The Gender Justice Issue - YES! Summer 2016 by YES! Magazine

C elebrating 20 Y ears of S olutions J ournalism

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LOVING THE WILDERNESS RIGHT WHERE YOU LIVE SMART ECONOMICS OF UNMARRIED WOMEN

summer

2016

ANITA HILL

THIS FEMINISM INCLUDES RACIAL JUSTICE, WOMEN’S RIGHTS, GENDER FREEDOM JOANNE SMITH

WHY BEING A “GOOD GUY” IS NOT ENOUGH

GENDER JUSTICE WOMEN’S RIGHTS, OF COURSE—BUT SO MUCH MORE

US $6.50 Canada $6.50

“THEY” AND THE EMOTIONAL WEIGHT OF WORDS I ASSUMED IT WAS RACISM— IT WAS PATRIARCHY

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SUMMER 2016 | No. 78

CONTENTS

IN DEPTH Gender Justice FEMINISM AT THE HEART OF RACIAL JUSTICE

16 This “New” Feminism Has Been Here All Along Dani McClain

I Assumed It Was Racism —It Was Patriarchy Akiba Solomon

25 What the War On Repoductive Rights Has To Do With Poverty and Race Infographic by Tracy Loeffelholz Dunn

26 How Domestic Workers Did It Together Sheila Bapat IT’S EVERYONE’S LIB

29 What I Want for My Son Essay by Mariah MacCarthy

30 The Aha! Moment: Being a “Good Guy” Is Not Enough Joe Samalin

33 I Was Supposed to Be Pretty, Feminine, Nice, and Straight Essay by Raye Stoeve

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Forget the Bathrooms, the Trans Fight Is About Human Rights Eesha Pandit

36 Go Ahead, Cry Maud Fernhout

SIGNS OF LIFE

JUST THE FACTS

The Most Radical Break From Patriarchy Of All

Tracy Loeffelholz Dunn

5 Reasons Social Justice For Babies Comes In A Cardboard Box Marcus Harrison Green

EMPOWERED WOMEN

PEOPLE WE LOVE

Single Moms and Co-op Tamales

Funny Thing, Gender Justice Alexa Strabuk

Travis Putnam Hill

A Quiet Walk With 1,500-Year-Old Birds and Bears

Helping Native Women Reclaim Their Spirit

Terry Tempest Williams

Christa Hillstrom

12 Loving the Urban Wilderness Right Where You Live Shelley McEuen

15 THE PAGE THAT COUNTS Keith Barbalato and Kate Stringer

CULTURE SHIFT BOOKS + FILMS + MUSIC

56 Walking Pilgrimage

49 “They” and the Emotional Weight of Words Essay by Cole

The Naked Power of Burlesque Performers Taja Lindley

John Francis

60 The Real Reason to Ride a Bike Peter Kalmus

62 YES! BUT HOW?

Mosquito-Free Without the DEET Kate Stringer

64 ON THE COVER Photo by Jane Feldman Joanne Smith, executive director of Girls for Gender Equity, holding a painting of Anita Hill by Crystal Clarity.

What the Beltway Politicians Didn’t See Coming Commentary by Sarah van Gelder ALSO 1 :: FROM THE EDITORS 4 :: CONTRIBUTORS 5 :: MORE OF THE STORY 55 :: FROM THE PUBLISHER

PHOTO BY DAVID BYRD

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Feminism at the Heart of Racial Justice, 16-29

No. 78

IN DEPTH

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It’s Everyone’s Lib, 30-41 Empowered Women , 42-53

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Feminism at the Heart of Racial Justice

This “New” Feminism Has Been Here All Along

Dani McClain oanne

Smith’s

u n d e r s ta n d i n g o f f e m i n i s m

shaped in large part by her grandmother’s story. The nowdeceased matriarch, then employed as a nurse in Haiti, wrote to President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s seeking a way out of the country for her family during the turbulent reign of Haitian President François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Kennedy responded,

awarding Smith’s engineer grandfather a fellowship in Tunisia. But while in the North African country ahead of his wife and children, the man started a new family. Smith’s grandmother was undeterred by the betrayal and found a way to the United States and work that allowed her to eventually send for the children she’d left with relatives in Haiti.

