hunter of justice

Changing marriage

Quote of the day, from Melissa Harris-Lacewell, writing at The Nation:

Typically advocates of marriage equality try to reassure the voting public the same-sex marriage will not change the institution itself. "Don't worry," we say, "allowing gay men and lesbians to marry will not threaten the established norms; it will simply assimilate new groups into old practices."

This is a pragmatic, political strategy, but I hope it is not true. I hope same-sex marriage changes marriage itself. I hope it changes marriage the way that no-fault divorce changed it. I hope it changes marriage the way that allowing women to own their own property and seek their own credit changed marriage. I hope it changes marriage the way laws against spousal abuse and child neglect changed marriage. I hope marriage equality results in more equal marriages. I also hope it offers more opportunities for building meaningful adult lives outside of marriage.

Women in Congress bring home more bacon

As reported in Politico, a new study by researchers at Stanford and the University of Chicago have found that women in Congress do a better job than their male counterparts of bringing home money for their districts -

The study, which examined the performance of House members between 1984 and 2004, found that women delivered roughly 9 percent more discretionary spending for their districts than men.

For instance, during Rep. Judy Biggert’s first two-year term, Illinois’s 13th District received $382 million in federal funds, $70 million more than it received during the final term of her predecessor, Rep. Harris Fawell. Rep. Zoe Lofgren delivered around $859 million to her district, compared with $541 million brought in by her predecessor, Rep. Don Edwards, during his final term, the researchers said. And during then-Rep. Connie Morella’s first term, Maryland’s 8th District received $780 million, $183 million more than predecessor Rep. Michael Barnes brought in during his final term, they said.

While there are obviously variables beyond gender — seniority, party affiliation, majority/minority status and the differing priorities of a freshman and a veteran lawmaker — the researchers say they’ve accounted for those in making their male-to-female comparisons.

“You could easily make the argument that a politician who is on his way out, or someone who is sitting on a really powerful committee, is in a different position than someone just coming into office,” said Stanford researcher Sarah Anzia. “Not every example will cover every alternative explanation, but we control for all of those factors in the study.”

The researchers also found that women introduced more legislation than men who served in their same districts, often hitting the ground running in their first terms. “We find that, on average, women sponsor about three bills more per Congress per term than their male counterparts,” said Anzia. “They co-sponsor more bills than other members, and they also obtain more co-sponsors for their own bills.” 

...Researchers say the small number of female members may have something to do with their effectiveness. Women who run and win are likely the most politically ambitious and talented of their pool, having potentially overcome hurdles including voter bias and self-doubt about their ability to win. Female candidates also tend to attract more challengers. Politically eligible women tend to doubt their ability to get elected and raise money more than men do, multiple studies have indicated.

Once women get to Capitol Hill, those hurdles may drive them to perform better, on average, than male counterparts who have faced a less contentious road. “Research shows that even though women have similar success rates in primaries and elections as men, they are likely to face more challengers,” said Hartwick College political science department chairwoman Laurel Elder. “The results might be the same, but they might have to work harder to get those same results.”

Happy 89th birthday to women's right to vote

The Nineteenth Amendment - women's suffrage - was ratified on August 26, 1920, when Tennessee put the campaign to secure ratification of two-thirds of the states over the top. It seems like another world, until one realizes, as Hillary Clinton noted of her mother, that a fair number of little old ladies among us were born before women could vote.

Here's the NY Times coverage:

Washington, Aug. 26 -- The half-century struggle for woman suffrage in the United States reached its climax at 8 o'clock this morning, when Bainbridge Colby, as Secretary of State, issued his proclamation announcing that the Nineteenth Amendment had become a part of the Constitution of the United States.

The signing of the proclamation took place at that hour at Secretary Colby's residence, 1507 K Street Northwest, without ceremony of any kind, and the issuance of the proclamation was unaccompanied by the taking of movies or other pictures, despite the fact that the National Woman's Party, or militant branch of the general suffrage movement, had been anxious to be represented by a delegation of women and to have the historic event filmed for public display and permanent record.

Secretary Colby did not act with undue haste in signing the proclamation, but only after he had given careful study to the packet which arrived by mail during the early morning hours containing the certificate of the Governor of Tennessee that that State's Legislature had ratified the Congressional resolution submitting the amendment to the States for action.

