Small Steps Move Us Forward

The last post of the semester comes to us from Women’s Studies minor Emily Drone, who writes about her practicum experience at Oasis Women’s Center.  It was a treat to talk to Emily earlier this week about her experiences this semester: the pleasure she took from learning more about domestic violence and from actively working to help an organization that is so deeply supportive of women during an exceptionally difficult time in their lives was clear.  As she reminds us in this post, simple gestures and small steps can be among the most meaningful in our lives.

When I first spoke with Dr. Seltzer about a practicum for spring 2013, I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be.  My first instinct was that I wanted to help someone, do something hands on for once in my college career.  She mentioned Oasis Women’s Shelter and I was intrigued by it but also at the same time nervous about it.  A women’s shelter? That sounds like a tough and mentally exhausting job.  She encouraged me to go listen to Marcy Jacobs speak during a class period in the fall, and that was what sealed the deal.  The statistics that Marcy gave out about domestic violence were phenomenal, but not in the good way.  They stuck with me, which is when I knew that was where I wanted to go.

When I first showed up to the shelter in Alton, I was extremely anxious.  I had no idea what I was getting myself into

Sexual Assault Awareness Month and The Activist Impulse

Today’s blog post is from senior Women’s Studies minor Megan Smith, who is completing a practicum focused on sexual assault and relationship violence.   Her post today considers issues associated with sexual assault, but also serves as an important reflection on her experiences with Safe Connections on Campus, a terrific group based in St. Louis that has been active on  our campus.  

Happy Sexual Assault Awareness Month, everyone! Is it possible that it is already April? It sure doesn’t feel like it. With this being Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I figured this would be the perfect time to tell you all about my practicum experience with Safe Connections. Safe Connections is a non-profit organization in St. Louis whose mission is to reduce the impact and incidence of relationship violence and sexual assault through education, crisis intervention, counseling and support services. How Safe Connections got their start gets any true feminist fired up. Safe Connections’ story begins in 1976 when a group of local college women noticed the complete lack of resources for survivors in the area. They took action and began a grassroots crisis helpline in their apartment. Today, Safe Connections is located on Hampton Street, just minutes from the St. Louis Zoo and Forest Park and is home to a variety of services for the St. Louis Metro area. Over the years it has turned into an amazing agency that offers a 24-hour crisis helpline and free individual and group counseling services for women and teen boys and girls. In the Prevention Education Department, Project HART does workshops with local teens around issues of teen dating violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and many other topics, Girls Group and Guys Group work with smaller groups of teens to go deeper into those same issues, and finally, Safe Connections on Campus works with area universities to engage students, faculty, and staff in the movement to end relationship and sexual violence on and off campus. Safe Connections on Campus has been where I have spent my time and energy this semester, but before we dive into that, lets back up for a minute.

Why? That’s often a question I find others asking me, or I am asking myself. Why this field? Truthfully, that’s still a question I ask myself. How does someone become interested in working around the topic of sexual and domestic violence? Well, for me it all began right here at this university.

“Marriage Equality”: It Means More Than You Think

Today the Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of California’s ban on same-sex marriage, and arguments tomorrow will challenge the Defense of Marriage Act.  Philosophy Professor Alison Reiheld  considers multiple definitions of “marriage equality” here.

The struggle for—and against—marriage equality in the United States has generally taken marriage to be an unalloyed good.  But is it?

Certainly, our society provides many rights and privileges to the married which do not accrue to those who remain in long-term partnerships without marriage.  Indeed, there are two cases before the Supreme Court of the United States right now, one on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 (a voter referendum which affirmed traditional heterosexual marriage) and one on the constitutionality of the federal government’s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

The latter case, United States v. Windsor, was brought by Edith Windsor who married her long-time lesbian partner in Canada after decades of coupled bliss.  Because of DOMA, the federal government did not recognize her marriage and she was assessed over $360,000 in estate taxes which she would not have had to pay had her spouse been a man. Windsor won a Federal Appeals court case in 2012 but the case has now been appealed to SCOTUS by the federal government.

