I’d love your requests and recommendations for future Other Feminisms posts! The recent post about the elimination of periods was prompted by a reader email, and the discussion was so robust, that I’m planning two round-up posts to respond to your comments.
On Thursday, I’ll share your replies about writing rules as a substitute for teaching virtues. But today, I’d love to hear articles or ideas that have lingered in your mind, that you’d love to explore with the community here.
And I keep a list of books I’d like to read for my Other Feminisms projects here. I’m curious if you’ve read them/have recommendations about what to pick up next!
I often find myself very drawn to the feminine strengths for and role in what Alan Jacobs calls “invitation and repair” (https://blog.ayjay.org/tag/ir/), or Sara Hendren “critique and repair.”
So much of the coverage of the idea of how we can maintain and repair tends to be about the world of business (ex: software) or culture and politics or stuff (ex: manual trades). For example The Maintainers runs mostly along those lines (https://themaintainers.org/). Women can be involved in all that for sure. But when you start digging into older ideas of maintenance often specifically feminine things like home economics come up that are less discussed today.
Many of the Other Feminisms posts & discussions I find myself bringing up with my husband and friends tie into the underlying questions of 1) what is legitimate? and 2) what is valuable? In looking back through the archives, I’m reminded of how we’ve discussed the value of old age, care work, friendships, and accessibility, as well as the legitimacy of the female body in medicine and care work-as-labor. I’d love to know what other needs and activities people see dismissed as illegitimate/valueless, and then have a chance to discuss those activities/needs and our society’s perception of them in depth.
Related to above is a thought prompted by a link you shared about school lunches some time ago. I think it was by Virginia Sole-Smith. I don’t remember if she used the exact phrase “intensive mother,” but I remember being struck by how, to her, packing a lunch didn’t seem like valuable labor but rather a symptom of diet culture that ought to be rooted out. There wasn’t space for lunch packing to be labor that a mother or father valued doing. And it’s struck me not just from her piece but many times while reading family policy thinkpieces that there has been a common rhetorical method to present one’s family life/parenting situation both as underprivileged and as normative — and thus deserving of policy support — while other approaches are a result of bad socialization/values/etc. Understandable, but I’d love to discuss how to craft arguments and approaches that account for a variety of home situations and preferences as legitimate. I am mostly atuned to this with childcare, as I keep seeing my situation getting left out at both the local and national level, but I’m sure there are others and I’d love to discuss them.
To follow up, the reason I see this connected to Other Feminisms and not just Stuff Claire Likes Talking About is that a lot of what I see dismissed as valueless or illegitimate is either historically done by women or something that presently skews female
Also, symptoms. Women are very often diagnosed with anxiety disorders because their physical symptoms aren't considered legitimate. Then six years later a physical disease or something is discovered.
Yes! When women say, 'this physical symptom is not normal for me' or 'this is something I value' or 'this choice is the right one for me', we are often ignored, discounted, devalued. I'd love Other Feminisms to be a place where we talk about approaches to make sure all voices are heard, especially those whose experiences are most routinely dismissed.
This is admittedly a goofy suggestion, but it's one I've been thinking would be really fun to hear your thoughts on for a while: I would love if you wrote about the kind of moral reasoning you can see people doing on the subreddit Am I The A**hole? It is a fascinating place because people people don't have explicit moral commitments or arguments, so what you get is a really good reflection of the culture's unconscious moral commitments. Unsurprisingly, autonomy is the most frequently invoked principle.
What gets really interesting is when the principle of autonomy conflicts with other principles. You get to see people work their way through that tension, sometimes by asserting contradictory principles, sometimes by deciding to subordinate one principle to another. This post is the best example I've found of that kind of tension: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/otvrul/aita_for_not_lying_about_why_i_could_not_remove/.
Haha, AITA is also my guilty pleasure and I definitely agree with you about how it reflects people's unconscious moral commitments! Reddit's relationship-adjacent subs are interesting to me because I think they distill both the best and the worst impulses of a certain type of moral reasoning.
Unsure if this is within the purview of the Other Feminisms project, but I reflect often upon how lucky I've been (as a man) by pure chance to be exposed to so many of these views and experiences. Growing up with some close female friends who had an openness to share what they had dealt with--from terrible men on dates, to how they had been treated differently at work, to just how they felt navigating the world--made it much simpler for me to cultivate empathy and understanding of what women face on a lot of these fronts, and to be able to support and explain why a lot of policies and social changes discussed here are necessary. I suppose I wonder what we can do (without an undue burden of emotional labor on women) to share these experiences with a fair amount of well-meaning but ignorant people (usually men, but in the upper classes a lot of these experiences are foreign across the board) so that a broader social understanding or change can take place. I'm under no illusion of everyone magically understanding the challenges that women face at once. But I do wonder what we can do to spread this knowledge to people even more in an accessible and reasonable way, in the way that Other Feminisms has done that a lot, for me.
The topic of having truly productive one-on-one conversations about ones experiences... might be it. (We put so much effort into communications that go out to large numbers of people we don't know well, at the cost of "starving off" our one-on-one correspondence.)
Re-capping the relational intricacies of how a dialogue went--or how it could be done better or more charitably--or diving into the "meta" of how a good context "sets things up" well for a good conversation to happen at a juncture in time... all this is kind of catnip for my mind! Maybe that's true for lots of other women here!
Also, the question could also ask for times you've seen SOMEONE ELSE do this well. Or "Characterize the person/writing you WANT to engage with on topics that are uncomfortable-for-you"?
Or stories of things (interactions, reading) that cause someone to "flip" their view. Have you read this, or someplace where Leah wrote about it elsewhere? http://www.leahlibresco.com/didnt-you-ever-break-on-the-floor/ Every time I go back, I realize I forgot just how encouraging the possiblity she describes is.
I haven't seen that specific piece before, but it is lovely now that I have! I do agree that broadly speaking one-on-one conversations are the place to go here--but I think so often about so many men that would never be in a place to hear this sort of thing one-on-one, or (because of who they are or the circumstances around them) don't *have* anyone who's willing to engage with them at that intimately personal level. I'm also definitely interested in what you write about the tips and tactics (for lack of a better word, not that this is a "debate" to be "won") for ensuring how these go well, or even how to discuss them outside of my experience. There is definitely a type of guy out there who's only willing to hear about these sorts of things from other men, and I would love to think more about how to present these broad experiences and facts that aren't my own in a way that still opens the floor to some breaking.