None of the leaders of the woman suffrage movement was present when the proclamation was signed. "It was quite tragic," declared Mrs. Abby Scott Baker of the National Woman's Party. "This was the final culmination of the women's fight, and, women, irrespective of factions, should have been allowed to be present when the proclamation was signed. However the women of America have fought a big fight and nothing can take from them their triumph."

Leaders of both branches of the woman's movement- the militants, headed by Miss Alice Paul, and the conservatives, led by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt -- some of whom had been on watch nearly all night for the arrival of the Tennessee Governor's certification, visited the State Department, and the militants sought to have Secretary Colby go through a duplication of the signing scene in the presence of movie cameras. This Mr. Colby declined to do, on the ground that it was not necessary to detract from the dignity and importance of the signing of the proclamation by staging a scene in imitation of the actual signing of the proclamation....

At the same time Mr. Colby congratulated the women of the country on the successful culmination of their efforts in the face of discouragements, and declared the day "marks the opening of a great and new era in the political life of the nation."

"I confidently believe," said the Secretary, "that every salutary, forward and upward force in our public life will receive fresh vigor and reinforcement from the enfranchisement of the women of America. To the leaders of this great movement I tender my sincere congratulations. To every one, from the president, who uttered the call to duty, whenever the cause seemed to falter, to the humblest worker in this great reform, the praise not only of this generation but of posterity will be freely given."...

Late this afternoon Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the National American Suffrage Association, and Mrs. Helen H. Gardiner, another active worker in that organization, were received at the White House by President and Mrs. Wilson. The National Woman's Party, known as the militants and a rival organization to that headed by Mrs. Catt, was not represented.....

A mass meeting [and jubilee at Poll's Theatre tonight] was attended by women from every section of the country and a number of officials of the administration, including members of the Cabinet, were present.

European Court of Human Rights: failure to protect women from domestic violence can be human rights violation

In Opuz v Turkey, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found that a state violated the human rights of the applicant and her mother in failing to protect them against domestic violence.  The applicant had alleged that the state bore responsibility under the European Convention on Human Rights for its failure to take action against her violent husband who repeatedly attacked her and killed her mother. For the first time in a domestic violence case, the Court found violations of:

• the right to life (art. 2) "in respect of the death of the applicant's mother"


• the prohibition of torture (art. 3) "in respect of the authorities' failure to protect the applicant against domestic violence perpetrated by her former husband"


• and the right to non-discrimination on the basis of sex (art. 14). It explicitly recognized domestic violence as a form of gender discrimination that gives rise to state responsibility.

Regarding the sex discrimination claim, the Court found:

the existence of a prima facie indication that hte domestic violence affected mainly women and that the general and discriminatory judicial passivity in Turkey created a climate that was conducive to domestic violence ... the criminal-law system, as operated in the instant case, did not have an adequate deterrent effect capable of ensuring the effective prevention of [domestic violence] ...

Bearing in mind its finding above that the general and discriminatory judicial passivity in Turkey, albeit unintentional, mainly affected women, the Court considers that the violence suffered by the applicant and her mother may be regarded as gender-based violence which is a form of discrimination against women. Despite the reforms carried out by the Government in recent years, the overall unresponsiveness of the judicial system and impunity enjoyed by the aggressors, as found in the instant case, indicated that there was insufficient commitment to take appropriate action to address domestic violence.

HT: IntLawGrrls

Sotomayor: "The facts that judges choose to see"

The following excerpt is from the infamous speech that Judge Sotomayor gave at Boalt in October 2001, later published in the La Raza journal, and which now has been demagogued endlessly by rightwingers desperate for a way to stop her appointment. In my view the speech offers not just a solid defense against charges of racism (it makes me choke even to write that), but a set of perceptive insights into the process of judging. Judge Sotomayor obviously has thought deeply about the tensions with which she must live and work as a Latina judge. I will be thrilled if she becomes a Justice of the Supreme Court.

... Professor Judith Resnik says that there is not a single voice of feminism, not a feminist approach but many who are exploring the possible ways of being that are distinct from those structured in a world dominated by the power and words of men. Thus, feminist theories of judging are in the midst of creation and are not and perhaps will never aspire to be as solidified as the established legal doctrines of judging can sometimes appear to be.

