Angry Lobsters Want Your Guns

Dr. Hersch; there are three relevant class-related posts below this, but I thought since we've got a couple of weeks of vacation on the way, there would be no harm in a spot of fun...

A fascinating NRA pamphlet has popped up on the Internet recently, and it's worth a look for the aesthetics alone.

The pamphlet, titled Freedom in Peril, cryptically warns of the Coming Confrontation, which of course refers to the day when all those New World Order-type liberal Democrats will swoop in like thieves in the night and rob the good people of planet Earth of all of their firearms.

The full pamphlet can be found here (PDF). The picture above clearly depicts one of the primary threats to the sanctity of the 2nd Amendment; crazed animal rights wackos with their gang of mad-pissed critters. Note the Evil Dynamite-Wielding Owl of Doom just to the left of the hairy-legged woman (probably a feminist, no doubt).

I think this pamphlet is a fine piece of propaganda if I've ever seen one, and I don't mean that sarcastically. The illustrations are, in my opinion, beautiful.

This last photo depicts a God-fearing American family observing the impending doom which is about to envelop them and everything they hold dear (i.e. guns). I think readers are to assume that the tsunami is composed primarily of New World Order-type liberal Democrats, or else it wouldn't really be all that threatening.

Enjoy what remains of your summer!

"Will I ever find a liberated man?"

It wasn't just Ms. Magazine and other "lib" magazines that discussed the women's movement. Mainstream publications such as McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, and Redbook all sought to cater to the growing population of liberated consumers.

These magazines attempted to maintain the status-quo as much as was possible while at the same time catering to the concerns of feminists. Often times the women featured in such mainstream articles decided that the home really was the best place for them, and that's were they'd stay.

Of course, as mentioned before, the movement was not monolithic, and many feminists did opt to remain or become housewives. Still, these magazines often served as platforms for opportunistic advertisements seeking to capitalize on the movement.

"You've Come a Long Way, Baby," Virginia Slims told their female audience. After their long days battling those mean old men, they deserved a refreshing, mild cigarette to calm their nerves and help them keep their trim figures! Dewar's Scotch informed women that alcohol consumption was a sign of independence. The list goes on.

And while it's no surprise that corporations saw women's weaknesses and took advantage of them, it's nonetheless disappointing to think about. Glad nothing like that goes on today.

"We, black women, do both."

If white women in America were discriminated against and undervalued, black and minority women were even more so. If one needed any more proof that the women's liberation movement was not monolithic, one needn't look further than black feminists.

The so called "double jeopardy" situation dealt with by black women would be a tough burden for anyone to bear. However, it simply wasn't in the best interest of many African-American females to join the ranks of their white counterparts in the burgeoning movement.Writer Celestine Ware described why:

Feminist goals, like abortion on demand and easily obtainable birth control, are viewed with paranoid suspicion by some black militants at a time when they are literally fighting for their lives and looking everywhere to increase their numbers.

Of course, these militants were predominately male, and their suggestions that "their women" not use birth control in order to populate were not taken well by many women. For them, they had been seen as nothing more than breeding machines by slave masters in the past, and were now seen as the same thing by their lovers and husbands, although for different reasons.

When the nationalist Black Unity Party declared that "none of the sisters should take the pill [so that they could produce more black warriors]," a group of black women responded:

If we practice birth control, it's because of poor black men ... who won't support their families, won't stick by their women ... Poor black women would be fools to sit up in the house with a whole lot of children and eventually go crazy, sick, heartbroken, no place to go, no sign of affection -- nothing.

Indeed, social and economic disparities left many of these women with precisely that -- nothing. And black men were clearly just as insensitive to the needs of black women as white men were to those of white women: Chauvinism is truly colorblind.

Photo: New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to fun for president of the U.S. c. 1967.

"[He] participated in the Junior Year Aboard program in Liechenstein, where he learned to make dumplings."

What is the best way for a group and/or movement to make others sympathetic to their cause and/or struggle? Do protests and public demonstrations cause onlookers to think deeply about the group's cause, or are they mostly turned off by what they perceive as "fringe" or "extreme" actions? How does a group strike that balance between passive (conservative) and active (radical)?

This is something that I've thought about a great deal, and not just regarding 2nd wave feminism. I think about it whenever I hear about folks protesting the war, or listen to a candidate give a speech, or read about nonviolent resistance methods during the Civil Rights era.

Obviously, the folks involved in said movements are usually the ones giving this dilemma the most thought:

From the beginning, Ms. [Magazine] faced the double task of speaking to the converted and recruiting new readers. Ms. covered grassroots organizing activities of feminists activists as well as the different problems faced by minority and poor women. But more often the magazine focused on the problems encountered by its largely middle-class audience of white women.

Of course, the women's movement was effective in many areas, and Ms. Magazine no doubt contributed to that effectiveness. But could it have been more effective by practicing different methods? Should activists have been more conservative in their efforts, or more radical? Obviously, a question that is impossible to answer today, but one that I believe is worth contemplating.

Photo: First Ms. Magazine to hit newsstands, July 1972.

"I learned about women from men"

"I learned about women from men," lamented the female character in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. It may be a fiction book, but it's incredible when one thinks about how true that statement was for countless women of yesteryear. Afterall, who else would they learn about women from?