Wow. Yeah. So someone I was talking with noted talked about "tending to choose [online] community based on shared VALUES," but considering engaging more with communities based on shared INTERESTS. There's more than one way to aim for mutual respect!
If you're talking with someone who's -realllly- good at, idk, programming in Haskell... or even someone who's really NOT as good at you and is getting help from you, and engaging in a meaningful way... that's really personal! (in the latter case, accepting help involves vulnerability.) You're going to all-around be more sympathetic to them, so maybe open up a shared-interest friendship like that to more avenues of difficult-for-you discussions.
Tactics include:
1. Accept "It doesn't all depend on me." If you find someone abhorrently "wrong on the internet" and are utterly unsympathetic to them, you are maybe not the right person to "straighten them out"!! Save your energies for another convo. Often when we "take an action" like that, we invisibly prevent someone ELSE whose thoughts & views are more adjacent from responding. (But even if it's a one-on-one convo in an existing friendship... the first time it veers into a topic that is one of our "hot buttons" or we are really unprepared for.. really... we should go slow, not saying the first thing that pops into our heads.)
2. Realize that humans are predictable. Often, when someone's got a weird soapbox, you can expect this SAME conversation will come up again, possibly with him or her using the exact same WORDS. People talk about this like it's purely a bad thing simply because it's uncomfortable! My take? PREP FOR IT. My memory is basically a giant list of "things people (living and dead) have said," ranked by "emotional intensity" and "salience and/or apparent salience to various people I want to convince of things." XD So one way I prep for that is by just trawling through that corpus and juxtaposing things Person A said on a given topic with Person B's thoughts on that, iterating, and eventually come up with things that are not horrible ideas to say, (some of the out-takes are!!) and don't even sound horrible. (It's a very "I can unilaterally fix this relationship" approach, which hilariously seems to contradict what I said before about "it doesn't all depend on me," I now notice!)
There's more, of course. Hope to share more later.
What are some specific examples of conversations that have helped you? Or topics female friends have helped you on, if not too personal? (My brother-in-law used to attend a Bible study at church that was primarily composed of middle-aged-moms. His unusual work schedule--as a tutor--left his mornings free. The women would always say he's going to be such a great husband--he'd already patiently listened to tons of convos about, e.g. menopause, from womens' perspectives. XD )
I am very interested in practical things - like, as unfortunate as it is that things are the way they are, they are in fact that way, so how can we best live in this unfortunate situation? There are a hundred variations on that. How can we best advocate for ourselves with doctors who aren't listening? How can we make sure we get good medical care when the whole system doesn't work well for women? How do we make decisions about work and family, given that the modern economy isn't ideal? How can we make advantageous decisions about where to live in a world where suburbia is the unfortunate norm? How do we teach our daughters (and sons!) about all this? How do we teach our daughters about their dignity as women when the whole world teaches them their dignity comes from being little men, and when we have our own insecurities about it?
Apr 19, 2022·edited Apr 19, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
I have a similar interest in seeing more of the practical side of these discussions - perhaps more opportunities to discuss areas IRL where people interested in these topics can be more intentional about finding each other and also incorporating it into other areas of their life. I know a lot of people on here have church communities where they find this. For the rest of us I am thinking of a thread that is centered on introducing each other based on geographic location, sharing work and volunteer spaces and organizations we know of that focus on these topics and other ideas for how we all integrate these ideas into our lives. I love this substack (and many other online communities I've found around my varied and heterodox ideas) and am always looking for more ways to incorporate them into my offline life. To share broadly some of the things my husband and I do - we have a weekly book club with each other where we read about these topics together, we volunteer at a caregiving center that helps elderly folks look after their pets so that they can keep them for longer, we support a few women breadwinners living below the poverty line who are known to us in my (developing, third world) home country so that they can have more flexibility off work to raise and spend time with their young children. We are also considering home-schooling our children. Right now my paying work is in expanding abortion access but the ethos of my workplace is steeped in a very mainstream, corporate feminist outlook that is completely at odds with my own reasons for wanting abortion to be safe and equitable. I am trying to find a new/adjacent career path that would allow me to focus on what I am more passionate about which is addressing the unjust reasons many people need abortions in the first place and would love to know if anyone has suggestions of organizations doing this work that are not explicitly pro-life. I would love to hear and learn what other people do and borrow ideas off each other!!
Highly recommend working for a union! Not only do many unions do fantastic organizing, policy and research work all about making our country more equitable, they also do it from a member driven perspective that sets them apart from the nonprofit world.
yeah... you and I differ on the abortion issue specifically but I *do* think that society is organized in such a way that puts a lot of unjust pressure on women to have abortions. Like the fact that motherhood is not valued, children are not valued, in fact both are kind of stigmatized in the professional world. You have to hide your first-trimester misery and I think this is absurd. For lower-paying jobs, job schedules are unpredictable, job security is iffy already, and a new baby can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Family and community support is often lacking. There just plain aren't a lot of kids around, and that makes kids more foreign and hard to know what to do with. Pregnancy is often miserable and there isn't a lot of research on how to make it less miserable, because it isn't a priority. Everyone knows how to judge mothers for doing it wrong. And on and on and on.
You might look at the Institute for Family Studies. They're probably not exactly what you're looking for, but I think it's at least adjacent and they may link out to organizations that are closer to what you're looking for.
Thanks Mary, I completely agree with you about all the issues you listed, many of which we discuss on this substack and those are exactly the kinds of underlying issues I would prefer to be involved in addressing.
Just an aside on my desire for changing work and how it ties in my own circumstances right now, I find that even from my own very privileged position, navigating my pregnancy (and soon to be first child) has brought me up close with SO many of these issues and I have it "really good". I am probably in the top 1% of mothers in terms of the support I have from my work and my community and I still feel this way. One of the interesting things about having a workplace that is SO supportive (I get 4 months leave fully paid and a ton of flexibility around hours and remote work, plus zero guilt from coworkers) is how much I've realized it also ties me to that workplace. I am definitely grateful for how I have been treated but I don't really buy into the fact that I "owe" them anything for this, rather it is what I wish was simply the norm for everyone, in terms of humane and supportive family policy. But knowing that my husband and I want at least one more child, it does make it very difficult to look for other work because the policies offered by my current workplace are so difficult to come by and this support has been invaluable for us during this pregnancy. I had hyperemesis and my boss essentially allowed me to take almost 2-3 weeks off (working half days, time off while hospitalized, etc) without clocking it officially because she knew I needed my sick time to maximize my maternity leave. Thinking of a second pregnancy at a different job I am just at a complete loss for what I would do if I have another first trimester like the one I did this time. Someone on here mentioned first trimester paid leave and hell yes to that - but we seem so impossibly far away from something like that when the status quo is where it is right now. I recently read an incredibly depressing stat that the average american woman goes back to work 10 days after giving birth. Given that as a society that is the mean we are starting from, there is no doubt a tremendous amount of work to be done and I hope to be a part of it someday!
