Taxonomy

Happy Birthday, UDHR!
Saturday, December 10, 2011 - 20:30
            Today is the 63rd birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Happy birthday, honey! What an opportunity for people in the US to get to know you better.
 
            Occupy Wall Street, please meet Article 23: "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."
 
            And all you folks who've lost your jobs to outsourcing or your homes to foreclosure, meet Article 25: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
 
            People in the US government also need to get to know the UDHR better, not to mention our own Constitution. This week the Senate passed a secret National Defense Authorization Act —according to the ACLU, which is campaigning against it, the NDAA will authorize the President to have the military lock up anybody, including US citizens, indefinitely, without trial, here and anywhere in the world. The Senate passed this bill despite opposition from the Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, Director of the FBI, and Director of Counterintelligence, among others. Don't our Senators know that Article 9 of the UDHR says "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile?"
 
            It is ironic how few Americans actually know the UHDR when so many in the international hipousie think human rights is a US imperialist plot. In fact, as Gita Sahgal, Director of the Centre for Secular Space, points out in her guest blog below, published today in openDemocracy, far from springing full blown out of the forehead of Eleanor Roosevelt, many of the best ideas in the UDHR came from what in my youth was called the Third World.
 
Who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
 
 
On the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we might consider whether the idea of human rights with their firm assertions, their belief in the ‘rule of law,’ and their globalised vision remain relevant in the world. The idea that there are absolute standards has come under attack from both the left and the right. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre , author of 'After Virtue', said, Natural rights and self evident truths proclaimed in the American declaration of independence are tantamount to belief in witches and unicorns. While from the left, in ‘Human Rights and Empire’, Costas Douzinas has called human rights the political philosophy of cosmopolitanism and argued that human rights now codify and ‘constitutionalise ‘ the normative sources of Empire.
 
Those fighting the attempts by the Bush administration to tear up human rights prohibitions on torture, would be surprised to see themselves as empire builders. The only weapons they had were the Constitutions of their countries and the human rights system, with its unequivocal rejection of torture. While recent developments in human rights may certainly be used to justify foreign military interventions on humanitarian grounds, a vast body of human rights law also limits the abusive power of the state and protects the freedom of the individual. But are these freedoms ones that are derived from ‘the West’ and therefore limited in their application?  States affiliated to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) certainly seem to think so. In the 1980s and 90s Islamic states drafted the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, as an alternative declaration.
 
The idea that different peoples were endowed with separate rights would have seemed absurd in the middle of the twentieth century to those struggling against colonial oppression or trying to build new nations. The barbarity unleashed on the world by a global war, was certainly in the minds of delegates. But so too was the yearning to build a better world within the nation-state, as well as limiting foreign aggression and war.  ‘It was imperative that the peoples of the world should recognize the existence of a code of civilized behavior which would apply not only in international relations but also in domestic affairs', said Begum Shaista Ikramullah, a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan  and a delegate of the UN in 1948.
 
Susan Waltz is one of the scholars who has done much to recover stories such as the role of Begum Ikramullah and others in  the forgotten history of the drafting of the UDHR. Her work shows how mistaken many assumptions are about this foundational document. Eleanor Roosevelt is  often seen as the single author of the Declaration, since she chaired the drafting Committee. Civil and political rights are seen as classical ‘Western' concerns, whilst social and economic rights are thought to have been advocated for by the Soviet bloc.
 
In fact, as Waltz shows, Roosevelt supplied neither the text nor the substantive ideas that shaped the UDHR. Ricardo Alfaro, former President of Panama, proposed the idea and first draft of such a Declaration, which was taken up by many others including public intellectuals such as HG Wells. While early drafts were worked on by Rene Cassin of France, along with many US lawyers, each clause was voted on by member states, and many suggestions came from drafters from small and newly de-colonised states. The Latin American states promoted  social and economic rights, while the Soviet Union concentrated on racial discrimination – a convenient way of bashing the US, as well as colonial states.
 
The  desire for emancipation of all, emphasising that rights applied to everyone everywhere, emerged as a major concern. Significant additions were made by newly de-colonised states regarding, slavery, discrimination, the rights of women and the right to national self determination.
 
Two of the most important drafters were Hansa Mehta of India, and Charles Malik of Lebanon, who was Committee Rapporteur. Hansa Mehta, an extraordinary activist and brave member of the Constituent Assembly in India, was responsible for the wording of the Article I ‘All human beings are equal in dignity and rights,’ arguing that if the word men was used, it would not be regarded as inclusive but rather taken to exclude women. She was the key figure who ensured gender equality in the document.
 
Yugoslavia proposed that human rights should apply to the peoples of non-self governing and trust territories. Carlos Romulo of the Philippines argued that full rights should be given to the colonies. Article 2, thereby ensures non-discrimination (a standard clause that came to be adopted in all treaties) on the grounds  of race, class property, social origin and so on; but it also ensures that subject peoples were also endowed with rights. ‘no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.’
 
Political differences were very evident. But the arguments were not necessarily divisions between blocs. There were political divisions among Muslims on religion and marriage, two very contentious areas. Saudi Arabia objected to Article 16 on the right to choice in marriage. Begum Ikramullah opposed the Saudi view making a speech against child marriage. She accepted equal rights in marriage on the grounds that equal did not necessarily mean the same. Egypt’s Wahid Rafaat accepted the language on marriage, noting that marriage limitations based on race (as in the US) were more shocking to his country than limitations based on religion or nationality. The clause on marriage, in short, was fought for by a range of opinion to form an egalitarian and adult basis for marriage which was absent then from most countries whether eastern or western.
 
The clause on being able to exercise freedom of religion was supported by a number of Muslim delegates. The Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Zafrallah Khan, quoted the Qur'an ‘Let him who chooses believe, believe and him who chooses to disbelieve, disbelieve.’ He believed that the right to change religion was consistent with Islam. Moahammed Habib from India, supported the statement as consistent with the Constitution of India. However, Saudi Arabia objected to it, and eventually abstained from voting on the Declaration itself. No-one voted against the Declaration, although Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the Soviet bloc abstained, with 50 countries voting for it.
 
Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, member of the drafting sub-Committee, wrote: “I perceived clearly that I was participating in a truly significant historic event in which a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing—which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality.  In the Great Hall…there was an atmosphere of genuine solidarity and brotherhood among men and women from all latitudes, the like of which I have not seen again in any international setting.”

 

(0)
Petition to Support the Afghan Women's Network
Friday, December 2, 2011 - 17:08

I have been working on women’s human rights for many years, most recently with the Centre for Secular Space, a new global think tank formed to oppose religious extremism, strengthen secular voices, and ensure that the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities don’t disappear from view in the rush to make peace with Islamic fundamentalists. Ever since stories started appearing about Karzai wanting to negotiate with the Taliban and the US backing him up, we have been worrying about what would happen to Afghan women.  The Afghan Women's Network has developed a terrific demilitarization program but nobody here seems to have heard about it, while some of the men in the US State Dept. consider women’s rights a "pet rock" to be discarded when serious negotiations begin. I wrote a blog about this, but what good is a blog? 

 
Seeing Peace Unveiled on PBS and hearing that Afghan women were being excluded from the Bonn conference, which begins Dec. 5, sharpened my sense that something awful was about to happen. So I wrote another blog. It felt about as effective as putting a message in a bottle. But by this time, a lot of other people were taking initiative; pressure mounted; emails started flying; and the global network Women Living Under Muslim Laws put out a very strong statement denouncing “the ethical incoherence of States that engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan under the fallacious pretext to protect ‘poor oppressed Muslim women living under the burqa’, and now prevent them from participating as full-fledged citizens in the peace process in their country, all while engaging with their oppressors,” and calling for women and progressive forces everywhere to use “all possible media avenues in support of Afghan women’s claim to full participation in the negotiations.”
 
The next day, thirteen women were suddenly included in the Afghan delegation to Bonn. Two days later, the Afghan Women’s Network sent out an update saying that, as a result of concerted domestic and international pressure, the official delegation was now 31% female. However, these women were added at the last minute and had not been consulted about what would happen at the Bonn conference. In addition, fifteen women have been added to the Peace Council, but these women  were handpicked by government people, including warlords. In short, “real meaningful participation of women at all levels is still very minimal.”  
 
By then the Bonn meeting was just a week away. There wasn’t enough time to pull together a big coalition of women’s and human rights groups, or to get a list of celebrity signatures that might impress the State Dept. But at least we could do a global petition. Ariane Brunet in Montreal and I worked on the text; we got input from others in our network; and the petition went up late Tuesday night. It is now starting to reach international listserves. If we get enough signatures, maybe we can convince our governments to actually listen to the Afghan women’s demands. Please sign, link on FB, tweet, and forward to your friends!
 
 

 

(0)
Afghan Women Excluded
Monday, November 21, 2011 - 23:08

Afghan Women Excluded

 
On December 5, less than two weeks from now, the second conference on Afghanistan will convene in Bonn, ten years after the first one installed the Karzai government. It will include all the usual suspects—Afghan governmental bodies, foreign governments, and representatives of Afghan civil society—with one big exception. Despite some pressure—who can say how much?—from the State Department, and the clear and cogent demands put forth by the Afghan Women’s Network, no Afghan women’s groups or representatives have been invited. As Human Rights Watch points out, 
 
“The Afghan government’s key donors and facilitators of the conference, including Germany and the United States, do not appear to have made women’s rights a priority for the meeting.” This is despite Hillary’s promise not to abandon Afghan women, and the fact that support from the German Greens—who are members of the government—helped build the Afghan Women’s Network.
  
When you consider that the Taliban’s treatment of women was a pretext for this war, these facts are staggering, if not surprising. The recent broadcast of “Peace Unveiled” on PBS’s Women, War & Peace series shows the kind of opposition Afghan women activists are up against and how unreliable US support for them appears. It’s an important program and series, very much worth watching, and all the episodes can be viewed online. 
 
Despite all the talk about UN resolution 1325, people in the US, even most feminists, have not focused on this problem. I wrote a blog last July saying how important it was to support the demands of the Afghan Women’s Network. To my surprise, I was asked if I wanted the war to go on forever—as if the only two choices were between endless war or betraying Afghan women.
 
To accept this is to accept the idea that the only meaningful form of US action is military. President Karzai (who changes his tune frequently) has been all over the papers saying how much he wants a continued alliance with the US, meaning we should keep giving him lots of money. Are we to put no conditions on this aid, let human rights go out the window, and, in the name of respecting cultural differences, keep financing a corrupt regime with an attitude towards women and gays barely different from the Taliban’s?
  
Could the Obama administration perhaps show a little principle here? A little backbone?
  
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon posted an article today in Foreign Policy called “Afghan women are not ‘pet rocks’” (referring to a dismissive remark by a State Department official). I am cross-posting it below and hope you will forward this and link to it widely because there has been so little media attention to this. Let’s try to generate some pressure here.
 
Afghan women are not "pet rocks"
By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Monday, November 21, 2011
 
Afghan women have long fought for a say in their country's future, but that fight has grown more urgent in the run-up to the Bonn Conference, a gathering charged with laying out a plan for Afghanistan for 2014 and beyond.
  
So far, women's battle to win a substantive role at Bonn - and any other peace talks that may come to the capital - has gained little traction either at home or abroad.  And in the US, those backing women say they face an uphill fight convincing the Obama Administration to speak out more about the need for women's participation.
  
Afghan women leaders have issued press releases and formal position papers in the run-up to December's meeting demanding that civil society makes up 30 percent of Afghanistan's delegation to the Bonn Conference, with women accounting for half of that group.    
 
The Afghan government has not yet announced its official delegation, but so far one man and one woman from civil society have been invited to Bonn, with the woman getting three minutes to address the plenary.  Of the sixteen women attending a separate civil society forum, only one will have access to the official conference, according to the Institute for Inclusive Security, which recently brought Afghan women leaders to Washington to press their case on the Hill and with the Obama Administration.
  
"We would like to have strong participation in these processes, we would like to know what is being discussed, what is put on the table," says Orzala Ashraf, a peace activist and founder of an Afghan NGO for women and children. "We would like to ensure that these bargaining chips (in any peace process) are not women's rights or our achievements of the past ten years."
  