Concern isn’t only manifesting in voter referenda and the courts, however.  In solidarity with same-sex couples unable to access the rights and privileges that accrue to the married, some heterosexual couples whose unions would be recognized by both church and state have put off marriage.  In Cook County, Illinois—within which Chicago is located—the #1 reason for straight couples to register for civil unions was just such solidarity.

But consider for a moment: is marriage naught but good?  Society assigns rights and privileges to the married not open to others, but what of its burdens?  I am not making an argument against marriage, here.  I am, myself, happily hitched.  But a more nuanced view of marriage will acknowledge both its merits and deficits.   By deficits I do not mean the fact that one is now committed to a new entity, the marriage, as well as to the one married. These are the responsibilities which are the flip-side of the rights and privileges.  I mean, instead, the historical aspects of marriage which make it clear that it has not always been an unalloyed good for both parties, and sometimes has not been good for either.  I believe a closer look will reveal that the notion of  “marriage equality” has been too narrow.

Not All Objectification is Sexual

The fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which coincides with numerous challenges to women’s healthcare and reproductive choices,  has given us a lens for reconsidering women’s reproductive rights.  In this thoughtful post,  Prof. Alison Reiheld frames the issue from a bioethicist’s perspective.

In 1972, the year before the landmark Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade which celebrated its 40th anniversary this January, philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson published her now-famous article, “In Defense of Abortion.”  She played the unusual card of granting that fetuses are fully persons. Arguing over that claim, she suggested, prevents us from discussing other serious moral issues related to abortion. Her focus is on whether one person can ever justifiably be compelled to sustain the life of another against his or her will.
She asks us to imagine that you—whether you are a man or a woman—are hooked up to an ailing Violinist who needs to use your body for life support for nine months until his treatment is complete. Then you can be unhooked and go about your business. If you disconnect yourself and walk away, he will die. Thomson concludes that no one can be justifiably compelled to provide life support in such a situation. It would be good of you to do so, as it is good of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament of the Christian Bible to stop and render aid. But it is not required, and it is deeply wrong to compel people to be Good Samaritans. This, she contends, is analogous to asking a woman to continue a pregnancy against her wishes. In considering the biologically necessary fact that a woman’s body is like a sheltering “house” for a fetus, Thomson enjoins us to remember that women are nonetheless persons who house fetuses rather than mere houses. Forty years after Roe, we must still face this issue as states and medical professionals increasingly exert control over pregnant women’s bodies.

This kind of control takes several forms. One is criminal penalties for “irresponsible behavior” during pregnancy, whether or not it leads to criminal charges. This motivating idea is behind the image you see, below. Since the recent release of a scholarly evaluation of prosecutions related to pregnancy, there has been increasing press coverage of what is being called “the criminalization of pregnancy.” Of course, this is something of a misnomer: it is not being pregnant that is criminalized, but failing to respond to being pregnant by curtailing any and all behaviors which pose a risk to the fetus. Guardian journalist Karen McVeigh reported on the results of an article  published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law and released January 15 of this year. The study documented 413 civil and criminal cases across 44 states in the U.S. Less severe examples include a pregnant woman who refused a doctor’s recommendation for a gestational diabetes test and was then institutionalized in a locked psychiatric ward and another who was kept incarcerated by an Ohio judge in order to prevent her from obtaining an abortion before the gestational stage at which elective abortions become illegal. One of the most severe is the case of Bei Bei Shuai, an Indianapolis woman who was 30 weeks pregnant when the man who got her pregnant left her; she attempted to commit suicide by eating rat poison. Her attempt failed, but in the process she delivered prematurely. The infant survived the delivery and was placed on life support, but eventually died. A few months later, Shuai was arrested and charged with murder and attempted feticide. A verdict has not yet been rendered.

Philosophy, Civil Wars, and Climate Change

Visiting Philosophy Professor Elizabeth Victor has written of her own research in an earlier post for this blog, and here she thinks about broader discipline-based issues raised at the recent American Philosophical Association’s eastern division meeting by its Vice president, Prof. Linda Martín Alcoff.   In recounting what might be termed the politics of political analysis, Liz reminds us that we need not look far to face questions of bias and social justice.  