100% this. Also, it is a *tremendous* failure of our social contract that any of this is left up to individual employers. Treating workers like humans should be mandated by law *and* backed up by norms/values that respecting people's humanity (including frailty!) is the bare minimum.
I am in first trimester rn and I had to quit my job because, I don't have hg, but I am frequently and unpredictably miserable. I am all about first trimester leave. But I think a company that offered first trimester leave would be reluctant to hire women who are pregnancy risks. And women who have manageable first trimesters might get judgy of women who have miserable ones, and male bosses and Co workers might say "well she didn't need it so why do you?" So practically idk how to even begin.
I would add more general sick leave! It’s available to everyone, whether they are undergoing chemo or have HG, and so I think is less likely to discourage hiring women of childbearing years.
Oh Mary, I am so sorry to hear that!! My pregnancy has been completely miserable too. I really do agree about the varied (and extremely broad) spectrum of pregnancy outcomes being one of the hardest things in a lot of these discussions. I think this expands to a lot of other issues too because we don't have a good framework for how to tackle problems when they aren't standardized or shared across the board - the range of experiences around disabilities and chronic illnesses as you said for sure. Whenever there is a wide spectrum of outcomes it seems that those having worse outcomes are shunned or disbelieved. I have definitely come up close with this in pregnancy and I feel myself having to fight against perpetuating it in myself too. Because as much as I am so frustrated with people who don't believe my experience, I also find myself silently judging and shaking my head in disbelief at people who talk about how much they enjoyed their pregnancies and how easy it was for them.
I am new to this Substack newsletter (but so happy to have found it!), so please forgive me if this subject has been covered ad nauseam. As a millennial member of the sandwich generation, I have spent the last decade as a mother of two young children and caregiver to my parents, who both passed away from cancer. I stepped out of the workforce to be a caregiver, and I suddenly found myself at odds with a number of feminist arguments. I wrote about these "soundtracks" in this article: https://ifstudies.org/blog/welcome-home-a-womans-choice-to-prioritize-caregiving-over-career. While there have been few moments of light in this pandemic, one is that the value of care has become a political, societal, and cultural conversation. Unfortunately, I think we are still ignoring an important element: some women (and men, although we are talking about women here) want to care for their loved ones during critical life stages (namely, the beginning and end of life), and this choice is still stigmatized in favor of outsourcing this care. This stigmatization limits a woman's future opportunities. I would be interested to hear other's thoughts and experiences on this topic.
Relatedly, I've been noticing how we now pay for a lot of things that used to be done as a community. Childcare and elder care are obvious examples, but also, we pay for lactation consultants instead of learning from all the other women in the community (mostly because there just aren't many who could teach breastfeeding) and then it becomes a luxury for those who can afford it instead of a normal thing that everyone has access to.
Yes, I think women are encouraged to outsource so much, but outsourcing presupposes a salary that exceeds the cost of this outsourcing. And who are we outsourcing to? Other women, who often can’t afford the services for their own families. Further, I know I found myself very unprepared for the responsibilities I took on when I chose not to outsource, as I lost my mother as I was becoming a mother. I admit that growing up I rejected learning a lot of domestic skills (in the name of feminism?), and when I suddenly found myself without any community support, I felt very alone. Further, when I chose not to outsource and stepped out of the workforce, I was accused of failing feminism.
Tying into that, I’d love to discuss how to build a care/housework economy that is just to the worker. Even if carework done by family is valued or compensated, some people are going to need childcare, elder care, and help around the house (not to mention just wanting to hire help around the house if you have the budget) - how do we structure this so the worker is protected and can flourish? What does a childcare or domestic help economy look like where the worker receives a just wage?
I see this as being related to the need for 'specialization' and the corresponding tendency toward credentialing. Like, you can't be a midwife who also knows about lactation and works as a programmer, you need to be either a certified midwife or a certified lactation consultant and you're looked on with suspicion if you do other work outside of your primary practice.
Yes. And some things you really do need to devote serious time and make it a specialty but other things you don't. My midwife and pediatrician are at the same practice, and often the midwife pops over to the pediatrician office after the baby is born to help the new mom with nursing. For me it was super great because I knew my midwife because I saw her all pregnancy but I didn't know the pediatrician yet, and it was nice to have a familiar face.
This isn't actually a suggestion for Leah, since my guess is that she already has a toppling tower of to-read books, but I'm currently reading "Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800 - 1939." It's fascinating & explores how tightly-knit, highly religious communities imagined, ostracized, policed, and cared for their weakest members, during a transition to modernity that was both uniquely promising and uniquely traumatic. If you're reading OF and have any interest in Jewish history (or history of disability/madness) I strongly suspect you'll get a lot out of it.
One more thing! I'm trying to work on a sex talk for my 12 year old daughter. I'm liking Christine Elba (?) "More than consent" thinking but I'd like some more smart commentary on delaying sex, sex in marriage, NFP ...for my very with it tween who likes ethics pod casts and RBG t shirts
I'd love to read The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability by Elizabeth Barnes. It's been on my list for years but I think I'd be less intimidated by reading it with a group (I took two required philosophy courses in undergrad as part of my university core of common studies - for some reason I have no problem reading academic theology but academic philosophy makes me nervous :-)
I think it would be great if you added to your reading lists biographies of women who may be considered radical collectivists -
Bolshevik Women by Barbara Evans Clements.
Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty, by Kate Hennessy.
Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life by Vivian Gornick
Also a shoutout for LeGuin, and The Dispossessed!
