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Feminism is Alive and Well ... Even Sarah Palin Wants to Be One

.. these feminists are cool .. fair and reasonable .. an easy and interesting read .. enjoy ..

Gloria Steinem, grande dame of the feminist movement, and Jehmu Greene, Women's
Media Center director, discuss the state of feminism with Katie Couric.

@Katie Couric / By Gloria Steinem, Katie Couric, Jehmu Greene 91 COMMENTS

July 8, 2010 - Editor's note: Due to a production error on Friday, AlterNet accidentally published only the second half of the transcript of Couric's interview with Gloria Steinem and Jehmu Greene. We're resurfacing the article over the weekend to make sure readers have another chance to read it through.

KATIE COURIC: The Atlantic recently featured an article called "The End of Men" that caught my attention. It stated that this year for the first time women became the majority of the US work force and most managers are now women. And for every two men who received a college degree, three women did the same. And according to the article, many moms-to-be would rather have a pink nursery than a blue one. So have we come a long way or are there still big obstacles on the road to equality? Joining me today are two women with a lot of expertise in the area. Gloria Steinem is a writer and journalist who is the godmother of the modern women’s movement. And Jehmu Greene is the president of the Women’s Media Center and former head of Rock the Vote. As always I’d like to say a quick thank you to the sponsor of our webshow - Dove.

COURIC: First of all, let’s talk about this article. Because I know that it’s something you both read as well and you had a problem with the title. It was called “The End of Men” and that bugged you.

STEINEM: Yes, it’s a stupid (haha) title because the idea is that somebody has to win. They can’t even imagine equality. So the lack of ability to imagine equality and cooperation instead of domination is certainly a big problem in getting there.

COURIC: But don’t you think that the title was a bit misleading? The article was really about how women are suddenly – and this is something we’ll have to discuss too because there are a lot of things that contradict the very thesis of this piece -- making themselves known in a variety of fields and a variety of areas that heretofore they have not. That’s sort of what I took away from the article. They were trying to market the article and capture a lot of attention? Why would a magazine do that?

STEINEM: No. Well it’s possible that the writer didn’t like the title either because I agree with you that it was different from the article. But the idea that women are almost now the majority of workers in the labor force is true, but it doesn’t tell us that they’re still earning 25% less and they’re still less likely to get promoted. And you know actually it’s a big motive for men to work for equal pay for women so that men are not the hired paid ones who get fired first.

COURIC: Oh I see. In the “mancession” as they call it. Jehmu, what did you think of the article?

GREENE: I think that some of the questions she poses are harmful as well. To start off by saying “What if equality is not the end goal?” Equality has always been the end goal. And I do think that she dismissed a lot of the issues that we’re still facing, as Gloria mentioned. To casually pass on the fact that men are still clearly in control in many of the upper echelons of society -- it was a really brief phrase -- and then she went on to continue to point to a number of the advances we’ve made, which clearly need to be celebrated. Clearly we owe a lot to the work that has been done for decades. And I think though, we still have to look in the media -- though we’ve had great success with your show and Diane Sawyer and a lot of women who have made it in very successful ways in front of the camera -- 3% of the decision making positions in the media (the “clout” positions) are still held by women where 97% of the decisions are made by men. There’s a lot of work to be done.

[p2] Continued from previous page

COURIC: What was confusing for me when I read the article ... I thought, well, this is a lot to celebrate and then I would read other pieces. And Anna Quindlen came and gave a speech in Charlottesville and she brought up some very antithetical points to the piece. But before we mentioned those can I just talk about some of the good news real quick before we totally become buzz-killington, as my daughter says?

Women are 60 % of all college graduates. Women are 68% of all master degree holders. They have more PhDs and almost 42% of those with MBAs are now women. So there are some good things. As we mentioned, they are the majority in the work force. But let’s talk about some things that are not so good.

STEINEM: But even that is not so… It’s great that women are educated. I couldn’t agree more because it gives you pleasure in your life. But part of the reason women need a BA degree or a college degree is that even with one they make less than a man with a high school education because they can’t become plumbers and electricians or they’re less likely to get into the trades that pay a lot even without a college education.

COURIC: Which is an interesting point. But let’s talk about some of the negative statistics and why they still exist. Now this is according to the White House Project. Women account for only 18% of our top leaders in all fields. In politics – in female representation -- the US has dropped to the 69th spot, behind Iraq and North Korea, which I found so shocking. In 1993 women were 12% of partners in law firms. Today it’s a whopping 18%. Only 17% of Congress is made up of women. Women make 78.7 cents for every dollar a man makes. And women earn more college degrees, as I mentioned, but hold only 16% of leadership roles in the business world, 23% in academia, and 22% in journalism. And of course the number that you mentioned are decision-making -- I guess management -- jobs. So why these depressing statistics? What’s behind this? And why haven’t we come further if so many strides have been made?

