Why Am I A[n Older] Feminist?

I never believed that at the age of 63  I would still have to be an active Feminist. But unfortunately the world is not a friendly place for women. So here are some of the reasons why even older women, especially mothers, don't have the luxury to withdraw and have to become more involved.
--- I am a feminist because I am the mother of two daughters.
--I am a Feminist because there are still places in the world where women are killed,  enslaved and raped,  and other places they are “just” continuously abused and harassed.
---I am a Feminist because  girls should enjoy the same educational opportunities as boys
---I am a feminist because in the workplace women should  have the same chances as men, to advance in their career, and should receive equal pay
---I am a Feminist because we need equal number of women in the civil service, the Israeli Knesset and  the government.
---I am a Feminist because  there is not enough representation of women in the media,  and issues pertaining to women are hardly discussed.
---I am a Feminist because  pregnant women and young mothers should not be discriminated against in the job market and in the work place.
---I am a Feminist because women should feel comfortable to nurse their babies everywhere, without worry
---I am a Feminist because I detest sexist and undermining jokes and remarks.
---I am a Feminist because women should be able to walk alone at night wearing whatever they please.
---I am a Feminist because the workplace should be more friendly to women in general and mothers in particular, children are not the sole responsibility of their mothers.
---I am a Feminist because Carol Gilligan is right:  Feminism is Humanism
--I am also a Feminist because when I shopped for a car, the dealer talked directly to my partner and ignored me.  As a result I have to buy a car on my own.
Last year few days before the beginning of #MeTOO I heard an excellent  program on NPR: “Looking Beyond Marches” the Feminist Movement in 2017.
One of the points raised was that Feminism should be less reactive and more proactive. At that moment I felt that something needed to be done, few minutes later I opened the Facebook group: Older and Experienced Feminists for Israeli women of all age.  As an older woman and a feminist I believe that we should be proactive rather than reactive. So instead of responding to the continuous misogynistic noise in the media we should ignore it and go on promoting important issues. It is only a Facebook group but it is a good place to learn and be truly proactive and engage the many challenges that Feminism still face today.

The post was published at the Times of Israel

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-am-i-an-older-feminist/- 

A Young Girl on Bicycle: Anwar Burqan vs Two Border Police officers

With everything else that’s going on in our part of the world, the incident in Hebron, at the end of July, with the two Border Police officers and the young girl on bicycle, seems like ages ago.

To refresh the reader's memory, here is the story as it appeared in Haaretz on August 2nd: “Two Border Police officers were filmed driving a Palestinian girl, who was riding a bicycle in Hebron, away and then, once she fled, one of the two picked up her bike and threw it into the bushes”

Obviously this incident has serious implications, how is it possible that two adults in their official capacity would scare a little girl to death and chase her away? Focusing on the story one important detail comes to mind: Anwar Burqan was not just another little girl, she was riding a bicycle.

The bicycle has been a feminist symbol, and an icon, of self reliance and freedom since the last part of the 19th century. The development of the safety bicycles, in the late 19th century, was especially crucial to women as they were also produced in a special form for skirted women.

Some feminist writers consider this point a revolution and a beginning of a new order.  Ever since the late 1880s women have started riding bicycles and it has given them a certain degree of independence. All of a sudden, quietly, women and girls gained freedom of movement and were able to come and go as they pleased and on their own.

For a long time, and in most part of the world, bicycling has ceased to be a symbol and became an integral part of life for everyone.

But in more traditional societies girls/women and bicycle just don’t mix. The Saudi Arabian film Wadjda which tells the story of  a bright girl who is determined to win money to buy a bicycle she’s forbidden to ride. She hopes to accomplish this feat by winning a prize in a Koran competition and for that dream she is willing to memorize endless verses of Koran. But when she finally wins the competition honestly and naively admits that she intends to get a bicycle with her money, she is denied the prize.

Apparently, Hebron is not different than Wadjda's world, here too the   bicycle is regarded as a dangerous symbol of independence which threatens the world order. Young Anwar Burqan was not allowed to exercise her right to freedom of movement when she rode by herself around her home town on her bicycle.

I would like to end with a quote about bicycling from the Feminist and leader Susan B Anthony: "Yes, I'll tell you what I think of bicycling, I think it has done more to emancipate woman than any one in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on wheel. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat and away she goes.”

Keep riding Anwar Burqan, away you go!

The post a[[eared in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-young-girl-on-bicycle-anwar-burqan-vs-two-border-police-officer/

The Group Of Religious Feminists With No Sense Of Humor And The Desert Island

For many Jewish people Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are truly High Holidays, for me they mark yet another year in which “I won't  set a foot in a synagogue.” This phrase is taken from a famous Jewish fable/ Joke for the High Holidays...

