became banned from that village. A meeting was arranged in another village where I could talk to the relatives of the couple. At the interview they told me that the couple committed suicide not because they were publicly beaten (the infamous Dorra) but because they were publicly humiliated when their heads were shaved! They told me that a woman could take a lot but could not sustain such a shame of losing her hair in public. I, sitting with them with my salon cut short hair, had no problem relating to that. Because it was the symbols and meanings carried with the punishment which were heavier than the act of the punishment itself. And even if I think that what could be more precious than life, I am in no position to criticize them from the outside. This is what I learnt from Third World feminism - not to analyze the incident out of its context. And for the same reason, when the grieving relatives (all women) told me that even though they felt that sometimes the punishment following a Fatwa was too harsh for women they still supported the system of Fatwa as it was a functional mean of social control, who was I to judge? Even if those same women had the generosity at heart to accept the adultery committed by a woman and at the same time were anxious that if there was no social control what would their children learn, who was I to think I was more enlightened than they were? When I was very clearly told by village women that what women did in Dhaka or on TV was not acceptable to them, who was I to censure? I can only share my views with them, I cannot impose on them. I can understand their positions in their context, I cannot label them "oppressed" waiting to be rescued. I can present alternatives, I cannot force them. I am an example of privilege. I am what any of them could be given my background. And their views could be any of mine, given I lived in their environment. If any kind of social change has to be made we have to work both at the macro and the micro level. Feminism can not be addressed separately from politics or isolated from other interconnected factors like culture and religion. Some of my interviewees were extremely independent. They not only earned money and functioned as the heads of the households - they broke their problematic marriages, they sent their daughters to schools, they entered institutional politics and got elected for twenty years at a stretch, they manipulated social customs, they traveled alone at night and yet they covered their heads. Where do I draw the line of "feminism"?



[1] For reference see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Uma Narayan, Sandra Harding, Leila Ahmed, Marnia Lazreg etc.

============================================

Snigdha Ali does research in the field of Developmental Sociology. She writes from Atlanta, USA.

source: http://www.mukto-mona.com

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About A Room of One's Own: Liberation, Feminism, and Androgyny

A Room of One's Own was based on lectures that Virginia Woolf gave at two women's colleges in October of 1928; and when she gave them, Woolf might well be described as being at the height of her powers.

To The Lighthouse had been published in May of 1927 and had met with a generally positive response from both critics and public; indeed, it sold better than any of its predecessors.

And in October of that year, Woolf conceived what would be her most unusual work and the one that would give her the most pleasure.

This was Orlando.

In her diary, she describes Orlando as "a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day [in which the main character, modeled on her close friend, Vita Sackville West] changes from one sex to another."

"What a treat," she writes.

Orlando was finished in March of 1928.

In May of '28 Woolf traveled to Paris to receive the Femina Vie Heureuse prize for To the Lighthouse. This woman's prize was the only award she ever accepted during her lifetime

That summer, she began working seriously on the lectures on Women & Fiction.

In September, Orlando was published to significant acclaim.

From London, her sister Vanessa would write: "the great excitement [here] is Virginia's new book"

And as her nephew Quentin Bell observes in his biography of her, Orlando moved Woolf into the realm of public accessibility.

By the time Orlando was published, Bell writes,

... a great many people had discovered that Virginia Woolf was a novelist that had to be tackled if one were to lay any claims to intellectual alertness ... [But] her manner of writing was still unfamiliar. For these, Orlando came like an answer to prayer. Here was a work by a highbrow - a 'difficult novelist' -, which nevertheless was easy, amusing, and straightforward in its narrative.

Sales of Orlando were impressive.

To the Lighthouse had sold 3,800 copies in its first year. Orlando sold over 8,000 in its first six months.

It was, her husband Leonard said, the turning point in her career as a novelist.

So in late October of 1928, when she went to Cambridge with Leonard and Vanessa and gave her lectures at the Newnham and Girton colleges there was, her sister remembered, "an atmosphere of triumph."

Virginia Woolf, born on January 25, 1882, was then 46 years old.

The process that turned the lectures into a book took much of the following year and provided its author some measure of satisfaction, especially once she settled on the work's form.

In her diary entry for April 13, Woolf notes that "Women and Fiction" [the working title for what would become A Room of One's Own] has considerable conviction. "I think that the form, half talk half soliloquy allows me to get more on the page than any how else."

