Dare To Be A Feminist

Many people might end up taking issue with my point of view here or how I’m expressing it. That will happen. I can’t, nor am I intending to, speak for every single person affected by the majestic tentacles of misogyny and patriarchy that reach out in all directions and attempt to suffocate the life out of any sense of shared outrage or mutual support of each other’s struggle with either. Plus, I admit, my thinking is not particularly nuanced on a day like today. Like a lot of people, I’m mostly just pissed.

In January of 2013, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta signed a historical dotted line, lifting the 1994 ban on women serving in combat positions in the United States military. The lift on the ban was met with confusion and celebration, concern and cheers. The ban, officially called the ground Combat Exclusion Policy, declared “service members are eligible to be assigned to all positions for which they are qualified, except that women shall be excluded from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground” [1]. Today, 214,098 women serve in the U.S. military, representing 14.6 % of total service members [2].

The justifications for the ban were not made explicit at the time it was put into effect; then again, no explanation was really necessary. In 1994, it was widely accepted that there were “practical barriers” to a woman being an adequate soldier, namely physical constraints, emotional frailty, and tensions between the sexes [3]. In 1991, General Robert H. Barrow, former commandant of the Marine Corps, testified before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, saying, “If you want to make a combat unit ineffective, assign some women to it” [4]. These prevalent attitudes make it unsurprising that the 1994 ban was put into effect without much debate.

Now that the ban is being lifted, some of these same attitudes are being cited by critics and concerned citizens alike. But truly evaluating these apprehensions shows that not only is lifting the ban plausible and overdue, but also one of the strongest triumphs for women’s rights in decades.

We spoke to Joan Wages on why we need monuments and museums dedicated to women's history, and what it's going to take to get there.

civillyunioned: “ Gwenn Craig - San Francisco - August 14 1980 (by Gay Freedom Day) During the Democratic National Convention in 1980. ”

Former Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher was the first and only woman premier Britain has ever had. But despite being a leader in a crucial time for women’s rights internationally, the Iron Lady never considered herself a feminist. She said to her adviser, "The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison."

On the occasion of the publication of an anthology of her writing and the accession of a NY Wages for Housework archive at Mayday Rooms in London, Marina Vishmidt interviewed Silvia Federici on her extensive contribution to feminist thought and recent...