Isaacs S. (2010). Surviving in the Apartheid Prison

Names: Isaacs, Sedick
Born: 1939
Died: 18 October 2012, Cape Town, Western Cape
In summary: Teacher, Robben Island prisoner, chair of the education committee on Robben Island, banned  person, Specialist Scientist in Medical Informatics and Statistics, Head of Department of Medical Informatics, Honorary Fellow of the International Medical Informatics Association, Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, Chartered Member of the British Computer Society, Honorary Fellow of the International Medical Informatics Association and Companion of Demontford University in the United Kingdom. 

Sedick Isaacs was born in 1939 and grew up in the Bo-Kaap, Cape Town, Western Province (now Western Cape). He was the second eldest in a family of four children. His father, a businessperson in the fishing industry, died when he was six years old. His mother then took over the running of his father’s business, which ultimately went bankrupt. His mother then supplemented the family income by undertaking embroidery work.
From an early age, Isaacs was fascinated with science and was engaged in performing science experiments at home. He would spend hours in libraries learning about explosives, radio transmitters, broadcasting and other similar subjects.
A primary school teacher initially made Isaacs and his classmates aware of oppression. This continued up to high school. At the age of 13, he was involved in distributing political pamphlets and attending meetings of the Teachers League of South Africa (TLSA) and the Non European Unity Movement (NEUM). After completing his education, Isaacs worked as teacher at Trafalgar High School in Cape Town. It was while teaching at the school that he met Achmad Cassiem. Isaacs with his knowledge of explosives tried to train some of his friends in the use of this. This attracted the attention of the security police who monitored their activities. Consequently, Isaacs, his friends Achmad Cassiem, Marnie Abrahams were arrested in 1964 following the testing of explosives at Strandfontein Beach, Cape Town. They were taken to Caledon Police Station. The Security Police, among them the notorious Spyker van Wyk, severely tortured and assaulted him and subjected him to sleep deprivation.
Following his appearance in the Supreme Court in Cape Town, he was found guilty of sabotage and sentenced to 12 years on Robben Island. Upon arrival on the Island, he was placed in Category D (a prison ranking with very little privileges) and was Prisoner number 883/64.
In his book, Surviving in the Apartheid Prison, Isaacs describes in detail the inhuman and barbaric treatment political prisoners had to endure at the hands the prison authorities and warders on the Island, as well as the time he spent in the punishment cells for what the prison authorities considered infractions of prison rules. Isaacs was also punished by being held in solitary confinement. The almost inedible food and meagre portions contributed to the physical torture of the political prisoners.
For the first seven years, Isaacs was in Cell C1 (apart from the time when he was incarcerated in the punishment cells for “bad behaviour”). Cell C1 was a study cell where the prison lights were a little brighter than the rest of the prison. When possible, he would tutor his fellow prisoners in Mathematics. In his first month, Isaacs received a most welcome letter from his mother but his next letter came more than a year later as he had lost privileges for his “contribution” to the first hunger strike on Robben Island.
In 1965, Isaacs and the other prisoners embarked on a hunger strike, the first on the Island. The hunger strike was aimed at forcing the prison authorities to improve conditions under which political prisoners lived. Accused of having written up the reasons and trying to smuggle out the reasons for their actions to the newspapers on the mainland, for their hunger strike, Isaacs was placed in a punishment cell. This was his first of many experiences being held in the punishment cell. Although, according to the prison regulations the maximum sentence for solitary confinement was 21 days, another 11 months passed before he was released from solitary confinement.
To while away the tedium of solitary confinement, he engaged in mental mathematical problem solving and later “playing” chess with Achmad Cassiem who was also held in a cell next to him in the punishment section. However, the guards caught them and as punishment their food privileges were stopped and their supply of toilet paper withdrawn.
In the ensuing ‘trial’ held on the Island, where the he was officially ‘charged’  for writing unauthorised letters (related to the hunger strike), the prison authorities found Isaacs guilty and sentenced him to be flogged. Furthermore, his study privileges were also withdrawn.
After his release from solitary confinement, Isaacs resumed his duties as chair of the Education Committee in prison and later the chair of the First Aid Unit. He taught mathematics and physical science to his fellow inmates. Isaacs completed a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics while on the Island. When heattempted to enrol for postgraduate studies (a MSc degree),  this was blocked. He was compelled to enrol for another undergraduate degree in Information Science, Mathematical Statistics and Computer Science. Upon his release, he became a Specialist Scientist in Medical Informatics and Statistics and then the Head of Department of Medical Informatics at Groote Schuur Hospital on Cape Town.
Isaacs made five attempts to escape from the Island, albeit all unsuccessful. With the assistance of Japhta Masemola, Anthony Suze, Benny Ntoele and Lizo Sitoto, he decided, with the others to manufacture a master key to be used in an escape attempt. However, the ‘escape’ was not attempted as Isaacs was found with a radio that was smuggled, in his cell. His stay was extended by nine months after he was found guilty by a magistrate who was brought in from the mainland.  
Isaacs was released from Robben Island towards the end of September 1977. His family was not informed of his release. Upon his release, he was banned for seven years. He was even refused permission by the then Minister of Justice to attend the University of Cape Town (UCT) for postgraduate studies. Nevertheless, he managed to register at the UCT and was forced to meet with his lecturers, clandestinely, in the Cape Town Botanical Gardens. Due to his banning orders, it was extremely difficult to obtain employment even when vacancies were open to him.
Isaacs married Maraldea, a nursing sister in 1979. For this he had to apply to the then Minister of Justice to include his wife in the list of people he could associate with as a banned person. At one stage, he was forced to sell eggs and worked as a handyman to eke out a living.
After his banning orders expired in 1986, Isaacs was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the International Medical Informatics Association for outstanding contribution to Medical and Health Informatics. He also obtained a visa to undertake a sabbatical in Germany in 1990 where he was able to complete his PhD. He was then elected Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society.
In 2010, Isaacs was elected Honorary Fellow of the International Medical Informatics Association and in 2011, he was nominated as a Companion of Demontford University in the United Kingdom. Again, in 2010 Isaacs was nominated as a Sports Icon by the Department of Arts, Culture and Recreation for his contribution to Sport on Robben Island.
Dr Sedick Isaacs passed away on 18 October 2012 in Cape Town.
References

• Isaacs S. (2010). Surviving in the Apartheid Prison. XLibris, (Cape Town).
• Hartley A. (2012),  ‘Tributes pour in for struggle veteran’, from Independent Online, [online], Available at www.iol.co.za, [Accessed on 24 April 2013]
• http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/sedick-isaacs

Proof that for mathematicians, life begins at 40

Zhang Yitang is proof that for mathematicians, life begins at 40

Middle-aged Chinese researcher's prime numbers breakthrough is more evidence that the days of the maths whiz kid are well and truly over

Sunday, 09 June, 2013, 2:37am

by Tom Yam

• 

Zhang Yitang

No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any art or science, is a young man's game," the British mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote in A Mathematician's Apology. But the older guys are now catching up.