This form, moreover, allows her to write more rapidly than usual, even if it necessitates more revision

When she began to compose in this manner Woolf observes in her diary, "it made itself up and forced itself upon me . . . at such a rate that when I got pen & paper it was like a water bottle turned upside down."

The writing was as quick as my hand could write; too quick for I am now toiling to revise; but this way gives one freedom & lets one leap from back to back of one's thoughts.

The excitement, one might suggest, that the reader may feel in the rapid movement of the author's mind in A Room was mirrored in its creation

Nevertheless, Woolf was not without misgivings as she created A ROOM.

In May of '29 she writes in her diary:

About W. & F. I am not sure-a brilliant essay? -I daresay; it has much work in it, many opinions boiled down into a kind of jelly, which I have stained red as far as I can.

But I am eager to be off - to write without any boundary coming slick in [my] eyes: here my public has been too close: [it's difficult working with] facts; getting them malleable, easily yielding to each other.

In June Woolf would refer to A Room as "that much corrected book"

And in August, upon finally completing her corrections prior to publication, she would ask:

Good or bad? [It] has an uneasy life in it I think; you feel the creature arching its back and galloping on, though as usual, much is watery & flimsy & pitched in too high a voice.

In October, as the book was about to be published, Woolf would wonder how it would be received:

I will here sum up my impressions," she writes in her diary, "before publishing A Room of One's Own. It is a little ominous that Morgan [E.M. Forster] won't review it. It makes me suspect that there is a shrill feminine tone in it which my intimate friends will dislike.

I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive jocular kind ... that the press will be kind & talk of its charm, & sprightliness; also I shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist; ... I shall get a good many letters from young women.

I am afraid I will not be taken seriously

I doubt that I mind very much

Whether or not Woolf minded, she needn't have feared.

A Room of One's Own was published both in England (by her and her husband's Hogarth Press) and in America, on October 24, 1929 and was an immediate success - with the public, with the critics, and with her friends

... the sales of A Room are unprecedented," Woolf would write in her diary, "have beaten Orlando. ... orders for 100 taken as coolly as 12's used to be. We have sold, I think, 5500; & our next year's income is made.

And in her letters to her friends we can see Woolf's appreciation of their response to A ROOM, along with her continuing assessment of it.

In October of 1929, on the heels of its publication, she writes to Vita Sackville- West:

I'm delighted you read my little book, as you call it ... although you don't perceive it, there is much reflection and some erudition in it...

And in November, to G.L. Dickinson, she writes:

I can't tell you how pleased I am that you like my little book ... I'm so glad that you thought it good tempered - my blood is apt to boil on this one subject ... and I didn't want it to. I wanted to encourage the young women - they seem to get fearfully depressed - and also to induce discussion ... there are numbers of things that might be said, and that aren't. The double soul [i.e. androgyny] is one of them; and also education...

To E.M Forster, on January 3, 1930, she writes:

... being my best critic, as I think- how glad I am you liked A Room! I was awfully afraid you wouldn't.

And in May, she writes to Dorothy Brett:

I am very glad you liked A Room. It was rather popularized for the young and should have had more in it. But I wanted them to swallow certain ideas with a view to getting their brains to work.

Finally, on a somewhat different note, in September of 1930 she writes to a Mrs. Wilson:

I am delighted to learn that you have a new room and that I am the cause ... It is most encouraging to hear that there is one woman who is not going to write - since I published my little book I have been afraid that the writers would far outnumber the readers. But I shall now think with great pleasure that you are using YOUR room to read in, and so shall hope to be counted ... among your benefactors.

The letter to Mrs. Wilson is interesting because it suggests that early on Woolf's book was seen to have a relevance to women beyond the literary sphere.

But what are we to make of A Room of One's Own.

October 1992 was A Room's sixty-second birthday: the sixty-second anniversary of its publication.

The work, we might say, has become "a senior citizen;" were it a person, it would be eligible for social security

What might it have to say to us today?