In terms of posts, I would love it if we got a monthly head-on take from you on a hot other-feminism-y topic. Like, why you think transhumanism, or SB8 in TX, or maintaining mask mandates for kids is dangerous. Or what you think is both good and flawed in effective altruism / the way we talk about covid / our current party system and how they discount the perspectives of women. A post that is slightly less conversational and more 'this is what exactly I think right now, and here's why' that can generate a vigorous conversation and a follow up post about how you've changed your mind (or not).
I like the idea of recommended reading, or essay reviews, of voices in feminism or women's thought whom I might not know I’m missing! Leah, I think you do an admirable job of exposing us to contemporary writers and teachers and journalists whose pieces are out and about in the world right now. I’d definitely look to this space for guidance on who I might have missed along the way as I grew up in a middle-ground, not-much-to-say-about-it-all kind of environment.
Or even a once-annual “book club” read along, with enough notice to take on a whole book together and then schedule a certain comments thread for discussion. I learn a lot by considering the articles you share and by following the subsequent threads; I wonder if we could tackle a book-length topic or if that exceeds the scope of this space.
1. "Images or exhortations you use to remember the gravity of small acts of diligence?" question! My mind exploded with, "It's not just 1 or 2... I use like 5... no 20... no, more!" I struggle!! Link: https://otherfeminisms.substack.com/p/the-romance-of-regularity?s=r
2. Host an ESSAY CONTEST for us!? Or an IDEOLOGICAL TURING TEST? (idk what the two positions would be.) Hehee! Not asking so much is that? :-D (Spoiler: yes, it is!) Link to ITT Leah hosted in 2015: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2015/04/2015-ideological-turing-test-index-post.html ("What sin--if any--lies at the root of all other sin? And why?" was one Q for Christians and ppl 'LARP'ing Christians for the contest. "Name a book that shaped your moral sensibilities and talk a little about how. Fiction is fair game." was one prompt for non-Christians and ppl trying to pass as non-Christians in the contest.)
3. You once asked, "Who would you like me to interview?" Amy Chua! Not only do I like her because she staked out a controversial position on parenting, and then wrote a memoir about it which forced me to think.. (also, "Battle Hymn" is UTTERLY self-deprecating!) ...But also, I learned that when she did some high-profile writing dissecting the umm... tribe/hierarchy dynamics of another country, she got tons of vicious emails from those who stood to lose. I want to have enough of a "spine" to willingly go into something where I receive terrifying hate mail, based on convictions I hold.
Those are the first 3 things off the "mental queue"!! I'm sure there's more, oh, there is more. Thank you for asking.
It’s been almost a month and I’m back again but oh well! I clicked down a line of links this morning from a different substack expecting to find an interesting article about mother media and alas found only snark - but it made me think about the “other” in Other Feminisms and how wide can we make the other? Are there limits to the big tent or can we make an expansive definition of what is good in womanhood and motherhood and leave space for a variety of life paths? I would be interested in hearing where people think the line is but also in how they’ve been challenged or changed their mind to have a more open view of what women and mothers “ought” to do.
I wasn’t going to suggest anything this time around, counting on the many others to have plenty of good topics for a while!
And I apologize if this has already been suggested (haven’t had time to read the comments on this post yet!).
But it occurred to me today that we don’t have many practical conversations around rest. About how hard is it to admit we need it, the stigma that comes with it. About how counter it runs to the pace of our world, and how there is always something important that will fall behind if we do stop to rest (I’m a teacher by vocation and come from a family of teachers; it is a truth universally acknowledged that taking sick days and personal days generates more work than simply powering through!). About how needing rest often feels like failure, even though it is a need we were made to have.
It’s not that conversations around rest aren’t happening -- Saundra Daulton-Smith’s work on the types of rest has been helpful to me and in my family. And it’s always going to be a slow process to make a paradigm shift, right? Our paradigm shift is currently at the place where it’s ok to to talk about rest, as long as it’s someone else who is needing it! Hahaha!
I’ve personally also found help (with shifting rest paradigms) from other religious traditions than my own, namely Buddhist teachers and in the rather blended practice/teachings of yoga nidra. This kind of learning is something I would have been nervous about during my younger decades, but I have felt confident enough in my Christian faith these past few years to be able to learn from others and to find The Way that I firmly believe underlies all of reality (The Dao, as Lewis calls it in *The Abolition of Man*).
I would love to hear how these very real struggles with rest look in more lives than just my own. How others have been learning to give and receive permission for rest. Resources that have helped others. Etc.!
I'm interested in childbirth... How it's generally an awful experience for most women I've known and if they have practices to give women more freedom while maintaining good outcomes in other cultures , if there is any advocacy happening outside of home birth to make the experience better
Speaking personally, I found books on the Bradley method + the book The Birthing Partner really helpful. I had a very good labor with my most recent baby (thought she ultimately got stuck and had a forceps delivery), and my doctors have been good about taking my post-partum pain seriously and helping me work toward resolution.
Maybe this too centers on poor women. To a person, we've had awful birth experiences with our shelter guests, though also my own births, with midwives and induction and epidurals, we're kind of awful... I kind of felt like I traded my humanity for the epidural. The worst experiences for our shelter guests is for those that were sexually assaulted or abused. The hospital process lacks any respect for the body of privacy
A friend of mine works with the Sisters of Life, and unfortunately, the mothers they work with are often treated very badly by the doctors and nurses, too. The sisters try to stick close by the moms in the hospitals, because the presence of a habited religious makes the doctors behave a little better.
I'm interested in how poor women want to parent but can't seem to find suitable partners ... So they neither benefit from the feminist advances at the top nor are they able to support children, especially several children. What makes the options for women in the bottom 1/2 of the economy so limited?
If anyone here ever wants to talk about Whit Stillman’s films I’d be… extremely down? In part because I just love ‘em, but also because I feel like his films jive really well with Christine Emba’s critiques of the sexual revolution and general discussions of romantic/sexual ethics in this space.
I'm also interested in discussing further what are the actual differences between men and women. We can say "men tend to be like this and women tend to be like that" but that leaves lots of room for exceptions, and I don't want any men in the women's bathroom, even if they're "feminine" in certain respects, and I think all women should have certain protections, even if they're "masculine" in certain respects.
The professional world was built for men because it was built during a time when women didn't really participate in it. I'm interested to look at the positive changes that have been made in the professional world because of the influence of women.
