Got Milk? On Cows and Bitches.

The California Milk Processor Board and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners have created a new ad campaign to get "somebody" to drink more milk because, they say, it helps with PMS. I put the word "somebody" in quotes because those quotes are the gist of this post.

But first let's back-track a bit: Here is what Adweek wrote about the campaign:

Today's deep, patient sigh goes out to the California Milk Processor Board and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for their new "Got milk?" campaign positioning milk as a cure-all for the grab bag of unpleasantness known as PMS. They tried this once before, in 2005. The new campaign is called "Everything I Do Is Wrong," and with headlines like "We can BOTH blame myself" and "I apologize for letting you misinterpret what I was saying," it presents women as more uncontrollably irrational than ever before! The print ads send you to a Flash-heavy microsite (how quaint!) that tracks the global PMS level and helps men create apology videos with big-eyed flying kittens.

Examples of the ads:

The idea is that milk will help with PMS and make men's lives easier. More on the scientific basis for that milk-PMS connection can be found at the MS Blog:

The California Milk Processor Board’s latest campaign is meant to raise awareness of milk’s health benefits in reducing the symptoms of PMS. The campaign is not targeted at women, though, but at dudes.

...

Connie Bohon, an ob-gyn in Washington, D.C., calls the link between milk and PMS “soft,” telling the Washington Post, “There are some beliefs that calcium can improve PMS symptoms [but] I don’t know that it’s universally accepted.” The belief is based on a 1998 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology–a study sponsored by SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare, makers of calcium-supplying TUMS–which found that women who took 1,500 milligrams of calcium via supplements experienced nearly a 50-percent reduction in PMS symptoms. Still, there’s no clear evidence that this would work the same with calcium-rich foods like milk.

Because the campaign is being positioned partly as a public service announcement, it straddles the line between commercial marketing (the profit motive) and social marketing (the do-good motive). In this case, the Milk Board appears to want to improve women’s health, but ultimately, commercial profit is their bottom line. It’s frustrating enough when advertisements capitalize on anti-feminist messages, but it’s absolutely maddening to see commercial marketing masked as social marketing and using the same anti-women tactics.

Got it? It's a fascinating tangle of stuff: PMS jokes, henpecked men, health benefits, obvious traps for feminazis to step in with their mustachioed angry faces (can't you get a joke? PMS bothering you?).

That's why it's useful to go back to my initial question, the one about the "somebody" in the campaign who is supposed to drink more milk and how that is going to be achieved.

That "somebody" is a woman with PMS. But the ads are not aimed at her, and the benefits the ads tout are not about the possible connection with calcium and reduced discomfort before menstruation. Nope. The benefits are to henpecked men! So the "somebody" the ad is aimed at is a man, although he is not urged to drink more milk. Rather, he is urged to urge her to drink more milk so that he can get a more peaceful life with less henpecking. Women will be more logical while on milk!

It's a win-win.

Coming Soon to a TV Screen Near You (by res ipsa)

A new documentary: Gloria: In Her Own Words. Unfortunately, no trailer available yet. First airdate is August 15th.

I can't think of any other feminist in my lifetime, save maybe Jane Fonda, that has been the target of so much sneering contempt and looney hatred as Gloria Steinem.

Good News Two

This would be the number of young women and girls who did well in Google's first science fair:

Shree Bose, age 17, from Fort Worth, Tex., won the grand prize for developing a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients who have developed a resistance to chemotherapy. Naomi Shah, 16, from Portland, Ore., found ways to improve indoor air quality and decrease people’s reliance on asthma medications. And Lauren Hodge, 14, from Dallastown, Pa., researched the effects of different marinades on potential carcinogens in grilled chicken.

“As a girl, to see that my gender actually is going to come into this field that’s been so dominated by men is exciting to me, and to be a part of that is even more exciting,” Ms. Bose said in an interview.

This is good news from a feminist point of view not because the girls dominated in this particular case, but because a major misogynist argument is that women cannot invent anything whatsoever.

Good News One

The quarterfinal soccer game between the U.S. and Brazilian women's teams. It was an exciting game and it was taken seriously as a game. The othering of women was minimized and the idea of what sports are supposed to be reigned:








Though I must admit that I have not read the YouTube comments were the dregs of humanity often gather.

Women’s rights are human rights (by Suzie)

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sept. 5, 1995 at the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing.

This may sound like common sense, but it took women around the world to push for this understanding. The idea got traction in the early ‘90s, according to an excellent essay by Charlotte Bunch and Samantha Frost, experts on global women’s rights. I remember when Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch began to pay more attention to women’s rights.

Not everyone has gotten the memo, however. Some liberal/leftist men continue to see rights specific to women as secondary to fears about governments intruding on their own rights. A prime example are supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who don’t understand that sexual abuse infringes on women’s human rights.

In Britain, Assange has hired a team of human-rights lawyers to replace his previous attorneys. Last month, one of his new lawyers, Ben Emmerson, was appointed the UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights. I don't expect him to care about the rights of women, judging from his performance this week in court, where Assange appealed his extradition to Sweden.

In the July 7 Nation, Assange fan Tom Hayden wrote: “The original heroic narrative about revelations of war crimes and government secrets is frequently diverted today by speculation about sex crimes …” He then lists important revelations from WikiLeaks. He didn't list statistics on sex crimes. A summary of Bunch and Frost's essay puts his writing into perspective:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 [applies] to women. However, tradition, prejudice, social, economic and political interests have combined to exclude women from prevailing definitions of "general" human rights and to relegate women to secondary and/or "special interest" status within human rights considerations.

Many societies separate what happens in public and in private. On both sides of the political spectrum are people who want to limit how much the government meddles in their private lives. Human-rights activists have focused on the public sphere, specifically on how governments have abused citizens. The problem for women is that they are more likely to be abused by men in private, with mostly male authorities ignoring those abuses.

[W]omen have traditionally been relegated to the "private" sphere of the home and family; the typical citizen has been portrayed as male, and thus the dominant notions of human rights abuse have implicitly had a man as their archetype. Thus, abuses done to women in the name of family, religion, and culture have been hidden by the sanctity of the so-called private sphere …

Conservatives have been skeptical of social and economic rights, such as health care, decent housing and proper nutrition, saying this smacks of socialism. I’d add that some liberal men have argued that social and economic rights take precedence over civil and political rights – not for them – but for women, especially poor ones. The argument goes like this: Poor women in X country need food and shelter; they don’t have time to worry about sexism. Men making this argument don’t get that gender discrimination hurts women’s abilities to secure housing, work, shelter, etc.

They are thrilled that WikiLeaks exposed government abuses, but they don't understand, or choose not to understand, that it's a basic human right for women to have control over their bodies, without being raped; without acquiescing to sex because they feel like they have no choice; without men disregarding their desire to wear a condom.

