Conference turris::womannotes-v1

       I'll be attending most of the lectures to better understand
       Feminist thought and needs. I shall bring a notebook.
    
                                                     Russ

    You would do better to bring a dictionary.
    
    _Websters'_First_Intergalactic_Wickedary_ by Mary Daly
    
    to be precise -- because you will *NOT* understand their use of
    such terms as "witch", "wicked", or "snool" without it.
    
    							Ann B.

    You can pick one up at Words Worth in Harvard Square on the way
    to the lecture!  I just called, they have them in, they'll even
    hold a copy for you if you want (617-354-5201).

    Wise ones ... I already own and have read ALL such type 'dictionaries.'
    There isn't a single term (or concept) that I haven't come across
    -- or pondered.
    
    
    "There is no dark side of the moon really, as a matter of fact it's
    all dark."  -- Pink Floyd
    
    
                                                       + - Russ

    
    Hello, Ann Marie?  Care to tell us more about this lecture series?
    Will any WOMAN noters be there?  Perhaps we could use this note
    to discuss our reactions to each lecture we attend.  Unfortunately,
    I have school on Monday nights, but I may be able to get to one
    or two.
    
    Hoping to derail this derailment,
    
    Justine

    re .7   De-rail what?  I am honestly trying to better understand
            feminism in its various manifestations.
    
            For those others that think me a "fool", simply LOOK at
            that much criticized/praised book called the Bible, and
            compare it to the various 'Feminist' Dictionaries that
            are floating around. 
    
            I await with much patience the opinions of OTHER PEOPLE
            the Verdict on which book sheds the valuable light.
    
    
                                                   Russ

    Say, how 'bout we all go out afterwards for coffee (and fisticuffs, if Russ
    really wants :-)  :-)  :-)  :-)  :-)  :-)  :-)) ?

    re .9   Yes Lisa coffee after tonites diatribe sounds like a
          splendid idea. Is the Au Bon Pain open at that hour? If
          so who's buying?  
    
            I see no need for fisticuffs unless someone tries to force
          some Witch's brew down the hatch. The last thing I want to
          do tonite is to fly into a rage trying to find a broomstick
          so I can 'fly away'.  :-)
    
            Of course I'll likely be seeking the haven of Scotch to
          sooth away the pains of self-discovery that such a lecture
          will bring.  
    
            Hope to see you all there.
    
                                                           Russ

    Hey, what do you expect from someone who can't take a joke.

    I have not been reading =WN= in awhile.  I posted the lecture series
    because I thought some women in =WN= might be interested in the
    topics to be presented this year.
    
    Justine, I will be posting the history....herstory....of this series
    soon.
    
    Ann Marie

    
    
    I am very, VERY interested in the lecture series but I doubt that
    I will be able to attend any.  What I would like is for someone
    who does and who wants to discuss the talks to let me know and we
    could converse by mail or even in person if they live near either
    Stow OGO or North Chelmsford.  (Greta has school three nights a
    week and needs the car to get to and from Lowell.)
    
    Also, any material that is referenced I would love to know about.
    
    _peggy
    
    		(-)
    		 |
    			The Goddess gave me life, not 
    			necssarily time, to learn.
    
     

There is a schism in feminism now, which can be seen in the writings of some 
feminists who condemn creative radical feminism; this criticism is a 
symptom of our current Post-Modernism culture.  This was the thesis of Sharon 
Welch's lecture last Monday night (2/29/88).

To begin, she read a typical criticism by a feminist academician [whose name
I've forgotten--Biddy, I think].  She illuminated some of the implicit
messages in the review:

	. a fear that speaking out in favor of feminism may cause someone
		else to be repressed
	. a fear that speaking out about feminism will codify feminism
		and thereby create a new elite of experts

[Biddy] went on to criticize Mary Daly's work; Welch drew our attention to 
[Biddy]'s failure to cite specific works and then described the distortion 
in the criticism:

	. a distortion that Daly's work is merely a documentation of
		  the history sexism
	. a distortion that such work is not of continuing importance

Actually Daly's work opens up for new evaluations and for tracing new 
manifestations of sexism.  Many people will assume, as has
[Biddy], that shedding a false consciousness is easy, when actually it's
an arduous, time-consuming process.  A series of writer's works hold
within it the evolution of her shedding of this false consciousness and
prompt us on to our own.  It isn't something that is done with at once.

	Post-Modernism and its Sources

In Post-Modernism there is the belief that Something Big is at Stake:
that now this is the terrain of culture we're seeing, and now culture is
also a site for political battles.

The shift from Modernism to Post-Modernism is rooted in the feminist movement,
and the civil rights movement, and in the rise of voices from the Third World.
These movements destroyed the notion that white males speak for everyone.
But a strange distortion has taken place: since now the "universal" male 
voice no longer speaks for everyone, this has led to a claim that no voice
can speak for more than just a fracture of a voice, reflecting voices.
And so anyone who speaks of their experience based as being a woman, based
in black family traditions, based in Third World culture, is rejected as 
being naive appeals to 19th century humanism--they're retrograde, not 
progress.  These continuing emerging voices cause upsets because they 
threaten not just the redefinition of power but the *redistribution* 
of power in society.  Daniel Bell, one of the foremost Post-Modernists, 
has criticized these different voices as refusing to accept civilization--
--a nice one that.  While it is true that these movements are saying that 
we refuse to subordinate our energies to a deferred end because of this 
they are criticized as being unready for "civilization".