To begin to answer this question, of course, we need to examine the text with some care, but at the outset this may seem a daunting task, for this is a work that can appear somewhat perplexing due to the wealth of information and perspectives that it contains; and getting a hold on A Room is not eased by a form in which, as we noticed earlier, its author gives herself the "freedom to leap from back to back of [her] thoughts"

Indeed, one finds oneself leaping "back to back" with Virginia Wool through her thinking on a wide range of phenomena, including literary events, historical events, individual writers, individual works, criticism, social theory, and personal experience.

A way out of this perplexity, however, might be seen if one considers two different meanings of the word "culture"

On the one hand, "culture" is an anthropological concept: it's about how people live, the patterns which express how members of a society experience the world.

Different societies, we say, have different cultures

But on the other hand, there is the more common meaning of "culture;" it's included in the anthropological meaning, but is usually thought of separately.

Here "culture" simply denotes the arts, including fiction

We speak of a person "getting culture," or "being cultured," for example.

In A Room of One's Own, it can be suggested, Virginia Woolf is concerned with BOTH meanings of culture; and she connects these two meanings through the concept of gender

"Talk about the creative life of women," this is to say, about women and fiction, necessarily involves speaking not only about cultural matters - in the sense of aesthetic things - but it also involves considering socio-cultural things phenomena like political economy and social history

The topic of women and fiction encompasses both cultural meanings

And it's part of Virginia Woolf's power and charm hat she is able to move so easily between these different cultural discourses - leaping if you will, "back to back" between them, in an apparently effortless way.

Sometimes, admittedly, because of the speed with which she leaps, following her is not always effortless; but it's always worth whatever effort it may require.

In any case, it's to that which we can now move.

In what follows, in part, I will explore what Woolf's text reveals about three cultural notions - liberation, feminism, and androgyny.

And I will try to indicate something of how these inform both what the work means and how, like any classic, it remains relevant to contemporary concerns.

-----------
by Joel Rich
originally delivered in the University of Chicago First Friday lecture series, February 1992; revised, May 2005

source: http://www.cygneis.com/woolf/Lecture%20-%20About%20A%20Room%20of%20One%27s%20Own%20by%20JR.htm

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Feminist Cultural Studies and The Javanese Culture

Feminist Cultural Studies (Kajian Budaya Feminis: Tubuh, Sastra, dan Budaya Pop) is a book written by Aquarini Priyatna Prabasmoro, one of Indonesian feminist writer. Some of her articles were published at Kalam, one of the most reputable literary journal in Indonesia, supported by Utan Kayu community.

Nana Podungge wrote a review about that book and criticize patriarchal society, especially in Javanese society which took woman on the second class. Nana show us the relationship between wife and husband in a family.

Aquarini who is married to a Javanese man didn’t know this. When one day she used Ngoko language to the husband, the husband’s family members didn’t like it and consider Aquarini an impolite woman. As a feminist, It directly left a bad taste in her mouth coz using Javanese language made her less important than her husband. Then she asked her husband to speak the national language—Bahasa Indonesia—that doesn’t have such a hierarchy. She is lucky, I suppose, coz her husband didn’t complain and agreed with her.

In a way, it is a dilemma. When more and more people think like this, it will make Javanese language vanish. However, I agree with Aquarini that the application of three different hierarchies in this local language will make women feel inferior, as someone less important.

It reminded me of my own bitter experience in my first marriage. I didn’t use Kromo Inggil to speak to him in the past. However, I used to call Angie’s dad “Mas”, one term mostly used by Javanese people to show respect to men. He just called me my name. After we got divorced, I no longer call him “Mas”. It left a bad taste in my mouth! It really made me forced to be the less important party only coz I was born female; and he the respected one only coz he was born male!

Perhaps for many people it is just a trivial thing. But to me—also to Aquarini—and perhaps also to some other feminists—this is a principle thing in life.

It reminds me of questions asked by many people to me, “Why do you feminists bother those things taken for granted for centuries and try to deconstruct them? Why don’t you just live in peace by accepting everything just the way it is? (Read => to accept that men are the better sex, the superior, the smarter, the stronger, etc.)
We just want to have equality. It sounds easy but difficult to make it real.

Source: http://afemaleguest.blog.co.uk

What do you think about woman in Javanese Society or in other patriarchal society, do you agree with Nana and Aquarini, or against their opinion?

