On the subject of young feminists

Here is a blog by a 25-year-old lesbian feminist medical student that I just discovered. She also wrote a really interesting post about the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Pauli Murray and the Indivisibility of Human Rights

Pauli Murray was a friend of Mary Daly's, mentioned several times in Daly's intellectual autobiography, Outercourse. They seem to have met during the time when Murray was teaching at Brandeis University, and Daly was less radical than she was to become later. As time went on, their approaches diverged. Daly left the Catholic Church and became an advocate for woman-only theorizing and activism. Murray, emphasized reconciliation among warring groups, and in 1977 became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. I'm not sure if these two women remained friends as their opinions diverged, but I would love to have been able to listen to a conversation between the two of them.

With that in mind, here is a term paper that I wrote about Pauli Murray for my US Women's Movements class:

Pauli Murray and the Indivisibility of Human Rights

At the close of the Civil War, the movement that had worked to gain freedom for enslaved African Americans and rights for all women was split by the controversy over passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution. These amendments sacrificed the goal of universal human rights in order to achieve a needed, but much more limited objective: political and voting rights for African American men. However necessary this compromise might have been, it had the tragic result of setting up antagonism between activists for the rights of African Americans and activists for the rights of women.

Nearly one hundred years later, this tragedy nearly repeated itself in the controversy over Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed job discrimination by private employers on the basis of race and other categories. As a joke, or perhaps as an act of sabotage, Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia added “sex” as a protected class under Title VII. Supporters of civil rights for African Americans worked to defeat this amendment. But then Pauli Murray, an African American lawyer and activist, wrote a powerful memo supporting the inclusion of sex as a protected class.

“The human rights `revolution’ transcends the issue of discrimination on basis of race or color,” she began. “Women’s rights are a part of human rights.” (MacLean, 70). Murray’s memo played an important role in helping this provision pass the US Senate (Murray 1987, 358). In this situation, she acted as a reformer. In other situations, she acted as a radical activist, such as when she was arrested and jailed in 1940 for violating a bus segregation law in Virginia, or when she helped lead nonviolent direct action to desegregate Washington DC restaurants in the 1940s. But whether her tactics were reformist or radical, her goal was always the same. Pauli Murray believed that human rights were indivisible, and that unity and reconciliation were the path to liberation.

Drug company milks breast cancer for fun and profit...

according to a post on one of my favorite blogs, the Feminist Peace Network.

The guy who talks in Tough Guise

Here is a link to the web site of Jackson Katz, the narrator of the film Tough Guise that we've been watching in the Mary Daly group.

documentary discussion

We Haven’t Come a Long Way. And We’re Not Babies

Kathy McCallie October 27, 2010

“Step by Step” is a documentary film about the women’s movement in the 1940-1970’s illustrating the power of courageous hard-working women to make a difference in the world. As a middle-aged woman who remembers the efforts to pass the ERA, I was profoundly moved watching the film. One lingering impression is the reality that women have been working decade after decade to chip away at sexism and gynophobia with only modest gains. I admit up front that I tend to be cynical, always the first to argue that the glass is half empty. Nonetheless, I felt impatient and discouraged remembering how much hope I used to have back in the 1970s and 1980s.

Back in those days there was an ad campaign that used the slogan: “You’ve come a long way, Baby.” Maybe it was for cigarettes. I just remember glossy pages of womens’ magazines carried the ads, and I liked them. The ads seemed to proclaim that women were making political progress toward equal rights. They depicted some old scene of a woman doing oppressive labor contrasted with a jazzy, new image of a liberated woman. Then the ERA failed to pass. How could that have happened? As my consciousness was raised further, I no longer liked the ads that suggested women should be grateful for the progress we had made. The pervasive message from the society claimed that women had it pretty good as compared with other times and places: “At least you aren’t being beaten and abused! You women have it better in the United States than just about anywhere in the world. You should be grateful for all the progress you’ve made.” After that I put up a poster on my office wall that read: “We haven’t come a long way, and we’re not babies!” After ERA failed, I was furious for several decades. My fury was reawakened watching the “Step by Step” documentary.

The film reminded me of how much enthusiasm and energy there was in the feminist movement in those days. Where is the movement now? Our Mary Daly discussion group feels like a lifeline to the hope that feminist consciousness survives. Let’s keep talking and reading – keep moving on the outercourse journey. I hope you will watch the documentary with me and tell me what you think about it.

