Adventures in Women's Studies 101

I have two little anecdotes to share:

Last week, I asked my women's studies class how many of them consider themselves feminists; one student raised her hand (out of 60). When I asked them if they believe women and men should be equal in society, everyone raised their hands. This was a perfect set-up for talking about the antifeminist backlash, but also extremely depressing.

Earlier today, I asked my students to discuss what needs to be changed in terms of gender equity/inequity in society today. A guy in the back of the room who has barely made a peep so far this semester responded (this is an approximation of what he said), "I think it's really important that women have the right to abortion because from my perspective, as a guy, it's my job to support her decision no matter what because it's her body and not mine. And I don't think it's right that society makes being pro-choice look so bad and that some people, like the religious right, think it's okay to make decisions about women's bodies for them."

I now love this guy...although he still didn't raise his hand when I asked if anyone considered themselves a feminist. Peer pressure? Cultural denigration of a term that should be more neutral than it's often presumed to be? Any other theories?

Sweet dreams are made of this...

We were talking about gender roles and performative acts of gender constitution (from Joan Riviere's "Womanliness as a Masquerade" to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble) in class last week, and I decided to show a clip from Jennie Livingston's amazing 1990 documentary, Paris is Burning. In the film, Livingston showcases the underground, urban gay/drag club scene which popularized voguing (and, yes, it's this club scene that inspired Madonna).

Anyway, searching out a good clip to show from Livingston's film reminded me of my favorite 80s band, The Eurythmics, and their 1982 MTV scandal. In an interview I heard a while back, lead singer Annie Lennox explained that the still-relatively-new MTV banned the band's music video (for the song "Love is a Stranger, below) because they couldn't tell whether Lennox was really a woman or a man dressed in drag. Apparently gender ambiguity was not cool with MTV back in the early 80s; they obviously got over that pretty quickly.



Reminiscing about The Eurythmics sent me on a whirlwind trip down memory lane, which I thought I'd share with you here. Here's one of their most bizarre (and, in my opinion, awesome) videos, for their 1987 song "Beethoven (I Love To Listen To)":



And, because it would be severely remiss for me not to post this, especially relevant, video, here's Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox singing their 1985 hit "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves":

Women's Suffrage...it's pop quiz time, y'all!

This semester I'm teaching an Introduction to Women's Studies class in order to buff up my CV and gain some more varied teaching experience. So far, two weeks in, it's been great experience. My students seem generally engaged and invested, and they talk in class without my prompting. I think it'll be a good semester, even if teaching a lecture class (as opposed to the discussion-based classes I've taught before) is a brand new thing for me.

That said, in order to help encourage them to do the readings, I'll be springing some pop quizzes on them here and there over the course of the semester. Tuesday's quiz was about women's suffrage and based on a chapter they read from Louise Michele Newman's book White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (chapter 2: "The Making of a White Female Citizenry: Suffragism, Antisuffragism, and Race").

Anyway, here's the quiz. How would you fare?

1. Define suffrage/suffragist.
2. Define abolition/abolitionist.
3. True or False?: Female anti-suffragists were also against women’s rights in other areas.
4. True or False?: Black men were the most adamant opponents of a woman’s right to vote.
5. True of False? Colorado and Wyoming were two of the first states to allow women the right to vote.
6. True or False?: The 15th amendment gave women the right to vote.
7. True or False?: The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) were really the same organization.
8. True or False?: Some suffragists argued that women should be allowed to vote because their “moral purity” would help rid politics of its corruption.
9. Besides gender and race, name two other markers of identity that came into play in the suffrage movement.