March 12, 2012
Think more widely
“Progress has been made… yet the struggles continue, the passion and fury can erupt at any time, and many of feminism’s most cherished victories are continually menaced. The media constantly polarize the debates by pitting groups of women against each other, like stay-home moms versus daycare users, or pro-and anti-choice campaigners, or “pro-sex” women against those dried up prudes who want to spoil all the fun. The tactic isn’t new: First Wave suffragists were also derided and parodied as anti-sex killjoys and harridans. The trick to evading these binary traps is to think more widely. Who economic, sexual, class or political interests are being served by the female mouthpieces and role models provided by the media? The answers can be complex, but at least they’re more thought-productive than the simple-minded oppositions (home or career? breast or bottle?) so dear to the media.” –Michele Landsberg, Writing the Revolution
I’m reading Bill Moyers’ The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (1995) and am astounded at the number of stellar American women poets, institutions in themselves, who, in the interviews, say they are not real poets, or whose heads were full of negative, judgmental voices. It is not just me.