Is Feminism Still Relevant?

[MrsSpringsteen]

Tina and Amy were so funny. Too bad they were hardly on it. Liked them much better than Ricky Gervais, he's just not my taste.

That James Franco joke was hilarious

That was Hillary Clinton's husband-gotta love that.

[dazzledbylight]

Originally Posted by BonosSaint

Althuogh men are often held to a standard of "maleness" both by men and women that can be harmful to them, I think that women are less seen as individuals with individual strengths, talents and foibles than men are. We are much more perceived in a group status. Society allows men to be defined by many attributes in a single package, to have nuance and complexity. Women aren't given as much. That's the price of being considered a lesser, even (sometimes unconsciously) by other women.

We accept the limits or we don't. There have been a lot of changes in the last 40 years or so, but a lot still remains the same under the surface.

very interesting idea ! one i've never heard/read about

ML>As someone who sometimes is assertive (tho try not to be agressive)
i hate that pigeon-holing of "acting like a man" type of stereo type.... though i myself still ocassionally stereotype myself ... i do my best to be self-aware and take mymind out of that knd of thinking

[BonosSaint]

^I always find the different standards/interpretations interesting (and often annoying). And I'm not going to say I'm not guilty of it myself sometimes. We celebrate individual men. We don't celebrate women as often. Politically, I am pleased that Hillary got rock star status. Doesn't mean anybody has to like her or vote for her. Just mean she's captured people's imaginations in a way usually reserved for men. So I've started looking around more and realize the women I've been missing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/ma...anted=all&_r=0

[Pearl]

Here's a good NY Times article by Stephanie Coontz called Why Gender Equality Stalled

Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders. Feminists should certainly support this campaign. But they don’t need to own it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/op...ef=todayspaper

[BonosSaint]

NY Times

February 17, 2013
A Game Aims to Draw Attention to Women’s Issues
By ELIZABETH JENSEN

Social cause gaming, or the use of games to promote awareness of societal problems, has been growing since pioneer online projects like Food Force, the United Nations World Food Program’s 2005 game about confronting famine, and Darfur Is Dying, MTV’s 2006 offering in which players navigate the terrors of a Sudanese refugee camp.

Subsequent games have raised awareness of subjects like H.I.V., sex trafficking and political conflicts, among others.

On March 4, a new game on Facebook, inspired by the book “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” will be introduced, with a focus on raising awareness of issues like female genital mutilation and child prostitution.

Half the Sky Movement: The Game, more than three years in the making, is one of the most ambitious efforts yet to entice a mass audience to social media games with the goal of social change. It is a concept, however, that even its supporters say is largely untested.

The game seeks to engage new audiences not reached by the 2009 book, written by the married team of Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, and Sheryl WuDunn, a former Times journalist.

A spinoff four-hour documentary was broadcast on PBS in October, with a four-hour sequel coming in fall 2014.

Even more directly than possible with the book and television program, the game’s producers hope to actively involve the public.

The central character, an Indian woman named Radhika, faces various challenges with the assistance of players, who can help out with donations of virtual goods, for example. The players can then make equivalent real-world donations to seven nonprofit organizations woven into the game.

Ten dollars, for example, will help buy a goat for Heifer International; $20 will help support United Nations Foundation immunization efforts.

To further engage players, those who reach predesignated levels unlock donations from Johnson & Johnson and Pearson, which have each contributed $250,000 to buy real-world operations from the Fistula Foundation and books for Room to Read, respectively.

If the Half the Sky game takes off and the money is claimed quickly, the producers hope other sponsors will step in, said Michelle Byrd, co-president of Games for Change, a nonprofit that promotes the creation of so-called social impact games and is the game’s executive producer, along with Show of Force Productions.

Asi Burak, also co-president of Games for Change, said the hope is to draw two million to five million players, persuading 5 percent or more to donate. Players can play at no charge, but they will make faster progress through donations.

Those usage figures would put the game in the top rungs of social cause gaming.

The genre is still new enough that “I think it’s an open question as to whether or not and to what degree people want to play a game that’s focused on a social issue,” said Ken Weber, executive director of Zynga.org, the nonprofit arm of Zynga, the company behind Facebook’s FarmVille game.