Since Hardy wrote those lines in 1940, it has been conventional wisdom that mathematical breakthroughs are most often made in a moment of brilliance by a born genius at a young age, rather than an experienced practitioner after decades of work.

Last month, however, Zhang Yitang, a 50-year-old lecturer in mathematics at the University of New Hampshire, defied Hardy's glib assertion. Zhang, who had not published any original work since 2001, submitted a paper to the peer-reviewed Annals of Mathematics in which he solved one of the most longstanding and difficult problems in pure maths. His proof - that there are an infinite number of consecutive pairs of prime numbers (those that are divisible only by 1 and themselves such as 3, 5, 7, 11) separated by less than 70 million - may be meaningless to the layperson, but to number theorists it is earth-shaking.

The fact that Zhang is well into middle age gives hope to legions of mid-career mathematicians oppressed by Hardy's dictum that groundbreaking work in their field should be left to the young.

Of course Hardy could point to many examples in the history of mathematics to support his assertion. The French mathematician Evariste Galois laid the foundations for modern algebra in the 1800s while he was still a teenager and died at the age of 21. During the same era, the Norwegian Niels Abel, aged 19, independently came up with group theory, which is invaluable in many areas of mathematics and physics. Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian maths prodigy mentored by Hardy at Cambridge University, compiled 3,900 results in identity and equations before he died at age 32 in 1920.

In more recent times, there's Terence Tao, whose parents emigrated to Australia from Hong Kong. Tao is a polymath who does brilliant work across many mathematical disciplines such as number theory, harmonic analysis and combinatorics. He received his PhD in mathematics from Princeton University at 20 years old, was at 24 appointed the youngest ever full professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, and at 30, in 2006, received the Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics.

The media reinforces the stereotype of youthful mathematical creativity. In the movie A Beautiful Mind John Nash, who as a graduate student in his early twenties did pioneering work in game theory, is depicted hanging out at a bar in Princeton when a sudden insight leads him to the concept that became known as the Nash equilibrium, which is today widely applied in economics and conflict analysis.

While such young guns make romantic figures for feel-good movies, Zhang's story may be even more inspirational for being the achievement of age, experience, persistence and sheer hard slog. It took him over three years of intensive, single-minded research in his late forties to solve the prime numbers problem.

He is not the only late bloomer. At age 41, Andrew Wiles, a Princeton and Oxford University mathematician, cracked Fermat's Last Theorem, which had vexed mathematicians for 358 years since Pierre de Fermat came up with it in 1637. Wiles had pondered the problem since he discovered it in a library when he was a 10-year-old student in Scotland. After seven years of intense and solitary work, he presented his results at Cambridge University in 1993, and, like Zhang, stunned his fellow mathematicians. It took another year for him to correct an error in his first proof in collaboration with his former student Richard Taylor.

An equally difficult problem, the Poincaré conjecture, was also solved by a mature thinker. In 1904 Henri Poincare, one of the most creative mathematicians of all time, made his conjecture about the topology, or shape and space, of a three-dimensional sphere. The Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States offered US$1 million to the person who could prove the conjecture. In 2006, the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman did so. He was 40 years old. Offered the cash award as well as the Fields Medal, Perelman turned both down. Declaring, "I am not interested in money or fame", he was the first and only person to decline the prestigious medal. He said his contribution was no more significant than that of an American mathematician, Richard Hamilton, who devised the technique that allowed him to prove the conjecture.

Why have recent mathematical breakthroughs been made by older brains? There is just much more mathematics requiring more time to master than during Hardy's day a century ago. As Jordan Ellenberg, an expert in algebraic geometry at the University of Wisconsin, has noted, today there are no whiz kids like Galois and Abel. It simply takes them longer to learn from many more intellects.

Wiles tapped into the work of the Japanese mathematicians Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura in two distinct branches of maths to figure out Fermat's Last Theorem. Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture was aided by Hamilton's work in differential geometry at Columbia University. Zhang's breakthrough in prime numbers built on the work of Dan Goldston at San Jose State University in the United States, Janos Pintz of the Renyi Institute of Mathematics in Budapest and Cem Yalcin Yildirim of Bogazici University in Istanbul.

As for whether the frontiers of mathematics are best advanced by youthful flashes of intuition or long years of logical deduction, Poincare provided an answer. He wrote: "Logic and intuition have their necessary role. Each is indispensable."

He should know. He came up with his famous conjecture when he was 50 years old.

Tom Yam is a Hong Kong-based management consultant. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Interview with Pierre Cartier: The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki—

Thanks JM for posting this on FB



� 1 (1998) · pp.22–28

The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki—
An Interview with Pierre Cartier, June 18, 1997
Marjorie Senechal

Nicolas Bourbaki, 1935–???? If you are a mathematician working today, you have almost certainly been influenced by Bourbaki, at least in style and spirit, and perhaps to a greater extent than you realize. But if you are a student, you may never have heard of it, him, them. What or who is, or was, Bourbaki? Check as many as apply. Bourbaki is, or was, as the case may be:

• the discoverer (or inventor, if you prefer) of the notion of a mathematical structure;
• one of the great abstractionist movements of the twentieth century;
• a small but enormously influential community of mathematicians;
• a collective that hasn't published for fifteen years.

