“Each life has its share of heroism, an obscure heroism, born of abdication, of renunciation and acceptance under the merciless whip of fate.”
This blog item contains articles which offer mostly western perspectives, since there are regular news/journal content on gender issues from Europe and North America. Much more can be added from the African continent and other areas undergoing rapid development.
I recently read and can recommend the article dubbed "The personal is political" [http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html ] which was published while I was still incubating in the womb. The historical perspectives are interesting and probably as relevant as ever. That article got me thinking that without acknowledging real experience in anecdotes, we may end up with abstracted policies which become reduced to platitudes. In the current era a few women get celebrated and/or fast-tracked career-wise while most women have to juggle new and old complexities. Meanwhile there is the risk that gender education for the next generation is left to pop culture which is full of contradictions.
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flashback - gender in politics: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/what-sank-julia-gillard-the-truth-about-sexism-in-australia-8679285.html
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http://global.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/world/europe/charting-the-impact-of-everyday-sexism-across-the-world.html
Special Report: The Female Factor
Charting the Impact of Everyday Sexism Across the World
By BETH GARDINERLONDON — When Laura Bates started a Twitter account asking women to share stories of sexist treatment, she expected a handful of replies, and hoped they would yield an article for Web or print consumption. Just over a year later, the effort she now calls the Everyday Sexism Project has grown to more than 30,000 posts from around the world, with nearly 50,000 Twitter followers.
The project’s Web site and Twitter feed have ballooned into a compendium of firsthand testimonials that range from angry descriptions of patronizing remarks to heart-wrenching accounts of rape and other assault. Women post about crude come-ons in the workplace, lewd comments on the street, groping on crowded public transportation and much more. Most, but not all, of the comments come from developed countries.
Yesterday guy on packed Tube took opportunity to rub his crotch against me and stroke my bum when I couldn’t move,” wrote Naomi Phillips, using the Twitter handle @nayphillips and referring to the London subway. “Worst thing about it was that I didn’t say anything out loud. Concerned about making a scene & what if I was wrong? I wasn’t.”
Working with supporters in other countries, Ms. Bates, who lives in north London, has created companion sites in 15 nations, including Brazil, France, Germany and the United States. Her original impulse to tackle the issue came after a week in which a man grabbed her leg on a bus, a group shouted at her from a car and two men commented on her breasts as she walked by.
When the online posts started streaming in, she said, she began to see how common such incidents were, and how many women were eager to discuss experiences they had kept to themselves. The rush of stories “feels like something that was waiting to happen,” said Ms. Bates, 26, an actress and writer. “We’re not sure that we’re allowed to talk about it, and as soon as we start talking to someone else about it, they go, ‘Oh, my God, me too!”’ Women, she says, have been taught not to make a fuss about crude treatment and have learned to just put up with it.
“But when there’s 25,000 other people saying, ‘Actually, I agree with that too,’ it’s no longer possible to shame you into silence,” she said. “Social media allows us to stand behind each other, and it’s so powerful.”
In May, Ms. Bates helped lead the introduction of a campaign urging Facebook to remove graphic images of violence against women, some of them with joking captions. Supporters bombarded advertisers with Twitter messages, demanding that they refuse to allow their ads to appear alongside such content. Facebook said that it does not allow content that is hateful, threatening or incites violence and that it responds as quickly as possible to reports of language or images that violate the site’s terms.
As galvanizing as the Internet may be, Ms. Bates is keenly aware of the need to grow offline, too.
The lawmaker Yvette Cooper, the opposition Labour Party’s top official on Britain’s domestic affairs, said she was using comments Ms. Bates compiled to push in Parliament for a sex and relationships curriculum in schools that includes teaching zero tolerance for violence.
The stories posted on Everyday Sexism include many that “we wouldn’t as politicians normally see, because it’s not the kind of thing that people will necessarily write to us about,” Ms. Cooper noted. “There was one from somebody who said, ‘Our lesson on violence was a police officer came to talk to the girls about what to wear and how to stay safe, and the boys went out and played football,”’ she said. Ms. Bates said she had been speaking more frequently at schools and colleges around Britain, and she is advising on a project the police are starting to tackle unwanted sexual behavior on London subways and buses.
Most shocking, Ms. Bates said, is the number of posts she receives about or from young girls. One woman wrote last month that her 8-year-old daughter had asked her the meaning of a lewd term for female genitals, then said a boy in her class had told her he planned to pound hers when she was older. “Is this the culture that is infecting our schools now?” wrote the mother, who gave her name as Jules. Other stories are more hopeful. One woman, who gave her name as Vicki, wrote that when a man she was giving directions to grabbed her breast, “the usual anger-but-not-quite-sure-what-to-do-about-it was replaced with something else. I’d read enough versions of same story just a few days previously.”