With the U.S. and its NATO allies focused on extricating themselves from Afghanistan, the task of laying out the path ahead has assumed extreme urgency for Afghans. "It is of high importance for women's groups and civil society to make sure their voices are included in any road map," says Ashraf, "in any direction that Afghanistan is going to take." 
But whether those voices will be heard remains an open question.  
 
As Human Rights Watch noted, "The Afghan government and its international backers say that women's rights are one of their ‘red lines' as they plan for the withdrawal of international forces. If this is the case, why are Afghan women struggling to get a seat at the table in Bonn?"
  
Those in Washington attribute part of the reason to a White House inner circle that sees the role of women as far removed from the issue of Afghan security.  As the Washington Post famously noted earlier this year, women are seen as "pet rocks in our rucksack" that are "taking us down."
  
"These guys don't get it," said a senior administration official who has argued that women's participation is crucial for Afghanistan's stability, as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell did in 2002. "Ten years on we still have to make the case that women are additive."
  
As I've written in these pages, it is far from the situation of a decade ago when leaders across Washington fanned out before the cameras to speak about the importance of supporting Afghan women. After five years of Taliban rule, in which women were denied the rights to work and education and to leave their homes, the international community offered its arrival in 2001 as a new start.  
  
Secretary of State Clinton helped women leaders win a speaking role at last year's Kabul Conference and has promised women that "we will not abandon you," but with her departure imminent and 2014 looming, talk of a Taliban return is surging.  
 
Fears of what the Taliban's ascendance would mean for women have only grown stronger with news of the stoning death of a woman and her daughter in Ghazni Province.  Assassinations of leading human rights supporters and police officials and attacks on girls schools have skyrocketed in recent years - even as talk of a peace deal with the Taliban has come to be viewed in NATO capitals as the best option for ending the war.
  
Some American advocates for women say any talk of Taliban negotiations is misplaced, especially given the recent assassination of former President and head of the High Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani.
  
"We don't think anybody should be negotiating with the Taliban," says Esther Hyneman of Women for Afghan Women, which runs family centers and safe homes for abused women across Afghanistan.  "If the Taliban wanted a role in the government, why don't they run for parliament in a democratic election? They don't want a role in the Afghan government -- they want the Afghan government."
  
Women's group leaders say that just like in the 1990s, when they lobbied to stop the Clinton Administration from recognizing the Taliban government, they will not stand by quietly while women half a world away are denied their constitutionally guaranteed rights to work and education. They note that Afghan women are making progress for themselves, pointing to the rising number of girls attending school, as well as female midwives, police officers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, civil society activists, parliamentarians and educators as evidence.
  
"We will keep the pressure on and support women in any way we can," says Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which helped to lead the fight against Washington's recognition of the Taliban in 1996.  "There is now a huge network of non-profit organizations within Afghanistan and we are talking to them and they are taking the lead.  What we can do is continue to put pressure on the U.S. government not to agree to anything that omits half the population."
  
Yet some wonder just how committed the White House is to supporting women's participation in their country. The President has not spoken often about Afghanistan - and far less about the country's women.
  
"Perhaps the tremendous unpopularity of the war puts [President Obama] in an awkward position," says activist Mavis Leno, wife of talk show host Jay Leno and one of the women who put the issue on America's map -- and in PEOPLE Magazine in 1998 -- after the Taliban came to power in 1996. "I don't think he is doing as much as he could."
  
Hyneman goes further:
 
 "I am at my wit's end at the lack of discussion by the media, by our government, by our president on the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan." Of Obama, Hyneman says, "I am appalled that he has not mentioned Afghan women's rights since his speech on withdrawing US troops."
 
Women's activists say they are watching closely to see exactly what the Afghan government -- with support from the United States -- agrees to in any peace deal.
  
"I just don't understand why the fate of these women has to be considered as special pleading," Leno says.  "Are we just going to stand back and see this happen again? Women were making it a little way up the hill; can we at least make sure that they don't slide back down again?"
  
They say they share Americans' desire to end the country's longest war, but that a peace that leaves
women out will not last.
 
"We are in favor of peace, but this is not the road to peace, it is the road to bloodshed and subjugation and civil war, a repeat of the years past," Hyneman says. "Everyone will be sitting in front of their TV sets wringing their hands as we see women brutalized.”
 
 

 

(0)
Secular Space
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - 15:02

Three weeks ago, I was on a panel at John Jay College’s Center for International Human Rights, organized by the Centre for Secular Space, a new thinktank formed to “oppose fundamentalism, strengthen secular voices, and promote universality in human rights.”  One way to do this is to provide information that is hard to find elsewhere.  On this occasion, Ariane Brunet, a Canadian human rights expert, galvanized the room by saying that the revolution in Tunisia actually began with a strike by women garment workers ten years ago; these workers subsequently played a leading role in the protests that led up to the exit of dictator Ben Ali in January, 2011.

This is not the story one hears in the US press, where the emphasis has been on the rise of the “moderate Islamist” party Ennadha, which won a plurality of 42% in the recent election for a constituent assembly and has formed a governing coalition with two liberal parties. Rachid Ghanouchi, the leader of Ennadha, has become the darling not only of the US State Department and the New York Times but of leftwing thinkers at the Guardian and the Institute for Policy Studies, where Rob Prince wrote recently:
 
"Although there have been concerns circulating among neoconservative circles and the French ruling class that the stunning Ennahda victory suggests some kind of Sharia state just around the corner in Tunisia, the response in the United States and Europe has been mostly positive…. Claims that Ennahda is some reincarnation of the Afghan Taliban or a Tunisian version of the Saudi Wahhabist movement are so far off the mark as to be ludicrous. While of course there will be political differences between Ennahda and its more secular coalition partners, there will be no Taliban-style Sharia in Tunisia, nor are the gains that Tunisian women have enjoyed since 1956 likely to be seriously eroded."
 

Despite this hopeful appraisal, and the fact that Ghannouchi is criticized by more authoritarian Islamists, many Tunisians say Ghannouchi speaks out of both sides of his mouth. 

