Blog For Choice

As I started this post, I decided to review what I had written last year. And what I discovered was that last year I said exactly what I wanted to say and exactly what I still want to say. I can't say it better, and I have nothing to add or subtract,.so here it is again.

I have already told you about when my grandmother in California had given birth to five children in six years and wrote to her brother in Ohio, the doctor, asking how to prevent any more pregnancies. He wrote and gave her the information, but the first sentence in his letter was, "Memorize this information and then burn this letter because I could go to prison for telling you this."

Until my grandmother had that information, she had no choice, no control over her body and life at all. My grandfather was fated to work harder and harder and provide less for more children. Not being able to decide these very personal issues is less than freedom.

I worked for 12 years teaching parenting skills to parents who either had their children in foster care or were in danger of the state placing them there. I saw all sorts of horrible things and heard of even worse than I saw. The abuse that is heaped on children when their parents resent them is unbelievable. The unintended neglect that occurs when a girl has a child when she is too young can put the child's life at risk.

It is not good for children to be born when their parents resent them or are unable to care for them properly. Choice has to be available. For those of us who would like to see as few abortions as possible, the need is great to give people full information on how to prevent pregnancy, and abortion needs to be available for when birth control fails.

I came of age before Roe v. Wade and I remember friends seeking out the name of a doctor in Mexico. That assumed the girl could get her hands on the money to go to Mexico. Many couldn't. Just because abortion was illegal, that didn't mean that poor girls didn't have them. It just meant that they sought them out in dark alleys and often died because the procedure had been botched.

The current direction of this administration is to work to outlaw abortion and birth control both. Plan B was kept off the market for much too long, although it does not cause abortions. The people who kept it off the market knew the truth about it. They teach abstinence only sex education and post the lie that abortions cause breast cancer on government websites. This is not a desire to protect women, it is a desire to control them.

And it isn't belief in the sanctity of life. People who refuse to teach teens how to avoid AIDS and other diseases don't consider the life of those teens as sacred. People who send other people's children to die don't consider the lives of those children sacred. People who drop bombs on other countries don't consider the lives of those people sacred. People who refuse to fund stem cell research, who value the "life" of an embryo which is going to be thrown away if it isn't used over the life of someone who has already been born, don't consider the lives of the born sacred. People who would rush to Washington to sign a bill to prevent a husband from being able to allow his brain dead wife to die in peace but don't bother to cut a vacation short while New Orleans is drowning don't value life.

God alone knows what these people value, but it isn't life. The sanctity of life doesn't end at birth. A few cells are not more valuable than a living woman or her husband or her other children.

Discovering Nature

I was thinking, after yesterday's post, about how we discover the nature of things. Particularly the nature of the young child. I used to wonder how it was possible for my great-grandfather, who was a math professor, to be so unobservant as to misunderstand infant dependence for selfishness. To think that the crying new born even knew that her mother was exhausted in the next room.

And I can now see, with knowing that the idea was not original with him*, but rather a part of the dogma of his ancestors' religion, how that came to pass. Because, when you start out, as anyone before the age of science pretty well did, with a belief that God has already given you the answer to this, you see the events in the world in that frame. The baby whose crying deprives his mother of sleep is seen to prove that babies are selfish and the idea that the baby only knows she is hungry and has no way to feed herself or ask politely will not occur.

But, when you have science, you observe the events without the frame, and you can see more clearly. Maria Montessori, who was the first woman physician in Italy, studied children as part of her internship**. She watched them with as little a priori theory as she could. As she developed materials, if the children did not learn from them as intended, she did not blame the children but changed the materials or the method. She gathered a great deal of new information about the way children learn.

Jean Piaget was a student in a Montessori school when he was young. Later he wrote a paper on marine biology that was so impressive the society to which he had submitted it invited him to present it. He wrote to decline, because the meeting was being held past his bedtime; he was only 8.

It is no wonder that Jean Piaget revolutionized the study of young children. Where Montessori had studied three year olds, Piaget studied his own children from birth. He watched them, he played games with them to see at what age they could perform certain mental tasks.*** Like Montessori, he looked at them with an eye as free from preconception as it was possible for him to have. He became, not only a developmental psychologist, but also a Montessori teacher. Any students who worked with him had to take Montessori training before they began. As a Montessori teacher, one of my major tasks was to sit and observe the classroom when the children were busy. It is that observing with as little prejudice as possible that leads to new knowledge.

* It wasn't just the idea -- when I read Fischer's book, the example he used and the words were exactly what had been quoted to me from Great-grandfather Upton.
**Because of her gender, she was assigned to work with feeble minded children. That work led her to further develop educational tools for them, some the creation of others, some her own. When her impaired students tested out at age level with normal Italian children, the authorities in both medicine and education were impressed with what a great job she had done. Montessori was appalled that normal children were being so poorly taught that her students could do as well as they did and went on to apply the materials and methods she had used with six year olds to normal three year olds. Montessori approached this work in a new way partially because, before she studied medicine, she studied engineering. How lucky for children that her father indulged her intellectual curiosity.
***It was Piaget's work that showed that one reason babies demand to be fed right now is that they have no sense of time. Now is all there is. When a baby is hungry, he is starving to death, he has always been starving to death, and he will always be starving to death. When the baby can wait the few moments his mother needs to pick him up and feed him, he has learned about time.

Portrait of Jean Piaget courtesy of Robert Kovsky; Maria Montessori courtesy of Edith Stein. This is my favorite picture of Montessori; it shows her as the young woman who was sent to speak to the issue of women's suffrage in Italy. She was chosen because feminists were, then as now, dismissed as ugly women who couldn't find husbands. Montessori so obviously was not.

