Tag: feminism

Feeling Thankful

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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It’s going to be Thanksgiving in the United States in a couple of weeks, and that got me to thinking about the people who worked hard and made sacrifices to make sure “we the people” means everybody. Given the way the current regime is trying to destroy those rights, it seems important to remember how we got them and what we need to do to keep them.

I’m thinking about these things in the United States because that’s the history I know best and it’s also where rights are under attack right now. But you can find similar histories in many countries.

Me, I thank the suffragists who made it possible for me to vote and led to many more women in positions of authority. That happened 105 years ago now, which may seem like ancient history if you were born in this century, but doesn’t seem that long ago at all if you’re my age.

I mean, my grandmothers were born before women could vote in the United States. My mother was born just three years afterwards.

I also thank the predecessors of the suffragists, the women who organized for their rights back in the 1800s, often working alongside abolitionists. I looked up the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and discovered that Frederick Douglass – who was the only African American at the convention – argued strongly for the inclusion of women’s right to vote, which was why they included it in their statement.

Douglass’s efforts in this regard are just one reason I think the abolitionist and the later civil rights movement were critical to rights that I have, and that we all share these days.

It’s not really freedom if it’s not freedom for all. The activism that finally implemented some of the rights set out in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments not only expanded the freedom of Black people, but expanded the rights for everyone.

I also thank unions for my freedoms. I’m personally grateful to the News Guild, my union, which enabled me to retire in reasonable comfort, but I’m grateful in general to all those people who fought for workers’ rights over many years, and who are still hanging in the fight right now. Continue reading “Feeling Thankful”…

Age and Resistance

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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“Be realistic. Demand the impossible.”

According to Rob Hopkins, whose book How to Fall in Love With the Future is my current morning read, that’s something people said on the barricades in Paris in 1968.

Since he quoted it in English, it must have spread far beyond Paris .(I’m sure even Parisian students in the Sixties would use French for their slogans on account of they are, in fact, French, and French people care about their language, even the radicals.)

It certainly reminds me of my experiences back in those days that we label the Sixties even though they extended into the 1970s. And it’s yet another reminder that much of what underlies progressive work in the United States (and other places, but I know the U.S. stuff) today is built on what we did back in the 1960s.

Part of the reason I’m writing about this is that I’m really, really tired of the “OK Boomer” nonsense on social media, a phenomenon that is inaccurate and ageist and shows a true lack of knowledge about recent history (which makes me worry about the lack of knowledge of history going back more than my lifetime).

But this is not a “kid’s today” post accompanied by headshaking and tut-tutting. From my perspective, the kids of today are great, and I suspect a lot of the generational name-calling is produced by bots and provocateurs.

It’s just that a lot of what the extremists running our country right now condemn as “woke” and “DEI” grew out of work we did toward making the United States a better place, and I’m damned if I want to let them destroy it.

I’m talking about the Civil Rights Movement, which actually started quite a long time before the 1960s (there’s some fascinating history of the legal strategies that led up to Brown v. Board starting in about 1920, just as an example) though a lot of things came to fruition then – some laws on equal opportunity and voting rights with teeth in them, plus some significant activism with groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers.

I’m talking about second wave feminism, which also owed quite a bit to the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I’m talking about Stonewall and the gay rights activism that developed from that.

I’m even talking about hippies and the Summer of Love and Woodstock. Continue reading “Age and Resistance”…

Some Thoughts on Gender and Community

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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One of the many things my sweetheart and I bonded over when we first got together was a love of Whileaway, the place where people live in Joanna Russ’s story “When It Changed.”

We’d both like to live there – that is, in the there before it changed.

I should point out that my sweetheart is a man and, for those of you who haven’t read the story, only women lived in Whileaway.

But he would, in fact, fit into that world rather well, despite being essentially and comfortably male.

It was, in fact, by being around him that I realized the most accurate statement of my gender is “not male.” That’s despite the fact that I’m the one with a sword and a black belt and, even though I know better, much more likely to end up in a physical fight.

I’m not talking about the kind of masculinity we often discuss as “testosterone poisoning” (though testosterone is not nearly as powerful as many believe) or the toxic masculinity of the fascists who just got elected.