More on Betty Ford (by res ipsa)

As a follow-up to Saturday's post about Betty Ford, here is an interesting opinion about Ford from yesterday's NYT by Nixonland author Rick Perlstein. In it, the reader learns not only that Betty and Gerald Ford once owned (and presumably played) "The Women's Liberation Board Game," but also that Betty Ford had a following among gay men. Perlstein speculates that the letters from gay men he read at a Ford family estate sale after President Ford's death must have been prompted by remarks Betty Ford made on gay rights at some point. So in addition to abortion, sex, infidelity, addiction, cancer, and the Equal Rights Amendment, a first lady addressed some topic of importance to gay men. Watergate, gas lines, and bad music notwithstanding, the Seventies weren't all bad.

I wonder what Betty Ford would have thought of New York's new marriage equality law -- and marriage equality in general?

Today's Recommended Reading on the Economy

Is this article by James Galbraith. It is clearly written and offers a point of view which is rare in the mainstream media.

Apropos of nothing, the whole government deficit debate and its sudden appearance out of nowhere might just turn me into a conspiracy theorist, especially after that Let's-Invade-Iraq message late in 2001.

In both cases the reasons for the sudden emergence of a particular topic remained completely unclear to me. People were not talking about the need to invade Iraq right after 911, and neither were people talking about the Deficit Monster this year until someone decided that it would be the topic of this season.

We are being led by the nose, my sweet readers. Just thought I'd point that out.

Five Sexist References in Just One Show! Well Done, Fox News.

Via Media Matters:





I will give you only the first example from that video:

Greg Gutfeld Twice Compared Government Spending With "A Wife And Her Credit Cards." Discussing the debt ceiling, panelist Greg Gutfeld said, "That's the problem with being president: You love raising the debt ceiling. It's like a wife and her credit cards. Americans have to be the husband that takes the credit card and breaks it up." He later said of President Obama: "He's like your wife running around with your credit cards."

Gutfeld assumes:
a) that the husband is the one whose money the family spends
b) that the wife spends that money (which belongs to the husband only) in a reckless fashion, until the husband breaks up her credit cards
and
c) that the viewer of this program can easily identify with the husband rather than the wife.

There's more about sugar daddies and prostitutes and mistresses. Most every type of woman, from stay-at-home-wives to prostitutes got bashed in just that one show!

I felt sad for those two women sitting at that desk, because by inference they were what Gutfeld (mostly it was him) used to ridicule the government. And they just sat there.

Orrin Hatch Sure Has A Big Hatch

So I am irked. Orrin Hatch thinks that the rich pay too large a share of the federal income taxes in this country:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) took to the floor of the Senate on Monday afternoon to defend comments he made last week about the poor needing to "share some of the responsibility" for shrinking the national debt.

...

"It touched a nerve because last week after I raised this issue on the Senate floor, MSNBC and the liberal blogosphere -- presumably armed with the talking points from the Senate Democrat war room -- went ballistic suggesting that I wanted to balance the budget by raising taxes on the poor," Hatch said.
"I'm not surprised, but this completely misses my point and the point, and the point is this: no matter what these Democrats tell you, the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation's tax burden, and 51 percent pay absolutely nothing in income taxes," Hatch said.
"Keep in mind, I don't believe we should tax the truly poor, but now that's up to 51 percent in just over two years of this administration -- people who don't pay income taxes," Hatch said. "Are they all truly poor? I don't know. All I know is that it doesn't sound right that the majority of people -- the majority of tax units -- in this country do not pay income taxes, and the minority has to carry the burden."

He's pretty careful to point out that his figures only cover federal income taxes. The total taxes in this country also include state and local taxes and sales taxes, for instance.

But that's not what made me so irked (my new favorite adjective). Consider this example: A small community has 100 tax units. Ninety-nine of them have seen their earnings fall to 200 quatloos a month per household, while the taxable income begins at 300 quatlooss. One member, however, earns now a million quatloos per month and pays all the income taxes in the community.

Is a minority supporting the whole tax load? Sure. Is this unfair? Nope.

I made my example an extreme one but similar trends apply in the United States. The inequality in income and wealth is increasing, and the proportions in which the wealthier classes pay federal income taxes is roughly in proportion to their share in total incomes earned. Of course they have loads more wealth on top of that, and wealth is taxed much more gently than income.

Another way to respond Senator Water-Carrier For the Billionaires is by pointing out that if he wants to increase the tax-paying base for federal income taxes he should work for a more equal distribution of income in the society. Get jobs for the jobless and they start paying taxes! It's a win-win.

Today's Echidne Thought: On What Opinions Mean.

It would be easier to write a post if one didn't have to do research first, sigh, just as it's easier to give strong opinions without first thinking about the topic carefully. Or at all.

This has to do with something I read quite a while ago which stated that opinion writers should write about topics on which we don't have any good evidence, that this is the proper role of opinions, and that those opinions should be strong ones, to maximize readership.

I was left shaking for a while after absorbing that, because everything I wrote was All Wrong! It was a liberating moment, exhilarating even. But it left me thinking that I should simply kill this blog. You can see the ladders and maps (or training wheels on my bike) in the archives everywhere, the attempt to base things on evidence, the hedging and on-the-other-handing! I'm a wimp goddess. Yessir.

The most recent reason for this whining post is with the burden of doing research on why people vote against their own best economic and sociological interest. I get entangled in those academic articles, coming out covered with spiderwebs and soot and carrying the oddest academic terms in my hands, to ponder over them for hours. What do people mean when they say that voters want structure? What do they mean when they talk about values? Why are my values not real values and why is the structure I want not regarded as a structure?

Now, had I written that post on why peasants vote for their feudal overlords without doing any research the post would have been snappy and spiffy and clear. Who knows what it will be now if it ever gets created.

Which is to point out that pure opinion writing might be easier, after all.

The Vow Bachmann and Santorum Took

You probably have heard about it. It's a vow to go along with a rather extremest traditional-patriarchal-marriage guys in Iowa, and Bachmann signed it. Santorum appears to have agreed to it, too.

The initial version of the vow started like this (click on the pfd on that page):

Faithful monogamy is at the very heart of a designed and purposeful order – as conveyed by Jewish and Christian Scripture, by Classical Philosophers, by Natural Law, and by the American Founders – upon which our concepts of Creator-endowed human rights, racial justice and gender equality all depend.2
Enduring marital fidelity between one man and one woman protects innocent children, vulnerable women, the rights of fathers, the stability of families, and the liberties of all American citizens under our republican form of government. Our exceptional and free society simply cannot endure without the transmission of personal virtue, from one generation to the next, by means of nurturing, nuclear families comprised of sexually-faithful husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. We acknowledge and regret the widespread hypocrisy of many who defend marriage yet turn a blind eye toward the epidemic of infidelity and the anemic condition of marriages in their own communities. Unmistakably, the Institution of Marriage in America is in great crisis:
 Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African- American baby born after the election of the USA‟s first African-American President.3

Well, you can imagine how well that disgusting reference to slavery as being beneficial to African-American families was received. So the new version of the vow removed the slavery reference.