They Decided To Share

digby, on Hullabaloo, has posted this quote from Chris Matthews, Tweety of the day

"This gender thing is so tricky. Here's my theory. Men voted in the first part of the last century to give women the vote. They had all the votes and decided to share them. They thought, 'they're smart, we're married to them, if momma's not happy nobody's happy' sort of thing."

Let's try telling that to my great-grandmother, the suffragist, shall we? To all of the women who marched and went to jail and were force-fed to break their hunger strikes. To all of the women who heard that only ugly women who couldn't catch a husband would ever want to vote. To all of the women who died before it ever happened. To Abigail Adams, who asked her husband to "remember the women" in the Constitution.*

Even a child's publication, the Scholastic, says on its suffrage page, Women's Suffrage

Woman suffragists often met hostility and sometimes violence.

Yes, yes. Hostility and violence. That sounds to me like deciding to share. Doesn't it to you?

And how about this (also from Scholastic)?

During the Civil War, suffragists shelved their cause temporarily, hoping that at war's end, women as well as emancipated slaves would be enfranchised. After the war Republican party politicians believed enfranchisement of the ex-slaves would be defeated if harnessed to the even more unpopular cause of woman's suffrage. They succeeded in passing the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which gave the vote to black men but not to women.

It has always amazed me that men were willing to give the vote to men of other races before they were willing to give it to their own mothers and daughters and sisters. I could understand their not wanting to share power with their wives and even their sisters. But their mothers and daughters? What kind of person doesn't see the humanity of his own parent and child? What does that say about those men?

* Let's remember that there have always been men, like John Stuart Mill and my great-grandfather, who believed in the equality of the sexes. I am not talking about them here. I am talking about the majority of men, who had power and did not gladly give it up.

photo, National Archives of Scotland, Photograph of Janet Arthur, suffragist, 1912, taken from the Home and Health Department criminal case files, NAS ref. HH16/43/2

Remembering How It Was

AMC is running a series, Mad Men, about a New York advertising agency in 1960. I've caught the last three episodes, and I'm hooked. They have the look and feel of the time down so perfectly. Even though I was a high school senior and then a college freshman and in California in 1960, and the series is about working adults in The Big Apple, it almost smells like 1960.

They smoked, and thought nothing of second hand smoke. They drank almost all day long. They were sexist and racist and other things we have outgrown.

In the first episode that I saw, the secretaries test lipstick that the agency is representing. As they try on the shades, they blot their lips on tissues, which are then dropped into a waste basket. After the session, one of the secretaries brings the waste basket to an ad exec, saying, "Here's your basket of kisses." Of course, he wants to know where she got the phrase and she tells him she just thought of it. Later he is telling a few other ad men about this and describes listening to her make intelligent comments as weird. "Like watching a dog play the piano."

And, of course, when she is encouraged to write ad copy, it is on her own time and she doesn't get paid extra.

All of which got me to thinking about how things were for women in those days. About having a B.A. and being asked in job interviews for my typing speed. I also remember one job interview when I was asked what kind of contraceptive I was using. And an interview while I was still married where they wanted to know if my husband would object to my working occasional Saturdays!

When I returned to college after Julie was born, I was 23. And had two small children. UC Berkeley wanted me to get permission from my parents to live off campus! I was having none of that, and responded that I would be happy to live in campus housing with my children. It's amazing what having the guts to stand up for yourself will accomplish. Faced with the prospect of a three week old baby in the dorms, suddenly I didn't need permission after all. My Aunt Florence was newly widowed and returned to University of the Pacific at the same time. She had to get the dean's permission to live off campus although she was 41 and she only got it, as a single woman, because she owned a house within a mile of the campus. One day she was in the grocery store, wearing grey wool slacks and a white cotton blouse, and the dean of women came up to her and explained that if she was seen in town again in slacks she would be expelled.

I remember being told in 1975 by the financial director of the agency I was working at that "no woman can manage a business." Barely two weeks after that, there was a situation where someone had to go to the medical director and tell him something he wasn't going to want to hear. It should have been the accountant, who wouldn't do it. So then he called the financial director, who back peddled like crazy and refused to do it. So, I did it. By the time I got to the man's office, the fact that two men had been afraid to do it had me a little bit tense, but I took my foot in my hand and did it. The response? "Why the hell didn't Larry or Bob come to me about this? Are you the only one in the agency with guts?" Bob didn't really say too much about women being able to manage after that. Well, he did once, but I looked at him and looked at the medical director and looked back and he had the grace to blush.

My grandfather gave my mother some money in the mid-60s, and she decided to buy stock with it. She had to get Daddy's permission. Daddy was outraged. "This," he declared, "is her money. Her father gave it to her. It has nothing to do with me. Why should she need my permission to spend it on anything she wants?" But, that was the law. It was also the law that a married woman needed her husband's permission to have a bank account or credit card in her own name. And, if she didn't, if he died, she had no credit history.

And although things are no longer that bad, they still aren't perfect. It is interesting that watching Mad Men throws certain behaviors in the here and now into sharp relief.

Beauty Hints

When I was in my early 30s, I read a beauty hint that suggested soaking a cotton ball in your signature scent and wearing it between your breasts. Your body heat, so the theory went, would cause the scent to last all day. So, the next time I went to the store I bought some and tried it out.

About half an hour later, my breasts began to burn. I slipped into the bathroom, checked and discovered that the writer of that hint obviously didn't have cleavage. I had two painful, red circles, one on each breast, where the top layer of skin had burned away. Just removing the cotton ball did no good, because when skinned circle met skinned circle, it still burned like all get out.