This is the detail of the book (in Bahasa Indonesia)

Judul buku: Kajian Budaya Feminis: Tubuh, Sastra, dan Budaya Pop
Penulis: Aquarini Priyatna Prabasmoro
Penerbit: Jalasutra, Yogyakarta & Bandung
Cetakan: Pertama, 2006
Tebal: xlviii + 464 halaman

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Postfeminism vs. the Third Wave

In reading the essays on postfeminism in this section of EBR, I'm struck by the imprecision of the term. Some of the essays - like Stobb's - seem not to be discussing postfeminism per se, but just younger feminist negotiations with the conditions of life in the early 20th century. Others, like Guertin, use the term postfeminism but without a particular sense of its significance; this piece seems more to be discussing feminism in general, or perhaps third wave feminism - I find the discussion of cyberfeminism fascinating, but I don't buy that it's equivalent to postfeminism. Helford, Yaszek, and Mazza seem to be engaging with the idea of postfeminism in ways that I find most interesting and useful; they're identifying something other than third wave feminism, and they're considering the significance of the "post" rhetoric as it applies to feminism in an era of backlash.

The term "postfeminism" always makes me wary - it's a suspect term, a catchphrase from the early '90s that was used to suggest that we no longer need feminism, that we're past it. I don't hear it that much anymore, but when I do, it's often problematically used in a way that suggests it's synonymous with third wave feminism.

Now, speaking of imprecise and suspect terms, third wave feminism is right there with them - it's a highly contested term that loosely defines a generational and political cohort born after the heyday of the second wave women's movement. Although I've edited a collection of essays that both embraces and interrogates the term,notenotenote
Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Northeastern University Press, 2003)note1note others - like Bitch publisher Lisa Jervis - have argued that it's time to get rid of it altogether.

The controversies surrounding the use of the term "third wave feminism," however, are different from those surrounding "postfeminism." When feminists debate the third wave, generally they're trying to determine if there's enough of a generational divide between older and younger feminists to warrant a whole new label. The question seems to be, have we moved far enough from the social issues that propelled the women's movement in the 1960s and '70s to be able to suggest that there's a new wave? The rhetoric surrounding postfeminism, by contrast, tends, as Lisa Yaszek notes, "to describe the contemporary moment as one in which the goals of feminism have been achieved" and "to invoke a `blame-the-victim' mentality." Often arguments made from a postfeminist perspective rely on what Elyce Helford identifies as "the belief that personal choices and `bootstrap' efforts can bring a woman (and hence all women) empowerment and equality." While the third wave says, "We've got a hell of a lot of work to do!" postfeminism says, "Go buy some Manolo Blahniks and stop your whining."

Postfeminism relies on competitive individualism and eschews collective action; it obscures or makes invisible the many ways in which women are often fearful, subjected to rape and other kinds of violence, and politically and economically underprivileged. The third wave, however - in texts from Third Wave Agenda to Manifesta to Colonize This! - grapples with women's intersectional identities and demands an end to all the forms of oppression that keep women from achieving their full humanity.

Postfeminism and the third wave, then, are entirely different entities. Rebecca Walker's 1992 essay, "Becoming the Third Wave," articulates these differences powerfully; the essay documents the virulent and persistent sexism of the early 1990s and calls young feminists to rally to the cause, and the final paragraph of the essay consists of this declaration:

I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.

Reading that always makes me want to make a fist and say, "Hell, yeah."

So, thirteen years after Walker's declaration, are we not finally past postfeminism?

:: this article written by Alison Piepmeier, originally published at www.electronicbookreview.com

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Smart Women on "Stupid Girls"

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and Misconceptions, says there is a disturbing new genre of teen fiction targeted at millions of young female readers. She says most parents have no idea that these catchy paperback sets known as "chick literature" contain graphic, sexually explicit content. "One of the girl characters says, 'I've got to stop taking Ecstasy and seducing married men'—that's her character development," says Naomi.

With their two-dimensional portrayals of female characters, Naomi says the books send negative messages to young girls. "These books basically tell our daughters that their value comes from how high they are in the pecking order in their high school, whether they can afford all of the fabulous designer goods, and provide a hot sexual experience for the boys in their lives," Naomi says.

Dr. Robin says these books are dangerous in many ways. "[They] are defining for girls who they are, making them think they're choosing it, and then profiting off of the demise of a whole generation of girls and women," she says.

