personal political

boys into men

A woman I know who is pregnant has found out she's expecting a boy. Initially both she and her husband were not sure how to respond to the news. The man worried that their son would be a sporty, macho type, which he adamantly is not. She felt surprised that her female body could be producing a male - but now she's moving towards relief, relief that she won't be able to totally replicate the entwined relationship she has with her own mother.

After the initial surprise when I learnt I was pregnant with a boy (surprise that was mainly based around the realisation that the baby was real), I felt relief too. I was relieved that my narcissism would have a boundary placed on it - that there'd be a limit to my identification with the child. Before the baby had even been born, I could imagine the intense, contradictory feelings I'd have for a daughter. I think I would have had impossibly high expectations of a girl and of myself as feminist mother of a daughter. A boy felt like an unknown, in the positive sense - he was free to be whoever he turned out to be.

feminist blogging

I was interviewed (by email) by Blog Without a Bicycle (great blog title!) about being a feminist blogger.

iwd - death in childbirth

For International Women's Day, I could write nothing more thought-provoking than this account and thoughts on death in childbirth in Indonesia.

carnival of feminists

The 29th carnival of feminist blogs is up at the Imponderabilia of Actual Life (written from Michigan USA). Fantastic holiday reading.

feminist blogs

The 26th carnival of feminist blogs is up at A Blog Without a Bicycle.

eight

There are only eight blogs listed under the Feminism tag on the Australian blogs site. That's a bit sad, isn't it.

mary

Mary Wollstonecraft is famous for her Vindication of the Rights of Women and she's famous for being Mary Shelley's mother. But I hadn't known until today that her two fames are linked in a very sad way - she died as a result of childbirth.

As a young woman caught up in the excitement of the women's movement, I was not much interested in historical feminism - or feminists. It felt to me as if we had already surpassed anything they had written about [if only, I think now] and my time was better spent reading contemporary theorists and novelists. It wasn't such a conscious and arrogant decision as it sounds - it was more that I never felt much interest in them, there was too much going on now.

Nowadays I have, I hope, a much bigger appreciation of how impressive women such as Wollstonecraft were. I feel a connection to her voice across time. And it came almost as a physical blow to me to hear that she'd died in that way. What an incredibly cruel irony that someone who argued so eloquently that women were not inferior due to their biology should have died as a direct result of her femaleness. As so many millions of women have done.

she's a girl

This morning we were visited by some friends of friends, very nice people we only see once or twice a year. They came with their big boy and their little girl, who we hadn't seen since she was a crawling baby.

She was in pink. Pink (striped) tights, a pink skirt (with stiffeners in it to make it stick out like a tutu), pink cardigan. Pink shoes.
She wore accessories. Pink hair clip. A necklace. A bracelet.

"The only affordable clothes for girls are pink" said the mother immediately (it obviously had to be talked about). "Oh, you've been waiting 10 years to dress someone up in pink", said the father. Plainly, he was right. Her sheer delight in the femininity of her little girl flooded the room.

They told us she was very decisive, much less malleable than the boy had been at that age. She could stand up for herself against him - and indeed, we saw that in action.

So maybe the clothes are a pink herring, nothng to do with how she'll turn out.

Nevertheless, the effect, for me, was of a child dragging a ball and chain. Or of the parents coming in with a large club which they hit us about the head with, all the while screaming "SHE"S A GIRL!"

I just don't get why people need to do this.

childcare

I contributed a comment over at the Cast Iron Balcony on this subject. Now Cathy Sherry takes a strong line in the SMH. It's a very important discussion.

bert

Berts: I was taught in high school by a nun called Sister Bertrand, who we used to refer to as Bertie. Around the same time, Dr Bertram Wainer was playing a major role in Australian current affairs. And I had an Aunty Bert, whose name was short for Bertha - I never heard her called that, she was always Bert.

I watched the tv documentary about Bertram Wainer the other night with great interest. He was a Melbourne doctor (with a lovely Scottish accent) who was at the centre of the push to legalise abortion. I hadn't realised, even though I later worked in that field myself, exactly what he'd done. I hadn't realised that it wasn't a simple [okay, difficult] matter of getting the law changed.

In Victoria - and, I wouldn't be surprised, NSW and other states too - backyard and some 'frontyard' abortion was allowed to go on because police at high levels were being paid bribes.  The homicide squad was on the take - ironic isn't it, that abortion was seen as the province of the homicide squad. When I think of watching Homicide as a child (we were allowed to stay up late for it), to think now what those kinds of men were really up to...

So legalising abortion was a matter of confronting police and political corruption. Wainer and his family and others who worked in the abortion field received death threats and at least three attempts were made on his life. But he carried on pushing for change in what looked like a remarkably sanguine way.

As a Catholic schoolgirl, the received view was that Bertram Wainer was a horrible, evil man. When I hear his name now, it still has that connotation. Having seen this documentary, I marvel at how far removed from confronting the real evil (isn't that what the church is meant to be doing?) that view was. The Catholic view of abortion is so very rarefied...