So I spent the next week with band aids on my boobs. Anyone know what to do with 99 useless cotton balls?


(You didn't think I'd taken a picture of my poor, abused breasts, did you?)

How Low Can They Get?

Today on Angry Black Bitch SharkFu wrote about a 14 year old girl who was raped, and when she went to the hospital was not even told about emergency contraception. Go and read it. Think about it. What kind of hospital staff doesn't tell a 14 year old rape victim about emergency contraception? How can the possibility that two cells will unite and create life be more important than the future life of a 14 year old girl who is already here and suffering? How can anyone consider that she should have to pay for the sexual experience she surely didn't want or enjoy? The experience that was more power than sex, and that she will never recover from completely already.

I can understand if she were already pregnant, how a person who believed abortion was murder could advise against an abortion. I wouldn't like it, but I can understand how it would happen. But, when she wasn't pregnant, when it was early enough to use a true contraceptive and prevent a pregnancy, prevent a later need to decide whether to have an abortion or not, how could anyone not allow her the choice? In any circumstance, but especially in this.

Sarah Warren Prince Osborne

Today is the 315th anniversary of Sarah Osborne's death. She died in Boston Prison, May 10, 1692, waiting to be hung for witchcraft. Sarah was my many-greats grandmother, on my mother's side of the family. She was also one of the first three women to be accused in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Sarah was a sick woman without power who came to grief over a disagreement with powerful in-laws of her first husband* about land. She hadn't been to church in two or three years, because of an illness which kept her bedridden. Additionally, she had married her indentured servant, Alexander Osborne, an action which was not approved of. Some sources say that there were questions about the propriety of their relationship before their marriage. She was one of the few accused who neither confessed nor accused anyone else. She was the first to assert in her defense the claim that the devil could take the shape of any person without their knowledge or agreement.

Historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum state that Sarah's refusal to comply with customary "patterns of land tenure and inheritance" and her relationship with Alexander Osborne were a threat to the social ideal, which was considered to be devinely sanctioned.

Meghan Carroll, in her paper "Sarah Osborne" for her University of Virginia class, Salem Witch Trials in History and Literature, has stated that "Ultimately, it was her refusal to compromise her integrity that cost Sarah Osborne her life." What more could any of us want to be said about us?

Rest in peace, Grandma Sarah.

* The Putnams, also ancestors of mine.

Post Script Julie has posted about Sarah as well at A Witch!

The Femine Mistake

Deja Pseu at Dilettante's Progress: More Big Fat Invalidation discusses Leslie Bennetts's The Feminine Mistake and the tendency of some reviewers to dismiss her thesis on the basis that Bennetts is fat. Now, I have an issue with people's work being dismissed because of how they look, no matter how that is. If someone were to invalidate the work of a blond or someone who is beautiful or a man with long hair or whatever, I would recognize that the critic is shallow. The same with the reasons someone might dismiss my work -- that I'm fat, female, old, and a secular humanist. And yet, what I want to say to you has much less to do with how disgusted I am that a woman's work is dismissed because of her weight, than with the work itself.

When my father died, my mother was 25 and utterly untrained to work, since this happened in 1948. She struggled and struggled and could only get her children back together and under her roof by marrying a man who would support us. Then, she was afraid to stand up to him, knowing that if he were to divorce her she would be back where she had been before, but with one more child to support. I am certain that, if she had not been so terrified of the possible (but, knowing Daddy, improbable) consequences of speaking up when she didn't like his harshness and sarcasm with her children, life would have been much more pleasant in that house. The fact is that Daddy worshiped her. How she didn't know it amazes me, but when I once told her that she was the love of his life, she was astonished.

Anyway, I vowed that I would never let myself get in the position of helplessness, and I never did; if you don't learn from other people's pain, you may have to suffer yourself. It was enough that my mother suffered not being able to take care of her children and that we suffered being separated from her and her fear of it happening again. My children and I never went through that.

Women who are not able to support themselves and their children often say that they can trust their husbands, they know they are married to honorable men. Some of them are wrong, and find themselves sinking into poverty when their husbands turn out not to be so honorable. And even when they are right, no one is so honorable that he can not die while you still need him. To me, it just makes no sense to allow that kind of vulnerability to threaten your children and yourself.

Stumping Columbo

One of the things I love to do is take long walks, and I live in the ideal location for it. My apartment is on the side of Mount Roberts, at the beginning of one of the loveliest walks you could ever find. Basin Road runs uphill from my place for about a block and a half and then the houses stop, the Road curves into the Silverbow Basin, crosses a small bridge, and continues on without paving. The road now meanders on, following the side of the mountain. To the left, the mountain continues down, where it meets Gold Creek, and Mount Juneau climbs on the other side. Before I injured myself (and again in the future, so help me, again in the future) I had a choice of how to walk to work. I could take six minutes and go downhill from my front door, or I could take an hour and go uphill, into the Basin, over the spillway, on to the boardwalk of the flume on the Mount Juneau side, to Evergreen Street, past the cemetary, past the Governor's House, and then around and back up to my office. Particularly when there was no ice through the Basin, that's the way I went. I would get into the office feeling very alive and invigorated and all over good. I carried a notebook with me because as I walked I wrote poems for Maya. In the six minutes I went downhill, I could get a four line ditty; in the hour I might generate three or four complete poems about my cats or the landscape.

