On 9/2/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie:
> Muslim women (beginning with Muhammad's first wife, Khadija, who was a
> businesswoman) actually already had the right to own their own
> property when such a right was not available to women in predominantly
> Christian societies.
how does this work _in practice_ (rather than just in theory)? Is it
possible to dig up one of your on-line sources that talks about the
actual life of women _on the ground_ in Iran?
It seems to me that you, as well as many men, are getting too used to
the idea of not doing their own research and having women do it for
them. What makes them think they can opine about Muslim women in
faraway nations without doing any research at all on their own?
That said, here's another useful article:
Louise Halper, "Law and Women's Agency in Post-Revolutionary Iran,"
Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 28, Winter 2005
<http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlg/vol28/halper.pdf>. It's
focused on women's struggle for better laws and practice of marriage
and divorce, and the question of property is discussed in that
context.
me:
> > further, in many cases women participate in a workplace in a way that
> > is controlled in an extremely paternalistic/patronizing/patriarchal
> > way. It used to be that female teachers in the US had to live up to
> > all sorts of "moral" rules, about their sexuality, etc. I doubt that a
> > country which requires that women wear special clothing that covers
> > their heads and bodies would be any more liberal here.
Yoshie:
> Women in the USA to this day do not enjoy paid maternity leaves common
> in almost all countries: "...
>
> In contrast, in Iran, women enjoy paid maternity leaves: ...
Maternity leave is a good thing.
So, what are you doing to win it here? Only women are supposed to
struggle for it?
But when it's handed down from above rather than being won via
struggle from below, the powers that be are likely to take it away or
interpret it in a way that's extremely paternalistic.
Why do you assume that the maternity leave in Iran was --
automatically? -- handed down from above to women rather than women
winning it, since you say that nothing happens automatically? It's an
interesting contradiction in your thought.
Here's an analogy: it used to be that the US had a pretty good welfare
system (compared to what existed before), handed down to poor women by
LBJ, etc. It was interpreted in an increasingly paternalistic way and
eventually (under Clinton) became work-fare. As far as I can tell, the
positive aspects of the old system arose due to popular struggle, not
due to the benevolence of our rulers or the automatic workings of the
Invisible Hand.
What's missing in your account is women in welfare rights
organizations, trade unions, etc. actively fighting to shape the
welfare system, the sort of women's struggles that Mimi Abramowitz,
Jill Quadagno, etc. have written about.
> There are many things that women in Iran would want to change, but in
> some respects they enjoy more feminist social and economic rights than
> American women do.
I wasn't bragging about the success of US feminism compared to other
countries' feminism (and I don't know where you got the idea that I
was). Instead, I was using the country I am most familiar with as a
source of examples. (I try not to talk about countries about which I
don't know very much. If I do talk about other countries, I talk about
those aspects I know about.)
Again, the nature and content of "rights" might look very different
_in practice_ than on paper, especially since women in Iran have so
little power in their society.
Again, you are assuming lack of power without bothering to prove it.
I admit that head-scarves, full-body veils, etc. can be quite
charming, but do the Iranian women dictate what the Iranian men wear?
Islam has male as well as female codes of modesty, and codes differ
from one society to another (e.g., beards were de rigeur in
Afghanistan under the Taliban).
As a matter of fact, all societies have gender-differentiated dress
codes. You can transgress them, but only at your cost.
(Britney and Chrisina might look better in burkas.)
> Perhaps, American men such as yourself ought to
> first exert yourself to win American women the rights that women in
> Iran already enjoy.
getting beyond the implied insult, the key is not for women in the US
to aspire to get what exists [in theory] in some other country (and to
be supported in their aspirations by men) as much as to build on
actual, concrete, aspirations and problems here and now to improve the
independent self-organization of women here and the rights and
privileges that women receive here. (and it's important for men to
support these efforts in a non-paternalistic way.)
Well, the fact remains that American women do not have the right to
paid maternity leaves that almost all other women in the world have,
and American male leftists are too busy looking at veiled women in the
Middle East to help American women get what they need.
if you have any contact with the independent women's organizations in
Iran, Yoshie, maybe you could help build bridges between them and such
organizations here.
It would be good if we could bring Iranian women activists to an
INCITE! conference or a comparable network of women of color, rather
than liberal feminist organizations, but that's best done by fluent
Farsi speakers.
> > It's a little strange to find myself making (Marxist-) feminist points
> > to Yoshie. The fact is that there is no automatic process that
> > produces the liberation of women. Throwing women in the workforce can
> > easily lead to their being thrown out again (as with women in the US
> > after WW2). Capitalist dynamics only create possibilities for gender
> > equality: it is women's struggle that can realize the possibilities.
> That's because you assume, without evidence, that I'm arguing that
> there is an "automatic process that produces the liberation of women."
if you were to present your assertipms about automatic processes in
conjunction with acknowledgement of the existence of power structures
resisting liberation, maybe people (it's not just me) wouldn't make
such assumptions.
It seems to me that, on a list like this, the necessity of both
changes in larger political economic conditions and self organizing by
women (or any other group) ought to be a given, rather than stated in
each posting. After all, I'm not writing a primer to Marxism and
feminism here!
On 9/2/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I had to restrain myself from signing Joanne Landy's
latest open letter on Iran after reading your 9 thousandth defense of the
Islamic Republic.
There is always a simple solution that I have proposed many times
before: not reading my postings. It's a mystery to me why you can't
restrain yourself from reading what I write. Since you are still
apparently reading what I post here, the purge can be only explained
by your intolerance to views that differ from yours.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