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Smith, who leads an organization in Brooklyn called Girls for Gender Equity, said that she remembers being told about her grandmother while growing up: “She got your grandfather the job. She accessed politics. She was educated.” That example now informs the work Smith does supporting the 11- to 24-year-olds who come to her organization for training in community organizing. “Her leadership shaped everything that I know about feminism and Black feminism,” Smith said. Smith’s own identity is rich and layered. She is a Black woman, a Lesbian, a first-generation Haitian American, and one of three daughters raised by a single mother who earned a bachelor’s degree at the age of 50. These and other aspects of her identity figure into how she understands and lives feminism. In other words, she embodies what’s often called intersectional feminism. Through her organization’s work with the New York City Council’s Young Women’s Initiative and the White House Council on Women and Girls, Smith is one of many voices exposing new audiences to this intersectional approach. In the process, she often finds herself making a critical point: While her feminism— a feminism that takes into account the totality of a person’s identity and experience—may be a new concept for some, there’s nothing new about it. The feminism that some find more

familiar, the feminism that made words and phrases like “womanism” and “intersectional feminism” necessary in the first place, is less explicitly inclusive. Consider the plain and simple feminism that novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie named in her TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” and that Beyoncé then enshrined in her 2014 song “Flawless.” As Adichie put it, “Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” This is a clear, concise explanation voiced by a Nigerian writer and amplified by an African-American entertainer, one that implies a big tent with room for all kinds of people. Yet many are turned off by the word when it stands on its own because of the exclusive ways it’s been applied throughout history. “Feminism” can serve as shorthand for a political project that, in theory, sought to liberate all women but, in practice, elevated a particular slice of womanhood. The typical student of 19th-century feminism is more likely to think of Elizabeth Cady Stanton than Anna Julia Cooper, the Black educator and author of the 1892 book Voice from the South, if asked who advanced the movement’s first wave. Gloria Steinem is nearly a household name; Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, the Black feminist and attorney who was often paired with Steinem for ’70s speaking engagements, is not. This is because of the textbooks and mainstream media projects that build and preserve standard narratives about who feminism benefits and who has kept it alive all these years. Unfortunately, differences between the priorities of second- and thirdwave feminism and those of the

intersectional approach gaining more traction today are often presented in mainstream media as a generational conflict. Take, for example, the campaign-trail debate last winter over why many young women seemed unmoved by Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. Most news outlets framed the phenomenon as a clash between older White women and their younger counterparts. Think Gloria Steinem suggesting that young women were simply on the hunt for dates with the young men supporting Bernie Sanders and Madeleine Albright’s “special place in hell” quote about the destination of any woman not supporting Clinton. The coverage described both a betrayal of the old guard by women young enough to be their granddaughters and the emergence of a new guard that considers itself feminist but understands the word in entirely different ways. This framing cast millennials as the engines behind a “new” feminism—one in which efforts toward equality on the basis of sex (Clinton’s domain) get equal footing with efforts toward racial justice, immigrant rights, the eradication of poverty, and the centering of Queer and Trans people’s issues (not exactly Clinton’s domain). But the lack of enthusiasm about Clinton was not actually evidence of a clash between generations. Similar tensions have long existed within struggles for women’s rights, and two recent historical documentaries show just how. In She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, a 2014 film about women organizing in the ’60s and ’70s, the Black feminist activist Linda Burnham talks about going to an abortion-rights rally in San Francisco in the early 1970s and being confronted

At left: Joanne Smith (second from left), executive director of Girls for Gender Equity, with members Hyunhee Shin, Sharone Holloman, and Fariha Farzana. Photo from pages 16-17: Members of Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn, left to right: Sharone Holloman holding Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink, Charisma Barrington holding Sojourner Truth, Miasia Clark holding Anita Hill, Feria Morisset Noé holding Myriam Merlet, Joanne Smith, Zainab Abdemula holding Vandana Shiva, Fariha Farzana holding Dr. Mae Carol Jemison, Shenese Patterson holding Shirley Chisolm. Portraits by muralist Crystal Clarity.