Zynga, which has raised $15 million for about 50 causes like Japanese earthquake relief through FarmVille, signed on to support the Half the Sky game, helping in its development and promotion.

Zynga felt the game had “a fighting chance,” Mr. Weber said, because the content was compelling, there was already an established book and television property, financing was in hand — producers have raised $1 million — and Games for Change had hired “a commercial-grade developer,” the Canadian company Frima Studio of Quebec City.

Other supporters include the Ford, Rockefeller and United Nations foundations; Intel; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Half the Sky game starts out simply, as Radhika ponders how to afford a doctor visit for her sick daughter (the answer is to harvest mangoes, which players do for her).

Each step requires players to answer a question — for example, should Radhika ask her husband for help or stay silent? Neither answer is wrong, but each takes players on a different route.

As her empowerment grows, Radhika moves across the globe to Kenya, Vietnam and Afghanistan. But many of the game choices get progressively darker. One leads to a mother living and her baby dying.

Still, some of the game’s nonprofit partners have pushed for even more verisimilitude, Ms. Byrd and Mr. Burak said, questioning, for one, why Radhika can read when many women in her situation would be illiterate.

Finding that balance — how much to simplify complicated issues, how much fun to include and how much to focus on positive solutions versus grave challenges — has consumed much of the development process, the producers said.

“It’ll be a very interesting test as to what people’s thresholds are,” said Mr. Weber, of Zynga.

Players who reach the final level learn about sex trafficking in the United States and can donate to an organization in New York called GEMS, or Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, which helps young women leave the commercial sex industry.

Rachel Lloyd, the organization’s founder, said that games were “a brave new world for us, too. We’re watching and seeing how this works, if people really do engage in the way that we’d like them to.”

[BonosSaint]

NY Times

The New York Times

February 21, 2013
Women With Something to Say
By BEN BRANTLEY

A brigade of outspoken women is poised to take over Broadway this season, turning big New York stages into personal podiums and, quite possibly, pedestals. For these are women (and one little girl) who have inspired veneration and emulation throughout the years — in one case through millenniums.

Hailing from the worlds of American politics, Hollywood deal making, children’s literature, urban fable and the Bible, they are figures prone to saying what other people will or can not. This means that even when these characters whisper, their voices have the volume of bullhorns.

It also means that actresses bold enough to play them have the opportunity to make 10-course meals of their roles and to grab the Tony nominating committee by the lapels. So clear your throats and start talking, Ann Richards, Sue Mengers and Holly Golightly. You too, blessed Virgin Mary and little Matilda. We’re all ears.

First up is Richards, the former governor of Texas, who died in 2006 and has been reincarnated by Holland Taylor. You remember Ann Richards. She’s the one who stole the 1988 Democratic convention with one of the most quotable political speeches in recent memory, which described George H. W. Bush as being “born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Those words are not cited in “Ann,” the one-person show written by and starring Ms. Taylor and directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein, which opens at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on March 7. But there are plenty more where they came from, because Richards was a master of salty phrases that stung when the occasion required. As a gal amid good old boys and a Democrat in a red state, she had to be.

Like Richards, Mengers stormed and set up camp in a traditionally male bastion. Mengers, whose name became a byword for chutzpah, was an über-agent in Hollywood, where the corridors of power are even more slippery and treacherous than those of Austin and Washington.

She will be played by an actress who knows from Hollywood — and from chutzpah: Bette Midler, who opens on April 24 at the Booth Theater in John Logan’s “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers.” Ms. Midler, whose scenery-chomping bravado seems made for Broadway but hasn’t been there in decades, will be directed by Joe Mantello.

Since one of the show’s producers is the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, a friend and mythologizer of Mengers (who died in 2011), it seems safe to assume that this portrait of an agent will be friendlier than the savage cartoons inspired by her in the film satires “The Last of Sheila” and “S.O.B.” (Of the creator and star of “S.O.B.,” the director Blake Edwards and his wife, Julie Andrews, Mengers said, “An Alp should fall on their house.”)

Though Ms. Taylor and Ms. Midler had the chance to meet the women they are portraying, I am presuming that the same cannot be said of Fiona Shaw, who appears in yet another one-woman show, “The Testament of Mary,” which opens on April 22 at the Walter Kerr Theater. Ms. Shaw, last seen on Broadway in 2003 as the child-killing title character of Euripides’ “Medea,” is taking on a very different and even more famous mother, perhaps the most famous mother of them all.