	Definition of Modernism

Modernism grew to challenge industrialization and was critical of mass
culture.  An example is Kafka's fiction with its critique of
bureaucracy and bureaucracy's effect on the human soul.  Modernism aimed to
shock the bourgeois.  It valued the crisis with no allusion to past
history; as did the "Glass Wall" kind of architecture had no references 
in appearance to previous styles of architecture.

Critics of Modernism by Post-Modernist justly claim it was elitist in its
cynicism and in its restriction to access to its places of teaching; and
therefore it failed to serve as a basis for popular revolt, becoming 
merely a mood for cultural despair.

	Post-Modernism in the US

In the US, we have a Post-Modernism that is reaction.  It plays with styles
from various histories but without any critical awareness of the importance
any particular item may have played in its past; it can be termed a
pastiche of styles, an indefinite replaying for no purpose, a living in
an immediate presence and drawing on cultural stereotypes with impunity
because of this loss of sense of history.  Reality has been translated into 
a series of images.  Modern big buildings, as can be seen in downtown Boston
today, paste together confections of architectural bits from many different
periods.  Movies such as "Body Heat" and "China Town" play with images and
historical stereotypes, but without showing any understanding
of the relation of the images to their relative importance.  Playing around
such as this has led to a re-emphasizing of the stereotypes and to a
confusion of ethical codes.  Any attempt to name the Self outside of the
stereotypes is said to be retrograde rather than creative.  And so we
see mass culture only as consumerism, and folk art and the sharing of
it is ignored. [Is this our proud, new global village?  --lsc]

These are the sources of [Biddy]'s fears--that feminism does not conform
to the Post-Modernism mystique.  That by retaining its voices, feminism
is a discredited movement.

	Exceptions to the Post-Modernist Model

The past of feminism and other movements is a history of resistance.  We
remember the oppression, we remember the cost, and, as opposed to 
Post-Modernism, we remember a past of deep connections with the elemental
sources in nature.  How often in a city can you see any stars, or feel
movements refuse to deny their past, but remember them and create new
memories.  Despite [Biddy]'s criticism, the naming of a female identity
can occur in ways other than the one which means to name is equivalent to
exclude, if we also hear all voices in their complexity.  This identity is
arduously won but it is an honorable task.

Welch mentioned a common phenomenon of many feminist conversations, of
a need to confess complicity in patterns of oppression.  This stumbling 
block has to be surpassed for creative growth.

As a parting, Welch reminded us that the most powerful stories empower you
to tell your own stories.  She cited examples in stories by feminists.
It was a good ending, or rather, a good cycle: from a criticism of creative
feminism, through an explanation of the roots of this criticism, we were
again empowered and encouraged to be our creative selves.

			%	%	%	%

I enjoyed this lecture and the opportunities for new directions for me that
it invoked.  I wonder, however, can we, along with being creative for our
own sake, also defend our continuing creativity by composing messages for
Post-Modernists to understand.  Can we create a series of images to 
demonstrate the validity of all voices, or is this a restriction inherent
in such a medium?  And is it also an unnecessary drain?

[This review is not for the squeamish. --lsc]

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

Jane Caputi's lecture was fascinating and fast-paced.  Her thesis was the
relation of The Age of the Sex Crime to the Nuclear Crisis, with percussion
by the visual images she has collected.  Her slides were collection of ads, 
magazine covers, and articles that I'm sure many of us have seen, but 
collected together their effects were harder to ignore, and her combinations 
were deft.

Our Nook-ular Age

The first images were some startling juxtapositions of sex and nuclear energy
or nuclear weapons:

	. a t-shirt with the slogan "Nuclear Energy is Safer than Sex"
	. a t-shirt with the slogan "A Little Nukey is good for Everyone",
		with a dancing cooling/containment tower which had a little
		atom symbol for one eye, the word "afterglow" for a _smile_,
		and feminine legs
	. an ad from a nuclear engineering magazine, with the title
		"Why is a beautiful woman like a nuclear reactor", the
		copy in script, and a drawing of a woman in a long, flowing
		negligee, reminiscent of douche or other feminine products ads;
		an image of a kept and dainty, hidden power source
	. an article from the New York Times about arms, with an array
		of bombs, looking distinctly phallic
	. a illustration from another article with a giant diaphragm over
		a mushroom cloud
	. a cartoon of a US general and a USSR general exposing their giant
		bombs placed as erect penises

Helen Caldicott and Mary Daly and a few humorists (such as the one who drew
the cartoon above) have publicly noted these comparisons, but as a rule
they go unremarked.