But all the rest of the fun was left untouched! Thus, we are told that women will be protected by not letting them become subject to the shariah law! And by not being allowed to participate in military combat roles! Protection of the innocent fruit of conjugal relations AND of women requires fighting abortion, which is lumped together with such evils as sexual trafficking. Also, tax policies, welfare policies and divorce laws must be changed to protect the traditional patriarchal marriage. That will protect innocent women and their fruits, too.

Then there is this bit about those marital fruits:

Recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial
health and security. 20

It must be code! What on earth does robust childbearing mean? Tough giant women squatting down to give birth while hoeing the potato fields? I doubt it. It probably means that women should be encouraged to have many children. Some writers have suggested that this is code for the Quiverful movement which requires women to maximize the number of children they can deliver. What the women themselves think does not matter.

Indeed, this is the problem of everything in this vow if you read it carefully. Women are resources to be protected, just as children are to be protected. The protection, however, is not supposed to come from laws and the government (which the vow wants to see much diminished) but from....?

hmmm

The Invisible Jobless

This is a good article as the starting point of a discussion about the invisible unemployed, about the way we all suddenly worry about government deficits when we did not worry about them during the eight long years of the Bush Reich, about the way jobs are supposed to be so very important in politics but in actual fact matter not at all, about the takeover of state governments by the forces of Sauron (killing off the unions, the funding base of the Democratic Party, for instance) and about the oddly phlegmatic Democrats on all levels of government.

As I said, in a long-winded way, the article is but a starting point. It ends with this, for example:

Mr. Lichtenstein, the historian, notes that it took awhile for the poor to mobilize in the Great Depression. Many initially saw President Roosevelt as an ally and only later became disillusioned. As Langston Hughes wrote in a 1934 poem, “The Ballad of Roosevelt”:
The pot was empty,
The cupboard was bare.
I said, Papa,
What’s the matter here?
I’m waitin’ on Roosevelt, son,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Waitin’ on Roosevelt, son.
For the moment, jobless Americans are waiting on President Obama. If unemployment stays as high as many expect, and millions exhaust their benefits, they may just find their voice in 2012.

Here's the problem with that: What would their voice be, given the two-party system? I guess they could always vote back the people whose policies caused this depression, which would be the Republicans, for more of the same.

In the shadows of Las Conchas (by Skylanda)

Two weekends ago, on one of those glittery bright, hot mornings that New Mexico is known for, I drove up to Los Alamos to have breakfast with a friend. The most notable event on the horizon was a plume of smoke from the Pacheco fire on the opposite side of the valley, by afternoon nearly obliterating the view of the east-side Sangre de Christo mountains. By the end of next day, a second plume had arisen on the west side Jemez mountains, and the hills were on fire in what has become the largest wildfire in New Mexico's history.

More notably, the Las Conchas fire – named for its original flash point in a pretty little canyon in the highlands that I remember as the place where a friend once made a comical attempt at teaching me how to rock climb – butted dangerously close to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and its legacy of Cold War-era waste and cast-offs. An all-out effort to protect the lab and the town ensued, with over 2,000 personnel on site at the height of the effort last week. The fire was diverted from lab property and, at least insofar as data that has been released goes, the cloud of smoke and ash that has periodically descended over Santa Fe and the Espanola valley in the two weeks since does not hold any more health threats than any other cloud of smoke and ash might.

Not so lucky were the pueblo lands surrounding the lab – the homelands of people who go by names like Cochiti, Pojoaque, Jemez, Santa Claran. An undercurrent of rage from some quarters in the pueblos has contrasted sharply to the feel-good community effort Santa Fe put out to house and host refugees from the evacuation of Los Alamos, one of the wealthiest and most well-educated communities in the United States. The lab was protected while the pueblos burned, it is argued, the wealthy homes on the mesa were taken care of while the native lands were consumed in flame; you can debate the intent, but resulting disparities are hard to miss.

But this is a far from simple circumstance of resource distribution to the wealthy and poor, and the race lines that accompany those delineations. The blaze had to be stopped at the LANL boundary; no one, in any community, would have seen any good from the vaporization of some tens of thousands of surface-level barrels of solvent- and plutomium-laced legacy waste being housed on LANL land. Moreover, Los Alamos benefitted from a very unwitting benefactor: the remarkable burn scar of the Cerro Grande fire, which denuded the hillside above town over ten years ago, burning so hot that the usual post-conflagration flourishing of flora and fauna never took hold. Cerro Grande – which burned into both LANL and the town of Los Alamos in the year 2000 – is a large part of what protected Los Alamos this time around.

That is not by any means to say that a travesty of environmental justice was not committed. It was, but it did not start in this week with this fire. It started centuries ago with the colonization of pueblo land, of course, but for useful purposes the metaphorical accelerant hit the flame in the 1940s when the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bomb was situated on the pretty little mesa that is the home of the first atomic bombs and a now legacy stockpile that would make New Mexico one of the world’s top nuclear powers were it to secede from the rest of the United States. In this article, a woman from the Santa Clara pueblo describes the shattering of a native belief system after LANL arrived: how can one maintain the spiritual relationship to such things like rain and fire if you know those things may now carry the silent killer of radioactive and chemical waste – especially from the days when phrases like “environmental protection” had not yet begun to exist. The future of LANL is even further complicated by the construction of a new plutonium processing facility on the lab site, essentially a brand new bomb-building factory, to the tune of $6 billion in taxpayer money – a rankly anomalous development under a federal regime that has made a loud public show of nuclear arms control as a goal.

Yet few people in New Mexico really want to see LANL go altogether; in a region that that barters back and forth with a couple of states in the deep south for the bottom rung of every marker of poverty and mal-development, Los Alamos is an oasis of education and income that spills over to the surrounding neighbors and influences the per capita indices of wealth inexorably upwards. There are no easy answers here.

It was less than 4 months ago that an earthquake and tsumani put Japan’s nuclear industry on notice that even with the best of intentions and the most technically proficient means, human efforts cannot predict or control the stochastic vagaries of natural and unnatural disasters. Los Alamos skated a hair’s breadth from those same lessons these last two weeks; though we escaped unscathed this time, let us learn them anyway: the health of people and the move to good stewardship will not start with the renewal of the dream of the Manhattan Project. There are too many variables; there are fires in the night, there are earthquakes at dawn, there are decades of broken trust behind the gated curtains that ring the LANL property. This is no place to be making nuclear bombs. Nowhere is any place to be making nuclear bombs.