That same point can be made with respect to people of color. No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people of color voice. I need not remind you that Justice Clarence Thomas represents a part but not the whole of African-American thought on many subjects. Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judith Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging. ... As recognized by legal scholars, whatever the reason, not one woman or person of color in any one position but as a group we will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging. ...

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, ... our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line, since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Minow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

... I, like Professor [Stephen] Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. ...[N]ine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown [v. Board of Education].

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept ... [that] the presence of women and people of color on the bench [will make a difference]. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage....

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely, and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me require. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences, but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate....

[Full text of speech here]

Soccer moms with vodka - the new bad mom blogs

From The American Prospect, an essay on the trials of making space for real mom moments in an apple pie culture:

A mother tells her child that Häagen Dazs is a special medicine for mommies because she doesn't want to share. Another purposely ruins her daughter's favorite T-shirt with red nail polish. One joins Weight Watchers so she has a place to go by herself once a week. Another mom admits, "I can't wait to wean my daughter so I can get stoned again."

These are some of the "mommy misdemeanors" revealed in the book True Mom Confessions, published this month. In the introduction, author Romi Lassally explains that she launched TrueMomConfessons.com in 2007 as a forum for women to share their transgressions. "Online, under the veil of anonymity and with 24/7 accessibility, I believed that the conversation about the REAL and not the IDEAL of motherhood could flourish," she writes. The book is a compendium of Lassally's favorite admissions, which pour in daily from all over the country.

Welcome to bad-mom culture, in which women don't just own up to their maternal shortcomings -- they flaunt them. Moms have been publicly admitting to their mixed feelings about motherhood at least since 1976, when Adrienne Rich compared herself to a monster in the feminist classic Of Woman Born. ...But with the advent of confessional culture and the ascension of blogs and virtual message boards, bad-mom culture and its gleeful impropriety have flourished.

This is evident even from the names of the Web's many mommybloggers. With their almost macho grandstanding, each one is more rebellious-sounding than the next. A Suburban Mom: Notes from an Asylum and Psycho Supermom make much of their own craziness. Other mothers tout their questionable habits, as with Adventures of Leelo and his Potty-Mouthed Mom and Martini Mom (tagline: "Like a soccer mom ...with vodka"). A recent post on Bad Mom -- not to be confused with Bad Mummy or Bad Mutha Blogger -- states, "It seems like my house will never, ever be completely clean & orderly," requests, "Call me in for dinner when you're done, please?," and features a photo of a coffee mug next to a beer.

In some ways, these maternal rebels are simply reacting to the very real anxiety that women have always felt about being perceived as bad mothers. Though there is a smattering of bad-dad Web sites, the idea is practically redundant: Most any sitcom father makes clear that paternal figures are supposed to be a little bit bad, an antidote to the steadfast mom. A bad mother? Now that's a scandal.

Second wave feminists stuck in the first stage of grief: "is there a future for our so-called movement"?

The American Prospect has just posted this perceptive essay by Courtney Martin, a daughter of 70s feminism, inspired by a speak-out in New York on the "Unfinished Business" of the women's movement:

... Most of the voices from the audience sounded eerily similar. They spoke longingly about the exuberant past, characterized by abundant energy and "sisterhood." They lamented that no locatable movement exists anymore, that no one is organized, that no one is out in the streets. At one point, [Esther] Broner even admitted, "I interpret everything through that time."

With the utmost respect for Broner, whom I found refreshing and radical, I think that this approach is at the center of contemporary feminism's biggest challenge. We are intergenerationally fractured, right down to the most foundational of questions: Is there a formal feminist movement anymore? Does there need to be?

Members of the second-wave generation developed their feminist identity during the heyday of direct action. They had ecstatic, very physical experiences of feminism. They went to meetings -- so, so many meetings. They pounded the pavement. They participated in direct-action spectacles like taking over the offices of The Ladies Home Journal. They yelled until their vocal chords were raw.

Now these women are older, many of them happily shifting into what Jane Fonda calls "the third act" -- a stage of life when they don't give a shit what anyone else thinks, and they want to see the world live up to its God damn potential, once and for all. They start dying their hair funky shades of red. They urge their husband to get a hobby as they head out for another expletive- and laughter-filled lunch with their friends -- other women who are funding feminist causes, editing feminist publications, and leading local feminist efforts. In some ways, it's a return to their earnest youth -- a time less fraught with the compromises that come with juggling families and careers. They're prioritizing changing the world again. And as such, they seem to experience an old hankering for an unapologetic women's movement that they can see, hear, and touch.