She noted his license plate number and called the police, who charged him criminally, she wrote. A woman named Danielle Morgan got an apology, although not from her own harasser, after she wrote on Twitter about a group of men who shouted “sluts” at her from a passing car. “I did this when I was a young stupid” man, wrote a poster using the Twitter handle @Hurp_durpa. “I’m ashamed every time I think about it. I am so sorry.”
Men contribute about 10 percent of posts, Ms. Bates said. One, Richard Twyman, who manages a Manchester betting shop, said Everyday Sexism had helped him understand the impact of things he used to do unthinkingly, like questioning what a rape victim was wearing or rating the appearance of women on the street. “As a young guy, if I was out with some girls and a girl that was too drunk to know what she was doing leaned on me, I’d grab a feel,” he said by phone. Now he confronts others he sees engaging in such behavior, he said.
However, in addition to encouraging feedback, Ms. Bates gets hundreds of violent threats, some vowing to rape or kill her. When the boyfriend she lives with was traveling, she stayed with friends rather than alone at home. She runs the site herself with some help from volunteers. A trickle of money comes from publishing articles on harassment, but the project operates at a loss. Ms. Bates said she has put £2,000 to £3,000, or $3,000 to $4,500, into the site, not counting income lost in the unpaid hours she spends on it. She earns a small amount from publishing articles on the subject of sexism and is seeking grants from several organizations.
It is featured in a documentary made for the Gucci-backed Chime for Change concert for women and girls on Saturday in London, and Ms. Bates said she hopes some support may come from that. The police plan to use the Everyday Sexism site to enhance their intelligence on where and when harassment happens, said Inspector Ricky Twyford of the British Transport Police, the project manager for the move to curb sexual harassment on London’s buses and trains. They also want Ms. Bates to repeat what Inspector Twyford called a powerful talk she delivered to police officials, in which she read posts from women describing being harassed or assaulted. The police plan to record it to use in workshops for officers who patrol the transit network, he said.
Stella Creasy, a Labour Party lawmaker who exchanges Twitter postings with Everyday Sexism, said these stories demonstrated that women remained unequal. “This is real life, this is happening every single day to women in our country,” Ms. Creasy said. “There is a resurgence of feminist activism, and I say bring it on. That is amazing, that is going to make Britain a better place for everyone.”
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Next is a recent provocative article by Yasmin Alibhai Brown. A rebuttal from young feminist is posted below it. Visit the original link to view reader comments.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/todays-young-women-have-betrayed-feminism-8660798.html
Today’s young women have betrayed feminism
I squarely blame the young with their foolish apathy and criminal self-indulgenceby Yasmin Alibhai Brown
Kate appeared at the Queen’s birthday parade, big with baby, smiling, blooming. She, who wore an ice- cream pink outfit, is a perfect icon of today’s womanhood – rich and canny, compliant in public, not fearsomely feminist but sweetly feminine, a princess who, unlike rebellious Diana, may just live happily ever after because she fits in and fits our times. Hundreds of thousands of young, female undergraduates want Kate’s life and luck. Why that should be so is too depressing for me to ponder. But it is so.
Other stories appeared this week about beautiful women having plastic surgery and also about pretty Kim Sears, the girlfriend of tennis champion Andy Murray, who is still waiting for a proposal. We learnt that the next Bridget Jones film is being made about that hopeless and dependent woman addicted to dieting and romance. Yes I have watched these movies and laughed, but then thought of the grim messages they convey. And the popular confessional journalist, Liz Jones, had extracts published from her memoir. Here is a taster: “[I wish] someone had told me I was normal and acceptable then I wouldn’t have spent my life trying so hard to be better than I am. Lying. Manipulating. Tanning. Plucking. Jogging. Dieting.”
Shame
on those women between 20 and 40 who have squandered thehard-won
achievements of original feminism. And to add insult to self-injury,
these younger generations seem proud that they dissed and dumped all
we fought for. We expected better and more from those who followed.
It is, I know, very fashionable these days for the young to blame
baby boomers for being “selfish” and spoiling it all. Well enough
of that. I squarely blame the young, who, through foolish apathy,
criminal self-indulgence and sometimes uninformed loathing of the
women’s movement, have ensured that our social, political and
economic environment is less fulfilling, much less safe, less equal
and less nurturing than it was even in the 70s and 80s when we old
Fems were burning bras and raising hell. There are exceptions. There
are always exceptions, but what matters are the common narratives and
those, alas, are regressive and anti-women.
Are they proud, the “post-feminists”, when their eyes scan the landscape? Catharine MacKinnon, radical feminist campaigner and theorist in the 1980s, wrote compellingly of how “the eroticisation of dominance and submission” creates social norms for male/female relationships way beyond the bedroom. So what do we get now? The bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey, a God-awful S&M trilogy, mainstreaming the idea of male domination and “knowing” female submission. The almost total pornification of Britain is now used without any embarrassment by males, aided and abetted by females. Internet porn sewage swills around and is defended in the name of “freedom”. In one Sunday tabloid I found a full page advert for porn DVDs. You too could have Black and White Babes, Uni Girls in Sex Heaven, Gang Babes, Teen Group Sex costing a pound each. Meanwhile most modern girls suffer from body image problems; many find it hard to say no to sex; too many boys associate sex with porn images where females are roughly taken and look like Barbie dolls.
