Ha-Ha-Hallmarks of Feminism

Now here’s a comment I just can’t let hang out there:

Despite the “progress” in decreasing the glass ceiling of wage gaps, educational attainment, fertility control, improvements in technological changes in domestic appliances, and more freedom in the market sphere, women are not any happier. Instead, career-women, failing marriages, neglected children, unkempt homes and general unhappiness are the hallmarks of feminism.  [Zeal for Truth ????!!!!]

Well roll on the miserable floor, I just had to come up with something to counter that howling piece of miscreancy.  And here it is, just in time, from Barbara Ehrenreich via Tom Englehardt:

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

On Slate’s DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that “the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women’s complaints disguised as manifestos… and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act — in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs.” Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: “[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach… [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”

But it’s a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone’s mood.  [more]

Ehrenreich’s latest book is out – Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America at amazon.ca

Here’s Ehrenreich interviewed by John Allemang at the Globe & Mail, more stuff at The Situationist here and a half-hour audio discussion at Talk of the Nation here

Bits That Bite

Echidne on David Letterman:

Bosses harvesting their subordinates for sex is almost always a bad idea.

 

 

Dr. Eric Steele on the opposition to gay/lesbian marriage (via Pam’s House Blend):

. . . the clothing of rationality and God’s word have been used forever to hide the naked truth of racism, sexism and other prejudices. The arguments against the right of gays to civil marriage is no different; if you peel off the clothing, what lies underneath most opposition to civil marriage rights for gays is just naked fear, ignorance and prejudice.

 

Dave Zirin on football and homophobia:

Football came of age at a time when America was embarking on imperial adventures around the globe. Football was seen as a way to toughen up the youth so they wouldn’t become “sissies” and a way to teach the very “values” of Christian expansion and manifest destiny. This philosophy was known as “Muscular Christianity,” and its most prominent spokesman was an aristocrat-turned-boxer named Theodore Roosevelt .

 

Katha Pollitt on Roman Polanski:

What happened was not some gray, vague he said/she said Katie-Roiphe-style “bad sex.” A 43-year-old man got a 13-year-old girl alone, got her drunk, gave her a quaalude, and, after checking the date of her period, anally raped her, twice, while she protested; she submitted, she told the grand jury “because I was afraid.” Those facts are not in dispute–except by Polanski, who has pooh-poohed the whole business many times (You can read the grand jury transcripts here.) He was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like many accused rapists, to spare the victim the trauma of a trial and media hoopla. But that doesn’t mean we should all pretend that what happened was some free-spirited Bohemian mix-up. The victim took years to recover.

 

Diane Loupe on prostituted young women in Georgia:

A Future. Not A Past wanted to get a better estimate of girls on the street, so it funded independent researchers to track how many adolescent girls are being hawked. The research was based on scientific probability measures and estimates of the age of prostitutes, using methods similar to those used by scientists to determine the population of endangered species.

The number of young victims has been increasing since 2007, according to that research.

An estimated 374 juveniles were being commercially sexually exploited in August 2009 in Georgia, up from 251 in 2007 and 361 in 2008, according to Danielle E. Ruedt, public health programs coordinator for the Governor’s Office for Children and Families, which took over funding of the research from the campaign.

Numbers for the street, hotels and escort services have remained flat, but “the Internet number is going through the roof,” said Kaffie McCullough, campaign director of A Future. Not A Past.

Internet ads promising “young girls,” “barely legal” females and other code words for underage females got a much higher response from potential customers than other ads, the campaign’s researchers found.

While applauding the decision of Craigslist, an online provider of information about goods and services for sale, to eliminate its “erotic services” category, McCullough noted that many ads pimping girls have moved to other Web sites.

 

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness [pdf], Betsy Stevenson & Justin Wolfers

 

Katha Pollitt on Stevenson and Wolfers (and Huffington):

But how happy were women, really, in that golden pre-feminist era? Culture critic Caryl Rivers pointed out to me that in 1973, studies showing that married women had the highest levels of psychiatric problems, including depression and anxiety, prompted sociologist Jessie Bernard to declare marriage a “health hazard for women.”

