Joanna wrote:
> But just as celebrating abortion is not the right move in support
> of feminism; neither is saying "sex work is just another job" ...
> because ultimately we don't all want to be whores of any stripe.
Why shouldn't we celebrate doctors, nurses, and other medical workers who provide safe and legal abortions, saving the lives of women, braving the risk of terrorist attacks? And why don't we celebrate sex workers who take pride in their profession, successfully organize their fellow sex workers, and improve their own working conditions? -- Yoshie
I'm avoiding posting further to this entire thread, but thank you Yoshie. As a worker bee, a prole, on the front lines of the women's health, sexuality, and sex worker health wars, thank you. I'm busting my ass to get into a nurse practitioner/midwife program so's I can get higher up in the pecking order to have more clout to agitate for just these things and to provide the actual services myself (a line worker = prole = staff RN can't do this, you can if you're a NP, CNM or MD). Abortions are easy to perform but the right to have one is meaningless if there is no one to do them and other laws, such as parental notification laws, make them moot.
I was struck when reading a book about the rise of the women's health movement in the 1960s-1970s by Sandra Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, a History of the Women's Health Movement. She talks about the 4 places in the USA where this movement more or less independently originated. For example, Boston feminists theorized, and created the Our Bodies, Our Selves book. An excellent contribution, but .... Chicago, on the other hand, created Jane, the underground abortion service -- these women just DID it, and theorized about it after the fact, after providing the actual service to give real women in the real world real options for their lives. Jane will return.
I don't think this is a mistake, either: Chicago was home of the labor movement, the settlement reform movement, social gospel, in the 1800s-1900s, created Haymarket, Jane Addams helped get the tenement squalor cleaned up, the birth control movement, women's vote, the beginnings of public health nursing which had the potential to revolutionize the future of health care delivery in the USA until the nascent medical-insurance-hospital industry in the 1920s killed it under the guise of creeping communism. We may be reaching another tipping point as those radicals did a century ago. There comes a point where you have to just DO it and put your neck on the chopping block. Praxis over theory. The way the political winds are blowing, many of us do/will be putting our licenses or lives on the line to provide services.
Grace