march 16
eight days after international women's day, i'm talking about international women's day
Last Monday, a girl from my floor came into the kitchen where I and a friend were eating lunch and greeted us, beaming. “Hello! Happy Wednesday!”
“Hi! Did you just say ‘happy Wednesday’?” I asked, puzzled. I was pretty sure it was Monday, though since my schedule changed about a month ago and I now have a day off on Tuesday (it used to be Thursday), my sense of time has really deteriorated.
“No,” she said, “I said, ‘happy women’s day’!'”
This response, at first, was no less unclear. March 8? Women’s day? Was this a thing? Since when? I then remembered I’d seen something on Twitter or Instagram about International Women’s Day. Apparently it’s a big deal here (which makes sense, as I learned Austria was one of the first countries to celebrate the holiday in 1911), and in Europe in general. The friend I’d been sitting with is from Italy, and she said it’s traditional to give women mimosas (the flowers, not the cocktail; a let down, if you ask me) to honor the day.
I clarified that I’d been confused because the holiday really isn’t a big deal in the United States (correct me if I’m wrong). And I didn’t say this part to them, but I also don’t really have much interest in the holiday, for several reasons. One reason (or a few) is well summed-up by writer Marguerite Joly, as shared by Luisa Weiss:
My wish list for International Women's Day is so long and does not feature a state-mandated holiday. How about equal pay, legal access to abortion, tax-free hygiene products and a side of acknowledgment of women's mental load for starters?!! I do not want [gratitude] or flowers or a gd holiday; I want immediate inclusion and equality, justice and equity for all women of all colors, socio-economic backgrounds and all sexual orientations and abilities.
That’s one reason.
Accepting that I can do nothing to change the fact that it will be celebrated, I take issue with International Women’s Day because it seems to be about uncritically celebrating women who achieve some degree of parity with men, no matter what structures and hierarchies they uphold once they’ve reached it. Achieving ‘success’ as a woman, at the cost of others, does not a feminist make, in my view. Take, for example, J.K. Rowling, who by all accounts is a successful author, maybe one of the most successful ever, and made it to that point despite, I’m sure, plenty of sexism and misogyny. Recently Rowling came under fire for extremely public and impassioned transphobia on Twitter and on her website, taking issue with a headline that used deliberate language to include trans people and defending the paramount importance of biological sex in the name of ‘feminism’, basically arguing that trans women are not women and measures that improve the lives and material conditions of trans people must necessarily come at the cost of those of cis women, a classic TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) talking point.
I won’t dwell on Rowling, since I’m only using her to illustrate that not every woman who manages to occupy spaces traditionally occupied by men, in spite of their womanhood, is inherently progressive or revolutionary, and I don’t think it’s particularly useful to have a holiday with such a premise, which some refer disparagingly to as #girlboss cishet feminism. I’m not claiming that I am perfect in this regard either. I worked for a non-profit last summer whose mission very much aligned with this premise; in spite of myself I felt some sort of pride when Kamala Harris, self-proclaimed “top cop,” was elected the first woman vice president; and even using this platform, which refuses to moderate content from openly transphobic and misogynistic writers, and pays them for it, I am contributing to the problem. But, like many of us, I’ve had a lot of time in the past year to read (and spend a lot of time on Twitter) and am starting to understand why representation in historically-male roles/spaces isn’t enough.
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On Thursday afternoon, I learned a class I normally teach on Friday mornings was cancelled, so a teacher asked me to come to her class, 5th form (equivalent of high school freshmen). The topic was “rules,” and the teacher asked me to talk about rules students have to follow in American schools, prompting a classic comparison with the Austrian experience every class I teach seems to end in. (I think there’s a famous quote: “The arc of every class taught by a foreign-language teaching assistant bends toward cross-cultural comparison.”)
I picked some basic ones—be on time, don’t skip class, don’t cheat—and ones that I thought were particularly unique to American schools, or uniquely silly. Like the fact that chewing gum was banned in my high school because it was ‘distracting,’ the same rationale used to explain the need for a dress code, curiously (*sarcasm*).
In my presentation, I showed images of what I can remember being banned at my high school: too-short skirts, too-short shorts (both defined as those with hems falling above the tip of your fingers), leggings, spaghetti-strap tops, and baseball hats.
Astute readers will notice that four out of five of these items are primarily worn by girls. My students pointed this out as well. (And there may have been more rules that applied to clothes boys often wear, but I don’t remember them, nor do I remember them being as intrusive.) One student was particularly peeved by the spaghetti-strap-top rule. The picture I chose to represent this rule showed a top that was neither low-cut nor showing any bra straps, fear of either being the assumed reason behind the rule. But, seeing neither of these fears realized, my student asked the key question:
“What’s wrong with showing shoulders?”
