yonmei

11:37 pm: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 13
Jules Gibb writes in the Gude Cause songbook that she wrote this song in 1986, to commemorate the opening of the original Pankhurst House as a women's resource: that it was inspired by a woman in her 90s in a local nursing home who had been a suffragette.

( Oh you never knew my Nana, she died four years ago. She lived in that old folks home in Moss Side, you know, I used to go on Sundays, sometimes took the kids, I was always so proud of what she did. )



Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

03:21 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 15
This song was written for The Fall Out Marching Band, a London-based anti-nuclear band who joined the Walk For Life from Faslane to Greenham in 1983. My parents are both anti-nuclear campaigners for years before any of us were born or thought of: I was able to date my childhood memories of early anti-nuclear marches by the chants and protest songs.

Well, more or less, because I think I remember this one from 1982: with my mum, I went to Greenham to Embrace the Base in December that year.

Hey you Gen'rals in the military
What d'you need more atom bombs for?
You got enough bombs to kill us all 10 times
Yet still you keep on asking for more.

Take those toys away from the boys
Take those toys away from the boys
With those B Fifty Two and the F Sixteen and the S Twenty
Trident Trident Trident Pershing Pershing



Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry, war

11:25 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 16
The song under the cut was collectively composed by women in one of the first Scottish Women's Refuges in Edinburgh in 1977, during a power cut in which they all sat together in the candle-lit kitchen to keep warm. The song was first printed in My Song Is My Own: 100 Women's Songs first published in 1979 by Pluto Press.

( Oh the weans are greetin' and the sink is leakin' An' ye're staunin' in the pub wi' yer pint o' Tartan Special An' ye say ye're educatin' a' the younger generation Tae yer left wing politics and that's a fact. )





Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry

11:35 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 17
Mary Brooksbank, Dundee mill worker, socialist and union activist, poet and songwriter, went on strike for the first time at the age of 14 (1901 - my great-grandfather was on strike that year too!): she and other young women working in the jute mills marched and won a 15% pay rise.

We Are Out For Higher Wages, Mary Brooksbank (1897 - 1978)

We are out for higher wages,
As we have a right to do,
And we'll never be content
Till we get our ten percent -
For we have a right to live as well as you.

"I have never had any personal ambitions. I have but one: to make my contribution to destroy the capitalist system."





Tags: dundee, edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry

08:40 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 18
When I was a little kid, my mum took me and my brother and sister to see the house in Dundee where Mary Slessor was born. Mary Slessor is (still) the only woman who isn't royal to appear on a British banknote: you'll find her on the Clydesdale Bank £10 note. (David Livingstone used to be there: in 1998 he disappeared and Mary Slessor replaced him.)

She was born in 1848: she went to Africa in 1876: she died there on 13th January 1915.

She was a missionary, and the version of her story I remembered from that long ago was that her mother was a mill-worker, her father died when she was young, and she made up her mind to go to Africa. (She was plainly not in the mold of the usual Victorian middle-class missionary, and I concluded that she probably just really wanted to go to Africa, and "being a missionary" was the only way a weaver's daughter could have made it there in those days.)

This was not quite true. Mary Slessor's father was probably an alcoholic: after his death, Mary Slessor's mother (and Mary herself) pulled them into the middle-classes: by the time Mary went to Africa (Calabar, in Nigeria) she was the very model of a respectable middle-class Victorian missionary.

Except she wasn't. One of the stories they still tell about her in Dundee is that when she confronted a gang of young men, who tried to make her flinch - or break her face - by swinging a metal weight at her head: she laid a bet with them that if she didn't flinch, they'd come to the Sunday school she was running. (For fictional accounts of how these Sunday schools were frequently the main source of education for working children who had no other days free*, see Tom Brown At Oxford or The Daisy Chain.) She didn't flinch, and the whole gang came.
*In England and Wales, often the Sunday schools would have been the only source of education for any working class child: in Scotland, up to the age of 12, in principle at least all children could go to school - but of course, you couldn't work in a factory and go to school. (Some mill owners ran schools on their premises for child employees: Mary Slessor worked half time and went to school half time from 12 to 14.)

