Question of the Week ~ racial profiling

 

“Racial profiling by the police is unjust, even if it might make us somewhat safer.”  Do you agree with that statement?  Answer yes or no, and then please tell us why.

Charter for Compassion

The Great Mother

Why Women Should Rule the World ~ by Dee Dee Myers, 2008

Dee Dee Myers, only 31 at the time, was the first woman ever to be White House Press Secretary.

"I wasn't the first woman to be the first woman, of course. I stand on the shoulders of the countless others who stuck their necks out -- and sometimes got their heads knocked off -- for going where no woman had gone before. Not all of them were trying to advance the interests of the sisterhood. Still, because of them, those of us who followed have had more, different, and better opportunities.  I know I have."

I highly recommend Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers (2008) to everyone, but especially to those who have taken on the Women Unbound reading challenge.  This book is an eye-opener and a consciousness raiser.

She starts with why women DON'T rule the world, moves on to why women SHOULD rule the world, and then give us her ideas about how women CAN rule the world.  I especially like her sense of humor.

"In her fascinating book The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine explains that male and female brains are indistinguishable in the weeks following conception.  Then, at about eight weeks, the male baby gets a dose of testosterone, which literally begins killing off cells in the communication, observation, and emotion processing centers of the brain -- and growing cells in the sex and aggression centers.  It's sort of like "Wow!" and "Duh!" all at the same time" (pp. 70-71).

"'If the three wise men had been women, they would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, brought practical gifts, and there would be Peace On Earth' [she quoted].  Of course!  But they weren't women, so the wise men got there late -- and brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Can you imagine what Mary -- who's just delivered a baby on a bale of hay without an epidural -- must have thought about that?" (p. 103).

Sometimes she states the obvious (obvious to most women, anyhow) and then shares her story.

"I often felt that I had to work harder than my male colleagues to be heard, a frustration I know so many other women have experienced" (p. 177).

"Still, lots of my female friends have chosen to downshift or suspend their careers at different points in their lives, for a variety of reasons, in ways that men just don't" (p. 160).

"Unlike the men in the room, she had to fight like crazy just to be part of the conversation" (p. 40).

She also clues us in on what we're doing wrong.

"Headhunters say that women often come off as less confident because they are more honest about their weaknesses, while men talk only about their strengths" (p. 191).

At the beginning of each chapter is an interesting quote:

"I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and career." -- Gloria Steinem (p. 153)

"When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look.  When a woman gets up to speak, people look; then if they like what they see, they listen." -- Pauline Frederick (p. 15)

"It may be the cock that crows, but it's the hen that lays the egg." -- Margaret Thatcher (p. 129)

I could go on quoting from this book, but I'll just encourage you to read it.  This is an excellent book, and I rate it 9 of 10.

The Pull of the Moon ~ by Elizabeth Berg, 1996

When we read a book, we always bring to the task whatever is going on in our lives at the moment.  I read this book through the lens of feminism because I am taking part in the year-long reading challenge called Women Unbound.  This novel turns out to be perfect to kick off the project because I could see in it so many things happening to Nan (the protagonist) that women over the years have struggled with as they try to get a handle on what Betty Friedan called "the problem that has no name."  I started exploring that "problem" last week when I pulled a teaser quote from this book:

"And then I went to the bookstore, to the poetry section, to find something about the beauty of older women and I found nothing" (p. 23).

In our youth-obsessed culture, elderly women are not much noticed.  But women can feel diminished at any age.  The chapters of this book alternate between letters Nan wrote to her husband, Martin, after she ran away and entries she added to a journal she kept of her rambling journey to nowhere in particular.  Here, she's thinking about occasions when a woman feels diminished because she is being ignored:

"Not long ago, I saw a woman in a drugstore pick something up in her hand, delighted, and hold it out toward her husband.  It was just a perfume bottle, but the shape of it was lovely.  "See this, hon?" she said.  And the man said, "Yeah," but he had his back to her and was walking down the aisle away from her.  The woman put the thing back, diminished" (p. 38).

Nan realized later that she had lost herself, which is another way of feeling diminished.  Here's what she wrote in a letter to her husband:

"When I got to the grocery store, the oddest thing happened.  I found it very, very difficult to buy anything.  I would pick something up, then think, no, it's Ruthie who really likes pineapple.  No, Martin is the one who loves London broil.  I wanted to get something special, ... but everything I picked up, I put back.  Finally, I leaned against the dairy case and thought, well, come on, Nan, what do YOU really, really like?  And then I thought, my God, I don't know.  I've forgotten" (p. 160).

And women are left out of the history books, as Nan noticed:

"It seems to me that the working minds and hearts of women are just so interesting, so full of color and life.  And one of the most tragic things I've seen is the way that's been overlooked, the way that if you try to discover what the women were doing at any given time in history, you are hard pressed to find out.  Why?" (p. 90).

When I was in school in the 1940s and 1950s, history lessons were all about men.  We had to memorize dates related to kings and wars and when Columbus "discovered" America (he "sailed the ocean blue" in fourteen hundred and ninety two, in case you've forgotten).  If a woman was mentioned, she was part of a pair (and was always listed second), as in Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs who sent Columbus west to discover a trade route to India.

Aging is difficult for many women, maybe all of us.  Sometimes it's the physical aspects of aging that seem most troublesome.

"A woman a bit older than me told me she recently found a hair under her chin and it terrified her so much she got in her car and drove for fifty miles -- nowhere, just around in circles.  It was a black hair, she said, stiff as a whisk broom.  When she came home she locked the bathroom door and got out her eyebrow tweezers and pulled the thing out.  She said she looked at it for a long time, and then she flushed it down the toilet -- flushed it twice.  After that she spent a good fifteen minutes checking her face for more hairs. ... It's so humiliating, she told me.  It's like you're being punished for something and you've no idea what you've done wrong except age" (pp. 148-149).

Nan was a woman on a journey to sort out her life.  The first book I have completed for the Women Unbound reading challenge, then, is The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg, 1996.  I rate it 8 of 10, a very good book.

Question of the Week ~ cheat a child?

Suppose a child goes into a store to buy a loaf of bread.  The shopkeeper realizes that he could shortchange the child.  But he worries that if he did so, other customers might find out, and he would lose business.  So he gives the child the correct change.  Does the shopkeeper’s action have moral worth?  Answer yes or no, and then please tell us why.

For all my friends doing NaNoWriMo

moar funny pictures

 Joy Renee of Joystory came up with this one.  Now that she's gotten it out of her system, she says, she'll be able to continue her forays into fiction.  NaNoWriMo, for those of you who have never heard of it, stands for National Novel Writing Month.  November is the month when thousands and thousands of folks struggle daily with word count because they are attempting to write 50,000 words before November 30th.  Those 50,000 words will be the first draft of a novel.  Yes, really.  They're mad, aren't they?  Umm, and I've done it twice, in 2007 and 2008, succeeding both times in passing the goal before the end of the month.  Last year, however, I got sick on December 4th, mere days past the deadline.  The illness turned out to be congestive heart failure, so I decided not to pressure myself this year.