women's struggles

Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons

admin — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

“Sometimes, I think they forget the women.” One seemingly simple statement at the start of this book—spoken by the chief librarian for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction—serves to explain the importance of a text like Reading Is My Window. What began for Megan Sweeney as a dissertation on prisoners’ relationships with true crime books evolved into a years-long study of analyzing the reading patterns of the occupants of several women’s prisons across the country.

In addition to conducting 245 individual interviews with female prisoners, Sweeney also facilitated fifty-one book group discussions. The interviews and interactions with the prisoners make up at least half of the book, so by the second chapter, you’ll find yourself engaging with the prisoners and their individual stories of mental, physical, and sexual abuse, along with drug use. The stories that emerge from these interviews and discussions offer a fascinating insight into how the women manage to regain a kind of humanity through reading while residing in an institution determined to dehumanize them. Solo, Monique, and Denise are among the many who will stay with you long after the last page, and rather than pitying them, Sweeney’s nuanced descriptions of each prisoner’s personality helps you understand that they are actively making their world better through reading, even if their world will never interact with the one outside the prison walls.

Sweeney structures her study through the investigation of three specific genres: urban fiction, narratives of victimization, and self-help books. She also examines the aspect of community building through prison book clubs, and the material comfort that comes from the mere act of holding a book—something that we in the free world take for granted. While those topics make Reading Is My Window an interesting and provocative read, the excerpted interviews are what take the book out of being purely academic and ground it in the personal.

Far too often, it is easy to do just what the chief librarian from Ohio said: forget the women. Prisoners are already a population of people that we often turn away from, so when the modifier of “woman” (and often “African American”) is added to that, remembering them as people who have worth becomes even less of a priority. By telling these women’s stories and taking them out of the institution, Sweeney takes the first step in driving home the point that if we forget these women, we may as well forget ourselves.

Reading Is My Window serves as a call to action. Sweeney spares no detail in describing the shoddy state of penal library systems, pointing out that many prison administrations see books as rewards for good behavior rather than necessary tools for prisoner rehabilitation. It’s safe to say that, after reading this book, you’ll want to consult the list of organizations that provide books to prisoners Sweeney includes at the end of the book to see how you can help advance the worthy cause of prison literacy.

Written by: Alyssa Vincent, April 24th 2010

Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Hester Eisenstein

Paradigm Publishers

I have been waiting for a book to tell me how things went wrong, how we ended up with lady cops and mothers in combat zones, how “feminist” became an insult. Did we women do it to ourselves, or were we pushed? Hester Eisenstein, professor of sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, has offered Feminism Seduced, which, as promised and despite its flaws, does map elements of the neoliberal project to some “feminist” initiatives, but it is not the book I have been wanting, the one that explains, not so much the academically popular theory of “recuperation,” but how the radical women might have kept the momentum of the women’s movement going and in the right direction.

Let’s get the most obvious major flaw of the book out of the way: the near total omission of lesbian-feminism, a powerful influence in the radical wing of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Though it is like blaming a reporter for the headline on her story to blame Eisenstein for the judgments of her indexer, the lack of an index entry for lesbianism reflects the extreme once-over-lightly she gives to the historical role of this feminist tendency, which cannot be subsumed under “queer theory” or dismissed with “conflicts over suppression of lesbian influence... eventually faded.”

Eisenstein’s nuanced concern about the limitations of the “women of color” construct apparently does not extend to the inability of the category “GLBT” to comfortably incorporate Rita Mae Brown’s “woman-identified woman.” This is a glaring oversight from an author who rightfully chastises a movement which often alienated women of color and working-class women.

Eisenstein’s argument or rather arguments are directed, she insists, mostly at hegemonic, state feminism (an approved version of reform feminism). She views feminism as driving out what she calls “labor feminism,” the initiatives for women within the labor movement that resulted in laws protecting women. Essentially she argues that women’s demands for wage equality, while benefiting professional women, put working- and lower-middle class women into poorly paid service jobs and undermined the expectation of a “family wage.” These feminist demands served to facilitate more direct anti-union activities begun by big business at the same time. (She seems less interested in the exclusion of women from trade unions in the higher paying blue-collar occupations like plumbing and carpentry.)

Moreover, feminist emphasis on paid labor undermined women’s work in the home and thus “welfare” programs. On a global level, feminism linked with modernity destroyed traditional societies and allowed access to markets to the forces of globalization, by focusing on such issues as “genital cutting,” which Eisenstein comes close to defending. She charges that the empowerment of individual Third World women through measures such as microfinance has taken the place of state-led development. She then recounts the use of feminist ideology in the promotion of imperialist initiatives, such as President George W. Bush crowing about liberating the women of Afghanistan from Taliban oppression, and in encouragement of Islamophobia.

The author presents a not entirely trustworthy account of feminist history and its continuance in women’s studies and a fairly standard leftist rendition of the neoliberal project—a lot of ground to cover. The reader is left to piece together her thesis from topic-based chapters that operate as silos, disrupting both the narrative history and the argument—without the aid of a Venn diagram.

In the end, she presents a post hoc analysis that stops short of proving her case against even mainstream feminism. Her solutions—maternalism, a socialist state, ACORN, and the California Nurses Association—seem neither particularly feminist nor radical. Perhaps that feminism is best that doesn’t take a gendered view of all the evils of the world but rather gives women the power of agency to uproot them.