I often find myself very drawn to the feminine strengths for and role in what Alan Jacobs calls “invitation and repair” (https://blog.ayjay.org/tag/ir/), or Sara Hendren “critique and repair.”
So much of the coverage of the idea of how we can maintain and repair tends to be about the world of business (ex: software) or culture and politics or stuff (ex: manual trades). For example The Maintainers runs mostly along those lines (https://themaintainers.org/). Women can be involved in all that for sure. But when you start digging into older ideas of maintenance often specifically feminine things like home economics come up that are less discussed today.
Many of the Other Feminisms posts & discussions I find myself bringing up with my husband and friends tie into the underlying questions of 1) what is legitimate? and 2) what is valuable? In looking back through the archives, I’m reminded of how we’ve discussed the value of old age, care work, friendships, and accessibility, as well as the legitimacy of the female body in medicine and care work-as-labor. I’d love to know what other needs and activities people see dismissed as illegitimate/valueless, and then have a chance to discuss those activities/needs and our society’s perception of them in depth.
Related to above is a thought prompted by a link you shared about school lunches some time ago. I think it was by Virginia Sole-Smith. I don’t remember if she used the exact phrase “intensive mother,” but I remember being struck by how, to her, packing a lunch didn’t seem like valuable labor but rather a symptom of diet culture that ought to be rooted out. There wasn’t space for lunch packing to be labor that a mother or father valued doing. And it’s struck me not just from her piece but many times while reading family policy thinkpieces that there has been a common rhetorical method to present one’s family life/parenting situation both as underprivileged and as normative — and thus deserving of policy support — while other approaches are a result of bad socialization/values/etc. Understandable, but I’d love to discuss how to craft arguments and approaches that account for a variety of home situations and preferences as legitimate. I am mostly atuned to this with childcare, as I keep seeing my situation getting left out at both the local and national level, but I’m sure there are others and I’d love to discuss them.
To follow up, the reason I see this connected to Other Feminisms and not just Stuff Claire Likes Talking About is that a lot of what I see dismissed as valueless or illegitimate is either historically done by women or something that presently skews female
Yeah!
Also, symptoms. Women are very often diagnosed with anxiety disorders because their physical symptoms aren't considered legitimate. Then six years later a physical disease or something is discovered.
Yes! When women say, 'this physical symptom is not normal for me' or 'this is something I value' or 'this choice is the right one for me', we are often ignored, discounted, devalued. I'd love Other Feminisms to be a place where we talk about approaches to make sure all voices are heard, especially those whose experiences are most routinely dismissed.
This is admittedly a goofy suggestion, but it's one I've been thinking would be really fun to hear your thoughts on for a while: I would love if you wrote about the kind of moral reasoning you can see people doing on the subreddit Am I The A**hole? It is a fascinating place because people people don't have explicit moral commitments or arguments, so what you get is a really good reflection of the culture's unconscious moral commitments. Unsurprisingly, autonomy is the most frequently invoked principle.
What gets really interesting is when the principle of autonomy conflicts with other principles. You get to see people work their way through that tension, sometimes by asserting contradictory principles, sometimes by deciding to subordinate one principle to another. This post is the best example I've found of that kind of tension: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/otvrul/aita_for_not_lying_about_why_i_could_not_remove/.
Haha, AITA is also my guilty pleasure and I definitely agree with you about how it reflects people's unconscious moral commitments! Reddit's relationship-adjacent subs are interesting to me because I think they distill both the best and the worst impulses of a certain type of moral reasoning.
Unsure if this is within the purview of the Other Feminisms project, but I reflect often upon how lucky I've been (as a man) by pure chance to be exposed to so many of these views and experiences. Growing up with some close female friends who had an openness to share what they had dealt with--from terrible men on dates, to how they had been treated differently at work, to just how they felt navigating the world--made it much simpler for me to cultivate empathy and understanding of what women face on a lot of these fronts, and to be able to support and explain why a lot of policies and social changes discussed here are necessary. I suppose I wonder what we can do (without an undue burden of emotional labor on women) to share these experiences with a fair amount of well-meaning but ignorant people (usually men, but in the upper classes a lot of these experiences are foreign across the board) so that a broader social understanding or change can take place. I'm under no illusion of everyone magically understanding the challenges that women face at once. But I do wonder what we can do to spread this knowledge to people even more in an accessible and reasonable way, in the way that Other Feminisms has done that a lot, for me.
The topic of having truly productive one-on-one conversations about ones experiences... might be it. (We put so much effort into communications that go out to large numbers of people we don't know well, at the cost of "starving off" our one-on-one correspondence.)
Re-capping the relational intricacies of how a dialogue went--or how it could be done better or more charitably--or diving into the "meta" of how a good context "sets things up" well for a good conversation to happen at a juncture in time... all this is kind of catnip for my mind! Maybe that's true for lots of other women here!
Also, the question could also ask for times you've seen SOMEONE ELSE do this well. Or "Characterize the person/writing you WANT to engage with on topics that are uncomfortable-for-you"?
Or stories of things (interactions, reading) that cause someone to "flip" their view. Have you read this, or someplace where Leah wrote about it elsewhere? http://www.leahlibresco.com/didnt-you-ever-break-on-the-floor/ Every time I go back, I realize I forgot just how encouraging the possiblity she describes is.
I haven't seen that specific piece before, but it is lovely now that I have! I do agree that broadly speaking one-on-one conversations are the place to go here--but I think so often about so many men that would never be in a place to hear this sort of thing one-on-one, or (because of who they are or the circumstances around them) don't *have* anyone who's willing to engage with them at that intimately personal level. I'm also definitely interested in what you write about the tips and tactics (for lack of a better word, not that this is a "debate" to be "won") for ensuring how these go well, or even how to discuss them outside of my experience. There is definitely a type of guy out there who's only willing to hear about these sorts of things from other men, and I would love to think more about how to present these broad experiences and facts that aren't my own in a way that still opens the floor to some breaking.
Wow. Yeah. So someone I was talking with noted talked about "tending to choose [online] community based on shared VALUES," but considering engaging more with communities based on shared INTERESTS. There's more than one way to aim for mutual respect!
If you're talking with someone who's -realllly- good at, idk, programming in Haskell... or even someone who's really NOT as good at you and is getting help from you, and engaging in a meaningful way... that's really personal! (in the latter case, accepting help involves vulnerability.) You're going to all-around be more sympathetic to them, so maybe open up a shared-interest friendship like that to more avenues of difficult-for-you discussions.