 

Alex Dibranco on the student sex column movement:

Isabel Murray, feminist columnist for the Free Press, takes Cosmopolitan to task for its heteronormative, male-pleasure-oriented approach, while pointing out that it and similar women’s magazines are nonetheless the only noncampus media addressing female sexuality (explaining why until recently it was the most read magazine among college women). People are downright uncomfortable with the concept of female sexuality: even at Dartmouth’s SexFest, where Murray managed a table, she was struck by how “hesitant and disturbed” people seemed by her dental dams and a two-dimensional model of a vagina–far more so than by the condoms and three-dimensional plastic penis. The most controversial Dartmouth sex column took heat for dealing too explicitly with female sexuality.

 

Elsie Hambrook on women voters:

Women hang their vote on issues and often, on different issues than what men consider important. New Brunswick’s own Joanna Everitt, a political studies professor at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, is a Canadian expert on gender and politics. She says there are differences in how women and men vote, and that that split has been growing.

While men are more concerned with a candidate or party’s policies on the economy and federally, on the military, women are more likely to look at social policies, such as health care and education.

That difference has impacted the outcomes of some federal and provincial elections. Women and men vote in similar numbers, but differently, and parties need to be able to attract both genders.

Everitt recently concluded in a report, “If the (federal) Conservatives held as much appeal for women as they did for men in the 2006 election, they would not have ended up forming a minority government.”

 

Michael Valpy on women voters:

When he was host of BBC Two’s The Late Show in the 1990s, Mr. Ignatieff was called the thinking woman’s crumpet.

But interviews with Canadian women voters – businesswomen, academics, writers, PhD students in their 20s and 30s – elicited words well removed from crumpet. They called him stuffy, drab, arrogant, inauthentic, paternalistic, unmemorable, unsexy and, most of all, untrustworthy.

 

Michael Ignatieff on “Three Minute Culture”:

 

Stephen Harper tribute to friendship:

 

Harper and friends, redux:

 

But Harper hates more than 50% of Canadians:

 

So some women created a fan club [snark].

 

Adrienne Rich: No ‘Hostage of Power’

From Christopher Soden at the Dallas GLBT Arts Examiner:

Considering the literary canon of Lesbian writers, perhaps none have had the pervasive impact and influence of poet Adrienne Rich, who entered the scene early, but continued to learn and evolve as she gained recognition and accolades for her modulated, angry, confrontational, articulate, yet subtle verse. Not that Rich only addressed defiant feminist gender politics. Much of her poetry has a reflective, wistful feel about it. No one (who gave it much thought) would accuse her of monotony or polemics. Married to Harvard economist Alfred H. Conrad in 1953, they had three sons before the epiphany of her actual orientation was fully realized, the territory of her writing symbiotic with her journey of self-discovery.

A pretty good summary of Rich’s poetic career follows here.

Adrienne Rich at Modern American Poetry

Rich interviewed by Don Swaim in 2008 at Wired for Books

On Adrienne Rich at bookslut

A list of online criticism for Adrienne Rich

Come on Ye Young Feministes!

See this post at Broadsides to learn more about this great and spreading movement.  Then join if you’re a young woman and support if you’re a man or older woman.  YAY!

Pay Equity

Who will fight to uphold women’s right to pay equity?  Certainly not Stephen Harper and his (neo)Cons.  Not Michael Ignatieff either.  We can count on the NDP but on their own, they can only hope to get this bill separated from the budget bill so that there’s some chance of it being voted down now that Iggy has decided to sell women out and support the government on the budget.  Women fought hard for this most basic of rights, equal pay for work of equal value.  Why on earth should they be put in the position of having to bargain for pay equity with their government employer over and over again?  How long do you think it will be before the private sector insists on the same “privilege”?

This from Linda Diebel’s blog, the Political Decoder:

The unravelling of rights is exactly what’s happening with the Conservatives’ new “Equitable Compensation Act.” There’s an Orwellian title for you – like the Patriot Act. The change the Conservatives slipped into the recent budget – after failing last year – has nothing to do with equitable pay. In fact, it’s the opposite. It removes any chance women in the federal civil service have of fighting for pay equity by denying them the right to complain to the Human Rights Commission, or to go to court, when they believe there is discrimination. Instead, pay equity issues are to be solved as part of the regular bargaining process but – get this! – if anyone agitates on the basis of pay equity, they face a $50,000 fine. So the Conservative regime is forbidding a woman from fighting for herself and, simultaneously, penalizing her union from fighting for her.