The answer is: all of the above, and they are four closely woven strands of an important chapter in intellectual history. Is it time to write that chapter? Has the story of Bourbaki come to an end? Bourbaki was born in Paris in 1935 when a small group of mathematicians at the École Normale Supérieure, dissatisfied with the courses they were teaching, decided to reformulate them. Most mathematicians have had that experience at one time or another, but the scope of Bourbaki's dissatisfaction grew quickly and without bound. By 1939, writing as an anonymous collective under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki, it began to publish a series of books intended to transform the theory and practice of mathematics itself. From its beginning, Bourbaki was a fervent believer in the unity and universality of mathematics, and dedicated itself to demonstrating both by recasting all of mathematics into a unified whole. Its goals were total formalization and perfect rigor. In the post-war years, Bourbaki metamorphosed from rebel to establishment. Bourbaki's own rules explicitly provided for self-renewal: from time to time, younger mathematicians were invited to join and older members resigned, in accordance with mandatory "retirement" at age fifty. Now Bourbaki itself is nearly twenty years older than any of its members. The long-running Bourbaki seminar is still alive and well and living in Paris, but the voice of Bourbaki itself—as expressed through its books—has been silent for fifteen years. Will it speak again? Can it speak again? Pierre Cartier was a member of Bourbaki from 1955 to 1983. Born in Sedan, France in 1932, he graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied under Henri Cartan. His thesis, defended in 1958, was on algebraic geometry; since then he has contributed to many areas of mathematics, including number theory, group theory, probability, and mathematical physics. Professor Cartier taught at Strasbourg for a decade beginning in 1961, after which he joined CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Since 1971 he has been a professor at IHES (Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques) at Bures-sur Yvette, and has taught at the École Polytechnique and at the École Normale, where among other activities he runs a seminar on epistemology. In 1979 he was awarded the Ampère Prize of the French Academy of Sciences. Professor Cartier has been involved in various programs to help developing countries, including Chile, Vietnam, and India, build science at home; he is also an editor of a book about art and mathematics. Few people are better qualified to discuss the silence of Bourbaki. We are grateful to him for agreeing to do so with the readers of The Mathematical Intelligencer.

The Interview

Senechal: Please tell us first about your own connection to Bourbaki.

Cartier: As far as I remember, my first acquaintance with Bourbaki was in June 1951. I was a first-year student at the École Normale, Henri Cartan was my professor of mathematics there, and at his request Bourbaki invited me to join their meeting at Pelvoux, in the Alps. I remember that we discussed many things, especially a text written by Laurent Schwartz on the foundations of Lie groups; it was one of the first drafts in the well-known series of Bourbaki on Lie groups. It was not many years after Schwartz's invention of distributions, which made him famous. You have to understand that the mathematics students at École Normale were all students of both Henri Cartan and Laurent Schwartz (who left Nancy for Paris in 1952). We attended their seminars and courses and tried to use their new tools in all directions. Francois Bruhat and I were among the first to understand the importance of distributions in the theory of Lie groups and their representations. Bruhat devoted his thesis to these topics and I published my own contributions only much later. For me, it was very important to be exposed from the inside. I was surprised to see all these great people I had known from a distance. I was accepted very freely. It took three or four more years before I was formally accepted as a member. In the fifties and sixties, there was a continuous spectrum from the inside core Bourbaki to the outside. The work that was printed in the books, what was reported in the seminar, and the work of the students were closely linked, and I think that is one of the reasons for the great success of French mathematics at that time. Of course, those times were very different. The scale was much smaller. Then there were about ten doctorates a year in mathematics in France (compared to three hundred today). At that first meeting I was what they call a cobaye, a guinea pig. I was very enthusiastic about it. First of all, it was the first thing in modem mathematics that I saw. I came from a small city, from a difficult situation because of the war. I had been a student in a very provincial, very outdated high school. Some of my teachers were very good but of course they were very far away from modern science. The mathematics I was taught was classical geometry, in the uncultivated, synthetic way. I did have the luck to have an imaginative teacher in physics, and so at first I wanted to by a physicist. Then I was a student at the Lycee Saint-Louis in Paris before being accepted at the École Normale, and I took private lessons in physics from a very peculiar teacher, Pierre Aigrain. (A graduate of the Naval Academy, he was in 1950 an assistant professor of physics; eventually he became Secretary of State for science under President Giscard.) Usually a bright student completes the program in two years, but I managed to get through it in one. But both the mathematics and the physics I was taught were totally outmoded at that time, totally. I remember that, in a course called General Physics at the Sorbonne, the professor made a solemn declaration: "Gentlemen"—he did not mention ladies but there were very few girl students—"in my class what some people call the 'atomic hypothesis' has no place." That was 1950, five years after Hiroshima! So I went to Aigrain and said, "What do I do?" and he said, "Well, of course, you have to get your degree, but I will teach you physics properly." This shows what the French university was at the time. In order to understand the influence of Bourbaki, you have to understand that. Bourbaki came into a vacuum. Many people have discussed the reasons why this was so; I don't think this is the place to discuss it again. But obviously in the fifties, the early fifties, the teaching of science was very poor. It took Bourbaki about five or six years to subvert the whole system. By 1957 or '58 the subversion had been almost complete, in Paris.

Senechal: But Bourbaki began in the thirties...

Cartier: The first book was published in 1939, but there was the war, which delayed things, and also André Weil was in the States, Claude Chevalley was in the States, and Laurent Schwartz had to hide during the war because he is a Jew. Bourbaki survived during the war with only Henri Cartan and Jean Dieudonné. But all the work that had been done in the thirties blossomed in the fifties. I remember how we—the young mathematicians—were really eager to go to the bookstore to buy the new books. And at that time Bourbaki published at least one or two volumes every year. When I formally became a member of Bourbaki in 1955, I had to abide by the rule that everyone should leave at 50, and so I left in 1983, when I was almost 51. I devoted almost 30 years of my life, and at least one third of my work, to Bourbaki. The working habits of Bourbaki involved very many preliminary drafts of a book before it was published. At the time, we had three meetings a year, one week in the fall, one week in the spring, and two weeks in the summer, which is already one month of hard work, ten or twelve hours a day. The published books comprised about 10,000 pages, which means approximately 1000 to 2000 pages of preliminary reports and drafts written every year. I estimate that I contributed about 200 pages a year during all this time with Bourbaki.

Senechal: How many people belonged, at that time?