YES! PHOTOS BY JANE FELDMAN

by “a sea of White women, very few women of color.” She recalls that someone in the crowd grabbed a bullhorn and asked for the Black women present to gather under a tree. The idea behind the impromptu caucus, she says, was that “maybe we have something to talk about that might be different from what’s coming from the stage, and indeed we did.” The organization Black Sisters United developed as a result. In the same film, the Lesbian feminist activist Rita Mae Brown recounts how Lesbians were excluded from mainstream second-wave organizing. On joining the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1968, Brown said, “I joined NOW, and I was the youngest person there, and I think I was the only Southerner. I called them on the carpet about class, and I called them on the carpet about race, and then I called them on the carpet about Lesbianism. I said, ‘You are treating women the way men treat you. And those women are Lesbians.’” The 2015 documentary No Más Bebés, about the forced sterilization of Mexican immigrant women at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in the 1960s and ’70s, highlights tensions between White and Latina feminists. The latter group called for a waiting period for sterilization to ensure that women understood what they were consenting to at the hospital, thus safeguarding against a eugenicist practice that had resulted in doctors tying the tubes of unsuspecting Spanish-speaking women who had gone there to give birth. “The [White] feminists wanted sterilization upon demand,” Gloria Molina of Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional, a Chicana empowerment organization, recalls in the film. “They basically opposed our waiting period. They weren’t really taking into account that, if you’re Spanish-speaking or if you don’t speak English, how you were being denied a right totally.” Burnham, Brown, and Molina were taking an intersectional approach to feminism. When it comes to blind spots such as those described above,

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Empowered Women

The Lakota Martial Arts Ninja Helping

Native Women Recover Their Spirit

Christa Hillstrom at t y

Stonefish

c a n ta k e d o w n

a fully grown man

by his finger. She makes it look graceful—a skillful flick of the wrist and her 220-pound husband, Dereck, drops straight to his knees. Patty, a 26-year-old joint-lock ninja of Lakota heritage from North Dakota, has been studying taekwondo for more than a decade. She knows dozens of complex hapkido

sequences that can immobilize opponents. But for demonstrations like the one she is doing tonight, she keeps it simple: single-action moves with names that women can remember in a panic, like grandma’s grip, jazz hands, and, in this case, single-finger takedown. Most people start timidly, afraid of pushing too hard, but Patty urges them to act like they mean it—anyone who apologizes has to drop and do squats. Based in Fargo, North Dakota, Patty and Dereck are kicking off a series of self-defense workshops in a local community center through their project, Arming Sisters/Reawakening Warriors. Their first group is small, with just three participants—two adults and a preteen girl. Dacia, 41, of North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Tribe, said she’d never heard of the program before seeing the event advertised by the tribal center. Before launching into the hapkido moves, Patty and Dereck talk through the impacts of generational trauma in Native American communities. Dacia keeps coming back to the point that strikes her most: You have the power to change your own life.

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Patty launched the original program in 2013 to offer Native American women a self-defense model that was more about rediscovering strength than putting up your guard. This year, she and Dereck are trying to expand, launching workshops for men and boys on masculinity. Together, they have led more than 25 trainings around the country, from reservations to college campuses. In Patty’s words, the workshops focus on putting the “self” back in self-defense. Many Western approaches put people on guard against the world, she says. “I wanted women to rediscover what’s powerful in themselves.” That means common self-defense

principles—like verbalizing boundaries and removing yourself from dangerous situations—are applied much more broadly. “Removing yourself”could mean anything from crossing to the other side of the street to leaving a relationship after years of abuse. And while you might come away with some useful tricks to thwart an attacker, the hope is that the physicality and communion will also rekindle a belief in yourself. “You are strong,” Patty tells women. “You are awake.” Only individuals can reempower themselves, Patty says: The “re” in these sessions is central. When you realize you can take down a man like Dereck with one move, she says, you begin to think, “I’m strong—I’m not only physically stronger than I thought, I’m emotionally stronger than I thought.” Maybe strong enough to break cycles of violence and trauma. Patty, who as a preteen survived an assault by two White men, long internalized her own trauma; she didn’t tell anyone for years. “I wouldn’t say it out loud even to myself,” she says. She hears similar stories during the talking circles that follow her workshop’s trainings. Sometimes women, emboldened by one another, share their stories for the first time. About one-third of Native American women are raped during their lives, YES! PHOTO BY DAN KOECK

WHILE YOU MIGHT COME AWAY WITH SOME USEFUL TRICKS TO THWART AN ATTACKER, THE HOPE IS THAT THE PHYSICALITY AND COMMUNION WILL ALSO REKINDLE A BELIEF IN YOURSELF. “YOU ARE STRONG,” PATTY TELLS WOMEN. “YOU ARE AWAKE.”