Once this legislation is passed, a woman working in the federal public service will have fewer rights than women working elsewhere in Canada.

“We fought this battle so hard 30 years ago,”  [NDP MP Judy] Wasylycia-Leis said in an interview … “and I never thought we’d lose what we won. It’s shocking. They are taking it away in one fell swoop with the stroke of a pen . . . It hurts.”

There is still a way to stop it, she says. The act is part of the budget legislation and Wasylycia-Leis and her NDP colleagues are trying to divide it off into a separate bill that would then face its own vote in the House that, hopefully, wouldn’t be a non-confidence motion. If the Liberals and (one would think) the Bloc unites with the NDP, it could be defeated. The act should be in committee the week of February 23 and the House not long after.

Wasylycia-Leis says she’s embarrassed men in other parties haven’t fought harder for such a basic right for women. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, she argues, could have refused to support a budget that contains this new pay equity regime, instead of demanding only  progress reports.   “Maybe,” she said, “they’re not aware what this does to women.”  [emphasis added]

Oh they’re aware Judy.  But I know you know that.  I would prefer it a great deal if this bill was called what it is – the Inequitable Compensation Act.  At least that would be honest.  But then, we’re talking about politicians.

I’m supposed to be too old to be shocked.  I’m shocked.

Sanity on the Octuplets

Hysperia loves Patricia J. Williams and has for a long time.  At The Nation, Williams adds some sanity to the discussion of the octuplets birthed by Nadya Suleman .  Here are some bits:

No doubt Suleman has emotional problems. But rather than caring about her mental health, much of the media are content to pillory her as a drain on the public dole–selfish, frivolous, calculating and cruel. No Brangelina-style accolades of “God Bless ‘Em” in People magazine. Just impassioned calls to cut off her remaining sources of income and to criminally prosecute the doctor who fertilized her. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even ran an op-ed calling for the government to appoint a legal advocate for every child born to an unmarried woman, since the “lack of a father’s guidance” must be “a major cause of [children's] suffering.” Furthermore, in the case of Suleman’s children, “the legal advocate would file suit against the fertility clinic or a physician who knowingly contributed to their abuse–life in a multiple-child household headed by a single woman.”

[...]

This past fall The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Alex Kuczynski, fashion writer and self-confessed “cosmetic surgery addict.” Her wish to have a child was framed by fierce determinism, the “natural outgrowth” of marriage to her husband–without whom she “would skip the child.” Kuczynski is married to a man whose “sperm had a track record”–six other children by two prior wives. She, the third bride and twenty years her husband’s junior, described herself as engaged in nothing less than a “battle for my fertility”; having a biological child was “necessary,” a “mad desire,” a “compulsion” and “proof” of the marital bond, without which she faced “wrecked hopes” and an “abyss of grief.” Indeed, to die “without having created a life is to die two deaths: the death of yourself and the death of the immense opportunity that is a child.” When she thinks she’s pregnant, she feels a “shiver of victorious accomplishment…. my own fecundity triumphant.” When she tells people she’s not, she feels “barren, decrepit, desexualized,” “branded with a scarlet ‘I’ for ‘Infertile,’” “the dried-up crone with a uterus full of twigs.”

Just because Kuczynski is married and wealthy does not make her less obsessive or more profound than Suleman. Kuczynski sounds like a sad, silly child mooning over “fertile but fit” stars like Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek and “John Edwards’s sometime mistress,” who all had babies in their 40s. Likewise, Suleman takes heart looking at Angelina Jolie. Suleman and Kuczynski represent disturbing emotional extremes. But that should not excuse the rest of us from examining the oppressive competitive natality that seems to have gripped us–the fantasies of “baby bumps” and breeding, always breeding, yet more of “our kind.” Our culture’s antifeminist backlash and its unrealistic aspirations have bewitched Kuczynski and Suleman, these two young women who are so addled and so suggestible, so endowed and yet so impoverished. All these years after the age of “liberation,” perhaps it is time to revisit the myths we still concoct about childless women’s worth.

