Purpose of this blog
Thanks for joining me! I’m Rachel and I’m an Anthropology student at Purdue University. This blog is for an American Studies class for which I am doing a final project on feminist social movements and the underlying societal problems they aim to address, as well as the dynamics of social movements in general.
Collective identity plays a key role in mobilization and effectiveness of social movements. Activists aim to frame collective identities that will help them recruit participants who can relate to the issue. The ability of activists to create a sense of collective identity and a collective “who we are” sentiment of group pride is a crucial factor in the effectiveness of a social movement. Collective identities are also in constant interplay with personal identities, but they are never simply the combination of the members’ personal identities. Rather, a collective identity represents a common denominator of the group or the factor that relates all the members, while personal identities are the bundle of characteristics, beliefs, values, and interests that are unique to each group member. Collective identity is also not equivalent to shared beliefs and values among all members; instead, it is more of a sharing of goals with the group that does not necessarily require a sense of comradery among its members. Collective identities represent imagined as well as concrete identities, and they help us to make sense of the social world.
Ideas from Francesca Polletta and James Jasper’s article “Collective Identity and Social Movements.”
It has long been the norm to associate men with culture and women with nature. Sherry Ortner wrote an influential article on this topic titled “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” that was published in Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere’s prominent 1974 book Women, Culture, and Society, a pioneering work in the area of women’s studies and the anthropology of gender. In the times of early humans, it is commonly thought that men made tools and interacted with society at large while women were in charge of household and homemaking duties. The root of this theory is women’s association with reproduction, e.g. birth and raising children, and therefore with biology and nature. It has subsequently led to an understanding of two separate spheres to which people belong: women are meant to stay in the home in the domestic and family sphere while men belong to the outside social sphere. Michelle Rosaldo also recognizes that such an assumption has become so normalized in our society now that we often don’t bother to question it. This normalization of gender role division is a central problem in women’s and gender issues because people will not feel the need to change something they don’t notice in the first place.
This simple graphic makes the gender wage gap very clear. The wage gap is an effect of the system of oppression of which women are victims because it is a manifestation of the implicit and explicit biases people have toward women. By this I mean that high-up people in companies implicitly or explicitly value the work of women less than they value the work of men. This can happen for various reasons, one of which is the ancient association of women with nature and men with culture that I’ve mentioned previously. Women are primarily in charge of reproductive processes, e.g. giving birth to and raising children, so employers may account for the possibility of a mother’s obligations to her children before hiring her. Women receive maternity leave while men do not (in most countries, including the US), which creates an imbalance in parenting duties. This leads to women staying home more and therefore working less and getting paid less. To combat this, governments should sponsor paternity leave programs for companies as well so that parenting responsibilities are more equal, ultimately leading to more equal pay.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2017 is a good resource that tracks the wage gap and publishes a report on it annually.
There are countless international organizations relevant to women’s issues: the Union of International Associations’ Yearbook of International Organizations identifies over 1,000 organizations related to the keyword “women” alone. Some have specific aims, such as Graduate Women International (GWI, headquartered in Geneva), while others are more broadly representative of women’s issues, like the International Council of Women (ICW, headquartered in Seoul). Many countries have their own national organizations aligning with the worldwide feminist movement, many of which have international ties. The ICW, founded in 1888, is one of the key international organizations (IOs) associated with transnational womanism and feminist movements, and arguably the first official IO to truly prioritize women’s issues. Other organizations formed in following years, focusing first on woman suffrage and branching out to other women’s rights issues.
Several organizations exist within the UN that address or are dedicated to women’s issues. The most prominent of these is the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, or UN-Women, within the General Assembly. The Human Rights Council in the General Assembly also addresses women’s rights, as does the Status of Women Commission in the Economic and Social Council of the UN. There are also organizations within the Secretariat that address women’s issues including the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG/SVC) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Over the past century and a half, the women’s movement has become increasingly globalized. While some nations are more willing to address the issue than others, it is quickly becoming a primary concern among women (and men) across the world. There are a great deal of international organizations, non-governmental organizations, intergovernmental organizations, and other communities dedicated to this issue worldwide. There are also many facets of the issue, including women’s political and economic rights, violence and harassment rights, and reproductive rights, to name a few.