Patty Stonefish’s tattoo is of the Arabic word “horreya,” which means “freedom.” She spent years in Egypt during and after the Arab Spring, watching women take their place on the frontlines of Tahrir Square. “I got it because, especially as a Native, freedom got ruined for me,” she says of the tattoo. “Egypt gave me the true definition back.”

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It’s Everyone’s Lib

GO AHEAD, CRY

I love to laugh the way I used to when I was a child. That belly-tickling, headtilting, wide-mouthed laughter. That laughter that leaves you gasping for air and brushing warm tears off your cheek. I think if any force can break the claustrophobic box of civility, it is the force of child-like laughter. Emma, 20

Whenever I cry, I can’t help but smile soon afterward because it brings to awareness the level of genuine emotion and compassion that is constantly available to us. It’s a catharsis, a purge, a spontaneous recognition of something deeply connected to whatever constitutes our self-concept. It’s nothing short of beautiful. Buckminster, 20

a n n e r s a n d m a c h i s m o : Traditional

In my opinion, laughing makes my face one big wrinkle, but at least my inside feels all warm and lovely, and that’s what matters. Laura, 18

Western gender etiquette is clear. Ladies, don’t be loud and unruly. Men, be tough. Dutch university student Maud Fernhout challenged these stereotypes in her photo series “What Real Men Cry Like” and “What Real Women Laugh Like,” in which she asked fellow students from different cultures to do exactly that. When the women saw their own faces crinkled with elation and mouths agape, they were repulsed. “They said, ‘I look so ugly,’” Fernhout recalled. “But when they looked at the other girls, they said, ‘Oh, she’s so pretty!’ and they realized it was okay.” Seeing others break the mold of what a woman’s face should look like changed how they felt about themselves. Fernhout found that attitudes toward crying men varied by culture: Eastern European students were most resistant, while Italians and Spaniards cried easily. Women’s reactions to how they looked laughing didn’t vary, Fernhout said, perhaps because most of Europe shares the same standards of beauty but not the same standards of masculinity. She hopes that these images will force people to look at their own preconceptions of gendered behaviors. y —Jennifer Luxton

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For me, crying is not showing your weakness. When I cry, I can accept my feelings and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m able to continue. It makes me stronger. Job, 18

PHOTOS BY MAUD FERNHOUT

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SIGNS OF LIFE SMALL STEPS TOWARD CHANGE

Marcus Harrison Green

In 1938, the Finnish government presented a gift to impoverished expectant mothers: a box. This gift would transform parenting in the Scandinavian nation. Measuring roughly 27.5 inches long, 17 inches wide, and 10.5 inches tall, each box contained a sturdy mattress and essentials for the first few months of infancy: blankets, clothing, pacifiers, and bibs. Today, the boxes are showing up all over the world, representing much more than a collection of baby items.

5 REASONS SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR BABIES COMES IN A CARDBOARD BOX

Boxes provide a safe sleep space

Baby boxes are more than cutesy cardboard containers: They contribute to safe sleep. The Finnish government extended the baby box program to all mothers in 1949. Prior to the box program, 65 out of 1,000 babies died within the first year of birth. Today, Finland’s infant mortality rate is 2.52 deaths per 1,000 births. Of course, improved medical care accounted for much of that change. But studies suggest that the box has also played a critical role as it provides a safe sleep space for infants, a fact not lost on American doctors. U.S. pediatricians and advocacy groups are pushing hospitals to give away the cardboard cribs to help reduce America’s infant death rate: 5.87 deaths per 1,000 births— the highest of any wealthy nation. According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the safest sleep environment for babies is sleeping alone on a firm surface without blankets, pillows, or loose bedding. The baby box provides that, and officials in Texas recently decided to pursue using baby boxes to help curb an increase in cases of sudden infant death syndrome. According to data from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, in 2015, 159 infants died in circumstances involving sharing a bed with a parent or sibling. University Hospital in San Antonio introduced the boxes in 2015 to address that problem. Initially, the hospital provided boxes to 100 new mothers. The boxes proved popular, and the hospital ordered 500 more to fulfill the demand of parents-to-be.