Written by Colm Toibin and first staged in Dublin in 2011, “The Testament of Mary” (which is also the title of the short novel by Mr. Toibin, published last year) is an intense monologue centered on the Crucifixion of Jesus and its aftermath from the unflinching perspective of his mother. Unlike Richards and Mengers, Mr. Toibin’s Mary does not quip wise. But like them she has plenty to say about a world ruled and ruined by men.

“I tell the truth not because it will turn night into day,” Mary says in Mr. Toibin’s novel. “I speak simply because I can.” The lyrical but austere prose in which she delivers her truth is, to put it mildly, a challenge for any performer. But you might recall that Ms. Shaw managed to turn a solo performance of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” into gripping visceral theater in 1996. That production was staged by her frequent collaborator Deborah Warner, who has auspiciously reunited with Ms. Shaw for “Testament.”

Holly Golightly is not, strictly speaking, a truth teller. This glamorous gamin, created by Truman Capote in the 1958 novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” is a masterpiece of self-invention, a country girl transformed into the ultimate big-city party girl and, to use Capote’s words, “American geisha.” But if she depends on the kindness of men with money, she is also a defiantly independent figure and, for all her pretensions, an expert in deflating the hypocrisies of others.

Immortalized on celluloid by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 movie, Miss Golightly will assume flesh at the Cort Theater, where Richard Greenberg’s stage adaptation, directed by Sean Mathias, opens on March 20. Emilia Clarke, who has been occupying the tumultuous Middle Ages for several seasons on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” time travels to mid-20th-century Manhattan to embody the willowy and wily Holly.

And then there is Matilda Wormwood, the youngest but by no means weakest of this season’s female powerhouses. True, the title character of “Matilda the Musical,” a British import that opens on April 11 at the Shubert Theater, is a mere schoolgirl. But she possesses the gift of telekinesis and, just as important, a gift for language, both of which come in handy when she leads a revolution against a tyrannical headmistress.

Adapted from Roald Dahl’s 1988 children’s book by Dennis Kelly (script) and Tim Minchin (songs) and directed by Matthew Warchus, “Matilda” is about both speaking up and taking control of the narrative of your life. (She will be played in rotation by four young actresses: Sophia Gennusa, Oona Laurence, Bailey Ryon and Milly Shapiro.) As Matilda sings at one point, “Nobody but me is going to change my story.” You can imagine Holly, Sue and Ann (Mary might perhaps demur) agreeing with the wisdom of these words.

[digitize]

I love Ann Richards.

[BonosSaint]

She was fun.

[MrsSpringsteen]

There's a show on PBS Tuesday night-Women Who Made America

[BonosSaint]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/ma...gewanted=5&hpw

A longish, but interesting (to me, at least--interesting is pretty subjective) article.

[BonosSaint]

Some healthy progress. NY Times

March 21, 2013
Once Few, Women Hold More Power in Senate
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
WASHINGTON — An hour before her colleagues gathered for their first vote of a new Congress, Senator Kelly Ayotte slipped into an empty Senate chamber to savor the grandeur of her legislative home. As Ms. Ayotte, a freshman Republican from New Hampshire, sat down at the wooden desk where generations of lawmakers from her state had cast their votes, a doorman marched toward her with purpose.

The desks, he sternly told her, were for senators only.

Ms. Ayotte’s induction that January day in 2011 into the most rarefied ranks of the nation’s political class — female senators — had begun. “The desk thing really stuck with me,” Ms. Ayotte said. “There still just aren’t that many of us.”

In the 90 years since Rebecca Felton of Georgia became the first woman in the United States Senate — sworn in for a mere 24 hours — women remain an anomaly in the upper chamber. But with 20 female senators now in office, an all-time high, women have morphed from the curiosity they were for much of the 20th century into an important new force on key committees and legislation.

A record nine women now lead committees, including some of the most powerful ones. For the first time there is a woman — Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat — in charge of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which dispenses billions of dollars annually throughout the government and has long been particularly dominated by men. Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, is the first chairwoman of the Budget Committee and is charged with shaping the Democratic strategy in the fiscal battle dominating Capitol Hill.