Cartier: About 12. It was always a small, well-delimited group. The seminar was different, much more open. But still, in the 1950s, if you look at the table of contents of the seminar volumes, about half the papers were written by members of Bourbaki; in those days the interaction between the seminar and the group was very strong. Now that's no longer true: it's still a distinguished series but it's usually written by people who have no direct connection with the institution Bourbaki. But at that time people published in the seminar series part of their discoveries, or preliminary accounts of Bourbaki's ideas that later appeared in the books. I was typically a member of the third generation. You can say that there have been four. The first generation were the fathers: André Weil, Henri Cartan, Claude Chevalley, Jean Delsarte, and Jean Dieudonné, people who founded the group in the thirties. (Others joined in the beginning, but left soon.) Then there was a second generation, people invited to join during or just after the war: Laurent Schwartz, Jean-Pierre Serre, Pierre Samuel, Jean-Louis Koszul, Jacques Dixmier, Roger Godement, and Sammy Eilenberg. The third generation was Armand Borel, Alexandre Grothendieck, Francois Bruhat, myself, Serge Lang, and John Tate.

Senechal: Did these generations differ in their attitudes or outlook?

Cartier: They were very different. I think they became more and more pragmatic, and less and less dogmatic.

Senechal: And how did that show up in Bourbaki's work?

Cartier: From the beginning, the Bourbaki treatise was conceived as comprising two parts. The first part is on foundations and consists of six books, on set theory, algebra, general topology, elementary calculus, topological vector spaces, and (Lebesgue's) integration theory. The last four of these books give the foundations of analysis, as perceived by Bourbaki, with a strong bias toward functional analysis. The second part, falling short of more ambitious projects, consists of two very successful series, on Lie groups and on commutative algebra. Looking back at the list of the Bourbaki members of the second and third generations, you realize that some of the world's leading experts of the time were there, and that accounts for the breadth and depth of the second part of Bourbaki's work. The older generation had learned mathematics in the old-fashioned way. They were the ones to reshuffle mathematics. The second generation had already been exposed to the new teaching. My generation, the third generation, did not have to prove that the new method was better than the old one because we were taught with the new method basically. I think I was just on the borderline, because in high school I was still taught in the old method, but when I went to Paris I was exposed to the new thinking. And so we were less and less dogmatic, because we didn't have to prove anything. The core of French mathematics had surrendered to Bourbaki. Bourbaki had already seized power, not only in intellectual terms but also in academic terms. It was clear that from an institutional point of view, Bourbaki had won. If you look at the volumes on Lie groups, you will see that the later ones have chapters that you don't expect in Bourbaki. It became more and more explicit; there are tables and drawings. I think this was basically the influence of one person, Armand Borel. He was fond of quoting Shaw, "It's the Swiss national character, my dear lady," and very often during a discussion he would say, "I'm the Swiss peasant." Of course at that time differential geometry was blossoming, and it had always been a great challenge to Bourbaki. You have to remember that the father of Henri Cartan was Elie Cartan, the geometer, and the Bourbaki recognized only one godfather, Elie Cartan, and had much dislike for all the other French mathematicians of the thirties. Bourbaki came to terms with Poincaré only after a long struggle. When I joined the group in the fifties it was not the fashion to value Poincaré at all. He was old-fashioned. Of course, the opinion about Poincaré has completely changed. But it's clear that his style and Bourbaki's style were totally different. The fourth generation was more or less a group of students of Grothendieck. But at that time Grothendieck had already left Bourbaki. He belonged to Bourbaki for about ten years but he left in anger. The personalities were very strong at the time. I remember there were clashes very often. There was also, as usual, a fight of generations, like in any family. I think a small group like that repeated more or less the psychological features of a family. So we had clashes between generations, clashes between brothers, and so on. But they did not distract Bourbaki from his main goal, even though they were quite brutal occasionally. At least the goal was clear. There were a few people who could not take the burden of this psychological style, for instance Grothendieck left and also Lang dropped out.

You can think of the first books of Bourbaki as an encyclopedia. If you consider it as a textbook, it's a disaster.

Senechal: Did the goals stay clear in people's minds all the time, or were they changing?

Cartier: They changed. The first generation had first to create a project from nothing. They had to invent a method. Then in the forties you can say that the method had emerged and Bourbaki knew where to go: his goal was to provide the foundation for mathematics. They had to submit all mathematics to the scheme of Hilbert; what van der Waerden had done for algebra would have to be done for the rest of mathematics. What should be included was more or less clear. The first six books of Bourbaki comprise the basic background knowledge of a modem graduate student. The misunderstanding was that many people thought that it should be taught the way it was written in the books. You can think of the first books of Bourbaki as an encyclopedia of mathematics, containing all the necessary information. That is a good description. If you consider it as a textbook, it's a disaster.

Senechal: Were you aware of that when you were a member of Bourbaki? Did people in Bourbaki realize that this was not a textbook?

Cartier: More or less, but not so clearly as now. There was some misunderstanding about that, I suppose because we didn't have textbooks. I remember very well how I learned algebra and topology. When I was a student, every time that Bourbaki published a new book, I would just buy it or borrow it from the library, and learn it. For me, for people in my generation, it was a textbook. But the misunderstanding was that it should be a textbook for everybody. That was the big disaster. Anyway, by then the scope of the project was more or less clear. But what should Bourbaki do after that? The second generation had an existing method, and had just to develop a project with clearly delineated boundaries. The third generation had to go beyond that, to go into the open world, which meant, at that time, geometry in a general way: algebraic geometry, differential geometry, several complex variables, Lie groups, moduli spaces, and so on. I think I'm responsible for the idea that Bourbaki should devote a special chapter to the geometry of crystallographic groups. The reasons for that are clearly stated in the introduction to the series on Lie groups. Coxeter was the first to understand the relation of Lie groups to the crystallographic groups and their classification. Certainly the people who were working on Lie groups were, by spirit, more geometrical and more pragmatic than the others. But I remember that I had to fight quite hard to convince my colleagues within Bourbaki that crystallographic groups should be given preeminence.

Senechal: What was Bourbaki's opinion of Coxeter?