Source: The Oprah Winfrey Save

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Ethnic or Postcolonial: Gender and Diaspora Politics

by Suchitra Mathur, University of Wisconsin

1. With the announcement of Jhumpa Lahiriís Interpreter of Maladies as the 2000 Pulitzer prize winner for fiction, the literature of the South Asian diaspora has attained official recognition as a part of the "American" literary tradition. This is not to say that Lahiri is the first member of this immigrant group to make an impact on the American literary scene. The name, in fact, that is best known in this context is that of Bharati Mukherjee who won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988, and whose works have become part of the American multicultural canon. Mukherjeeís work, however, especially since the award-winning The Middleman and Other Stories , has consistently focused on issues of migration from an American perspective. Lahiriís collection, on the other hand, includes three (out of nine) stories that are not only set exclusively in India, but also privilege the perspectives of Indians settled in India. What then does it mean when such a book wins the award "for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life"? By what definition is Lahiri, a person of South Asian descent, born in London and raised in Rhode Island, an "American"? Does she belong to the ethnic category "Asian American" or is she a diasporic postcolonial best identified as "South Asian / Asian Indian"? And what are the implications of such classifications? A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America grapples with such questions in thirteen theoretically illuminating essays.

2. The word "chronicle" in the title foregrounds this collectionís focus on experiential records rather than their fictional renditions, distinguishing it from anthologies such as Our Feet Walk the Sky , Contours of the Heart , and A Lotus of Another Color that bring together writings in many different genres. This collection, in fact, does not even offer interpretative critiques of such fictional works as found in Between the Lines, edited by Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. And yet, the essays in A Patchwork Shawl are not historical or sociological documentaries by putatively objective scholars. Many of the authors use the personal essay form, highlighting their subjective position as the grounds from which they begin their theoretical explorations into the conditions of South Asian women in America. This form, as Dasgupta points out in her "Introduction," allows the authors to "facilely mingle the creative with the critical, the subjective with the objective, and the emotional with the analytical" (15). The essays thus break through the barriers imposed by disciplinary and/or literary requirements. At the same time, the privileging of the personal also justifies the differences in theoretical rigor and ideological perspective that characterize these thirteen essays. The collection then lives up to its name; it is a "patchwork shawl" that foregrounds the ragged seams of this textual fabric as it attempts to cover the "unlimited woman, the diasporic woman who gladly renounces security within the confines of four walls to walk the path of freedom" (ix).

3. The precise definition of the confining "four walls" differs from essay to essay. Broadly speaking, the three sections that the essays are divided into may be seen to represent the three levels at which South Asian womenís self-definition is restricted in America. While the first, "Who am I? Re-Questing Identity," focuses on the ways in which language, religion, and sexual orientation define individual womenís identities, the second, "Me and We: Family and Community," emphasizes domestic hierarchies between mothers and daughters as well as husbands and wives, and the third, "Nation and Immigration: Rethinking the ëModel Minorityí," examines the cultural as well as material rigors of geopolitical divisions within a global context. In each case, the limitations imposed by these categories are exposed and undermined by making visible the liminal spaces, the cracks that mark any faÁade constructed by essentialist identity politics. Grace Poore, for instance, uses her self-identification as a "South Asian of dual Tamil heritage born and raised in Malaysia" to question the efficacy of politically correct terms such as "Asian American," and "woman of color," and to point out that "language was never meant to be a culmination, only a movement toward transformative change" (27). Similarly, Naheed Islam undermines any easy monolithic definition of "lesbian" by examining the different ways in which "sexuality is expressed within historically and culturally specific contexts" (73). By referring back to their countries of origin and invoking frames of reference alien to the American cultural landscape, these authors challenge the existing models for anti-racist and feminist work within the United States. Since the local is inextricably intertwined with the global, the ethnic (Asian American) cannot be separated from the postcolonial (South Asian), and western feminisms have to engage with conceptual frameworks emerging from other geopolitical locations to become a part of the global feminist conversation.

