Dianne Post

No Excuses: Nine Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power

beth — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:00:00 +0000

When I heard Gloria Feldt being interviewed on NPR, I thought I might have some problems with No Excuses, so I asked to review it and follow up with a telephone interview of Feldt. When I read the book, my first impression was confirmed. After an hour interview with Feldt, who I had met previously in Arizona, she seemed such a nice, genuine person concerned for women that I was torn about what to do with the review. I reread the book and got upset all over again. Feminism, like quarks, comes in many colors. My working class background and grassroots perspective has colored my response.

Feldt’s main theme is that the women’s movement is stuck, and it’s our own fault because we resist using the power we have. She argues that all formal laws and barriers have fallen and only social norms and self-limitation hold us back. She insists that because of the economic collapse, now is the time, because women will be tapped to clean up the mess made by men. But rather than charging forward, we are stepping back yet again.

In the interview, Feldt supported her belief that the world wants women by pointing out that management studies from Ernst and Young have found that companies with a higher percentage of women in management function more efficiently and have a higher return in the market. The World Bank analyzed the results of parliaments that have 30% or more of women and found that they make better decisions. But in counterpoint, the number of people in slavery, many of them women and many in the U.S., is higher now than it was at the height of the Black slave trade. The U.S. now has the largest gap between the rich and the poor. Poor women are driven into prostitution, domestic work, or sweatshops to feed their children.

While Feldt is clear that she is only talking about the U.S., international trends also do not support her conclusions. The just released report, The Authoritarian Challenge to Democracy: Selected Data from Freedom House’s Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, found that in 2010, twenty-five countries exhibited declines in freedom and only eleven showed gains. Both Mexico and Ukraine dropped from Free to Partly Free. The number of countries designated as Free dropped from eighty-nine to eighty-seven, the number of electoral democracies dropped from 116 to 115, the worst since 1995. In 2005, the number was 123. The Middle East and North Africa regions that have been the focus of democratic reform declined even further from an already low democratic baseline.

The author encourages women to make one last push for equality to get us over the finish line. But in discussion, she admitted that one final push will not solve every problem and cannot create complete equality. The 2010 election that was to be yet another “year of the woman” resulted in fewer and more conservative women in Congress. But she believes a final push will lead to greater equality and that will be a profound shift in human rights and justice.

She wrote the book because political changes and society transformations are complicated, and people do not make the connection between theory and action, laws and reality. Those dots have to be connected over and over again, so the “push” does not mean an end, but a beginning starting from a different place. The “push” does not include quotas that have been credited the world over with creating more gender balanced governing bodies. She believes that the politics are such in the U.S. that it would be an unlikely fight to win today. Since she believes that almost all of the legal barriers and many of the policy barriers have been eliminated, if women decided to seek parity, and took action, they could achieve it in ten to twenty years.

Certainly, Feldt is correct that women should redefine the use of power in a non-abusive way. Models of that approach are outlined in the book. The problems of co-optation and internal barriers are discussed. The essentials necessary to embrace her philosophy—money and control over our own bodies—are however, both in short supply. The “power tools” she sprinkles throughout the book read a bit “New Agey” until the end of the book where they are given more in-depth analysis. Many of her slogans are old wine in new bottles without attribution to earlier feminists whose shoulders she stands on. Practical methods are not mentioned such as union organizing or fighting for quotas in political parties. In the “tool section,” she encourages women to smile, but in fact, smiling is counter-indicated. In December 2010, Stanford business school professor Deborah Gruenfeld recommended that women stop all the smiling. “Women give away power all the time, by smiling or looking away when they are saying something authoritative.” In the finale, Feldt argues that to re-ignite the movement, we should be courageous sisters and support other women.

“Equal rights for the sexes will be achieved when mediocre women occupy high positions,” said Francoise Giroud (1916-2003), as quoted in the 2006 SheSource article, “The Glass Ceiling in Media: Think the glass ceiling is gone—or just an outdated metaphor? Think again” by Tekla Szymanski. Women have to perform to be promoted; men only have to have potential and connections. The article outlines the dismal state of women in commercial media. Even in media that focus mainly on “women’s issues,” only 28% of the publishers and 50% of the executive and senior editors are female.

In that article, Feldt is quoted, “One reason the glass ceiling remains strong in broadcast and newspapers is media consolidation, which squeezes out positions at the top and in mid-management, where women might have been in the pipeline to advance...When resources are scarce, the old boys' network closes ranks and chooses leaders it feels most comfortable with—those most like themselves.” This statement is counter to her argument in the book that there is no glass ceiling, only a sticky floor.

