Required Reading: "The Face of Feminism" Edition

Thought I'd share a coupla things I read over the weekend that struck a chord.

>>Jessica Valenti on "The Sisterhood Split" -- this captures a lot of what I've been feeling about the dialogue around Clinton's candidacy and reactions from mainstream feminsim:

...Herein lies the reason so many of us are loath to discuss intrafeminist problems publicly. We know that Clinton supporters are taking heat from sexists--whether at home, at work or from pundits who relish talking about Clinton's "shrill" voice or whatever thinly veiled misogyny of the day is on cable news. We don't want to provide the backlash more fodder. We also know how hard our feminist foremothers fought to be here and how important the moment is--and we want to be a part of it. I certainly do. But not at the expense of what I believe is best for women, and not just because a movement that assumes it knows what's best for me tells me to.

This is refreshing after reading Astrid Henry's "Not My Mother's Sister" -- a book reviewed on by Feministing's "Not Oprah's Book Club" with a cover more befitting "Ya Ya Sisterhood" than a somewhat dense scholarly deconstruction of the generational lines in the sand drawn between 2nd and 3rd wave feminisms. And by dense I mean that the footnotes and bibliography were as long as half the text itself, and my head just isn't in the game anymore when it comes to academic writing. Too much writing for email, where there's a premium placed on punchy prose (and did I mention aliteration?). But I'm rambling...I like that Henry is trying to get at the roots of intergenerational infighting in order to shore up the movement and refocus energy outward, but I think I prefer Valenti's approach:

...feminists make a mistake in prematurely calling for unity. Instead of glossing over the problem with the rhetoric of sisterhood or having an elite group declare the dispute settled, let's own the conflict and use it to make real progress.

>>On the topic of global feminisms, Alternet's Joshua Holland asks "Is Islam Really Stuck in the 12th Century on Women's Rights?" A lot of what I've read from him has challenged the "clash of civilizations" contingent and called out Islamophobia and Western ethnocentrism, and this was no exception:

The bottom line here is that increasing women's civic, political and economic participation is a good fight, and an incredibly significant one. Focusing primarily on the status of women in Islamic countries to rid ourselves of the stigma of our own inequalities or to justify Western hegemony over the rest of the world is not.

I had to read this at least five times before it really registered:

Portuguese women got the vote in 1976, Swiss women in 1971.

No. Words.