I don't blame them. All of their stories -- about marching in the streets, about taking over offices, about riding around the country in vans, falling in love – not only sounds like they had a whole lot of fun, but also managed to make some profound political changes. But I also recognize that it is a time that has passed. Not only is the women's movement -- as it was known in the 1960s -- over, but women my age don't even agree on what a "woman" really is.

Sometimes I feel as if my generation -- women in our 20s and 30s -- are feminism's Frankensteins. After all, Broner herself was responsible for building some of the first women's studies programs in the nation. Now a generation is graduating from them using words like "genderqueer" -- meaning that one doesn't identify exclusively as male or female. We generally aren't down for the subtle messaging by many older women who believe that females in positions of power are inherently less violent or more community-minded than their male counterparts, a view that Bitch magazine founder Lisa Jervis hilariously called "femmenism."

"Heckuva Job" award goes to ...

The morality police have come up with another really smashing idea: prosecute teenagers who send sexually suggestive photos of themselves to friends.  (When done by cellphone, this is "sexting.") The Wall Street Journal reports that district attorneys in Ohio, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and  Wisconsin have tried to stop this practice by filing charges against teens who send and receive the  pictures.

Hunter's Heckuva Job Award, though, goes to ... Wyoming, County, PA prosecutor George Skumanik, who opined that teens who sext are accomplices to the charge of producing child pornography. Mr. Skumanik now has to defend the lawsuit that he so richly deserves.  According to the ACLU, which represents three of the teens and their parents:

In February 2009, Skumanick sent a letter to the parents of approximately twenty Tunkhannock students, including the ACLU's clients, threatening the students with criminal felony charges if they did not agree to be placed on probation and participate in a counseling program he devised. A course outline indicates that the program will help the girls "[g]ain an understanding of how [their] actions were wrong," "gain an understanding of what it means to be a girl in today's society," and "[i]dentify non-traditional societal and job roles."

The district attorney told a group of parents and students in February that he has the authority to prosecute girls photographed in underwear, like the ACLU's clients, or even in a bikini on the beach, because the photos are "provocative."

There are so many things to love about this strategy. First, it's obvious from the description of these re-education camps that they aren't planning to do any for boys. What a surprise.

Second, the primary targets - sexually precocious teenage girls - are a group who society just loves to punish in order to protect. Think of the many wonderful disciplinary strategies developed in their name over history. Parental consent laws! Curfews! Long ugly skirts!

My favorite aspect of the anti-sexting campaign, though, is its wonderful counseling program, the one being set up so that these wayward types can "gain an understanding of what it means to be a girl." Including free lessons in "non-traditional societal roles." And people wonder why feminist has become a dirty word. This sounds like cultural revolution as devised by a team made up of Phyllis Schlafley and Catharine MacKinnon.

You're doing a heckuva job, George.

UPDATE: The federal court issued an injunction against George's plan.

Feminism, Law and Masculinity

Call for Papers: Feminism, Law, and Masculinity

The Feminism and Legal Theory Project of Emory University School of Law has issued a call for papers for a workshop, "Feminism, Law, and Masculinity," to take place Sept 11-12 2009:

This workshop will explore the relevance of masculinities studies to feminist legal theory and activism. We have long struggled, both within and without the academy, to understand how law defines the feminine by articulating, constructing, and regulating women and the female body. Similarly, and more broadly, feminisms have focused on the place of gender in the construction of social relations that too often fail to protect the interests of women. This work notwithstanding, the place of masculinity has received relatively little attention. We hope to facilitate social and cultural resistance to assertions of hyper-masculinity, particularly those that arise in response to feminism itself.

We will interrogate the privileged positioning of the male body that results from its being cast as normative. We also invite papers which engage feminist ethics or approaches to address the relevance of masculinity to feminist legal theory. We particularly welcome submissions locating masculinity within those areas of study feminism has identified as key: violence, reproduction, state responsibility, poverty, and rights....

Please email a paper proposal of several paragraphs length by March 30, 2009 to:
mfineman@law.emory.edu and m.o.thomson@law.keele.ac.uk

Ginsburg keeps date to speak at Radcliffe; tells audience, "you have to spark a change in the kinds of lives people want to live"

[The following is a combination of reports from the Harvard Crimson and the public affairs office.]