Lots of people walk in the Basin, alone, together, with or without dogs. At almost any time of day, you will intersperse times of solitude with moments of sociability. People greet each other, give reports of any trouble further along, such as a new rock slide blocking the board walk or a washout of part of the path, and in general behave in a friendly way. If they trust you, they will tell you about the herons who are nesting just off the path.

I began to encounter this young jogger.(This is a picture of a generic jogger, not the one I saw.) I would see him first thing in the morning. I would see him after work. I would see him any time of day on the weekend. He was about 24 or so, tall, naturally thin, effortlessly athletic, and as annoying as he could be. Every time we met, he would say, "Good girl." And I would seethe. Not getting caught up in the insult involved in calling a woman old enough to be your mother a girl, there was the patronizing assumption that I was interested in his judgment of my activities. I realize that I don't know what exactly he meant, but what it felt like to me was that he approved of me getting out there and exercising and doing something about my weight. That, as a man, he felt he had a right to judge me, a woman. That, somehow, it was my job to look a certain way, which would please him, or get out there and work on it. It was as angering as when men (who you may or may not know) tell you to smile*! I found myself getting tense when I started my walks, anticipating this person who was now looming in my mind as a real burden. Some days it was all I could do to make myself take the walks that I had always loved.

I began having these fantasies of violence. I would picture encountering him on the boardwalk and when he made his stupid remark, pushing him down the mountain. I could hear the satisfying crunch of his bones as he fell and see the bloody swath his body would cut through the trees. It was a lovely fantasy.

The best part was that no one knew that the two of us had ever had any contact. I could kill him with impunity and never be suspected at all. Why, even Columbo wouldn't be able to solve this one.

But, you know, fantasies like this may relieve anger for a while and they may satisfy the need to protect yourself for a month or two, but they aren't good for the soul. So, one day when we met, I stopped him and told him how his remark felt and about the fantasies I had. He was more than startled. After that, when we met we smiled at each other and went on our way. After that, I no longer started a walk wondering just where I would be this time when he upset me.

* I'm a person, and I'll scowl if I want to!

Burnout

I had a job I loved. It could have been created just for me. I used my best skills and fulfilled my deepest passions. I had fun while doing measurable good. I developed and taught my own parenting classes, wrote handouts and educational materials, did parenting coaching, wrote grant proposals and progress reports, supervised and trained staff, maintained a library of books and videos to lend parents, drove around making home visits, and didn't have to own a car. I helped people get their children out of foster care; if they were referred to me early enough, I helped them keep their children from going into the foster system to begin with. I went to people's homes and sat at the table, drinking coffee, and talking about their children. I gave advice and people followed it. I consulted other professionals about the needs of children and was certified as an expert witness for the court. I actively researched children's issues to the depth of my curiosity, using that knowledge to help parents help children.I made a difference to families. More and more children called out my name in public places, at times running to give me a hug. I had statewide recognition for the work I did. I called myself the community grandmother. Other people who had worked in this job usually lasted less than 18 months. I did it for 11 years.

I had a job I loved. And then, I couldn't do it anymore. And when I burned out it wasn't because of the child abuse or the horrible stories women told me about their own childhood or the mistreatment they had received at the hands of the men who should have loved them. It wasn't even because I was getting such a warped view of men, dealing with the victims of child and spousal abuse. If the majority of men I heard about in my job were toxic, some of them were wonderful fathers and husbands. Often the fault lay with the woman, or there was no fault, only lack of knowledge. Besides, if it got too bad, I could always see Richard or talk to Ted and remember just how good men can be.

What got to me, in the end, were the women I could not help. The women, like Rodin's Fallen Caryatid, who were crushed by the weight of a burden that no one person should be asked to bear. The women that no one could help. I carried a client load of at least 36 and that was only part of my job, which meant that I saw them for an hour every other week, working Tuesday through Saturday. Alternate Saturdays, that last year, the last clients I saw were not the same ethnic group; didn't live in the same area; other than being young and female, weren't even close in appearance. But they could have been the same woman. (And I had many more just like them.) This was how I ended my week. Every week. There was one visit that was symptomatic of them all. The young mother told me that she had almost hit her kids the day before. In response to questioning, she slowly revealed that instead of hitting them, she told them to go hide in their rooms because she was afraid of what she might otherwise do. It had been Friday of a long, hard week. She had gone to pick them up after a full shift at her minimum wage job. Her feet hurt. She had been tired and hungry and cross. They had been tired and hungry and cross. The boys started fighting in the car, and although I had taught her that the thing to do in that case was to pull off the road and just sit there, saying nothing, until they quieted down, she couldn't do that because she was afraid that if she did, she would turn around, lean across the seat, and beat them senseless. When she got them home, carrying the youngest up three flights of stairs, the apartment was messy. She started to cook dinner, knowing that if she sat down she would never get up again. The boys were fussing and fighting and pulling on her jeans for attention, demanding to be fed right now. And so, she told them to go hide in their room. It happened at least three nights a week like this. There were a lot of long, hard weeks.

No, she couldn't stop after work and take a walk or sit and have even a glass of water to relax, because her babysitter charged her $5 for every minute she was late; a couple of times a month she would get stuck in traffic and be two or three minutes late and it made a major dent in her budget. It meant she couldn't afford to pack a lunch for a day or two. No, she didn't have any support from family or the boys' father. No one, not even a friend she could trade babysitting with, to give her any respite.

What fun had she had that week, I asked. She and the boys had watched Mulan. In parts of Juneau TV doesn't get reception without cable and she didn't have it, only about six tapes, all children's tapes, purchased for $1 each at the pawn shop. How many times had she seen Mulan? Oh, at least 200. She was always broke; every week she paid what she had to to house and feed her family, and then the rest went to pay back the last person she had borrowed from. Which meant she needed to borrow from some one else to get through until the next paycheck. We checked her budget and it was bare bones. I have no idea how she survived; she certainly wasn't wasting any money that I could see.