Cartier: I think that by the sixties people realized the importance of his work. Borel had many of the same ideas and Jacques Tits also played a role. Tits was much closer in spirit, in his way of doing mathematics, to Coxeter than to Bourbaki. He wasn't formally a member of Bourbaki but he had a long collaboration with us. So we could thank him, in the books, for his collaboration without breaking the rule of anonymity. Tits was very generous: he supplied us with many of the exercises, and many of his results were published for the first time in Bourbaki volumes. But of course he had a very different way of thinking about mathematics. In the second generation and third generation, the two main series were commutative algebra (with algebraic geometry in the background) on the one hand, and Lie groups on the other hand. And there is an obvious difference of style and of emphasis, despite the fact that at that time Bourbaki was really a collective and everyone contributed to every book, more or less. Serre was a master of both sides; he was not an expert in Lie groups at first but he became one. Serre was the natural leader in the second generation because, like Weil in the first generation, he was the only one with a really universal approach to mathematics. But neither of them was an analyst. Certainly the contents of Bourbaki were much more about algebra, algebraic geometry, than about analysis. By the fourth generation the goal was less visible. Grothendieck had developed his own program, outside of Bourbaki, so the need for a Bourbaki was less obvious. And there was also some lack of a global understanding of mathematics. The members had become more specialized in their interests. There were various attempts within the group to focus on new projects. For instance, for awhile the idea was that you should develop the theory of several complex variables, and many drafts were written. But it never matured, I think partly because it was too late. There were already many good textbooks on several complex variables in the seventies, by Grauert and other people. By the end of the seventies, the method of Bourbaki had been so well understood that everyone knew how to write in this spirit. There was a whole generation of textbooks, and books, which were under his influence. Bourbaki was left without a task, and so he decided to devote part of his energy to revising his own books, the so-called "New Edition." The revision was mostly completed; these were really thorough revisions.

Senechal: Do the revisions include a change of style?

Cartier: No, no. But for instance, the section on the topology of metric spaces was much more developed and deepened, the proofs were improved, and there is a small volume that tried to bridge the gap between probability theory and the way that Bourbaki presented Lebesgue integration theory. That was an attempt to correct one obviously mistaken point of view of Bourbaki.

Senechal: What other areas of mathematics do you see now as having been left outside?

Cartier: First of all analysis, although there is an elementary calculus text, a very good book, that was the influence of Jean Delsarte. There is essentially no analysis beyond the foundations: nothing about partial differential equations, nothing about probability. There is also nothing about combinatorics, nothing about algebraic topology, nothing about concrete geometry. And Bourbaki never seriously considered logic. Dieudonné himself was very vocal against logic. Anything connected with mathematical physics is totally absent from Bourbaki's text. In the Bourbaki seminar, I contributed a long series of papers with emphasis on questions of mathematical physics. But I was the only one, and my contributions were not always accepted without a fight. But even in the areas of mathematics that were not considered by Bourbaki, looking backwards over the last thirty years, it is obvious that their development has been very much influenced by the Bourbaki spirit.

Senechal: Was there a bias against physics, or did Bourbaki just not think about it?

Cartier: Well, of course there was a strong bias against it, for most people. At the beginning I suppose I was slightly heterodox within the Bourbaki group. I had a longstanding interest in mathematical physics. A few years ago, in a discussion with André Weil, just after he published his own memoirs, I said, "You mentioned that in 1926 you were at Göttingen ... in 1926 something happened in Göttingen." And Weil asked, "What did happen in Göttingen?" and I said "Oh! Quantum mechanics!" And Weil said, "I don't know what that is." He was a student of Hilbert in 1926 and Hilbert himself was interested in quantum mechanics, Max Born was there, Heisenberg was there, and others, but apparently André Weil didn't pay any attention to it. I recently had an occasion to give a public lecture about the philosophy of space of Hermann Weyl, so I read the literature about him carefully. There is an obituary of Hermann Weyl written by Chevalley and Weil. They praise him, for good reasons, but there is no mention of his work in physics, not even his work in general relativity. By all accounts, the two best books of Weyl are his book on general relativity and his book on quantum mechanics!

Senechal: Bourbaki's last publication was in 1983. Why doesn't it publish anything now?

Cartier: There are several reasons for that. First, there was a clash between Bourbaki and his publisher, about royalties and translation rights, ending in a long and unpleasant legal process. When the matter was settled in 1980, Bourbaki was allowed to make a deal with a new publisher. Using the extensive work done in the seventies towards the revision of the old books, we were able to republish them in a new edition. We completed the existing series by two or three more volumes, but then ... silence. Beyond the easily stated goal of a "final edition," Bourbaki struggled in the seventies and the eighties to formulate new directions. I mentioned already a failed project about several complex variables. There were attempts at homotopy theory, at spectral theory of operators, at the index theorem, at symplectic geometry. But none of these projects went beyond a preliminary stage. Bourbaki could not find a new outlet, because they had a dogmatic view of mathematics: everything should be set inside a secure framework. That was quite reasonable for general topology and general algebra, which were already solidified around 1950. Most people agree now that you do need general foundations for mathematics, at least if you believe in the unity of mathematics. But I believe now that this unity should be organic, while Bourbaki advocated a structural point of view. In accordance with Hubert's views, set theory was thought by Bourbaki to provide that badly needed general framework. If you need some logical foundations, categories are a more flexible tool than set theory. The point is that categories offer both a general philosophical foundation—that is the encyclopedic, or taxonomic part—and a very efficient mathematical tool, to be used in mathematical situations. That set theory and structures are, by contrast, more rigid can be seen by reading the final chapter in Bourbaki set theory, with a monstrous endeavor to formulate categories without categories. It is amazing that category theory was more or less the brainchild of Bourbaki. The two founders were Eilenberg and MacLane. MacLane was never a member of Bourbaki, but Eilenberg was, and MacLane was close in spirit. The first textbook on homo-logical algebra was Cartan-Eilenberg, which was published when both were very active in Bourbaki. Let us also mention Grothendieck, who developed categories to a very large extent. I have been using categories in a conscious or unconscious way in much of my work, and so had most of the Bourbaki members. But because the way of thinking was too dogmatic, or at least the presentation in the books was too dogmatic, Bourbaki could not accommodate a change of emphasis, once the publication process was started. I think the eighties were a natural limit. Under the pressure of André Weil, Bourbaki insisted that every member should retire at fifty, and I remember that, in my eighties, I said, as a joke, that Bourbaki should retire when he reaches fifty.

Senechal: It seems that this more or less happened.

Cartier: Yes, I think one of the main reasons is that its stated goal, to provide foundations for all existing mathematics, was achieved. But also, if you have such a rigid format it is very difficult to incorporate new developments. If the emphasis doesn't change, it's still possible. But of course, after fifty years, the emphasis had changed.

Senechal: Would you say a little more about that?

