Call for Papers: Women as Breadwinners

Another PSA for my reading audience:

Call for essays: Breadwinning Broads: stories from women who bring home most (or even all) of the bacon

The topic of wives out-earning their husbands has received a lot of attention recently. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a third of all wives earn more than their husbands (2003). The Breadwinning Broads project wants to hear about life from the perspective of these meal-ticket mamas. Our hope is to shine a light on the shifting roles in modern marriages or relationships and how women feel these changes have impacted their identity as a wife, girlfriend, partner, mother, daughter or woman.

The Breadwinning Broads project is seeking first person essays of 2000-3500 words from wives, girlfriends, or partners, who earn, or once earned, most or all of the household income. Rather than social commentary or man-bashing rants, we are looking for stories focusing on unique perspectives of being the breadwinner.

Here are some questions that may help spark your essay:

1. As the breadwinner, how to do you see yourself? How do you think others see you? Has been the breadwinner changed you? What have you learned about yourself?

2. Does being the breadwinner feel liberating or confining? How and why? What are your hopes? What are your fears?

3. How has being a breadwinner impacted your role as a daughter? Was your mother a breadwinner, as well? Has your role as the provider affected your relationship with your mother or father?

4. How do you feel about your work outside the home? Are you passionate about it? Hate it? How do your feelings about your job affect the way you see yourself as the breadwinner?

5. How might your role as breadwinner impact your daughter(s)? Son(s)? Does being the breadwinner shape your feelings about motherhood? How? Why?

6. What about your marriage or relationship changed, improved or deteriorated as a result of your breadwinning status? Did you willingly enter into your role or did circumstances require you to take it on? If your marriage or relationship did not last, was it due to your role as the provider?

Above all, we are looking for writing that moves us, makes us laugh, surprises us and gives us unique insight into life as a breadwinning broad.

Please submit essays to breadwinningbroads[at]yahoo[dot]com by May 31st, 2011.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The Fine Print:

Submission of an essay does not guarantee publication in the book. Several factors will be considered when determining which works will be selected for publication by the editor and publisher.

1. Electronic submissions only, please. Essays will not be returned to the author.
2. No contributors will receive financial compensation for their work whether or not it is selected for publication. Contributing authors will be recognized in the book and in the book publicity for their published work.
3. If selected for publication in the book, authors agree to terms in a consent agreement (e.g., permission to publish the work in the book, use in promotional materials, use of name in the book, release of copyright).
4. Authors affirm that submitted work was not previously published.
5. The editor and publisher reserve the right to reject any submissions and to edit the stories for grammar, style and space.

Editor: Katie Griffith holds an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Wyoming and has spent the last ten years studying cultural and social trends in the United States. The Breadwinner project began when she and many of her thoughtful friends realized that things had really changed—and they weren’t sure they liked it. Katie has worked as a lecturer in American Studies, a young adult librarian, an educator and, of course, a breadwinning wife and mother.

A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Twenty-Seven

See the full calendar here.

A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Twenty-Two

See the full calendar here.

A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Seventeen

See the full calendar here.

A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Thirteen

See the full calendar here.

A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Twelve

See the full calendar here.

A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Eight

See the full calendar here.

A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Four

See the full calendar here.

Call for Essays: Here Come the Brides: An anthology about lesbian marriage

One of the Ms. Magazine editors and a Ms. blogger have joined forces to edit what sound like a fascinating anthology about lesbian marriage. The call for essays is below, and you can find more information at their blog.

Call for Submissions: Here Come the Brides! The Brave New World of Lesbian Marriage (Seal Press, 2012)

2,000-4,000 words

Editors: Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort. Audrey Bilger is the Faculty Director of the Writing Center and Associate Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. Michele Kort is Senior Editor at Ms. magazine, a freelance writer and author of three books (including Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro).

The Book: Same-sex marriage is obviously a hot topic these days, and we want to look specifically at the lesbian side of the equation. Given the secondary status of women throughout much of the globe, bonds between women—particularly intimate connections—can redefine the political landscape as well as the domestic realm. Anna and Eve don’t get as much press as Adam and Steve, but they’re potentially more threatening to the status quo.

The anthology Here Come the Brides will primarily cover legal marriages, but also lesbian commitment ceremonies in locales where the legal status of gay marriage is still up for grabs. We hope the book will be able to represent a diversity of points of view in terms of race, class, ethnicity and geography, and incorporate transgender perspectives. Although the book will be generally upbeat about lesbian marriage, we’d also like viewpoints from those who are opposed to either being married themselves or who have issues with the institution or the politics of same-sex marriage.

