The same question was posted to the Solidarity listserv a while ago, and I wrote the following in response:
At 1:46 PM -0500 2/14/03, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>Lysistrata is a very sexist play in which women use their attractiveness
>>to men as a means for preventing men from going to war. It never occurs
>>to the protagonists nor, presumably, the author, that women have more
>>effective and less objectifying ways of exerting their influence.
>
>You mean the part about women going on a sex strike? The sex strike
>in itself isn't sexist, though much of the gendered _language_ in
>which Aristophanes has women talk about it certainly is. We can
>change the language, so the players won't act like sexual objects in
>the sense of the bad old New Left phrase "Girls Say Yes to Boys Who
>Say No."
>
>When staging the play (or any play), we are not obligated to
>reproduce it exactly as it was written and staged. We are free to
>take it and transform it in a way we see fit. For instance, we can
>include lesbians in the play, now that the US military includes
>women, too, and exclude sexist lines that do exist in the play: e.g.
>"'Tis a hard thing, by the two goddesses it is! for a woman to sleep
>alone without ever a strong male in her bed. But there, peace must
>come first". We can put it like this in stead: "'Tis a hard thing,
>by Goddess, for a woman to sleep alone without ever a strong woman
>in her bed. But there, peace must come first." We can include
>butch gay men and drag queens also. What fun!
>
>For a play born in a fundamentally sexist society -- in which women
>were not free citizens, women could not be actors, and women (with
>exceptions of common traders, prostitutes, etc.) were excluded from
>the public sphere including theater festivals -- _Lysistrata_ has
>many remarkable moments, still resonant after all these centuries:
>
>***** LYSISTRATA: Yet, look you, when the women are summoned to
>meet for a matter of the greatest importance, they lie in bed
>instead of coming.
>CLEONICE: Oh! they will come, my dear; but it's not easy, you know,
>for women to leave the house. One is busy pottering about her
>husband; another is getting the servant up; a third is putting her
>child asleep or washing the brat or feeding it.
>LYSISTRATA: But I tell you, the business that calls them here is far
>and away more urgent. *****
>
>To this day, more women than men shoulder the double burdens of wage
>labor and domestic labor, which tends to make women's participation
>in political activities more difficult than men's, due to time
>crunch. I'm very politically active and write to a number of
>listservs a lot, but that's in part because I am child-free and my
>work hours are more flexible than average workers'.
>
>You can also criticize the play on the grounds that (A) it is
>essentialist in a way that, for instance, radical (as opposed to
>Marxist or socialist) feminists' arguments are and that (B) it
>equates "women" with upper-class women. We can change that, too,
>before staging the play.
>
>What I really like is the idea of women of all nations seizing the
>US treasury and other financial centers of capitalism, as women of
>Greek city states in the play take over the Athenian treasury.
At 1:50 AM -0500 3/10/03, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>I'd disagree with Epstein that the mass movement that made major
>changes in the social and cultural landscape (and is currently
>holding the line on some of these) was one of all-woman formations
>working on the environment, health care or 'social justice.' The
>changes she's excited about came about when women stopped focusing
>on the plight of every other poor downtrodden creature on the planet
>and started focusing on our own liberation.
I don't think you disagree with Epstein. She's saying that there are lots of feminists today, in many organizations that aren't specifically feminist, but all-women feminist formations focused on women's self-liberation -- the life force of second-wave feminism -- have ebbed.
At 1:50 AM -0500 3/10/03, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>Second, there is a battle within NOW between those who think it's
>most effective as an inside-the-beltway lobbying organization whose
>members are mostly a fundraising base, and those who believe its
>power comes from an active membership in chapters all over the
>country. You can probably tell which side of the split I fall on.
>But this is not the answer to the perennial 'what happened to the
>women's movement?' because NOW has largely stayed a chapter-based
>member-activist organization, despite the tendencies of recent
>leadership.
Maybe your local NOW chapter is still a viable member-activist org, but the one in Columbus is hardly that. The president of the local NOW chapter keeps complaining about low to no attendance at chapter meetings. It has no troops that it can mobilize. I wonder about other NOW chapters. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>