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| Ms. Steinem |
I used to roll my eyes when people called me a feminist just because I was female and I said what I thought. I grew up without any notion that I might be considered inferior because of my sex. I didn’t encounter it in any schools I went to, including college. I majored in history and technical theatre, fields with a few more men than women, but nothing extraordinary. Never encountered sexism, not until I got my current job. But that’s another story….
As a history instructor, I read a lot of textbooks, looking for good ones to assign. I have always objected to putting women’s history, or anyone’s history, in sidebars and boxes. To me, if you’ve got a U.S. history book, you should have the history of everyone here. Putting women in a box is ridiculous — they, and everyone who isn’t a white adult male citizen, are part of the main flow of history, period.
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| Ms. Pankhurst |
Well, I could take that attitude, because I was a child of the 70s. Feminism was, apparently, so engrained in me I couldn’t see it for what it was. When strains of feminism began to denigrate men, I rejected them. Equality, not superiority, was the goal. Militant feminists (a term used 100 years ago for suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst) seemed hostile to half the population, so I didn’t want to be called a feminist. Thus the eye-rolling.
The history of the push for sexual equality has, like all other historical movements, been one of ups and downs, not continual progress. I grew up during an upswing, but the goals of that era (economic and social equality) were simply not achieved.
For example, women still do not receive equal wages to men. New studies are quick to point out that is because they do not enter the high-paying fields. They choose Marketing and Human Resources over Finance. Pamela Stone’s study Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home noted that successful women with children often quit jobs because of inflexibility and insensitivity in the workplace, as well as husbands’ career demands. Leslie Bennett’s The Feminine Mistake warned that younger women leaving the workforce will have trouble returning and possibly financial trouble in the future because of how the workplace works (see a blog entry by her) . What both books, and zillions like them, have in common is that they consider only middle-class educated women in careers that they have chosen. As Joan Walsh points out, many of these books miss the simple fact that most women in the workplace do not have a choice about having a job — they need it to survive. At that point, it is no longer a women’s issue, but everyone’s issue.
So if it isn’t really about economics, perhaps it’s social. In the last twenty years, the focus has been not on how men and women are the same, but on how they are different. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. In an effort to appreciate each other’s differences, and create a sort of sexual multiculturalism, we’ve lost a basic “feminist” goal, one I had just assumed. I see powerful women on television spending their time sitting in chairs talking about clothes and makeup. Most medical studies are still done using men, but the resulting medication is given to women, and often doesn’t work right. An acceptance of our differences has done very little except provide a different set of excuses for refusing to see individuals as individuals.
What we now have is called “post-feminism”. This is the idea that basically, feminism has been achieved, so we don’t need it anymore. When I first heard the word, I thought it meant “feminism lite” (you know, less filling, fewer calories than feminism). But in fact, it’s more of a return to traditional roles, just using sexual multiculturalism, biological clocks, and Harvard grad moms to shore up the argument. Susan Douglas notes that post-feminism is a necessity to sell products, because it keeps women buying stuff to make themselves more beautiful and their domestic chores more managable. Now I’m thinking that anti-bacterial soap (soap is already anti-bacterial), air freshener (open a damn window) and Charmin Ultra are post-feminist plots designed to keep me from ever being equal to men. I saw a bumper sticker awhile ago that said “I’ll become a post-feminist when I live in a post-patriarchy”. A valid sentiment.
Oh, sorry, I gotta go have coffee with my girlfriends and feel empowered. 
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I finally took a few hours to explore Second Life, about which I’ve attended many conference sessions over the last several months. I have learned that innovative instructors teach classes in this virtual world, and are turning it into a true VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). There are spaces like EduIsland, and people like Corwin Carillon (
But then, I went into a building, to a meeting room, and managed to sit down in a chair (you right-click on the chair and click “Sit here” on the menu). When I tried to get up (“Stand up”), I got stuck in the chair. My legs were embedded in the seat and I could not moved forward or backward. It took me ten minutes, and finally I got out by sitting somewhere else.
But in one of the most interesting examples of a media mashup, a point is made that the process begins with deconstruction of content, then putting it together in a way that forms a new idea. The 
This technology concerned the machine gun, but it would be a mistake to think that one side had machine guns and the other didn’t. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, both sides had machine guns. As John Ellis explained in his 1975/86 book The Social History of the Machine Gun, the difference was how they were used. The French though of them as field artillery, and gave them to the gunners, who replaced some of their artillery and put the new weapons at the rear. The Prussians realized they were a new weapon, and created a machine gun corps with the guns at the front. That’s why the war was so short.
Kurt is up in heaven now (I have to write that, since he was a humanist and wanted it said when he died as a joke). This reminder that human contact is more important than technology comes from a 1995 interview with Inc. Technology’s editor David H. Freedman, about living in a computerized world. I think it’s funny to put it in an electronic blog — I hope he would have appreciated the irony.
I went seeking a good story and insight into one of my favorite historical figures. What I got was a stream of emotional scenes, with only a hint of political context. The focus was on what the characters felt, from the extremity of the martyrs being burned at the stake to the horror of a poisoned dress. Feelings, emotions, highlights of drama. Students asked me, “Was Elizabeth accurate?” I wanted to answer, “How do I know? I have no idea how everyone was feeling!” Until I saw this film, I had thought that 
O’Toole’s next extraordinary performance in 
What most impressed me was his use of a “smartpad”. Using 
This is my car, a 1982 Honda Civic 1300FE. A piece of history. 
No, I’m not an archaeologist. But the Discovery Channel’s new documentary “
“This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.”
Yes, I know, the “intelligence” for the Iraq War came from them, and Blair got them into the war, but I always liked their strategy. 
During World War II, Churchill advised just such a strategy against the fascists. First, secure North Africa. Then Italy. Then the Balkans. This last didn’t happen. From the beginning, two forces opposed it. The first was Stalin, who demanded a second front in France. Roosevelt didn’t want the Soviet Union shunning the rest of the world after the war, which was a possibility if pressure wasn’t lifted on the Russian front. The second force was the U.S. military, which wanted to head for Berlin, the big city, the capital, ASAP. Go for the area of strength and knock it out! That’s American strategy. 
This semester I’ve gotten some good discussion, with some students supporting social Darwinistic activities of the U.S., and others being much more cynical. I like to have some objectivity, even though 
Condoms 
Items not around anymore
The design for the Diva Cup goes back to the 1930s, but the use of cups goes back much further. Again, Canadians have more options in this area. Recently, 
So after several late nights grumbling (a mild term) about my hosting problems, I return to Moodle itself today to grade tests and (again not for the first time) find myself totally delighted with the ease of using it. Today’s example is that I was adding in the correct answer to essay questions before I started grading, and I was able to make them purple so I could easily see the difference between a student’s answer and my own feedback. Then, instead of grading quizzes on a student-by-student basis, I was able to use Manual Grading to see all instances of answers to the same question, and grade all of them on the same screen page. While breezing through this, I noticed that a good student had a better answer than my own. So I just opened the quiz and changed the feedback. No problem, instantly saved, viewable immediately by students, even though I was in the middle of grading and the quiz had already been deployed. Try that, Blackboard!