One of the biggest bills to pass the Senate last year was farm legislation led by Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat who presides over the agriculture committee. Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, shepherded the highway bill.

“We are growing in number,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “But more importantly, we are growing in our power. When I first started just six years ago, it was unusual to have a woman managing a bill.”

Just as important, even male senators say, is the potential the women hold for changing the tenor of the Senate and pushing for compromise in the highly partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill.

“I don’t want to generalize, because this isn’t true of all of them, but they tend to be interested in finding common ground,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio. “So I think it’s going to have, and is having, a positive impact on the Senate.”

While partisan division is the central characteristic of the modern Congress, women have begun to crack away at the gridlock by forming coalitions that have surprised leaders of both parties. Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, led the repeal in the Senate of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2010, allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the military.

This year, all four of the female Senate Republicans split with their party and voted with Senate Democrats to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which had lapsed during the last Congress.

But politics remain just beneath the surface. In a recent roundtable involving the women and ABC’s Diane Sawyer, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, sharply disagreed with Ms. Collins on the efforts the women should devote to reproductive rights. After Ms. Collins described reproductive issues as “settled law” and said “I don’t know why we would want to keep bringing those issues up,” Ms. Warren shot back that “I don’t think they are entirely settled” and that “we better speak out” when there are attempts, for example, to limit health insurance coverage for birth control.

“Obviously there is so much more partisanship in recent years, and that has a spillover,” said Olympia J. Snowe, the moderate Republican former senator from Maine who left the Senate last year, dejected by the political polarization on Capitol Hill and what she described as her growing inability to reach across the aisle. But she called the 20 women “a critical mass” that she expected could “largely effect change together.”

On a practical level, the women’s growing ranks have overtaken the physical facilities available to them. There are, at present, a mere two women’s bathroom stalls near the Senate floor, which often means long lines. But the senators have learned to use the situation to their advantage: Ms. Stabenow said recently that she and Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, spent their time in the bathroom line strategizing over how they might get a new farm bill passed.

“It’s a good problem to have,” Ms. Stabenow said. “We have enough of us now that we can negotiate in the ladies’ room.”

Off hours, the Senate women have a bipartisan dinner together once a month, a ritual organized by Ms. Mikulski, which they say creates personal bonds and helps them work together on policy. At a recent dinner at the Capitol Hill home of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, the women nibbled on bread pudding for dessert while they talked about children and, Ms. Landrieu said, “about how our siblings keep us in our places.” She added, “It’s just so nice to be able to relax and put your guard down.”

The dinners “are the only reason I’ve been successful,” Ms. Gillibrand said, recounting how Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, helped her write the bill that provided health care to the first responders to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “In the Senate you have to start with a bipartisan core to get things done, and that core is often formed with the women,” Ms. Gillibrand said.

A wide array of scholarship supports the view that women tend to cross party lines to build legislative consensus more frequently than men. In a recent article in the American Journal of Political Science, “When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?.” the authors found, for example, that the dynamic tends to favor women in the minority party. In particular, the study found “while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies.”

The study found that over the course of 30 years in the House, minority party women were better able to keep their sponsored bills alive in later stages than minority party men, largely by keeping the focus on the underlying policy goal over politics.

Women have also focused on legislation that men do not typically consider, like financial security for women, an issue championed by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Texas Republican who retired in January. The seven women now serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee have begun to push their priorities, including efforts to prevent and adjudicate sexual assault in the military as well as to open combat jobs to women.

The Senate women have frequently come together on child care and family health legislative issues. During the reauthorization of a bill to finance the military last year, Ms. Gillibrand went to the floor with an amendment to expand coverage for beneficiaries’ children who have autism and other developmental disabilities, financed by a $45 million, one-year payment out of an existing military budget line.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, went to the floor to argue vociferously against the cost of the measure, but it passed, with every female senator voting in the affirmative. “I supported it,” said Ms. Ayotte, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, who has little in common politically with Ms. Gillibrand.

The fragile road of the Senate sisterhood, however, has been laboriously paved one brick at a time. Of the 44 women who have served in the United States Senate, many began as short-term appointees who filled out a dead husband’s term, and often did so as the only women in the chamber.