Los Alamos sits on the edge of an ancient super-volcano known as the Valles Caldera; on a recent night, driving through the Espanola valley at dusk, the flame-out from one finger of the Las Conchas fire burned so bright that traffic stopped along the highway to gawk at what appeared from miles away to be flow of molten lava down the slope linking Los Alamos to the rest of the world. In a way, it was an unearthly beauty: a thing you do not forget. For today, the wind blows north again and the skies are clear over the valley, while the fire rages elsewhere: too easy to forget, while still it burns. Let us remember though, and take these days forward, and make amends, and try to leave the fire the next time to burn clean, not with the hazy legacy of a half-century’s worth of bitter waste.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Seven: The Fourteenth Century to the Fifteenth Century

(Echidne's note: Earlier parts of this series can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 ,part 5 and part 6.)

Julian of Norwich (c. 8 November 1342 – c. 1416) was one of the most
important English mystics, venerated in the Anglican and Lutheran
churches. Little is known of her life apart from her writings. However,
it is known that at the age of 30, suffering from a severe illness and
believing she was on her deathbed, Julian had a series of intense
visions of Jesus Christ. She was at home during this time, and gives no
mention of her personal life up unto that point, so some scholars have
suggested that Julian was unmarried or possibly a widow who lost her
husband and children in the plague. In any case, Julian wrote down a
narration of the visions immediately following them, which is known as
The Short Text of the Revelation of Love. Twenty to thirty years later
she wrote a theological exploration of the meaning of the visions,
known as The Long Text of the Revelation of Love. These visions are
also the source of her major work, called Sixteen Revelations of Divine
Love (circa 1393). This is believed to be the first book written in the
English language by a woman. Julian's theology was optimistic, speaking
of God's love in terms of joy and compassion as opposed to law and
duty. For Julian, suffering was not a punishment that God inflicted, as
was then the common understanding. She believed that God loved and
wanted to save everyone. Similarly, Julian saw no wrath in God. She
believed wrath existed only in humans but that God forgives us for
this. Julian's theology was controversial in regard to her belief in
God as mother. In her fourteenth revelation, Julian writes of the
Trinity in domestic terms, comparing Jesus to a mother who is wise,
loving, and merciful. Julian's revelation revealed that God is our
mother as much as He is our father. Julian became well known throughout
England as a spiritual authority: the English mystic (and author of the
first known autobiography written in England) Margery Kempe mentions
going to Norwich to speak with her. Grace Warrack's 1901 version of
Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, with her sympathetic informed
introduction, introduced most early twentieth-century readers to
Julian. After this, Julian's name spread rapidly as she became a topic
in many lectures and writings. In 1979 an annotated edition of Julian's
work was published, and after this her book was widely sold and
discussed, at a time of renewed spiritual searching by many. Her books
are widely available in English.

Christine de Pizan (also seen as de Pisan) (1363 – c. 1430) was a
Venetian-born woman of the medieval era who strongly challenged
misogyny and stereotypes prevalent in the male-dominated medieval
culture. As a poet, she was well known and highly regarded in her own
day. In her The Tale of the Rose (1402) and Letters on the Debate of
the Romance of the Rose (1403), she attacked Jean de Meun’s writing for
its immoral, often vicious portrayals of women. She endured criticism
for being too pointedly on the defensive. By 1405, Christine de Pizan
had completed her most successful literary works, The Book of the City
of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, also called The Book
of the Three Virtues. The first of these shows the importance of
women’s past contributions to society, and the second strives to teach
women of all estates how to cultivate useful qualities in order to
counteract the growth of misogyny. The Book of the City of Ladies is
commonly held to be the first feminist text written by a Western woman.
Christine’s final work was a poem eulogizing Joan of Arc. Written in
1429, The Tale of Joan of Arc celebrates the appearance of a female
military leader who, according to Christine, vindicated and rewarded
all women’s efforts to defend their own sex. Besides its literary
qualities, this poem is important to historians because it is the only
record of Joan of Arc outside of the documents of her trial. After
completing this particular poem, it seems that Christine, at the age of
sixty-five, decided to end her literary career. The poem is available
in English and French at
http://www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_song_pisan_contents.asp. The
standard English translation of The Book of the City of Ladies is by
Earl Jeffrey Richards (1982). The first English translation of The
Treasure of the City of Ladies, also called The Book of the Three
Virtues is Sarah Lawson’s (1985). Some of Christine's writings about
Jean de Meun's writing are available in "Debate of the Romance of the
Rose (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe)", translated by David F.
Hult.

Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438) is known for writing The Book of
Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography
in the English language. This book chronicles, to some extent, her
extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia, as well
as her mystical conversations with God. She is honoured in the Anglican
Communion. Her work is widely available in English.

Teresa de Cartagena (b. c. 1425) was a Spanish author and nun who fell
deaf between 1453–1459, which influenced her two known works Arboleda
de los enfermos (Grove of the Infirm) and Admiraçión operum Dey (Wonder
at the Works of God). The latter work represents what many critics
consider as the first feminist tract written by a Spanish woman. Both
Arboleda and Admiraçión are semi-autobiographical works that provide an
authentic written voice of the Medieval female, a true rarity among
works of the Middle Ages. Teresa’s first essay, Grove of the Infirm,
examines the effect of her deafness on her life and its spiritual
development. After being devastated by the initial onset of the
illness, Teresa meditates in the silent prison of her deafness and
ultimately concludes that God has afflicted her in order to separate
her from the distractions of everyday noise. After much reflection in
the prison of echoing sounds within the cloisters of her ears, Teresa
reasons that her soul would have been purer if she had never been
exposed to speech at all, which makes one turn to the outside material
world and forget the inner spiritual world. The copyist, Pero López,
indicates that her work was addressed to Juana de Mendoza, wife of
Gómez Manrique, a poet and prominent political figure of the time, but
within Arboleda, she addresses a “virtuosa señora” (virtuous lady) who
may be Juana de Mendoza and suggests a female audience at large.
Despite her strategies to disarm the male reader in Arboleda, men still
rejected Teresa’s work as plagiarized. In response to this male
criticism, she composed Admiraçión operum Dey, making the argument that
if God created men who could write, then he could just as well have
created women who could write, and while men have been writing for
centuries, it does not make it any more natural for them to write, but
rather it seems natural because men have been writing for such a long
time. In addition, simply because women have not traditionally written
like men, it does not mean that female writing is any less natural.
Cleverly, Teresa argues that if God bestows a gift upon men then he can
just as well bestow the same gift upon women, thus concluding that the
criticisms of her opponents call into question God’s authority to
distribute gifts and consequently offend him. The “virtuosa señora”
addressed in the second work as in the first acts as the female
listener who sympathizes with Teresa’s concerns. To further illustrate
her point, the author makes use of various imagery and references,
alluding to the Bible story of the powerful Judith who kills Holofernes
after a whole army of men could not perform the task. She also expounds
upon the virtue of the interior life of the housewife. Her writings are
available in English as "The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena:
Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Interpretive Essay.",
translated by Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez.