We’re looking for a variety of material: primarily first-person essays, but also secondhand observations, bridesmaid/mother-of-the-bride/etc. stories, and even analytical pieces (as long as they’re written in an accessible style). We’re open to graphic essays/cartoons as well, and we’re eager to see lesbian wedding ephemera: great photos, invitations, newspaper wedding announcements, vows, guest favors.

Needless to say, we’re looking for terrific writing—colorful, moving, funny, surprising, insightful. We can imagine essays that cover a lesbian marriage from soup to nuts, but we think it’s more likely, given the word limitation, that it might be best to focus on a certain aspect of lesbian marriage or of your particular wedding—at least as an organizing principle. Here are some questions to think about; perhaps one or more will inspire a resonant tale:

What made you decide to get married?

How significant was legalization in your state/country in your decision?

How/who popped the question?

What trepidations did you have about marriage?

What does marriage mean to you? What doubts do you have about the institution?

How is marriage the same/different for a lesbian couple?

How did your families handle the news? Was there any particular joy or heartbreak about someone who did or did not support your wedding?

What was the planning process for your wedding? Was it a fancy affair, or just a trip to the courthouse?

Did you have a best man/woman or bridesmaids/bridesmen?

Do you have children, and were they involved in the wedding?

Do you have a good story about your wedding outfits? About the ceremony/reception? Who did you invite?

If you’re an interracial couple, did that bring out issues beyond your lesbian connection? Same question if one or both of you is transgender.

Was your wedding traditional—or did you purposefully try to “queer” it?

Did you write your vows? Did you put out an announcement in the newspaper?

Did you go on a honeymoon?

What do you call your spouse?

How has lesbian wedded life met/exceeded/confounded your expectations? Does your relationship feel different since you married?

Has marriage made you more/less radical about LGBT issues?

Deadline for submissions: January 30, 2011.

Please consider running your ideas past us before you plunge into writing. We also encourage early submissions.

Please email inquiries and submissions to: abilger[at]cmc[dot]edu

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Feminist Readings: 'Sexual Politics'

Kate Millett's Sexual Politics is one of those books people talk about a great deal but don't actually read. It's a feminist 'classic', we think - historically important but out-of-date and hopelessly stuck in the second wave. Of course, that means it's unfit for consumption in these more enlightened times.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sexual Politics is inflammatory, but it's hardly the anti-male diatribe some (Camille Paglia, etc.) claim it is. It's well-written, enlightening, and completely relevant for the modern reader.

In fact, Sexual Politics contains the most reasoned, sensible critique of the traditional family I have even read. Even more, the sexual revolution - now much maligned - is shown for what it really is. Without sexual revolution, there can be no overthrow of the patriarchy, traditional gender roles, or anything else. The political is not merely personal, but irrevocably sexual as well.

While this concept alone makes the book well worth reading, the critique of Freud's views on women is also excellent. These views, of course, have been thoroughly debunked by modern psychology and are no longer considered current. Unfortunately, due to endless popularizations of his theories, he continues to be an enormous influence on popular thought about gender (and everything else). People still talk about penis envy, assume that women are naturally less sexual, and on and on.

Millett, rather than sticking with a formal psychological treatment of Freud, attempts to show that his conclusions about women were based entirely on preconceived cultural attitudes and personal failings. It succeeds completely. Now, I have no idea whether Millett's treatment of Freud makes any sense on psychological grounds, but it's the perfect antidote to popular attitudes about women's psychology, from 'that's what she said' jokes all the way up to bizarre notions of female frigidity as dispensed by advice columnists and talk show hosts.

The only 'flaw' to be found in Sexual Politics are the novel criticism sections that bookend the volume. I place 'flaw' in quotes because there's absolutely nothing wrong with the sections themselves. They're well-written, logical, not overly anti-male, but I had to question their purpose. Knowing that D.H. Lawrence is, well, a sexist asshole in the first degree doesn't really affect the political-sexual environment of the world. Plenty of novelists are sexist - but they're just novelists. (I understand that Millett intended them to be seen as reflections of the greater culture, not as cultural agents, but it still seems to be given too much importance)

I bring this up merely to say that Sexual Politics is far, far more than angry literary criticism. Don't be put off by the first chapter; read the whole thing. You won't be disappointed.