Prominent feminists used to say pornography is a metaphor for women’s defeat in the long war for respect and parity. We are defeated. A report by the IPPR think-tank found that ambitious, middle-class, professional women are now more or less equal to their male counterparts, but that those on low wages and with little power are actually doing worse. I went to Ladywood, Birmingham last week, where 70 per cent of children are raised by single mothers with little money. They do their best and most look much older than they really are, both mums and children. The cuts are hitting women much more savagely than men. The cost of childcare is forcing the poor out of the legitimate job market, so many are forced into twilight jobs with slave wages. (This is happening to men too.
The
rape and murder of women, horrendous in real life, are now favourite
subjects for slick thrillers, in which lady detectives lead the
investigations. Domestic violence remains high and facilities to help
the women are closing down. There was a shocking reminder of how
vulnerable even the most powerful women can be with pictures in a
Sunday newspaper, showing Charles Saatchi with his hands around the
neck of his wife Nigella Lawson at an outside table of a restaurant.
She was in tears.
With
such a depressing scenario, it was good to hear that journalist
Charlotte Raven, 43, once a wild child of Thatcherism, was to
re-launch Spare Rib, the influential feminist mag which started in
1972 and died in 1993. It would be engaging, promised Raven,
surprising, political and sharp. And then Marsha Rowe and Rosie
Boycott, the two original founders, both of whom I like and admire,
threatened to sue Raven if she used their title name. Damn pity that.
We needed this mag to appear and succeed.
But
never mind, soon Kate and William’s baby will be born, and young
British women will rejoice and talk about little else. Transformative
politics? Not for them. They have cuter things on their little minds.
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Young Women Are Not Failing Feminism, We Are Its Lifeblood
Posted: 17/06/2013 17:52Yasmin Alibhai Brown's piece in the Independent accuses young women of failing feminism . As a young woman and feminist I am angered and appalled by this; away from the insulated world of the comentariat and media young women have been organising for years, in student unions, in our local communities, online and out there in the real world.
In her viscous and unfounded attack on young women she states"Shame on those women between 20 and 40 who have squandered the hard-won achievements of original feminism. And to add insult to self-injury, these younger generations seem proud that they dissed and dumped all we fought for."However from my experience I see women of all ages, teenagers to retirees, fighting hard to retain those rights and to further the cause of women's liberation, often directly addressing and challenging the mistakes of the third wave, working hard to offer a feminism more inclusive of all women. I have been active in feminism since university where I met an amazing and inspiring group of young women who undertook various actions and events raising awareness and money for feminist causes at home and worldwide. We worked closely with local women and founded Merseyside Women's Movement , a hub of grass roots women's activism on Merseyside with which I am still involved today alongside many other inspiring women, many of us in our twenties and thirties.
Just
recently I attended Reclaim the Night in Liverpool, a march organised
by students, including women from the very same university women's
group I attended a few years ago. The event was host to inspiring
women speakers of all ages from across the country, from councillors
to writers. To suggest younger women are not interested or ignorant
of the women who went before us is insulting, in my activist work I
work along women of all ages, I have sat and listened intently to
women speak of their experiences at Greenham common, of living in
Palestine, of fighting for the rights of migrant and refugee women,
today women still wear the colours of the suffragettes with full
knowledge of their origins and the utmost respect for our
predecessors. I have been in audiences alongside other young women to
hear 'old school' feminists such as Germaine Greer and Selma James
speak, young women who will debate and ask searching questions. I
have seen young women at the forefront of fighting against the cuts,
campaigning to keep childcare centres open, campaigning for better
education around consent, volunteering for women's services,
organising resistance against fascism and organising events ranging
from academic discussion forums to arts events and film screenings.
It
seems to me Alibhai Brown is out of touch with what modern young
women are up to, preferring to characterise us as the shallow
stereotypes displayed in the mainstream media as opposed to actually
listening to and engaging with us. By idolising the past, such as the
controversial return of Spare Rib, a project with a lot of financial
backing, she ignores the media women, especially young women, have
created themselves with little or no backing. I would go so far to
say she is out of touch with feminism as a whole.