Last week's Radcliffe College conference , “Gender and the Law: Unintended Consequences, Unsettled Questions,” opened with a panel composed of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; U.S. District Court of Massachusetts Judge Nancy Gertner; First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Sandra L. Lynch, and former New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda J. Greenhouse. 

[Photo shows (L to R) Gertner, Ginsburg and Greenhouse]

The Justice spoke about her experiences as a female in the traditionally male-dominated field of law. When she attended Harvard Law School, Ginsburg said, she was one of only nine women in her class. Ginsburg began her legal studies at Harvard Law School in 1956; however, her husband was offered a job in New York and Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, where she finished her degree. But, said Ginsburg, to the delight of her audience, “lately, Elena Kagan has said, ‘whenever you want a degree you can have one.’”

Ginsburg and her fellow panelists discussed how the law in general has changed as society has changed. In the 1960s and ’70s, when Ginsburg was beginning her career as a lawyer, people were beginning to question the status quo in terms of gender discrimination and the law.

“People were awakening to a form of discrimination that [had been] considered, ‘just the way it is,’ and students wanted to know more about this subject [gender and law] and what could be done to change the way things were,” said Ginsburg. “It was a headier time because it seemed so clear — the pace of change was so clear, what had to be done was so clear. But now it’s much more opaque, it’s less about … explicit discrimination, and now it’s more about subtle discrimination.”

Ginsburg acknowledged that progress now requires more than just legal action. “There are distinct limits to law,” Ginsburg said. “You have to spark a change in what people want to do, what kinds of lives they want to live.”

After Ginsburg described former Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist rehearsing to swear her in, Greenhouse said, “I think rehearsal’s a good thing when you’re swearing somebody in, right?” The reference was to Chief Justice John G. Roberts' blunder during President Obama's inauguration. The audience erupted in laughter for several seconds, while Ginsburg smiled and remained silent.

Greenhouse ended the proceedings with a general question about the future of law, to which Ginsburg replied: “As hard as times are, I remain optimistic about the potential of the United States.”

Delta days on Capitol Hill

From Politico

If a woman in red demands to be noticed, a thousand women in red are impossible to ignore. At least that’s what the members of Delta Sigma Theta are counting on when they head to the Hill next week, clad in crimson and cream, to lobby their senators and representatives on the African-American sorority’s national agenda. Don’t let the word “sorority” fool you: The Deltas won’t be pushing to lower the drinking age or fighting for their right to party. Most of the women who will attend the 20th annual four-day legislative seminar known as Delta Days at the Nation’s Capital are long out of school, and they’re coming to learn how to be effective advocates on issues like poverty, affordable housing and education.

“It’s an awesome sight to see so many black women here on the Hill,” says Nicole Williams, communications director for Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). “There’s a powerful message, I think, that black women have a place at the political table.” From Hill staffers like Williams to elected officials like Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), members of the sorority formed in 1913 by African-American women at Howard University have followed trailblazing sorors — as Delta sisters call one another — including former Reps. Shirley Chisholm (D-N.Y.) and Barbara Jordan (D-Texas) and former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) to become a quiet force in the nation’s capital.

Delta and the other “Divine Nine” African-American fraternities and sororities serve as built-in career networks, support systems and social clubs for many of their members in the capital, but Delta has a particular history of political action that its sorors are committed to paying forward. Its founders broke away from Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s first black sorority, at Howard in part because they wanted to be more civically engaged. Their first public action was to take part in the Women’s Suffrage March in Washington — although, because they were black, they had to march at the end of the line.

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), who died last year, was an outspoken Delta who made red her signature color and was buried wearing her DST pin.  Fudge, who served as Tubbs Jones’ chief of staff, recalls that when she and Tubbs Jones first arrived in Washington, former secretary of labor and soror Alexis Herman held their first fundraiser. Fudge and Tubbs Jones shared an apartment but didn’t have any furniture. The Deltas brought them some. When Fudge ran for mayor back in Ohio, it was the Deltas who raised the money for her campaign. And after the loss of her friend and mentor, Fudge says, it was the Deltas who persuaded her to run for Tubbs Jones’ seat.