The Age of the Sex Crime

The 20th century has seen a new form of the sex crime: the territorial serial
sex killings.  In 1888 Jack the Ripper set a new paradigm, which many 
contemporaries could only see as parallels to the new medical branch of
gynecology and the operations performed by gynecologists.  Jack the Ripper,
whose identity has never been determined, slit the throats of his victims
and then mutilated their bodies and removed their uteruses; it was thought
to be the work of a gynecologist or student.  Freud and Kraft-Ebbing
later described how it paralleled the male sexual act.  These series of
unsolved murders set a mythical role model--"Jack the Ripper" is a folkname,
it spurs emulators, and the emulators also get media attention.  It has become
a new mode for expressing gynocide.

[My next two figures are uncomfortably high--can anyone with better notes
correct me, please.]  In the US, the FBI reports that about 2000 women per
year are killed by husbands, and 5000 are killed by serial murderers.  It
has reached the level of terrorism.  Serial murders may get local media 
attention but rarely nationwide coverage.  We all know about the Hillside
Strangler in L.A. and Son of Sam in New York City; Jane Caputi had a front
page from a Columbus paper from with the past 5 years showing the pictures 
of a dozen murdered girls ages 10 - 14, and none of the audience had even heard
of this example.

The icon of the serial murderer has brought us an eroticization of murder and 
infused our culture with its ideology of male violence.  For example, a page 
from Hustler spoofing the Dewar's scotch ad, but for a fictional 
"Do-ers" whiskey, featuring the Hillside Strangler, listing as his last 
accomplishment his last dead victim, and with an overtitle 
"Things We'd Like to See".  For another, one cosmetics company used the 
Son of Sam mood of terror in an ad to sell makeup: it created a line called 
"Self Defense"; one of the more memorable lines of this murderer was that he 
only killed pretty women.  Because of these and other images, showing 
serial murderers as heroes and advertising aids, Caputi asserted that 
the serial murderers are not as abnormal as journalists portray them.

Hustler models are often shown spread-eagled, a traditional position of
humiliation and punishment.  An Esquire cover was shown, with a naked
women in a trash can...victims of serial or mutilationist murderers are often
left in trash cans or otherwise dumped as refuse.  Caputi read an review
from the New York Times of a opening of a sculpture at the Guggenheim,
"Woman with her Throat Cut", which described the sculpture as a depiction
of a woman whose throat had obviously been cut, with obvious signs of
rape and murder, and yet she's alluring, she's sexually inviting--this is
a description of a major sculpture in a museum noted as a place for Great Art.

As Jack the Ripper attacked women's wombs, nuclear war will attack the whole
earth.

The Mechanical Bride

Marshall McLuhan described the Mechanical Bride, an image we can see in
advertising today in pictures of women as machines or like machines or women 
as fragmented body parts, and in machines with "female" characteristics.
For example pantyhose ads showing unattached legs, makeup ads showing eyes
without faces and arranged on a palette, chromed fembots, car ads citing
feminine sex-appeal of the product (as if a woman is somehow buried inside
the car).  Caputi cited reports of sex crime perpetrators who claim that
they got their ideas from the media, which shows women as interchangeable
objects with interchangeable parts--as things.  One world-renowned designer is 
well-known to use both real women and wax models in photo series, and in some 
cases to blur the distinction between real and fake.  Many ads show heavily
airbrushed photos of models, giving us an image of a smooth, poreless,
unnatural skin. A cassette tape ad ("Imagination becomes reality") goes 
further with its depiction of a chromed robot with the shape of a mature 
woman curled up in a pre-birth fetal position: what sort of a world would 
she give birth to, Caputi asked and then answered, a totally artificial one.


Caputi quoted Rachel Carson's description of how in cities we lose our touch
with and therefore our taste for the natural.

The Mechanical Mother

The next several slides were a series of images of the earth, interestingly
enough, mostly post-1980, in which the globe is outsized by men, male toddlers,
male hands (sometimes male hands deforming the globe), and various
phallic symbols such as airplanes and bombs.  More recent images are
bizarrely constructed artificial earths: a world made entirely of phone buttons
was one example.  The pictures of the globe being held out away from the body
by male hands are often for purposes for illustrating a nuclear war article,
as for, say, a news magazine.  Caputi asserts that this image and the
description of the end of the world through nuclear war of humans is also
an image from certain Christian fundamentalist sects--the fate of the
world ending in fire.  Threads of connectivity can also be seen between
SDI--the war in the sky--with the image of a father god in the heavens.

A Call for Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones

How we counter these images, how do we change a story of the earth ending
in a fire and our culture's apparent rush into it.  How do we stop these
images of women as things and the earth better if artificial.  Needless to
say, this was a depressing point in the lecture.  But Caputi had hope to
share with us.  Drawing on three figures from the Wickedary, the Gossips,
the Gorgons, and the Crones, she encouraged our individual efforts, by
bringing forth these figures from within ourselves.

As Gossips, we have a mission to talk about what we see, to speak out against
images leading to objectifying living things.