Sites such as The F Word, Feministing and Feministe, g et thousands of hits and many writers such as Jessica Valenti and Laurie Penny write about feminist issues for mainstream publications such as the Guardian and New Statesman. Many smaller blogs and magazines allow women to express themselves on a wide range of feminist issues and projects such as"Everyday Sexism"and "Holla Back" have been extremely successful in highlighting issues around sexual harassment. Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency has faced torrents of abuse for highlighting sexism in video games and has inspired many women to speak out about the misogynist abuse they face online. Project such as Lady Geek and Little Miss Geek are dedicated to getting more women into tech, currently a very male dominated area. Fashion blogs such as My Arched Eyebrow and Fuller Figure Fuller Bust are giving women a platform to speak about fashion in a body positive context, helping young women become more confident and accepting of their bodies. The Women's Room has been set up to address the dearth of female experts in the media and is currently campaigning to keep women on banknotes.
All these projects have been started by women in the 20-40 age bracket Alibhai condems, some are even younger such as teenager Lili Evans who helped start the Twitter Youth Feminist Army. Indeed many of the women behind these projects have been featured in mainstream media, such as newspapers and radio so one cannot help but wonder if Alibhai Brown has even made an effort to interact with young women instead of insulting us with slurs such as 'They have cuter things on their little minds'.
There is a multitude of similar projects out there, many spearheaded by young women addressing various feminist causes both in the UK and worldwide. Perhaps if Alibhai Brown looked around a bit more she would see us, thousands, millions of us. She would see we are not the 'rare exceptions' she assumes us to be. She might even go so far as to support us instead of shooting us down and insulting us, something which to me is grossly anti-feminist. She would see that there are young women campaigning against the sexual objectification she highlights in her piece, that there are young women fighting against violence against women, fighting to save women's refuges and rape crisis centres, supporting their peers who are victims and survivors of rape and violence. Are all young women feminist warriors? No, but the same can be said of any age group.
The truth is there are millions of us out there working hard to further the feminist cause, not using our platform to berate our sisters and tear them down, if anyone displays 'foolish apathy and criminal self indulgence' it is Alibhai Brown herself for smearing young women in such a derogatory, and dare I say it misogynistic, way whilst being ignorant of all the work we are doing.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/world/europe/27iht-letter27.html?ref=feministmovement&_r=0
Liberté, Égalité, Fertilité
By KATRIN BENNHOLDPublished: July 26, 2011
PARIS — Could there be any worse time to leave Paris?
The City of Light is more luminous than ever, after the sunniest spring and summer I’ve experienced during my decade here (a recent wet spell notwithstanding).
Line 1 on the Métro, my fast track to work, is being automated and could thus soon be shielded from the ritual strikes.
And, as austerity bites in several parts of Europe, the French are collectively boarding their ever-expanding fleets of high-speed trains to head for the annual August break — a painful reminder of the long paid vacations that few employees can hope to get anywhere else.
Worse, I’m six months pregnant, the point at which all maternity-related health care here becomes 100 percent state-covered, while my daughter is almost eligible for the free full-time child care offered by the maternelle — state preschools available to toddlers from the age of 3.
On the long list of things to miss about France, the climate, public transport and generous amounts of vacation do of course feature prominently.
But, for this woman at least, none of that can beat a combination of free preschools, family allowances, tax deductions for each child, a paid, four-month maternity leave and to top it all off, an extended course of gymnastics, complete with personal trainer and electric stimulation devices, to get you and your birth canal muscles back into shape, courtesy of the taxpayer. (I still remember my physiotherapist cheerfully promising me a “six-pack” in time for the bikini season after I gave birth the last time.)
For my French girlfriends, having children is just another thing you do in life. You fit them in — one, two and often three of them — with your career, your relationship, your other projects.
In my native Germany, it’s your life that has to fit in with the child. Having a baby (it’s rarely more than one these days) is still a profoundly disruptive event for women, one that tends to curtail career ambition and earning potential in keeping with a stubbornly traditional vision of motherhood.
Even in my generation of thirty-somethings, the stigma weighing on working mothers remains heavy. One result: Germany’s birthrate is one of the lowest in Europe, and our rate of female part-time work among the highest.
In Anglo-Saxon countries like the United States, and Britain, where I’ll be posted next, the situation is different again. Working moms don’t face the stigma there — but at the same time have much less of the government aid that French women enjoy.
Perhaps my biggest shock in transferring to London was to discover that as a working mother of two I would be paying about €2,000, or $2,900, more in income tax per year. Only for single people, or married couples without children, does the widely held assumption hold true that you pay a lot less tax in Britain than in France.
Child care in London is also more expensive, and those costs don’t necessarily cease at school age: A large variance in quality between state schools means that parents more often turn to private schooling. The debate about school districts does of course exist on both sides of the Channel. But if private schools in France are often Catholic schools with fees that are counted in hundreds, not thousands, of euros, in London you’re sometimes talking about tens of thousands of pounds in education fees before your child even applies to college — or find yourself paying a premium on real estate in the immediate vicinity of decently ranked state schools.
