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Feminism
Will Work For Food
Sharon Hays On The Real Cost Of Welfare Reform
Look at it this way: Keeping a child on welfare costs about sixteen hundred dollars a year in cash and services. To keep that same child in foster care costs about six thousand dollars a year. And if that child winds up in prison, the cost is around twenty thousand dollars a year. Most governments figured out a long time ago that welfare is the cheapest way to keep people out of institutions — and also to keep them from taking to the streets to protest their poverty.
August 2004
Feminism Then And Now
A Conversation With Alix Kates Shulman
The definition is much broader now that feminist ideas have spread throughout the culture. I would say that anybody who wants to call herself a feminist is a feminist. In addition, there are “applied feminists” — to borrow the writer Carolyn Heilbrun’s wonderful term — meaning someone who may not call herself a feminist but who lives like one. In the early days, there was a lot of debate about who was a real feminist. At the beginning of any movement, definitions seem to matter more. In the late sixties, there was a sense that we were just a handful of people. As the movement spread, we were very worried about being co-opted. So whether or not a newcomer was a “true” feminist seemed to matter, especially if that person was representing feminism in the media; there was a lot of mistrust of the media. We didn’t want to give up on our larger ideals and settle for something less.
June 1998Girls
Besides teaching sixth- and seventh-grade English, I’m also homeroom teacher for the entire seventh grade, which consists of forty-nine girls who are impossible to tell apart as they all appear to be named Lisa and wear identical outfits — white blouses, green skirts, green knee socks.
June 1998My Fat Lover
My lover is fat. It upsets some people to hear me state this so baldly. “Doesn’t it hurt her feelings?” they ask, as if the polite thing were to act as if I hadn’t noticed that my lover weighs nearly three hundred pounds. Perhaps they think she hasn’t noticed, either — that, upon reading what I have written, she will realize for the very first time that she is fat.
November 1997Between Living And Dying
A Conversation With Anne Finger About Disability, Abortion, And Assisted Suicide
We’re being told that medicine is supposed to get rid of disabled people — either by curing us or killing us. This idea is deeply rooted in industrial culture. I think there will be tremendous social pressure to “choose” suicide in the future.
December 1996A Failed Divorce
Living beyond my means in a Manhattan apartment with two babies, no income, and a philandering husband, I suddenly found myself as vulnerable and dependent as any traditional suburban housewife.
May 1996On Becoming A Postfertility Woman
From the moment menstruation begins and the first drop of fertile blood appears, girls are trained to fear unwanted pregnancies. I remember well my initiation into the disquieting ways of my body: as my mother and I walked down the wet slate path toward the car, she turned to me, paused momentarily, and said, “We’ll help you out if you get into trouble.” (Trouble. A code word for pregnancy, dead ends, the facts of life not yet discussed.)
August 1995A Woman’s Place
My mother was content to be a housewife; I — computer literate, liberal-to-left, educated — celebrate the achievements women have made during my lifetime and believe in the flexibility and potential of feminist politics. In my mother’s eyes, however, feminism has, at best, abandoned her; at worst, it has actively hunted her down.
December 1993Lady Con
Even with two thick coverlets over the blankets, her pelvic bone pressed like a wooden hanger against my cheek; I was sure it would leave a red mark. She had been eating for nearly two weeks now. How thin could she have been when she was first released?
September 1991Out Of Season
Last week while she was in bed with the first bout of morning sickness, she watched the “Donahue” show. The woman he was interviewing, a fleshy redhead who leaned sensuously toward the camera, had just written The Mistress Book.
September 1991