Gail Evans, CNN’s first female executive vice president is quoted in the same article saying that women need to learn to play the game, and that we buy into the same stereotypes: “Women take care—and men take charge. Women have to start supporting each other. Their success is connected. Women think it’s all about “I can do it.” They think that, “if I try hard, it’ll change.” We have to go from “I can do it,” which gives isolated success to, “We can do it.””

I’m left confused. On the one hand, we are told (and Feldt says in the book) that women need to stop putting everyone else first. On the other hand, we are told that women tend to go it alone and should support their sisters. On one hand, we are told that women managers do better because we are more collaborative, but on the other hand, we are told that women think in terms of I not we. Which is it?

While I certainly agree with Feldt that women need to re-think their attitude toward power, no reason except the economic collapse explains why now is the time for women. The same people who caused the crash are still at the top in Obama’s government, at Harvard, and at Goldman Sachs. The CEO of GM that went bankrupt is now in charge of a job creation committee. The massive grassroots movement in support of Elizabeth Warren was not enough to have her appointed to the new consumer watchdog agency. Those in charge have no intention of turning over the reins. A woman warned us of the financial collapse. They didn’t listen. A woman warned us about 9/11. They didn’t listen. They may send in women to clean up their mess, but then they will send them back home again. The vicious attacks on Hillary Clinton during the primary should remind us of the fear of women that still lurks in the hearts of men.

As a lawyer, I cannot understand the claim that no laws or barriers exist. The book itself gives many examples of the laws and barriers, the facts and the acts, that still stand in our way. She acknowledges that the hardest barriers are the ones inside our head, describes her own struggles to escape the negative messages and admits that it took her well into her adult life to free herself, but yet she chastises young women as if she expects them to know so much more than we did at that age. She repeatedly disproves her own statements and doesn’t seem to notice.

As a long-time advocate for battered women, I was especially troubled by a description of the domineering, coercive, and controlling behavior by Claire Bloom’s husband Philip Roth that resulted in Bloom sending her daughter away. Feldt characterizes this as voluntary, which is a failure to understand the dynamics of domestic violence and coercive control. I asked about this in the interview and she answered that Claire Bloom was not a woman who needed to opt for the man over the child because she had means, talent, and networks. Coercive control happens to women who are rich and famous as much, or in some studies even more, than to women who are poor and unknown. The means, talents, or networks of women do not insulate them from male violence and control. In fact, it often means they have more to lose if they escape and keeps them locked in.

If the book is written for a specific group of women, “…for those of us who count ourselves among the lucky ones, the time for excuses is over…” I concur, because I too have little sympathy for women with money and power who turn their backs on other women. But if she meant it for all women, then I have a problem with the blaming and shaming that lies behind the words. The focus on the lucky ones should have been made clear from the beginning, otherwise the book reads a lot like blaming the victim.

Feldt both agreed and disagreed with my analysis. She agreed that the privileged women are the ones who have been able to be the leading edge in a formal way and have been able to get their message to the public. While that is commonly said, the new movie Made in Dagenham reminiscent of Norma Rae shows the tremendous impact made by working class women.

The author did have certain expectations that the book would resonate with our generation (we are about the same age) and the young feminists, but did not expect it to resonate as well as it has with the entrepreneurs who often don’t belong to any formal groups and wouldn’t call themselves feminists or with the young women who are the first in their family to graduate from high school or college. In the first six months since the release of the book, she believes it has resonated with the lower SES group and the acceptance of the message has been a great joy to her. One thing is clear, women need to be leaders. The leader, according to Feldt, is not necessarily the CEO but the person who gets things done.

The author had planned to write another book about women’s relationship with sex, but the unexpected success of this book has derailed that for a while. The book has taken on an unanticipated life. It’s being used in women’s studies, seminars, and she’s been asked to do a webinar. So for the short term, she’ll be working with the themes of the book perhaps putting her nine power tools into specific workshop formats to concretize them, which would be useful. On her bucket list, she has many more books to write and steps to take into women’s future of equality.

Written by: Dianne Post, February 22nd 2011

Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico

mandy — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Monica Diaz

University of Arizona Press

After the Spanish invasion of Mexico, the invaders converted the existing noble class of Indians to Catholicism so that the church could regulate the lives of its subjects and help the Spanish colonial administration. The noble class in colonial Mexico had special status and though never equal to the Spanish, they sometimes allied with them against the indigenous people. The nobles wanted to maintain their status and property, they had education and language, and the Spanish wanted to use them as intermediaries to govern the natives. Women lost power and authority under Spanish rule, but noble women tried to maintain their place, at least in the convent.