“A Jewish sailor was shipwrecked on a desert island and the first thing he did was build two synagogues....

Years later when he was rescued people were bewildered and asked him: Why he built two synagogues... to which he replied.

"Oh that other one... I won’t set a foot there”!*

Sadly this joke reflects a less than funny reality.

When we lived in small university towns in the Midwest we always went to Shul on the High Holidays. We are not religious but being outside Israel we wanted to celebrate the holidays with other Jewish people.

Please keep on reading in The Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-group-of-religious-feminists-with-no-sense-of-humor-and-the-desert-island/

Blue Jasmine, A College Dropout Or A Gifted Anthropologist?

Although women’s education is not the main theme of Woody Allen’s movie Blue Jasmine, it is an important leitmotif --serving both as a characterization  device and as a moving force of the plot. In the opening scene on the plane, the heroine Jasmine tells the unfortunate lady who happens to sit next to her that after she had met her future husband she dropped out of university. She asks her neighbor whether she could imagine her as an anthropologist.

The neighbor does not have an answer, she has no idea who this rambling lady is, but Woody Allen has made a clever choice. Jasmine has not completed her education, still she is a gifted anthropologist. She becomes involved in a long standing field study of the rich and  famous. She does not keep a scientific distance from her subjects, quite the contrary. For several years she lives among them, carefully observes their movements and studies their practices, gradually she adopts  their norms and attitudes and becomes almost indistinguishable from them.

For years Jasmine has not worried about completing her education, as it served its purpose—marrying a rich man. However, when this chapter in her life abruptly and tragically ends, she is forced into a totally different field. Here she could no longer function as an anthropologist, she has no desire to study her new environment or adopt its customs. Thus she turns to education again hoping that once more it will provide her with the delivery she so desparately needs.

Unfortunately this time around Jasmine cannot be saved, going back to school proves too difficult in her current state of mind, and the connections that she obtains let her down.

Education (or learning), as it is presented in Blue Jasmine, does not have any intrinsic value; it only serves as a means for a specific purpose or as desperate prospect for a way out. I feel that Allen's disbelief in human nature has resulted in his cynical view of education in general and of education of women in particular.

This view of education brings back images of bleak periods in the history of Feminism; for generations women had to work much harder than men in order to be taken seriously. Moreover, their dedication was mocked or frowned upon by men (and sometimes by women). Until the 1980s gaining admission to either Oxford or Cambridge was much more difficult for women than for men, since their enrollment was limited to the only few openings in the women’s colleges.

Once they were admitted, their presence in these universities was not always welcome. Earlier in the century the poet and critic John Betjeman expressed a highly negative view of Oxford’s women who “drive out many good men from the clubs and societies they invade.” He even accused them of raising the standard of examinations since “they work so more doggedly than many of the men” The prominent feminist Edith Summerskill (an Oxford graduate, a physician, a Member of Parliament and a Minister of Cabinet), wrote to her daughter Shirley, a student in Oxford in the fifties that “it would be quite inaccurate to suggest that we were welcomed into the universities or into the public life”

 Blue Jasmine does not take place in the 1950s, a period when women were accused of going to university only to find a suitable husband, but in the present. Thus Jasmine must have attended university toward the end of the 20th century; I don't believe that at that time many women dropped out of school in order  to become  socialites.

Critics would argue  that Blue Jasmine is one of Woody Allen's best films, and  I am quite certain that it will win numerous awards. And yes, it is true that Cate Blanchett is brilliant as Jasmine and Woody Allen's  homage to old Blanche from Streetcar Named Desire is touching. However, we should not forget how hard we worked to get to where we are today and leave the 1950s behind. So at the risk of sounding humorless, I say: "it's not funny" and demand not to be  sent back there.

Simone De Beauvoir And The Burden Of The Double Day, Revisited

 NOV.10.2013 - 2:54 PM

The other day I heard an inspiring yet somewhat disturbing story. It was about the challenges of a young career woman-- a mother, in the relentless business world. Her daughter celebrated her birthday at the preschool and had warned the  mother that if she failed to show up to the party on time, she would dismiss her as a mother.

On the appointed day the mother had to attend a meeting which was due to end fifteen minutes prior to the party. As it was rush hour, she knew that she would never get from the center of Tel Aviv  to the party on time. Desperate times called for desperate measures, thus she had planned ahead and hired a delivery motorcyclist who waited for her at the end of the meeting and raced  through heavy traffic to the school: She wasn't late.

