Blog 11

I was searching the web for feminist topics to write my next I came across this wonderful article named “What’s Happening To Women’s Studies?”. This was published in http://www.feministcritics.org blog.

This blog talks about women’s studies programs in colleges. I thought this is really relavent topic for all of us as of course we are all in college.

According to CBS study, “Some colleges are closing them down due to lack of student interest, while others are re-branding them as ‘gender studies’ classes.” The Toronto Star’s Catherine Porter defends the women’s studies programs, while The National Post’s Barbara Kay is much more critical.

Anna Maria Tremonti was the host for this show. She had some calls in the show. One guy nick called in and he was talking about his college experience of taking women’s studies class just like all of us. He said that, it was directly oriented against males, they always said that women are being treated by the men wrongly and they have to fight back. He also mentioned that he felt that there lot of lot of animosity towards males.

In response to that Barbara said that feminism movement in US has always been focused white on white middle class females. It might have actually ignored.

Barbara mentioned in her talk that women’s studies are not about hating men or working against them. It is not even about recruiting feminists. According to her “It is an interdisciplinary study which explores intersections of  sexuality, race, social class, ability, religion and markers of social and cultural experience in historical and contemporary perspective.”

Blog 10

To be honest I learnt about feminism basics and what it means to be a feminist only through this class. I have not been studying about feminism and feminist visions never before in school. Here I have a make point that I did my schooling in India. I think western world is far more superior and open even though there are still problems in terms of supporting feminist visions and talking about them freely. So I wanted to do little bit of research on feminism in India. This was kind of educational research for me.

I did some basic research and learnt about some great personalities in feminist literature. However I came across a video that was very interesting to me. It is not really supporting feminist visions but I thought it was interesting to talk about.

Here is the link for that video.

http://whatmenthinkofwomen.blogspot.com/2010/05/feminists-in-india-french-kiss-is-rape.html

this video discusses about how the government in India is trying to make changes in the law regarding rape to reduce violence against women.

This was reported by Rajesh Kumar who is from Mumbai and they are talking about amendments made and that were published in Times of India.

They mentioned that the proposed draft was sent to the union of ministries and was turned down by them because of large scope for misuse. Some of the points in this article that were really interesting were if a man by a any chance puts his finger or mouth in a woman’s mouth he could he jailed for seven years. It is considered as rape according to this draft.

Ofcourse men are really opposing this bill and say it creates more gender inquality but women leaders say that these laws are long pending and would surely ensure safety for women acroos the nation.

Blog 9

http://news.yahoo.com/video/business-15749628/economic-he-covery-and-the-race-for-jobs-24606247

This was a video showing the employment changes during the economic recovery.
This video stated in the beginning that gender discrimination is heating up in the hiring department. One gender (male) is just not winning the other gender (females) in the fight for job they in fact are overwhelming. It was stated that 90% of the new jobs went to men.
It was said that men lost twice many jobs as women in the recession. And during recovery it’s more like he-covery.
There was an interview of Dawn Rayner, who is unemployed and on hunt for jobs for the past 3 years. She has applied for over 2000 companies but she didn’t yet get one.
This also showed some numbers about the jobs gained. It says that 1.3 million jobs were gained from july 2009- feb 2011. Out of them 1.1 million went to men. Only 113,000 were given to women.
In retail jobs where women and men are usually in equal proportions. In this recovery men gained about 100,000 jobs but women lost about the same number of jobs. Over all, men gained about 600,000 jobs and women losing about 300,000 jobs.
Joan Entmacher explained why this could be happening. She said that may be recruiters are thinking that it is important to put men back to work as they have to feed the family. She also mentioned that this is not entirely true. 40% of the families are supported by woman’s income.
Over all I think that more than gender something else also decides who is getting the job. However it is disappointing to see that recruiters are trying to put men back to work because they still think men have to support families where as women can stay home taking care of home things.

Blog 8

Older women’s bodies and the self: the construction of identity in later life.

http://www.arts.yorku.ca/soci/mandell/courses/4680/pdf/Hurd%202001%20PDF%20file.pdf

As a science student, doing research is not new to me. But when I am writing science I can only use certain kinds if sources such as scholarly journals. So I was just looking up feminism and age related things in the scholarly journals. I found this amazing article which I was surprised to see. They have actually conducted surveys of people which wrote in entire article in scientific manner including using citations from previous works. To be honest I actually didn’t think there could be these kinds of articles on feminism. Quite surprising.

