radical feminism
Some thoughts on marriage, stay-at-home mothers and homeschooling as a radical feminist act
I have been meaning to write this one for a while now, but it's not just my blogADD that has kept me away from this discussion. I just so get emotionally pissed off about this subject that it becomes unbearable to try to write everything that comes shooting by my brain. Yet Nance here point to a post by Amanda Marcotte that has pissed me off so royally that I have to respond to it.
In the comments Amanda insists that she allegedly has no problems with either stay at home mothers or homeschoolers; yet in her writing she betrays herself. When she opens up her post with and I quote, "This interview in Newsweek with Laura Derrick, the president of the National Home Educator’s Network, was even fluffier than I expected it would be when I opened the link", you know that her expectation was to see a piece excoriating the "different path" of homeschooling.
It goes downhill from there because she conflates her contempt for xian fundamentalists with homeschooling:
I didn’t expect the interviewer to hammer at Derrick about the issue of whether or not it’s wise for people to homeschool their kids if they are doing so with the intention of teaching them that Noah had a pet dinosaur or that Jesus founded America (and therefore feed them into upper echelon jobs in the Justice Department), but I figured it would at least come up. No luck, though.
In the next paragraph her cluelessness about homeschooling shows with flying color when she claims to know that homeschooling is gaining steam in the left. Ahh ... hmmm ... see ... no!
Homeschooling has never been an either/or proposition for people in the left or right. It has been always a proposition for radicals; especially radicals who have a strong libertarian political background. There's conservative libertarians, Christian libertarians and then people like me, who Chris Nolan has most famously described as Social/Progressive Libertarians.
The problem is that christian fundamentalist homeschoolers in this country have had a well funded public relations machine. That's it. That's all.
The HSDLA was the pet project of Michael Farris, one of the signers of the Manifesto for a Christian Church; which really should be read as a manifesto for a extremist American theocracy.
But you already suspected as much.
Homeschooling | Labor | Marriage | Parenting | Politics | radical feminism | Universal Health Care
To hell with a bigger piece of the pie, we want the whole fucking bakery!
©2007 Lilian M. Friedberg
This is rather long, and I'm recycling it (from my own blog and MLW) partly in response to something someone said (JJ Ross I believe) in one of the dKos threads....a question about the 'whole enchilada.'
This subject came up the other day in a class I am teaching, when I explained to a student that one of the slogans of the German feminist movement of the late 70s, early 80s had been: "to hell with a bigger piece of the pie, we want the whole fucking bakery!" It was immediately apparent that my student did not understand the slogan's intended spirit--he immediately said something like "take control of everything." No, I said, it's not about taking control of everything, it's that we (as radical feminists) don't have any interest in this whole damn "piece of the pie"-game--we want the whole fucking bakery so that we can bake a completely new pie, with new ingredients, new recipes, new everything, not so that we can control existing institutions.
We aren't in the market for "control"--we're looking for bread, bread and roses. Gainful employment. Meaningful life.
My experiences in the German feminist movement--nearly ten years, from 1984--1993, put the whole "feminist enchilada" in a different light. I rarely comment on these things, for fear of stepping on toes or sticking my finger in the wrong freshly-baked serving of banana cream pie. Looking back now, though, it still feels to me like the American feminist movement has been forced into a box where its almost single-minded focus must be on the ability to fuck freely and to keep scripture off its soul!
The German feminist movement, at the time--and to some extent still today--had the luxury of focusing on more of those "bread and roses" issues: the transformation of economic structures and work environments to render them amenable to "meaning life" for women; creating sustainable economic paradigms in which women of all colors, creed and sexual orientation could be gainfully employed, doing meaningful work and at a comfortable living wage. And to me, these issues remain of central concern. Priority concern. Here's hoping this "personal is political" story might shed some light on the whole spectrum of "feminisms" that are out there, the different forms and focuses they may or may not take.
In the 1980s, I spent a lot of time working with witches. In Europe. Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, and above all in Germany--the place where the greatest number of historical witches is said to have gone to the grave in the Burning Times. In Italy, where the Witches, rather than be burned at the stake, filled their pockets with stones and walked into the sea--only to emerge centuries later, in the form of the women with whom I was working. In Ireland, where I once sat for hours on end in this little Witches' Hill. There's an inscription on the back of this picture. It reads: October 30, 1987. Love, Margareta.
alternative economics | cooperative capitalism | Culture | Feminism | radical feminism | Germany
Confessions of a Reformed Radical Feminist (Potty-Mouthed) Christian/ity Basher
There is a subtext underlying the various discussions circulating in Cyberspace at the moment--running the gamut from the controversy surrounding the Edwards campaign, to the Megametameltdown focusing partly on what constitutes "free speech," to what will likely be the next charge brought against Barack Obama from the Left (i.e., it's not his Muslim past that's the problem, it's his Christian present) and, of course, it all comes back--at least in a roundabout way--to that elephant still lurking in the liberal-left living room: understanding, in terms of real world political strategy, just what it is that Lesbian Feminist author Bernice Johnson Reagon was saying in her now quarter-century old speech/essay on Coalition Politics:
You don't go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that's the only way you can figure you can stay alive.
And ...
I want to talk a little about turning the century and the principles. Some of us will be dead. We won't be here. And many of us take ourselves too seriously. We think that what we think is really the cutting line. Most people who are up on the stage take themselves too seriously-it's true. You think that what you've got to say is special and that somebody needs to hear it. That is arrogance. That is egotism, and the only checking line is when you have somebody to pull your coattails. Most of us think that the space we live in is the most important space there is, and that the condition that we find ourselves in is the condition that must be changed or else. That is only partially the case. If you analyze the situation properly, you will know that there might be a few things you can do in your personal, individual interest so that you can experience and enjoy the change. But most of the things that you do, if you do them right, are for people who live long after you are long forgotten. That will only happen if you give it away. Whatever it is that you know, give it away, and don't give it away only on the horizontal. Don't give it away like that, because they're gonna die when you die, give or take a few days. Give it away that way (up and down). And what I'm talking about is being very concerned with the world you live in, the condition you find yourself in, and be able to do the kind of analysis that says that what you believe in is worthwhile for human beings in general, and in the future, and do everything you can to throw yourself into the next century. And make people contend with your baggage, whatever it is. The only way you can take yourself seriously is if you can throw yourself into the next period beyond your little meager human-body-mouth-talking all the time.
Blogging and feminism | Christianity | coalition politics | radical feminism