Many nobles quickly converted to the Catholic religion but women were unable to enter convents except as servants until 1724 when a convent was established specifically for noble indigenous women. Their lives were even more restricted than the Spanish nuns, and their regime in the convent resembles torture more than worship. Monica Diaz, author of Indigenous Writings from the Convent, argues that the women maintained their identity as Indians and nobles by defining themselves in opposition to the Spanish nuns, and when the Indian convent was threatened by allowing Spanish nuns to enter, the noble indigenous women used the tools of language that the colonial system had given them to their advantage.

The author’s stated intent was to focus on the structure of discourse and the agency of the Indian nuns during the battle to keep the convent for Indians. The nobles relied on the colonial focus of “otherness” that had been used to discriminate against them, to argue that the convent should exclude Spanish nuns, a separate but equal argument, but of course they weren’t equal. The argument put the church into a tough spot to claim on the one hand that the Indians were capable of being nuns but on the other hand that they were incapable of running their own convent. The church wanted to minimize the antagonism, because they wanted to continue to control the women and manipulate them as a model minority. Because the church insisted on hierarchy and ethnic difference, the Indian women could use those same arguments to their benefit.

Diaz compared the writings of nuns and priests to show how the priests re-wrote the women’s work and published it without attribution. However, few writings by noble Indians existed so most of the data was from Spanish nuns. A chapter about sermon writing illustrated that when priests talked about Indian nuns, they eliminated any personal history and portrayed their good behavior as a miracle and their main positive attribute as obedience.

Because the noble Indians could write in the style of the oppressor, the author argued that they had agency other indigenous women did not have. According to Diaz, they knew how to create and manipulate alliances, they understood hierarchy and power struggles, and they used this to defend the Indian-only convent. She claims that the elites found a way to maintain their political autonomy by creating a place in the new religious order. The point of the book is that the noble women adapted to new reality but maintained an Indian identity. Since few writings of the noble Indians survived, the sample is quite small and the author’s assumptions and deductions are not fully supported. Whether the actions of the women were positive agency or defensive survival and whether they maintained their Indian heritage is questionable. As with most academic books, one must stumble over the style of writing and use of words.

Written by: Dianne Post, February 16th 2011

Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France

mandy — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Christine Adams

University of Illinois Press

The Society for Maternal Charity, a women-run organization, survived more than one hundred years through wars, revolutions, and changes of government. The group began because the large numbers of foundlings, abandoned due to poverty, were not only expensive for the State but had a very high mortality rate. The women’s societies were viewed as better bargains than orphanages and an extension of the women’s domestic sphere. Besides, France needed population for cannon fodder in its many wars.

The same dichotomous themes marked the Society’s growth and demise as we see today: rich/poor, government/private, national/local, stay-at-home/working mothers, male/female, and resentment by the poor/blindness of the rich. The same hot button questions existed in the nineteenth century: the worthy poor versus the lazy hordes, married women versus single tarts, breastfeeding versus wet nurses, the question of whether women were positive influences in society to “clean up” messes and women as children.

Even after the French Revolution, women remained barred from politics and civic affairs. But from participation in these organizations, they gained valuable skills and leadership training. Many of the societies had large budgets and staff giving the women executive experience. The Society raised money, lobbied politicians, and ran formidable businesses. These women from the elite classes proved that women could do hard work by going into ghettos and experiencing situations they had never imagined, let alone encountered.

These groups originated many business principles that today we consider basic: accountability by detailed financial statements, transparency by annual published reports, and maintaining minutes of meetings. They understood that often the husband’s interests didn’t align with the wife’s, and thus they gave the aid directly to the woman. Today, it is axiomatic in international aid that assistance should go to women, because they will spend it on the family while men may not.

The Society was eventually brought down by a perception that they were enforcing religious doctrine by insisting that the women have a religious marriage and enforcing morals such as that the recipients breastfeed and be “proper” women. The Society as a whole was faulted for relying on these religious precepts, though less than fifty percent of the organizations held these beliefs. Yet, the issue of the deserving versus undeserving poor is based on the impact of religion in political affairs. In reverse, the Bush Administration deliberately favored faith-based charities, as doing the job that government should not.