4. An important step in recognizing these interconnections is exploding stereotypes that define a "self" in terms of an "other" by placing "Asia" and "America" on opposite sides of the tradition vs. modernity dichotomy. Over the past couple of decades, this opposition has been especially acute with reference to religion, resulting in the demonization of Islam as a rigidly patriarchal belief system that fosters political terrorism and the brutal repression of women. Such an ahistorical and monolithic characterization of a complex religio-cultural discourse facilitates the consolidation of a seemingly secular and gender-equitable image of "America" and encourages a simplistic reading of immigration as liberation for all muslim women in the United States. Combating such stereotypes requires a careful process of recovery as well as recreation that foregrounds not only the rich diversity of Islamic traditions, but also the agency of muslim women in defining their culturally specific immigrant identity. In "Being ëAmreekaní," Naheed Hasnat traces the complex histories of Islamic philosophy and cultural practices to carve out a space where she can successfully balance "religion, culture, and an American way of life" (44). By naming this her "Amreekan" identity, Hasnat draws attention to the necessary transformations diasporic women create in their places of arrival, making immigration a complex process of transcreation rather than simple translation.

5. Hasnatís essay is followed by Lubna Chaudhryís which provides multiple examples of such hybrid identity formation through an analysis of the stories of four Pakistani muslim immigrant women in the United States. The two essays, however, offer an interesting study in contrast; while Hasnatís piece is written as a personal essay, Chaudhryís article follows the more scientific format of reporting a research project. This strategy of juxtaposing the experiential with the theoretical appears to be maintained almost consistently throughout the collection, and may be seen as a conceptual weakness that undermines the explicitly stated commitment of the editor to blur the distinction between the objective and the subjective. However, a careful look at the essays reveals that any easy classification of their style or content in singular terms ignores their complex interplay of the personal and the political. In some essays, this results in a redefinition of these two terms. In Bhattacharjeeís case, for instance, the personal is invoked through a collective rather than an individual identity; it is the authorís experiences as a member of Sakhi for South Asian Women that provide the springboard for her discussions of immigrant national identity. And several other essays, such as those by Chaudhry and Roy, that focus on the construction of theoretical models not based exclusively on the authorsí personal experiences, do include an awareness of the interdependence of theory and practice. These authors not only undertake a rigorous examination of their own roles as activist/researchers, but also allow a space for the voices of their subjects, even when these voices do not support their ideological framework. The essays thus become truly dialogic, offering the readers a glimpse into the gaps and fissures that mark the intersection between experience and theory.

6. And yet, the editorís introductory emphasis on the personal essay as "the most appropriate vehicle of expression" for the "previously silenced" does raise some questions (15). Does the "previously silenced" include the entire population of South Asian women in America, or is there a distinction within this group between intellectuals and subalterns, between those who can and cannot speak? A few of the essays, especially those related to marital rape and domestic violence, seem to emphasize such an internal hierarchy based on class. Almost all the examples in these essays refer to women whose cultural and financial resources place them in a lower class than the activists/researchers who are writing about them. The authors of these essays do carefully negotiate between re-enacting the victimization by speaking for the victims and rendering their own positions transparent by allowing the victimsí words to speak for themselves. However, this balancing act, while preventing any easy distinction between subjective experience and objective theory, does not prevent the continued silencing of violence as a reality that affects all classes of South Asian immigrant women. Ironically, the women who "cannot" speak then are not the subalterns but the intellectuals whose experience of violence is not addressed in these essays.

7. On the other hand, the focus on class distinctions within the South Asian community is instrumental in exploding the model minority myth that has not only been perpetuated by the images of Asian Americans created by the dominant media, but is also actively embraced by the bourgeois South Asian American community. A Patchwork Shawl explores the costs and consequences of such ideological assimilation, including the denial of any heterogeneity within the South Asian community and the complicity of this group in maintaining the international division of labor. In the process, the collection becomes not only an expression of resistance, but also of activism that, in Shamita Das Dasguptaís words, "piece[s] together our experiences, experiences that bridge two worlds, the one left behind and the one newly adopted" (12). Through this back and forth movement the authors draw attention to hitherto ignored cultural and material resources that can be sources of strength for a minority population. Several of the essays, for example, include references to Shakti as an empowering model of womenís strength in Hindu mythology that needs to be re-established in diasporic communities. And Sonia Shahís careful analysis of South Asian American class politics ends with a call for cross-ethnic alliances, as exemplified by the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV), that recognize the common economic interests that bind together different minority groups within the United States.