Perfectly perfect.

Read the whole thing here

Remembering Rosemary Brown

This is the first of my contributions to Black History Month.  I loved Rosemary Brown from the moment she hit the national scene in Canada.  I miss her voice so much and perhaps particularly now, when women’s rights are being sold out to an ailing economy by cynical politicians and economic inequality stemming from racism and sexism has created a great divide.

 

Rosemary Brown was elected to the provincial legislature of British Columbia in 1972, becoming the first black woman in Canadian history to be a member of a Canadian parliamentary body. A busy mother of three as well as an active member of the New Democratic Party, she ran for leadership of the federal NDP in 1975 but lost on a fourth ballot to Ed Broadbent. Rosemary served in the B.C. legislature until 1986, when she became a professor in women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

Born in Jamaica, Rosemary grew up on the tropical island. After emigrating to Canada in 1951 she studied at McGill University and the University of British Columbia, then pursued a career in social worker. A determined feminist, Ms. Brown worked throughout her life to promote equality and human rights. Her campaigns includes efforts to eliminate sexism in textbooks, increase female representation on boards and prohibit discrimination based on sex or marital status. Rosemary’s dedicated community service won her a multitude of honours, including honorary degreees from many universities and selection as an officer of the Order of Canada.

On the day of Brown’s death, the National Film Board of Canada completed work on a documentary/memoir of Brown and her “co-grandmother, Ruth Horricks-Sujir.  You can read a bit about it and view a clip here.  I’ve seen it several times – it’s wonderful.

There’s more about Rosemary Brown at the African American Registry and a great collection of remembrances by Penny Kome at section15.ca

The Vatican & The Twisted Sisters

Is feminism destroying “manhood”?  That would be good news.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t done much towards destroying Vatican manhood:

While visiting Manila-Philippines, Vatican official Paul Josef Cordes declared yesterday that “feminism” is not only eroding manhood but causing “a crisis in fatherhood.”

According to Cordes, “gender mainstreaming” and “radical feminism” attack biological manhood by insisting that gender roles are learned. He claims that men are demeaned by the ideal of a “sweeter man” who is both emasculated and feminized.

Cordes lays the blame for delinquency and suicides among “fatherless children,” on women. This prompted a local feminist (who considers “sweeter men” as a cause for celebration) to ask the obvious: “How is it that when men abandon their families, women get blamed?”

Cordes’ lament comes in the wake of deliberations in the Philippine Senate, which is likely to result in the passage of pro-women’s rights legislation called the Magna Carta for Women. The bill seeks to adopt the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) into local legislation.

While there is reason to hope that a law furthering women’s rights will be passed soon, it was recently noted in the local media that the influential wife of a former Senator was “lobbying” in the Senate by threatening senators with no less than the “opprobrium of the Catholic bishops.”  Even as I write this post, advocates are hard at work to defend the provisions of the bill, which are being targeted for deletion by the self-appointed Catholic lobbyists.

Good lord!  Or not.

Read the whole thing here

But ya know, the position of the United States on the ratification of CEDAW isn’t much better than what the Romans want, really:

So, where is the whole U.S. CEDAW ratification movement?

Not only has the U.S. not ratified CEDAW, but most supporters of ratification, including new Vice President Joe Biden, treat its ratification like voting for a national flower, taking pains to reassure the public that ratification would not impose any new burdens on the government. Of course, this is true, because with the full support of the Democratic Congress and the women’s movement, the version of CEDAW now pending in the U.S. Senate has been gutted to the core by some eleven reservations, understandings and declarations (RUDs). (A full listing of RUDs is available at thomas.gov under Human Rights Treaties.) The support by liberal proponents of CEDAW, including Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama, is not qualified by the important distinction that the treaty should only be ratified without reservations. These leaders, while well intentioned in their efforts to ratify the treaty, do not realize that if passed with the qualifiers currently in place, CEDAW will threaten the advancement of equality rights globally.