As France became more secular and organized, they recognized the potential power of civic organizations and tried to rein them in. They created model statutes and bylaws and required the Society to adopt them. When the Society refused, the funding stopped and the Society died.

Prior to the welfare state, all assistance was charity. States still question if it is a duty to provide for the poor. By demanding money from the state, the Society made the point that the State had responsibility to care for the poor. Christine Adams, the author of Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood, claims that these societies are the reason that France, as most of the European Union, has a much better welfare state with specific provisions for pregnant women and families, more generous vacations, health care, paternity leaves, etc. The women’s Societies, women’s work, should be given due credit.

Written by: Dianne Post, December 31st 2010

Dream of Ding Village

caitlin — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Yan Lianke

Grove Press

Grandfather Ding is the patriarch of the family that founded Ding Village. He dreams of a world that sometimes comes true and sometimes should but doesn't. Both of his sons are ne’er-do-wells, one a crooked, arrogant man who becomes a high level Communist cadre with boatloads of money, the other a layabout who makes nothing of his life. The older son makes his money from being a “blood head," a man who buys and sells blood in the rural communities and ultimately infects an entire Chinese province with AIDS through contaminated blood. As the community dies, the son creates more and more abusive schemes to increase his wealth and moves to an opulent house in the city.

Villagers sell their blood to buy things like a particular brand of shampoo. In the end, all monies are invested in death—buying a casket—and the grandeur of death becomes far more enticing than the reality of living. The future is sold off for the past by blind followers of corrupt leaders.

The grandfather at first follows the directives of the party as much as his son, only he achieves its goals through more humane means: by convincing the citizens it is good for them. Is this better? Does it make his manipulation any less blameworthy? A benign dictator is still a dictator, and is perhaps even worse than an outright hostile one, because the victim doesn’t even know what he's lost and has no way to fight back against an unidentifiable enemy.

Grandfather Ding makes two unsuccessful attempts to convince his son to take responsibility. The more he tries to do good, the worse it gets for him. As the village descends into Lord of the Flies savagery, the one story of true love does nothing to soften the blow. It’s all about money. The grandfather is left with no options to combat evil but a final act of desperation.

While this is a critique of communism, it might as well also be of the U.S. since the “trickle-down” eighties, the “me” nineties, and the “never ending war” of the naughts. At the core of any concentration of power—call it communism or capitalism, patriarchy or religion—is corruption and greed.

The book alternates between the dream states of the grandfather, as told by his dead grandson, and the waking nightmare of a dying village and the shame of his own family. The family conflict illustrates the counterpoint of the extremes of wealth and poverty and the struggle between power and humanity, problems faced in the contemporary U.S. as well as China. The author uses repetition as a rhetorical tool to emphasize the cyclical nature of these problems, but sometimes he uses it too much. Overall, though, the writing is lyrical and often beautiful, with vivid descriptions of the living conditions of rural China.

The village dries up and dies as the people do, and the corrupt son continues to accumulate wealth off the misery of others—in his case blood, death, marriage in the afterlife (in the case of the U.S.—disease, wars, private prisons). The son convinces himself he’s a philanthropist. The father, a janitor, convinces himself he's a professor. What’s real? When is a dream true?

Written by: Dianne Post, December 5th 2010

Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference

annette — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Kamala Visweswaran

Duke University Press

In a book about race, class and cultural differences, the author argues that a global common culture focused on human rights may be emerging. Proving an excellent example of the gulf between academics and activists, research and experience, the book’s reader strains through reams of multi-syllable words, only to confront a mass of contradictions and confusions, statements unsupported by facts or logic, and conclusions that are unfair or just plain wrong.

The author analyzes race and caste and claims that we are reminded daily that we live in a post-racial world. That’s not the world I live in. The election of President Obama has increased, not decreased, expressions of racism. The author claims violence against women is invisible in the United States. It’s everywhere I look. She compares race, caste and class and questions whether race is biological, social, or even exists as science proves.

Her critique of what she calls feminist universalism focuses on refugee/asylum law. But she fails to acknowledge that in a patriarchal state no law, no matter how well written or intended, will remain untainted. She also fails to take into account the ever present tension for activist lawyers–making a political point or representing your client. The client always comes first.

While true that human rights standards are often not applied to the United States, especially under the criminal administration of George Bush, much has changed since that time. Two cases about family violence are at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Gonzales v. U.S. and Dombrowski v. U.S.) and four countries have now protected American women from the failures of the United States under the Hague Convention. Hillary Clinton recently announced that the U.S. will hold itself to the same standards it holds other countries in its annual Trafficking in Persons report. This is a major and important shift in policy.