RIP Lucille Clifton

Rest in Peace, Lucille Clifton, award-winning African American poet who died yesterday at age 76.

Here she is reading two poems at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2008:


And...

Homage to My Hips, by Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

Feminist Readings: Aristocratic Women in Medieval France

(Yes, it's a book reviewish column - see the end for rambling about what I think I'm doing.)

Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (1999), edited by Theodore Everglades is a collection of five pieces on, well, exactly those women mentioned in the title. The first concerns one particularly powerful individual, the remainder examines all the women of whom records remain in particular regions of France. It's quite narrow in scope, the intended purpose being to expand scholarship on women living in the 11th through 13th centuries.

In this it succeeds, but the real value of the book to the casual reader is that it provides real, non-trivial examples of important women in the Medieval Era. Let me explain:

'Women in History' v. Historical Women

From the book:

At this level of analysis, the sources often reveal that women who embodied the joining of two families through marriage and child bearing were not merely passive pawns in power relations among groups of men; rather, they were active participant whose actions could affect ... the course of politically significant events.

The influence of feminism on historical thought and history education over the last half-century is fairly obvious. There's been a real attempt to add women to textbooks and discussions, to consider women as historically important figures. There's been criticism of this - not just by those whose patriarchal ideals are being threatened, but by otherwise well-meaning feminists. They claim that women have been oppressed to the extent that they really haven't accomplished much of worth before, say, the 19th century or so, and that we shouldn't try and pretend otherwise.

There's something too this - who hasn't read a sidebar about some minor female figure in an otherwise male-oriented work and wondered why they bothered including it (other than being 'politically correct') It's saddening, really, that they can't find anything better.

And that's where works like Aristocratic Women in Medieval France come in. The work presents, in meticulous detail, the recorded activities of a number of powerful women whose actions had a real effect on lives and events. They disperse money, give legal judgment in disputes, and sign official documents. They act in place of their absent or deceased husbands, maintain a position of power over male relatives, and even hold property in cases where it was previously thought to be an exclusively male privilege. In short, these women were important entirely in their own right.

Now, this book make no connection to larger scale, more general history, but I have no doubt that such a connection could and will be made. But for the purposes of this book there can be no doubt that women played an important role in this period of time.

On the other hand...

There are a couple of things to note: first, the book is only about wealthy women from powerful families - it would be even more interesting to look at the average women (perhaps in relation to aristocratic women). Not the focus of the book, but something to think about. Second, the book itself states that this was a sort of high point for women - after the 13th century, power began to be gathered more an more into the hands of a few patriarchs, who kept their 'lines' intact by way of sole male heirs - effectively shutting women off from sources of societal power.

In the end...

It's easy to be erased. Adela of Blois (for instance) was one of the most well-known figures of her era and locale, but by the standards of patriarchal history, she is unknown and worthless.

And that's what we should learn here. Insisting that women are equally important has to be an ongoing work - and restoring women to their proper place in history (and they do have an important place, not just as side notes) is a vital part of this process.

--
(What's all this? Basically, I spend an inordinately large amount of time reading various feminist/womanist/related books, and I've always been disappointed that out of so much interesting feminist thought and research, so little is actually discussed or even heard of. So, each week I'll take a book at random and summarize it, hopefully both disseminating new ideas and keeping old ones alive. For the academics reading this - I'm not in Women's Studies, I'm just an academic (science, in particular) type with too much time on her hands, so if I get something technical wrong don't roast me, okay?)

A different take on Christmas

A little post for tonight: a new look at the Christmas story from the incredible Jeanette Winterson (h/t AfterEllen)!

Happy Holidays, from FWF...I'll be back bloggin' fresh on Monday.

Bella vs. Buffy

I've admonished my partner for talking down about the Twilight movies when she hasn't actually seen them--hence Twilight is now sitting shamefully at the top of our Netflix queue--which is why I haven't yet posted any sort of take down (or praise???) of the series on this blog. I haven't read the books. I haven't seen the movies. A good friend of mine with preteen daughters described the books, and not favorably, as "Harlequin romance for prepubescent girls," and I'm just too busy to waste my time on a whole series of books I won't even enjoy. It's not even worth the pleasure of being able to critique them. On the other hand, I think I can probably sit through the movies and maybe even be able to enjoy them, so count on my Twilight-related commentary (better late than never) sometime in the next month or so.

