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| More comfortable...but still an Elephant in the Room! |
Since 1970, August 26th commemorates the passage of the 1920 Equal Voting rights and part of the commemoration is a yearly proclamation by the US President: here is the text of President Obama's 2013 frank proclamation made a couple days ago.
This is not flashily being covered by the press today or yesterday.
In fact, here is what I find on social and traditional media:
1-Evidence of continued anxious motherhood about whether the right choices are being made about work/childrearing balance abounding .See my recent blog entry on the topic. Some of this anxiety arises by itself, some of it is aided by less than mindful opinions offered by others regarding what they believe to be the perfect balance.
2-Evidence of double standards even towards fictional characters. The actress who plays Cersei on Games of Thrones often expresses that the vituperative correspondance she gets is truly astounding. Far in excess of the mail directed at the bad boys on the show. Similarly Anna Gunn, the actress who plays the wife of the main protagonist in "Breaking Bad" opens up in an interesting NYT Op-Ed this weekend, entitled "I Have a Character Issue" where she speaks about the everest size amount of hate mail she gets including...death threats. I don't watch Breaking Bad....yet...but am well aware that it's a cultural phenomenon and that the wife of the protagonist is hardly the most contemptible character on the show. She opines, thoughtfully: "I finally realized that most people's hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do wit their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn't conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypal female, she had become of kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender."
3-The blessed columnist Gail Collins who is a reliable and regular source of laughter and amusement, managing unbitter sarcasm even as she writes about the most ridiculous political situations actually mentions Women's Equality Day this weekend, also noting the absence of any fanfare to mark the day.
I could not put into words "where we are" better than Gail: "The great thing about Equality Day is that it works in two ways. We can mull both how far we've come and how far we have to go..."
Indeed. In fact, our annual Academic Women Network retreat is today and we will take time from our (some will say) impossibly busy work/life schedules to reflect on how far we have to go and how we can, one hopes, accelerate the process or at the very least not prematurely rest on laurels.
Till Later,
Anne
More than 40 years after women's liberation movement stormed onto the scene opening a floodgate of dialogue about women's rights, its deja vu all over again as women are still being moved around like pawns in a political arena. For decades women have consumed an abundant of conflicting and confining images about our role in the world. For an intriguing look at a visual smorgasbord of mid century female stereotypes that littered a pop culture landscape that eventually erupted in a women's movement please view http://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2013/08/26/womens-equality-day/
ReplyDeleteThank you Sally. Impactful images indeed.
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