The Gorgons eyes have the power to turn to stone.  Emily Culpepper wrote in
the Spring 1986 issue of "Women of Power" about she called up the image of the
Gorgon in her mind and successfully and surprisingly fought of a would-be
rapist.  Perhaps we have that face that would stop a clock, in this case
the clock is the Doomsday Clock.

And of course, the judgmental eyes of the wise old Crones have great power 
to just say "No".

	=	=	=	=	=	=	=	=

[If you missed the lecture I'm afraid you missed the full impact of Jane
Caputi's argument.  There were more pictures and more examples that she
mentioned than I could note down or remember...and lucky for me, I was 
busy scribbling so I had an excuse for looking away.]
    

RE: .18

"[My next two figures are uncomfortably high--can anyone with better notes
correct me, please.]  In the US, the FBI reports that about 2000 women per year
are killed by husbands, and 5000 are killed by serial murderers.  It has reached
the level of terrorism."

Here are some male and female victim statistics that are pretty interesting...

"While everybody seems to know that men commit significantly more crimes, it is
perhaps less well known that they are also significantly more likely to be the
victim.  Males are the victims of aggravated assault 143% more often; 404% more
often the victim of a burglary; 150% more often the victim of larceny; and 45%
more often the victim of robbery.37  And according to the 1972 Uniform Crime
Reports, men were the victims of murder in approximately 80% of the cases.38
Although men are arrested for murder six times as often, when it comes to spouse
killings which compromise over 10% of all murders, almost half of all these
killings are committed by women.39

These is a special hazard to being a male homosexual in our culture.  As a
recent study pointed out, "The major emphasis of legislation in the field of
criminal justice is directed toward the male homosexual, as laws are almost
never enforced concerning the female homosexual."40 

A cursory search by that researcher of fifteen law enforcement agencies in
southern California revealed an apathy toward female homosexuality.  Females
arrested on charges related to this ranged from 2% to 4% of the total number of
arrests for homosexuality. "... the Los Angeles Police Department has had a
range of 2.9% to 4.3% of a five year period."  The researcher concluded that
there was almost a "... total lack of interest in female homosexuals as a law
enforcement problem."41

No chapter on the hazards of being male would be complete without a discussion
of the suicide statistics.  They are perhaps the most telling of all the
statistics regarding the "glories" and "joys" of being male.  Up to the age of
twenty four, the male rate of suicide is over three times as high as the
female's.  Over the age of sixty five, the rate is almost five times as high as
the female.42  These statistics do not account for the many automobile
accidents leading to death which may have been suicides.  Men have a twelve
times higher ratio of success to failure in suicide attempts in comparison to
women.  That is, women attempt suicide approximately four times as often as men
while men actually succeed in killing themselves three times more often."

From: THE HAZARDS OF BEING MALE (surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege),
Herb Goldberg, Ph.D. 1976,1987 

    Jim,
    You have complained repeatedly about people derailing conversations
    in this notesfile. I can see that your note addresses one small
    point in lisa's report. But I don't understand how your note addresses
    the basenote topic: the W.I.T.C.H. lectures. Furthermore, your note
    seems suspiciously familiar -- haven't you entered it in this file
    before? Please move your note to a more appropriate topic. 
    
    Liz Augustine
    co-moderator

    Congratulations, Liz!  You are the winner of the "Dejavu Note Noticer"
    award!  In fact, 735.19 is, except for the first couple of lines,
    word-for-word note 713.13!
    
    Since we've already seen 713.13, and since the statistics aren't
    even close to the ones I was looking for, how about we delete .19,
    .20, and .21.

		RE-VISIONING RACHEL CARSON'S SILENT SPRING
			lecture by Pat Hynes

Pat Hynes has written a book about Rachel Carson and _Silent_Spring_ which 
will be out in the spring of 1989 from Pergamon Press.  One of the
difficulties she had in writing was that close associates of Carson's resisted
additional biographical writing (Paul Brooks' _House_of_Life_ is the primary
biography).  Hynes persisted and brought a different view as biographer,
noting the double-edged blow of _Silent_Spring_: both the exposure of the 
pesticide industry and the ways in which that industry reacted strongly and
fought back, and the aspect that this, like _Uncle_Tom's_Cabin, was a book by
a woman that led to sweeping changes.

Her reasons for doing this are several.  The kill potential of technology and
the many small Silent Springs still occurring every day.  The ways in which 
women and nature are viewed as existing for use by men and Hynes's personal 
outrage at this.  Her time in the EPA, and a rereading of _Silent_Spring_,
showed a dedication of her coworkers, amounting to a second wave of American
environmentalism, which could well benefit from a re-analysis.  Also, all the
biographers, even the favorable ones, have given us a stereotyped image
of Rachel Carson as  unfulfilled spinster, and Hynes wanted to write a fresh
image.