That said, just because I don't feel qualified to talk about the series, doesn't mean I can't engage with other people's critiques -- for example, this one from Fannie's Room, in which she compares Twilight's Bella to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is great. And, as a companion piece, there's a video version of this epic comparison (although the video is more of a "if Buffy met Edward..." mash-up):



I know critiques of New Moon and the Twilight series have been floating across my RSS feed over the past month, and I'd be eager to read more of them. So, if you've seen a good post about the films/books or written one, please feel free to comment with a link below.

Feminist Flashback #36

In honor of Mother's Day (Happy Mother's Day to you all!), for this week's feminist flashback I'm showcasing my own mother, Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner. To say I'm proud of her and awed by her would be an understatement, and I couldn't wish for more phenomenal parents than Rita and my father. That said, with her permission, I'm posting one of her poems from her 1995 book Mother Love, which loosely revolves around the Persephone and Demeter story from Greek mythology. This is not, by any means, her most recent book of poetry, but considering it's Mother's Day, it seemed vastly appropriate (her newest book, Sonata Mulattica came out last month--more on that in a later post).

In any case, to my beautiful, kind, brilliant mother on Mother's Day, I love you.

To all the other mothers in the world, Happy Mother's Day!

Exit
by Rita Dove

Just when hope withers, a reprieve is granted.
The door opens onto a street like in the movies,
clean of people, of cats; except it is your street
you are leaving. Reprieve has been granted,
"provisionally"--a fretful word.

The windows you have closed behind
you are turning pink, doing what they do
every dawn. Here it's gray; the door
to the taxicab waits. This suitcase,
the saddest object in the world.

Well, the world's open. And now through
the windshield the sky begins to blush,
as you did when you mother told you
what it took to be a woman in this life.

R.I.P. Marilyn French

Marilyn French, Novelist and Champion of Feminism, Dies at 79:

Her first and best-known novel, “The Women’s Room,” released in 1977, traces a submissive housewife’s journey of self-discovery following her divorce in the 1950s, describing the lives of Mira Ward and her friends in graduate school at Harvard as they grow into independent women. The book was partly informed by her own experience of leaving an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. Women all over the world seized on the book, which sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages.

Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” had had on racial equality 25 years earlier.

Congratulations to Carol Ann Duffy....

GB...it's about damn time!

After 341 Years, British Poet Laureate Is a Woman:

The writer Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Britain’s poet laureate on Friday, becoming the first woman to take a 341-year-old job that has been held by, among others, Dryden, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Cecil Day-Lewis and Ted Hughes.

Ms. Duffy, 53, is known for using a deceptively simple style to produce accessible, often mischievous poems dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest minutiae of everyday life. In her most popular collection, “The World’s Wife” (1999), overlooked women in history and mythology get the chance to tell their side of the story, so that one poem imagines, for instance, the relief that Mrs. Rip Van Winkle must have felt when her husband fell asleep, finally giving her some time for herself.

Announcing the decision, the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, called Ms. Duffy “a towering figure in English literature today and a superb poet” who has “achieved something that only the true greats of literature manage — to be regarded as both popular and profound.”

R.I.P. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

I'm a few days late, but I just wanted to post a brief, through very heartfelt, note about the tragic loss of feminist and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died the evening of Sunday, April 12th from breast cancer at the age of 58.

There's an excellent tribute by Richard Kim in The Nation, beginning with a sentiment I wholeheartedly share:

I have only ever worn out one book. The first copy--which I still keep as an artifact of my 20s--became a palimpsest of sorts, its text underlined in four different colors of pencil, emblazoned with streaks of yellow and green neon highlighter. Little enigmatic notes crawl up and down the margins of dog-eared pages, and decomposing Post-it notes jut out untidily from the edges; the spine has long since given way. At a certain point, picking up this particular copy became too overwhelming an encounter with my old selves, and so I bought a fresh one, which I tried in vain to keep clean. That book is Epistemology of the Closet, and its author is the brilliant, inimitable, explosive intellectual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died last night from breast cancer at the age of 58.

It is difficult to calculate the impact of Sedgwick's scholarship, in part because its legacy is still in the making, but also because she worked at a skew to so many fields of inquiry. Feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis and literary, legal and disability studies--Sedgwick complicated and upended them all, sometimes in ways that infuriated more anodyne scholars, but always in ways that pushed established parameters.