Conservative feminists, together with other idiots, oppose honoring "revolutionary" sex worker

The following post from the Times of London tells the latest chapter in the story of a woman I'm embarrassed to say I had never heard of, but who was well enough known in Europe to garner lengthy obits like the one in The Independent, which called her a "virtuoso writer and revolutionary whore." Someone needs to write a biography about this lady.  As for the likes of the "women's rights activists" who object to honoring her, the less said ...

A decision by the [Geneva] city government to transfer the remains of Grisélidis Réal, a renowned prostitute and champion of prostitutes’ rights, to a grave of honour next to some of the city’s most illustrious former citizens has erupted into a very public row. In the conservative Swiss financial centre the idea of a prostitute being buried near to the Protestant reformer Jean Calvin, the right-wing Argentinean-born writer Jorge Luis Borges or the educationalist Jean Piaget has appalled traditionalists and even angered women’s rights activists.

They believe that the elevation of a woman who represents a profession demeaning to their gender is wrong and have threatened to stage a protest. “This is an insult to all women. It is the pinnacle of bad taste to bury a woman who glorified prostitution next to the religious reformer Calvin,” said Odile Roulet, a Geneva lawyer and activist who has lodged a complaint with the local council.

Born in 1929 to a respectable middle-class family, Réal became a prostitute after completing her studies in art and music. She moved to postwar Germany to entertain Allied soldiers, with a preference for the British whom she deemed “true gentlemen”. She became popular as an author of books about her life as a high-class prostitute, such as A Courtesan’s Dance Card. In her memoirs she detailed the often embarrassing perversions of her clients, many of whom were later publicly identified from her descriptions.

When she retired from entertaining clients at the age of 66, Réal became a social worker, establishing associations and groups to help prostitutes and to campaign for their rights as sex workers. She died of cancer in Geneva in 2005 aged 75 and was buried at a normal cemetery. In March last year Geneva city authorities said they intended to exhume her remains and lay them to rest at the Cimetière des Rois – Cemetery of Kings.

Local laws stipulate that only people of exceptional merit can be buried at the cemetery, but Patrice Mugny, an MP and head of the cultural authority of Geneva, said Réal deserved her neww status. “Grisélidis Réal championed the women’s right of choice and she fought her whole life over for prostitutes to be able to do their job with dignity. She was famous all over Europe for her struggle,” he said...

Gender war in Iraq

From The Guardian:

Women [in Iraq] are being killed simply for being women," says Nadje Al-Ali when I meet her at her home in south London. "In Basra in 2008 a reported 133 women were killed for not 'being Islamic' enough. And these are only the ones that made it to be officially counted. I saw the police photos - they were horrific."

Al-Ali's new book, What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, analyses how Iraqi women have fared since the US invasion of March 2003. The news, unsurprisingly, is grim. Written with the political scientist Nicola Pratt, the book is based on interviews with 120 women, including Iraqi women's rights activists, NGO workers and international policymakers. The climate that they describe in Iraq is one of lawless "hyper-patriarchy", and with this evidence in tow, Al-Ali and Pratt take aim at a wide range of targets. These include the occupying powers, extremist Islamist militias, Iraqi leaders and "imperialist feminists" (those who claim solidarity with women from developing countries while stereotyping their cultures as barbaric).

Al-Ali, 42, is a second-generation Iraqi immigrant whose extended family has seen the sharpest end of both Saddam Hussein's regime and the post-invasion chaos. An established author and academic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she is staunchly "anti-imperialist and anti-war" but finds herself regularly at odds with some of her natural allies, who object to her speaking out against Iraqi resistance fighters. Still, Al-Ali believes it's important to take this stance. "A significant proportion of Iraqi groups engaged in armed resistance against the occupation are also harassing, intimidating and even murdering ordinary Iraqis," she says, "particularly women and vulnerable groups."

In her book she highlights the fact that, as a result of consecutive wars, the Iraqi population is now disproportionately female - with some estimates putting the ratio of women to men at 65/35. There are 300,000 impoverished widows in Baghdad alone, forced to run their households on two hours of electricity a day. As early as July 2003 a Human Rights Watch report highlighted "the vulnerability of women and girls to sexual violence and abduction", and kidnaps that target women (often related to sex trafficking) have increased since the start of the war, as have female suicide rates and honour killings.