Katha Pollit on Anita Hill

Katha Pollit at The Nation has an interesting commentary about the weird phone message that Clarence Thomas's wife left for Anita Hill.

Mary Daly reading from the Wickedary

Here is a link to an audio clip of Mary Daly reading from the Wickedary.

This clip comes from KPFA in the SF Bay area, and they also have a cool women's blog.

Communion

I am not a usually a church goer, but the other week I did go to church at a very nice place called Church of the Open Arms. They used inclusive language to talk about god, alternating male and female pronouns. I'm not saying this will turn me into a churchgoer, but I found it encouraging.

Here is something that I realized during the middle of the service. At the start of communion, the pastor raised up a loaf of bread with the traditional words, "take eat, this is my body." Suddenly, it was perfectly clear that this had nothing to do with Jesus. No icky and confusing concepts like transubstantiation or "real presence" are required to explain it. You just have to leap to the obvious conclusion that the bread is literally made from the body of the Earth, and that is the source of the connection with the divine. Another patriarchal reveral reversed.

I don't think Mary Daly ever directly addressed the subject of communion, but in the Wickedary she does define the patriarchal "absence of Presence."

 lack of content and purpose; the normal nothingness of bore-ocracy; the routinized rule in snooldom, absence of soul. Examples: negation of meaning in a conversation, lack of affection or intelligence in a face; nonresponse to a question or to an act of love

Which pretty much sums up what I saw and experienced when my mother used to take me to the Lutheran church when I was a little girl.

What I'm learning from Mary Daly

I came to the Mary Daly group a few months ago and it's become a very important part of my life. Outercourse is challenging reading and so we often read only a few pages in our time together. Even so, I find myself thinking about Mary Daly's words during the week. She obviously pondered her use of language, as well as the language used in books she studied, religious and other. And now I often think of the words I hear and speak ... trying to listen carefully to learn how I might be using words in ways that minimize myself and other women.

I grew up in a home in which my brother and father were favored. Implicit in every interaction with them was the understanding that I should defer to them. If I disagreed, my mother, father and brother were displeased with me (my younger sister seemed to live in her own world most of the time). They would ask why I was always "starting an argument" or why I "wouldn't leave well enough alone". I tried to learn different ways to express my opinion, thinking that if I could just express myself the right way, they would want to know what I thought. I know now that, unless my view of reality jived with theirs, to them I was just plain wrong and further discussion was futile.

Expressing myself, being honest about what I thought, meant that my mother and father and brother were unhappy with me. And not expressing myself, just agreeing with them, meant that I could have a relationship with them, albeit very limited, but it was something. The problem with this was that I grew constantly more distant from my own self, more unhappy and more depressed. Eventually it became difficult for me to know what I even thought and to become constantly apologetic when expressing an opinion.

And so in my journey to find myself, I learn from Mary Daly, a woman who was not afraid to disagree with male authority, not afraid to express herself, not afraid to know herself, not afraid to trust herself.

This is a test

In order to be better able to help other contributors to this blog navigate the process of accepting an invitation to the blog, signing on, and posting, I have created a new avatar, test pirate. I am Amazon Grace, and I have been blogging under that name for a little more than two years.

Amazon Grace is, as you may know, the title of Mary Daly's final book. I didn't know that when I adopted it as my blogging name. I picked it because Grace is my middle name, and the play on words occurred to me, and I couldn't resist it. When we were planning to start the Mary Daly group, I decided to reacquaint myself with Daly's work, and found that my blog name was also the title of a book that Daly had published in 2006. This is an example of what Daly calls Syn-Crone-icities, defined in the Wickedary as :"`coincidences' experienced and recognized by Crones as Strangely significant."

This illustrates one of my favorite things about Mary Daly, the way that she plays with language and invents new words. For Mary Daly, liberation is not about following rules, it's about playfulness and thinking outside the box.

So this new avatar was deliberately chosen to use another concept from Mary Daly, the concept of being a pirate, as quoted by Deborah Barlow on the blog Slow Muse:

“Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin,’’ she wrote in the opening of “Sin Big,’’* her New Yorker piece. “The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’ ’’

Here's hoping you have a sin-ful day, in Daly's sense of the word.

(By the way, once you create your account and sign in, if you look around on your Dashboard, you will see a link that says "view blog." Click it, and the blog will automagically appear.)