And when I left, I closed her door behind me and leaned back against the wall; my glasses were too fogged by tears for me to dare to take the stairs. Because there was no way to help her, except to totally change society so that young women don't end up with burdens like this.

I had a job I loved. And then I didn't.

Waking Up Sixty

In February, Ronnie of As Time Goes By went on vacation and asked some of us elder bloggers to write a post each to cover while she was gone. I kept intending to link to mine for you, but kept forgetting. Since my 65th birthday is tomorrow, I decided to cross post it.

Most of you have noticed that as we grow older we tend to become more comfortable in our own skin. When I was in my twenties, I worried about what strangers walking down the street thought of me. By the time I was in my mid-thirties, it didn’t worry me unless I was doing something I would rather not be seen doing: I worried about being seen carrying a Lane Bryant bag (someone might guess I was overweight if I were seen carrying a bag from a fat-girls shop, and of course if I weren’t seen doing that, no one would ever find out) or my skirt flying up when I fell down.

By the time I was into my fifties, my attitude had pretty much changed to, “if they don’t want to hear me sing, they can walk down some other block.”

I did fall one day when the sidewalks were so icy that I had to scoot on my butt to the curb and put my feet in the gutter to find a place where I could get the leverage to stand up. A young man carefully worked his way up the hill and asked me if I was alright. And I found myself answering, “Oh, yes. Nothing hurt but my dignity. Oh. Not even my dignity.”

That was me at 59 years, 364 days. Pretty comfortable with myself, unconcerned about my size or what other people thought - pretty certain that most people had enough things in their own lives to think about that they didn’t bother to think about me. Content with how I was living my life.

And then, on April 22nd I went to bed in that condition, woke up 60 and discovered a level of self-acceptance that somehow, in those few hours of sleep, had increased by a magnitude of hundreds. I went from accepting myself to celebrating myself. It was just the most amazing thing, to be me!

I found the level of increase astounding. There was a recognition of how important to my survival and sanity the most negative of my dark side attributes were. Of how natural were facets that had caused me embarrassment in earlier years.

And somehow, I wanted everyone to celebrate their natural selves. I began to praise my inner-bitch and invent new holidays. We could, for instance, have a day to commemorate the fact that your body can eliminate toxins - people would wear only brown and yellow. Or to honor our fertility by wearing faux maternity clothes with pristine tampon jewelry. Or folk skirts made with Georgia O’Keefe flower prints.

Taking Care of Yourself

So, tell me, who taught this tiger to hunt and to fight? To be violent, when it is necessary? Was it the violent father who taught this? No, because tigers, like most animals, are not raised by their fathers. They are raised by their mothers. Which has to mean that Mamas are fierce.

And, polar bears are pretty fierce as well. Like the tiger, these guys learned all that they know about fighting from their mother. A female, you know.

I'm mentioning this because, among human beings, the female is considered the weaker sex. Most of us have no idea how to fight and couldn't teach our children how to protect ourselves. But, this is not natural. Nature has made us fierce, and culture has made us weak and helpless.

In his book, "Protecting the Gift," Gavin de Becker tells about addressing large audiences of women and asking them to raise their hands if they believe that they could kill someone. No hands go up. And then, one woman will say, "Well, if someone were threatening my child" and another will agree and suddenly the audience is full of hands that are up. We know we could kill to protect our children. de Becker tells of a mother who was walking her very young daughter to a dark parking lot after a movie when she realized a man was following them. She got her child into the car, and the man grabbed the woman and tried to pull her out. She was driving out of the parking lot, thinking, "If I need to, I can shove these car keys into his eye" when she realized that she had shoved those car keys into both of his eyes.

But you know, had she been alone, she would not have fought like that. She would not have known that she could fight like that. In fact, as de Becker mentions in his book "The Gift of Fear," human beings are the only creatures that put themselves in danger to avoid hurting someone's feelings. Like when a woman gets onto an elevator alone with a man who frightens her because if she didn't he might think she didn't trust him. Sometimes the women who do that end up dead. No tiger would get into a small space that smelled of an enemy. Tigers, who are just about as fierce as any animal ever, don't care if they hurt anything's feelings. (Or if they look foolish.) Only women have been taught that other people's feelings are more important than our lives.

If we really want to protect our daughters, we need to make sure that they know that they can fight like that. That they can protect themselves. That they do not have to be victims. They need to know self defense. Here is an excellent short article Self Defense

Use Your Head

People (guys as well as girls) who are threatened and fight back "in self-defense" actually risk making a situation worse. The attacker, who is already edgy and pumped up on adrenaline — and who knows what else — may become even more angry and violent. The best way to handle any attack or threat of attack is to try to get away. This way, you're least likely to be injured.

The author first tells why you should use your smarts before your body, and then goes on to talk about the importance of taking a class and practicing the moves so that if you do have to become physical, you are confident and you can.

I took a class about 20 years ago on how to say no to a rapist and live. We were taught that we probably weren't stronger than an attacker, but we also probably were smarter. That the attacker was prepared for all of the responses he could predict. What he wasn't prepared for were the responses he couldn't predict. So, a few months after that, when a man jumped out from behind a cinder block fence and grabbed me, I dropped to the ground, started to howl like dog, and shoved grass into my mouth as fast as I could. Scared the poor man to death! He turned around and ran. If I would do that, how could he tell what else I might do?

