In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: Women We Love

Women in Law

Ruth Bader Ginsburg reminds all of us how far women in the law have come. It’s good to take a look back and see how much things have improved in just a few decades; it also serves as inspiration to keep pushing forward, and to refuse to accept the status quo as “good enough.”

Ginsburg chose to give her audience a history lesson, recalling the struggles that women have endured to practice law and work as judges in the United States.

Men, she said, often argued against allowing women into law schools or state bar associations, for such nonsensical reasons as they didn’t have a bathroom for them.

Ginsburg noted, however, that women’s role in law can be traced back to ancient times when the Greeks worshipped a goddess of justice named Athena and the Book of Judges in the Bible tells of Deborah, a prophet, judge and military leader.

Yet, the first woman was not admitted into a U.S. law school until 1869. And after graduation, women found states unwilling to admit women to the bar. Even when this battle was won, the number of women going into law remained small.

Ginsburg noted the president of Harvard Law School answered a question on declining enrollment during World War II by saying, “Not as bad as we thought, we still have 75 students and we haven’t had to admit any women.”

In the 1960s, 3 percent of law students were women. My class at NYU is 45 percent, and overall women’s enrollment numbers in all schools average at or above 50 percent. Women are 23 percent of tenured law professors, and 35 percent of teaching staff. Nine women head state bar associations.

These numbers are good, and the represent huge improvements. I don’t want to rain on the parade, but it’s worth pointing out that while women are now studying law in equal numbers to men, they haven’t yet broken into the profession in nearly the same numbers — nine female heads of state bar associations is pretty good, but last time I checked there were 50 states. Likewise, 23 percent of tenured law professors is good, but when you consider that women are 50 percent of the population it doesn’t look quite so sunny. Of course, this is in large part a product of the fact that 30 years ago, women weren’t attending law schools in large numbers, and so obviously there’s a smaller pool of established female lawyers and legal academics to draw from. I’m crossing my fingers that 10 years from now, we’ll be caught up.

Via How Appealing. Thanks to Dad for the link.

Electing Women in Africa

An interesting article in the Times about women voting and running for office in Liberia.

Women were victims and commodities in the long civil war – some combatants were effectively paid by being given the right to rape, to brutalize women and girls in captured towns and villages. But as the nation emerges from war and joins the growing family of African democracies, women have emerged as a key voting bloc in what may be this nation’s first truly free and fair elections.

Women’s groups were also a major force in forging the peace accord that led to the departure of Charles Taylor, the warlord who became Liberia’s president in 1997 and presided over the civil war that had begun in 1989 and wreaked havoc throughout the region. The head of the election commission, Frances Johnson-Morris, is a former Supreme Court justice, and three other commission members are women.

As democracy takes hold on the continent, African women have taken to the ballot, often registering to vote in numbers equal to men and heading to the polls despite social and economic tasks – child care, housekeeping and poorly paying work in the informal economy – that could keep them from the voting booth.

Of course, these social and economic tasks tend to be the same things that keep women from running for office in the first place.

The barriers can be high. One woman, a would-be candidate, tried to mount a campaign for the House of Representatives for the All Liberian Coalition Party and came to Mr. Diawara for advice, he said. She could not afford the $750 fee and asked the party president for help. The party chairman offered her $500, and said she should find the rest. But with little financial support, she had little choice but to abandon the race. A man took her place.

In many African countries, legal land ownership for women is a relatively new right — in others, women don’t have property rights, and therefore have a much harder time making money than men do. Couple that with all the social issues surrounding women’s rights, and we can see how difficult it is for women in many countries to run for office. The women who manage to break the mold have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to get where they are. They’re inspirational.

This is one election I’ll be following.

Love

Go give the inimitable Twisty some love. If I’d been through that shit and someone tried to serve me a dry fucking pancake, I’d need some love.

Anyone who has anything rude to say in this comment thread will be banned from the site altogether.

Challenging Colombia’s Restrictive Abortion Laws

From The Economist, via my friend Sean (no link, sorry, just the text; all emphasis is mine):

Last bastions – Abortion in Latin America

Challenging Colombia’s restrictive abortion laws

A challenge to Colombia’s abortion laws could lead to wider liberalisation

ONLY a handful of countries continue to ban abortion totally, even when the mother’s life is in danger. Colombia is one of them. Earlier this year, its Congress increased the maximum sentence for violators to four and a half years in prison. Yet every year, an estimated 400,000 desperate women prefer to run the risk of jail and dangerous backstreet abortions rather than give birth to an unwanted, possibly severely handicapped baby, or a child resulting from rape or incest.

Illegal abortions are the third cause of maternal mortality in this predominantly Catholic country. Colombian women’s groups have long been campaigning for decriminalisation. United Nations bodies responsible for monitoring international human-rights conventions have lent the movement their weight, arguing that Colombia’s draconian laws violate a woman’s fundamental right to life and health. Public opinion is in favour of greater liberalisation when the mother’s life or health are at risk, or when the fetus is severely deformed. Yet repeated attempts in Congress to amend Colombia’s penal code have hitherto failed.

Now Monica Roa, a young Colombian lawyer working for Women’s Link Worldwide, a women’s rights group, is seeking to mount a legal challenge for the first time. In a suit filed in the Constitutional Court, she argues that a total ban on abortion is unconstitutional and violates Colombia’s international treaty obligations. In an effort not to offend Catholics too much, she is calling for abortion to be permitted in just three instances: if the mother’s life or health are at risk, if the fetus is severely malformed, or in the case of rape.

Ms Roa claims that the chances of passing a new abortion law are now higher than at any time in Colombia’s history. She would appear to have good grounds for optimism. The Constitutional Court has already ruled in other cases that international law supersedes domestic law. International groups, including Yale and Harvard Law Schools, have filed briefs in support of her claim. And both Colombia’s procurator-general’s office and the Ministry of Social Protection have admitted that illegal abortions present a serious public health problem.