"The party ran an unveiled woman as an election candidate, vowed not to touch laws banning polygamy and ensuring equal rights in divorce and inheritance that some say are at odds with Islamic Sharia, and presented a programme differing little from that of secularists…. Yet Tunisian commentator Rachid Khechana said many in Ennahda give different messages in their own communities.  'They use different rhetoric in the rural areas where it's more conservative: rhetoric about stopping culture from outside, corruption of youth and defending Islam,' he said. 'In the mosque, they tell their believers they should not fear what they hear them saying on TV.'" 

 
Please note that the fashionable new term “moderate Islamist” does not necessarily imply moderation on issues like women’s and gay rights; it merely implies a willingness to achieve a strict Islamic state through elections and social pressure rather than violence. But social pressure can be extremely coercive.  According to Tunisian student leader Halel Sayeh:  “Nous avons déjà vu à l’œuvre cette pression sociale qui a poussé d’innombrables femmes à opter pour le hijab, de peur d’être mal perçues dans leur milieu social fraichement radicalisé.” [We have already seen the work of this social pressure, which has pushed innumerable women to opt for the hijab, for fear of being considered immoral in their newly-radicalized social environment.]

Certainly Islamists—whether Ennadha members or less “moderate” salafis—have been on the rampage in Tunis. Ariane Brunet laid out a sequence of troubling events: a mob attack on the Grande Synagogue de Tunis, and assaults on unveiled women (most women in Tunis are unveiled) and women sitting in cafes, who were beaten with sticks by Islamist mobs. Then there was the violent censorship of Nadia el Fani’s film Laïcité Inch’Allah (Secularism, God Willing), including death threats against the director, destruction of the movie theatre where it played, and a physical attack on the theatre’s director. Last month an Islamist mob made a similar attack on a cable TV station that showed the Arabic language version of Marjane Satrapi’s animated film Persepolis, in which a little girl has imaginary conversations with God, who is drawn as a bearded man. The home of the owner of the station was also attacked. Although Ennadha disclaimed responsibility for these mobs, it opposed the showing of Persepolis and Ghannouchi clearly supported the idea of mob censorship in an interview, saying the masses wanted to express their indignation. 
 
One test of the “moderate Islamists” of Ennadha will be whether they are willing to use the police powers of the new coalition government to secure human rights. Will they defend freedom of expression if that free expression offends some Muslims? Will they insist that the police protect unveiled women, transsexuals, and Christians who are attacked by Islamist mobs? We shall see.
 
Meanwhile, in the US we too are having problems with the interface between religious extremism and human rights. Yesterday, citizens of Mississippi voted on a “personhood” amendment to the state constitution declaring a fertilized egg a legal human being. This would have criminalized not only abortion, but any form of birth control that prevents a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, including the IUD and the morning after pill. As Susan Jacoby says, “Make no mistake about it: Proposition 26 is entirely about the determination of far-right religious institutions to make their brand of faith the legal standard for all matters involving sex, reproduction and women’s (though not men’s) bodies.” The amendment was defeated but its supporters will continue to pursue this goal.
 
Then there is the publicly funded bus company that serves a community of Hasidic Jews in Kiriat Joel, Monroe County, New York. According to the Jewish Weekly Forward, buses to Kiriat Joel have a curtain stretched down the center aisle, with men sitting on one side and women on the other, so that the men will not be distracted by the sight of a female ankle.  Never mind the fact that segregation on public transportation is illegal.  
 
Twenty, even ten, years ago, I would not have believed it possible that sex segregation would be permitted on a publicly funded bus line in New York. But in the US as elsewhere, secular space is being nibbled away, bite after bite, by extremist religious movements and government complicity with them. The consequences of this nibbling are particularly dreadful for women, gays, and religious minorities. Ennadha may be committed to equality for women, but try telling that to the Tunis transsexual whose neighbor just grew a beard and started going to the mosque and is now threatening to kill her.  
 
To fight the imposition of far right religious views, a number of us, scattered around the globe, have started the Centre for Secular Space. You can read our principles on our website; and you can write to us there. As yet we have no office and no paid staff, but some of the smartest and bravest women in the world are behind this initiative, so do follow our website, which will soon add interactive features and seek comments.
 
Secularism does not mean that everybody has to be an atheist. It means that government, including public education and transportation, must be free of control by religious authority; and that the state should defend religious freedom while opposing religious discrimination and coercion. States that cop out on this job will need to hear from all of us.
 
 
 
 
 

 

(1)
Vision and Demands
Monday, October 3, 2011 - 20:21

 

            I just moved and have been too blitzed  to get down to Wall Street yet. I’ll head downtown when I get my strength back but it sounds like the kids are doing fine on their own.
 
            Some would disagree with this assessment. They fault Occupy Wall Street for not having concrete demands and a strategy; its website forum  holds many such complaints, and responses. The American Prospect website posted another such criticism. I had to laugh when I read it, because the tone reminded me so much of early days in the Boston women’s liberation movement, when we formed Bread and Roses and the boys kept saying our plans were too amorphous.
 
            “What’s your strategy?” they said. “What are your demands?” They explained that revolutionaries actually need not one set of demands but TWO—a set of “immediate demands” around which we would mobilize the masses, and another of “transitional demands” for when we were on the verge of seizing power. 
 
            But we were thinking more about vision than demands. Our vision was of a non-hierarchical society where people would share wealth and knowledge and be able to develop into their best selves without being held back by poverty, racism, sexism, and constant wars. But since everybody said we had to have demands, we came up with a list, which we put on a leaflet for the first Boston International Women’s Day march held in decades, on March 8, 1970. The list was so long we had to use legal size paper. Here it is:
 
 
THE ECONOMY
 
            Women must be enabled to participate in the economy on a basis of equality with men. We believe that the nature of work in our system is demeaning to human beings, and we do not want merely to upgrade women into the alienated jobs that men now hold. However we refuse to do the low-grade, low-paid, and service work any more. Such jobs may be shared by men and women, as must housework be shared, and be recognized as legitimate work that deserves pay. We take it to be our right:
 
1. That all persons, including children, be assured a personal income commensurate with the cost of living and independent of their family status.
 
2. That all employers immediately be required to comply with the law of the land and pay equal wages for equal work.
 
3. An end to sex discrimination by job definition, which evades the law by defining all desirable jobs in such a way that only men can fill them. Secretarial and executive tasks should be shared between men and women; responsibility should be shared between doctor and nurse.
 
