From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/17-2
As we go marching, marching,
we’re standing proud and tall
The rising of the women means
the rising of us all.
Our lives shall not be sweated
from birth until life closes,
Hearts starve as well as bodies:
bread and roses, bread and roses.
The
song “Bread and Roses” and the 1912 strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts,
where the phrase originated, remind us how important women’s struggles
have been in U.S. history, and that the liberation of women is central
to progress toward social justice.
There hasn’t been much talk
about women’s liberation lately. Women have the vote; more than half the
students at universities are women; rape is classified as a crime;
there are women doctors, lawyers, soccer players, and secretaries of
state. A lot of young professionals—and a lot of our students—would say
that the whole idea of women’s liberation is passé, a non-issue.
Then,
this spring’s political campaigns revealed a deep and ugly wound:
misogyny that ranged from Rush Limbaugh’s crass attack on Georgetown Law
School student Sandra Fluke to the repeal of Wisconsin’s pay equity
law, from the Republican attacks on Title X (which subsidizes cervical
and breast cancer screening, testing for HIV and other sexually
transmitted diseases, and birth control for 5 million low-income women)
to Virginia’s mandated vaginal ultrasounds for women who want abortions.
What
has been exposed is that the notion that we are “post-sexist” is a lie.
There is a disturbing similarity to how the election of an African
American president has masked the worsening realities for large numbers
of African Americans—in the words of prison rights activist and scholar
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “One African American in the White House and a
million in prison.” Professional opportunities for a narrow stratum of
women have masked the worsening realities of life for millions of women
caught up in the welfare system, the prison system, low-paying service
jobs, domestic violence, and the ideological misogyny of growing
fundamentalist religious and political perspectives.
The Stereotype of the ‘Lazy Teacher’
The
vilification of K-12 teachers is part and parcel of this misogyny. Last
year, when teachers led the occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol,
many pointed out the obvious: Attacks on teachers—and other public
sector workers like nurses and social workers—are overwhelmingly attacks
on women. When “reformers” from former D.C. superintendent Michelle
Rhee to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie portray teachers as incompetent,
incapable of leadership, and selfish, they don’t need to specify women
teachers for that to be the image in people’s minds—76 percent of U.S.
teachers are women; at the elementary school level, it’s nearly 90
percent. As education blogger Sabrina Stevens Shupe wrote recently, “The
predominantly female teaching profession [is] among the latest
[targets] in a long tradition of projecting community/social anxieties
onto ‘bad’ women—from ‘witches’ to bad mothers to feminists and beyond.”
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