Feminist Ryan Gosling: what timing! A week from today is annual Love Your Body day, sponsored by the NOW Foundation.
(via newsweek)
No matter how much we may think we still feel the yoke of housework, electric appliances like the vacuum helped fling open the window for women back in the early part of the 20th century.
Think of it! No more dragging heavy Persian rugs outside to beat the bejesus out of them for hours on end. Finally! Some help cleaning the endless soot that settled from gas lamps and fires.
Oct. 3 marks the 112th anniversary of the patent for the first vacuum.
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Isn’t the reason we need these feminist sites because women’s issues and news are still marginalized, while things pertaining to men are still classified as general interest? Because big, important things like, say, making and raising human beings, are still considered something only ladies read about? Along with not insignificant matters like gender equity, body image and, often, sex? We don’t get the space to report on and discuss these things in traditional, mainstream sections so we rely on women-only sections to get the job done.
Well it seems like that after six years of running Broadsheet, the editors are ready to take these issues out of a feminist context and present them as, gasp, news. If the editors stick by their word, Salon’s great arsenal of writers will bring their feminist point-of-view to the publication’s arts, culture and news coverage; at Salon, feminism won’t be a niche perspective or a specialization, it will be the ubiquitous standard. While it is to soon to know if that will be the case, it is ultimately what I think we should all be shooting for.
"—
The Forward’s Elissa Strauss on why we should celebrate the demise of Broadsheet.
Davos Institutes Quotas (And We Become the Unlikely Defenders of the World Economic Forum)
Quotas are practically a dirty word. But this week, organizers of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos—where the (usually white, male) ruling class gathers to solve the world’s problems—announced that sponsors must bring at least one woman in their five-person delegations. And the world gasped. But the more we’ve thought and written about women and progress, the more we think that the top-down approach is the right one. So we defended their decision here.
Here’s to hoping that this year all those big brains actually get us somewhere.
"You know what also makes me happy? That I’m the first woman editor of Newsweek, which is very exciting. You know that in the 1970s, the women editors of Newsweek launched a lawsuit against the management because there were hardly any women doing anything of any consequence on the magazine. And women’s liberation took over and they hired the great lawyer, Eleanor Norton, and they went to battle for their rights. I feel that it - you know, a merger has created what the lawsuit couldn’t."
— Tina Brown (via)
"French women are exhausted. We have the right to do what men do — as long as we also take care of the children, cook a delicious dinner and look immaculate. We have to be superwoman."
—
The editor-in-chief of Elle France, on a new Pew Research Center survey, which found that three in four French people believe men have a better life than women—by far the highest share in any country polled. As the New York Times puts it: “The birthplace of Simone de Beauvoir may look Scandinavian in employment stats, but it’s Latin in attitude. French women appear to worry about being feminine, not feminist, and French men often display a form of gallantry predating the 1789 revolution.”
Ouch.
In Which Spike.com Declares the ‘Top Seven Cutest Feminists’
Um ya, that is not a joke. And Nicole Kidman is #1!
Abolition, The Declaration of Sentiments, and Seneca Falls: We’re Loving Suffrage History!
Don’t be fooled by the title. In “What Hath Feminism Wrought,” a post yesterday on the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about a new book (“What Hath God Wrought”) about the history of the antebellum south. It includes a long exploration of the links between abolitionists and the early women’s rights movement, and ends at the 1858 Seneca Falls Convention, where attendees came surprisingly close to prioritizing ordination over the right to vote. Coates quotes from the Convention’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” a re-write of the Declaration of Independence to include women. It’s chilling. Read it:
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.That last line reminds us why we have issues with marriage.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
Should Women Flirt Their Way to the Top? Damn Straight, Says Forbes.
Well this is sure to cause an uproar. In today’s ForbesWoman, author Jenna Goudreau posits that women who don’t flirt are ignoring “one of their greatest career assets”—a valuable strategic tool (if used effectively), she says, to climb up the corporate ladder.