After Mrs. Felton’s brief sojourn through the Senate in 1922, Hattie Caraway, an Arkansas Democrat, became the first woman to truly serve. Appointed to the Senate in 1931 after the sudden death of her husband, Ms. Caraway shocked her state and party by running in the general election the following year. “She was expected to go back to be the widow from Arkansas,” said Betty K. Koed, the associate historian for the Senate. She won, and kept her seat until 1945.

Next came Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican who served nearly five terms in the House before winning her Senate seat in 1948, a spot she held for 24 years. The occasional woman continued to get elected, including Ms. Mikulski, who arrived in 1987 and in 2012 became the longest-serving woman in Congressional history. (She has served 26 years in the Senate and 10 in the House.)

In 1992, known as “The Year of the Woman,” the election increased the number of women in the Senate to seven from two.

Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is now chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was elected that year, as was another California Democrat, Barbara Boxer.

The male senators vacillated between relief — the chamber was crawling out from its antediluvian state — and fear. “When we first got here they were like, ‘What are we going to do with all these women?’” Ms. Murray recalled. “There was a huge fear, though it was never stated: ‘Would these women be bomb throwers or legislators?’”

They had come to work, although it took some convincing. “When I started out it was an absolute disadvantage to be a woman,” Ms. Boxer said. “You had to prove you understood numbers, that you understood history.”

Some were also visibly balancing work and home, although today Ms. Gillibrand and Ms. Ayotte are the only female members with small children.

While Senator Caraway once noted that a run in her stocking “would make headlines,” women today are more likely to draw attention for their legislation. But Ms. Klobuchar remembers that after six months in the Senate, a male senator — she will not say who — stepped into a “Senators Only” elevator, took a look at her and asked what she was doing there.

After the aide with Ms. Klobuchar told the man that Ms. Klobuchar was, in fact, a senator, Ms. Klobuchar looked her male counterpart straight in the eye and said, “But who are you?”

[BonosSaint]

A woman is worth less than a nonviable fetus, I guess.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 19, 2013
Irish Jury Finds Poor Care in Death of Woman Denied AbortionBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DUBLIN (AP) — An Irish jury on Friday found that poor medical care led to the death of an Indian woman who was denied an emergency abortion while she was having a miscarriage.

The jury ruled after a two-week coroner’s inquest into the death of the woman, Savita Halappanavar, at University Hospital Galway in western Ireland on Oct. 28.

The six-man, five-woman jury agreed that Ms. Halappanavar, 31, died from “medical misadventure” involving the failure of the hospital’s staff to identify, document or address her development of blood poisoning. Ms. Halappanavar’s husband, Praveen, said the hospital staff refused to give his wife an abortion even though her fetus had no chance of survival, citing the country’s Roman Catholic social policies against abortions.

The staff waited three days until the 17-week-old fetus had died. By then Ms. Halappanavar was in an advanced state of septicemia, and she died four days later.

The six-man, five-woman jury ruled that Ms. Halappanavar, who was a dentist, died from “medical misadventure,” meaning incompetence in her care.

At the conclusion of his fact-finding inquiry, the Galway coroner, Dr. Ciaran MacLoughlin, praised Mr. Halappanavar for his courage in protesting publicly against his wife’s medical care at the hospital, where doctors had refused to perform a termination while the fetus had a heartbeat.

Outside the courtroom, Mr. Halappanavar said legal action would continue to try to hold particular staff members responsible for his wife’s death. He said the hospital’s inaction for several days while his wife’s health deteriorated during a drawn-out, painful miscarriage meant she might as well have stayed at home.

“They could have intervened right from Day 1 because they knew the fetus was inviable, so why wait?” he said, adding that the testimony had pinned down systemwide failures but no personal responsibility.

The case highlighted a two-decade problem in Ireland’s abortion law. A 1992 Supreme Court ruling declared that abortions deemed necessary to save a woman’s life must be legal, but successive governments have refused to pass any law to support the ruling, fearful of voter backlash in a nation where Catholicism remains the dominant faith. With the Constitution containing a blanket ban on abortions, doctors remain fearful of prosecution on murder charges if they perform a termination.