What, indeed?
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The reason this newsletter took so long to reach your inboxes is that I started writing it three times. The first time, I wanted to write about Oprah’s interview with Meghan and Harry, as that interview was basically the only thing I could think about all last week and I wanted to share my excitement at such a perfect synergy of events that took place: the interview Sunday night, the class taking place Monday morning, the class wrapping up a unit on the U.K. and starting a unit on multiculturalism. Ultimately, however, the class on was haphazard at best, and others have already so eloquently articulated the misogyny, racism, and classism of it all, better than I could have.
The second time, I started writing about the strange class I taught about International Women’s Day, which centered on a rather unsatisfying list of 21 Powerful Quotes To Celebrate International Women’s Day but took a turn when the teacher started explaining the social construction of gender as articulated by Simone de Beauvoir and ended with this ad from a razor company. And with this second draft I couldn’t figure out a way to connect it to what I really wanted to say about International Women’s Day, which is this: International Women’s Day, and much mainstream feminism, doesn’t care about interrogating the broader issues behind inequality and injustice. We blame women for suffering in our society, celebrate them when they succeed in spite of our society, but do nothing to change the society.
We blame women for suffering in our society: When a girl wears a tank top that exposes bra straps, why do we ban that for being inappropriate and somehow suggestive, rather than teaching boys—or more concerningly, the adult administrators making the rules for teenagers!—that girls’ body parts are not inherently sexual? To take it a step further, when woman is the object of harassment, or worse, we place blame on her clothing, her rudeness, her failure to pay close enough attention to her surroundings—and notably not on the one harassing, or worse.
We celebrate them when they succeed in spite of our society, but do nothing to change the society: When children are forced into the home for 24 hours a day because of, oh, idk, a pandemic, we laud mothers for making sure the kids are doing their online school and for feeding them and entertaining them the rest of the time—on top of working, or else sacrificing their jobs—rather than expecting the same support from fathers on these fronts, let alone any kind of support from our government, in the form of consistent financial assistance during, I reiterate, a pandemic. When we celebrate women who ‘lean in’ and work their way up the corporate ladder to become one of those #girlbosses, we don’t stop to think about the fact that girlbosses, like their male counterparts, can oversee any number of injustices under capitalism—material, environmental, racist, misogynistic (yes, women can be misogynistic, too!)—and, perhaps even more than their male counterparts, reinforce ugly ‘pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps’ logic.
The good news is I think these things are changing. I saw many Instagram infographics (I can hear you rolling your eyes, but hear me out) last week about shifting from blaming victims of harassment, abuse, and violence to holding the perpetrators of these crimes accountable; many of them were connected to the death of Sarah Everard, whose remains, in an instance of devastating irony, were found two days after International Women’s Day, who went missing five days before the holiday while walking home from a friend’s house. Some of the most impassioned responses to the New York Times story of “Three American Mothers, On the Brink” that I’ve seen have, indeed, been about the different expectations, in opposite-sex couples, for mothers and fathers. Even if the ambition among women to be a #girlboss hasn’t disappeared (just as it hasn’t among men), the advice that simply ‘leaning in’ is enough has been largely debunked.
The good news is my students are young, confident, and clear-eyed about ridiculous double-standards. Next year* I can anticipate International Women’s Day and prepare a lesson that takes advantage of their relatively unjaded and questioning nature to think about what it would mean to recognize International Women’s Day differently.
This newsletter has gone on long enough, but just one more thing: This time last year, I was packing up and moving out of Bowdoin for the last time, though I thought at the time I might be back in a few weeks; two months, tops, back in time for graduation. Oh, ho ho! How naive we were. We bucked requests from the college to limit social interaction, to get in and get out as quickly as possible, to keep a distance. Masks weren’t a part of the discussion yet, but if they had been, we probably wouldn’t have been wearing them.
Even the president of our college, witnessing the outpouring of emotion happening as a friend prepared to leave, bucked the very protocol he told us to follow and joined us for the photo op.
Almost exactly one year later, this past Sunday, I received my first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccination against the coronavirus. More on that in another newsletter later this week (you lucky dogs!), which I promise will be shorter but probably not less angsty.
Thanks for reading, as always.
Em
* “Next year,” as in, I’ve applied to stay a second year! I requested to stay at my schools, where the students are curious and thoughtful and smart and respectful, and where I know the teachers and their styles. But I plan to move to Vienna and commute. In pandemic conditions, with most restaurants and opportunities for entertainment limited, Eisenstadt actually hasn’t been a bad place to be, since I don’t feel like I’m missing much. But next year, I hope to get out a bit more, so I think I’ll want to be in a more…lively place.