STEINEM: Patriarchy is behind this and racism is behind this. These are really old systems so it takes quite awhile.We had a suffragist and an abolitionist movement that gained a legal identity as human beings for women of all races and men of color. That took more than 100 years. Now we’re striving for legal and social equality. That’s gonna take 100 years probably. We’re only 30 years into it. This is a long process and we’ve come an incredible distance, which we need to celebrate, but really the problem mainly is our idea of our sound bite minds that we think it’s going to happen right away. We have to do as much as we can every day and push the boundaries. But we also have to plan for our daughters and our grandsons who are also going to be feminists. We have to look forward.

COURIC: What do you think are the major factors? If you had to pinpoint sort of actual things, in addition to social and cultural movements taking a long time to have an impact. Are there specific things that are keeping women from progressing more in the workplace?

GREENE: We have to look at the media again. It surrounds us. It tells our stories. When you look at G rated movies having the same amount of sexualized images of girls and women as R rated films do, that clearly has an impact. When you look at the speaking roles in all animated films that one out of three are going to be girls or women. If you look at just the acceptance of sexism in the media, especially with our female candidates, the levels of attacks and how it is accepted which is completely contrary to if something is said that is deemed as being racist. I think I’m actually quoting you when I say “sexism needs to become as repugnant as racism.” We are far from that place today because the outrage isn’t there. We saw in the 2008 presidential campaign, with the level of attack Senator Clinton came under, all without much response from the community to say: “This is unacceptable." Whether it is products that are being sold or statements that are said on air, we do have a long ways to go to raise the level of outrage around sexism.

[p3] Continued from previous page

COURIC: So do you think little girls are programmed to be subservient, submissive in popular culture in terms of the images that confront them from a very very early age? I’m very cognizant of this having two daughters and being a strong, proactive feminist and proud of it so I’m very conscious of that… But I also see films like Mulan that celebrate sort of a really strong woman and I try to see other things in mass media that counter some of these images that we’ve been seeing all our lives. As someone who’s 53 and grew up kind of in that culture. So do you see things changing for the better in some ways?

GREENE: We’re making incremental changes. That’s what’s so in a sense laughable about the title of the piece “The End of Men.” We are so far away from that.

COURIC: We don’t want the end of men by the way, let's state that loud and clear.

GREENE: We don’t want that and that has never been the goal of feminists. But we absolutely have large steps that still need to be made. And a lot of this can again be pointed back to the media and the role they play. We have Dora, which is a great example to point to, but the majority of images, the majority of speaking characters, the majority of the positions of authority, an overwhelming majority are going to be men and boys

STEINEM: There’s progress but I think we’re mostly measuring progress by whether or not women are doing what men used to do. We need to also measure whether men are being nurturing parents and being truly parents, because women cannot do two full time jobs. And that is the problem of most women in this country right now -- they’re working outside the home and inside the home too. And men are missing being nurturing parents. There are all kinds of wonderful studies showing that men live longer, have fewer illnesses, less depression, better sex lives, all kinds of things if they are egalitarian parents.

COURIC : Well I did read something this weekend in the Washington Post that I found very heartening. It was about a shift in the role of fathers. It was really a profile of a single father who adopted two African American boys. A white man in Washington DC. A single guy. But it went on to say that according to the Labor Department, for every hour and a half a mother spends doing the child caring responsibilities, men are now spending 49 minutes. Now I thought that was actually a wonderful advance in terms of sharing the responsibility of raising children. Do you see that trend?

STEINEM: It is an advance. Men are doing more than their fathers but they’re still not doing anything like as much as women are doing. So it’s on the way, but it’s not there yet. But this I think is deeply connected to our political life too. Because most of us women and men are raised almost entirely by women. We associate female authority with childhood. And we think it’s appropriate to childhood and not to adult life and politics. Because we really haven’t seen it that much. So some people, and I think men especially, as we saw in the last election, feel regressed when they saw Hillary Clinton, a powerful woman because the last time they saw a powerful woman they were eight. So men raising children is crucial in every area because it shapes our idea that men can be nurturing. Women can be knowledgeable and authoritative. We both can be both.

ok .. page 4 of 10 ..

COURIC: Do you think one of the reasons that a patriarchal society is perpetuated -- that white males in positions
of powers and authority generally, t generally hire people who look like them and that’s part of the problem.
http://www.alternet.org/story/147478/feminism_is_alive_and_well_..._even_sarah_palin_wants_to_be_one?page=0%2C3

http://www.alternet.org/story/147478/feminism_is_alive_and_well_..._even_sarah_palin_wants_to_be_one

.. revisit .. oh, what do two dummies and Palin equal? .. easy, eh .. lol .. "How Dummies Redefine Feminism"