This time the mother found a solution, but I have to wonder about all the other instances when she couldn't, and about all the important occasions in her daughter’s life that she had to miss.The preschooler and  her mother suffered many disappointments.  It seems that from an early age the daughter learnt that a threat could actually be an effective tool to help her mother steer in her direction.

The story demonstrates the creativity and resourcefulness of the mother, she thinks outside the box and comes up with innovative solutions. Those are rare and sought after qualities even in the business world. However, it is a sad comment on our society when a  mother  has to literally risk her life to get to a her daughter's birthday party on time.

For generations Feminists have been wrestling with the issue of combining home and work. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, (1953) was against women's employment and argued that combining home and work meant a burden of the ‘double day’ which underpinned the subordinate position of women in society. She further details the hardships in store for women, at all professional levels, who attempt to combine marriage and work. She points out the difficulties of the woman worker or employee, the secretary, the saleswoman, all of whom go to work outside the home. It is much more difficult for them to combine their employment with household duties, which would seem to require at least three and a half hours a day, with perhaps six hours on Sunday – a good deal to add to the hours in factory or office. As for the learned professions, even if women lawyers, doctors, and professors obtain some housekeeping help, the home and children are for them also a burden that is a heavy handicap.

De Beauvoir, who never married, wrote about the plight of working married women. The sociologists Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein studied working mothers and like most Feminists of their era, advocated part-time work for mothers once their children went to school. They promoted this style of work in their book Women’s Two Roles (1956) since they regarded being  part of the working force for women as a mission and as an end in itself.

Today, sixty years later, most mothers cannot afford to work part time even if they wish to do so. De Beauvoir was right: many women, mothers in particular, still face the burden of the double day once they get home. And if they need to make some changes in their work's schedule, they have to take heroic measures.

After all this time, most men still find it easier to view this situation as a woman’s problem, but this  is a grave oversight. Men  should help make the working environment  conducive for mothers, as it is also their own children that the mothers are forced to disappoint.

I hope that the daughter in the story would not grow up believing that it's just not worth it. Moreover, it will be unfortunate if, in order not to disappoint their own daughters, she and other female friends would decide either not to have children like de Beauvoiror, or if they do have them to go back to being stay-at home moms like most of their foremothers.

What Would Dorian Say? Or My New Gray hair

That I stopped dying my hair is not news of any importance, but seeing Hilary Clinton’s soft golden hair, as she faces Barack Obama, on the front page of Ha’aretz today, I realized again, that when it comes to gray hair a rose is never just a rose. And no, this post is not about Feminism (with a capital F), although I must admit that whenever I attend any Feminist function I notice a sea of gray hair.

For as long as I can remember, my mother had beautiful  gray hair, she kept it short and let it dry in the sun. For a nurse, it was a practical no-nonsense hair style, and it suited her personality. I was convinced that one day I would be just like her. But when the time came and I turned gray, one of my daughters asked me to dye my hair. I hesitated; I always considered myself a woman who accepted  life changes, and imagined that I would age, if not gracefully, at least, with style.

 My daughter argued that it was too early, that I was too young to be old.  She even paraphrased a favorite line from The Diary of Bridget Jones in which Bridget admits that, as a student of women magazines, she knew better than to believe that we were judged by our personality.

As my daughter is the family’s fashion arbiter, I deferred my plan to grow old and seized the last days of spring by restoring my hair back to its original dark color. After all, I told myself, it was important to make my daughter proud.

But, from my experience,  trying to please our loved ones hardly ever works. I knew the truth behind my gray roots, and resented the effort of hiding it from the rest of the world. Whenever I saw gray haired women I found myself  complimenting them on their hair, and then explaining  why it was that I had dark hair. Of course I sounded false and hypocritical. I experienced a similar unease (and even wrote a post about it), under very different, and graver, circumstances, when we lived on the green line. Then too I felt that I had to justify to the world why I lived in a town which was considered a settlement.

A psychologist might call my predicament in both cases a cognitive dissonance, but it simply translates to not being true to myself. I was lucky that, with those two different issues, I was able to remedy the situations and to live according to my beliefs again. I moved back to Tel Aviv and stopped dying my hair.

Inside I don’t feel old, not even a bit,  but I wonder what other people see when a gray haired woman skate by them. This is a new thought, probably my dark hair blended better, and made me less conspicuous in the park.

My daughter told me the other day that gray hair is back, it may be true, but I like to think of it as her way of saying that she accepts my choice.

PS. Although I chose not to explore this aspect, it is interesting to note the juxtaposition of Clinton's golden hair and Obama's "distinguished looking" gray hair.

And one more thing, several  friends commented that hair color is a matter of personal choice. I agree, and hope that it was clear that, like always, I was only talking about myself.