4. That all employers give priority to the hiring and promotion of women, with preferential hiring to women of races and classes that have been discriminated against. No men must be laid off to comply with this demand.
 
5. Childcare by men and women, during work hours, provided free by the employers, and controlled by workers and the community.
 
6. An end to discrimination against part-time or temporary workers, who are mostly female or minors; for example, equal fringe benefits and employment opportunities.
 
7. Maternity leave for both men and women, with guaranteed return and no loss of pay or seniority.
 
CONTROL OF OUR BODIES
 
            Women should be able to control their own bodies, to have children if and when they want to, and to refrain from having children if they want to. This ultimately means an end to all laws governing birth control and abortion, with the exception of legal standards of health and safety. It also means that if proper health care is to be equally available to all women, we must have free medical care for all people. We consider these to be our right:
 
1. Abortion, birth control devices, and pregnancy tests to be provided on demand to women of all ages, under safe conditions, at no cost.
 
2. Prenatal, maternity and postnatal care to be provided to all women at no cost. Women should be able to determine the manner and place in which they give birth.
 
3. Drastic increases in government funding of birth control research; research priorities to be determined by women, since it is their health which is at stake.
 
4. Higher safety standards for drug company research and regulation of their profits. An end to drug company imperialism in the form of testing unsafe drugs on third world women, and then charging exorbitant prices for them. No testing of dangerous drugs on mental patients, prisoners, or others whose lives are not their own.
 
5. Free, available and complete information about women’s bodies, available to them as a right in all institutions.
 
6. An end to the double standard which puts prostitutes in jail and lets their clients go free.
 
7. An end to all forms of environmental abuses; particularly an immediate halt to those which have their most disastrous effects on women and children, such as Strontium 90 and DDT poisoning which poisons mother’s milk.
 
8. While we think population control is essential, it must not be substituted for a sharing of the world’s resources between rich and poor countries. Therefore, we want an end to the kind of population control, on the national and international levels, which concentrates on controlling the population of people of color.
 
THE FAMILY
 
            The family unit should not be seen as the only economically and socially acceptable unit of society. Central to the liberation of women is the provision of alternatives to the present pattern of child-rearing and housekeeping, which results in each mother’s veering virtually the entire responsibility for her children and her home. Such alternatives would go far towards eliminating the untenable choice most women must make between bearing children and developing independent work. We therefore demand:
 
1. Free, community controlled 24 hour child-care centers, staffed equally by paid men and women, young and old.
 
2. Alternative forms of good, reasonably priced ho using, including provisions for cooperative childcare, communal cooking, etc., for all people.
 
3. The establishment of a personal income for all persons, independent of familial status, commensurate with the cost of living.
 
            The state should not interfere in personal relationships. In this context we demand the abolition of all laws regulating marriage and divorce; the abolition of all laws regulating sexual behavior between consenting persons; the abolition of all laws regulating living arrangements, for instance, laws against cohabitation; and an end to the legal concept of illegitimacy. Children should have a choice of living arrangements with relatives, non-related adults, other children, and any combination of these possibilities. This means civil liberties for minors; they must not be legally penalized or prosecuted by their parents for choosing to live with other people, exercising their sexuality, or doing other things that offend their parents’ sense of propriety. Any number of adults should be able to make legal contracts between themselves, other than marriage ceremonies, that will concern mutual responsibilities for each other and for children.
 
EDUCATION AND CULTURE
 
            The educational system and the media in our country perpetuate undemocratic myths about the nature of women, working people, and black, brown, red and yellow people. They also deny these groups any knowledge of their own history. The media and educational system must be redesigned by the people whom they oppress, to express the past and to meet their needs for development in an atmosphere free from psychological oppression. With respect to women, these things are necessary:
 
1. An end to sexual tracking at all levels of the educational system. By this we mean not only courses specifically designed for each sex, but also the subtler forms of tracking, such as encouraging boys to be smart and girls to be ladylike.
 
2. That all courses be thoroughly revamped by women to end the perpetuation of male supremacist myths.
 
3. That the facts about sex inequality be added as a topic to all school curricula, and that new courses be developed by women in their culture and history.
 
4. That vocational counseling in high schools and colleges be totally redesigned so as not to channel women into low status, low potential occupations.
 
5. That trade schools, vocational schools, colleges and graduate schools admit one-half women, with preferential treatment of women from races and classes that have been discriminated against.
 
6. An end to advertising which exploits women’s bodies to sell products.
 
7. An end to sex-role stereotyping in the media.
 
 
            Our list left some things out, notably gay rights (Stonewall was the year before) but a lot of it still looks pretty good.  Since we never did anything with it, there is no way to measure our impact quantitatively or in terms of how many of our demands were achieved; our goal was a revolution in consciousness. One of our project groups went on to become the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, famed for Our Bodies, Ourselves, now celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Bread and Roses itself lasted only four years but we were trying to build a movement, not an institution, and we stayed active in the movement; many of us went on to do pioneer writing, labor organizing, academic, media, and global solidarity work.
 
            I think—I hope—the kids on Wall Street are at the beginning of a movement, as we were then. They too have come up with a list of demands (or rather, complaints) which appears to have been modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Like our Bread and Roses list, it should be seen as a vision statement, not an electoral program. As such, it’s quite terrific.  I hope Occupy Wall Street will be able to hold onto its democratic process and vision and not get pushed into somebody else’s programmatic mode.  As the movement develops, it will find its own shape. 

 

(3)
9/11, the left, and women’s human rights
Sunday, September 11, 2011 - 15:20

Portside, the leftie elist, asked a number of people to write a response to the anniversary of 9/11.  Here's mine.  It doesn't say everything because we had a 500 word limit, but it says one of the big things.  You can find other people's responses, and lots of other news, at portside.org/.
 
           The US left was theoretically unprepared to deal with the attacks of 9/11 and the resulting upsurge of nationalist politics.  There had been no widespread effort after the end of the Cold War to sum up the history and problems of “actually-existing socialism,” much less to examine the way globalization was creating a surge of rightwing fundamentalist movements.    
 