I, too, have an earmarked copy of Epistemology of the Closet and I deeply admire not only Sedgwick's body of work but also her singular intelligence and remarkable insight.

From Epistemology of the Closet:

...the question of gender and the question of sexuality, inextricable from one another though they are in that each can be expressed only in terms of the other, are nonetheless not the same question, that in twentieth-century Western culture gender and sexuality represent two analytic axes that may productively be imagined as being as distinct from one another as, say gender and class or class and race. Distinct, that is to say, no more than minimally, but nonetheless useful. (p. 30)

And, from her seminal article "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl":

Today there is no corpus of law or of medicine about masturbation; it sways no electoral politics; institutional violence and street violence do not surround it, nor does an epistemology of accusation; people who have masturbated who may contract illnesses are treated as people who are sick with specific disease organisms, rather than as revelatory embodiments of sexual fatality. Yet when so many confident jeremiads are spontaneously launched at the explicit invocation of the masturbator, it seems that her power to guarantee a Truth from which she is herself excluded has not lessened in two centuries. To have so powerful a form of sexuality run so fully athwart the precious and embattled sexual identities whose meaning and outlines we always insist on thinking we know, is only part of the revelatory power of the Muse of masturbation. (Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 4, Summer 1991, p. 822)

Rest in peace, Eve Sedgwick. You will be greatly missed, in academia and beyond.

Amazon Fail

I have no words. And not just because this rising scandal has been up and down the Internets today and everyone's already said everything I'd like to say re: censorship, discrimination, and sheer stupidity. I can't wait to see how this is going to pan out. And I'd really like to hear a better explanation from Amazon.com than that it was a "glitch." Via Salon:

While the much of the country spent Easter Sunday gorging on marshmallow peeps and pictures of the president's new dog, your trusty local blogosphere fired up a four-alarm scandal over goings-on at Amazon, which had mysteriously stripped the sales rankings of hundreds (thousands?) of books, many of them with LGBT subjects, and reclassified them as "adult" content. The move prevents those books from showing up on the site's Best Seller list and can seriously screw up search results, pretty much rendering some titles invisible.

[...]

So what constitutes "adult" material? What were these terrifying, racy tomes from which the public needed to be protected? Well, as the LA Times blog reported, they include Augusten Burroughs' "Running With Scissors," Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" and the National Book Award winner, "Becoming a Man" by Paul Monette. Oh, and Ellen Degeneres' autobiography. Of course. So many books had been wiped out of the search terms that, on Sunday night, a book search for the term "homosexuality" turned up this: "A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality."

Some glitch. Amazon better fix this...and fast.

ETA: More news on the glitch from Feministing's Jessica Valenti whose books Full Frontal Feminism and Yes Means Yes were both affected.

ETA #2: Kate Harding over at Salon reports on Amazon's official statement (though not really an apology), in which their spokesperson calls the whole debacle a "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error."

Feminist Flashback #29

For this week's Feminist Flashback and, again, in honor of women's history month, I present two of the many poems included in Alice Duer Miller's 1915 book Are Women People?: A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times, the full text of which is available over at The Gutenberg Project. Enjoy!

Such Nonsense

"Where on earth did the idea come from that the ballot is a boon, a privilege and an honor? From men."—Mrs. Prestonia Mann Martin.

Who is it thinks the vote some use?
Man. (Man is often such a goose!)
Indeed it makes me laugh to see
How men have struggled to be free.

Poor Washington, who meant so well,
And Nathan Hale and William Tell,
Hampden and Bolivar and Pym,
And L'Ouverture—remember him?

And Garibaldi and Kossuth,
And some who threw away their youth,
All bitten by the stupid notion
That liberty was worth emotion.

They could not get it through their heads
That if they stayed tucked up in beds,
Avoiding politics and strife,
They'd lead a pleasant, peaceful life.

Let us, dear sisters, never make
Such a ridiculous mistake;
But teach our children o'er and o'er
That liberty is just a chore.


The Protected Sex

With apologies to James Whitcomb Riley.

"The result of taking second place to girls at school is that the boy feels a sense of inferiority that he is never afterward able entirely to shake off."—Editorial in London Globe against co-education

There, little girl, don't read,
You're fond of your books, I know,
But Brother might mope
If he had no hope
Of getting ahead of you.
It's dull for a boy who cannot lead.
There, little girl, don't read.