8. A Patchwork Shawl then, though focused on South Asian women in America, is an important contribution to the growing voices of resistance emerging from the margins of U.S. society. As a collection committed to giving voice to the silenced and making America a part of a global diasporic community, this book makes an equally important contribution to the fields of ethnic (Asian American) and cultural (postcolonial) studies. At the same time, its recognition of its own limitations, its inability to "represent all perspectives. . .[or even] all South Asian countries" (15) makes it a work in progress that invites further investigation into the strategies for crossing disciplinary and national boundaries in theory as well as practice.

Credits:
Copyright © 2000 by Suchitra Mathur, all rights reserved. This article is reproduced with the kind permission of the editors of JOUVERT: Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
Source: www.scholars.nus.edu.sg

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“Post-feminism” or plain old sexism

By Sharon Smith

“POST-FEMINISM” is the phrase du jour among mainstream political pundits, often accompanied by derogatory comments toward anyone who continues to complain that women lack equality.

U.S. society has entered a “post-feminist” phase, a level playing field, according to this group of commentators. Women’s oppression belongs to a bygone era, and ideas of women’s liberation are merely outdated relics of that era. If anything, these pundits inform us, the women’s movement of the 1960s went too far and now must be reigned in. This is the typical rationale for curbing abortion rights.

But more insidious is the repeated accusation that feminists have created a “victim” consciousness among women by inflating statistics to exaggerate problems such as rape and sexual objectification. Without evidence, these claims have gained the status of conventional wisdom through sheer repetition.

Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for example, regularly ridicules the problem of date rape, with comments such as: “The biggest myth that won’t die is that one of four college women is raped on campuses each year...If 25 percent of Daddy’s little girls were being sexually assaulted at college, there wouldn’t be any girls on campus.”

The figure Parker holds in such contempt is based on a study conducted in the 1980s by Ms. Magazine, surveying 6,000 students at 32 colleges which found that one in four college women had been a victim of rape or attempted rape--a figure now accepted even by the U.S. Department of Justice. Furthermore, less than one in every three rapes and sexual assaults were reported to law enforcement officials in 1996.

Date rape is not a figment of the imaginations of “hysterical” feminists, but an indisputable reality for women in the U.S. Nevertheless, in the age of “post-feminism,” demands for women’s rights are deemed a colossal act of self-indulgence.

Those who are offended by images of women in popular culture must be either pro-censorship prudes or outmoded feminists born without a sense of humor. After all, who but the most bitter feminist could fail to be amused by the plot line of Pamela Anderson’s new Fox television show, which finds the former Baywatch babe starring as a busty bimbo working in a bookstore? (And the show’s called Stacked!)

Those who are irritated by the show’s promotional ad (Anderson posing suggestively atop a pile of books, as her silicone-enhanced breasts defy the force of gravity) might be jarred by beauty standards and sexual ideals manufactured on Wall Street and in Hollywood yet absorbed by women throughout society.

“Manufactured” is no exaggeration, given that 9.2 million cosmetic surgery procedures, from breast augmentation to Botox injections, were performed in 2004--mainly on women--according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, up 24 percent from 2000. Ironically, this rise in cosmetic surgery coincides with a 10 percent decline in medically necessary reconstructive surgery procedures in 2004 alone, due to declining insurance coverage.

The beauty ideal, moreover, has changed drastically from the buxom Marilyn Monroe (size 12-14) to today’s undernourished supermodel (size 2-4). A woman between the ages of 18 and 34 today has just a 1 percent chance of being as thin as a supermodel.

As modeling executive Jennifer Venditti explained in a 2001 Cosmopolitan article, “The smaller the sample, the better [the clothing] drapes...It’s almost like the body is not present.” This can be a problem for human beings. Yet this image permeates popular culture with unrealistic images that negatively affect self-esteem among females from a very young age.

Thanks to these airbrushed beauty standards, 80 percent of American women are dissatisfied with their appearance, according to the National Eating Disorder Association, contributing to the incidence of anorexia and bulimia currently suffered by up to 10 million women in the U.S. By the age of 10, 80 percent of girls in the U.S. have already tried to diet to lose weight.

“Post-feminism” is a term brimming with hypocrisy--promoted primarily by those who oppose women’s rights--turning women’s bodies over to the control and judgment of others. The need for women’s liberation is far from antiquated--it is, in fact, thoroughly modern.

::link source; http://www.socialistworker.org/2005-1/539/539_07_PostFeminism.shtml

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