The whole concept of missionaries is essentially imperial: if you want to read the perspective of a missionary child, Pearl S. Buck's life of her mother, The Missionary, with the perspective of Buck's adult understanding of her childhood memories, is an excellent one. But, given that: what Mary Slessor became famous for among the Calabar was not only her abandonment of a "Western" standard of living (she lived, her contemporaries recorded with disapproval, among the natives and as the natives lived, without shoes or hat, when as George Orwell records, wearing a hat was the key marker of "white blood" in colonial countries): she was known for her support for women and her refusal to accept the practice of abandoning twin babies to die: she adopted them, and became known as "Mother of all peoples". She wasn't known for converting people to Christianity: she got money for her "mission" and spent it on buildings and other improvements for the Efik people's standard of living. When she died, she was given a state funeral.

So maybe my first estimate of her, thirty-odd years ago, wasn't too far off: she was a woman who knew what she wanted to do, and did it.

(Mary Slessor Foundation, Dundee City Council website, Mundus, Mary Slessor on the £10 note)

( Her thoughts reach out to a distant shore As she stood upon the Law, Mary Slessor was her name, A weaver doon at Baxter's Mill. )





Tags: dundee, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

08:23 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 19
From Revolt on the Clyde by Willie Gallacher (link):

In Govan, Mrs. Barbour, a typical working-class housewife, became the leader of a movement such as had never been seen before, or since for that matter. Street meetings, back-court meetings, drums, bells, trumpets - every method was used to bring the women out and organize them for the struggle. Notices were printed by the thousand and put up in the windows: wherever you went you could see them. In street after street, hardly a window without one: "We Are Not Paying Increased Rent".
These notices represented a spirit amongst the women that could not be overcome. The factors (agents for the property owners) could not collect the rents. They applied to the courts for eviction warrants. Having obtained these, sheriff's officers were sent to serve them and evict the tenants. But Mrs. Barbour had a team of women who were wonderful. They could smell a sheriff's officer a mile away. At their summons women left their cooking, washing or whatever they were doing. Before they got anywhere near their destination, the officer and his men would be met by an army of furious women who drove them back in a hurried scramble for safety."

The landlords began suing through the small debts court for the right to impound wages to cover unpaid rent. The women organised a demonstration for the day of the trial of several rent strikers, and the factories emptied all across Glasgow as the men went to join it:

"From early morning the women were marching to the centre of the city where the Sheriff's Court is situated. Mrs. Barbour's army was on the march. But even as they marched, mighty reinforcements were coming from the workshops and the yards. From far away Dalmuir in the West, from Parkhead in the East, from Cathcart in the South and Hydepark in the North, the dungareed army of the proletariat invaded the centre of the city. Into the streets around the Sheriff's Court the workers marched from all sides. All the streets were packed. Traffic was completely stopped. Right in front of the court, John Maclean was on a platform addressing the crowd as far as his voice could reach. In other streets near the court others of us were at it. Roar after roar of rage went up as incidents were related of the robbery of mothers and wives whose sons and husbands were at the front. Roar followed roar as we pictured what would happen if we allowed the attack on our wages.
It was obvious to the sheriff that the situation was too desperate to play with. He telephoned London and was put through to the Minister Of Munitions, Mr. Lloyd George. "The workers have left the factories," he said after explaining the nature of the case. "They are threatening to pull down Glasgow. What am I to do?" "Stop the case," he was told, "a Rent Restriction Act will be introduced immediately."
From Glasgow Herald of 1915: "Thanks to the fine stand made by Glasgow women and the determined attitude of the Clyde munitions workers, the Government has introduced a Bill to legalize pre-war rent during the war and for six months thereafter."

Ninety years later, Jean Donnachie and Noreen Real had the same organising flair as Mrs Barbour:

To the politicians, Noreen and Jean said: You've asked us to make these people welcome to our community. We have taken them in and with the next breath you come with a battering ram.' When they, along with other local people, watched a couple of families trying to escape and saw a man jump from his third floor verandah to get away as his door was being battered in, they knew they could not stand by.
"Then Jean and I decided we were going to start doing dawn patrols in the complex," says Noreen.
"We got every asylum seeker in the block to give us their mobile number and their house number and, depending on what block the Home Office van stopped at, someone would run in and tell Jean and she would phone every asylum seeker in that block and get them to come out by the stairs."
The Home Office people always went up in the lifts.
"We would even get people into a neighbour's house because the Home Office did not have the power to go in and we started asking people to leave their fire escape gates open."
They held candlelit vigils during dawn raids and kept 5.30am vigils for months - and won their fight to stop the raids.
Jean was one of those who went to see First Minister Alex Salmond, demanding to know why it took so many years to work out if a family can stay or not.