Why did Rachel Carson's _Silent_Spring_ have such a large effect?  It wasn't 
merely that the time was right, because another work was written on the same
topic.  Was it her superb prose?  It wasn't that she wrote a less technical
book, because _Silent_Spring_ is scientifically more rigorous than the other
book.  [Sorry, I missed the title of the other book.]  But she showed the
implications, where he [the other author] only told.  She was an activist,
not merely an expository writer: she revealed the legal loopholes used in
the industry and the violations of separation of interest.  Rachel Carson
wrote from the inside out.

"Woman scientist" was and is a contradiction in terms.  Men perpetuate 
limiting myths about women, especially that women's energy is needed for
reproduction, and is inappropriately spent in tough rational pursuits such
as science.  The challenge for women who would be scientists in the 19th and
20th century is access to education, then employment, then promotion.  An
example is Ellen Swallow, who fought all these battles.  [For those who don't
know, she was the first woman to attend MIT, starting on special status about
1871, and eventually teaching there in a special school for women.]  
She founded Ecology, a field denigrated then by the MIT hierarchy, so she 
brought it to women as the primary interested audience.  Although actually, 
she was diverted to working for men, since by doing this she 
professionalized housekeeping.  Other examples are Carr and Parsons, 
John Muir's "assistants", who at different times provided him everything from 
moral support and encouragement, to housekeeping and cooking, to technical 
advice and art work.

Rachel Carson shattered this role of women being only helpmates, a role which
renders women and their contributions invisible.  Working on her own, she 
challenged technological companies roles in harming our environment.

Rachel Carson summed up the role of the pesticide industry as a shift in the
balance of power between man and nature: a new-found power to destroy nature.
She showed how the sea was being used as a dumping ground for nuclear 
research and energy and the pesticide industry.  She illuminated how 
radioactive waste is now present in rains.  She demonstrated our rapid use
and misuse of streams.

In the latter part of the 20th century, the feminist environmentalist's role
is more complex.  Now we have the "technically sweet" industry of reproductive
technology.  The risks to the ecosystem of this industry are down-played;
the political and socio-economic effects are ignored.  The risks to 
women are overlooked as is the invasion of medicine into their lives.  There
is an established 14-day age limit for embryo experimentation, but no such
cut off for women.  The industry is unchecked by any consciousness of women
of themselves, and indeed some women who have participated as subjects have
stated that they felt treated as things, not as people.

Rachel Carson preferred to be known by her work.  Perhaps this explains why
her personal letters remain unavailable to biographers, and perhaps this,
along with those and other limiting myths explain why her male biographers
have depicted her as having an unfulfilled personal live.

How Rachel Carson came to write _Silent_Spring_ is not a story of a lonely,
unfulfilled woman.  There is a background of supportive women.  Carson 
started out to write a short work on pesticides, prompted by a letter from
another woman biologist friend in Europe.   But the evidence was overwhelming,
and so she saw she had to build a defense against the reaction to her attack.

Carson's life was marked by a capacity for friendship with women, first her
mother, then a biology profession, and other strong and intellectual
friendships with women.  Passionate friendship can be a strategy for power,
and her male biographers have overlooked this part of her life.

Although her colleagues were mostly men, women have championed and carried on
her life.  Some of these women were personal friends.  Some were those, like
Hynes, who were aroused by her work.  _Silent_Spring_ created possibilities
for women to follow and expand after her.

_Silent_Spring_ has three core concepts: 

	. in nature nothing exists alone

	. due to the intensive use of pesticides since World War II, the
		whole world is being poisoned

	. the advocating that we must take the road less traveled: we must
		persist in reverence for life even where we must struggle
		against it

The center issue of _Silent_Spring_ is pesticides.  Critics called the 
introductory fable hysterical.  Since then, we have had at least three major,
well-known Silent Springs [Bhopal and the Rhein River were two of those
mentioned], but there have been other less dramatic, less evident Silent
Springs also.  For example, pesticides seeping into aquifers, making well 
water no longer	drinkable.  A related issue to this is the difficulty in
qualifying this land, especially any farmland that may be affected by 
contaminated water tables, as Super Fund sites--since they aren't illegal
hazardous waste sites.  This blind side of public policy was on of Rachel
Carson's points.

Wars on people and nature use many of the same weapons: nerve gas and 
defoliants.  In nature, nerve gas is used on insect pests and defoliants on
weeds.  Rachel Carson restated the complexity of being part of nature and part
of modern society.  Her work politicized the issues by naming names.  Just
as Friedan, in a parallel work, exposes the pseudo progress in women's
sphere in _The_Feminine_Mystique_, Carson exposed the "Better Living Through
Chemicals" mystique.

Rachel Carson called us to a better course, incorporating a knowledge of the
balances of nature and our fellow inhabitants.  Better approaches to problems
can be found that attack only individual pest targets, such as sex lures,
male sterilization, and bacteria that affect on the target.  Also, there
are solutions that include the whole picture, such as the work done in
Canadian forest hygiene.