Men were the gatekeepers of not only the media, but popular culture and opinion. This is the way it had been for, well, ever. Women's views simply were not represented in general discourse. Sure, you had a female author pop up here and there, but it was nearly impossible for her ideas and/or opinions, no matter how relevant, logical or creative, to be taken seriously by more than a handful of people. And why should they? Freud spoke for women psychologically, and Hugh Heffner portrayed them culturally -- what more could they ask for?

Isabel, Jong's protagonist from Fear of Flying, offers another striking nugget for contemplation:

Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story ... Until I was twenty-one, I measured my orgasms against Lady Chatterley's and wondered what was wrong with me. Did it ever occur to me that Lady Chatterley was really a man? That she was really D.H. Lawrence?

Eventually, this did occur to women. But for many, it was too late. Women had been defined by men in every conceivable way for so long that it was fully ingrained. Not until authors like Freidan, Greer and Jong came along was the full story presented.

"Days when you don't learn something can be a drag."

Caught between the civil rights movement and various hippie and anti-war groups of the New Left, the modern woman's liberation movement struggled to achieve recognition and coherence.

Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organizations which one might think would've been sympathetic with the struggles of women, proved to be just as male dominated as society at large. This being the case, Rosen writes that the chaotic unraveling of Students for a Democratic Society fueled the real beginning of the women's movement.

At a time when many African-Americans involved in the struggle for civil rights decided that white involvement served as a hindrance to their cause, many women came to the same conclusion regarding men.

Now on their own, women sought to define themselves and their goals. What exactly should they be fighting for? Who would raise their children while they rallied and went to work? These were some of the questions they now grappled with. Nanci Hollander submitted for consideration what Rosen calls "striking" and "years ahead of its time," but what seems rather tame today:

Instead of women assuming the major responsibility for raising the children, the man and woman should assume and share the task equally. In order for this to work, however, society would first have to re-arrange work and make it more flexible.

Looking only at this aspiration, has it come to fruition in the U.S.? Do men and women share this task equally? Should they? I would argue that they should, but that they do not. As many strides as the women's movement has made over the years, I believe there is still much to be done in terms of full equality.

When women earn on average only 77% as men for the same work, then there is still something wrong. But this single statistic is arguably indicative of a more pervading societal attitude toward women and their value within society.

Photo: Alice Paul, New Jersey, National Chairman, Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Edmonston. ca. 1910-16. Library of Congress

"In the fifties, the only thing worse than sleeping with a man was to telephone him."

Rosen begins her book by saying that it's not just about women:

This is not a book just about an isolated section of society. Dissident movements provide a microcosmic view of the dominant culture's values, assumptions, and social structure.

I will surely not disagree with that statement. I think that the way a society treats its minorities reflects well that society's character. Obviously, this also applies to the civil rights movement, among others.

I found Rosen's analysis of the post war social environment to be quite convincing. Not that I hadn't heard her argument before, but I think that she did a nice job of clearly articulating it:

Reared in the Depression, most had grown up in a culture that valued duty, thrift, long-term commitment, and an old-fashioned work ethic. But they married and bore children in a culture of abundance that prized planned obsolescence and disposability, glamorized leisure, and promised individual happiness through the purchase of products.

Personally, I believe the second sentence in that statement sums up the current situation in the U.S. -- if not the rest of the Western world -- today. And personally, it sort of annoys me that this sentiment isn't seriously discussed in our mainstream outlets. If you don't agree that our disposable consumerist culture is the Greatest Thing Ever, says conventional wisdom, then you're obviously some sort of extremist reject who ought not to be voicing such outrageous opinions and upsetting everyone.

Clearly, marketing executives knew exactly what they were doing when aiming their products at women in the '50s and '60s (and today), as made clear by author and consultant Anita Colby when she exclaimed "Honestly now, where would you be without the little woman's rebellion?"
She was saying that business men ought to thank heavens that their wives are mentally unstable, because it causes them to buy more stuff!

Savages.

"Paralysis of Analysis"

It doesn't matter how many times I read about black civil rights in this country (as well as slavery), I never cease to be amazed at how much the U.S. failed these people.

That being said, I intrigued when I read Malcom X's idea to bring the issue before the United Nations and have them hold the U.S. in violation of the Human Rights Charter. Yesterday was the first time I'd heard about that. Of course, it never ended up happening, and it very well may never have happened; regardless of X's death. But that's not to say that it shouldn't have happened.

The U.S. government was entirely complicit -- and sometimes cooperative -- with the systematic oppression of millions of people. I think a few of Lewis' quotes on the matter pretty well capture the mind-blowing silliness of the facts:

Sheriff Jim Clark proved today beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is basically no different from a Gestapo officer during the Fascist slaughter of the Jews...
This is but one more example of the inhuman, animal-like treatment of the Negro people of Selma, Alabama. This nation has always come to the aid of people in foreign lands who are gripped by a reign of tyranny. Can this nation do less for the people of Selma

And:

I don't know how President Johnson can sen troops to Vietnam. I don't see how he can send troops to the Congo. I don't see how he can send troops to Africa, and he can't send troops to Selma, Alabama!

Lewis was right to wonder why his government was more concerned with the plight of people on the other side of the globe than it was with those living within it's borders. Not that people halfway around the world don't deserve our help. They often do. But to ignore and/or support the gross violations of human rights on it's own shores while criticizing other countries for doing the same thing didn't do much for the credibility of the folks running the show here.