The Death of American Feminism And Religious Orthodoxy

Writing for Slate, Katha Pollitt has decisively answered profound questions about feminism in America, discussing Gail Collins’ new book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

In an unconscious nod to Lubna Hussein, and our Smarty Pants crowd, Pollitt’s correct in saying that, second wave feminism was about symbolically about the right to wear pants.

There is no more threatening gesture to the patriarchal, orthodox, conservative religious male mind than a woman wearing pants.

Unlike Pollitt who finds garter belts repressive, I typically wear skirts and believe in the redemptive power of fine lingerie and expressed female sensuality. But I will march in the streets all over again — and I believe it’s time — for the rights of women to wear pants worldwide.

The protection of women’s FULL rights is a debt and moral obligation that every woman has to the global sisterhood. Millions of American women have never accepted this obligation that we have to each other, unlike European women who have fought long and hard for their own rights and those of poor women worldwide.

The majority of American ladies have consciously or unconsciously chosen to follow patriarchal values and edicts, believing in our hearts that men are better able to legislate women’s rights than women are.

Whether it’s American bishops dictating the terms of American health care or Republican representatives shouting down the Democratic women’s caucus members prior to the House vote on the health care bill, men are in charge of the gender-related, formerly ‘feminist’ discussion in America and have been since the eighties.

Not every idea embraced by these fundamentally conservative and patriarchal guys is bad for women. Goodness knows, the bishops have an excellent track record of operating health care clinics devoted to some of the needs of women worldwide.

Yet, the price for admission into that religious men’s club is agreeing that contraception should be denied women everywhere in the world. When one digs into the facts of America’s support for these policies, I read that there’s widespread disagreement between the bishops and what American Catholics really believe.

The Catholic Church denies Rep. Patrick Kennedy communion, over his support of abortion rights and access to birth control for all women. In reality in America, they should be denying communion to about half the Catholic congregation.

Reading the American press, I have no sense that Catholics don’t embrace the Catholic bishops policy in Washington. Thanks to the Internet, I discover that there’s a lot of disagreement out there in America’s Catholic land.

Yet, the dissent seems to be powerless, even in Washington. Is it a known fact that Catholics vote against their personal beliefs of what’s best for America, and march as they are told to at the ballot box? This subject is not my forte.

Catholics for Choice conducted a September 2009 poll by Belden Russonello & Stewart in which American Catholics professed the following:

- 68 percent of Catholic voters disagree that — as a Catholic — you should oppose the entire health care reform plan if it includes coverage for abortion.

- 68 percent of Catholic voters disapprove of US Catholic bishops saying that all Catholics should oppose the entire health care reform plan if it includes coverage for abortion and 56 percent think the bishops should not take a position on health care reform legislation in Congress.

Yet Politico reports this morning that Catholic bishops are gearing up for an even greater influence in American politics, and the article insinuates — as most media does — that American Catholics, aka the American citizens who are also voters, agree with the bishops’ position.

American is known for being much more religious than other countries, and we have made a choice about women’s rights in America and elsewhere in the world.  I respect the importance of spirituality in our lives, but in the majority of religions, men are in charge and fundamentally opposed to the inclusion of women as policymakers.

Women are the benevolent caretakers and we do as we are told in all the world’s great religions. This is the nature of the universe.

I promise you that if women worldwide had refused to attend church until the cardinals and bishops figured out some way around the topic of birth control, we would live in a very different world today.

In spite of their answers to poll questions about their beliefs, these same good people support a host of measures worldwide that condemn married women in Africa to death and millions of children to orphanages.

As a second-wave feminist, I never dreamed that that in 2009 we would be arguing about condoms for married women in AIDS-infected countries, saying the women have NO RIGHTS to make critical choices about their own health and wellbeing.

Personally, I don’t see the difference between this anti-contraception, anti-condom policy for married women exposed to AIDS-infected husbands in Africa (or anywhere on the planet) and flogging women in Sudan. Frankly, flogging is the lesser of the health-related consequences of these patriarchal policies.

As Pollitt correctly reasons: the American patriarchy and rise of eighties-style conservativism in America seriously derailed our feminist-agenda, thwarting the changes witnessed in Europe for women, and especially in Scandinavia.

I could suggest that American women were roadkill in this male-dominated, conservative movement that began in the eighties, but in fact many women chose it willingly and in rapture. Men are not the bad guys here.

Millions of men wish we could talk some sense into American women, unleashing our old commitment to the very issues that tie women up in knots worldwide.

US President Barack Obama and First Lady MIchelle Obama meet with Pope Benedict XVI in his library at the Vatican on July 10, 2009As I wrote last week — because indeed my blood is boiling these day over the hypocrisy of American politics — American policies have added unspeakable misery to the lives of poor women everywhere in the world, because American women are very, very good girls.

Kathy Pollitt writes:

American women, alone among those in Western industrialized nations, have no paid maternity leave (let alone parental leave) or (as of yet) national health care. Care of dependent family members—children, the elderly, the sick—is women’s unpaid labor. Workers have few rights. Aid to poor families—including mothers and children temporarily poor due to divorce—is humiliating and stingy. Feminists have not even been able to eliminate the sexism embedded in the minimal welfare state we have: Unemployment insurance, the income tax, and social security are all structured around dated ideas about gender and work that disadvantage women. Moreover, as Republicans strengthened their hold on government, the legal gains women had made were undermined by judicial decisions, bureaucratic fiat, and simple lack of enforcement. Under George W. Bush, for example, the EEOC switched its focus from race and gender to religion. via Slate

As long as we are good girls before all else, American women will never achieve the rights enjoyed in other countries. I remind you AGAIN, this great country, America the bastion of freedom and ‘free enterprise’ is 31 in the recenty-released Global Gender Gap report, having lost three places in the past year.

In political equality we are a pathetic 61. When the salivating bishops get done with us, we’ll be rivaling Italy, currently residing in 72 place, behind all the other countries in Europe. Italy is sandwiched between Vietnam and Tanzania.

How do we explain this reality of America lagging miles behind the rest of the civilized world on feminist issues? Does anyone really care about women’s rights in America ? From my perspective, the silence is deafening. Anne

Comments

[Jordi]

Hi Anne,
We are lucky in Spain: our vice-president, our defense minister, and the new equality ministry, among some others, are all run by women. Many of us welcome this change.
But reactions from conservative groups are radical and constant. I don't know about the american church, but the Spanish church is obsessed, along with its powerful media, on criticizing every little gesture made by these women in our government. Ashaming.
Even the idea of creating a feminist, anti-patriarchal political party seems extremely difficult in Europe, although there has been an pioneering try in the recent past (Feminist Initiative).
Patriarchy benefits from division among women. Until 'good girls' and 'bad girls' don't come together and join against this male-based world, politically, socially and spiritually, deep change won't arrive. Let's not loose hope!
Take care,
Jordi.