It’s not as easily defined as that. It’s a maleness that is not uncomfortable in an all-female setting while still being itself.

I wanted to do many things in my life that were coded as male, but I never wanted to be a man. I am resolutely not girlie, nowhere near as feminine in interests or appearance as many of the trans women I know, but I am still comfortably a woman.

I set my pronouns as she or they because I don’t have a lot invested in my gender identity, but I would, in fact, correct you if you called me “he.” I am not male. (I wouldn’t be offended, but then I am not someone who gets subjected to intentional misgendering, another issue entirely.)

It isn’t likely to happen. I may be big and aggressive and loud, with a black belt and a law degree and an unwillingness to let people walk over me, but people don’t ever seem to take me as male. I don’t know if it’s the hair or the way my body’s shaped or just my presence, but something about me seems to say “female” to most people in much the same way that my quieter and calmer sweetheart’s presence seems to say “male.”

In fact, I suspect it’s my apparently obvious womanness that makes some men get very angry when I don’t turn tail or apologize profusely when they try to walk over me (or run me down with their cars). Women are supposed to quail before men like them, and I do not.

I often put that attitude down to years in martial arts, but as I reflect on it, I think the attitude was there long before I started training. Training made it safer for me to stand up to such men because it gave me tools to use in response, but I was always going to demand my rights.

Funny, though, while those men scream at me and clearly want to hit me or grab me, they never do. That might be because even as they are dismissing me as a girl and showing their contempt for me, they can read something in my presence that tells them it would be a bad idea to lay a hand on me.

I hope that’s the case. I make every effort to convey the attitude that messing with me is a bad idea. I may look like an old woman, but don’t assume I’m harmless just because you have some stereotypical idea of old women.

Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Gender and Community”…

Women Betraying Women

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I see that the appalling woman who is currently governor of Arkansas is attacking women who don’t have biological children, specifically Vice President Kamala Harris. This follows on the equally appalling man who is the Republican nominee for vice president doing much the same.

They are part of the current “pronatalist” movement, which is white supremacist nonsense. There are plenty of babies and young people in the world; they’re just the “wrong” race and in the “wrong” countries.

I mean, there are eight billion people on the planet, which is more than enough. And before you moan about how the population is aging, you might want to look at South Africa or Nigeria, where the population is quite young. We’re not running out of people,.

Since I am a happily childless woman who has taken care of myself since I was grown, right wing proponents of women having more babies (which also means women having fewer rights and positions of power) get on my last nerve.

But what is making me most furious today are women like Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, Alabama Senator Katie Britt, and Justice Amy Barrett. (I think I’ll avoid discussing the dog-murdering governor of South Dakota and the wild-eyed extremist women in the U.S. House.)

All these women have powerful jobs today because of feminism, and all of them are out to destroy the rights of women.

I mean, let’s get real: the Republicans wouldn’t be putting women in powerful positions if they didn’t need to cater to women’s votes. I guarantee you that if they succeed in implementing the wet dreams set out in Project 2025, you won’t see so many women — even right wing women — in positions of authority.

Once they start enforcing the Comstock Act, they’re going to go after the 19th Amendment.

As a feminist old enough to remember that the inclusion of women in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 coupled with second wave feminism gave me choices that my mother didn’t have, nothing makes me much madder than women who sell out other women for their personal gain.

These women got to get an education and a political career because of the efforts of people like me going back to the suffrage movement, and they’re using those things to harm people like me. Continue reading “Women Betraying Women”…

It’s International Women’s Day!

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I was reminded that the day this post first appears is March 8, which has been designated as International Women’s Day, so despite the fact that I had another post almost finished, I decided that I should write about women.

I mean, I am a woman. While I like a lot of things coded male — swords, for example — I am definitely not male. In fact, my current go-to answer when asked to name my gender is “not male.”

And while I find the idea of non-binary attractive, especially since I do not fit particularly well in many of the niches coded female and am fine with “they” as well as “she” when it comes to pronouns, I am a woman. I am also very sure that nobody gets to tell me what that means.