According to Al-Ali's interviewees, women are being bullied back into the home. The fact that George W Bush depicted the invasion of Iraq as a path to women's empowerment makes the situation even more outrageous. In her book, Al-Ali meticulously explains how Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush were deployed to reassure the world that the US was concerned with women's liberation - Laura Bush being wheeled out for photo-opportunities with US organisations such as Women for Free Iraq.

Al-Ali feels that the cynical use of the women's rights discourse by the US has also led to a backlash against feminist activists in Iraq, who can be easily undermined, or even vilified, by being accused of supporting an American agenda.

Does she see the establishment of a 25% quota for women in the Iraqi parliament as a sign of progress? "Yes, but who are the 25% in practice? They are the sisters, daughters and wives of the male conservative leaders. They've no political background and when there's a vote they look around to see what the men are doing before they lift their hands. However, yes it is a positive because it has allowed six to eight secular women's rights activists into parliament who wouldn't have got in otherwise."

Impact of affirmative action quotas for women as political candidates

The authors of this online essay conclude that while they don't change deep-seated norms, quotas for women in politics work to achieve greater numbers of elected women officials:

While women have the legal right to equal participation in politics in almost every country around the world, they remain vastly underrepresented in local and national politics. As of July 2006, women accounted for only 17% of parliamentarians worldwide, and a woman headed the government in only seven countries (UNICEF, 2007). These numbers vary dramatically by region. In 2004, the highest share of female parliamentarians was found in the Nordic countries (39.7%), while the lowest was in the Arab States (6%).¹

Can public policy alter this? Over a hundred countries around the world have introduced some sort of affirmative action policies for women in public office (Dahlerup, 2006). Many European countries, in particular, have such policies, although usually, the only requirement is that women make up half of the candidates. A study of France (Frechette, Maniquet and Morelli, 2007) suggested such policies may not help women gain seats (today, there are only 18% of women in the national assembly in France). In contrast, Rwanda, where a 30% gender quota has been mandated since 2003, has just become the first country in 2008 where female parliamentarians make up the majority of the legislative assembly.

How might quotas work?

One reason to expect quotas to have a long-term impact on the electoral outcomes for women is that they force voters to observe women in political leadership positions. If women, on average, perform better than anticipated by voters, then voters will be more willing to elect women candidates in future elections, even in the absence of quotas.

Work in social psychology (mainly based on laboratory experiments in the US) suggests that group stereotypes affect individual perceptions of the effectiveness of women as leaders (Huddy and Terkildsen, 1993; Eagly and Karau, 2002). In the field of politics, it would suggest that pre-existing social norms that associate leadership with men may make it harder for women to enter the political arena. The lack of exposure to female leaders would, in turn, perpetuate biased perceptions of female leader effectiveness. Regardless of competence, if women leaders are presumed to be ineffective, their chance of successfully participating in politics is slim.

Overall, little is known about the long-run impact of quota on women’s future electoral successes. This is an important question, since reservation policies are keenly debated in many countries. Showing that quotas durably level the political playing field would provide a strong argument in favour of such laws. Alternatively, if quotas were shown to provoke a backlash amongst voter and thus limit females’ electoral chances, the wisdom of such laws would be in doubt.

There is already evidence that female leaders make different policy choices once in office, specifically ones that better reflect women’s preferences (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004). But how do voters and the pool of potential female candidates respond to seeing women in office?

Let's emulate this stimulus: retraining grants for caretakers

A new program in Britain, described in The Guardian:

Parents who take long career breaks to look after their children are to be rewarded with £500 in training grants to coax them back into work. The grants will be made to every person who has taken more than five years off work to care for a child or sick relative.

They are to help parents retrain after a spell out of the workforce and to ensure that those who have sacrificed some of their career to caring duties do not slip down the career ladder. Ministers want to reward people - mostly women - for the contribution their caring duties have made to society and make sure they are not disadvantaged when they return to work. The grant will be universal.

The plan, from John Denham's Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (Dius), will be piloted to test the best way to allocate the grants. It is a feature of the New Opportunities white paper due next week to improve social mobility.

The money will be paid into a skills account rather than in cash and may be used for IT courses, sales and marketing or project and financial training. The funding comes after widespread concerns that women's earnings and careers are damaged after having children. On average women earn 17% less an hour full-time and 41% less part-time than men.