>Brad asked:
>
>> > And does she really know nothing about how her great-great
>> >grandmothers lived?
>>
>
>And Doug replied:
>
>> Evidently not. Here she is, a radical intellectual woman, holding
>> forth at a conference, to an audience that was about half women. That
>> wouldn't have happened even a generation ago. But hey, you know, shit
>> just keeps getting shittier, without relief.
>>
>
>And I say: well, you could argue that such a dramatic rise in ignorance
>over the last generation is proof of the immerseration thesis </sarcasm>.
>
>Seriously, though--what arguments or examples did this person exhibit to
>back up her claims?
Well, when I said that life expectancies in most of the world had risen over every interval you'd like to choose - 10, 20, 40, 100 years - she dismissed this, saying that life expectancies have fallen in Africa and Russia. Well yes they have, and these are symptoms of great economic and social crisis, but they've risen in Latin America, East and South Asia, and in the Middle East and North Africa - and the averages for all the World Bank's major income groupings (low, middle, lower middle, upper middle) have all risen. When I said that it was just wrong to say that capitalism has been an unmitigated disaster for women - that many women find having a job preferable to being utterly dependent on men, even in conditions of exploitation - she dismissed this too, and cited the example of recent trips to Italy, where women from Eastern Europe are held in sexual slavery. Which is indeed horrific, but really not the whole story of women under capitalism.
Doug