Linda Martín Alcoff is a philosopher who specializes in epistemology, feminism, race theory, and existentialism. She is currently the vice president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (the largest division of the APA). In her annual address to the APA , Alcoff reframed the “civil wars” of philosophy, traditionally understood as the conflict in style and focus between the analytical and continental schools of thought, to discuss pluralism, inclusion, and the problem of representation in the discipline.

Alcoff pointed out that the harm in ignoring other “styles” of philosophy all too often coincides with what she calls “demographic challenges.”  She invited philosophers to ask the difficult question of whether the low number of women and minorities in philosophy might be related to the treatment of feminist philosophy more generally. Reminding her listeners that the host of the 1998 World Congress of Philosophy (John Silber) attacked feminist philosophy in his address as “an assault on reason,” and that same year leading Philosopher Colin McGinn commented in the Times literary supplement that “feminism now has a place in most departments, for good or ill, but it has not made any impact on the core subject,” Alcoff suggests that we cannot, despite the common assumption, delink the treatment of women in the discipline from the treatment of feminist philosophy.

Masculinity Studies: What Is It, and Why Would a Feminist Care?

Prof. Helena Gurfinkel‘s courses, whether they be focused on Victorian literature or critcial theory, always challenge assumptions of gender and sex.  In this blog post, she reminds us that feminism is not alone in considering the ways that gender is constructed.

In the 1960s and 70s, the Women’s Movement and feminist theory first called our attention to the fact that gender mattered. Moreover, a crucial relationship exists between gender and power. In a patriarchal society, men, as heads of family and state, have power. Such a society tolerates the kind of feminine behaviors that make it easy for men to uphold and amplify their socioeconomic advantage and discourages, even punishes, the kind of behaviors that do not.

Such was, and remains, the premise of feminist social inquiry. Of course, over time, feminism has turned into feminisms, paying attention to global women’s rights, as well as to the issues of race, class, and sexuality. By the time the 1990s had rolled around, Gender Studies had started to emerge as an offshoot of Women’s Studies. Relying on the feminist premise of patriarchal privilege and inextricable link between gender and power, gender-studies scholars discovered that patriarchy sought to construct and regulate all genders, not just women. To Gender Studies we owe a number of other important discoveries: that sex and gender are not the same; that, consequently, the gender binary (man/woman) is a frail social construct, and that the relationship between gender and sexuality is not nearly as simple as we used to think.

For Malala

Today’s post is contributed by Prof. Carly Hayden Foster, who is currently teaching WMST/POLS 441: Women in Politics in America, and will teach both WMST 200: Issues in Feminism and WMST 490-02: POLS 449: Women in Lawmaking next Spring.  Here, she turns her attention toward the devastating cost of women’s activism in Pakistan, considering the enormous bravery of 14 year-old Malala Yousafzai and the unthinkable consequences of her courage.  

I was inspired, about a month ago, when I read about a brave Pakistani teenage girl named Malala.  Malala wrote about the dangers and injustice she experienced living in the Swat region of Pakistan, where the Taliban has ordered the closing of schools for girls. The BBC carries her blog posts which vividly describe her experiences, and her fears that her own school will be closed, burned, or bombed, as happened in nearby communities.

And now I am heartbroken by the news that this brave girl has been shot by the Taliban.

Lest we get discouraged by the mundane, mid-semester feeling of too much work left and not enough time, let us instead take a moment to reflect on Malala’s bravery.  As a teenage girl in an intensively repressive and misogynist environment, she spoke out against what she knew in her heart was injustice.  She fought for her right, as a girl, to be allowed to go to school. She did this knowing that the men with guns knew who she was and where she lived.  Malala understood the importance of school, and she put herself at risk so that she and other girls like her might get an education.  As I write this, Malala is still alive, but unconscious, and on a ventilator.  She is not likely to fully recover from the damage to her brain caused by the bullet.  Let’s send Malala and her family, and all the girls who have to fight for access to education just because they are girls, our thoughts, wishes, prayers, and whatever else we might have to offer. Here are some links to organizations that help further the cause of providing education to girls.

Room to Read

Shining Hope for Communities

Afghan Institute of Learning

Also, the Half the Sky Movement has links to additional gender focused global charitable organizations.

Perhaps the SIUE community could make some contributions in Malala’s name.