If I were taking a class now, I would take one of those where you train with an "assailant" in a padded suit and learn to really take him down. It is important to know that you can do it, and from all I've been able to learn that comes with practice. The padded suit allows you to practice all out.

So, I would like to suggest that we remember that every violent wild animal out there is trained in how to use that violence by its mother, which means that violence is a quality of the female. Protective violence is a good thing, and we need not to train it out of our daughters. They aren't safe with the results of teaching them to be ladies.

Hatred

Please go over to Bullies -1, Sanity - 0 on Brilliant At Breakfast and read what has happened to Amanda Marcotte. For those of you who don't know, Amanda is the feminist blogger at Pandagon who was hired by the John Edwards campaign. Over the last few days, Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and an anti-Semite if I have ever read one, has mounted an attack at Amanda, aimed at getting Edwards to fire her, because of some opinions which he considers bigoted that she expressed on her own site, prior to being hired by Edwards. It seems, that as a feminist, Amanda doesn't like the stance of the religious right, including the Catholic church, on abortion, contraception, women's rights, and condoms. She considers the Catholic church to practice full-throated misogyny. Donohue, as I said is an anti-Semite (he has claimed that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular ... Hollywood likes anal sex.") Go here and read how his followers have responded to his call for action, but only if you a. have a strong stomach and b. can bear the sight of just how ugly the human mind can get. It truly astounds me that these people are saying these things in what they consider to be the defense of the Catholic faith. Of course, it astounds me that people who talk like this can go out in public and be mistaken for human beings.

Amanda, in order to not detract from the Edwards campaign, has resigned and gone back to tending her blog. And tend it she must, since it is being gang raped by the simple tactic of going there and hitting the refresh button again and again. It looks like all of the wingnuts are giving a good 7,000 hits for every vile drop of hatred in their souls. She reports something like 100 hate e-mails in a 12-hour period.

Not only that, but other feminist blogs are also being attacked. I've tried three this morning and found them full of incoherent code.

The Secret Service & Me

In 1984, while campaigning for vice president, Geraldine Ferraro came to Stockton, California, where I was living at the time.

My business partner, Alison Hudson, and I were out and about that day and stopped in at City Hall for some reason. While there, I needed to use the women's room and so left Alison in the hall. There was no one else in there when I went in. But, as I was coming out of the stall, with my skirt still up so I could pull my blouse down neatly, there were Ms. Ferraro and four male secret service agents. We smiled, she said "Sorry" and I said, "That's perfectly alright" and I left.

Outside were a passle of news folks with cameras and Alison. As soon as the camera people saw that I wasn't Geraldine, they turned off their cameras. As Alison and I walked out of the building, she said, "What did you say?"
"What?"
"What did you say? You always have a ready quip, what did you say?"
"I was too amazed to find four men there while I was showing off my slip to think of anything to say!"

About half an hour later I realized what I wished I'd said. "They passed the ERA without telling me and now we do have unisex bathrooms!"

Let Us Praise Ourselves

I was over at Echidne of the Snakes and found this little exercise which looks like it can be very illuminating.

Let Us Praise Ourselves
Zuzu on feministe suggests an interesting topic for discussions on feminist blogs: The difficulty we have of stating our good points. The "we" here is most likely feminist women, but all sorts of people have trouble with this. Just imagine yourself standing in front of some small group of quite friendly people and being asked to list at least five things about yourself that you really like. Gulp.

***Remember the rules: No belittling, no hedging.

Ok. So, I'm pretty set-up with how confidant I have become over the years. I know that I couldn't have done this in my 20s without a lot of belittling and hedging. But, over the years I have seen my self-confidence grow and my ability to be embarrassed by myself really shrink. So, can I do this?

1. I am kind. Certified by a number of people, and finally recognized by myself.
2. I am a talented writer. I do it well and love to do it and have never experienced writer's block, no matter the product. Grant proposals to poetry, I have a wide range.
3. I have a great sense of humor. I can laugh at myself, and at a wide variety of kinds of humor. From knock-knock jokes to puns to erudite and cryptic references, I see funny in a lot of places. I tell jokes well, with emphasis and inflection and very good timing. I don't like practical jokes that hurt people or embarrass them, but if they are truly in good fun I think they are funny. I can get with nonsense and silliness. I appreciate over-the-top stupidity and dry wit. I've even, over the decades since I left Catholic boarding school, learned to like earthy jokes and scatalogical delivery. (Although, I wouldn't want to listen to a Carlin or a Lewis Black CD with my mother.)
4. I'm damned smart and not hesitant to say so. I don't believe that there is anyone who can make me feel stupid. Physicists (and other people whose minds work differently than mine) can make me know how little I know about their world without making me feel dumb because of it. The brillance of the neo-cons have never impressed me, since by my standards, they are not intellectuals, no matter whether they think they are or not. I like being smart. It was my claim to family attention when I was little and the only child/grandchild/niece around and it still is. I never let a guy think he was smarter than me, because I respect guys and myself more than that. I didn't hesitate to raise my hand and know the answer first when I was in school and I was willing to sit up all night and argue with my husband about ideas. And, when I meet someone who is smarter than me (there are lots of them out there) it is a sheer pleasure. I can be competitive, but not fragile, about this.
5. I have made peace with and become proud of my Inner Bitch. That's the part of me that can fight for the right. It gives me strength and inventiveness and will find the way to protect and advance.
6. I love the way my hair is graying. I liked it when it was auburn and I have liked it at every stage in between. I did add some highlights when the blonde began to brown out, but the minute the gray started coming in I stopped that because I didn't want to cover it up.
7. I can make friends quickly and easily. This is a result of moving around so much as a child -- you make friends quickly or you don't make them at all. And, apparently this is even more of an asset than one might think, because "smart girls" aren't supposed to be able to find friends quickly where ever they go, but I always have.
8. I know how to dress well. I have learned what looks good on me and how to put it together. I remember the day a man approached me on the street to ask where I bought my clothes, because he thought that if his wife had things like I have she could look "so attractive," too.
9. I am pretty unselfconscious. I wear men's shoes because I have very wide feet, and neither the shoes nor the reason I wear them bothers me. I know I'm fat and don't hesitate to talk about it when appropriate -- not in the "my diet" way which is really an apology for not being thin, but in the "Can you move six inches? I'm rounder than you think I am" way. Two weeks ago, when my bridge fell out and I was going around with a three tooth gap in the front of my mouth, I went to all of the meetings I was scheduled to attend and had the teens I work with in stitches over looking like a Jack-O-Lantern.
10. I'm pretty adventurous. I moved to Juneau without a job in line when I was 51 years old and had exactly one nickel left when I got my first paycheck. I lived on a homestead with a four year old and a six year old. I've fed frostbitten lettuce to a moose calf while his mother was watching -- admittedly, I thought she was the neighbor's "pet" moose, but still those are big animals.