            The global feminist movement had been warning of this danger since the civil war in Algeria.  In the nineties, a wave of political fundamentalism began to sweep the world, expressed in movements like Shiv Sena, the Muslim Brotherhood, Jewish settlers, the Christian Coalition—all groups that mobilize religious identity in the service of rightwing goals.  9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” were global manifestations of the kind of struggle that went on in Algeria, where salafi-jihadis attempted to control local communities through terror, rape, and murder; the government responded with counter-terror, kidnapping, and murder; and civil society was caught in the middle. 
 
            Long before 9/11, feminists were aware of this terror/counter-terror dynamic because control of women’s bodies and lives is a primary object of political fundamentalism.  Far from being one-sided, the global women’s movement also recognized the ways neoliberalism was destroying local communities, livelihoods, and environments.  We responded to both threats by reframing women’s economic and social problems in terms of human rights, enlarging traditional definitions to include reproductive and sexual rights, and to address crimes committed by “non-state actors”—militias, fundamentalist groups, fathers, brothers, and husbands.  We had to fight to be heard; but through the nineties the global feminist movement developed an analysis and praxis which departed from previous leftwing politics by making human rights—including economic and social rights—central.
 
            Then came 9/11.  Instantly, complexity went out the window and we were drowning in binary politics.  Either you were pro-US, pro-war, and pro-human rights (as defined by the administration) or you were anti-US, anti-war, and only interested in human rights if they were being violated by the US.  In some circles, even mentioning women in Afghanistan led to jeers and accusations of being like George W. Bush.  It was “out now!” and “support for the insurgency!”  Very few in the US left seemed to grasp that it is necessary to oppose both US militarists and jihadis, for both are enemies of human freedom, security, and social solidarity. 
 
            So what do we do now?  The war in Afghanistan has to end; the problems there cannot be solved by military means.  But the US has really messed up that country and we cannot just walk out and leave people there to clean up the mess we’ve made.  We need to listen to those on the ground, in this case the Afghan Women's Network, a fifteen year old mass coalition with specific recommendations about how to reintegrate Taliban fighters while at the same time protecting women and civil society.  A pdf file of their program, Recommendations on Afghanistan's Reconciliation, Reintegration, and Transition Processes, can be found here.
 
             Unfortunately, nobody in the US government seems to be paying attention to this program.  So how about some real solidarity?—not just mouthing slogans but giving political support to the concrete program of progressive people who are asking for help.  Strengthening the voices of Afghan progressives would be a ground-breaking way to commemorate 9/11.
 
 
 
 
 

(0)
Goodnight, Irene
Monday, August 29, 2011 - 22:11

            Several times in the last ten years, young people have asked my advice about what they should go into—what profession will allow them to serve the people and see the world?  I suggest disaster management.  It’s a growth field. 
 
            Last week we had an earthquake, this weekend a hurricane.  In the normal run of things, New York doesn’t get either.  The city shut down public transit for the first time in history and the mayor told people to evacuate low lying areas, but of course most of them didn’t.  New Yorkers think they can handle anything. 
 
            Americans are like that.  It’s the kind of arrogance that comes from not having had a war on our own soil for a hundred and fifty years, a confusion of luck and privilege with natural capacity.  It breeds the kind of stupidity that allows you to deny climate change.
 
            We’re going to have a lot of opportunities to show what we can handle in the years to come.  Extreme weather is starting to seem normal.  New York has already lost spring and autumn; now we move directly from winter to summer and back again, with maybe a week in between instead of three months.  How I miss the cold snap of fall, when all of a sudden the air would turn crisp and red leaves would carpet the ground.  These days, it just rains all the time and the leaves hang on the trees forever. 
 
            They’re calling Hurricane Irene a tropical storm.  New York didn’t use to be in the tropics.
 
            The climate is changing.  It has probably already changed irrevocably.  Last week hundreds of people from the Tar Sands Action project were arrested in front of the White House.  They were sitting in to encourage Obama to deny a permit to a 1700 mile pipeline the oil industry wants to run from Canada’s tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline will run right through our best farmland, with endless possibilities for spills and other disasters, not to mention encouraging the continued suicidal use of oil.  The anti-pipeline demonstrators got driven out of the news by the very climate change they are warning against, but they’ll be back.
 
            I’d like to believe protests could stop this thing.  I feel like we’re in a truck with no driver, going top speed down a catastrophic hill.  We have already damaged the planet so much we’d have a tough time saving it even if we changed our ways tomorrow.  Since the fossil fuel industry seems to be in charge of most governments, and they and their shills lie shamelessly, and profit is the only motive that makes sense to any of them, where is such a big change going to come from?  
 
            It’s going to take a hell of a lot of Tahrir Squares to turn this around, mass occupations of the public squares of Europe and North America, not to mention China and Nigeria and Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, just to make a dent in the way oil greases the wheels of politics. 
 
            Is such a thing possible? 
  
            Hurricane Irene turned out to be small potatoes as hurricanes go.  If it had killed a lot of people, the bible-punchers in Texas would have said God was punishing New York for gay marriage. 
 
            Since it didn’t kill anyone here, will they conclude God was rewarding us?
 
            More likely they’ll conclude that climate change isn’t real.  And as the driverless truck we’re in barrels downhill, they’ll try to find a way to step on the gas.
 

(3)
Dossier on the struggle for secularism
Thursday, August 4, 2011 - 00:31

            What complicated times we live in.  For the last ten days, my mind has been circling from the massacre in Norway to the carnage in Syria to the insanity in Washington, and then getting stuck at all the things I have to do, not just writing but an endless list of practical tasks.
 
              So, while my own thoughts percolate, I am passing along a wonderful resource: the latest dossier of Women Living Under Muslim Laws, edited by Marieme Helié-Lucas, which "addresses a burning issue: the specificity of the struggle that women – be they Muslim or ‘of Muslim descent’ – are waging in Europe and North America, and the way in which their struggle and their strategic decisions are perceived elsewhere, outside the context."

            The dossier centers on the ways that religion is increasingly impinging upon and appropriating secular public space, particularly for Muslims living in Europe and North America, many of whom primarily identify in terms of politics and/or nationality, not religion.  The editor's introduction continues:
 
            It is also true that one witnesses the rise of a traditional
xenophobic far right everywhere in Europe and in North America. All immigrants suffer from it regardless of their origin (including those of European origin, as demonstrated by the recent manu militari expulsion of Romanian and Bulgarian citizens out of France), but in countries where the majority of immigrants come from Muslim countries, there are some dangerous shortcuts in the making and a confusion between the geographical origin of these immigrants, their presumed religion and their being potentially dangerous.