Gwerful Mechain (1462-1500), who lived in Mechain in Powys, is perhaps
the most famous female Welsh-language poet. Little is known of her life.
Her work, composed in the traditional strict Welsh poetic meters, is
often a celebration of religion and sex, sometimes within the same
poem. Probably the most famous part of her work today is her erotic
poetry, especially Cywydd y Cedor ("Ode to the Pubic Hair"), a poem
praising the vulva. It is a work in which she criticizes male poets for
celebrating so many parts of a woman's body, but not their genitals.
"Let songs to the quim circulate," she declares. As for the pubic hair:
"Lovely bush, God save it." This poem is available in English. Unfortunately there does not appear to be an English translation of a
collection of her poems at this time. If you know of one please mention
it in the comments.

Laura Cereta (1469–1499) was a Renaissance humanist and feminist. Most
of her writing was in the form of letters to other intellectuals. After
the death of her husband she concentrated on scholarly pursuits,
publishing a volume of her letters in 1488, called Epistolae
familiares. She was highly criticized for publishing her own work. Her
father died six months after she published her letters, and she no
longer felt inspired to write because of her father's death and the
large amount of criticism from both men and women of her time. Cereta
died unexpectedly in 1499 at the age of 30. No writings from her last
years of life survived. In her letters, Cereta defended women's right
to education and fought the oppression of married women. Her letters
circulated widely in Italy during the Early Modern Period, and laid the
groundwork for the feminism of the Enlightenment. Cereta's letters also
discussed war, death, fate, chance, and malice. Her letter to Bibolo
Semproni has one of the few medieval references to the 1st century BC
woman poet, Cornificia. Unlike most women of her time, Cereta was able
to partake in letter writing because she had the social contacts to
participate. Laura Cereta's complete letters are available in English
as "Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist (The Other Voice in
Early Modern Europe)", translated by Diana Robin.

Stop Your Whining! Dawkins on Western Women.

Stop whining! That's what the famous evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins told the women of America, pretty much. Here's the story:

It all started with a video blog from Rebecca Watson, founder of Skepchick, about her experience at an atheist conference last month in Dublin. She participated in a panel in which she talked about the problem of sexism among atheists, and the rape threats she had received from men in the community who don't agree with her. Importantly, Dawkins was on the panel and the guy who went on to hit on her was in the audience. Afterward, she went to the hotel bar with conference-goers until 4 a.m., when she told everyone that she was tired and wanted to go to bed. A male attendee followed her out of the bar and into the elevator, where he said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" This is what she had to say about the encounter:

Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don't do that. You know, I don't really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and -- don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.

That's all. It took up just over a minute of an 8-minute-long video. She didn't call for the man to be castrated or claim to be a victim of great injustice; all she expressed was that his overture made her feel "incredibly uncomfortable," and that guys should generally avoid doing that. "That" being 1) hitting on a woman after she has gone to great lengths to explain why she doesn't want to be sexualized within the atheist community, and 2) ignoring her remark that she is tired and just wants to go to bed. PZ Myers, a biologist who pens the bookmark-worthy skeptics blog Pharyngula, wrote a post about it and then Dawkins himself -- the rock star of atheism -- waded into the comments thread with a satirical letter addressed to a Muslim woman:

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and ... yawn ... don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so...

This is quite lovely, for someone who wishes to learn more about persuasive writing. From now on I'm going to respond to anyone who whines: Stop your whining! Think about all those who died in the Rwandan genocide! You have nothing to complain about.

Which is to point out that Dawkins used that trick to respond to Watson.

But on another level it reads like something different: Look how nice men here are to you? We could be razor-blading your genitals and forcing you to obey our every word but instead we just ask you for coffee and let you refuse and even for that you yell at us!

Except that Watson did not yell. She pointed out the context: A discussion of sexism and rape threats was the topic of her panel, and then a man asked her for coffee at 4am in the elevator. A man who had attended the earlier discussion, on sexism and rape threats.

So yeah, that is creepy, in my view, and all she said was pretty much that it was creepy. No big deal, honest, until Dawkins made it into one.

Now let the gentle Echidne speak for a change:

All this is such good evidence of the different life experiences of many men and women. If someone invites Richard Dawkins for coffee in the elevator, he is most unlikely to think that the invitation might really mean anything more than coffee and a conversation. If his name were Richarda Dawkins, the interpretations of what is going on might be very different.

It still would not be a big deal, not like having your genitals razored, sure. But many women know how that little backpack of alertness and fear and checking out exit routes is seldom put down anywhere, how part of the brain blinks fast when those kinds of questions are presented (4am? we just talked about rape threats? locked elevator! can I get to the buttons past him? is he stronger than me? if I yell will anyone be awake to hear?), even when the rest of the brain just thinks the guy is totally self-centered asshole and doesn't understand how creepy this is.

And the difference is in the life experiences. (One day I will write a post about the boy at school who started stalking me or about the time when some stranger grabbed my friend's breasts in the middle of the day on a busy city street or about all those times when I felt someone's hand on my butt in the subway and so on. But I know many of already are familiar with that drill.)

It is those different life experiences which allow Dawkins to take the view he takes. He has only theoretical knowledge on the topic of sexual harassment, his emotions have not been primed and he indeed has the privilege of not having to learn much about the whole topic.

It is still not a big deal. But what upsets me about the discussion is the presumption that not having experienced continuous sexual harassment is not a handicap in understanding how someone who *has* experienced it would interpret the data.

An interesting aspect of this whole debacle is that it seems to have transformed Watson into a feminist! Or strengthened her transformation:

When I started this site, I didn’t call myself a feminist. I had a hazy idea that feminism was a good thing, but it was something that other people worried about, not me. I was living in a time and culture that had transcended the need for feminism, because in my world we were all rational atheists who had thrown off our religious indoctrination so that I could freely make rape jokes without fear of hurting someone who had been raped.
And then I would make a comment about how there could really be more women in the community, and the responses from my fellow skeptics and atheists ranged from “No, they’re not logical like us,” to “Yes, so we can fuck them!” That seemed weird.

Mmm. I think some probably responded more neutrally or positively. But yes, the othering of women is not dependent on being religious.

