Paradigm Shift

It sometimes seems as though the attack on abortion rights will never end. After all, just this week, the North Dakota legislature passed a ban on abortions after 6 weeks and moved a personhood amendment to the 2014 ballot, outdoing a recently enacted Arkansas ban on abortions after 12 weeks. The war on women’s reproductive rights is constant. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 92 abortion restrictions in 24 states were enacted in 2011 alone.

But in light of these aggressive and continual anti-choice attacks, New York’s Governor Cuomo has decided to not only buck the restriction trend, but to move in the opposite direction entirely. Standing firmly on the sides of women’s health and autonomy, Governor Cuomo has proposed a 10-Point Women’s Equality Act that, among many other things, would ease restrictions on abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy. The current New York law currently allows abortions after 24 weeks only if the pregnant women’s life is at risk. Though overridden by a federal law that protects women’s health, the wording of the current State law often inhibits doctors and women from accessing their legal right to obtain an abortion necessary for their health, for fear of legal retribution.

Governor Cuomo’s proposal would also make clear that health care practitioners, as well as physicians, can legally perform abortions, and would make abortion a part of the state’s public law, rather than part of the state’s penal code. This is an important symbolic stance: abortion is a part of comprehensive reproductive health care and there is nothing criminal about it. One in three women in America will have an abortion, and this gesture shows that New York stands in solidarity with those women and understands that abortion is a health care right.

According to a recent Siena poll, “80% of New Yorkers agree that New York should enact a law ‘protecting reproductive freedom for women, ensuring a woman’s right to make private health care decisions regarding pregnancy.’” Governor Cuomo’s proposals would do just that. This would not only affect the women of New York, ensuring their right to reproductive autonomy, but would have national implications, as well. It would send a signal to the rest of the country that restrictions on abortions are not inevitable, that attacking women’s rights to reproductive freedom is unacceptable. It is crucial that these proposals are passed: they would ensure that the right to an abortion is protected, and would signal to the rest of the country that abortion rights are legitimate, necessary, and imperative.

While New York does provide public health insurance coverage for abortion services, the reality is that many women still fall through the cracks. Many women are not eligible for state funding, but are still unable to afford an abortion on their own. While Governor Cuomo’s commitment to easing restrictions on abortions in an important move and will have inordinate positive impacts on women’s health and abortion access, for many women, the biggest restriction to abortion access is the cost.

This is why a full repeal of the Hyde amendment, which bans federal Medicaid coverage of abortion, needs to be repealed. Easing restrictions is important and needed, but so is expanding coverage and access. A woman cannot exercise her right to an abortion if she is unable to afford it. The Hyde amendment privileges women who can afford an abortion over those who can’t, and distinctly affects women of color. A right to an abortion should not be predicated on whether or not you can afford it. Easing restrictions can only do so much; we need an increase in state and federal funding in order to ensure the protection, availability, and access to abortion.

Governor Cuomo’s support for abortion rights is a small beacon of hope in the fight against anti-choice zealotry. It will help to reinforce that abortion is, in fact, a facet of women’s health care, and can serve to de-stigmatize abortion, both in New York and on a national level. And when 70% of Americans believe Roe versus Wade should stand, Governor Cuomo’s proposals reflect the national consensus that women have the right to an abortion. But this proposed legislation can only do so much. We need to continue to push for a repeal of the Hyde amendment and full support of abortion rights within comprehensive reproductive health care for women. We need to press our legislators to increase state and federal funding for low-income women to access abortions. And we need to continue to support those women who, through no fault of their own, are unable to afford an abortion.

There is no choice if there is no access.

During it’s previews, I went to go see the new production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella at the Broadway Theater. I loved the Leslie Ann Warren and Brandy/Whitney Huston versions as a child. The songs were so delightful to me, so when I found out the play was coming to Broadway I made plans to go because I wanted a chance to experience the music live. I knew that it was primarily a story for children, and I expected to see a lot of families with small kids at the theater. There were, and the majority of them were little girls dressed up for the occasion in princess costumes.

Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter is an exploration into the way toys and media are marketed to young girls – especially the Disney Princesses. Walking through the lobby before the play and at intermission, I felt like I was seeing her book come to life.

The play has the same music and songs from the previous television productions, but a new book written by Douglas Carter Beane. He draws heavily from Charles Perrault’s version of the story which also inspired Ever After. I have nothing but accolades for the cast, the orchestra, the costumes, and set design. It was a beautiful play aesthetically – but there is a lot to explore in the new story surrounding classic score.