The twisted sister CEDAW would preclude women from challenging laws based on the physical differences between men and women, including discriminatory maternity coverage or criminal abortion laws.

The most deceptive RUD, unopposed by CEDAW supporters, states, Nothing in this convention shall be construed to reflect or create any right to abortion and in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning. This language is touted as neutral or benign but is not. Drafted by the late Republican Senator Jesse Helms, a vociferous opponent of abortion, this language can and has been used as an anti-abortion weapon. Without the right to govern decisions about their own bodies and health, women will never achieve full equality.

Ironically, if the U.S. intention in ratifying CEDAW is to send a supportive message to women globally, our twisted sister version will, in fact, do the opposite. Although the RUDs seemingly apply solely to American women, they eviscerate the core of CEDAW, the definition of equality and provide legal authority to those who want to undermine women’s rights.

Here

Here’s the Women’s Division of CEDAW

Hoping Obama Will Help

My dreams have been full of the women of the Democratic Republic of Congo for months and months and my heart cracks a little more each time I think of them.  The Bush administration, the U.N., my country and the powerful countries of the world have been unsuccessful in ameliorating he conditions for women in Congo, to the extent that anyone has tried.  These days, I often push thoughts of those women aside out of feelings of despair.

Thus, it was with a sense of relief and great hope that I read the following open letter to President-Elect Obama at The Huffington Post:

On December 5, 2008, a few days before the 60th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a group of global and domestic women’s organizations gathered in New York to frame a shared agenda for advancing global women’s rights. Determined to use their collective strength and expertise to work together to advance a global agenda for women’s freedom, safety and agency, they crafted the following open letter to President-elect Obama and committed to working together to see their vision come true in this century.
Dear President-Elect Obama,

As a group of women leaders who have given our lives to the transformation, protection and empowerment of women in the United States and globally, we want to begin by congratulating you. We are honored and proud to have you lead the nation during this historic time. We also welcome your call to action, reminding us of what we have always known — that as global citizens we cannot solely rely on any one administration’s ability to bring about change, but must be steadfast in pushing forward our own vision and agendas.

We represent a historic movement for change: millions of women across the globe with innovative ideas, influential constituencies and collaborative solutions. We are calling on you to ensure that women are equally represented in everything, from your administration’s infrastructure to its decision-making and solution building. We are calling on you to exercise leadership in dismantling the structures that perpetuate gender inequality, impede women’s full participation in society and thwart real progress for people around the world.

As war rages in Gaza, it is clear that the time has come to dismantle militarism as the dominant ideology in world politics. We must ensure that women take the lead in building lasting peace in the Middle East, ending genocide in Darfur, stopping femicide in the Democratic Republic of Congo, fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan, and ending the war in Iraq.

Though the select-few women who hold leadership positions in this country’s political system inspire us; women represent more than 50% of the population and deserve more than marginal representation. We believe that in order for your vision of change to succeed, women must be in positions of power. While US women gained the right to vote 100 years ago, to date only 14% of the US Congress are women. This must change.

The major economic, security, governance and environmental challenges of our times cannot be solved without the equal participation of women at all levels of society — from the home to institutions of national and global governance. Women’s voices must be central in all major discussions including the economic crisis, overhauling our education system. Long-term investments in women’s education, health and leadership development are equally critical. Economic structures continue to marginalize women. Consider this: women represent two-thirds of the world’s labor yet we own less than 1% of the world’s assets.

In addition, more than 500,000 women die each year because of inadequate medical and reproductive care. Violence against women is a pandemic that determines women’s realities, impeding their access to education and economic self-sufficiency. This global epidemic is undermining the future of the world, as women are at the heart of all communities and families; we literally carry the future in our bodies.

Yet these are not “women’s issues.” In fact, such investments are vital to economic growth and the well-being of all individuals, communities, societies and nations. Consider India’s economic transformation of the past 15 years: The World Bank finds that states with the highest percentage of women in the labor force grew the fastest and had the largest reductions in poverty.