Written by: Frances Chapman, April 9th 2010

Women, Gender and Disaster: Global Issues and Initiatives

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:02:00 +0000

Edited by Elaine Enarson, P.G. Dhar Chakrabarti

Sage Publications

Women, Gender and Disaster provides a comprehensive overview of the role gender plays in various disaster situations. Case studies and essays are divided into four parts—Understanding Gender Relations in Disaster, Gendered Challenges and Responses in Disasters, Women's Organised Initiatives, and Gender-Sensitive Disaster Risk Reduction—to further develop the myriad of issues within gender and disaster. Women, Gender and Disaster brings together cross-cultural and grassroots perspectives on both response and reduction, examining what is being done now and what could be done in the future.

While the 380 page book does not keep the reader at the edge of her seat wondering what will happen next, it does provide several concrete examples and contexts that illustrate the importance of maintaining an awareness of gender in preparing for, during, and after disaster situations. The book gives important case studies and examples for those working in the disaster management field, policy makers, academics, and students alike.

In a forward by Salvano Briceno, the Director of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, he discusses the expected rise in disasters in the coming years. Briceno also highlights the fact that women and men are affected differently by disasters, and suggests that Women, Gender and Disaster be used as a movement. While it is difficult to make a movement out of stagnant words, the stories, themes, and lessons learned from the case studies prove to be intertwined and interdependent, prompting even myself, a mere novice when it comes to disaster-risk management, to learn more.

Beginning with a foundational analysis, part one looks at gender and how it is differentiated from sex and sexuality. In addition, gender is examined with relation to sustainable development, and a history of conferences and workshops is provided to give the reader a greater understanding of the context. Part two looks at specific challenges, drawing from various case studies including, but not limited to: Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua, floods in New Zealand, and Hurricane Katrina in the US. Part three focuses on specific initiatives by women’s groups. One author looks at peer learning in the aftermath of earthquakes in both Turkey and India. A case study of India’s Self Employed Women’s Association is also used to show the evolution of women responding to disasters. Part four takes a closer look at theoretical and operational concerns by examining three case studies and providing two action plans for mainstreaming gender in disaster risk management.

While Women, Gender and Disaster explicitly discusses women and gender, there is still more to be explored. A comprehensive study of power dynamics within disaster, going beyond the gendered dichotomy of male and female, and taking into account socioeconomic status, race, caste, and other overlapping systems of domination could greatly contribute to examining disaster with a truly feminist lens.

Written by: Lakshmi Saracino, March 3rd 2010

Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy

admin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:06:00 +0000

Directed by Renee Bergan, Mark Schuller

Documentary Educational Resources

The opening shots in Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy, a fifty-minute documentary narrated by Edwidge Danticat, reveal an island paradise: turquoise waters, green hills, beautiful, and colorful flowers. But these scenes don’t last long.

Almost immediately, we’re introduced to numerous working-class and poor women, nicknamed poto mitan, Creole for the pillar around which everything revolves. Their stories range from the heartbreaking to the enraging as one after another they describe the poverty that keeps them and their offspring from fulfilling their dreams.

Viewers will see incredible penury—large families crammed into tiny tin-roofed shacks—as well as miserable filth caused by infrequent garbage pick-ups. Graffiti in English and Creole spells out the community’s rage: People are Dying; Fuck You, UN, Go Home. The latter refers to the United Nations’ “Stabilizing Mission,” on the island since 2004 ostensibly to protect human rights and, according to a UN website, “restore a secure and stable environment” to the nation. That this has been an abysmal failure goes without saying.

While the film could have more clearly explained the UN’s purported function, and better describe the role of the World Bank and the neoliberal economic policies that have stifled Haitian development, the film’s focus on the women most impacted by the current social crisis is effective.

What’s more, the film assesses the pervasive sexism that continues to undervalue female children and adult women. As local lore has it, why send a girl to school when her life will involve nothing more than cooking and cleaning? What use is a “kitchen scholar?”

Marie-Jeanne, one of the women interviewed in the film, explains that while sexism is a factor for some people, her decision to keep her child out of school is purely financial. On a salary of $1.75 a day, she says that she cannot afford the $15 monthly school enrollment fee. The decision is obvious: When the choice is between food and education, the latter loses.

Another woman, unemployed since her factory closed in 2006, goes even further. “Misery and poverty facilitate violence. Anyone can get involved in crime. Anyone can become a thief.”

Dozens of people add their voices to the mix. Some describe whole families being forced to migrate to the capital city of Port-au-Prince because of ever-worsening conditions in the countryside; others reveal that they involuntarily forgo medical care for treatable diseases; and still others tell horrifying accounts of children dying of dehydration and hunger.

But there are small glimmers of hope. At the film’s conclusion, the viewers meet members of the Women’s Vigilance Committee (WVC), an organization that teaches female workers their rights and campaigns against violence. The WVC has also organized International Women’s Day celebrations, as well as marches and protests. As one WVC leader explains, “Women, if we don’t speak up, no one will speak up for us.”

Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. But as Camille, another interview subject, explains, “Haitians are not starving because of lack of food.” Haitians are starving because of inept political leadership, ignorance, and preventable poverty.

Knowing this is the first step. From there, action is inevitable.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, November 13th 2009