The pesticide industry sent a multi-pronged defense against the book.
The book was attacked when it was serialized in the New Yorker, before
publication by Houghton Mifflin.  Monsanto produced and published a parody
of it that beat _Silent_Spring_'s publication date.  Certain companies said
they would take away ad money to magazines with favorable reviews of _Silent_
Spring_.  Adverse reviews were distributed to newspapers and magazines.
And a fact kit was created and distributed, put together by "independent"
critics.  When CBS prepared a review of the book, with interviews with Carson
and others, thousands of letters demanded it not be aired, and 3/5 of the
industry commercial sponsors removed financial support.  Propaganda was
spread that without pesticides we'd be back in the dark ages.

Today, in organism research, faults and failures are glossed over, and
regulatory bodies show the same enthusiasms that agriculture did for
pesticides.

Traditional methods of denigrated the book were used.  It was questioned
why "spinsters" like Rachel Carson care about genetics, implying that women
who don't have babies don't care about life.  Straw targets were used in
arguments; for example, a claim was made that she cared more for a few cats
dead from DDT than she did about all the people dying from malnutrition.
And the theme was one of precarious nature needs to be controlled, just like
the witches did in the middle ages.

From 1900 to 1960, a chart depicting the amount of environmental legislation
is a flat line.  From 1962 onward, it is an exponential curve at the state,
federal, and local levels.  The EPA was created.  This growth is true for
every country in the world.

Warnings of risks no longer come from biologists, as they did in Rachel
Carson's time, largely because most of those biologists who could give 
warnings are too closely tied to the industries producing the potential and
actual dangers.  An example Hynes cited is herbicide resistant crops.
The literature about these crops is full of the promise of higher crop yields,
an altruistic ideal.  Objectors to these crops are called medievalist, and
products of inferior American science education.  The dangers of bioengineered
plants and the inherent risks of gene-sharing, leading to plants living
in places other than where intended, are ignored.

Rachel Carson's work gave us a tool for critiquing, although today it's likely
she'd concentrate on biology and not pesticides.  We must call for a 
transformation of science away from a paradigm for domination.

Hynes elaborated on the central paradigm of domination in science.  Roger 
Bacon wrote his metaphor of Nature as a woman to be raped, and this has
become a controlling, though not exclusive, metaphor.

Where men have located Nature in women is in fertility, and two of the 
fronts are the research of hormones for superovulation, and research into
sex determination.  Only a small number of women have been experimented on,
but all are affected by the perpetrated myths and the ultimate global
effects. 

Arguments now take the form that there is no longer any balance in nature and
routine intervention is needed.  For that matter, industrial leakage
affects infertility.

Rachel Carson called for a separation of regulation and research.  Today, as
yet, we have nothing comparable, no comparable book, about the research on 
women.  There are policies being made for the fetus, but none for women 
exposed to chemicals in the workplace.  We have an urgent need for policies 
centered on women's self-defined needs, not fetal-defined and not male-defined.

What can feminists learn from Rachel Carson's work?  Rachel Carson took
pride in succeeding where few women had succeeded, but denied being a feminist.
Perhaps like Georgia O'Keefe, who refuses to be called a "woman artist", this
came from not wanting to be separated and therefore ruled out for competition.
But Rachel Carson, unlike O'Keefe never sought male approval or mentors.
Her friendships with women in her life gave her power for her work.

	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

During the question and answer period, a few interesting questions came up.

. How do you work as a feminist in an environmental agency to work on 
	feminist issues?

	Hynes described her tactics in the EPA as

	. deconstructing myths

	. confrontation (not always pleasant)

	. affirmative action--and she also took an active and creative
		role in working to restructure the pyramid so that women
		and minorities were hired to fill management and senior
		technical positions


. She was asked about the anti-caesarian drug.  Although she didn't know the
	particulars of [the one mentioned by Karen Kolling in this notesfile],
	she said she'd long ago become suspicious of any such drug, because
	of the lack of separation between regulation and research she mentioned
	in her lecture, and because with this goes a willingness to experiment
	on women who may not be fully informed as to any risks and side-effects
	of the drug.


It was quite enjoyable to me to listen to an engineer who liked doing
engineering, who is a feminist, who while alert to the problems has some
feeling for solutions, and who was intelligent and responsive to questions.
_Silent_Spring_ is still in print and your public library will surely have
a copy.  I look forward to seeing Hynes's book.

Related recent items of interest:

	. this weeks "Frontline" on PBS in Boston examined three cases of
		the military's toxic waste disposal disasters and the effects
		on the aquifers in neighboring residential areas [3 out of
		the known 3700 problem sites, that is]

	. Gena Corea's lecture on 4/4/88, "The Reproductive Manhattan Project"



						Lisa S Chabot	6 April 1988
    

I'm pausing here again for a commercial and a disclaimer.  These postings
here of mine are more summaries than reviews.  Yet since they are based upon
my handwritten notes they may contain words not spoken by the lecturer,
nor do they contain all those words.  I would happily read someone else's
postings about a lecture rather than mine.  However, I would rather see
that any discussions of issues be pursued in separate notes and keep this 
string for a discussion of the lectures.