As policy makers, activists, researchers, and grant-makers we have spent our lives investing in women and know that these kinds of investments have immeasurable and fundamental impact for the better. Worldwide, women are uniquely positioned to bring innovative insights and creative solutions to global leadership forums. If we hope to improve existing economic, peace and security, and human development frameworks women must not only be included, but must be at the heart of the discussion.

We are calling on you to be the President who ushers in the time of women. Our vision of the future is one in which women and men are equal partners, standing shoulder to shoulder in confronting the world’s challenges. We welcome, with hope and anticipation, your shared commitment to this vision.  [emphasis mine]

We represent more than half of the world’s human potential. And our time has come.

Sincerely,

Linda Basch, PhD
President, National Council for Research on Women

Mallika Dutt
Executive Director, Breakthrough: Building Human Rights Culture

Eve Ensler
Founder, V-Day

Adrienne Germain
President, International Women’s Health Coalition

Sara Gould
CEO, Ms. Foundation

Christine Grumm
CEO, Women’s Funding Network

Geeta Rao Gupta
President, International Center for Research on Women

Carolyn Makinson
Executive Director, Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children

Kavita Ramdas
CEO, Global Fund for Women

Zainab Salbi
President, Women for Women International

In February, V-Day will be in  five American cities with its “Turning Pain to Power” tour – New York, Washington D.C., Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Dr. Dennis Mukwege will be on the tour with Eve Ensler.  Dr. Mukwege runs the Panzi Hospital in the DRC, offering services to women and girls who have been raped and won the 2008 UN Human Rights Prize.

Check out the V-Day site for more information on the tour and for tickets.  Please!

American Women, American Artists

Three Figures in Landscape

Miriam Laufer

Blue Ladies

Susan Bee

From Johanna Drucker on Bee and Laufer:

Thematically and formally, Laufer’s work shows the struggles of a mid-century woman artist formed in the legacy of modernism and then participating in first-wave American feminism. By contrast, Susan Bee’s work builds on that legacy. Born and raised in New York City, Bee is a first-generation American. She is an urban and urbane artist whose migrations map onto the grid of Manhattan and all its nuanced semiotics of upper West Side, East Side, and Tribeca studio spaces. However, she is also the daughter of Jewish immigrant artists, who escaped the Holocaust that engulfed many of their relatives in Europe. Her father, Sigmund Laufer, is also a graphic artist, printmaker, and book designer. Growing up in NY, Bee had many more sources of inspiration on which to model her work and approach than just that of her mother. Her peer group shared a sense of self-definition that women a generation earlier had to struggle to find on their own. The shift from individual struggle to collective effort was significant. In the 1970s, Bee was a young artist and the battles of an older generation had already broken the once total barriers to professional recognition for women. Bee came of age as the women’s movement swelled a tide of progressive energy. The work of feminist groups around the country brought an active discussion of women’s aesthetics to the fore. Bee’s own work challenges some of the received legacy of that first-wave sensibility, particularly by its enthusiasm (however critical) for the cliches and images of women in popular culture. But she also partakes of the permissions and entitlements gained by the women of her mother’s generation. In her painting and her publishing, Bee was able to begin from a foundation others struggled to achieve. In the generic, generational sense, Bee benefited from her (collective) mothers’ work and efforts.

Read the whole thing here

From Is Resistance Futile? by Susan Bee:

Some people question the need for exclusively women’s institutions like A.I.R. Certainly, there is the danger of ghettoizing female artists or of the damaging perception that women-only galleries are second-rate. In addition, A.I.R., in particular, faces a generational crisis: its membership is aging, and it is difficult to attracting qualified and interesting younger women. Younger women artists want to make it in the mainstream, if possible, not languish on the fringes, or in the past, where many think the feminist movement resides. Some of the pressure is off too: circumstances have improved for younger women artists, partly due to the intervention of galleries like A.I.R. Many more opportunities exist for younger women artists to move straight into the mainstream. All these issues swirl around the gallery, creating difficulties. But then, the decision to follow a feminist path in art has never been easy. Being political and announcing your difference is not the most unproblematic way to proceed in the artworld. That’s what makes maintaining an openly feminist space, with self-declared feminist artists in charge, a continuing challenge.

Arabesque (detail)

Susan Bee