I have to admit that I had no difficulty at all with this list. I could continue it, but twice the requirement seems enough to demonstrate just how superior I am. :)
And I'm wondering how this is? I know that Echidne's experience, of finding the task difficult, is much more the common one. Particularly for women, since we have been raised to think of ourselves last, to be modest, to let the men have the last word, to focus on others -- all of those things that make for low self-esteem and less than ideal mental health. Any woman in this culture -- hell, any woman who ever lived in any culture -- has had an incredible amount of brainwashing that should make this task not only difficult, but almost impossible. For women who can do it, this means that they most likely have been working on their self-confidence for a while and very consciously.

I think that the reasons I can do it easily are:
I had parents who genuinely loved me deeply. My father kissed me at my birth before I had been washed off -- it doesn't get any more accepting than that.
I had the wonderful experience of being the center of my entire extended family's world for five of my most formative years.
I went to a girls' boarding school, where there were no boys to defer to and excellence was expected of all of us.
I started working on ridding myself of the false modesty that I acquired subsequent to that (not that it ever took well) in my twenties.
And I'm almost 65 years old. I think that it is a general rule that we become more self confident as we get older -- what strangers walking down the street think of us simply becomes unimportant. For one thing, we begin to realize that strangers walking down the street probably have more important things to think about than us. We begin to realize that no one is perfect, and so we stop expecting it of ourselves. We figure out that the so-called dark parts of our personality are as necessary to life as our naughty-bits. Some one else has decided that we shouldn't show either, but we don't have to accept their rules: we can join a nudist camp or learn to appreciate what our anger is trying to do for us rather than swallow it.

And yet, and yet -- the list was easy to make, but pushing the publish button brings up thoughts of, maybe I am just a bit conceited. Gonna do it anyway . . . .

In A Nutshell follows

Alaska: Where Men Are Men& Women Win The Iditarod

When Susan Butcher began running the Iditarod dog sled race (1,049 miles), men made fun of her. They claimed that she was a typical female; she babied her dogs. When she started winning, race after race (4 Iditarod wins), to be followed by Lybby Riddles, we saw tee shirts that read: Alaska-- Where Men Are Men & Women Win the Iditarod.

I thought of this the other day when I heard the radio announcer refer to Governor Sarah Palin, first woman governor of Alaska, as "Mrs. Palin." Now, here in Juneau we often call the governor by first name -- I have spoken affectionately of Tony (Knowles) and Wally (Hickle) and scornfully of Frank (Murkowski), so Sarah would be fine. But Mrs. Palin is different. It is reducing the governor of the largest state in the Union to the status of Mr. Palin's wife.

And although Governor Palin is a Republican, so far she has been doing a pretty good job. She immediately put the jet plane that Murkowski had done an end run around the Legislature to buy, up for sale. She reinstated the Longevity Bonus which Murkowski had stopped. She cut off the building of a one-way, gravel road that would have connected two privately owned mines to Juneau but given us no access to the outside. She scuttled the clandestine negotiations Murkowski was holding with the oil companies and made them not only transparent, but open to other bidders as well. She ordered the state to comply with the Alaska Supreme Court order and begin same-sex partners health insurance coverage, although the Legislature had tried to stop it.

And so I wonder -- what tee shirt will we come up with this time? Perhaps, Alaska, Where Men Strut and Women Solve Problems?

Molly

You may have noticed a blog mentioned on my blogroll, Molly Saves the Day. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the link no longer worked. It took me to a commercial site instead of where I wanted to go. Since I like Molly, I would try the link every once in a while, thinking that while obviously someone had managed to do something to her site, somehow she would fix it. Didn't happen. So, I did a blog search for Molly Saves the Day, which netted me the following links/articles.

Hear Me Roar

Axinar

and Biting Beaver

I have no idea what to say. I had no idea such things could happen. Did happen.

I wish there were a way that I could express to Molly how outraged I am at what was done to her and how much I will miss her.

But, more than that, I wish there were a way that I could stop such cruelty. That such behavior were never thinkable to anyone. That all people felt secure enough and loved enough that hating others simply didn't happen.