Tactics include:
1. Accept "It doesn't all depend on me." If you find someone abhorrently "wrong on the internet" and are utterly unsympathetic to them, you are maybe not the right person to "straighten them out"!! Save your energies for another convo. Often when we "take an action" like that, we invisibly prevent someone ELSE whose thoughts & views are more adjacent from responding. (But even if it's a one-on-one convo in an existing friendship... the first time it veers into a topic that is one of our "hot buttons" or we are really unprepared for.. really... we should go slow, not saying the first thing that pops into our heads.)
2. Realize that humans are predictable. Often, when someone's got a weird soapbox, you can expect this SAME conversation will come up again, possibly with him or her using the exact same WORDS. People talk about this like it's purely a bad thing simply because it's uncomfortable! My take? PREP FOR IT. My memory is basically a giant list of "things people (living and dead) have said," ranked by "emotional intensity" and "salience and/or apparent salience to various people I want to convince of things." XD So one way I prep for that is by just trawling through that corpus and juxtaposing things Person A said on a given topic with Person B's thoughts on that, iterating, and eventually come up with things that are not horrible ideas to say, (some of the out-takes are!!) and don't even sound horrible. (It's a very "I can unilaterally fix this relationship" approach, which hilariously seems to contradict what I said before about "it doesn't all depend on me," I now notice!)
There's more, of course. Hope to share more later.
What are some specific examples of conversations that have helped you? Or topics female friends have helped you on, if not too personal? (My brother-in-law used to attend a Bible study at church that was primarily composed of middle-aged-moms. His unusual work schedule--as a tutor--left his mornings free. The women would always say he's going to be such a great husband--he'd already patiently listened to tons of convos about, e.g. menopause, from womens' perspectives. XD )
Alithos anesti!
I am very interested in practical things - like, as unfortunate as it is that things are the way they are, they are in fact that way, so how can we best live in this unfortunate situation? There are a hundred variations on that. How can we best advocate for ourselves with doctors who aren't listening? How can we make sure we get good medical care when the whole system doesn't work well for women? How do we make decisions about work and family, given that the modern economy isn't ideal? How can we make advantageous decisions about where to live in a world where suburbia is the unfortunate norm? How do we teach our daughters (and sons!) about all this? How do we teach our daughters about their dignity as women when the whole world teaches them their dignity comes from being little men, and when we have our own insecurities about it?
I have a similar interest in seeing more of the practical side of these discussions - perhaps more opportunities to discuss areas IRL where people interested in these topics can be more intentional about finding each other and also incorporating it into other areas of their life. I know a lot of people on here have church communities where they find this. For the rest of us I am thinking of a thread that is centered on introducing each other based on geographic location, sharing work and volunteer spaces and organizations we know of that focus on these topics and other ideas for how we all integrate these ideas into our lives. I love this substack (and many other online communities I've found around my varied and heterodox ideas) and am always looking for more ways to incorporate them into my offline life. To share broadly some of the things my husband and I do - we have a weekly book club with each other where we read about these topics together, we volunteer at a caregiving center that helps elderly folks look after their pets so that they can keep them for longer, we support a few women breadwinners living below the poverty line who are known to us in my (developing, third world) home country so that they can have more flexibility off work to raise and spend time with their young children. We are also considering home-schooling our children. Right now my paying work is in expanding abortion access but the ethos of my workplace is steeped in a very mainstream, corporate feminist outlook that is completely at odds with my own reasons for wanting abortion to be safe and equitable. I am trying to find a new/adjacent career path that would allow me to focus on what I am more passionate about which is addressing the unjust reasons many people need abortions in the first place and would love to know if anyone has suggestions of organizations doing this work that are not explicitly pro-life. I would love to hear and learn what other people do and borrow ideas off each other!!
Highly recommend working for a union! Not only do many unions do fantastic organizing, policy and research work all about making our country more equitable, they also do it from a member driven perspective that sets them apart from the nonprofit world.
Here's a clearinghouse: https://www.unionjobs.com/staffing_list.php
I also love the Secular, Eclectic, Academic (SEA) Homeschoolers group on facebook, a lovely thriving community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/441792022666177
Thanks Martha, great suggestions!
yeah... you and I differ on the abortion issue specifically but I *do* think that society is organized in such a way that puts a lot of unjust pressure on women to have abortions. Like the fact that motherhood is not valued, children are not valued, in fact both are kind of stigmatized in the professional world. You have to hide your first-trimester misery and I think this is absurd. For lower-paying jobs, job schedules are unpredictable, job security is iffy already, and a new baby can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Family and community support is often lacking. There just plain aren't a lot of kids around, and that makes kids more foreign and hard to know what to do with. Pregnancy is often miserable and there isn't a lot of research on how to make it less miserable, because it isn't a priority. Everyone knows how to judge mothers for doing it wrong. And on and on and on.
You might look at the Institute for Family Studies. They're probably not exactly what you're looking for, but I think it's at least adjacent and they may link out to organizations that are closer to what you're looking for.
https://ifstudies.org/about/our-mission
Thanks Mary, I completely agree with you about all the issues you listed, many of which we discuss on this substack and those are exactly the kinds of underlying issues I would prefer to be involved in addressing.
Just an aside on my desire for changing work and how it ties in my own circumstances right now, I find that even from my own very privileged position, navigating my pregnancy (and soon to be first child) has brought me up close with SO many of these issues and I have it "really good". I am probably in the top 1% of mothers in terms of the support I have from my work and my community and I still feel this way. One of the interesting things about having a workplace that is SO supportive (I get 4 months leave fully paid and a ton of flexibility around hours and remote work, plus zero guilt from coworkers) is how much I've realized it also ties me to that workplace. I am definitely grateful for how I have been treated but I don't really buy into the fact that I "owe" them anything for this, rather it is what I wish was simply the norm for everyone, in terms of humane and supportive family policy. But knowing that my husband and I want at least one more child, it does make it very difficult to look for other work because the policies offered by my current workplace are so difficult to come by and this support has been invaluable for us during this pregnancy. I had hyperemesis and my boss essentially allowed me to take almost 2-3 weeks off (working half days, time off while hospitalized, etc) without clocking it officially because she knew I needed my sick time to maximize my maternity leave. Thinking of a second pregnancy at a different job I am just at a complete loss for what I would do if I have another first trimester like the one I did this time. Someone on here mentioned first trimester paid leave and hell yes to that - but we seem so impossibly far away from something like that when the status quo is where it is right now. I recently read an incredibly depressing stat that the average american woman goes back to work 10 days after giving birth. Given that as a society that is the mean we are starting from, there is no doubt a tremendous amount of work to be done and I hope to be a part of it someday!