Betty Ford (1918-2011) (by res ipsa)

From Betty Ford's obituary:

But unlike many other wives of presidents, Mrs. Ford rarely hesitated to make public her views on touchy subjects. She held a White House news conference announcing her support of the Equal Rights Amendment; the mail response ran three to one against her. In 1975, appearing on “60 Minutes,” she said she “wouldn’t be surprised” if her daughter, Susan, had a premarital affair; the mail was four to one against her. Her husband jokingly told her later that the comment had cost him 20 million votes in the 1976 election, she said.

I remembered that Betty Ford supported the Equal Rights Amendment while her husband did not, but I didn't remember the news conference. Can you imagine the agita that must have caused Gerald Ford and his aides? She was also a vocal supporter of abortion rights and encouraged her then-president husband to appoint women to cabinet positions, ambassadorships, and the Supreme Court. (She was successful on the first two, but not on the Court appointment.)

To my mind, Betty Ford's greatest accomplishments were making the nation more aware of breast cancer and addiction. Breast cancer screening in this country got a lot more widespread after Betty Ford was diagnosed with the disease and underwent a mastectomy. I remember being taught how to perform a breast self-examination because of Betty Ford. And addiction? Simply not discussed. But then Betty Ford announced publicly that she was being treated for painkiller and alcohol addiction and later opened the Betty Ford Center. For all the jokes people make about celebrities cycling in and out of rehab and "therapy culture", I think the world is definitely a better place because at least some of us are able to think about and discuss addiction with less shame.

Here's a slide show of pictures from Betty Ford's life.

R.I.P.

Casey Anthony & feminism (by Suzie)

Feminists are all rejoicing in the acquittal of Casey Anthony, according to a Google search of "Casey Anthony" and "feminist," which turned up various conservatives and Men's Rights Activists making that claim. There was no other evidence, but then again, a lack of proof has been a theme of this case.

Searching for feminist thinking on the topic, I found a post by Amanda Marcotte in which she says she knew little about the case before anti-feminists attacked her. My own ignorance ended much earlier, when I was hospitalized last month. (I got out this week.) Being too sick to do much else, I watched a lot of TV surveyed pop culture. I live in Tampa, and the trial dominated the local news, including a local cable station with continuous coverage. Then the case was everywhere.

It's easy to see why. A cute 2-year-old, Caylee, goes missing and her family pleads for her return. The story takes bizarre turns, and the mother is in and out of jail. Once considered a good mother, she becomes the "baby killer."

Casey Anthony's defense team asserted that her father and brother molested her as a child, and she learned to lie to preserve family secrets. No evidence was presented, and the claim was dropped. Of course, plenty of girls get molested with no way of proving it later, and the family seems dysfunctional, but who knows. Whatever the truth in this case, feminists wouldn't absolve an abused woman of all guilt if she killed her child.

As Amanda notes, the madonna/whore binary has played a great role in the Anthony case. Check out this news story today in which the reporter concludes:

In a case filled with mystery, lies and fantasy scenarios, the identity of Caylee's daddy could remain a secret forever.

The most likely reason may be the one Casey Anthony gave a neighbor: She doesn't know the truth herself.

Why is this "most likely"?

Last year, Anthony's defense brought up gender bias, saying she faced harsher penalties that a man would. CNN also reported:

Defense witness Elizabeth Rapaport, a University of New Mexico law professor and author, testified that the lifestyles of white middle-class mothers charged with killing their children receive much more media attention than those of defendants in other cases.

ABC quoted Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist at UCLA, as saying "she is not aware of one news story that questioned whether Anthony could be innocent." She thinks reasonable doubt exists. That's how I lean, but I don't want to argue all the evidence. As Lieberman said:

"Casey obviously has a lot of psychological problems. Whether she murdered her daughter or not is another thing."

Some people are comparing the not-guilty verdict in this case to the one in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. But Simpson's fame made his case stand out from similar ones across the country. His trial raised awareness about the danger facing women who want to get away from their abusers. Anthony wasn't famous; her case got publicity as a murder mystery. Mothers of toddlers who commit premeditated murder are not a widespread social problem.

Penguins, Salmons or Criminals? Which Most Resemble Women?

Forced birthers do have weird ideas about women and their reproductive choices (which should not exist, naturally). Some of those ideas I wrote about in an earlier post. But Governor Bobby Jindal added "criminals" to the list of items which are like women:

Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal signed Louisiana's new anti-abortion law Wednesday, and linked women who seek abortions to criminals being Mirandized:
"When officers arrest criminals today, they are read their rights," he said. "Now if we're giving criminals their basic rights and they have to be informed of those rights, it seems to me only common sense we would have to do the same thing for women before they make the choice about whether to get an abortion."

Jindal is an American Talibani, by the way. Not by religion but by his views on women.

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies? Frum on Obama and Other Thoughts.

Did you ever expect to live in an era when a wingnut pundit blames the Democratic president for being too much of a wuss to offer the Republicans a good fight?

Well, you are living in that very era. David Frum (who worked in the George Bush administration and who also happens to be the husband of the very anti-feminist Danielle Crittenden) bemoans Obama's weakness:

The debt ceiling negotiations have amounted to a succession of retreats and concessions by President Obama.
At this point, the president confronts two possible outcomes in the coming weeks:
Outcome 1: The president and congressional Republicans reach agreement on a budget package weighted overwhelmingly in favor of the GOP. The president opened negotiations by offering $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. His current offer tilts even further to the GOP: $6 of spending cuts to $1 of tax increases.
Better still (from a Republican point of view), the spending cuts come from programs Republicans dislike, like Medicaid, rather than programs they like, like the farm budget. The tax increases meanwhile are designed to be as acceptable as possible to the GOP: no increases in tax rates, but instead trimming some of the less defensible deductions in the tax code.
Outcome 1 represents a very big win for Republicans over the future shape of the federal government, and a correspondingly big defeat for the president.
Outcome 1 also represents the president's best-case scenario.

...

Through it all, Obama has played nice, again and again entreating his Republican opponents to emulate his example and play nice too. It's not what Lyndon Johnson would have done. It's not what Franklin Roosevelt would have done. I doubt it's what Hillary Clinton would have done.
Which brings me back to my starting question: Why don't the Democrats rebel? Presumably, they elected Obama to stand up for their shared principles. But he's not standing up. He's rolling over. Or being rolled.

Mmm. Things have gotten even weirder if the rumors are to be believed: This fire sale the administration has started, to get rid of what passes for the modern United States, appears to include bargain basement offers cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Hurry while the offers last! Everything must go because the country is being liquidated.

Or: With friends like these, who needs enemies?

In New Zealand Women Earn Less Because They Menstruate

In a bizarre way I love stories like this one:

The head of a business group has been fired after asserting that menstruation makes women less productive in the workplace than men.