            It follows suit that when we speak against the growing rise of Muslim fundamentalism, we are accused of being sold out to governments, labelled racist, or ‘Islamophobic’, as if one could not struggle at the same time against both the traditional extreme right and the new fundamentalist extreme right. What is problematic, in short, is not what we do for women’s rights, for secularism and against the rise of fundamentalism, but where we do it. Should we wage these same struggles in our countries of origin, we would get support or at least we would not be accused in the same way. . . .
 
            We also face the worldwide trend of treating social and political problems at the national level by religious remedies, a trend that is reinforced by various UN organisations which reinforce it and sometimes even initiate it: it is now imams that are called by governments to solve difficulties in the suburbs, prevent riots and jacqueries. We stand that social and political problems should be dealt with through social and political means, and leave it to religious people to deal with religious problems of individuals, and not that of nations.
 
            I could go on quoting forever—there are wonderful articles about both Europe and North America—but better you should read the dossier for yourself.  You can download it at this link; look at the right hand corner, and also please note their fundraising appeal: www.wluml.org/.

 
 
 
 
            

 
 
 
 

(0)
Ellen Levine: Censorship, Abortion, and YA Books
Friday, July 8, 2011 - 14:16

I have worked for many years on issues of gender-based censorship, meaning the complex ways that women's voices—and issues that particularly affect women—are censored by the publshing industry, the media, educational institutions, and conservatives.  A new piece by Ellen Levine, a long time feminist and an established author of books for children and young adults, show how this censorship affected her YA novel about a teen who gets pregnant and actually has an abortion.  You want to know why there are so few stories of this kind  in TV, movies, or books?  Read this and weep.

When, Along with her Characters, an Author Gets In Trouble

By Ellen Levine

I’ve just written a novel about teen pregnancy in which someone actually has an abortion.  The story takes place in 1956, pre-Roe v. Wade, and the novel, In Trouble, will be published by Carolrhoda, available in July 2011.  Although I’ve written about “difficult” and “controversial” subjects before, I was startled by what I’ve learned over this long haul.
 
It was, to say the least, a challenge to sell the book, even though editors knew me and told my agent they admired and respected my work.  (I’ve written over twenty books for young people.)  I was told by one editor that the house would never publish anything that has a character who has an abortion. Pregnancy is a regular topic these days, but abortion is rarely mentioned except to be considered and rejected, or tolerated if it happens well off-page and not in present time.  You can write about teen pregnancy, but only if the girl has the baby.  (The “Juno” scenario.)  You can be pregnant from rape, incest, etc., so long as you bring the pregnancy to term.
 
Author and friend Susan Fletcher once gave me a terrific piece of advice.  When you get an editorial letter, it often begins with one line—“this is a fine manuscript”—and then continues for three to seven pages, detailing everything the editor thinks doesn’t work.  I call it the Fletcher 48-hour rule: put it in a drawer and don’t look at it again for two days.  Two days later you can reread it with a degree of calm, recognizing points that have validity as well as acknowledging when there’s a legit disagreement between you and the editor.  Then you assess if, when, and how best to make your argument.
 
I do listen carefully to editorial comments (after two days) and have often made changes based on an editor’s notes. It’s a wonderful experience when an editor with great insight helps me strengthen the work, as was the case with In Trouble.
 
But there have been times when I’ve recognized there’s something else going on. I did bump heads with several critics about my nonfiction book, A Fence Away from Freedom. It’s the story of the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII.  I had visited the remaining barrack at the former prison camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming—a gorgeous setting, which the prisoners viewed through barbed wire.  I interviewed dozens of former internees, and the book is comprised of their stories.
 
A tremendous amount has been written about the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and the extraordinary service of the Japanese American soldiers in the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team.  Very little, however, has been written about the prisoners known as the “resisters,” or the group called “the No-No Boys.”  I wanted to let people talk about their pre-internment lives and their prison camp experiences.  One reviewer dismissed the book because I didn’t tell the JACL story.  (Note: the JACL is discussed in the book.) Several years ago I spoke at a book conference about the effects of war on children.  Another speaker, a well-known children’s book writer, stood in front of the audience and declared the imprisoned Japanese Americans, whom she called Japs, “got everything they deserved.”
 
When I wrote a novel that took place during the height of the McCarthy period, Catch a Tiger by the Toe I admit I was stunned by some of the reactions, all offered in the name of editorial critique. As a routine matter, I don’t think one usually needs a Note to the Reader in a novel. But with certain historical periods I do think that backmatter is helpful. And so I wrote a Note, since I knew few if any young people would know who Senator Joseph McCarthy was, or what happened during the Red-hunting era. I wanted to tell the story of the effects of this political war on young people. I read extensively about the period and interviewed many people who were in elementary or middle school in the 1940s and 1950s and grew up in politically left families. The details of their lives gave me the color I needed for fiction.
 
The subject, however, made more than a few people very uncomfortable. At a New York City public library roundtable discussion of middle grade books that touched on social issues, one librarian (probably in her early 40s) dismissed the book saying, “I just don’t believe anyone would ever be fired for signing a petition.” This from a librarian is at the very least troubling.
 
With a novel in which an abortion happens, I knew I was raising a controversial subject. But I stumbled on something more: an insidious, often subconscious censorship largely through avoidance of the subject. And not just in books for teenagers, but in adult media as well. The NYTimes published an article (“Staging the Politics of Abortion,” April 14, 2011) about playwright Theresa Rebeck (Pulitzer finalist) who also wrote for "NYPD Blue" and couldn’t sell a script to that police show that had an abortion storyline. And Lifetime, the cable channel (“Television for Women”) wouldn’t buy her abortion story.
 