Cartier: André Weil was fond of speaking of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It is no accident that Bourbaki lasted from the beginning of the thirties to the eighties, while the Soviet system lasted from 1917 to 1989. André Weil does not like this comparison. He says repeatedly, "I've never been a communist!" There is a joke that the 20th century lasted from Sarajevo 1914 to Sarajevo 1989. The 20th century, from 1917 to 1989, has been a century of ideology, the ideological age.

Senechal: By ideology, do you mean the idea of a blueprint that can serve for all purposes and for all time?

Cartier: A final solution. There are good reasons to hate that expression, but it was in the people's minds that we could reach a final solution. There is a book by H. G. Wells called A Modern Utopia, which ought to be reprinted. By chance I was reading it just at the time of the collapse of the Soviet system. As you know, H.G. Wells was certainly very friendly towards the October 1917 revolution, he was a friend of the Soviets, admittedly. But he had a very sharp mind and he had such a sharp historical view that he could envision developments. Even though he was excited by this new era, he understood that the final solution doesn't exist and that it was a mistake to consider that you can reach such a state of social historical equilibrium that from then on society will stay as it is forever. Wells argued very well against this idea. If you read his books, you will see that as one of his obsessions. Hilbert, I think, reflected this Zeitgeist. There is one recording of his voice; in Constance Reid's book about Hilbert there is a floppy disk of it, a record of some speech that Hilbert gave in Germany in the thirties. It's very ideological. At the time Hilbert was aging and so his views were solidifying. If you put the manifesto of the surrealists and the introduction of Bourbaki side by side, as well as other manifestos of the time, they look very similar. My daughter is currently translating a book about the birth of cinematography, and in a chapter about the Italian futurists there is a very similar statement. In science, in art, in literature, in politics, economics, social affairs, there was the same spirit. The stated goal of Bourbaki was to create a new mathematics. He didn't cite any other mathematical texts. Bourbaki is self-sufficient. Of course at the time the communists in the Soviet Union were claiming the same. We know now it was a lie, and that the leaders knew at the time they were lying. Certainly Bourbaki was not lying, but still, the spirit was the same. It was the time of ideology: Bourbaki was to be the New Euclid, he would write a textbook for the next 2000 years.

For him it was important to see questions as a whole, to see the necessity of a proof, its global implications. As to rigor, all the members of Bourbaki cared about it: the Bourbaki movement was started essentially because rigor was lacking among French mathematicians, by comparison with the Germans, that is the Hilbertians. Rigor consisted in getting rid of an accretion of superfluous details. Conversely, lack of rigor gave my father an impression of a proof where one was walking in mud, where one had to pick up some sort of filth in order to get ahead. Once that filth was taken away, one could get at the mathematical object, a sort of crystallized body whose essence is its structure. When that structure had been constructed, he would say it was an object which interested him, something to look at, to admire, perhaps to turn around, but certainly not to transform. For him, rigor in mathematics consisted in making a new object which could thereafter remain unchanged. The way my father worked, it seems that this was what counted most, this production of an object which then became inert-dead, really. It was no longer to be altered or transformed. Not that there was any negative connotation to this. But I must add that my father was probably the only member of Bourbaki who thought of mathematics as a way to put, objects to death for esthetic reasons. From "Claude Chevalley described by his daughter" (1988) In Nicolas Bourbaki: Faits et légendes

Senechal: Why is there a lack of any kind of visual illustration in most of Bourbaki?

Cartier: I think the best answer would be the description of Chevalley given by his daughter [see insert]. The Bourbaki were Puritans, and Puritans are strongly opposed to pictorial representations of truths of their faith. The number of Protestants and Jews in the Bourbaki group was overwhelming. And you know that the French Protestants especially are very close to Jews in spirit. I have some Jewish background and I was raised as a Huguenot. We are people of the Bible, of the Old Testament, and many Huguenots in France are more enamored of the Old Testament than of the New Testament. We worship Jaweh more than Jesus sometimes. So, what were the reasons? The general philosophy as developed by Kant, certainly. Bourbaki is the brainchild of German philosophy. Bourbaki was founded to develop and propagate German philosophical views in science. André Weil has always been fond of German science and he was always quoting Gauss. All these people, with their own tastes and their own personal views, were proponents of German philosophy. And then there was the idea that there is an opposition between art and science. Art is fragile and mortal, because it appeals to emotions, to visual meaning, and to unstated analogies. But I think it's also part of the Euclidean tradition. In Euclid, you find some drawings but it is known that most of them were added after Euclid, in later editions. Most of the drawings in the original are abstract drawings. You make some reasoning about some proportions and you draw some segments, but they are not intended to be geometrical segments, just representations of some abstract notions. Also Lagrange proudly stated, in his textbook on mechanics, "You will not find any drawing in my book!" The analytical spirit was part of the French tradition and part of the German tradition. And I suppose it was also due to the influence of people like Russell, who claimed that they could prove everything formally—that so-called geometrical intuition was not reliable in proof. Again Bourbaki's abstractions and disdain for visualization were part of a global fashion, as illustrated by the abstract tendencies in the music and the paintings of that period.

Senechal: Did the members of Bourbaki appreciate abstract music and abstract art?

Cartier: I don't think there was much taste for abstract music or art. You could say that on the whole they had standard bourgeois tastes. Educated bourgeois—not philistine. For instance, both Cartan and Dieudonné were lovers and practitioners of music, but they were very classical. Cartan certainly, in his Protestant education, was very fond of Bach, and Dieudonné was quite a good piano player, at an amateur level, but quite good, and he had a fantastic memory. He knew hundreds and hundreds of pages of score by heart and could follow every single note. I remember I had a few occasions to go to the concert hall with him. It was fascinating, he would look at the score in his hand and exclaim "OH!" if a note was missing from the orchestra! He devoted the last six months of his life—when he decided that his mathematical life was finished, he had written his last book, and he retreated to his home—to listening to recordings and following the scores and the notes. It's interesting to know that revolutionaries in mathematics were not revolutionaries in other things. I suppose that the only person in the Bourbaki group who was really aware of the connections of the Bourbaki ideology with other ideologies was Chevalley. He was a member of various avant-garde groups, both in politics and in the arts. As the editor of Chevalley's work, I have decided, at the urging of his daughter, to include a special volume about his work outside mathematics. He had written various pamphlets, and various notes; Catherine Chevalley will have to work hard to collect these things and we will publish them as part of his collected works. Chevalley was the only one who perceived the connection between Bourbaki and the rest, and that may be why, in the seventies, he was more critical than other people. In the seventies a sensible person could already see the end of a long historical trend, and I think he was very sensitive to this. Mathematics was the most important part of his life, but he did not draw any boundary between his mathematics and the rest of his life. Maybe this was because his father was an ambassador, so he had more contact with various people.