I have another list, a much shorter one, of all the things I won’t miss about France: the overrated coffee, the smell of andouillettes, the “do not walk on the grass” signs in public parks and all the unnecessary traffic congestion due to cars piling into the intersection just as the light turns yellow. There are also the early-morning ticket controls in the Métro that in my experience seem to focus mostly on black and Arab-looking commuters.
But the No. 1 spot on this list is also occupied by something related to being a woman: A deep-seated machismo in everyday interaction that grated with me long before the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case made headlines.
Many French women appear to worry more about being feminine than feminist, and French men often display a form of gallantry predating the 1789 revolution. “Charming,” I thought, when I first arrived 10 years ago and an official in the Foreign Ministry scrambled to open every one of four doors in a very long, narrow corridor. But I soon tired of the unsolicited attention that young men sometimes heap upon women who are walking down the Champs-Élysées in a skirt.
France ranks 46th in the World Economic Forum’s 2010 gender equality report, lagging behind the United States, most of Europe, but also Kazakhstan and Jamaica. Women in France earn on average 26 percent less than men but do two-thirds of the housework.
As the historian Michelle Perrot put it to me a few months ago, “France may be Scandinavian in its employment statistics, but it remains profoundly Latin in attitude.”
And still, this is the only European country where I’ve routinely met successful businesswomen with three children and an enviable figure. At a time of aging populations and ballooning debt levels across the Western world, other countries can at least learn this from France’s 200-year-old natalist obsession: Investing in a public infrastructure that supports working mothers pays off three times. It raises employment rates, bolsters tax revenue and in the process grooms the workforce and taxpayers of tomorrow.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité remain important benchmarks for a successful society. Fertilité could turn out to be one of the most important ways to get there as the 21st century unfolds.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: Liberté, Égalité, Fertilité.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/world/europe/15iht-letter15.html?ref=feministmovement&pagewanted=all
LETTER FROM EUROPE
Fault Lines in France on Women
By ELAINE SCIOLINOPublished: July 14, 2011
PARIS — The French Revolution was supposed to create a new national identity for the French people: the “citizen” who would be equal under the law.
The male citizen, that is. The Declaration of the Rights of Man declared men, not women, “free and equal in rights.” French women were allowed to study in universities only in 1880 and got the vote in 1944. Today, they hold a meager 18 percent of the seats in Parliament; women’s salaries are nearly 20 percent lower than men’s.
So as Francecelebrated Bastille Day, and the sad scandal of Dominique Strauss-Kahncontinues, the country is struggling with a modern-day identity crisis: the place of women. “The question of genuine equality for women has been deferred since the French Revolution,” said Joan W. Scott, the eminent American historian of France. “The Strauss-Kahn affair has put it back on the table.”
Indeed, the Strauss-Kahn episode has exposed three fault lines in French society. One is a gender gap between women who want to talk about equality and justice and men who want to move on. Another is a generation gap between younger men whose consciousness about women’s rights has been raised and older men who just don’t get it. Finally, the scandal has triggered a messy, mean debate about feminism and how to reconcile it with femininity.
The gender gap: There is no expression for “gender gap” in French. But a Harris poll released last week concluded that among voters who had turned against Mr. Strauss-Kahn as their choice for president, more women cited his sexual behavior, while more men cited excessive spending habits.As the Strauss-Kahn saga moves into its third month, many women are demanding to be heard, while many men are losing interest. Suddenly, issues like rape, incest and sexual harassment have been worthy of debate. Forty feminist organizations met at a conference in the Paris suburb of Évry and pledged to make the war against rape their main cause in the coming year.
Françoise Bellot, head of the feminist Collective Against Rape, had never been invited to appear on French television. Now she is talking over and over — about the 75,000 women raped in France every year.
Will the conversation continue?“With a difficult economy in France and the monetary crisis in Europe, many men are saying, ‘Let’s go back to the essentials,”’ said Michelle Perrot, a French historian of women. “A lassitude is setting in. It’s not very glorious.”
The generation gap: In French politics, even within Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s Socialist Party, younger men say they are more willing than party elders to take seriously the charges against him and to use the episode to promote the cause of women.“The idea that every time he sees a woman he seems to want to possess her doesn’t sit well with us,” said Thierry Marchal-Beck, 24, national secretary of the Youth Socialist Party. “Even if it was consensual sex with a hotel maid, it’s still an abuse of power. It’s very important for men — young men — to take the leads in the feminist moment and to rise up and fight for equality between men and women.”
The feminist debate: Can women gain power and still wear flouncy skirts and be complimented by men on their perfume? Can women demand equal rights without becoming politically correct Americanized harpies? Can feminists be feminine? Some leading female intellectuals have evoked what they call a unique French-style feminism that involves old-fashioned rituals of gallantry, politesse and seduction.Irène Théry, for example, in discussing the Strauss-Kahn case in Le Monde, argued that French women can use seductive wiles to have it all. She praised “a certain way of living and not just thinking that rejects the impasses of the politically correct, wants equal rights of the sexes and the asymmetrical pleasures of seduction, the absolute respect of consent and the delicious surprises of stolen kisses.”