Alasdair Thompson, chief executive of New Zealand's Employers and Manufacturers Association, made the comments during a radio debate.
The BBC reported that Thompson sparked controversy by suggesting that women earned less than men because "once a month they have sick problems." He added that when women become mothers "they have to take time off to go home" to look after their children.

And this sparked a debate? That is so very funny.

Here's the debate that should have been sparked: How can a man in such a very important role know shit-all about women? I'd accept what he says from an outer-space alien who has only spent a few weeks on this earth, but from a man who actually grew up here and obviously thrived?

What Mr. Thompson's statements reveal is that he has never spent one single minute (no, not even over a nice mug of beer at a bar) to think about what makes women tick (except perhaps in bed). He has some vague ideas about the biological differences between the sexes and trots them out like a ten-year old would.

I have never had the luxury not to understand how a whole human gender works! So yes, I think he deserved to be fired for incompetence.

The Ringwraith Rule in Wisconsin

It would be fun to watch it from another planet:

While Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) law dismantling collective bargaining rights has harmed teachers, nurses, and other civil servants, it’s helping a different group in Wisconsinites — inmates. Prisoners are now taking up jobs that used to be held by unionized workers in some parts of the state.
As the Madison Capital Times reports, “Besides losing their right to negotiate over the percentage of their paycheck that will go toward health care and retirement, unions also lost the ability to claim work as a ‘union-only’ job, opening the door for private workers and evidently even inmates to step in and take their place.” Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.

Unpaid labor is such a great idea! Why not expand that to teaching, nursing and so on? Taxpayers would save loads of money.

Of course there is that shadow side: Increasing unemployment for all those workers who are displaced by the no-wage inmates, and then the decreasing tax revenues because the unemployed can't afford to pay taxes. On the other hand, they could choose the avenue of crime and that way get their jobs back, though with just room and board.

Well, the Wisconsinites elected a Ringwraith administration, so I guess this is what they want. But I can't help noticing that suddenly people who work for the public sector have become the enemies of all. Teachers are pure evil! Nurses are greedy and lazy! This is an example of how American political slogans work on the hindbrain, and how divide et impera works for the Republicans.

It's always some other group of peasants who is at fault, never the feudal overlords and ladies.

Your Best Potato Salad Recipes, Please

I learned to make a perfect omelet by asking for advice here. Since it worked so well, let me know how to make a perfect potato salad. Something that is good to eat in the kind of heat we are having right now.

You are also welcome to offer other hot-weather recipes! (No chilled mice-with-mint, however, because I know that one already, what with the snakes.)

And yes, this is a filler post because the two I'm working on are the kinds which require a long and painful gestation period.

We Marvel.... Hilarious

From Ohio:

Last Tuesday, Ohio Rep. Robert Mecklenborg -- a self-described "Catholic boy from the west side of Cincinnati" -- stood on the House floor to champion the most radical anti-abortion legislation in the country.
"We marvel, don't we?" he said, before voting for the "heartbeat" bill. "We marvel at the march of the penguins as they go to propagate their species under very, very difficult odds and conditions. We marvel at the leaping salmon as they return to their ancestral homes."
He also marveled over the mating habits of loggerhead turtles.
You're not alone if you don't quite see the parallel of wildlife to women's lives.

Read the linked article to find out what happened to Rep. Mecklenborg next.

I think Rep. Mecklenborg regards women's reproductive instincts as deficient. Women should crawl across skyscrapers to gain the breeding sites! They should corner Rep. Mecklenborg and demand his sperm, right now!

Marvelous stuff.

Hollaback's "I've Got Your Back Campaign"

Hollaback, the organization which fights street harassment, has a fund drive. You can contribute here.

Do You Deserve Safe Food?

The Republican answer is unclear. It might be "NO" or it might be something like urging each consumer to buy their own home laboratories so that they can check for bacteria and melamine and other fun fillers. Or it might be that many of them believe the holy marketplace would never (nevah!) allow bad products to thrive.

That they do thrive for quite a while, as shown by various past crises, is not a bug but a feature, I guess. We need a few deaths before it's worthwhile to do something about the markets. Otherwise the God of Greed might drop rocks on us. If it kills you slowly enough that you remain a functional consumer for a while and if nobody knows about it, the markets are fine with it.

This story is what made me go on one of my rants:

Whatever the reason, the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee has approved a spending bill that not only slashes the budget of the Consumer Product Safety Commission but also cuts off all funding for a recently launched database of product-safety complaints.
The online database is one of the most important consumer tools to emerge from Washington in years. It enables people to report potentially faulty or harmful products, as well as to research goods before making a purchase.

As usual, this is about following the money trail, sigh.

Thank You!

My sincere and divine thanks to all of you who helped with this year's fund drive. It's not too late to join, by the way.

I can now pay all the fees I need for blogging and perhaps even a conference trip! So sweet of you all.

Today's Funny

It's an interesting reversal. Reversals, in general, are informative.
----
Via Doug.

Seeing The Connections: From Culture To Fertility

While reading this post (which I recommend*) and its sources, I noticed something interesting: A discussion of the pressure for women to stay at home once they have children. From the Guardian on Italy, in the context of an engineering firms which decided to lay off only female workers, given that women should stay at home:

Italy has one of the EU's lowest female employment rates, partly because of pressure on women to give up their jobs when they become pregnant. One in five does not return to work after the birth of her first child.

And from the New York Times on Germany**, where similar expectations concerning stay-at-home mothering also prevail:

“There is a very traditional image of women and men that was taken to an extreme in the Third Reich: female mother cult and male fraternity. These mental stereotypes have not yet been culturally processed and purged.”

Alice Schwarzer, founder of the magazine Emma and perhaps Germany’s best-known feminist, likens this mindset to “a leaden blanket across all of German society.”

Despite a battery of government measures — some introduced in the past year or so — and ever more passionate debate about gender roles, only about 14 percent of German mothers with one child resume full-time work, and only 6 percent of those with two. All 30 DAX companies are run by men. Nationwide, a single woman presides on a supervisory board: Simone Bagel-Trah at Henkel.

Here's the connection: Note that Italy and Germany are also countries with some of the lowest fertility rates. Yet the usual way of writing about this doesn't mention culture or discrimination until deep in the body of the article, if at all. This article (from 2010) is fairly typical of the coverage of Germany. It begins with the usual scare-mongering:

Germany is shrinking — fast. New figures released on May 17 show the birth rate in Europe's biggest economy has plummeted to a historic low, dropping to a level not seen since 1946. As demographers warn of the consequences of not making enough babies to replace and support an aging population, the latest figures have triggered a bout of national soul-searching and cast a harsh light on Chancellor Angela Merkel's family policies.