This new book is not set in the French countryside like in Ever After or at all concerned with historical accuracy. It is still a play for children, but there’s plenty for adults to enjoy as well. I found the play funny and charming. Douglas Carter Beane’s Cinderella is still the traditional ingénue. The prince, still strong and brave, is also naive and somewhat insecure. Cinderella’s step sisters are not particularly cruel or ugly – Charlotte is mean and snarky and Gabrielle is something of a geek girl – which I adore. Cinderella’s stepmother is still oppressive and cold, but she too has multiple dimensions. The fairy godmother has been completely revamped as a character, and the play now includes Jean Michele – a populist rabble rouser and Sebastian, the corrupt royal regent.

Jean Michele’s subplot raises questions about caring for the poor and whether or not monarchy is fair. It’s not preachy and is couched in humor. I have no objection to adding a social consciousness to children’s (and especially girls’) entertainment, but the anachronisms and incongruities were making my head spin.

The lack of time and place was disorienting. In the original story, we aren’t supposed to think too much about how a servant girl is educated enough to make the references in “My Own Little Corner.” However it’s not clear whether the new story takes place in Medieval Europe, the enlightened Renaissance, or some kind of progressive Utopia. We know that Jean Michele and Prince Topher have been to University. But if they live in a time where notions of class are suffocating, how did Jean Michele, who is not wealthy, get an education? Jean Michele’s questioning of the monarchy is received as radical bordering on ridiculous by his countrymen, but the Prince takes his opinions to heart. Women are obsessed with marrying for money, but Jean Michele and the Prince speak to Cinderella and her sisters as equals with opinions about politics worthy of consideration. The play is full of contradictions.

There is joke about Cinderella and her sisters going to elementary school together, and in the moment it broke my suspension of disbelief a little. But its something young children wouldn’t think to question – of course little girls go to school – why wouldn’t they? This is the problem some critics have with the play, it’s trying to be both a classic fairy tale and a modern “Girl Power” story at once without making any of the compromises necessary for either genre.

I know I’m critiquing a children’s play. But the social consciousness of the play is hampered by sticking with the more traditional fairy tale conventions.

What I liked about the portrayal of women in this version of the play is that the male characters take the women seriously and there is little to no overt sexism on their part. However, although there’s now a B-plot about why its important to care for the poor and that everyone should have a voice in their community, it’s still ultimately a story about a bunch of women who want to marry a man solely for his wealth and status, so much so that they start to hate each other for it. Even though this version is going for a more progressive vibe, the Stepsisters Lament was left in, and sung by the entire women’s chorus rather than just the two stepsisters. It felt discordant with the rest of the play.

Cinderella does have a fair amount of autonomy in her fate. Even though she still sings that she knows she shouldn’t “make the first advance” she pretty makes several of them anyway. I still have a difficult time with the trope of the fourth date marriage, however, even when it’s not being so heavily sold to children.

The exception to fairy tale conventions clashing with the new book is the way Marie, the Fairy Godmother character has been rewritten. She is powerful and wise. The nonsense words in her songs sound like a spell she taught at Hogwarts rather than something batty and weird. Marie is still caring and kind to Cinderella, but you get the feeling you would not want to cross her. She’s still a plot device, but a force of nature at that.

“Impossible/It’s Possible,” the song sung by the Fairy Godmother and Cinderella has always been one of my favorite things about this play.

” The world is full of zanies and fools,
who don’t believe in sensible rules ,
and won’t believe what sensible people say,
and because these daft and dewey eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes –
impossible?!
Things are happening every day! ”

The new book really has this verse at its heart. When I was a kid I liked the message of nonconformity, and that it was okay to be a dreamer. I was really inspired by the idea that “Impossible things are happening every day.” I wasn’t quite sure what those impossible things were – but I interpreted it to mean both true love and other things like science and social progress. The new B-plot about Jean-Michele’s political aspirations fits the motif of “impossible things” and I like this expansion of the meaning a lot.

The marketing of the play largely ignores this though, and I understand why. They are sticking mostly with everything princessey and romantic and I get it – it is still Cinderella and princess gear is what sells. There is now a shirt that says “Impossible things are happening every day” for kids, which is neat. I would really like a “Zanies and Fools” t-shirt, though!

Bottom line: Cinderella is whimsical and fun, if not subversive.

“Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” plays at the Broadway Theatre.

Elizabeth also blogs at Political Flavors. You can follow her on Twitter @MissCherryPi.

When I was sixteen, my parents uprooted me from a Seattle suburb to the middle of Canada, in a tiny farming town in the middle of Canada. It was an opportunity to start fresh and become somebody completely different, but also a great chance to rebel and milk my parents’ guilt for taking me away from everything I know and forcing me into a town still waiting for a 3G phone tower in 2011. I did a little bit of both: I started wearing red lipstick every day and embraced term “feminist”. It scared the farm-town boys and my parents alike and I’ve never looked back.

I was a part of Human Rights Club in my Washington high school which opened my eyes to the many injustices in the world, misogyny being a huge one. As I learned about gender inequality in a broad sense in the club, I also exposed myself to feminism online. Feminist blogs kept me updated on current information, helped me feel included by being intersectional, and had relevant writers to whom I could relate. After the move, I compensated for the fact I no longer had Human Rights Club to guide me by immersing myself in online feminism whenever I could. It was on Tumblr and Blogspot where I first learned about rape culture, double standards, gender stratification, misogyny, and other crucial feminist concepts that shaped my thought and strengthened my beliefs.

I’m now out of high school and almost finished with my first year of college, I can look back on my beginning days as an identifying feminist with fondness (the bad bangs and naivety makes it hard to pretend it was all peachy, though). Something that began with worrying about facing the pay gap in ten years grew to be an integral part of my life. I am confident that feminism saved my adolescence. It gave me hope by being a reminder of the fact not everyone in the world lived in a place with suffocating gender roles and ignorance. It motivated me to try to dismantle some of the sexism I saw. Feminism shaped me to become a critical thinker of the world around me. It made me aware of patriarchal beauty standards and reject them. It helped me realize that I am a sexually autonomous being and allowed me to grow comfortable with my sexuality and grow confident in it, fighting rape culture and objectification. It pointed out all the injustices in the world that affect me and gives me the courage to fight against them. Feminism was the first and, to date, the only thing that I, a young woman of colour, truly feel a part of. I have so much to thank feminism for, although it, paired with the fact I’m always wearing lipstick, made getting boys to kiss me very difficult.

It’s been two and a half years since I was moved and I’ve since acquired over forty lipsticks. The majority of my lipstick collection is red, but there are a few fuchsia and several oranges, and, most recently, a growing number of purple shades. A tool of expression, lipstick has the power to make me feel complete and invincible. Feminism makes me feel the same way. It is empowering and personal, and I work to expand my collection of feminist knowledge every day. I went from a very linear understanding of feminism to recognizing the omnipresent patriarchy and realizing the absolute need for intersectionality.

At this point in my life, I’ve decided that feminism is an ideology and movement that I want to dedicate my life to. Currently, I’m pursuing a double major in political science and global development with a focus on gender and social change, with an unofficial goal of taking all the classes related to gender that my small, liberal arts and sciences school offers. My plans after graduating is to adopt cats and smash the patriarchy. I’m by no means a feminist academic, so the stuff I write about are about stuff I experience as a young woman, a person of colour, college student, and, of course, a feminist: double standards, race in relation to feminism, sexual liberation, intersectionality, and more. My hobbies include reading feminist books with scary titles in public, searching for the perfect red lipstick, doing tequila shots, making collages, and dancing wildly. I probably should have put this blurb in the beginning, but oh, well.

Hello.

I’m Laura, a new blogger to Paradigm Shift and a feminist living in the NYC area (Jersey City, to be exact) who is interested in the use of the female voice in literature and who is fascinated by some of history’s lesser-known feminist trailblazers.

My blogs will often be personal essays, so I thought an appropriate way to introduce myself would be by telling you about my introduction to feminism, my click moment.

As a teen, I always believed music influenced my feminism. My introduction to bands like Bikini Kill and Tilt fueled my growing teenage feminist fire. When asked to recount my click moment, I had always told the story of my first time at Warped Tour. In the summer following 9th grade I watched in awe as the Lunachicks performed. Theo Kogan’s stage performance convinced me I needed to dive into this thing called feminism and on the way home that night, something felt different. Something had changed. I had experienced my click moment.

Or so I thought…

As I look back now I realize although this was the moment that got me labeling myself as a feminist, and putting my time behind feminist causes, I had been a feminist-in-training for quite some time. This is because of the strong feminist influence in my household. Although I don’t think my mother would label herself a feminist, my mother was my original feminist model. In fact, thanks to my mother, when I was no more than six or seven I experienced my “mini-click.”

