Book Rec: Women: Images and Realities.

[BlueIris]

I think of this as one of the modern classics in the world of women's studies. It was the core textbook for my Women's Studies 101 class during my freshman year of college.

http://www.amazon.com/Women-Images-Realities-Multicultural-Anthology/dp/0767420896

I really love this one. It is a multicultural, multifaceted look at feminism and contains all of the terrific, must read essays from the '70s, '80s and '90s. I can remember reading excerpts from this book to my mother during that time and having her kind of nod her head and smile.

Some of the great reads in here including the famous "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack," by Peggy McIntosh, which I found here:

http://www.uakron.edu/centers/conflict/docs/whitepriv.pdf

It also contains Marge Piercy's still all too relevant poem "Right to Life":

http://www.thewitness.org/archive/april2000/poemrighttolife.html

Patricia Maniardi's "The Politics of Housework" is in this collection, too, I believe, and I think that's also available free in places, (although my Altavista-ing didn't turn it up.)

I realize many of us are familiar with these materials, but for members who are more "new" to feminism, this book is one to own.

[MadrasT]

1. Thank you, BlueIris!

[seabeyond]

2. good stuff blueiris

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that since
hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white
privilege which was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been
taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to
see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to
recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have
white privilege. I have come to se white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets
which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious.
White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports,
codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women’s Studies
work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes
about having white privilege must ask, “Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?” After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I
understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent
charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to
understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. I
began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into
oblivion about its existence

*

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male
advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of
meritocracy the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people
unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up
those in power, and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it
already.

talking to my 14 yr old last week, i am seeing that there is an area he is growing up "normal", lol, that i do not want. the inability to identify white, male privilege. we discuss so many things in the social and political and cultural realm, in our house and i was disappointed to see that he is not getting a piece of our society. this summer, we are going to have some projects. the boys read, and then we discuss. i have to find some interesting books on these subjects. but i am specifically looking for one on the black societal structure.

this is what happened. he goes to a school that is 90% or more white. and mostly upper income. he hangs with the few kid that are minorities. so he does not get it. he is so fair, but he will be fair to hitler or attila the hun, in all his fairness. a counselor came into class for a program on bullying. she said, this is a school of whites, and the few minorities get bullied. the kids were outraged. they dont. ever. even the ONE black kid in class said it did not happen. but there was not the discussion on how one black kid amongst all white are experiencing their time in school, that the white kids are clueless to.

after a discussion on this i had him read the list of white privilege so he could better understand. but i want a book that discusses as a whole.

i remember going thru this with oldest son when he was in middle school, too.

[seabeyond]

3. Right To Life

We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother's blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.

sigh...

[iverglas]

4. here is the full table of contents

http://www.mcgraw-hill.com.sg/html/9780073512310.html#

and when I say "full", I mean full! My goodness.

I get the feeling there's a fair bit more there from the 80s and 90s than the 70s, but it still looks like an amazingly comprehensive introduction to a lot of thinking.

[iverglas]

5. and I have found the companion piece

-- while googling for something else altogether (feminism and temperance, re my thread on the subject). A blog entry about the lack of scholarship on the connection between the Women's Liberation movement and the drug-related aspects of the counterculture in the 60s led to this book:

The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation

(Edit -- it didn't work, so google that title with -amazon and you will get the google books version.)

That's a google books thing; not sure whether it will work, so here's an amazon entry:

http://www.amazon.com/Feminist-Memoir-Project-Voices-Liberation/dp/0609803840

These essays come from a time slightly earlier than mine -- being a later boomer meant that all the good folk songs had already been written -- but speak more to some of our experiences with feminism than material from the 80s onward.

Nadine Taub, the lefty feminist lawyer who wrote one of the pieces, is a decade older than me, but our trajectories up to circa 1970 weren't so different (except that by the time I hit university at the end of the 60s I was very definitely a "women's libber", while in 1967 when she was already in practice she hadn't heard much about it yet). "Growing up, I simply could not do what was expected of a young woman ... I think this inability to meet role expectations ultimately proved very useful."

(If you scroll to the table of contents at the beginning of the book, you can click on the link for that article, for example.)