Yes, but to be utterly humorless about it, women are not chattel here, this is not a tribal war, and Laura Bush could get a lot further by calling a press conference than by donning a chastity belt. She won't do either, class trumps sex in this case and that's what it's doing in this war and the sooner we recognize that, the better off we'll be.
>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.
As for raiding the treasury, Bush and predecessors already did that, though we are still the proud owners of the national debt. Perhaps in the update the women could seize the treasury and find it empty but for an IOU to Citibank and a bill from Lockheed floating around the vacant vault.
Yoshie writes:
>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.
She's muddy about that. I disagree with Epstein's article on more points than anyone here wants to read about. She seems to be saying that social movements in general are on the wane, feminism among them, and the women who started feminism are now in academic jobs in which they have become comfortable and 'middle-class.' At the same time she's saying they're driven by longer hours--a cultural thing, she suggests--and one feminists didn't foresee (founding NOW documents contradict this). At the same time the problem was that the early successful movement was too middle class. I think that's her starting fallacy ('middle class' as a category starts the confusion) and it leads to a contradictory mire. (Yoshie, I'll email you offlist w/more reax if you want.) It would've been more memorable if she'd dared offer a programmatic suggestion or two.
>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.
A group of us picketed inside during a plenary at the NOW national convention in 2000 (?) on this issue. I'll just say there's an internal battle which we've not lost yet, although I think right now we're losing ground. NOW can mobilize quite handily when it puts resources into it, though--as with most chapter-based groups--the strength is mostly in a minority of chapters.
Jenny Brown