The Water We Swim In

In the late 80s, Julie had gone off to San Francisco and Richard and I were living together in Stockton. We had two tanks of fish -- one 20 gallon tank of mixed tropicals and one 35 gallon with two massive goldfish. I had been lazy and let the big tank go a little too long (they were my fish, and so my job to clean the tank), when I had to go to Southern California to do a training. Since I was going to be gone for a week, I asked Richard to take care of the fish tank before I got back.

When I returned, I opened the front door and the first thing I saw was the still dirty tank, with two fish floating on the top. Knowing that the thought of my dead pets was going to bother me until I dealt with it, I put my suitcase down, got the net, removed the first fish, and dumped it into the toilet. Just as I reached to flush, the fish revived and started swimming strongly. So, I put him in a pot of water, added his bowl mate, and cleaned the tank.

What made me think of this today was this entry over on Echidne of the Snakes.

Finally the M-word has been pronounced in the mainstream media. Finally. Here is Bob Herbert on the school massacres and their real nature:

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected.

My fish were trying to live in water so toxic that the toilet was preferable. It hadn't started out that way, it had happened slowly but steadily. Americans are now living in an atmosphere that is so toxic with hatred for women that we don't even see it. We don't notice the great preponderance of stories about violence that concern female victims because it has crept up on us a little at a time. Slowly but steadily our national atmosphere about females has become more toxic than the toilet.

Suffer the Little Children

Over at Big Fat Blog Paul has posted about The International Conference on Obesity in Sydney.

There was an interesting piece that Emily sent over from AFP. It claimed that girls as young as age 5 are worried about their weight. Instead of fostering a more supportive environment for all body types, however, Andrew Hill from Leeds University instead suggests a "modest" weight loss. For 5-year-olds.

Simply amazing! How utterly irresponsible to suggest that five-year olds diet at all! The study that came out of UC Berkeley's Center for Weight and Health in 2004 stated very clearly that dieting before you are fully grown sets you up to yo-yo ever higher and higher for life! That girls who diet before they are 14 are more likely to end up obese. That anyone who has been on three diets and isn't thin needs to stop now because they are never going to get thin this way, they are only going to get fatter.

Joanne Ikeda, co-director of UC Berkeley's Center for Weight & Health and lead author of the study stated that there is "growing evidence that repeated dieting adversely affects the body's metabolism, and that dieting before puberty disrupts the body's normal development."

Among those who began dieting before age 14, 84 percent said they weren't able to maintain any permanent weight loss. This compares with 67 percent of those who started dieting at age 14 or later.

These people can't not know this, any more than R.J. Reynolds doesn't know that tobacco is both addicting and fatal. Anything to turn a profit!

And think how much money they can make off of someone who starts dieting at 5! And how depressed she will be as her ability to lose weight as an adult is lower than it was when she was a little girl. If it takes three diets as a teen to set you up as a life long customer for these creeps, how many do you suppose it takes for a five-year old? What do you want to bet they already know?

And perhaps the most frightening thing about this was when I googled for an image of a "chubby child" and the pictures that came up were not of heavy children at all.

Holla Back

When I was about 21, I was walking in San Francisco and a really frightening looking man, obviously drunk (I could smell it) yelled at a young woman walking about half a block in front of me, "Hey, baby, how about a good f**k?" She shrank into herself, embarrassed that anyone could think she deserved that (I know how she felt, because women have all felt that way in that circumstance. As though it were our fault.) I have no idea how it happened, but the next thing, I was walking beside her with my arm around her shoulders, facing down the offensive person, and saying, "You weren't capable of a good f**k the best day of your life."

On a different subject, which I will bring together shortly, I promise. I hate to admit it (no, I don't. I revel in admitting it. I thrive on being unique and unusual and so I love to admit anything that will fill out my image in your mind and allow you to appreciate the full wonder that is me), but I'm a bit of a purist. I think that a phone should be a phone. It should ring without my having to learn how to make it ring the way I want it to. It should allow me to talk to people. That's it. (I resisted the answering machine, as well, and now I love mine, so just accept this as Maya's Granny being older and resisting change.) I have seen no use for having a camera in a phone, it has seemed to me rather like having a duck in a box of cat litter -- barely related if you really strain the concept, but dufus level dumb. At last! A use for cameras in cell phones that I can get behind! Not only that, but something to do when strangers men (let's admit it, the folks who do this are men) make sexual comments and disgusting noises at you on the street and you don't have my brass.

Women Expose Street Harassment by Elana Fiske on Alternet.org

Next time a stranger comments on your breasts in public, just shoot him -- with a camera, such as the one built into your cell phone.

This is the unorthodox advice of Holla Back NYC, a blog-cum-grass-roots movement that uses digital technology to combat street harassment. They urge women not only to take a photo when men hassle or insult them in public, but to make the photo public on hollabacknyc.com

***

Such grassroots action is vital, because street harassment is a very difficult crime to deal with by law, says Marty Langelan, author of Back Off: How to Confront and Stop Sexual Harassment and Harassers. "Most cities do not even have ordinances that would make it a misdemeanor, and even in cities that do, such as Washington [D.C.] ... police won't make an arrest unless they witness the behavior and consider it threatening. But [police] are [most often] males with guns, and not much is threatening to them."

Women, on the other hand, may feel threatened even by statements that seem to be compliments -- because they may be the precursor to more lewd or injurious conduct. (Indeed, Langelan urges women to be cautious about photographing harassers who seem at all violent.)

"Most of the guys I've spoken with can't believe that the problem is really that big a deal," adds Katie Runyan, 23, who founded Holla Back D.C., a group with whom Langelan plans to work. "They seem to believe that it's a mild annoyance or that it only happens once in a while. This proves to me exactly why this site needs to be created."