Senechal: Could you state the main reasons/or the decline of Bourbaki?

Cartier: As I said, in the eighties there was no longer a stated goal, except for the long legal battle. I think it was one of the cases of the century! We hired a famous lawyer who had fought for the heirs of Picasso and Fujita. We survived artificially: we had to win this battle. But it was a pyrrhic victory. As usual in legal battles, both parties lost and the lawyer got rich. In fame and in pocket. In a sense Bourbaki is like a dinosaur, the head too far away from the tail. When Dieudonné was the scribe of Bourbaki, for many many years, every printed word came from his pen. Of course there had been many drafts and preliminary versions, but the printed version was always from the pen of Dieudonné. And with his fantastic memory, he knew every single word. I remember, it was a joke, you could say, "Dieudonné, what is this result about so and so?" and he would go to the shelf and take down the book and open it to the right page. After Dieudonné (and an interlude by Samuel and Dixmier) I was the secretary of Bourbaki, and it was my duty to do most of the proofreading, I think I proofread five to ten thousand pages. I have a good visual memory. I wouldn't compare myself with Dieudonné, but there was a time when I knew most of the printed material in Bourbaki. But no one after me was able to do this. So Bourbaki lost the awareness of his own body, the 40 published volumes. And as I said before, Bourbaki was more or less like a family. The second or third or fourth generation in any family or any social group follows definite sociological patterns. My own family was typical. My grandfather was a self-made man, a very successful businessman. My father and my uncle went into the business, but they were not so devoted to the fight. And people in my generation—well, I suppose I made the right decision not to engage in it. Indeed, people in my generation who did go into our family business did not do so well, because they didn't have anything to fight for. But these are the inner workings. Of course the outside world also has an influence. That the outside mathematical world has changed is obvious. We all know that what Stalin could never achieve with his army, to conquer the world, the collapse of the Soviet Union has achieved for mathematics. The Russian mathematicians have brought a different style to the West, a different way of looking at the problems, a new blood. It's a different time, with different values. I have no regrets: I think it was worthwhile to live in the twentieth century. But now it's finished.

Senechal: How would you describe your journey with Bourbaki?

Cartier: I have been personally very happy, because when I reached the time of normal retirement from Bourbaki, I had the very fortunate opportunity to be asked to deliver the lecture on behalf of Vladimir Drinfel'd at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Berkeley in 1986 (Drinfel'd was prevented from coming for political reasons). It was a great challenge and a great honor for me; his paper is one of the most important papers in the proceedings. Overnight that changed my mathematical life. I said, "This is what I have to do now." Of course I knew the basic material but the perspective was new. I cannot claim that within the few hours I had to prepare the lecture I could really master it, but I understood enough to explain to the people, "This is new, it is important." When I began in mathematics the main task of a mathematician was to bring order and make a synthesis of existing material, to create what Thomas Kuhn called normal science. Mathematics, in the forties and fifties, was undergoing what Kuhn calls a solidification period. In a given science there are times when you have to take all the existing material and create a unified terminology, unified standards, and train people in a unified style. The purpose of mathematics, in the fifties and sixties, was that, to create a new era of normal science. Now we are again at the beginning of a new revolution. Mathematics is undergoing major changes. We don't know exactly where it will go. It is not yet time to make a synthesis of all these things—maybe in twenty or thirty years it will be time for a new Bourbaki. I consider myself very fortunate to have had two lives, a life of normal science and a life of scientific revolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.	Nicolas Bourbaki, Faits et légendes, by Michèle Chouchan, Éditions du Choix, Argenteuil, 1995.
2.	"Nicholas Bourbaki, Collective Mathematician: an interview with Claude Chevalley," by Denis Guedj, translated by Jeremy Gray, The Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 7, no. 2, 18–22, 1985.
3.	Les Mathématiques et l'Art, by Pierre Cartier, Institut des Hautes Études Scientlfiques preprint IHES/M/93/33.
4.	"The Continuing Silence of a Poet," by A. B. Yehoshua, in The Continuing Silence of a Poet: collected stories, Penguin Books, 1991.

on Faustian pacts

For another politician's compromise, see: http://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/barack-obama-s-six-deadly-sins-1.1539588#.UdBpJvlmjTo

 

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How the ANC's Faustian pact sold out South Africa's poorest

In the early 1990s, we in the leadership of the ANC made a serious error. Our people still paying the priceRonnie Kasrils, The Guardian, Monday 24 June 2013

Lonmin mineworkers pay their respects to Mpuzeni Ngxande, one of the 34 miners killed by police on 16 August near the Marikana mine. 'The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 prompted me to join the ANC. I found Marikana even more distressing: a democratic South Africa was meant to end such barbarity.' Photograph: Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images  

South Africa's young people today are known as the Born Free generation. They enjoy the dignity of being born into a democratic society with the right to vote and choose who will govern. But modern South Africa is not a perfect society. Full equality – social and economic – does not exist, and control of the country's wealth remains in the hands of a few, so new challenges and frustrations arise. Veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle like myself are frequently asked whether, in the light of such disappointment, the sacrifice was worth it. While my answer is yes, I must confess to grave misgivings: I believe we should be doing far better.

There have been impressive achievements since the attainment of freedom in 1994: in building houses, crèches, schools, roads and infrastructure; the provision of water and electricity to millions; free education and healthcare; increases in pensions and social grants; financial and banking stability; and slow but steady economic growth (until the 2008 crisis at any rate). These gains, however, have been offset by a breakdown in service delivery, resulting in violent protests by poor and marginalised communities; gross inadequacies and inequities in the education and health sectors; a ferocious rise in unemployment; endemic police brutality and torture; unseemly power struggles within the ruling party that have grown far worse since the ousting of Mbeki in 2008; an alarming tendency to secrecy and authoritarianism in government; the meddling with the judiciary; and threats to the media and freedom of expression. Even Nelson Mandela's privacy and dignity are violated for the sake of a cheap photo opportunity by the ANC's top echelon.