Mary Daly and the Church

Mary Daly's first book "The Church and the Second Sex" helped me a great deal to believe that I wasn't the only person hurt by the Catholic church. I was raised in a devote Catholic family in Michigan during the 1950's. Almost everyone I associated with was Catholic and I attended parochial school for 12 years. I think even at the age of 7 when receiving my first communion I understood that something dreadful was going on around me. Yes, I guess I was probably more sensitive than most kids because I was raised in a very dysfunctional home with a lot of absurd patriarchial rules.

I only understood later that the nasty disposition of the nuns who were our main teachers in school was caused by the humiliation and degradation that they endured at the hands of the priests. The nuns were basically slaves to these narcissistic, pompous men whose vows of chastity, poverty and obedience drove them to sexually abuse any vulnerable child with impunity.

In Mary Daly's first book she was hopeful that the Catholic church would eventually address these primitive patriarchial attitudes; however, she eventually understood that this would not happen in her lifetime because patriarchy is so pervasive in christianity and our culture. She died in January 2010 deprived of any good news for women. I, too, have left the Catholic church behind and only look forward with hope for the generations to come.

The Mary Daly group and other femminists feed my spirit in order that I may have a brief respite from the dysphoria that haunts me.

Patriarcy Thrives in Oklahoma

I just experienced a vivid reminder yesterday of one of the rules my mother lived with in the 1950's as a mother of five children. Here we are 60 years later and it is as if no time has passed at all. I was in a women's clothing store and the very nicely dressed woman in the check out line in front of me told the sales associate to put everything she bought in one bag because then her husband would not be as upset. The sales associate laughed and said that she thought most women played tricks like that so as not to be criticized by their spouses.


It was as if a mighty wind picked me up and transported me back to my childhood and I re-experienced the confusion, anxiety, dread and I have to admit a little excitement when my mother would buy things and hide them from my father because he wouldn't approve. Of course, my father always found out but sometimes it would be a long time later. There were no charge cards back then so the money had to come out of the meager amount he would give her to buy groceries. All of us kids were very skinny because my mother gave my father a full portion of food but we had to split what was left. I have always wondered why he didn't seem to notice what we were eating.

Let me make it clear that my mother was not buying trivial items, she wa buying us clothes for school and one very memorable time she bought a set of encyclopedias and hid them in a closet for a year until she had them paid off. We were allowed when Dad wasn't home to use those precious books and I believe this sparked the intellectual curiousity that exists within all my siblings. And, my father was not this evil dictator, he was just an average man who was profoundly affected by the rules of patriarcy. I am sure he felt it was his duty to defend those rules. He lived a good life because of those rules but I am sure that if any part of him lives on, he regrets victimizing his family with patriarcy.


Those years were so uncomfortable for me that I swore when I got married I would never hide my purchases or be told what amount of money I could spend. I have been true to my oath and my husband has learned to never question what I spend even if it is for something foolish. He knows the story of my childhood and even though it also goes against his patriarcial rules imposed from his childhood, he gives me a break on this one.

Thank you

Dear Amazon Grace - I am absolutely amazed that you put this blog together so quickly for us. My hope is also that we can entice other maybe closeted femminists to join our blog and delight us with Mary Daly stories and also personal stories.

This women's space is still much needed today even though women seemingly have received more rights and privileges from the patriarchs who still rule our country and our planet. Even though I am almost 61 years old, patriarchy is still the spoken language in my home. No amount of protesting or even tantrums changes this fact and I dread going to my grave without witnessing some semblance of true equality.

Our weekly Mary Daly meetings have been a breath of fresh air for me - a boost of feminine vitamins that I have been deprived of for a long time.

We know you're out there...

Since sometime early this year--maybe it was February--a group of women has been meeting at Church of the Open Arms in Oklahoma City to read the works of radical feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly.Our inspiration for this group was Daly's death at the beginning of January. Some of us knew her books from many years ago, and some of us had never heard of her before the group started meeting, but we knew she'd had a very large effect on feminist thought, and we wanted to learn more about her. We stared out by reading her first feminist book The Church and the Second Sex, and moved next to her intellectual autobiography, Outercourse.

Reading Mary Daly is challenging and exciting. Her thoughts have provoked us to deep analysis of our own lives and situations as women, much fine storytelling, and eating of snacks. We know that when she died, many women expressed their grief at her passing and appreciationg of her work. We think that there must be other women out there who are doing something like what we are doing, and we want to reach out to them. We want to be part of resurgent radical feminist Movement. So, if you find this, let us know what you think and what you've been doing.

The other current attendees of the group have been invited to join this blog, and I'm waiting to hear from you.