A victory for every woman (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism.
It’s Saturday night and I have written this while half-watching Eurovision. Croatia, my favourite, finished second to last, and I found Sweden’s winning number underwhelming. How was it for you?
And now for the reads…
1) “A victory for every woman who has suffered”
This week’s news that a federal jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation felt like a triumph for womankind. As E. Jean Carroll, the former president’s accuser in this civil trial, put it in a statement:
“I filed this lawsuit against Donald Trump to clear my name and to get my life back….Today, the world finally knows the truth. This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed.”
Politico quotes Carroll telling the court why she filed the suit:
“I’m here because Donald Trump raped me,” Carroll, 79, told the jury. Referring to a book she wrote in which she detailed the alleged incident, she said: “And when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation. And I’m here to try to get my life back.”
More than two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, Politico reports, but this verdict is the first time he “has been held legally responsible for sexual assault.”
2) What does a doesband do?
I came across the jarring neologism “doesband” in this piece by Harriet Walker, in which she ironically lampoons how rare it is to have a genuinely equal heterosexual relationship, like she and her husband seem to have. Having first reacted to the term “doesband” with offence when I saw it on Twitter (“Doesband? Meaning that a husband doesn’t do anything? or shouldn’t? How offensive!) on actually reading the piece (doh!) I realised that it is in fact a sharp comment on the persistent inequalities between men and women in relationships, where women tend to do more care and housework, and hold a far larger share of what is known as the mental load. Everyone she cites in the piece is about my age. It’s strange to think that some of the boys I grew up with could now be middle-aged husbands who don’t pull their weight. She writes:
A doesband is not doing anything his wife is not, nor is she expecting him to do all this stuff all the time. A doesband simply gets on with what needs doing because he understands how his own home runs. He is a small but seismic revolution not because of his actions, but for the fact he Doesn’t Need Reminding.
3) New poll finds 2 in 3 young women have experienced harassment at work
The Trades Union Congress, a British federation of unions, published a poll this week in which women reported high levels of harassment at work:
Three in five (58%) women – and almost two-thirds (62%) of women aged between 25 and 34 – say they have experienced sexual harassment, bullying or verbal abuse at work, according to a new TUC poll published today (Friday).
The TUC poll found that most of these cases were not isolated incidents with more than three in five (57%) women saying they’ve experienced three or more incidents of bullying at work.
And two in five (43%) women have experienced at least three incidents of sexual harassment.
4) Romani feminism
In the LA Times, Nicoleta Bitu, a Romani feminist activist, writes about how the struggle for Romani rights intersects with the fight for gender equality:
At the same time, I began to question the condition of women and girls in our community, and why we were treated differently from the boys and men around us. Even when I joined the Romani rights movement, I was expected to behave in certain ways that men defined. They determined who was a “good” Romani woman activist. Some Romani male activists tried to monitor my sexuality and called me a “whore” when I had a relationship with a man when I wasn’t married. It was the verses of our beloved Polish Romani poet known as Papusza (whose real name was Bronislawa Wajs) that brought me comfort. She wrote about the Holocaust and of being a woman defying constraints and traditional roles for women, for which she was ostracized by the community. Where were women’s rights within the discussion of Romani rights?
5) How should a woman work?
This New Yorker piece about Anzia Yezierska, a Jewish US immigrant novelist, is interesting for the history of early twentieth century America, but also for the history of how women have navigated tensions between their own ambition and the obligations of care. Maia Silber writes:
But her novels were less realistic depictions of the Lower East Side than parables set in that place, informed by the twenty years she’d spent outside it. In those two intervening decades, radicals and artists sought to redefine what it meant to be a woman worker and a working mother. Yezierska’s literary efforts were part of those experiments. She turned to fiction, as the literary scholar Susan Edmunds writes, when confronted with the limited possibilities available in her own life.
Thank you for reading, and if you spotted anything I should have included this week, let me know in the comments.
Bonus: This week I watched Blue Bag Life, a documentary/memoir that will break your heart. It is many things, and one of them is a beautiful, painful meditation on motherhood. If you happen to live in the UK you can watch it on iPlayer.