In “Feminism à la française,” an essay that followed in Libération, Ms. Scott called such reasoning by Ms. Théry and three others “an inaccurate characterization of any form of feminism” since it is “predicated on the inequality of women and men.” The quartet struck back, proclaiming their love for French literature, with its “infinite nuances: tender, gallant, libertine, romantic love.” They form “a precious resource for the harmony, embellishment and comprehension of our lives, that is, for pleasure, beauty and self-examination.”
Next, four other scholars came to Ms. Scott’s defense. In Libération, they praised her for bringing gender studies to the forefront as a worthy, important subject. They were troubled when seduction was described as the reconciling force in gender inequalities.
There is so much confusion about feminism that in June, Elle magazine described — in an article designed to be humorous — a dozen different feminist types. Among them: “La Féminerd” (“She signs all the petitions on the Internet”); “La Fémigraine” (“As soon as the misogynist man opens his mouth, she warns, ‘Stop, you bore me.”’); and “La Féminute” (“She fights for the cause, but only for a minute”). Elle’s cover for that issue shows the actress Monica Bellucci, nude. The headline on the story itself (with more nude photos) is “A Real Woman.”
In the United States in 1991, when Anita Hill testified before an all-male Senate committee that her former boss Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, he denied everything and was elevated to the Supreme Court. But the hearings were a turning point. Women demanded an end to men’s bad behavior; the men were clueless. The women replied, “They just don’t get it.”
In France, some who don’t get it are men like Patrick Allemand, the Socialist Party’s federal secretary in the Alpes-Maritime region. He said recently that the scourge of AIDS hadn’t disappeared from his region because of “tourism, the climate and women who are too beautiful.”
Others who don’t get it are women like Catherine Millet, the French author best known for her 2001 best-selling memoir of loveless sexual encounters in parking lots and swingers’ clubs. She wrote that yes, rape is traumatic when it involves violence. But if there is no weapon or beating, she said, it is a “traumatism that one can overcome, like any other everyday violence.”
Elaine Sciolino is the author of “La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life” (Times Books)
A version of this article appeared in print on July 15, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: Fault Lines in France on Women.
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NYtimes article reviewing status of women in France:
October 11, 2010
Where Having It All Doesn’t Mean Having Equality
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
PARIS — Could there be anything more French than this workout?
Weeks after giving birth, French women are offered a state-paid, extended course of vaginal gymnastics, complete with personal trainer, electric stimulation devices and computer games that reward particularly nimble squeezing. The aim, said Agnes de Marsac, a physiotherapist who runs such sessions: “Making love again soon and making more babies.”
Perineal therapy is as ubiquitous in France as free nursery schools, generous family allowances, tax deductions for each child, discounts for large families on high-speed trains, and the expectation that after a paid, four-month maternity leave mothers are back in shape — and back at work.
Courtesy of the state, French women seem to have it all: multiple children, a job and, often, a figure to die for.What they don’t have is equality: France ranks 46th in the World Economic Forum’s 2010 gender equality report, trailing the United States, most of Europe, but also Kazakhstan and Jamaica. Eighty-two percent of French women aged 25-49 work, many of them full-time, but 82 percent of parliamentary seats are occupied by men. French women earn 26 percent less than men but spend twice as much time on domestic tasks. They have the most babies in Europe, but are also the biggest consumers of anti-depressants.
A recent 22-country survey by the Pew Research Center summed it up: three in four French people believe men have a better life than women, by far the highest share in any country polled.
“French women are exhausted,” said Valérie Toranian, editor-in-chief of Elle magazine in France. “We have the right to do what men do — as long as we also take care of the children, cook a delicious dinner and look immaculate. We have to be superwoman.”
The birthplace of Simone de Beauvoir and Brigitte Bardot may look Scandinavian in employment statistics, but it remains Latin in attitude. French women appear to worry about being feminine, not feminist, and French men often display a form of gallantry predating the 1789 revolution. Indeed, the liberation of French women can seem almost accidental — a byproduct of a paternalist state that takes children under its republican wings from toddler age and an obsession with natality rooted in three devastating wars.
“At the origin, family policy wasn’t about women, it was about Germany,” said Geneviève Fraisse, author of several books on gender history. “French mothers have conditions women elsewhere can only dream of. But stereotypes remain very much intact.”
Or, as the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy put it: “France is an old Gallic macho country.”
France crystallizes the paradox facing many women across the developed world in the early 21st century: They have more say over their sexuality (in France birth control and abortion are legal and subsidized), they have overtaken men in education and are catching up in the labor market, but few make it to the top of business or politics.
Only one of France’s top companies is run by a woman: Anne Lauvergeon is chief executive of the nuclear power giant Areva and mother of two young children. Having those children is relatively easy in France, one reason Paris seems to teem with stylish career women with several offspring.