In a rare instance the show “Friday Night Lights” had an abortion story, and the NYTimes article about the show (“Abortion in the Eyes of a Girl from Dillon,” July 10, 2010) highlighted the fact that this was an extraordinary exception to the blackout on the subject. The article went on to describe instances of self-censorship/avoidance, e.g., in “Sex and the City” (a show about four high-powered sexually-active women) where in one episode an abortion is considered and rejected. Another stunning example of the free-floating fear about the subject happened in the soap “All My Children.” The show had featured a legal abortion in a 1973 episode. Thirty years later the earlier story was rewritten with a mind-bending plot twist—the abortion had never really happened because the embryo had in fact been “kidnapped,” implanted in another woman, and brought to term!
 
All this is happening in our world where one in three women in the U.S. will have an abortion in their lifetime. So this isn’t just a routine controversial topic; the media silence has silenced all of us, so that women’s stories, common to so many of us, are not being told.
 
I’ve no doubt some of the editors who rejected In Trouble didn’t like the characters, plot development, or curve of the arc. But I also think I bumped into a self-imposed wall of silence. The problem for writers is we’ll never know with certainty unless told directly, as I was by one editor.
 
My novel is not a polemic. The characters struggle with all their questions, fears, hopes.  It’s curious that a story about pregnancy and giving birth is simply a story, whereas a story that has an abortion is considered political. That shouldn’t be.

 
This story was first published in Vermont College's Hunger Mountain online journal.

(3)
Afghan women and the Taliban--over to you, Hillary
Monday, July 4, 2011 - 12:35

Note: The following blog was posted today as an op ed in the Guardian.  I have already been asked if I oppose bringing US troops home.  I don't; I want an end to the war.  But there is going to be a considerable period of drawdown in which the US and other countries which have been propping up the Karzai government should do whatever is necessary to protect what democratic opposition exists.  Women are central to this opposition and to the future of Afghanistan.  And let's not be naive here.  Even if troops come home, the US is not going to disappear from the region.  According to a recent visitor, the base at Bagram is still being enlarged.  
 
The US is negotiating with the Taliban! What will happen to Afghan women?

They have enough problems already, since the Karzai government is easily as misogynist as the Taliban.
 
But not to worry. Hillary Clinton is US Secretary of State. A feminist will determine US policy in the “reconciliation, reintegration and transition process.”
 
Surely the women of Afghanistan can rely on Hillary.  
 
She told them so in London in Feb. 2010, when Karzai and Afghan ministers met with Western and regional diplomats, who agreed to set up a fund to reintegrate “disaffected Taliban back into society,” as long as they swore to uphold the constitution. The London conference was planned by the British government and the UN, which seemed to have no problem overlooking its own Security Council Resolution 1325, mandating that all peace and post-conflict negotiations include a gender perspective. Only one Afghan woman was even invited—not their Minister of Women’s Affairs—and she was there to represent civil society in general, not voice the demands of women. 
 
But the Afghan Women’s Network, a fifteen year old coalition with 84 member groups and 5000 individual members, could teach the rest of us a thing or two about organizing. Despite the fact that they were not invited to London, four of them showed up, demanding “that the proposed reintegration process is not undertaken at the expense of women’s hard-won human rights.” They did intensive lobbying, worked with the press, and did their best to convince those present that “women are central to bringing peace and stability.”  In recognition of their work, Hillary invited them to her press conference and made a commitment to involving women in every stage of the peace process. 
 
But that was last year. Now Osama bin Laden is dead and the American people are sick of the war. They want out and so does the Obama administration.   Last year Hillary made protection of Afghan women’s rights a principle; today the principle appears to be negotiable.
 
In March, the Washington Post revealed that US AID was backtracking on a $140 million project to help Afghan women own land. Though most Afghans live by farming, only men are landowners. The original US AID request for bids called for specific measures to increase women’s access to land ownership, including legal aid, public education on women’s rights, and incentives to register land in the name of both spouses. But after intervention by the State Department, US AID put out new guidelines with no teeth, requiring merely that the project study inheritance laws to see if they could be amended to include women, and then only if the Afghan government supported the initiative.
 
When questioned, a “senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” said, "Gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities. . . .There's no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down."  
 
Of course, US AID contradicted the story, saying how much money it was spending on Afghan women and, when put on the spot in Congress by Nita Lowey, Hillary told the House that US commitment to Afghan women was undiminished.  But she didn’t say the old US AID regulations would be restored. That’s a pretty clear indication of how the wind blows.
 
Women in the Afghan Women’s Network made a lobbying trip to Washington this June to try to convince officials that the only way to get stability in Afghanistan is support women’s human rights. They brought specific recommendations on how to reintegrate the Taliban fighters, while at the same time protecting women and civil society. Their program can be downloaded here.
  
The AWN recommendations are brilliant. According to Gita Sahgal, former head of Amnesty International’s gender unit, they “are an example for all UN agencies dealing with post-conflict situations because they are family-oriented rather than fighter-oriented” and “deal with inclusion of women in monitoring and many different processes rather than just in peace negotiations.”
 
Ann Jones, an American writer who has spent years working in Afghanistan, says the US calls the shots there and could put such measures in place to protect women’s rights if it insisted, but people in Washington don’t get it. “They regard women’s rights as an add-on that’s unimportant and won’t face the implications of backing the same old warlords they have been backing since 1979. These guys are a disaster for both Afghanistan and us, because you can’t establish a stable country with leaders who have no regard for the welfare of their own people.”
 
The choice is clear: The US can either keep on with the same old policy of making deals with warlords, or try something new—empowering women and civil society. Official Washington apparently thinks the only realistic thing to do is what we have done before, even if it doesn’t work. 
 
This is not really a choice between pragmatism and idealism. We have tried the warlords option for many years, and it has not brought stability or prosperity or peace. Half the population of Afghanistan is female, with many households headed by women. These women are capable of farming, doing business, promoting education, safeguarding local people, stabilizing their communities. They have lived with war, and they know what works and what doesn’t. The AWL program proposes concrete measures to strengthen the position of women; such measures, embedded into local and national political processes, are a better foundation for security and peace than anything the US has tried so far. Why not support them?
 
Is Hillary willing to fight for the principle of including women? She understands that it is a principle; as Secretary of State, she is in a strong position; and she has enough political skills and support to do so effectively—if she is willing to stand up to the guys and take the risk of being branded a feminist rather than a realist. 
 
 
 

 

(0)
Syndicate content
Copyright © Meredith Tax 2010. All Rights Reserved.