Cultural influences on women’s movements in different parts of the world play a significant role in understanding social roles, making cultural relativism a necessary tool for understanding. For example, in South Korea and other East Asian countries, Neo-Confucianism has played a vital role in shaping ideas of women’s rights and societal roles. Neo-Confucian thought stressed a rigid hierarchical order of human relationships based on age, sex, and inherited social status. The relationships defined by Confucian thought require three obediences of women: to the father when young, to the husband when married, and to the son in old age. Women could never reach a stage in their lives when they were afforded self-autonomy – no matter her age or status, there was always a man to report to. The South Korean feminist movement is progressing, but social values like these can serve as obstacles to those initiatives. This demonstrates the immense influence cultural norms can have on the progress of the feminist movement in a society.
In this New York Times article, Manohla Dargis says “I learned much from watching the screen, including things about men and women that I later had to unlearn or learn to ignore. I learned that women needed to be protected, controlled and left at home. I learned that men led, women followed.” This issue is addressed in the Miss Representation film, discussing that women’s representations in various forms of media are often sexualized and demonstrate certain ideals like submissiveness and servitude that they are supposedly meant to embody.
The lessons Dargis lists that she learned from movies were: “women are there to be kissed, women need a spanking, women live to support men, women can transcend stereotypes, women can be heroes, women can be dangerous, women can be complicit, and women can speak out.” The first few of these lessons she discusses here align more with the theme of female oppression that is so common in movies, especially older movies. However, later lessons address more positive realizations with more feminist themes. It seems that in recent years, filmmakers are recognizing that portrayals of women in movies have deep, long-lasting effects on women and that they should represent more ideas of female empowerment rather than oppression.
Rania Youssef wore a black see-through dress revealing her legs to the Cairo Film Festival, and she has been charged for “inciting debauchery” by two Egyptian lawyers and could be jailed for up to five years if found guilty. According to one of the lawyers, her appearance “did not meet societal values, traditions and morals and therefore undermined the reputation of the festival and the reputation of Egyptian women in particular” (BBC). Many Egyptians were outraged by her outfit while some said she should be able to wear whatever she wants. There have been several other cases of Egyptian women being charged and/or jailed for revealing dress in the recent past.
This ideology contrasts sharply with American ideals of appearance. As I’ve previously discussed, American society values a sexualized and objectified view of women, so her outfit would have been perfectly acceptable at an American film festival. In fact, many female celebrities have worn much more revealing clothes to events in the United States.
This again highlights the point that the sexualization of women has become highly normalized in society, even for women themselves. It further shows that such a mindset may be spreading to more traditionally conservative cultures such as that of Egypt.
Miss Representation is a documentary that addresses misrepresentation of women in media. The film’s website describes the problem as follows:
The media is selling the idea that girls’ and women’s value lies in their youth, beauty, and sexuality and not in their capacity as leaders. Boys learn that their success is tied to dominance, power, and aggression. We must value people as whole human beings, not gendered stereotypes.
This documentary led to some personal revelations. It’s maddening but inspiring, and it’s on Netflix.
Here is the trailer:
The #MeToo movement has given a platform to many women to come forth and individually tell their stories. This has of course affected the celebrity world as well, famously including Harvey Weinstein and now Brett Kavanaugh, among others. Christine Blasey Ford bravely came forward to speak out against Kavanaugh, accusing him of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers, which he of course denies. The accusation was that he attempted to rape her at a party in their high school years. She risked her and her family’s safety by speaking out, as she received a great deal of death threats. After a tumultuous and emotional hearing, the Judiciary Committee agreed to a one-week supplemental background check into Kavanaugh by the FBI. Kavanaugh never really agreed to this; rather, he talked around the question of whether he would be open to the background check whenever asked.
This trial showed that the #MeToo movement has become pivotal in American society such that women feel empowered to speak out against prominent male figures who have sexually harassed or assaulted them. While Blasey Ford was hesitant to come forward with her claims, she was immediately embraced by the #MeToo community. As a society, we still have a long way to go, but this empowerment and empathy is a promising start.
#MeToo has inspired many varied anti-sexual harassment movements and actions including #MeTooPhD, its academia counterpart. Karen Kelsky created the hashtag on social media as well as this spreadsheet survey for women to anonymously tell their stories of sexual harassment in the academy, which has over 2,400 entries. It is a place for women in academia to “share their stories without fear of censorship or judgment, to know they are not alone, and to find strength in numbers and a foundation from which to recover and perhaps take action.” In this article, Kelsky mentions that she got some responses articulating that if the survey were to be completely accurate, it would also contain entries describing situations in which men treated women with respect. This is a sign of how toxic our system of masculinity truly is: men are now wanting a prize for treating women with the respect they deserve. This is sickening. Of course not all men expect trophies, but the nature of the system encourages oppression, thus men who do not comply feel they should be rewarded. Society has become completely backward.
