Iron Jawed Angels

Here's an interesting forward I received from my mother today on the topic of women's suffrage. Even I didn't know that most of these events occurred.

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-Grandmothers.
They lived only 90 years ago.



Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.


The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.



And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.



They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.

Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917. This is when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there, because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote. For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.



When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because -why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane, so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.

The doctor admonished the men: "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."

We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.

History is being made.

Sex and the City and the Feminist

I have to admit, I was pretty excited when Sex and the City first premiered on TBS. It was smart, funny, engaging, honest, and finally voiced women's sexual and dating concerns in a realistic way. At the time I was also a budding feminist, and felt that somehow, there was something about the show that made life a little bit better for women.

After I grew up and got My Women's Studies Degree, I realized that Sex and the City isn't exactly a beacon of hope for the feminist movement. It plays upon viewers' lingering racism and consumerism, and definitely isn't very radical or anything. However, I'm not one to complain about something just because it hasn't yet achieved perfection, and in general, I think that Sex and the City is really great for women.

One thing that always got me about Sex and the City was the surprising vehemence with which my male friends always proclaimed its inviability. Not only do men not like the show, they "hate" it. They think it's "stupid, "meaningless," worthy of a condescending chuckle and an eye roll. This reaction became even more pronounced when the Sex and the City movie approached its May 2008 release date. I was surprised to find most of the reviews downplaying its significance, and casting it aside as a piece of theatrical filth.

After reading the early reviews of the movie, I entered the movie theater with trepidation on opening night, expecting to see the hollow shell of the show I once loved. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the movie was actually pretty good. It was just as relevant, engaging, and hilarious as the television show - even more so, in my opinion.

Which brings me to my point. I usually hate most movies, especially ones targeted at women, because they are so infantile and insulting. The Sex and the City movie is no great work, but it isn't just a shallow, vapid concoction either. In my opinion, society's rejection of Sex and the City is a rejection of womanhood itself. When I'm arguing with someone about whether the show is good or not, I'm not really talking about the show, and neither are they. I'm talking about women's right to gather with their friends, respond emotionally to breakups, articulate their thoughts by writing, and have those things depicted on a television show without it being brushed aside as petty and meaningless.

Sure, Sex and the City can be annoying and counter-productive, but so can most male-gendered programs. No one complains about blatant consumerism when it's celebrated in the latest Bond film, but Heaven forbid that the Sex and the City feature one scene where Carrie discusses buying shoes. You don't have to like Sex and the City, but why would you hate it? Hating something insinuates that you not only dislike something, but that you also feel strongly enough about it to officially take a public stand against it. Why do people always seem to hate Sex and the City, but just dislike anything gendered male?

Idiocentrism

I happened to stumble across an interesting site the other day called Idiocentrism. What is idiocentrism, you ask? It is a

version of generalism. Because no one can know everything, generalist knowledge is inevitably partial, contextual, particularist, perspectivist, and idiocentric. ("What is Idiocentrism?")

Basically, it is one guy's version of academic methodology, created from the idea that modern academic studies have become flawed in their attempts at specialization. University fields are focused on exclusion and fragmentation, while generalism is focused on integrating a diverse knowledge base into a series of theories and hypotheses.

During my time at the University, I always despised how every paper I wrote was supposed to be about One Thing. Academic papers, as they currently stand, are structured by stating one main introductory hypothesis, and then supporting that idea with a series of proofs. However, my papers never followed this structure, because they were drawn from so many different sources. This always served to confuse my professors. Examples of my subject matter:

• Vegetarianism as Love
• Running as a Form of Zen Buddhist Meditation
• Feminism Within the Soto Sect of Zen Buddhism
• Bisexuality in America: The Search for Identification

I always thought that I was just really bad at organizing my thoughts. But the real problem was that I saw everything as interrelated, and so I couldn't reduce my topics down to one main line of reasoning. This is similar to Alan Watts' theory of polarization, in which he suggests that "opposites" are not truly opposite, they are just different poles of the same thing. For example, "good" and "bad" are not entities of their own, they are simply points along a continuation of "goodness." Therefore, "good" is just "gooder" than "bad," and vice versa.

Another problem I encountered as a result of my generalist philosophy was having my papers universally misunderstood. For example, I was working on a double major in Women's Studies and Religious Studies, and assumptions that were taken for granted in the Women's Studies field were considered false in the Religious Studies department. Therefore, a paper such as "Feminism Within the Soto Sect of Zen Buddhism" would be praised as traditional methodology by my Women's Studies professors, and criticized as radical idealism by my Religious Studies professors.

How can there be different truths within what is supposed to be one overarching truth? How can something be Wrong in one academic course and Right in another? This is the problem with University specialization. I think we need to go back to more generalist philosophy and be more accepting of scholars that refuse to limit themselves to irrelevant categories.