From: "Beverly Hill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Karen Allen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Fw: WDRC Barbara Ehrenreich's Barnard speech
Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 21:03:38 -0700
Re: WDRC Barbara Ehrenreich's Barnard speech
This is the speech given to the 2004 graduating women of Columbia
University. Barbara Ehrenreich is a well known social commentator,
author
and journalist.
> Barnard Commencement 2004
> Speech by Barbara Ehrenreich
>
> It is a total thrill to share this day with you today. I really
> feel honored to participate.
>
> How many of you are parents of graduates? What I'm really curious
> about is how you managed to get here today, after paying all that
> money for tuition - Greyhound bus? I put two kids thru Ivy League
> myself, which meant I had to hitchhike to their commencement
> ceremonies.
>
> I had another speech prepared for today- all about the cost of
> college and how the doors to higher education are closing to all
> but the wealthy. It was a good speech -lots of laugh lines - but 2
> weeks ago something came along that wiped the smile right off my
> face. You know, you saw them too - the photographs of American
> soldiers sadistically humiliating and abusing detainees in Iraq.
>
> These photos turned my stomach - yours too, I'm sure. But they did
> something else to me: they broke my heart. I had no illusions
> about the United States mission in Iraq, but it turns out that I
> did have some illusions about women.
>
> There was the photo of Specialist Sabrina Harman smiling an impish
> little smile and giving the thumbs sign from behind a pile of
> naked Iraqi men - as if to say, "Hi mom, here I am in Abu Ghraib!"
>
> We've gone from the banality of evil... to the cuteness of evil.
>
> There was the photo of Private First Class Lynndie England
> dragging a naked Iraqi man on a leash. She's cute too, in those
> cool cammy pants and high boots. He's grimacing in pain. If you
> were doing PR for al Qaeda, you couldn't have staged a better
> picture to galvanize misogynist Islamic fundamentalists around the
> world.
>
> And never underestimate the misogyny of the real enemy, which was
> never the Iraqis; it was and should be the Al Qaeda-type
> fundamentalist extremists: Two weeks ago in eastern Afghanistan,
> suspected Taliban members (I thought we had defeated them, but
> never mind) ... poisoned three little girls for the crime of going
> to school. That seems to be the attitude in that camp: In the case
> of women: better dead than well-read.
>
> But here in these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have every Islamic
> fundamentalist stereotype of Western culture -- all nicely
> arranged in one hideous image-- imperial arrogance, sexual
> depravity ... and gender equality.
>
> Now we don't know whether women were encouraged to partcipate. All
> we know is they didn't say no. Of the 7 US soldiers now charged
> with the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 3 are women : Harman,
> England and Megan Ambuhl.
>
> Maybe I shouldn't have been so shocked.
>
> Certainly not about the existence of abuse. Reports of this and
> similar abuse have been leaking out of Guantanamo and immigrant
> detention centers in NYC for over a year We know, if we've been
> paying attention, that similar kinds of abuse, including sexual
> humiliation, are not unusal in our own vast US prison system.
>
> We know too, that good people can do terrible things under the
> right circumstances. This is what psychologist Stanley Milgram
> found in his famous experiments in the 1960s. Sabrina and Lynndie
> are not congenitally evil people. They are working class women who
> wanted to go to college and knew the military as the quickest way
> in that direction. Once they got in, they wanted to fit in.
>
> And I shouldn't be surprised either because I never believed that
> women are innately less aggressive than men. I have argued this
> repeatedly - once with the famously macho anthropologist Napoleon
> Chagnon. When he kept insisting that women are just too nice and
> incapable of combat, I answered him the best way I could: I asked
> him if he wanted to step outside...
>
> I have supported full opportunity for women within the military,
> in part because -- with rising tuition-- it's one of the few
> options around for low-income young people.
>
> I opposed the first Gulf War in 1991, but at the same time I was
> proud of our servicewomen and delighted that their presence irked
> their Saudi hosts.
>
> Secretly, I hoped that the presence of women would eventually
> change the military, making it more respectful of other people and
> their cultures, more capable of genuine peace keeping.
>
> That's what I thought, but I don't think that any more.
>
> A lot of things died with those photos.
>
> The last moral justification for the war with Iraq died with those
> photos. First the justification was the supposed weapons of mass
> destruction. Then it was the supposed links between Saddam and
> Osama bin Laden - those links were never found either. So the
> final justification was that we had removed an evil dictator who
> tortured his own people. As recently as April 30, George Bush
> exulted that the torture chambers of Iraq were no longer
> operating.
>
> Well, it turns out they were just operating under different
> management. We didn't displace Saddam Hussein; we replaced him.
>
> And when you throw in the similar abuses in Afghanistan and
> Guantanamo, in immigrant detention centers and US prisons, you see
> that we have created a spreading regime of torture - an empire of
> pain.