But it does a bit better than some of this stripe by at least spelling out the cultural and institutional discrimination:

To explain Germany's low reproduction rate, Steffen Kröhnert, a social scientist at the Berlin Institute for Population Development, points to a number of factors. Many German women decide not to have children because of poor state-run child-care facilities. Most schools in Germany finish earlier than in other parts of Europe — some as early as 1 p.m. — leaving parents struggling to find and afford sufficient day care. And often women who take up part-time jobs to try to juggle work and family life end up paying a high financial price. "Many German women have to stop work and end their careers if they want to have kids," says Kröhnert. It doesn't help that German mothers are still often branded Rabenmütter — "raven mothers" — a pejorative label that accuses them of being bad mothers if they decide to put their children in nurseries and continue working.

Raven mothers? I bet there is no pejorative label for the fathers who continue working. But then if a woman does not have children, she is responsible for the downfall of her country.

All this is a partial explanation for the low birth rates in Germany and Italy. Those countries have decided to make motherhood an expensive proposition, given what the society expects of its members now. As far as I can tell, fertility is viewed solely as the women's responsibility, but the society sets strict expectations of how they should perform it.
------
* The other items in that post are, in fact, more important than the ones I discuss here. I chose those because of the connection which is not made as often as it should be made.
**I could not link to the NYT article because I haven't paid them yet.

Added later: I'm pretty sure that the statistics on women returning to the labor force after the birth of a child in the above quote on Germany is somewhat misleading. I've looked at various sources of data, and none of them gives such low numbers. Perhaps the quote applies to immediate return to work, and not to whether the women will ultimately rejoin the labor force?

A Guest Post by Anna: A Literary Canon of Women Writers, Part Six: The Twelfth Century to the Thirteenth Century

(Echidne's note: Earlier parts of this series can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and part 5.)


Akka Mahadevi was a Saint and prominent poet of the Siva worshipping
movement of the 12th century Karnataka (a state in Southwest India).
Her Vacanas, a form of didactic poetry, are considered her greatest
contribution. In all she wrote about 430 Vachanas, which is relatively
fewer than that compared to other saints of her time. Yet, as an
example of her prominence, the term 'Akka' (elder Sister) was given to
her as an honorific by great saints like Basavanna, Chenna Basavanna,
Kinnari Bommayya, Siddharama, Allamaprabhu and Dasimayya. She is often
considered an early feminist; she was forced to marry, but because she
was devoted only to Siva, she left her husband and all her possessions,
including her clothes, and wandered as a naked poet-saint covered only
by her long hair. Some of her poems are available in English in the
book "Songs for Siva: Vacanas of Akka Mahadevi", translated by Vinaya
Chaitanya.

Li Qingzhao (1084–c. 1151) was a Chinese writer and poet of the Song
Dynasty, regarded by many as the premier female poet in the Chinese
language. Her complete poems are available in English in the book
"Complete Poems", by Ching-Chao Li, translated by Kenneth Rexroth and
Ling Chung. Her poems were often at odds with the Confucian code of the
day.

Mahsati Ganjavi (born circa 1089 — died after 1159) was a 12th century
Persian poet. No details about her life are documented except that she
was born in Ganja and was highly esteemed at the court of sultan Sanjar
of the Seljuk dynasty. She was persecuted for her courageous poetry
condemning religious obscurantism, fanaticism, and dogmas, but her only
works that have come down to us are philosophical and love quatrains
(rubaiyat), glorifying the joy of living and the fullness of love. A
monument to her was placed in Ganja in 1980. The most complete
collection of her quatrains, about 60 of them, are found in the Nozhat
al-Majales, but this anthology has never been fully translated into
English.

Marie de France ("Mary of France") was a medieval poet, one of the few
female troubadour poets, who was probably born in France and lived in
England during the late 12th century. She would be the earliest known
French female poet if she was indeed born in France. She lived and
wrote at an undisclosed court, but was almost certainly at least known
about at the royal court of King Henry II of England. Virtually nothing
is known of her life; both her given name and its geographical
specification come from her manuscripts, though one contemporary
reference to her work and popularity remains. Her "Lais of Marie de
France" (a series of twelve short narrative poems) in particular were
and still are widely read, and influenced the subsequent development of
the romance genre. They are also notable for their celebration of love,
individuality of character, and vividness of description – hallmarks of
the emerging literature of the times. They are available in English in
the book "The Lais of Marie de France" (Penguin Classics), by Marie de
France, translated by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby.

Princess Shikishi (died 1201) was a medieval Japanese poet who lived
during the late Heian and early Kamakura periods. She was the third
daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa (1127-1192, reigned 1155-1158). In
1159, Shikishi, went into service at the Kamo Shrine in Kyoto. She left
the shrine after some time, and in her later years became a Buddhist
nun. She never married.
Shikishi is credited with 49 poems in the Shin Kokin Shū, a collection
of some 2,000 popular works compiled in the early Kamakura period, and
many other poems included in the Senzai Wakashū, compiled in the late
Heian period to commemorate Emperor Go-Shirakawa's ascension, and later
compilations. Her complete poems are available in English in the book
"String of Beads: Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi", translated by
Hiroaki Sato.

Fujiwara Toshinari no Musume (1171-1252), commonly called Shunzei's
Daughter, was a Japanese poet; she was probably the greatest female
poet of her day. As for anthologies available in English which contain
some of her poems, 29 of her poems were selected for the Shinkokinshū
and nine were chosen for the Shin Chokusenshū. Some of her poems were
also available in the book "Seeds in the Heart", by Donald Keene.

Blessed Beatrice of Nazareth (1200-1268), in Dutch Beatrijs van
Nazareth, was a nun. She was the very first prose writer using the
Dutch language, a mystic, and the author of the notable Dutch prose
dissertation known as the "Seven Ways of Holy Love". She was also the
first prioress of the Abbey of Our Lady of Nazareth in Nazareth near
Lier in Brabant. The "Seven Ways of Holy Love" (Seven Manieren van
Heilige Minnen) is a work of early mystic literature that describes
seven stages of love, as it is purified and transformed, before it can
return to God.

Marguerite Porete (died 1310) was a French mystic and the author of
"The Mirror of Simple Souls", a work of Christian spirituality dealing
with the workings of Divine Love. She was burnt at the stake for heresy
in Paris in 1310 after a lengthy trial, after refusing to remove her
book from circulation or recant her views. The book is cited as one the
primary texts of the medieval Heresy of the Free Spirit, a heretical
belief that it was possible to reach perfection on earth through a life
of austerity and spiritualism, and that Christians could communicate
directly with God and did not need the Catholic Church for
intercession. "The Mirror of Simple Souls" taught that the soul must
pass through seven spiritual stages before it reached perfection; it
became renowned and well read throughout France even though the Church
condemned it as heresy. It is available in English as "The Mirror of Simple Souls", translated by Jack C. Marler.