At 31, Fleur Cohen has four children and works full-time as a doctor at a Left Bank hospital. As she drops her youngest at nursery in stilettos and pencil skirt you would never guess that she gave birth only three months ago. Child No. 4 wasn’t “planned,” Ms. Cohen said, but it doesn’t change all that much: Instead of three children, she now takes four on the Metro in the morning and drops them at the public school and subsidized hospital nursery. She joked that children are probably the best way to reduce your tax bill. Irrespective of income, parents get a monthly allowance of €123, or about $170, for two children, €282 for three children and an additional €158 for every child after that. Add to that tax deductions and other benefits, and the Cohens pretty much stopped paying tax after baby No. 3.
Across town, Ms. de Marsac snapped on a plastic glove, inserted two fingers between Clara Pflug’s legs and told her to think of the wings of a butterfly as she contracted her birth canal muscles. The French state offers mothers 10 one-on-one, half-hour sessions of perineal therapy to prevent post-pregnancy incontinence and organ descent — and to improve sex. Ten sessions of free abdominal exercises follow; Ms. de Marsac promises Ms. Pflug a “washboard tummy.”
French women have on average two babies, compared with 1.5 in the European Union overall.
Asked by foreign delegations about “le miracle français,” Nadine Morano, the feisty family minister and mother of three, says bluntly: “We spend the most money and we offer good childcare, it’s as simple as that. Our country understood a long time ago that to reconstruct a nation you need children.”
The 1870 defeat by a much more fertile Prussia led to first efforts to encourage childbirth. Then came the losses of World War I. Since 1920, when the gold Medal of the French Family — to honor mothers of eight or more — was created, expenditure on pro-breeding policies has blossomed. Last year, €97 billion, or 5.1 percent of gross domestic product — twice the E.U. average — went on family, childcare and maternity benefits.
Emblematic in this regard are the “écoles maternelles,” free all-day nursery schools set up a century after the French revolution in part, said Michelle Perrot, a historian, to stamp out the lingering influence of the Roman Catholic Church.
La Flèche houses the oldest école maternelle in France. At 8:30 a.m., parents drop off toddlers as young as two. Classes end at 4:30 p.m. but a free municipal service offers optional childcare until 6:30 p.m. Children are guaranteed a place in “maternelle” from the age of three and 99 percent of them attend.
Katy de Bresson, a single mother of two, called the enrollment of her son Arthur a “mini-revolution.” Free of all childcare costs, she could return to work full-time. “I am a lot happier and a lot more self-confident since then.”
Working mothers being the norm, Isabelle Nicolas, a nurse whose youngest son, Titouan, is in Arthur’s class and who quit work after his birth, feels pressure to return. “I spend a lot of time justifying myself,” she said. “In France you are expected to do it all.”
But ask any mother here whether school had changed the life of her husband and the answer is “non.”
“The school is called ‘maternelle’ for a reason,” said principal Anne Leguen. “In France, children are still considered to be the responsibility of mothers.”
Forty percent of French mothers undergo a career change within a year of giving birth, compared with 6 percent of men. Both parents have the right to take time off or reduce their hours until the child turns three — but 97 percent of those who do are women.
Women spend on average five hours and one minute per day on childcare and domestic tasks, while men spend two hours and seven minutes, according to the national statistics office Insee. In Paris, Ms. Cohen’s husband is a doctor, too. But she bathes all four children, cooks and does the Saturday shopping — largely, she insists, by choice. “If I didn’t prepare food for my children, I would feel less like a mother,” she said.
At work, meanwhile, she plays down motherhood. She sneaks down to the hospital nursery to nurse her baby son, and tries to stay longer than her male colleagues in the evenings. Otherwise, “everyone will just assume that I’m leaving because of my children and that I am not committed to the job.”
A majority of medical graduates in France are female. Yet all 11 department heads in her hospital are men.
“French men have always been slow to give up power,” said Jean-François Copé, parliamentary leader of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right party, who is defending a bill to oblige companies to fill 40 percent of boardroom seats with women.
The French Republic made “equality” a founding principle, but women were allowed to vote for the first time only in 1945. Since a 1998 law obliged political parties to have an equal number of men and women candidates on their party lists, parties have tended to pay fines rather than comply.
Women leaders come under close scrutiny in what is after all the home of couture. Ms. Morano recalls being mocked on television for wearing the same jacket several times. Ms. Lauvergeon likened her outfit to “armor.” Four pieces of equal pay legislation have passed since 1972. But in 2009, even childless women in their forties still earned 17 percent less than men. “A patriarchal corporate culture,” is the main barrier facing women in French companies, according to Brigitte Grésy, author of a 2009 report on gender equality in the workplace.