>
> But there's another thing that died for me in the last couple of
> weeks - a certain kind of feminism or, perhaps I should say, a
> certain kind of feminist naivet�.
>
> It was a kind of feminism that saw men as the perpetual
> perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and male sexual
> violence against women as the root of all injustice. Maybe this
> sort of feminism made more sense in the 1970s. Certainly it seemed
> to make sense when we learned about the rape camps in Bosnia in
> the early 90s. There was a lot of talk about women then - I
> remember because I was in the discussions - about rape as an
> instrument of war and even war as an extension of rape.
>
> I didn't agree, but I didn't disagree very loudly either. There
> seemed to be at least some reason to believe that male sexual
> sadism may somehow be deeply connected to our species' tragic
> propensity for violence.
>
> That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.
>
> But it's not just the theory of this na�ve feminism that was
> wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy
> and vision for change rested on the assumption, implicit or stated
> outright, that women are morally superior to men. We had a lot of
> debates over whether it was biology or conditioning that made
> women superior- or maybe the experience of being a woman in a
> sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority was beyond
> debate. After all, women do most of the caring work in our
> culture, and in polls are consistently less inclined toward war
> than men.
>
> Now I'm not the only one wrestling with that assumption today.
> Here's Mary Jo Melone, a columnist in the St. Petersburg Times,
> writing on May 7:
> .
> "I can't get this picture of [Pfc. Lynndie] England out of my head
> because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism
> taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal
> from men, but that we were morally superior to them."
>
> Now the implication of this assumption was that all we had to do
> to make the world a better place - kinder, less violent, more
> just - was to assimilate into what had been, for so many
> centuries, the world of men. We would fight so that women could
> become the CEOs, the senators, the generals, the judges and
> opinion-makers - becasue that was really the only fight we had to
> undertake. Because once they gained power and authority, once they
> had achieved a critical mass within the institutions of society,
> women would naturally work for change.
>
> That's what we thought, even if we thought it unconsciously. And
> the most profound thing I have to say to you today, as a group of
> brilliant young women poised to enter the world - is that it's
> just not true.
>
> You can't even argue, in the case of Abu Ghraib, that the problem
> was that there just weren't ENOUGH women in the military hierarchy
> to stop the abuses.
>
> The prison was directed by a woman, General Janis Karpinski.
>
> The top US intelligence official in Iraq, who was also responsible
> for reviewing the status of detainees prior to their release, was
> a woman, Major Gen. Barbara Fast.
>
> And the US official ultimately responsible for the managing the
> occupation of Iraq since last October was Condoleezza Rice.
>
> What we have learned, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a
> substitute for a conscience; menstrual periods are not the
> foundation of morality.
>
> This does not mean gender equality isn't worth fighting for for
> its own sake. It is. And I will keep fighting for it as long as I
> live.
>
> Gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful
> world.
>
> What I have finally come to understand, sadly and irreversibly, is
> that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of moral
> superiority on the part of women is a lazy and self-indulgent form
> of feminism.
>
> Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman -
> whether a diploma, a promotion, a right to serve alongside men in
> the military - is ipso facto - by its very nature -- a victory for
> humanity.
>
> And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle - the
> struggle for gender equality - when in fact we have many more. The
> struggles for peace, for social justice and against imperialist
> and racist arrogance ... cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be
> folded into the struggle for gender equality.
>
> Women do not change institutions simply just by assimilating into
> them. But - and this is the "but" on which all my hopes hinge - a
> CERTAIN KIND of woman can still do that-- and this is where you
> come in.
>
> We need a kind of woman who can say NO, not just to the date
> rapist or overly persistent boyfriend, but to the military or
> corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.
>
> We need a kind of woman who doesn't want to be one of the boys
> when the boys are acting like sadists or fools.
>
> And we need a kind of woman who isn't trying to assimilate, but to
> infiltrate - and subvert the institutions she goes into.
>
> YOU can be those women. And as the brightest and best educated
> women of your generation, you better be.
>
> First, because our nation is in such terrible trouble - hated
> worldwide, and not just by the fundamentalist fanatics. My version
> of patriotism is simple: When the powerful no longer act
> responsibly, then it is our responsibility to take the power away
> from them.
>
> You have to become tough-minded activists for change because the
> entire feminist project is also in terrible trouble worldwide.
> That project, which is minimally about the achievement of equality
> with men, is threatened by fundamentalisms of all kinds -
> Christian as well as Islamic.
>
> But we cannot successfully confront that threat without a moral
> vision that goes beyond gender equality. To cite an old - and far
> from na�ve -- feminist saying: "If you think equality is the goal,
> your standards are too low."
>
> It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like
> beasts.
>
> It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth
> assimilating into.
>
> I'm counting on you. I want YOU to be the face of American women
> that the world sees -- not those of Sabrina or Megan or Lynndie
> or Condoleezza.
>
> Don't let me down. Take your hard-won diplomas, your knowledge and
> your talents and go out there and RAISE HELL!
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