Most shameful and shocking of all, the events of Bloody Thursday – 16 August 2012 – when police massacred 34 striking miners at Marikana mine, owned by the London-based Lonmin company. The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 prompted me to join the ANC. I found Marikana even more distressing: a democratic South Africa was meant to bring an end to such barbarity. And yet the president and his ministers, locked into a culture of cover-up. Incredibly, the South African Communist party, my party of over 50 years, did not condemn the police either.

South Africa's liberation struggle reached a high point but not its zenith when we overcame apartheid rule. Back then, our hopes were high for our country given its modern industrial economy, strategic mineral resources (not only gold and diamonds), and a working class and organised trade union movement with a rich tradition of struggle. But that optimism overlooked the tenacity of the international capitalist system. From 1991 to 1996 the battle for the ANC's soul got under way, and was eventually lost to corporate power: we were entrapped by the neoliberal economy – or, as some today cry out, we "sold our people down the river".

What I call our Faustian moment came when we took an IMF loan on the eve of our first democratic election. That loan, with strings attached that precluded a radical economic agenda, was considered a necessary evil, as were concessions to keep negotiations on track and take delivery of the promised land for our people. Doubt had come to reign supreme: we believed, wrongly, there was no other option; that we had to be cautious, since by 1991 our once powerful ally, the Soviet union, bankrupted by the arms race, had collapsed. Inexcusably, we had lost faith in the ability of our own revolutionary masses to overcome all obstacles. Whatever the threats to isolate a radicalising South Africa, the world could not have done without our vast reserves of minerals. To lose our nerve was not necessary or inevitable. The ANC leadership needed to remain determined, united and free of corruption – and, above all, to hold on to its revolutionary will. Instead, we chickened out. The ANC leadership needed to remain true to its commitment of serving the people. This would have given it the hegemony it required not only over the entrenched capitalist class but over emergent elitists, many of whom would seek wealth through black economic empowerment, corrupt practices and selling political influence.

To break apartheid rule through negotiation, rather than a bloody civil war, seemed then an option too good to be ignored. However, at that time, the balance of power was with the ANC, and conditions were favourable for more radical change at the negotiating table than we ultimately accepted. It is by no means certain that the old order, apart from isolated rightist extremists, had the will or capability to resort to the bloody repression envisaged by Mandela's leadership. If we had held our nerve, we could have pressed forward without making the concessions we did.

It was a dire error on my part to focus on my own responsibilities and leave the economic issues to the ANC's experts. However, at the time, most of us never quite knew what was happening with the top-level economic discussions. As s Sampie Terreblanche has revealed in his critique, Lost in Transformation, by late 1993 big business strategies – hatched in 1991 at the mining mogul Harry Oppenheimer's Johannesburg residence – were crystallising in secret late-night discussions at the Development Bank of South Africa. Present were South Africa's mineral and energy leaders, the bosses of US and British companies with a presence in South Africa – and young ANC economists schooled in western economics. They were reporting to Mandela, and were either outwitted or frightened into submission by hints of the dire consequences for South Africa should an ANC government prevail with what were considered ruinous economic policies.

All means to eradicate poverty, which was Mandela's and the ANC's sworn promise to the "poorest of the poor", were lost in the process. Nationalisation of the mines and heights of the economy as envisaged by the Freedom charter was abandoned. The ANC accepted responsibility for a vast apartheid-era debt, which should have been cancelled. A wealth tax on the super-rich to fund developmental projects was set aside, and domestic and international corporations, enriched by apartheid, were excused from any financial reparations. Extremely tight budgetary obligations were instituted that would tie the hands of any future governments; obligations to implement a free-trade policy and abolish all forms of tariff protection in keeping with neo-liberal free trade fundamentals were accepted. Big corporations were allowed to shift their main listings abroad. In Terreblanche's opinion, these ANC concessions constituted "treacherous decisions that [will] haunt South Africa for generations to come".

An ANC-Communist party leadership eager to assume political office (myself no less than others) readily accepted this devil's pact, only to be damned in the process. It has bequeathed an economy so tied in to the neoliberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the plight of most of our people.

Little wonder that their patience is running out; that their anguished protests increase as they wrestle with deteriorating conditions of life; that those in power have no solutions. The scraps are left go to the emergent black elite; corruption has taken root as the greedy and ambitious fight like dogs over a bone.

In South Africa in 2008 the poorest 50% received only 7.8% of total income. While 83% of white South Africans were among the top 20% of income receivers in 2008, only 11% of our black population were. These statistics conceal unmitigated human suffering. Little wonder that the country has seen such an enormous rise in civil protest.

A descent into darkness must be curtailed. I do not believe the ANC alliance is beyond hope. There are countless good people in the ranks. But a revitalisation and renewal from top to bottom is urgently required. The ANC's soul needs to be restored; its traditional values and culture of service reinstated. The pact with the devil needs to be broken.

At present the impoverished majority do not see any hope other than the ruling party, although the ANC's ability to hold those allegiances is deteriorating. The effective parliamentary opposition reflects big business interests of various stripes, and while a strong parliamentary opposition is vital to keep the ANC on its toes, most voters want socialist policies, not measures inclined to serve big business interests, more privatisation and neoliberal economics.

This does not mean it is only up to the ANC, SACP and Cosatu to rescue the country from crises. There are countless patriots and comrades in existing and emerging organised formations who are vital to the process. Then there are the legal avenues and institutions such as the public protector's office and human rights commission that – including the ultimate appeal to the constitutional court – can test, expose and challenge injustice and the infringement of rights. The strategies and tactics of the grassroots – trade unions, civic and community organisations, women's and youth groups – signpost the way ahead with their non-violent and dignified but militant action.

The space and freedom to express one's views, won through decades of struggle, are available and need to be developed. We look to the Born Frees as the future torchbearers.

• This is an edited extract from the new introduction to his autobiography, Armed and Dangerous

File under Feminism

“Each life has its share of heroism, an obscure heroism, born of abdication, of renunciation and acceptance under the merciless whip of fate.” 

― Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter

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 GARDINER

LONDON — 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-indulgence
by 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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http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/chloe-emmott/young-women-are-not-failing-feminism_b_3454711.html?utm_hp_ref=uk-lifestyle?ncid=GEP

Young Women Are Not Failing Feminism, We Are Its Lifeblood

Posted: 17/06/2013 17:52

Yasmin 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 BENNHOLD

Published: 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 SCIOLINO
Published: 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/