Bear in mind all of the above.  The lecture described here was delivered by
a woman of wit.  Much of what she said had the audience roaring with
laughter, but my humble keyboard may instead merely annoy rather than 
adequately enact the humor intended.  And most importantly, what comes next
is definitely Radical Feminism--if this is not what you want to read, 
Please Do Not Read It.

With this I will give you a form-feed and...



	ON BE-ING POLITICAL: FEMINISM UNDERSTANDING ITSELF DIFFERENTLY
			lecture by Bonnie Mann

Bonnie Mann said she'd come to talk about the Women's Liberation Movement
("Does anyone remember it?").  To do this, and in doing this, she invoked
the spirit of the movement.

Mann began by describing some of the history and the words of radical women
at certain points.  [Please pardon me for not getting the names of the 
speakers here]

	1968 - the oppression of women is a fundamental political oppression;
		the agents of this oppression are men

	1970 - a call for a revolution, a destruction of patriarchy

	1973 - free and defiant be-ing

In these early days, radical women knew they had to create a political
approach, and men were scared. 

Then things got confused for about 15 years.  It became hard to distinguish 
feminism from anything: right, left, sex...  To be a feminist meant you
went to therapy.  It meant you attended workshops, read pop-psychology, and
worked on changing your own behavior.  A conflict arose between feminism
and femininity, resulting in the "new femininity"--which meant doing all the
things feminists never did, _and_ it was liberating.

This Age of Confusion was also an age of tolerance: for example, it was
discussed how feminists _and_ man haters could get along peacefully.

Freedom = Slavery  &  Patriarchy = Feminism.  This superficial adoption of
feminism was no accident.  Feminism was a threat; it exposed patriarchy as not
the Only Way.  So men had to take the force out of it and make it no threat.
Feminism must fit in just as femininity does, a mere lifestyle choice within
patriarchy.

The Age of Confusion looked like the overthrow and ruin of the movement.
But now we are starting to emerge from the Age of Confusion.  By bringing
conflicts to light, we make positive steps to bringing the movement to
move again.  An example of this is the success of the anti-pornography
movement.  Another positive action is figuring out who is for, and who is
against: who is truly for feminism and who is actually against it.
There is a need to focus the conflict, and thereby to resolve us from our
confused state.

Reality was lost during the Age of Confusion.  A variety of silly stories 
were popular, including

	. there is no such thing as patriarchy

	. there is nothing but patriarchy

	. it's really just a problem of my space, your space

To which Mann quipped, "Reality is too big to fit in someone's head."

Feminism and patriarchy are not equal; feminism is Really Real.

To come out of the Age of Confusion, we need to focus on who we are and
what they've done to us:

	. things done to women

	. the conglomerate of actions, not just isolated and therefore
		dismissible events

	. the internalizing of the patriarchy by women

Really Real means who we are outstrips the things done to us.  To be Really
Real means to clarify, to dare to thing about be-ing.  [See the Wickedary
definition.]  It means to be a feminist unfolding wild, furiously female
reality.  Feminist reality has to do with everything, and being feminist
means being political.  

There are two edges to this feminism: an uncompromising passion for women, 
and an awe of who a woman is and who she might be if free; feminist outrage, 
moral outrage at what has been done to her.  The positive edge is a
creative force; the negative a destructive force against patriarchy.
These are the forces which will free women.

Mann described the dominance of patriarchal reality.  It is distinct from 
imperialist pressure which is the attack of one culture to dominate another.
In those imperialistic movements, both sides share patterns of woman-hate
inside the culture, the woman-hatred is at home and therefore moves easily
between cultures.  This woman-hating fuses with structures of racism and
imperialism; for example, the brutalization of black women by white men.
Cross-cultural brotherhoods function and perpetuate the traffic in women
(or women's bodies).  Resistance movements may target violence against women
of the oppressing class as an action of resistance (an example cited was
one noted author's description of how raping a white woman was an act against
oppression, and how he worked up to raping white women by raping women of
his own race).

Patriarchy saturates our daily lives.  The genius of a hegemony is that the 
acts seem separate.  For example, it isn't the woman-hating part of pornography
that bothers either the right or the left, although they may use pornography
for a ground for debate.

However, women seeking freedom continually surface.  9 million women were
burned for it (as witches) and it didn't work.  There are other less
directly brutal tactics: preclusion, digestion, and marginalization.

Precluding women includes erasing them from history, thereby disassociating 
them from ancestors and disassociating from the movement.  It means the
fragmentation of women from one another, by keeping them dependent upon
men and keeping them apart by racial discrimination.  It is also the daily
brutalizations, usually done to women who aren't feminists yet.

Digestion is the process by which we are drawn back into the patriarchy.
This is the control of women's rage, through, for example, therapy
("psycho-patriarchal control").  It is a transformation of feminist concerns,
as is the packaging of lesbianism as a digestible sexual practice, a private
choice within the patriarchy, equally as valid as child-rape as a sexual
orientation, and no longer a revolutionary act which removes the power of
patriarchy.  Digestion is also incorporation: convince women they can get their
slice of the patriarchal pie.  Examples are racism and the way the
dependency upon men and general poverty of women will cause white women
to buy into racism to get a bigger but still inadequate slice; token
women in the workplace and in politics; lesbian sado-masochism and lesbian
pornography (which is definitely opposed to loving women, but instead 
re-fosters the image of women as objects, this time to be used by women); 
and the push for lesbian motherhood, with all its stress on 
"biological clocks".

