Courtney Martin Reinventing feminism

Feminism and the Male Brain

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Feminism is not dead, by no means.

Feminism was the water I grew up in.

We had a memorable fight. Feminism is dated?

I realized feminism wasn't about man hating and Birkenstocks.

From this you can conclude that feminism is still necessary.

So my feminism is very indebted to my mom's, but it looks very different.

In the seminars, the Trustees learn about feminism, stereotypes, affirmative action and relevant legislation.

And perhaps this is the ultimate gift of feminism, that the personal is in fact the political.

Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, the definition of feminism and, of course, passion in this talk.

Once, when my daughter Paula was in her twenties, she said to me that feminism was dated, that I should move on.

Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men.

But, while some Western feminist insights may be useful to Afghani women and other women in the developing world as they resist certain forms of male oppression, we should not assume as Western feminists often have that our job is to proselytize our feminism. On the contrary, the feminism expressed by women such as these Afghani heroines should educate us in the West about our own shortcomings.

Being a visual artist, indeed, I am foremost interested to make art to make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism, and become an important, timeless, universal work of art.

Blogger Courtney Martin examines the perennially loaded word feminism in this personal and heartfelt talk. She talks through the three essential paradoxes of her generation's quest to define the term for themselves.

Now I tell you this I tell you this at the risk of embarrassing myself, because I think part of the work of feminism is to admit that aesthetics, that beauty, that fun do matter.

It is, in fact, unlikely that feminism played any role in President George W. Bush s decision to take the United States to war. But cultural concerns allowed him to recruit quite a few unlikely allies.

But I suspected there was something really important about this whole feminism thing, so I started covertly tiptoeing into my mom's bookshelves and picking books off and reading them never, of course, admitting that I was doing so.

Moreover, intellectually, these women remind us that Western feminism did not have to evolve the way it did, and can still change and grow to embrace a more satisfying and humane definition of equality. Simone de Beauvoir, whose seminal book

Meanwhile, many privileged women, instilled with a strong sense of entitlement, dismiss feminism as passé. But gender discrimination continues to pervade all aspects of society, with most social and political institutions continuing to foster glass ceilings, if not outright female subordination.

All three were powerful prime ministers of their countries, though perhaps not the epitome of what might be regarded as feminine values. They all outdid men at their own game and had little time for what came to be called feminism.

If in the Islamic Revolution, the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and didn't have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Tehran women who were educated, forward thinking, non traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist.

Marcus Buckingham, a business consultant, made the case that the data showed that women have become less happy over the past 40 years. Blogs, newsmagazines, and daytime talk shows agonized over the notion that feminism all that freedom, all those choices was actually making women sadder.

Maybe this is because feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.

Courses in the history of culture taught tolerance for cultural and gender differences and dealt with the gender equality, male and female roles in society and feminism and sought to inculcate creative and critical thinking that went beyond gender differences to the value of individual personality and talents.

Women s advocacy has also shaped a new approach to poverty alleviation in Morocco, in the form of the National Initiative for Human Development, which integrates efforts to improve education with better sanitation and housing. It is no exaggeration to say that the Moroccan women s movement has become the cutting edge of reform, engaging Islamization, modernization, democratization, and feminism.

In fact, the women had told the researchers whom Buckingham cited that they were not satisfied with many areas of their lives. If Western women have learned anything in the past 40 years, it is how to be unsatisfied with the status quo an important insight for the rest of the world, as we seek to export Western style feminism.

The message from the media was one of constant nagging and blame, such as the famous Newsweek cover that asserted (wrongly) that an older single woman had more likelihood of being in a terrorist attack than of finding a husband. The whole narrative, as the writer Susan Faludi correctly perceived, was not about marriage at all it reflected a backlash against feminism.

The emerging consensus in India in support of greater rights and freedoms for women, while certainly causing some upheaval and adjustment (especially within the growing middle classes) has not yet and might never poison the basic trust and warmth between men and women. Nor does it seem likely to emulate the splintered, individualized, solitary society and the commodified sexual revolution that Western, self based feminism reflects.

It is often assumed that modern feminism has no place, and thus can make little headway, in societies undergoing a religious revival, particularly in the Islamic world. But the real progress made in recent years on women s rights in Morocco suggests otherwise a unique combination of activism by secular and religious women, the calculations of political parties, and a significant role for the King has led to real progress.

I was so sure that Muslim women should be allowed to speak for themselves because of the faces of Muslim feminism I encountered in recent travels notably in Jordan, a country fascinatingly poised between tradition and innovation, developing under a forward looking monarchy that is seeking to modernize and, to an extent, democratize. For those Westerners who worry about Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world, surely Jordan is a worthy model to understand, support, and engage.