( In the tenements o' Glesga in the year one nine one five It was one lang bloody struggle tae keep ourselves alive We were coontin' oot the coppers Tae buy wor scraps o' food When the landlords put the rent up Just because they could A' the factories were hummin', There was overtime galore But wages they were driven doon tae subsidise the war Oot came Mrs. Barbour from her wee bit single end She said, I'll organise the lassies if I cannae rouse the men! )




Tags: glasgow, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

08:47 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 20
Flora Drummond and Chrystal Macmillan - Chrystal and the General. Two Scottish feminists from very different social classes.

Macmillan was one of the first women to take a degree at Edinburgh University. At the time, the Scottish Universities were a constituency that voted for an MP to represent them in Parliament: the legislation said "all persons" who had taken a degree could vote. Macmillan argued that "all persons" must include women: the answer of all the courts who heard her argue the case - all the way to the House of Lords (she was also the first woman to argue a case before the Law Lords, too) was that at the time that legislation became law, only men could take degrees, therefore only men could be allowed to vote in the university elections. Macmillan was also a pacifist and didn't care for Emmeline Pankhurst's "autocratic" way of running the WSPU: she is remembered on various sites about "forgotten Scotland".

Drummond applied to be a postwoman, was turned down because of her height (she was five foot tall) and turned into one of the most ferocious campaigners for the vote: there's a famous photograph of her being arrested after a demonstration in Hyde Park, surrounded by four policemen, all of them much taller than her, all looking a little bit embarrassed, and Flora Drummond looking highly amused at the four big men putting her under arrest. (She used to point out, when talking about why she'd come to London and got involved with the suffragette movement there, that the rule about how tall a postie had to be was inherently discriminatory, since men tend to be taller than women.) She wasn't a pacifist - there's a memorial of her in Hansard for the ages, an MP getting up and snorting about this woman taking munitions girls to France, who had been involved in the publication of a suffragette magazine that printed LIES about MPs. She's supposed to have got her nickname of "General Drummond" on the 1908 march, when - because of her height and also I suspect because if you can, why not? she directed the march riding on a horse.

This song was printed by the London Society for Women's Suffrage for a day of "songs sung at the Albert Hall on Suffrage Saturday, June 13 1908."

( Now everybody's heard about The string of names and a' that Of certain dames who feel in doubt If they should vote and a' that. For a' that, and a' that, their arguments and a' that, We've better on the other side, and mean to win for a' that. )




Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, history, i am a feminist, poetry

08:59 am: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 21
In 1911, Ethel Smyth, even then a noted composer (though not yet Damed), wrote the music for the song under the lj-cut. (The lyrics were written by Cicely Hamilton, a successful playwright in the 1900s, a member of the Women's Social and Political Union and the Women's Freedom League, a founder member of the Actresses' Franchise League and the Women Writers Suffrage League, and the author of Marriage as a Trade.)

In 1912, after a coordinated campaign in which the windows of opponents of women's suffrage were smashed all over London, Ethel Smyth - and Emmeline Pankhurst and over a hundred other campaigners - had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to two months imprisonment in Holloway Prison. On one occasion, while the prisoners were taking their outdoor exercise, Ethel Smyth (she would then have been in her mid-fifties) appeared at a window overlooking the prison yard, and conducted their singing of the "The March of the Women" by waving her toothbrush.

In an archival recording of Ethel Smyth remembering the suffrage movement, she remembers this song being sung, as loud as massed women's voices could raise it, outside the walls of the prison when force feeding was taking place, so that the selected victims could hear it.

( Forcefeeding in 1912 and 2009 )

( Shout, shout, up with your song! Cry with the wind, for the dawn is breaking: March, march, swing you along, Wide blows our banner, and hope is waking. Song with this story, dreams with their glory, Lo! they call, and glad is their word! Loud and louder it swells, thunder of freedom, The voice of the Lord! )




Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry

10:43 pm: A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm: Day Minus 22
On 10th October 1909, there was a Suffragette Pride March from the Meadows to Leith, via Princes Street: Gude Cause.

On 10th October 2009, several thousand other people - including me - will be repeating the march - not all the way to Leith: we'll finish on Calton Hill.