This author proposes another spinoff of the #MeToo movement: #IAmSexist. He calls upon all men to recognize that they promulgate male privilege, male power, and toxic masculinity in many ways, consciously and unconsciously. This system of power and oppression is part of modern society whether we like it or not, and unless you are speaking out against it, you become part of it. In some ways, it is not our fault that we have implicit biases against women; society teaches us that to survive and be socially accepted, we have to conform, and in order to conform, we must adhere to others’ beliefs.
These beliefs in systems of male power have a long history: we have posited that in ancient society, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Men were associated with culture and women with nature. Women bear and rear the children, so their role was perceived as primarily domestic work to support the men and families. We now know that these posited roles may have fallen victim to our current cultural lens and the transposition of modern views onto the past. Whether or not this is true, female oppression has a lengthy history, and even if male promulgation of this system of power and oppression is subconscious, we all must actively work against it.
With the advent of information and communication technologies like the internet and social media, online social movements are on the rise. The internet acts as an organizational and mobilization vehicle for activists, altering the dynamic of movements. Coordinators of social movements are able to reach wider audiences, even getting people involved who don’t necessarily consider themselves to be activists. I have personally been on the receiving end of this phenomenon: if not for several forms of media, social and otherwise, I would not be as involved in women’s social movements as I am.
Information and communication technologies were of course integral to the success of the #MeToo movement. Tarana Burke was able to mobilize so many people by creating a community of people who had been through similar experiences and who could offer each other empathy. She did this with a hashtag on Twitter, which has been trending on and off since then and sparked spinoffs that reach and even wider audience. Twitter, other social media, and the news allowed this movement to be as successful as it has been and continues to be. Thus, online resources and technologies are revolutionizing and changing dynamics of social movements, making them more accessible to the masses.
Ideas from Noriko Hara and Bi-Yun Huang’s article, “Online Social Movements.”
As Tarana Burke discussed briefly in her talk in September, the #MeToo movement isn’t about bringing down the perpetrator – it’s about creating awareness of the toxicity of our male-privileged society, joining in the cycle of giving and receiving empathy, and taking steps to heal oneself and get one’s sense of humanity back. Our norms teach us to respect fear more than we respect ourselves, and they teach us that women are the weaker sex in need of protection. The #MeToo movement is a way to show the world that we are not weak and that we will fight back when we are oppressed. We need to address the root of the problem: systems of gender privilege and oppression that are at the very core of our culture.
That being said, bringing down the perpetrator is still a bonus: it takes one more bad person away from society before they do more bad things, if only temporarily. According to the article, it also provides a new space for women to potentially occupy: “The analysis shows that the #MeToo movement shook, and is still shaking, power structures in society’s most visible sectors.” For example, “Robin Wright replaced Kevin Spacey as lead actor on “House of Cards,” Emily Nemens replaced Lorin Stein as editor of “The Paris Review,” and Tina Smith replaced Al Franken as a senator from Minnesota.” While women have replaced men in 43% of cases, this alone does not guarantee social change; “women are still vastly underrepresented at the top of American institutions.” The conversation must continue in order to bring about true social change.
Many people have heard of the #MeToo movement on the news as more and more women come forward to confront our diseased society, but few know about its beginnings. Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, came to chat with us about the movement, its meanings, and its implications at Purdue University about a month ago. I attended the event, and I found it to be very empowering. She touched on a variety of topics, including social norms about fear, the power of empathy, our sense of humanity, and many more. Sexual assault chips away at one’s sense of humanity, and services or counseling are like a band-aid, not a fix; empathy is what starts to help heal. “Society teaches us to pretend we’re okay,” and we have to fight that by confronting our fears and trusting ourselves.
The root of the movement for Burke was the idea of “how can I feel pain and joy at the same time?” She described a situation in which she might have a good day, get home feeling happy, then find herself reminding herself “I ain’t shit.” It’s like a mindset, a dark feeling you can’t fully escape from even after having the best of days; and that’s okay. We have to learn to “turn that volume down to one or two” and turn the volume of the good commentary up, which takes time to figure out. She referenced Maya Angelou several times as a guiding force in her life: she knows she is a Phenomenal Woman, but she doesn’t always feel it – and that’s okay.
(Quotes are from her talk in Loeb Playhouse at Purdue University on September 19, 2018.)
Feminist Social Movements in America 