My mother’s unconventional stances helped shape the way I view women, marriage, and beauty. And her influence began with her appearance. My mother has always kept very short hair and she has never worn any make up. She doesn’t own any. My mother has never dyed her hair. As I grew, I watched her once black hair lighten as more gray became introduced. Now in my twenties, I watch that gray turn into white. When my mother changed careers in her mid-fifties, she found job interviews difficult, as her gray hair was a definitive sign of age. She lamented, but stood her ground, vowing to get hired because she was competent and willing (at any age) to work hard. This was not the first time my mother faced resistance in the work force.  My mother studied to become a chemist in the late sixties. She was the only woman in her graduate classes and upon graduation she entered into a male-dominated field. In both instances my mother refused to give up. And in both my mother prevailed.

My father also worked in the sciences for many years. In fact, my parents were set up through a chemist my mother went to school with. My parents eventually married, and when my father proposed, my mother made a request. In lieu of an engagement ring, my mother asked for a cedar chest. Considering hope chests have long been an object associated with a female’s dowry, this reversal was rather unusual, but my father delivered. Learning the story of the chest that remains at the foot of my parent’s bed was an eye-opening moment in my childhood, however, it was not my mini-click.

When I was little, I always helped my mother send out the mail. It was one of our earliest traditions. My first true taste of independence came when my mother deemed me old enough to walk to the end of my block to deposit letters into the mailbox (although my independence was less about age and more about height, as I was given this task only once I was tall enough to see over the hood of a car). But before I could make my trek to the mailbox, I helped my mother seal the envelopes. I licked the stamp, licked the envelope, and would put on the return address label. This seemingly ordinary task was my introduction to feminism. I remember looking at my mother’s return labels, all of which began with the word “Ms.” This word was new to me. I had not learned “Ms.” in school. I remember asking my mother what “Ms.” meant. She looked up from writing out an address and said it was a prefix that could be used instead of “Miss” or “Mrs.” She went on to explain that just as “Mr.” didn’t change if a man were married, neither did “Ms.” It made one’s marital status irrelevant.

I was in awe. The idea that a woman could chose not to be defined by anyone but herself struck a chord with six-year-old me. It seemed that everything about the mail bred independence. It was in that moment that I knew once I got return address labels of my own, I too would be a “Ms.”

(Click)

It Was Rape

Words from the defendants, their lawyers, and their parents

“I had no intention”

“No pictures should have been taken”

“Terrible mistake that they made”

Today we learned that there would be justice for Jane Doe. The Steubenville rape case had more indisputable evidence (text messages, photos) than many other rape cases that are brought forth. After the verdict of adjudication of delinquency (similar to a guilty verdict in juvenile court) the calls for leniency were ignored as the two defendants could have been tried as adults. Even during sentencing very little was said about the rape of Jane Doe and the defense seemed preoccupied with their own fates. The tears cried by 17-year-old Trent Mays and 16-year-old Ma’lik Richmond were tears of the scared, not tears of the remorseful.

Rape is a felony of the first degree in the state of Ohio category 2 offences in juvenile courts. The court made the decision to keep the matter in the juvenile court. Regarding charges of rape, committed minimum 1 year maximum until 21.

Juvenile sex offenders will have treatment to prevent a similar crime from being committed. Both defendants will be registered as juvenile sex offenders. It is court ordered that they have no contact with the victim until they are 21.

This is an important case to keep in mind. Rape is not the inevitable result of a night out drinking it is a conscious decision on the part of the perpetrator to violate another human—in the case of Steubenville the alcohol ingested by Jane Doe negates the ability to consent.

If Jane Doe had been drunk and passed out with no rapists present she would have been fine. This case wasn’t about two bad athletes but about a culture where these boys have been brought up to think that they have to right to penetrate, urinate, and otherwise humiliate a young woman. It speaks volumes of the environment when so many people witnessed these behaviors and yet no one stepped in.  Yes they were young, but that cannot excuse behavior like the humiliations to which Jane Doe was subjected.

Although there was justice for Jane Doe today her battle is not over. She lives in a town that repeatedly tried to victim blame. Jane Doe won an a cost of two friends and national shaming. It takes a brave spirit, and it also illustrates why more women may be afraid to come forward.

Here’s more on the story