“Using flirtation is just smart,” Nicole Williams, the author of Girl on Top: Your Guide to Turning Dating Rules into Career Success, tells her. “If you need someone’s help, use the tools available to you. It’s naive to think it has no place at work.” (Oof.)
The commenters are already weighing in, of course, calling Goudreau shallow (and worse). But the real question is: is she right? Consider what we’ve already got stacked against us: working women in this country still make just 77 cents on the male dollar; we face the challenge of balancing motherhood with career, and whether or not we decide to have children, many of us struggle to scale the corporate ladder. We are navigating the workforce, meanwhile, in a culture of plumped lips and airbrushed bodies that hold us to an unattainable ideal—and where, in a corporate culture that still largely excludes women, female competition is more cutthroat than ever.
Which brings us to this: If we acknowledge that we’re being judged on our looks anyway—and that they’re indeed crucial to our career success (see recent disturbing Newsweek survey)—why wouldn’t we use them, own them, empower ourselves through them? Wouldn’t that be—dare we say it—the feminist thing to do?
It’s not as cut and dry as Forbes’ “Secrets of Professional Flirting” (oof, did they really need to go there?) but it’s something to think about. And it doesn’t make you a slut if you do.
The Beauty Advantage: How Beauty Can Affect Your Job, Your Career, Your Life
God we love this photo, despite the weird overly buff dude. Wanted to send out a link to Newsweek’s massive package on the role of looks at work, which includes pieces on: the double bind that women face, what would happen if women ruled the world, why women should shun that beauty ideal, and, of course, a feminist man’s perspective. There’s also a poll of hiring managers asked about the importance of looking good at work.
It’s a couple months of work, and well worth a look, if we can say so ourselves. There are also many breathtaking visual elements, including ladyfriend Cara Phillips’ series of photos chronicling plastic surgery offices around the country, called Singular Beauty, an interactive graphic of 100 years of beauty ideals, a gallery looking at beauty rituals around the world, and various other elements.
An excerpt:
Economists have long recognized what’s been dubbed the “beauty premium”—the idea that pretty people, whatever their aspirations, tend to do better in, well, almost everything. Handsome men earn, on average, 5 percent more than their less-attractive counterparts; pretty people get more attention from teachers, bosses, and mentors; even babies stare longer at good-looking faces (and we stare longer at good-looking babies). A couple of decades ago, when the economy was thriving—and it was a makeup-less Kate Moss, not a plastic-surgery-plumped Paris Hilton, who was considered the beauty ideal—we might have brushed off those statistics as superficial. But in 2010, when Heidi Montag’s bloated lips plaster every magazine in town, when little girls lust after an airbrushed, unattainable body ideal, there’s a growing bundle of research to show that our bias against the unattractive is more pervasive than ever. And when it comes to the workplace, it’s looks, not merit, that all too often rule.
Check it out! www.newsweek.com/BEAUTY
-jessica
Eleanor Clift Welcomes the Mama Grizzlies to the Feminist Arena. We Do Too.
Our colleague Eleanor Clift has a very smart column today about whether Sarah Palin’s Mama Grizzlies are feminists. She writes:
Win or lose elections, the Mama Grizzlies have proven adept at breaking through the noise and getting more than their share of attention, just like their benefactor, Sarah Palin. Like Palin, they have found their voice. They don’t want anybody telling them how to raise their children, or taking their guns away. Thirty years late to the battle for women’s rights, they’re claiming the mantle of feminism.
It’s nice they’re embracing feminism after demonizing the term for so long, and I welcome them to the arena. Let’s see if they can do for women what their sisters on the left have done since the ’70s, breaking down the barriers for women in all areas of American life including politics.
The column, unlike a lot of the discourse on whether or not Palin and others are “feminist enough,” manages to challenge Palin’s politics but avoid the knee-jerk take excluding those whose positions many feminists find objectionable. We agree with Clift: welcome ladies.
-jesse