The government of Prime Minister Enda Kenny has pledged to pass a law by July, with related medical guidelines, that defines when lifesaving abortions can be given. But Mr. Kenny’s own party is split down the middle, with Catholic conservatives pledging to vote against the measure amid lobbying by church leaders.

Dr. MacLoughlin, the coroner, published eight recommendations for the hospital to improve how it records and shares patient information among staff members, and monitors the risk of infections and blood poisoning in patients.

His other recommendation was for the national Medical Council to publish guidelines defining the exact circumstances when an abortion can be performed to save the life of the mother. These guidelines, long sought by Ireland’s maternity hospitals, “would remove doubt and fear from the doctor and also reassure the public,” he said.

[MrsSpringsteen]

Too bad they're in such an incompetent entity. Makes me wonder what kind of progress that really is.

I meant that about the Senate article obviously, thought you just posted that but I guess you did yesterday.

[Pearl]

medical misadventure - like it was no big deal.

But I believe Savita will get her justice someday. It may take a long time, but Ireland will eventually lighten up on its abortion policy. I don't think it will keep its laws forever.

[jeevey]

Originally Posted by Pearl

Yikes, I guess I'm making a mistake being reluctant to call myself a feminist

Well, I guess this is a good time to start?

If you believe that women should have social, political, personal and economic autonomy equal to men's, you're a feminist. That's all that it is.

[BonosSaint]

[QUOTE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 24, 2013
Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female NovelistsBy AMANDA FILIPACCHI
I JUST noticed something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.

The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men. The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of “American Novelists” is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible.

Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for “American Men Novelists.”

People who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of “American Novelists” for inspiration, might not even notice that the first page of it includes far more men than women. They might simply use that list without thinking twice about it. It’s probably small, easily fixable things like this that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world.

Here’s the page on American Novelists, if you’re curious to take a look:

Category:American novelists - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And here’s the page on American Women Novelists:

Category:American women novelists - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I looked up a few female novelists. You can see the categories they’re in at the bottom of their pages. It appears that many female novelists, like Harper Lee, Anne Rice, Amy Tan, Donna Tartt and some 300 others, have been relegated to the ranks of “American Women Novelists” only, and no longer appear in the category “American Novelists.” If you look back in the “history” of these women’s pages, you can see that they used to appear in the category “American Novelists,” but that they were recently bumped down. Male novelists on Wikipedia, however — no matter how small or obscure they are — all get to be in the category “American Novelists.” It seems as though no one noticed.

I did more investigating and found other familiar names that had been switched from the “American Novelists” to the “American Women Novelists” category: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ayn Rand, Ann Beattie, Djuna Barnes, Emily Barton, Jennifer Belle, Aimee Bender, Amy Bloom, Judy Blume, Alice Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V. C. Andrews, Mary Higgins Clark — and, upsetting to me: myself.

Some lucky female novelists, mostly the ones who are further down in the alphabet, haven’t been gotten to yet and are still in the big category “American Novelists.” Some are in both categories. But probably not for long.

I also noticed that Edwidge Danticat was plucked from “Haitian Novelists” and dumped into “Haitian Women Novelists.” So it seems, at least, that women from different countries are treated the same. It’s just too bad they’re not treated the same as men.

I belong to an e-mail group of published female writers called WOM (it stands for Word of Mouth). Some of the members are extremely well known. On Tuesday morning, when I made my discovery of this sexism on Wikipedia, I sent them an e-mail about it. I have since then been deluged with scandalized responses from these female authors. Word is spreading at a phenomenal rate, on Facebook and elsewhere. Already, changes are being made to the category “American Novelists.” A couple of female authors have started appearing on the first page, when yesterday there were only men.

Wikipedia is created and edited by its users. Hopefully, those users are starting to get the point.

Amanda Filipacchi is the author of the novels “Nude Men,” “Vapor” and “Love Creeps.” She is finishing a new novel.

][/QUOTE]

Sigh.

Kind of reminds me when Limbaugh talks about a woman's job, he assigns her a diminuitive like "reporterette". I can take that with a sense of snarky humor. It is amazingly pervasive though to assign women to a subcategory, to a diminuitive of one sort or another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/op...gewanted=print

[BonosSaint]

April 24, 2013
Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female NovelistsBy AMANDA FILIPACCHI
I JUST noticed something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.