France is Latin not just in its culture of seduction, but also in its late work hours, Ms. Grésy said. And the disproportional weight of a small number of male-dominated engineering schools in grooming the elites has done its part in excluding women from power. Xavier Michel, president of École Polytechnique, points out that the number of female students has risen tenfold from seven to 70 since he graduated in 1972 — but that leaves it at just 14 percent.
Simone Veil was 18 when French women first voted and 28 when she was allowed to open her own bank account. At 38, as health minister, she pushed through the legalization of abortion. “A lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t,” she says today. More comfort to her than many of the laws in recent years is the fact that more fathers push strollers through her neighborhood.
Ms. Fraisse, the philosopher, says more than two centuries after France got rid of the king as the father of the nation, it needs to get rid of the father as the king of the family. “We had one revolution,” she said, “now we need another one — in the family.”
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Aliens in Skirts Get Brushoff From Men at Work:
Miriam Meckel
Oct 18, 2010
Bloomberg Opinion
This month, Germany celebrated its 20th anniversary of reunification. Like any birthday present, it was received with joy when East and West merged in 1990.
But there was another amazing gift that the country has declined to accept over the past two decades: the mindset of 16 million emancipated citizens from the East who never questioned the idea that men and women can work regular full-time jobs while sharing equal responsibility for child care and education.
One of those 16 million people has made it into the Federal Chancellery. And it’s a woman. When Angela Merkel took office in 2005, this was lauded as a signal that Germany was finally forging ahead as a country of equal opportunity for men and women to leadership positions. Instead, it brushed off the advantages of eastern German gender equality.
This is the picture today: While half of all business- school students are women, a mere 27 percent of Germany’s managers are female, and this number drops to 13 percent when it comes to board membership at big enterprises. The European Union average is 30 percent.
Only five women are on the group management boards of the 30 companies listed on Germany’s benchmark DAX Index. Deutsche Telekom AG, E.ON AG, Merck KGaA, SAP AG and Siemens AG are the only ones that have seen the benefit of female representation at the highest level.
Torrent of Reproaches
This is stunning news in terms of gender equality, particularly considering Germany has made little progress for the last 20 years. The country has developed an even bigger remuneration gap between men and women. It is true that this is still a problem in many countries. But while women in the EU earn an average of 18 percent less than men do in the same jobs, Germany ratchets up the pay gap to almost 25 percent. It isn’t surprising that the EU Commission regularly directs a torrent of reproaches toward Germany.
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding recently announced that there would be a law-enforced quota for women in management positions if things don’t improve by the end of 2011. This instantaneously excited a wave of negative responses by male managers and the conservative press. There seem to be few worries Germany has slipped a notch to position No. 13 (behind Lesotho and the Philippines) in the latest “Global Gender Gap Report 2010” compiled by the World Economic Forum.
Performance Drivers
Why is Germany making so little progress in gender equality? Senior managers ignore the body of research showing that women act as corporate- and financial-performance drivers. The country’s political leaders underestimate the foreseeable gap of a staggering 24 million in the European workforce, which Germany could help fill if the female participation rate rises.
There are a couple of reasons for the lack of progress. First, Germany isn’t always the open-minded country it pretends to be. The idea of a working mother being a “Rabenmutter” (uncaring mother) -- a word lacking its equivalent in the rest of Europe -- is still prevalent, even in well-educated circles. Talking to senior management in Germany, one quickly realizes that “secretary” is still the only professional position that women in the company fill.
If women are to enjoy genuine support and be equal contenders for careers in senior management, there is a dire need for a major cultural change in Germany that includes new models of equal parenting, modern concepts for state-supported child day care and flexible working times. Without this change, families led by parents with equal obligations and opportunities won’t become a reality.
Jobs for Boys
Also, with too few women in top positions the routine of male self-selection for such positions is perpetuated. As many senior managers, including the few female ones, still live and work in a male-dominated environment, they tend to rely on their peers when promoting people.
If this self-sustaining process is to be disrupted, more female managers are urgently needed. They would offer two benefits: They would promote qualified women applying for the same positions as their male counterparts. And men would slowly get used to being surrounded not just by their own kind, but also by competent women.
Finally, women need some of those role models that men could always rely on. Female employees will refrain from aiming for senior-management jobs as long as the path is seen as a horror trip where you bang your head against glass ceilings, are viewed as a bad mother and treated like an alien in a skirt.
In 2008, Norway enforced a female quota for corporate boards, and the number of women board members has since increased to 40 percent. At a recent discussion on Norway’s policy as a possible role model for Europe, an entrepreneurial woman from eastern Germany had to admit that gender equality hadn’t become the modus operandi for a unified Germany.
Having rejected the big present of emancipation in 1990, Germany might have to finally enforce it by law.
(Miriam Meckel is the managing director of the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Miriam Meckel at miriam.meckel@unisg.ch
To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net
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Photo-essay:
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/examining-identity-one-gender-at-a-time/
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