100% this. Also, it is a *tremendous* failure of our social contract that any of this is left up to individual employers. Treating workers like humans should be mandated by law *and* backed up by norms/values that respecting people's humanity (including frailty!) is the bare minimum.
I am in first trimester rn and I had to quit my job because, I don't have hg, but I am frequently and unpredictably miserable. I am all about first trimester leave. But I think a company that offered first trimester leave would be reluctant to hire women who are pregnancy risks. And women who have manageable first trimesters might get judgy of women who have miserable ones, and male bosses and Co workers might say "well she didn't need it so why do you?" So practically idk how to even begin.
I would add more general sick leave! It’s available to everyone, whether they are undergoing chemo or have HG, and so I think is less likely to discourage hiring women of childbearing years.
Oh Mary, I am so sorry to hear that!! My pregnancy has been completely miserable too. I really do agree about the varied (and extremely broad) spectrum of pregnancy outcomes being one of the hardest things in a lot of these discussions. I think this expands to a lot of other issues too because we don't have a good framework for how to tackle problems when they aren't standardized or shared across the board - the range of experiences around disabilities and chronic illnesses as you said for sure. Whenever there is a wide spectrum of outcomes it seems that those having worse outcomes are shunned or disbelieved. I have definitely come up close with this in pregnancy and I feel myself having to fight against perpetuating it in myself too. Because as much as I am so frustrated with people who don't believe my experience, I also find myself silently judging and shaking my head in disbelief at people who talk about how much they enjoyed their pregnancies and how easy it was for them.
I am new to this Substack newsletter (but so happy to have found it!), so please forgive me if this subject has been covered ad nauseam. As a millennial member of the sandwich generation, I have spent the last decade as a mother of two young children and caregiver to my parents, who both passed away from cancer. I stepped out of the workforce to be a caregiver, and I suddenly found myself at odds with a number of feminist arguments. I wrote about these "soundtracks" in this article: https://ifstudies.org/blog/welcome-home-a-womans-choice-to-prioritize-caregiving-over-career. While there have been few moments of light in this pandemic, one is that the value of care has become a political, societal, and cultural conversation. Unfortunately, I think we are still ignoring an important element: some women (and men, although we are talking about women here) want to care for their loved ones during critical life stages (namely, the beginning and end of life), and this choice is still stigmatized in favor of outsourcing this care. This stigmatization limits a woman's future opportunities. I would be interested to hear other's thoughts and experiences on this topic.
Relatedly, I've been noticing how we now pay for a lot of things that used to be done as a community. Childcare and elder care are obvious examples, but also, we pay for lactation consultants instead of learning from all the other women in the community (mostly because there just aren't many who could teach breastfeeding) and then it becomes a luxury for those who can afford it instead of a normal thing that everyone has access to.
Yes, I think women are encouraged to outsource so much, but outsourcing presupposes a salary that exceeds the cost of this outsourcing. And who are we outsourcing to? Other women, who often can’t afford the services for their own families. Further, I know I found myself very unprepared for the responsibilities I took on when I chose not to outsource, as I lost my mother as I was becoming a mother. I admit that growing up I rejected learning a lot of domestic skills (in the name of feminism?), and when I suddenly found myself without any community support, I felt very alone. Further, when I chose not to outsource and stepped out of the workforce, I was accused of failing feminism.
Tying into that, I’d love to discuss how to build a care/housework economy that is just to the worker. Even if carework done by family is valued or compensated, some people are going to need childcare, elder care, and help around the house (not to mention just wanting to hire help around the house if you have the budget) - how do we structure this so the worker is protected and can flourish? What does a childcare or domestic help economy look like where the worker receives a just wage?
I see this as being related to the need for 'specialization' and the corresponding tendency toward credentialing. Like, you can't be a midwife who also knows about lactation and works as a programmer, you need to be either a certified midwife or a certified lactation consultant and you're looked on with suspicion if you do other work outside of your primary practice.
Yes. And some things you really do need to devote serious time and make it a specialty but other things you don't. My midwife and pediatrician are at the same practice, and often the midwife pops over to the pediatrician office after the baby is born to help the new mom with nursing. For me it was super great because I knew my midwife because I saw her all pregnancy but I didn't know the pediatrician yet, and it was nice to have a familiar face.
And we learn from YouTube instead of our community, because we don't have a community that can teach.
This isn't actually a suggestion for Leah, since my guess is that she already has a toppling tower of to-read books, but I'm currently reading "Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800 - 1939." It's fascinating & explores how tightly-knit, highly religious communities imagined, ostracized, policed, and cared for their weakest members, during a transition to modernity that was both uniquely promising and uniquely traumatic. If you're reading OF and have any interest in Jewish history (or history of disability/madness) I strongly suspect you'll get a lot out of it.
One more thing! I'm trying to work on a sex talk for my 12 year old daughter. I'm liking Christine Elba (?) "More than consent" thinking but I'd like some more smart commentary on delaying sex, sex in marriage, NFP ...for my very with it tween who likes ethics pod casts and RBG t shirts
You might want to give Simcha Fisher’s The Sinner’s Guide to NFP a read to see if it’s what you’re looking for.
I ordered it. Another question, do you have a suggestion for a fertility app?
I'd love to read The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability by Elizabeth Barnes. It's been on my list for years but I think I'd be less intimidated by reading it with a group (I took two required philosophy courses in undergrad as part of my university core of common studies - for some reason I have no problem reading academic theology but academic philosophy makes me nervous :-)
I've never heard of this book but I want to read it too! I don't know you but I'd be game to read it with you :)
I think it would be great if you added to your reading lists biographies of women who may be considered radical collectivists -
Bolshevik Women by Barbara Evans Clements.
Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty, by Kate Hennessy.
Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life by Vivian Gornick
Also a shoutout for LeGuin, and The Dispossessed!
