Rachel’s Musings

I’ve recently finished reading the thought-provoking Mismeasure of Woman by Carol Tavris. Although the book was published in the early 1990s, it is still eerily current. I keep wondering what Tavris might think of the Palin pick… But I don’t want to speculate on this here. There are many, many interesting things Tavris talks about in her book, I would like to focus on how normal bodily processes are turned into diseases. How women are pathologized simply for being women.

Take the Premenstrual Syndrome, for example. When women started to fight for their right to get an education, they were confronted with arguments that supposedly made it physiologically dangerous for them to study.      Continue reading this post » » »

The recent California Supreme Court decision in the Benitez case, shows who will be missing out with the focus on the right to marriage in the GLBT movement: Unmarried and single people.

The doctors for Lupita Benitez refused to provide fertility treatment to her because she was a lesbian, oh, and because she was not married. The doctor claimed that her religious views would prevent her from doing her job.      Continue reading this post » » »

I just finished Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller’s wonderful book “Liberty: A Better Husband. Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780 – 1840.” It is a great read for any single by choice because it provides some historical grounding: there were women in antebellum America who chose to remain single for various reasons and some of them were actually rather happy with that choice. Chambers argues that the Cult of Domesticity gave rise to a Cult of Single Blessedness that was built on the notion that it is better to be single than miserably married (17). Her book follows several women through their life - using their journals, letters, and in some cases professional publications. They struggle with finding their place in society, often making great personal sacrifices to live with the choices they made. Largely, though, they were accepted by society - until after the Civil War. Then things changed. Singlehood became a “great social disease.” Singlism was born.

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A post over at the Feminist Philosophers’ blog talks about an amazing woman, Alia Sabur, who is the world’s youngest professor in the history of academia. She also happens to be a Muslim. JJ ends her post stating that

in many Muslim countries women are a strong presence in science classrooms, as students and teachers.

This reminded me of an article I read in Free Inquiry about the dismal state of science in Muslim countries, written by a professor in Pakistan, which seemed to call into question any celebration of strong female presence. Either way, I was intrigued and tried to find information on women in science. I was looking for an international comparison of scientists in academia by gender. So far, I haven’t found much. In the process of looking I stumbled on a debate that took place in 2005: The Science of Gender and Science, a topic that I briefly mentioned earlier this year. As behooves the label dilettante, although I prefer the second definition, I abandoned my search for statistics and read the debate instead, which took me forever. This post has been a week or so in the making.

Both [Harvard psychology professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke] presented scientific evidence with the realization and understanding that there was nothing obvious about how the data was to be interpreted. Their sharp scientific debate informed rather than detracted. And it showed how a leading University can still fulfill its role of providing a forum for free and open discussion on controversial subjects in a fair-minded way. It also had the added benefit that the participants knew what they were talking about.

As you may recall, in 2005, the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, caused a loud out-cry by remarking that maybe women are underrepresented in science because of innate ability differences. The Pinker-Spelke debate was intended to see what the science really says.

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An interesting commentary at AlterNet made me realize how destructive the influence of the Religious Right really is (hereafter I call them the Wrong - they might be on the right-side of the political spectrum but they are dead wrong in their positions). The topics where their influence plays a role are ever expanding in my awareness. Here are some of them:

• Evolution: This is the most obvious one. Their attempts to derail science and teaching nonsense range from creationism, via creation “science,” to intelligent design.
• Global climate change: Here they try to cast doubt on the fact that we humans are influencing the weather patterns for the worse and are the major culprits behind climate change.
• Marriage: Not only are they opposing gay marriage but by imposing their standards of the heterosexual marriage as the only healthy family, they are attacking family diversity.
• Child rearing: Through ignoring research, they were able to perpetuate the myth that marriage is necessary for healthy child development.

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As the mother of a teenage boy, I was eager to read the article Lost Boys in the June 2008 edition of the Monitor. I was rather disappointed. The article ignores that despite the supposed educational gap, men still earn more than women. The last sentence even implies that the opposite is the case. The reasons given for losing boys are based on anecdotal evidence and do not reflect any changes in schools. Teachers have long been predominantly female, for example, so this cannot explain this trend. One of the suggested solutions sounds like the good-old-boys network resurrected, which is contrary to Dr. Kleinfeld’s claim that “we can design schooling where both boys and girls do well.” Nothing in the article presents even a hint of such designs.

The most disturbing comments came in the last two paragraphs, though. Starting with “helping boys succeed helps girls,” I excitedly expected to finally find out how schools can be designed to serve both boys and girls. But this is far from what Dr. Kleinfeld and the author of the article had in mind. No, these programs for boys help women find better partners! What a sexist and singlist statement! As if the only thing women are interested in is finding a partner, and a male one to boot. How about helping both girls and boys succeed in education without assuming that girls just get an education so that they can marry well or that boys should be better educated to make better partners?

(This is a copy of the letter to the Editor I sent to the Monitor on Psychology.)