(We did it a couple of years ago, from Princes Street to Calton Hill: a hundred or so women, the first core group of determined walking feminists.)

On the hill, two years ago, we sang "Bread and Roses": and tonight in the launch of the Gude Cause songbook, we sang it again. A slightly adapted version from James Oppenheim's lyrics written in 1912, inspired by a banner carried by some young women marching in Massachusetts during the textile workers strikes: "WE WANT BREAD AND WE WANT ROSES TOO".

( As we come marching, marching, In the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, A thousand mill lofts gray Are touched with all the radiance That a sudden sun discloses, For the people here are singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses! )




Tags: edinburgh, gude cause, i am a feminist, poetry

02:08 am: I stayed up to write about the neurobiological survey monkeys
The panel I went to on Sunday morning at Worldcon, where I transcribed Kathryn Cramer's comments and later blogged about it in more detail, was also written up by IzzybelBooks and the_Shoshanna. ide_cyan got recruited onto the panel from the audience.

As we might have expected, Kathryn Cramer also, eventually, wrote up that panel. After, apparently, looking for and reading all of our published accounts, none of which she links to or refers to by name, but which get referenced and dismissed in her post. (The webaddress at which she posted her account of it on 30th August, still live, is www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2009/08/word-for-the-day-opression.html: spelling error in the link is hers.)

Probably her most egregious elision is her claim that "another blogger" (that would be the_shoshanna) called ide_cyan "tongue-tied" - ide_cyan responds to this and to other points in an open letter to Kathryn Cramer, and the_shoshanna points out that wow, the fail just keeps on failing.

The title of Kathryn Cramer's post is "Oppression, Feminism, & Motherhood" and her response (without citing me or quoting it) to my comment that

Kathryn Cramer is by her own account a white woman whose best example of “oppression” is neighbours who think she shouldn't let her nine-year-old son out on his own. And while I'd certainly agree that drive-by parenting is one example of sexist bias – since mothers are the ones attacked in this way, not fathers – it becomes oppression only if Kathryn Cramer's neighbours have the power to get her arrested or evicted – if they have more social power than she does, more ability to kick her around than she does the ability to ignore them and continue parenting her child how she sees fit. Criticism of parenting decisions from social equals does not constitute oppression.

was to claim that:

a group of other audience members, who seemed to be a portion of Fail Fandom, left as a group. According to their blogs this group went off and discussed how appalling it is that I claim to be oppressed because I am a parent and because of where I live.

She goes on to argue that

I seriously doubt that Joanna Russ I know would argue that I and other American mothers are not oppressed. And I wonder by what right self-described feminists discard out-of-hand claims by individual mothers that they suffer oppression.

Is 21st century feminism really feminism at all? If it has abandonded [sic] mothers as such, it has abandoned its task of advocating the liberation of women.

The specific claim that we all four (and others) discarded out of hand was Cramer's assertion that "Living in Westchester is like one step short of living in East Germany - neighbours will call the cops if they see my nine-year-old son walking down the street alone because they don't think I should let him do that."

Examples of American mothers being oppressed: (1) That many health insurance companies do not provide coverage for childbirth in their standard plans. (2) That pregnant women do not receive free pre-natal care or post-partum care or have a legal right to paid and unpaid maternity leave with right to return to work. (3) That paid paternity leave, or paid parental leave which can be split between two parents, isn't even on the realistic wishlist. (4) That while a woman's right to breastfeed her child is legally protected anywhere she has a legal right to be, organisations and individuals feel free to discriminate against and harass women who are breastfeeding in public, and a baby at breast is regarded as more obscene than a soft-porn pic of a barebreasted woman. (5) That childcare is regarded as "women's work", unpaid labour gifted to the economy, and neither regarded highly nor rewarded. (6) That systematically and systemically, anything that "goes wrong" with a child is assumed first of all to be the mother's fault.

I could go on. I probably should. But Cramer didn't mention any of this: she mentioned an example of drive-by parenting that has to be an intensely annoying such example - but is in no way equivalent to being "one step short of living in East Germany" and isn't anywhere near the most acute examples - not only the woman in Montana who was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of the crime of letting her kids go to the mall without her: more horribly still, the couple in Texas who were arrested, charged, and had their kids taken away from them for the crime of taking photographs of herself breastfeeding her year-old son. But to Cramer the petty annoyance of her neighbours drive-by parenting is "oppression" and that the rest of us are being bad feminists for not agreeing with her.