In terms of posts, I would love it if we got a monthly head-on take from you on a hot other-feminism-y topic. Like, why you think transhumanism, or SB8 in TX, or maintaining mask mandates for kids is dangerous. Or what you think is both good and flawed in effective altruism / the way we talk about covid / our current party system and how they discount the perspectives of women. A post that is slightly less conversational and more 'this is what exactly I think right now, and here's why' that can generate a vigorous conversation and a follow up post about how you've changed your mind (or not).
I thought Dorothy Day: The World Will be Saved by Beauty was great!
I like the idea of recommended reading, or essay reviews, of voices in feminism or women's thought whom I might not know I’m missing! Leah, I think you do an admirable job of exposing us to contemporary writers and teachers and journalists whose pieces are out and about in the world right now. I’d definitely look to this space for guidance on who I might have missed along the way as I grew up in a middle-ground, not-much-to-say-about-it-all kind of environment.
Or even a once-annual “book club” read along, with enough notice to take on a whole book together and then schedule a certain comments thread for discussion. I learn a lot by considering the articles you share and by following the subsequent threads; I wonder if we could tackle a book-length topic or if that exceeds the scope of this space.
1. "Images or exhortations you use to remember the gravity of small acts of diligence?" question! My mind exploded with, "It's not just 1 or 2... I use like 5... no 20... no, more!" I struggle!! Link: https://otherfeminisms.substack.com/p/the-romance-of-regularity?s=r
2. Host an ESSAY CONTEST for us!? Or an IDEOLOGICAL TURING TEST? (idk what the two positions would be.) Hehee! Not asking so much is that? :-D (Spoiler: yes, it is!) Link to ITT Leah hosted in 2015: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2015/04/2015-ideological-turing-test-index-post.html ("What sin--if any--lies at the root of all other sin? And why?" was one Q for Christians and ppl 'LARP'ing Christians for the contest. "Name a book that shaped your moral sensibilities and talk a little about how. Fiction is fair game." was one prompt for non-Christians and ppl trying to pass as non-Christians in the contest.)
3. You once asked, "Who would you like me to interview?" Amy Chua! Not only do I like her because she staked out a controversial position on parenting, and then wrote a memoir about it which forced me to think.. (also, "Battle Hymn" is UTTERLY self-deprecating!) ...But also, I learned that when she did some high-profile writing dissecting the umm... tribe/hierarchy dynamics of another country, she got tons of vicious emails from those who stood to lose. I want to have enough of a "spine" to willingly go into something where I receive terrifying hate mail, based on convictions I hold.
Those are the first 3 things off the "mental queue"!! I'm sure there's more, oh, there is more. Thank you for asking.
It’s been almost a month and I’m back again but oh well! I clicked down a line of links this morning from a different substack expecting to find an interesting article about mother media and alas found only snark - but it made me think about the “other” in Other Feminisms and how wide can we make the other? Are there limits to the big tent or can we make an expansive definition of what is good in womanhood and motherhood and leave space for a variety of life paths? I would be interested in hearing where people think the line is but also in how they’ve been challenged or changed their mind to have a more open view of what women and mothers “ought” to do.
I wasn’t going to suggest anything this time around, counting on the many others to have plenty of good topics for a while!
And I apologize if this has already been suggested (haven’t had time to read the comments on this post yet!).
But it occurred to me today that we don’t have many practical conversations around rest. About how hard is it to admit we need it, the stigma that comes with it. About how counter it runs to the pace of our world, and how there is always something important that will fall behind if we do stop to rest (I’m a teacher by vocation and come from a family of teachers; it is a truth universally acknowledged that taking sick days and personal days generates more work than simply powering through!). About how needing rest often feels like failure, even though it is a need we were made to have.
It’s not that conversations around rest aren’t happening -- Saundra Daulton-Smith’s work on the types of rest has been helpful to me and in my family. And it’s always going to be a slow process to make a paradigm shift, right? Our paradigm shift is currently at the place where it’s ok to to talk about rest, as long as it’s someone else who is needing it! Hahaha!
I’ve personally also found help (with shifting rest paradigms) from other religious traditions than my own, namely Buddhist teachers and in the rather blended practice/teachings of yoga nidra. This kind of learning is something I would have been nervous about during my younger decades, but I have felt confident enough in my Christian faith these past few years to be able to learn from others and to find The Way that I firmly believe underlies all of reality (The Dao, as Lewis calls it in *The Abolition of Man*).
I would love to hear how these very real struggles with rest look in more lives than just my own. How others have been learning to give and receive permission for rest. Resources that have helped others. Etc.!
I'm interested in childbirth... How it's generally an awful experience for most women I've known and if they have practices to give women more freedom while maintaining good outcomes in other cultures , if there is any advocacy happening outside of home birth to make the experience better
Speaking personally, I found books on the Bradley method + the book The Birthing Partner really helpful. I had a very good labor with my most recent baby (thought she ultimately got stuck and had a forceps delivery), and my doctors have been good about taking my post-partum pain seriously and helping me work toward resolution.
Maybe this too centers on poor women. To a person, we've had awful birth experiences with our shelter guests, though also my own births, with midwives and induction and epidurals, we're kind of awful... I kind of felt like I traded my humanity for the epidural. The worst experiences for our shelter guests is for those that were sexually assaulted or abused. The hospital process lacks any respect for the body of privacy
A friend of mine works with the Sisters of Life, and unfortunately, the mothers they work with are often treated very badly by the doctors and nurses, too. The sisters try to stick close by the moms in the hospitals, because the presence of a habited religious makes the doctors behave a little better.
I'm interested in how poor women want to parent but can't seem to find suitable partners ... So they neither benefit from the feminist advances at the top nor are they able to support children, especially several children. What makes the options for women in the bottom 1/2 of the economy so limited?
If anyone here ever wants to talk about Whit Stillman’s films I’d be… extremely down? In part because I just love ‘em, but also because I feel like his films jive really well with Christine Emba’s critiques of the sexual revolution and general discussions of romantic/sexual ethics in this space.
I'm also interested in discussing further what are the actual differences between men and women. We can say "men tend to be like this and women tend to be like that" but that leaves lots of room for exceptions, and I don't want any men in the women's bathroom, even if they're "feminine" in certain respects, and I think all women should have certain protections, even if they're "masculine" in certain respects.
The professional world was built for men because it was built during a time when women didn't really participate in it. I'm interested to look at the positive changes that have been made in the professional world because of the influence of women.