Marginalization means to cut off those who aren't susceptible to preclusion
and digestion.  It involves institutionalizing (i.e., commit to mental
prisons) those women or attack and kill them.  Some forms of lesbian
separatism propagate the marginalization--those forms that consider the
patriarchy to be only straight women's problems; and these forms are 
unfortunate because they can be cut off in history and ignored.

The hegemony is maintained by the above among other things.  It is an
entrenched effort to keep men in, women out of power, daily power.

What next?  Well, the movement seems possible again, although confusion
still persists and the climate is hostile, and traditional organizations
seem impossible.  We must create, practice, and continue to ask "What Next?"

Important themes to remember when creating What Next are to consider the
climate, which is hostile, causes despairing women, and may preclude
traditional organizations.  We need to be creative and we may need to
focus on that climate.  We need to call forth "dragon women" and consider
how we can change the climate.  We need to realize the disturbances we can
create in women's everyday life.  The interactions of daily life can be like
wires of a cage.  If we break these wires, if we weaken these structures of
daily life, the institutions of patriarchy will also weaken.  We need to
remember the power of rumors and how they spread.  We all know how in the
media, more and more money is spent to say less and less, how entire ad
agencies are supported on miscommunications.  We need to enact the power of
the rumor to create our own realities and to spread our own truths.
And we need to push the limits of the possible.

The qualities of this new movement are that it's not going to be predictable.
We will awaken ancestral memories, cultivate the ability to remember; we
will remember 20 years ago, the talk of a women's revolution.   This movement
will be indigestible--it will be based on a passionate regard for women.
It can't be marginalized and it will not be a substitute for fighting back.
We will fight for our sisters.

So, how do we fight and how do we meet all the criteria.  We know what is
already possible.  For example, women kill rapists, not individual efforts,
but a political act against a political act.  This is a force to destroy the
destroyers: it is retribution, vengeance, nemesis.  Since prison sentences
for women committing violence are longer, this isn't the optimal political
resistance, but it is positive in that it is fighting back.  There are other 
more collective acts:

	. a rumor was mentioned that somewhere in the Midwest, a man
		acquitted of his 64th rape was castrated by a group of women

	. other examples of gangs of women exacting retribution were 
		mentioned

	. rumor of a group of women in Northhampton harassing a store selling 
		valentines and displaying pictures of Marilyn Monroe

No fixed strategy is delineated, but a pointer to take stock of what has been
done.  Imagine actions like those of the group in Northhampton catching on.
Imagine groups exacting retribution on cases the courts won't deal with.
Imagine a radical feminist group of six or seven in every community.
Imagine "domestic" women hearing rumors of wild women.

Let's take another look at the Age of Confusion.  Some of the things that
happened seem benign but may take on historical significance.  For instance,
feminism can move between cultures just as readily.  We are starting to have
lesbian-owned lands.  Witches and interest in the old religion has grown.
And we know have women who know how to do everything, we know everything
we need in order to destroy patriarchy.

This is wild politics, from the guts.  It will settle for nothing less than
everything.  It is feminism that saturates to such a depth, that life is
actually worth living.  For any men remaining in the audience, Mann said at
this point, her advice for the _next_ 15 years is to stay out of the way.
And for the women, let the rage and fury rise into the world, making a 
revolutionary movement we've never seen, a grand determination to be free.

	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

During the question and answer period, several issues were mentioned:

	. the therapization of the battered women's movements (and see above)

	. a new moment of clarity is coming from the anti-pornography
		movement

	. a straight woman can be a radical feminists, but she lives with
		an inherent contradiction, which is better or worse depending
		upon the man she is involved with

	. we need to throw out the therapy for empowerment, since it means
		generally getting our needs met, without consideration for
		the internal structures of these needs

	. a mention was made of the despair related to the lack of a
		viable revolutionary structure

	. refuse the terminology of therapy


An invigorating lecture.  A women who doesn't mince words and isn't afraid
to offend the audience.


						Lisa S Chabot	6 April 88

    Because Melissa Fletcher was involved in an auto accident in Florida,
    her presentation scheduled for 4-18-88 has been cancelled.  The
    series will continue on 4-25-88.

    am
    

May 9    FRAN CHELLAND: "Knowledge as Intimacy:: The Spiritual Reversal".

         Fran Chelland is a feminist philosopher/musician who writes and
         performs her own music and has done graduate study in philosophy at
         Boston College.  Also, she's assisted in the editing of Jane Caputi's
         _The Age of Sex Crime_ and Andree Collard's _The Rape of the Wild_. 

RE: .21

My apoligies, I did not recall posting the material in .19 to WOMANNOTES.

Jim.