Update: And actually, you know, the most irritating thing about this? I am totally inclined to be sympathetic to Kathryn Cramer about how her neighbours indulge themselves in drive-by parenting and how she wants her son to be a free-range kid. I think drive-by parenting is really, really annoying (speaking as a sometime childminder) and I think the modern ideal of children kept in a hermetically sealed environment not allowed unsupervised access to the outside world is going to be perceived as child abuse in the 22nd century, much as we now perceive the 19th-century habit of pacifying babies with opium and gin. But oppression is not neighbours sniping about your parenting skills. Having the police called (in circumstances where that evidently doesn't mean getting arrested and ending up in handcuffs, in a cell, in court, or deported) is doubtless a bloody nuisance, but it is nowhere near East Germany, and it is trivialising the real experience of women, far nearer in time and place, for whom having the police called is not just a bloody nuisance, but a threat of losing children, home, job, and the right to remain in the US, to argue that her privileged experience is the same as theirs and in dismissing her privilege we dismiss their oppression.

Update again (18th September):

K Tempest Bradford responds to Kathryn Cramer's response - and to her taking it down: Help, Help, I'm Bein' Oppressed and The Predictable Flounce. (If you're here via links from either of those posts, welcome! Sit down wherever you can find space and have a cup of tea. Ginger biscuits?)

Update the third: link to screencap of the post now deleted.



Tags: fannish snark, i am a feminist, joanna russ, racefail 09

02:30 pm: At the Worldcon: Day Four, morning
I am writing this at the same tiny hut-cafe in the Park St Louis where I ate tea on Tuesday evening: I will soon be having lunch, buckwheat crepe with tomato and cheese and a glass of freshly-pressed orange juice.

It's Tuesday again. The con's over. It was a major experience – worth the £120 I paid for membership: this and my days in Montreal were worth the £600 I paid for the flight. This Saturday I shall be wandering around the farmer's market again, this time next week I'll be back at work: but for these past days I was in another world. How do you put a price on intellectual experience?

( Sunday morning )

Sunday afternoon was something I was really looking forward to, because there was a trifecta of panels all related to each other – I was on the last panel (Writing Gender Issues), I had originally been invited to be on the middle panel (Rainbow Futures), and I was fascinated by the first panel (Human Reproductive Variants). But, it's quarter past two: I should finish up, post this, and take my freshly-charged battery out with my camera to go on photographing Vieux-Montreal. Or rather, be damned to “should”: I want to!

PS: Went in, paid ($9.08 for my crepe and orange juice) and while the woman was sorting out change for my $50, I tipped $2. Then when she handed me my change, I tossed the 2c in the change bowl, and she said "Merci" in a way that made me wonder if she'd noticed me tipping $2. Oh dear. Okay. I was back at my B&B to collect my camera battery and post this before it dawned on me that given I'm not likely to be back, it doesn't really matter if she knows I tipped $2.02 or thinks I only tipped 2c...



Tags: i am a feminist, racefail 09, worldcon

11:11 am: Things that I would like to consider about British politics, should I get around to writing them
( 10 things to think about and in the darkness bind them )

Tags: evil british politics, i am a feminist, lists, scottish politics

08:17 pm: Orson Scott Card: more homophobic raving
Orson Scott Card, homophobic terrorist, against the orderly pursuit of happiness.

Tags: angry queer, i am a feminist

08:16 am: Cardinal O'Connor frustrated
Abortion limit stays at 24 weeks.

Yay for the MPs who voted the right way. Boo for the stoopid MPs who voted to cut limits.

Tags: *bounce*, i am a feminist

11:28 am: Overheard in the Forest Cafe: and thoughts about the hierarchy of equality
Man, furiously: "And now a court says I can't see my kids!"
Other man, sympathetically: "Mumble mumble, rough, mumble, man, mumble rhubarb rhubarb."
Man, furiously explaining: "There's an exclusion order! If I go near them I could get arrested! My own kids!"
Other man, still sympathetically: "Mumble mumble rhubarb rhubarb."
Man, even more furiously: "And I've still got to pay! Why the hell do I have to pay if I can't see my kids!"
Other man, still sympathetically though his mumbles were getting shorter and shorter: "Mumble rhubarb."
Me, cravenly: *silence*

I was standing at the computer, and the two men were sitting at the table behind me (or possibly, going through the Free Shop stuff, I didn't turn to see).