PHOTO BY KELA / ANNIKA SÖDERBLOM

Meanwhile, in Seattle, the King County Public Health Department has begun distributing baby boxes to needy families who don’t have a safe place for an infant to sleep. And several South Asian nonprofits have introduced a version of the box called the “Barakat Bundle.” This version contains additional items—including antiseptics, sterile razor blades, and other equipment to ensure a hygienic delivery—to address the fact that many women have limited access to maternity care. More than a third of the 5 million infant deaths worldwide occur in the region.

Boxes are eco-friendly

Once an infant outgrows the box (usually at 8 or 9 months), the box and its nontoxic foam mattress can be recycled or reused, instead of ending up in a landfill. “The philosophy behind the boxes is saving lives, but it’s also about what kind of world we are leaving them,” says Jennifer Clary, co-founder of The Baby Box Co., believed to be the only baby box manufacturer in the United States. Clary says that environmentalism factors heavily into her company’s decisions, down to the ink and glue used in producing the boxes. She says both are certified nontoxic and environmentally safe. Concerns about pollution are not just for the environment, but for the babies themselves. A report by the President’s Cancer Panel stated that babies are born “prepolluted”—exposed to some 200 chemicals in the womb. Doctors suggest this increases the risk of developing diseases such as cancer later in life.

Boxes demonstrate support

Baby boxes send a powerful message to mothers, says Danielle Selassie, executive director of Babies Need Boxes, a Minnesota nonprofit. “It says that all babies start at the same spot and that the community cares about you,” she says. Selassie, who had her first child at 19, said she suffered firsthand the stigma that comes with being an unwed pregnant teen. The experience inspired her to establish her organization in 2015 after reading a BBC article about Finland’s program. For Selassie, now 37, the boxes are as much about intangible benefits as about the items inside. Teen moms often see the boxes as a desperately needed symbol of support. Whatever the circumstances of a woman’s pregnancy, Selassie said, she gets her box without judgment or contempt, a welcome contrast from what many experience while pregnant. Her organization gave away 54 boxes in 2015. Some recipients had no one to help them during their transition to motherhood, says Selassie. “The mothers are so grateful to have such a show of community support for their children,” she says. The nonprofit recently distributed boxes at a Minneapolis homeless shelter to pregnant teens, many of whom cried when they lifted the lid to discover the supplies. Babies Need Boxes also connects teen mothers with service providers such as housing and employment agencies. The organization plans to hand out 500 more boxes this year. yesmagazine . org

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Terry Tempest Williams

here is a great bird resting in the woodlands above the great river with marching bears behind her. A seasoned peace that can only

belong to the prairie creates the path on the ridgetop where she can be found. Time—not blood—is the life force animating the bird and these bears. Some 1,500 years ago, these earth mounds were made by the hands of the people who lived here in the Upper Mississippi Valley, ancestors to today’s Ho-Chunk people, also known as the Winnebago. This is the “Driftless Area” where the glacial sheets of ice that stretched across the North American continent during the Pleistocene fell short of this holy site. A Ho-Chunk woman would see these figures through the gestures of ceremony: the burying of the dead; the honoring of birds and bears. As a visitor, I experience this land as a walking meditation.