In particular nobody gets to tell me it means wearing pink or wanting babies or civilizing men, not to mention that nobody ever — EVER — gets to tell me that I can’t do such and such because I’m a girl.

I resisted that lie as much as I could while growing up, which, of course, meant that I never fit in much of anywhere.

I still don’t fit in much of anywhere, but one of the best things about getting old is that you don’t give a fuck.

I’ve done some things to push boundaries in my life, like criticize sexist practices in organizations, go to law school back when women didn’t much, and get a fourth degree black belt in Aikido, but here’s the thing I’m proudest of:

I love my body.

I came to this love through martial arts because I discovered in training how my whole body informs who I am. So part of this love is the fact that my senses and the way I move are integrated into who I am.

But also, I’m capable of looking at my naked body in the mirror and enjoying the shape of it, the curves of my hips and breasts, the width of my shoulders, the strength in my chest and legs, my height.

I don’t have a supermodel body; my height’s in my torso, not my legs, and there’s no way I could get skinny enough to fit into those tiny clothes even if I wanted to because my bone structure is too large.

Also, I like food way too much to starve myself. It’s my understanding these days that, despite all the uproar about obesity, being what is labeled “overweight” is actually healthier than being “normal,” not to mention “underweight.”

Which is to say that our norms for health and weight are completely entangled with our norms for beauty and it’s hard to take any of them seriously. I claim overweight with some pride.

Another thing I’m proud of is that I am not afraid of men. Continue reading “It’s International Women’s Day!”…

Gender and Chess

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The International Chess Federation (FIDE) is blocking transwomen from competing in women’s chess tournaments.

No one has come out and said it, but it’s clear that this is rooted in the misogynistic belief that women are inferior to men when it comes to chess. As with the bans on transwomen in physical sports competition, the underlying assumption is that someone assigned male at birth is clearly “naturally” better at chess than someone assigned female, and transition doesn’t take away that advantage.

However, a person assigned female at birth who has won women’s chess competitions will lose their titles if they transition to male. Apparently FIDE is recognizing that a transman counts as a man, even before they transition.

I gather FIDE sees the act of transitioning to male as confirmation that the person is not an inferior being and therefore should not compete in an inferior category.

Transwomen, on the other hand, will not lose the titles they won in male competitions before transitioning. That this is ludicrous doesn’t change the reasoning.

Of course, none of this makes any sense. There is in fact no reason at all for chess competitions to be divided by gender, except for the fact that chess has been dominated by men and women’s competitions are a way for women to get their feet in the door.

The assumption that women are inherently inferior at the skills of chess is just another misogynistic tool for blocking their participation. Continue reading “Gender and Chess”…

What We Can Do

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Reading Lyz Lenz’s latest newsletter (“Thank You, Dads of YouTube” ) brought me to the edge of tears.

It wasn’t her success at fixing her washer that got me. It was the fact that a woman much younger than I am still grew up surrounded by the belief that there were things women couldn’t do.

As someone old enough to remember how important this issue was in second wave feminism 50 years ago, it breaks my heart to know that so many people are still growing up with these stunted beliefs.

I don’t doubt that it’s true. It’s why I hope to teach some more self defense classes if we ever get enough of a handle on the pandemic for me to feel comfortable in a room full of people learning to yell “No.” Way too many women still believe that the fact that the average man is a little stronger than the average woman means they can’t protect themselves.

Spending half my life in the martial arts watching small people kick the asses of big people did that one in for me. I want to make sure other people know it, too.

We did make legal progress in the second wave, though the recent outrageous action of the partisan hacks on the US Supreme Court in nullifying the right to abortion by allowing a clearly unconstitutional Texas law to take effect is damaging legal rights as well.

(I was in law school when Roe v. Wade was decided. That was also a Texas case and I have met the lawyer who brought it — she was also my state representative back in the day.)

The same hacks also dismantled voting rights laws. It is not just women under attack in our society.

The extremist attacks make me angry, but the fact that so many women are still buying into the myths we fought to overcome in the 1970s is what breaks my heart. Continue reading “What We Can Do”…