But Ms Roa’s quest has brought her up against powerful enemies. In June, her office was broken into and two computers stolen, along with confidential files. She has now been assigned two bodyguards. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby group, has expressed concern about the safety of all those working on the case. Meanwhile, President Álvaro Uribe has rushed to assure the Catholic church that his signing of a treaty banning discrimination against women did not signify any support for abortion rights.

Ms Roa’s chief opponent is José Galat, elderly Catholic rector of the University of Greater Colombia. He maintains that abortion is akin to the massacres carried out by Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups. How can people complain about that violence if they allow mothers to assassinate the children in their wombs, he asks. He and his supporters have taken out gory advertisements featuring bloodied fetuses and have collected 2m signatures opposing any relaxation of the law.

Most countries of Central and Latin America-along with most of sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia-have extremely restrictive abortion laws, usually allowing the termination of a pregnancy only to save a woman’s life or protect her physical health. But Ms Roa believes there is now a momentum in the region toward greater liberalisation. A decision on the legality of Colombia’s laws is due by mid-December. It could help determine whether that momentum becomes unstoppable.

I wish Ms. Roa the best of luck. She’s up against a lot when her country doesn’t allow abortion even when having a child will kill the pregnant woman, when women who terminate pregnancies face almost five years in jail, and when everyone involved seems to be bending over backwards to suit Catholic church dogma. I hope she succeeds, and eventually goes further — it’s abhorent that 400,000 women are made into criminals for trying to control their family size. Harvard and Yale have filed amicus briefs on her side; perhaps I can single-handedly convince NYU to do the same.

Hey Cancer: Fuck You.

Fuck. I know it wasn’t her intent, but I’m still crying after reading this. Not the greatest reaction, I know, but sadness and anger will do it. I blame the patriarchy for that, too. Send your thoughts and well-wishes to Twisty. She seems like a pretty tough broad, so I have great faith that this spinster aunt will do what she needs to do. As for you all out there, go do a self-check right now. Get a mammogram. And if you can, make a donation.

In Memory: Constance Baker Motley

Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman to be a federal judge, the first female Manhattan borough president, and the first black woman to serve in the New York State Senate died two days ago, at 84.

Judge Motley was at the center of the firestorm that raged through the South in the two decades after World War II, as blacks and their white allies pressed to end the segregation that had gripped the region since Reconstruction. She visited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail, sang freedom songs in churches that had been bombed, and spent a night under armed guard with Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was later murdered.

Born ninth of 12 children in New Haven to immigrant parents from the small Caribbean island of Nevis, Motley’s father worked as a chef for Yale student organizations, including the Skull and Bones society. She decided she wanted to be a lawyer early on, and tried to finance her education by being a domestic worker. She got a break when a white businessman and philanthropist heard her give a speech at an African-American social center, and offered to finance her education. She went to Fisk University in Nashville for a year, before transferring to New York University, where she graduated in 1943. She went on to Columbia Law School, and after graduation worked as a civil rights attorney for $50 a week.

After becoming a federal judge in 1966, Judge Motley ruled in many cases, but her decisions often reflected her past. She decided on behalf of welfare recipients, low-income Medicaid patients and a prisoner who claimed to have been unconstitutionally punished by 372 days of solitary confinement, whom she awarded damages.

She continued to try cases after she took senior status. Her hope as a judge was that she would change the world for the better, she said.

“The work I’m doing now will affect people’s lives intimately,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1977, “it may even change them.”

Via my dad, who writes, “Jill, Look at Thursday’s obits, there is a very nice article about the first African-American woman federal judge who just recently died. It might be the basis for something to write about on your blog. Also when you start feeling down about the burdens of being a poor overworked law student, it can offer some inspiration.” Indeed, it did. As cliche as it sounds, the world is certainly a better place because of Judge Motley’s presence on it.

Allison Crews Dead At 22

This week, my mom wished me a happy Father’s Day, justifying that I am a mom and a dad to my boy. It made me wonder whether I should also wish E’s dad a happy Mother’s Day. Six years ago, pregnant and virtually homeless, I never would have thought that I would be so committed to my little family, as odd as we are, and as politically and emotionally motivated to make us work.

From Bitch Ph.D. I found out this morning that activist Allison Crews is dead at the age of 22.

You probably haven’t heard of her before, but this women’s thoughts were integral to me as a young single mother. She began girl-mom.com, a radical website for young single mothers, and worked in alliance with Hip Mama. Her essay, When I Was Garbage, is an articulate account of the marginalization we young mothers experience as we emerge in the world as parents before society says it is prudent.

I found this message board four years ago when I was looking for support, advice, and camraderie. The women there are very much responsible for my political parenthood. Thanks to these women and their stories, I recast my views of parenthood and rethought what a good parent looks like. I shed all my previous inhibitions and decided to parent being me, flawed but caring me.

I didn’t know Allison, but I am very much saddened with this news. Thanks to her hard work and dedication to living radically, I know that I am no less a mother for having become a parent in my teens. As she succinctly said, we are not a burden to society and my son is not a burden to me. Contrary to those who believe we are disadvantaged by the obstacles put in our way, we have security, connection, and love.

If it weren’t for Ms. Crews, I would not be so confident in that fact. Bless.

Posted in Uncategorized

The Illiterate Surgeon

This woman is truly an inspiration. With less than a third grade education, she has become one of the world’s leading fistula surgeons, after suffering the devastating injury herself. And kudos to Nicholas Kristof for drawing attention to obstetric fistulas, one of the least-covered and most terrible maternal health issues facing developing nations.

Posted in Uncategorized