When talking about Gender Based Violence (GBV), the author misses the fundamental analysis of GBV as about power and control. She says, “It is thus important to understand domestic violence as part of the structural violence wrought by liberalization and structural adjustment policies.” Domestic violence is no more caused by structural adjustment policies than it is caused by poverty or unemployment, alcoholism or anger. The fundamental cause, known for decades, is imbalance of power-also the backbone of structural adjustment policies. They both spring from the same well–abuse of power–the operating system of patriarchy.

Repeatedly the author fails to acknowledge the shoulders upon which she stands. She claims that feminists don’t understand that GBV is about state policy as much as about culture. On the contrary, the history of the battered women’s movement shows that it originally focused on the failure of state policy by suing the police for not enforcing the law, forcing prosecutors to charge abusers, and changing laws to hold the government accountable. T-shirt politics confirms how aware feminists are that domestic violence is intertwined with world peace—If you can’t have peace in the home, how can you have peace in the world?

Visweswaran wonders what it would mean to speak of a culture of violence against women in the United States and to understand domestic violence in the United States as a human rights issue. Advocates working in the battered women’s movement have spoken of it and understood it for decades.

The last chapter in Un/common Cultures contradicts earlier ones by showing that there is, in fact, a growing global human rights movement. But she fails to do her homework and thinks that university students urging divestment in countries that violate human rights is a new tactic. That was a common practice against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s. What’s new is technology that tells the world in minutes if a coup or revolution is occurring, so that actions can be supported from half a globe away. Her final conclusion seems a simple truism about social movements and left this reader wondering why she slogged through 225 pages for that.

Written by: Dianne Post, October 11th 2010

Rule of Law, Misrule of Men

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Elaine Scarry

MIT Press

In Rule of Law, Misrule of Men Elaine Scarry, a professor at Harvard, argues that the well being of the populace is the chief reason for a military. A proposition not much debated. She goes on to argue that after 9/11 the Bush administration did not focus on protecting the populace in the U.S., but instead focused on attacking people in other countries. She points out that U.S. military resources are so far beyond other countries (the U.S. spends more than the rest of the world combined on military) that opponents know they can’t use standard military measures, so they must resort to unconventional warfare and actions prohibited by international law. The U.S. doesn’t need to resort to that, but did under Bush. Scarry details multiple violations of international law in the process.

On the homefront, the acts of people should be private and those of government public. Instead the Bush administration reversed that theory by probing into the intimate details of citizens with the Patriot Act while the acts of the government were made private (e.g., secret renditions for torture, lies about yellow cake and weapons of mass destruction, prohibitions on pictures of dead American soldiers.) The Bush administration has been characterized as the most secret. They had a lot to hide.

It was not the Congress who stood up for the American people against these travesties, nor (by and large) did the courts. According to Scarry, the people stood up. Librarians across the country refused to turn in records. Town councils in 406 cities and eight states passed resolutions that they would not follow the Act. Two town councils issued indictments against Bush and Cheney, and promised to arrest them if they came into their jurisdiction. After ninety-two towns asked for impeachment proceedings, thirty-five articles of impeachment were introduced into Congress by Dennis Kucinich and Paul Wexler for both Bush and Cheney.

Rule of Law, Misrule of Men outlines many misdeeds of the Bush administration, but the greatest of these is torture—illegal without exception. The author names those responsible and those few who stood up. The Bush administration crossed the line. Failure to hold them accountable is, in itself, a domestic and international crime.

The actions of Bush put the entire concept of Rule of Law in the United States into question. It is not enough that Obama says he won’t do the same. The Rule of Law requires that the law doesn’t change from one president to another. One lawless president gives permission to others. To uphold the Rule of Law, the Bush administration must be held accountable in a court of law for their war crimes, urges the author. The United Nations, other countries, and international and domestic organizations have taken steps toward such accountability. No action has been forthcoming from the U.S. government, however.

What does all this have to do with women? Violence against women has become recognized internationally as torture since it meets the definition of intentional infliction of a high level of pain and suffering for no legitimate reason. Often, the activities that go on in the home are the same, or worse, than that which goes on in war zones. If torture can be legalized, can violence against women? The word patriotic comes from the same root as patriarchy–patri meaning father. Feminists have long said the root of the problem is patriarchy. So long as that is the organizing principle of society, women cannot achieve equal rights regardless of the Rule of Law.

Written by: Dianne Post, July 25th 2010