[Previous entry: "General Rejection of Bolivia Bombing"] [Next entry: "Madness: Britain's mental health time bomb"]

03/26/2006:

"Young, successful, well paid: are they killing feminism?"

...For the first time in history these 'elite women' can succeed in any career they want. According to a remarkable thesis that has blown open the debate around feminism, sexism and the future role of women, a new generation of bright, rich professionals have broken through the glass ceiling and have nothing to fear from the men around them. They will be just as successful.

The thesis was expounded in a highly controversial article for Prospect magazine by Alison Wolf, a professor at Kings College London and author of Does Education Matter? She argues that the meteoric rise of this new generation of 'go-getting women' who want high-powered, well-paid jobs has dire consequences for society. Wolf says it has diverted the most talented away from the caring professions such as teaching, stopped them volunteering, is in danger of ending the notion of 'female altruism', has turned many women off having children - and has effectively killed off feminism.

'[It is] the death of the sisterhood,' Wolf writes. 'An end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than men.

'In the past, women of all classes shared lives centred on explicitly female concerns. Now it makes little sense to discuss women in general. The statistics are clear: among young, educated, full-time professionals, being female is no longer a drag on earnings or progress.'

The article argues that the most educated women will now earn as much as men over a lifetime if they have no children. Even with children, the gap will be small. The desire to be successful acts as a major disincentive to women starting a family, Wolf argues.

'Families remain central to the care of the old and sick, as well as raising the next generation, and yet our economy and society steer ever more educated women away from marriage or childbearing,' she writes. 'The repercussions for our future are enormous, and we should at least recognise the fact.' The growth, Wolf argues, of the 'because I'm worth it' generation has led to the end of 'female altruism', where women would see the caring part of their life as normal.
observor.guardian.co.uk

Well the vast majority of females on the planet don't have any of these opportunities. And it's sort of ridiculous to fret about the END of workplace discrimination. 'Female values' are as unrepresented in the West as they are everywhere else, at least in any public discourse, and females often face the greatest physical danger from the terrorists they live with. If there were a true 'sisterhood' among Western women in the first place, our societies and our politics would look very different, and women would be fairly compensated for all the nurturing work that needs to be done in a healthy place. But the West is a pathological place, and worrying about the economic mobility of educated (and overwhelmingly white) females doesn't strike me as the place to begin to address the pathology.


Hillary the Hawk
...From Leon Trotsky to Ralph Reed to Hillary Clinton is a long, torturous road to follow, yet the chameleon-like Wittmann—who styles himself a Bull Moose progressive in the tradition of his hero, Theodore Roosevelt—has navigated it expertly. Wittmann’s new role as Hillary’s unofficial Rasputin is perfectly suited to her current political needs. Eager to overcome her reputation as the leader of the party’s left wing, Hillary is “repositioning” herself, in modern parlance, as a “centrist,” i.e. a complete opportunist. She could have no better teacher than Wittmann, who from the pulpit of his “Moose-blog,” advises her to “seize the issue of Iranian nukes to draw a line in the sand.” While paying lip service to multilateralism, she should “make it clear that while force is the last resort, she would never take it off the table in dealing with the madmen mullahs and the psychotic leader of Iran.”

...Hillary hails the 1998 bombing of Iraq, ordered by her husband, which killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and recounts the official mythology promulgated by the Bush administration: “[T]he so-called presidential palaces … in reality were huge compounds well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which Saddam Hussein was required by UN resolution to turn over. When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left.” As we now know, there was nothing even approaching WMD in those palaces, and Iraq had been effectively disarmed at that point. In late February or early March, Scott Ritter, then a UN arms inspector, met with then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson. Ritter was told to provoke an incident so the U.S. could finish bombing by the start of the Islamic New Year holiday.

Hillary, however, didn’t let any inconvenient facts get in her way. She boasted that it was under a Democratic administration that the U.S. “changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change” and took credit for the bright idea of putting Ahmad Chalabi, convicted embezzler and known liar, on the U.S. payroll. Her speech reads like a Weekly Standard editorial, reiterating each of the War Party’s talking points—the bio-weapons fantasy, the links to al-Qaeda gambit, the phantom nuclear arsenal: “This much,” she maintained, “is undisputed.”