What is an exclusion order? (from Shelter):

An exclusion order is a court order that suspends the right of a married person, civil partner or cohabitee to live in the family home. You can apply for an exclusion order if your spouse or partner has done or is threatening to do something that has harmed or would harm you or your children either physically or mentally. This will probably need to be more than one isolated incident that was out of character. It can be difficult to get an exclusion order and it will depend on your individual circumstances.

I don't want to say anything like "The courts don't make mistakes!" etc, but the fact is: there is a strong principle in the UK, in European law in general, that a parent has not just the right but the obligation to get to spend time with his kids. (I say "his" advisedly: mothers, having usually been the primary caretakers from birth, and in general remaining so even after a relationship splits, won't usually have the same difficulties in exercising this obligation.)

Courts don't serve an exclusion order lightly. If the man had been served with an exclusion order it was probably because he had, more than once, turned up at the family home since he and his partner split, and terrified the hell out of her and the children - terrified at least, and possibly struck his ex-partner or their children. The police had probably been called, at least once, to get him to leave. Or it could be worse. And given the way this man was behaving in the Forest, yelling and scaring his ex and his children seemed certain, and the rage in his voice made it more certain.

I wouldn't ordinarily even have considered joining in a conversation that I was not included in, but the Forest is one of those places where you can. But as the only things I would have had to say would have been on the lines of "Yes, you still have to support your children because their legal right to your support isn't tied to or affected by your legal right to see them, which it sounds like you've voided by your own fault" the main reason I didn't say any of that was because I was chickenshit.

There are seven equality strands (six recognised, but seven ought to be): race/ethnicity, religion/belief, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and poverty.

( And while there are individual differences, individual circumstances, it is surprising how consistent we are in Western culture about what order it's acceptable to be openly prejudiced: poverty, age, gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, gender, religion, race. )

Having sorted all this out in my head - and I will accept agreement, disagreement, re-ordering, shuffling, in comments - looking at my list, which is based on "what I feel the situation to be in Scotland at this time", I notice that it's very strongly based on legislation and law enforcement. It's been illegal since 1975 to incite hatred on the grounds of race; anti-sectarianism has been strongly enforced in Scotland, both socially and legally, precisely because Protestant and Catholic have been (and are) big issues for so long. (Edinburgh and Glasgow, and other cities in Scotland, have a city football team for the Protestants, a city football team for the Catholics, and if the city's big enough, a third team for - as a Catholic fan of Partick Thistle told me - the ones who don't like getting beaten up.)

There is no legislation banning incitement of hatred against people for their gender or their sexual orientation or their disability. (There might be in England and Wales soon, for sexual orientation at least, but there isn't in Scotland, nor likely to be.) There is a kind of fumbling recognition that it's not a good thing, expressed in some local authority guidelines and government language, but no legislation.

Not only is there no legislation about it, it's actually considered a positively good thing for children to be harassed/bullied about their gender identity, because of course children need to learn to conform.

No one talks about the problem of inciting hatred against people because of their income level at all. Contempt for people on a low income is considered, perhaps not positively good, but perfectly normal.

Which is worth thinking about, when considering if legislation will "make a difference". Eventually it will, though expecting instant results is not something that happens. A generation or two who grow up under the new legislation grow up at least knowing that it's unacceptable to express such hatred. Which is a step in itself, as I think anyone would agree who has ever been made uncomfortable by open expression of prejudice by someone who sees nothing wrong with it...

Tags: evil british politics, i am a feminist, outcasts should stick together, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, scottish politics, working at the forest

12:00 pm: What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism
glitterboy1 gave me an Amazon gift token for my birthday, and I decided to spend it on something I'd wanted for a long time: Joanna Russ's book What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism.

But: Amazon say "Temporarily out of stock. Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information."

Uh huh. What does this mean, in people's experience? Anything? Nothing? I can buy it second-hand from the US via one of the Amazon book dealers - at least one copy on offer is in "Very Good" condition - but I would like it new if I could.

Tags: birthday presents, books are what i read, i am a feminist, joanna russ

12:12 pm: Do I believe? a meme, a meme
Gacked from ide_cyan: ( Belief meme. )

Tags: atheistical, i am a feminist, meme