The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men. The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of “American Novelists” is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible.

Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for “American Men Novelists.”

People who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of “American Novelists” for inspiration, might not even notice that the first page of it includes far more men than women. They might simply use that list without thinking twice about it. It’s probably small, easily fixable things like this that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world.

Here’s the page on American Novelists, if you’re curious to take a look:

Category:American novelists - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And here’s the page on American Women Novelists:

Category:American women novelists - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I looked up a few female novelists. You can see the categories they’re in at the bottom of their pages. It appears that many female novelists, like Harper Lee, Anne Rice, Amy Tan, Donna Tartt and some 300 others, have been relegated to the ranks of “American Women Novelists” only, and no longer appear in the category “American Novelists.” If you look back in the “history” of these women’s pages, you can see that they used to appear in the category “American Novelists,” but that they were recently bumped down. Male novelists on Wikipedia, however — no matter how small or obscure they are — all get to be in the category “American Novelists.” It seems as though no one noticed.

I did more investigating and found other familiar names that had been switched from the “American Novelists” to the “American Women Novelists” category: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ayn Rand, Ann Beattie, Djuna Barnes, Emily Barton, Jennifer Belle, Aimee Bender, Amy Bloom, Judy Blume, Alice Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V. C. Andrews, Mary Higgins Clark — and, upsetting to me: myself.

Some lucky female novelists, mostly the ones who are further down in the alphabet, haven’t been gotten to yet and are still in the big category “American Novelists.” Some are in both categories. But probably not for long.

I also noticed that Edwidge Danticat was plucked from “Haitian Novelists” and dumped into “Haitian Women Novelists.” So it seems, at least, that women from different countries are treated the same. It’s just too bad they’re not treated the same as men.

I belong to an e-mail group of published female writers called WOM (it stands for Word of Mouth). Some of the members are extremely well known. On Tuesday morning, when I made my discovery of this sexism on Wikipedia, I sent them an e-mail about it. I have since then been deluged with scandalized responses from these female authors. Word is spreading at a phenomenal rate, on Facebook and elsewhere. Already, changes are being made to the category “American Novelists.” A couple of female authors have started appearing on the first page, when yesterday there were only men.

Wikipedia is created and edited by its users. Hopefully, those users are starting to get the point.

Amanda Filipacchi is the author of the novels “Nude Men,” “Vapor” and “Love Creeps.” She is finishing a new novel.

]

Sigh.

Kind of reminds me when Limbaugh talks about a woman's job, he assigns her a diminuitive like "reporterette". I can take that with a sense of snarky humor. It is amazingly pervasive though to assign women to a subcategory, to a diminuitive of one sort or another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/op...gewanted=print[/QUOTE]

Reminds me when Limbaugh talks about a woman's job in the diminuitive like reporterette, etc. I kind take that with a kind of snarky humor. I see its purpose. But the pervasiveness of putting women in subcategories as if the word novelist does not include women without the identifier--there are writers and then there are women writers-- does succeed in a diminished impression.

[anitram]

I don't know when they started making that distinction but it's like how they now have girl versions of things that girls have long enjoyed and never needed a separate identifying category. Lego for girls (WTF), Kinder Eggs for girls (double WTF).

[Irvine511]

Amazon.com: BIC Cristal For Her Ball Pen, 1.0mm, Black, 16ct (MSLP16-Blk): Office Products

Someone has answered my gentle prayers and FINALLY designed a pen that I can use all month long! I use it when I'm swimming, riding a horse, walking on the beach and doing yoga. It's comfortable, leak-proof, non-slip and it makes me feel so feminine and pretty! Since I've begun using these pens, men have found me more attractive and approchable. It has given me soft skin and manageable hair and it has really given me the self-esteem I needed to start a book club and flirt with the bag-boy at my local market. My drawings of kittens and ponies have improved, and now that I'm writing my last name hyphenated with the Robert Pattinson's last name, I really believe he may some day marry me! I'm positively giddy. Those smart men in marketing have come up with a pen that my lady parts can really identify with.

[BonosSaint]

^So true. How exciting.


PS As you can see, I had a bitch of a time posting that article. (Lunch was ending and I kept losing my post. So now there are duplicates all over the place. I obviously didn't proof that. )