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Effigy Mounds National Monument is a quiet space of contemplation in the northeast corner of Iowa where the Mississippi River creates a fluid boundary with southern Wisconsin. For millennia, tens of thousands of these earth mounds dotted the Midwestern territory of what we now know as the United States. Archaeologists have documented 23 different shapes of effigy mounds. But Manifest Destiny plowed them under in favor of fields of corn. Now very few remain in a landscape that has been transformed by industrial agriculture. Still, within Effigy Mounds National Monument there are 207 mounds, 56 of them effigies in the shape of animals. Most of the round mounds are believed to be burial sites housing the bones of men, women, and children who belonged to particular communities. Some burials contain bundles of bones, some charred, some dusted with red ocher. Other mounds have contained “flesh burials” where the body has remained intact. Artifacts such as Clovis points have been found nearby along with those that surprise, like a copper breastplate with twine made from basswood. Other mounds shaped from the earth are long, like a string of pearls stretched along the ridges, while others rise from the woodland floor in the shapes of birds and bears, possibly wolves, most with a view of the Mississippi River. We approached each mound as a prayer. Death, yes, as a gathering place, writes the poet Jorie Graham in her poem, “WE.” Death, yes, honored in a seasonal pilgrimage that perhaps was the end point of a journey taken to remember one’s ancestors. To visit any grave is a solemn practice. To visit these mounds is to be brought into the presence of an unseen force where the ground has literally been raised. Brooke and I rise before dawn the next morning. The creek bed is dry. We are walking on an old roadbed that cuts through a mature forest of red oaks. Cicadas begin their rasping chorus like an electrical current plugged in at sunrise. Diffused light follows us YES! ILLUSTRATION BY JULI E NOTARIANNI

A QUIET WALK WITH 1,500-YEAR-OLD BIRDS AND BEARS up the steep incline to the top of the ridge where it opens wide to a restored prairie dense with bee balm, sumac, and blackeyed Susans. Black swallowtails waft among the pale purple coneflowers. When we come to a stand of aspens, we face an eruption of birds: rose-breasted grosbeaks, redstarts, catbirds, yellow warblers, and vireos joined by chickadees, house wrens, flickers, and yellow-bellied sapsuckers. It is a charged place. We are drawn to a small path that veers right from the main trail. There in the shadowed woods is a circular mound covered in ferns. Neither Brooke nor I speak, but stand silently inside a cacophony of birdsong. Back on the main trail, we follow deer tracks to another large stand of aspens where a first-year summer tanager confounds us. We were unfamiliar with its marbled plumage, red-yellow. With Albert’s map in mind, we turn left down a mowed pathway wet with dew. Large ferns flirt with us, brushing against our legs as mourning cloaks and tortoiseshells float above the grasses. It is lush country. We descend into shadows overtaken by stillness. There, in a shaded clearing, are two mounds with a monarch butterfly hovering over them. Brooke and I separate. I do not recognize the shape of this particular effigy until I draw it with my feet. Its edge is distinct, a contrast between what has been mowed and what has not. The tall grasses suggest fur. After one full rotation, the vegetative body of ferns and forbs lets me know I have walked the contours of a small bear. I slowly walk the path surrounding the small bear twice. With the breezes, the body of the bear breathes. From the vantage point of an eagle, 10 bear effigies march down the spine of this mountain in single file. We walk among

them in silence. What was the impulse behind their creation? Love? Respect? A rising up of the relationship between humans and animals? Some say there are wolves and snakes among them. On the other side of the mountain, the green shuddering of fields registers as a single note of corn. Continuing down the path, the glare of the Mississippi River shines through the spaces between sugar maples and hickories as it meanders below. The temperature feels cooler, the shadows deeper. Suddenly, with a white oak as my witness, the energy of the woods shifts—in the clearing is the Bird. I stopped to see the winged effigy in its entirety. Falcon enters my mind, swift and swerving. What if the wind I have been hearing was the memory of flight? This bird made of earth glimmers as light dances on the leaves, and I want to touch her body, a garden, but I don’t. Restraint is its own prayer. The fact that a brilliant red-headed woodpecker flew down from an oak branch, landing where the raptor’s heart would be, only made the moment more miraculous. For the rest of the afternoon, I walk the effigy’s wings into motion. They say her wingspan is over 200 feet long. For me, her wings span time where the whispering of Holy Wisdom can be heard. Great Bird above the Great River, what would you have us know? y This is an excerpt from The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams. The book is available in June from Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Terry Tempest Williams is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar for Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a writer who divides her time between Utah and Wyoming. She is the author of several books. yesmagazine . org

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Alice Walker, author and activist

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