This is a research article written by Laura Hurd Clarke, University of British Columbia. This paper emphasized the uneasy and conflicted relationship between an older woman’s sense of herself and her aging body. To prove the relationship, they actually designed an experiment with 22 female participants ages ranging from 61 to 92 years old. This paper explored the influence of the loss of perceived physical attractiveness and loss of health and functional disabilities on an older woman personality. This paper also discusses about women’s experience of the body both mask and prison of the self and clarifies the challenge of the reflected image to a woman’s sense of being youthful on “inside.”
This was published in 2001 that means it is not that old and things that were expressed in here are relevant even now as things have not changed that much in terms of feminism since then.
In this paper I really liked the results section. Very thorough and detailed explanations using creditable sources were given. One of the results was that 18 out of the 22 women expressed tension between their sense of identity and their physical realities as they say that they don’t feel their chronological changes.
One of the quotes I absolutely loved was, “I don’t feel any different than I did when I was 17.” This was said by a woman of 77 years old. This again emphasizes that if one is pure inside and have confidence in themselves age does not come in their way to achieve anything.
This was a very log article it was hard for me to summarize in couple if sentences the whole sense of this article.

blog 7

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-family/#1.3

As we have been talking about family aspect in terms of feminism I wanted to learn more about this topic in the real world outside the book. Personally I feel that a woman can be a great family person and still be a feminist managing both at the same time. However I found one article published by Stanford University while researching about this topic. It has covered very important topics in the article named “Feminist Perspectives on Reproduction and the Family.”
One section I found very interesting was that if “The family constrains or enables women’s freedoms.” This article has also provided some real good statistics that were really surprising. For example, in this article it was said that women are still dependent on men financially as women are caught up doing household work and managing family which restricts them from working towards higher jobs. I was surprised to see that poverty lines change for women and men after the couple has divorced. In one study, ex-husbands’ standard of living was found to have risen by 42% the year after their divorce, while ex-wives’ standard of living was reduced by 78% (Weitzman 1985). This same article also discussed about some of Chodorow’s works which were hard to follow for me. At the end of the article they have concluded that “Whether families are the primary cause or a contributing cause along with other social structures and culturally generated expectations, feminists point to the ways that families are part of a system that reproduces women’s social and economic inequality. Families cannot be viewed apart from that system or in isolation from it. Nor can they be assumed to be just: too many of them are not. The issue, for feminists, is not whether the state can intervene in the family and reproduction but how, and to what ends.”
Over all this was a very useful article and I learnt so much by reading this article. If someone has time I would recommend reading this article.
Weitzman, Lenore, 1985, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America, New York: Free Press.

Blog 6

As we have been learning about health and reproductive-rights in this section I wanted to some research on abortion. I have looked it up and found of lot of information about the history of abortion and the effects it has on the society and also the rules of abortion in United States. In this blog I have decided to talk about abortion laws in Indiana because I think as women we need to know about the abortion laws in our state. I don’t know how many of you are already are aware these rules but as I moved to Indiana couple of years ago I had to do lot of research for this. 
Federal Medicaid funds are available for abortions only in cases where continuing her pregnancy would end the woman’s life or when the pregnancy is a result of rape. Indiana law requires that a woman must wait 18 hours before receiving abortion services and she must receive state-mandated information in person from one of the following:
(1) Physician performing the abortion
(2) Referring physician or physician’s assistant
(3) Advance practice nurse; or
(4) A licensed midwife.
The state-mandated information includes:
(1) The name of the physician performing the procedure
(2) The nature of the procedure
(3) The risks of and alternatives to the procedure
(4) The medical risks of carrying the fetus to term
(5) The probable gestational age of the fetus
(6) That medical assistance may be available from the county office of family and children
(7) That the father is legally required to help support the child
(8) That adoption is available and that adoptive parents might pay medical expenses. (IN code 16-34-2-1.1)
In Indiana licensed physicians must perform all abortions. The woman must file her permission for abortion and for restricted minors under the age of 18; the consent of one parent or legal guardian is required for the abortion. Abortions performed after the first trimester (about 3 months) must take place in a hospital or in an outpatient surgical center. Indiana law forbids so-called “partial-birth” abortions unless a physician reasonably believes that it is necessary to save the woman’s life and no other medical procedure is sufficient to save her life. (IN Code 16-34-2).
Sources:
Indiana Induced Termination of Pregnancy Report, 2000. Indianapolis: Indiana State Department of Health. 2000.
Who Decides? A S ate-by-State Review of Abortion and Reproductive Rights. 12th ed. Washington, DC: NARAL Pro-Choice America. 2003.

Blog 5

As we know and as we have been studying how this world is male dominated in most of the areas I wanted to write about some famous women that have become role models in this society for every woman to look up to.
This blog is about women that have come against their odds to achieve something they have dreamt of to set as an example for others.
As we can find successful women in every field it is difficult to put them all in one list. So for this blog I have decided to focus on women that defined women in sport world.
I focused more on cricket (I don’t know how many of you know about this game). Because I was grown up in India, this is the only game that I actually can understand. Basically cricket is similar to baseball here. This is called “gentle-man” game so no need to mention that this game is ruled by male society. But people below made a strong effort to find a place for women too in this game.
All of this information was obtained from cricinfo.com
Lily Poulett-Harris: she is from Australia. Through her hard work she has become captain of Australian’s women cricket team.
Lucy Pearson: She is from England. She was even got into some doping case but she got out of it and is playing for the team again.
Anjum Chopra: She is from India. She has played at the international level at a very young age of 17.
Ema Kuribayashi: She is from Japan. She is famous as she is the only women to play five women’s One Day Internationals in one year.
Maria Fahey: She is from New Zealand. She has made highest in the shortest time so far in the history.