Women's Views on News

Mark Steel: Is Sarah Palin 'militant jihadist'?

Writing in today's Independent, Mark Steel posits that the opposition to an Islamic Centre (it's not a mosque, though it does contain space for prayer) being built 2 blocks from Ground Zero is based on anti-Islamic fears and prejudices, and has nothing to do with protecting the memory of those who died in 9/11.

The centre will include a swimming pool, gym, performing arts centre and will host a range of interfaith and secular programmes. It will be open to everyone and is part-funded by the Cordoba Initiative, an organisation that aims to improve relations between Muslims and western cultures by creating programmes of active engagement between individuals and communities. Surely this is exactly the spirit that should be promoted in the years following 9/11?

The centre has been opposed most vociferously by Sarah Palin, who has called upon 'peaceful Muslims' to oppose the centre.

"So, as she's asking Muslims to oppose a centre open to everyone," writes Mark Steel, "That commemorates the victims of 9/11, it seems likely she's a militant Jihadist who thinks the building will be a betrayal of true radical Islam. She's certainly got experience of being filmed with rifles so she's probably sat by one while making a video up a mountain right now, leaning into the camera and booming 'The front crawl is the agenda of the infidel, my friends.'"

Critics have also stated that the centre would breach the 'sombre tranquility' of the Ground Zero and Mark makes an interesting point:

"So instead of this centre there should be more buildings such as The Pussycat Club," he asks, "Which is next door to where the towers were, and boasts of being the area's premier strip joint. But that must be in keeping with the sombreness, presumably because the girls start their slide down the pole in a fireman's uniform in honour of the heroic firefighters of that fateful day."

Former Labour MP, Shirley Williams, says Lib Dems now a right-of-centre party

The Guardian interviews former Labour MP and founder of the Social Democratic Party (now the Lib Dems), Shirley Williams, who has just turned 80.

Simon Hattenstone asks her what she thinks of the fact that the party she helped to form is now part of the government. She admits she was astonished that it ended up in a coalition with the Conservatives. 

"I'm making no bones about this, almost to the very end I argued for there to be a Labour-Lib Dem coalition. But Labour had already turned their mind to how they were going to rebuild – they weren't interested in a coalition and treated us with considerable contempt."

Having said this, she accepts that outcome would have made for a government so compromised as to be unworkable, just like the one she served in as a minister in the late 1970s. "And when I realised it wouldn't work because there wasn't the majority, my preferred choice – which may have been very irresponsible of me – was for a minority Conservative government." 

Why? "It was a slightly selfish position. We wouldn't have been forced to support things we didn't agree with. It was about protecting the legacy of the Lib Dems. I didn't want to see the Lib Dems, who I've always regarded as a left-of-centre party, suddenly becoming a right-of-centre party."

Quite. And all those people who voted Lib Dem would not now feel that they might as well have voted Tory. 

On women in politics

Journalist Edyth Betha interviews the executive director of the Pan African Civic Educators Network, Steven Duwa, about women's participation in Malawi's politics.

Duwa talks about the current situation faced by female MPs, equal representation of female politicians in the next general election and the possibilty of the first female president in Malawi. 

For the full interview, go to The Nation. 

Baroness Warsi defends women's right to wear burka

Baroness Warsi, the UK's first female Muslim cabinet minister, has defended the right of women to wear the full face veil, saying it does not prevent them from “engaging in everyday life”. Baroness Warsi, also the chairwoman of the Conservative Party, said that many Muslim women positively choose to wear the veil and not because of any pressure put on them.

According to the Telegraph, the remarks risk angering backbench Tory MPs, some of whom have called for the wearing of burkas to be banned outside the private home. Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary and Damian Green, the immigration minister, have, however, both spoken out against the idea of banning the burka in the UK.

In an interesting interview with Decca Aitkenhead of the Guardian, Baroness Warsi reacted strongly to the media's tendency to perpetually label her as a Muslim woman. Read WVoN's report on the interview here.

Is Baroness Warsi one of the most powerful women in Britain?

The conservative peer, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is, according to Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian, one of the most powerful women in the UK. 

Chair of her party, with a seat in cabinet as minister without portfolio, Warsi has been given a wide-ranging brief to work across government. As the former shadow minister for community cohesion and social action, she will be expected to focus foremost on social cohesion, and on the elusive matter of mending "broken Britain".

So if she doesn't like labels, why did she accept an award last year as Britain's most powerful woman, asks Aitkenhead? Warsi huffs, and says that she hopes that in five years time, such awards will be unnecessary.

Aitkenhead concludes that Warsi seems to want to have her cake and eat it. But then, I guess, who doesn't?

Wedded bliss or marital hell? The state of marriage past and present

Bella DePaulo's Living Single blog over on Psychology Today offers a four-part interview with historian and writer Rebecca Davis, who offers an insightful commentary into 'the American obsession with marriage'.

In her book, More Perfect Unions, Davis argues "how and why (the) idea that marriage is the ideal relationship for adults took root in American culture," and includes an analysis of the role of American marriage counsellors in both perpetuating and challenging traditional gender roles within married life.

As a single woman who has never been attracted to the idea of marriage, (I always assumed that there was a reason that marriage involved words synonymous with mental illness, like 'commitment' and 'institution'), for me one of the most fascinating things about this article is the side-effects of the decision to promote marriage as 'the' most desirable social institution for adult relationships, as described by Davis:

"Instead of simply teaching people to have "healthy" marriages (and we could spend hours parsing the multiple versions of "healthy" that evolved over the decades), marriage counseling taught Americans to define marriage itself as a healthy state of being. The flip side of that lesson, however, was that other forms of adult status - being single or divorced - were implicitly understood to be less desirable."

And here's another opinion piece about marriage from the London Evening Standard, but this one is about the anachronism in vows involved in a church wedding that still include the "O" word - obey. 

Wives of gay men 'homowives' struggle alone in China

The term ‘tongqi’ means the wives of ‘comrades’, a Mandarin slang term for homosexuals. But marrying an active gay man is not uncommon in China - some estimate that up to 90 percent of gay men marry heterosexual women. 

"The number of women in this situation has actually decreased in recent years," says Zhang Beichuan, director of the China Sexology Association and founder of ‘Friends Exchange’ magazine, a publication aimed at helping educate and support people dealing with issues related to homosexuality.

But this is little consolation for women stuck in a loveless marriage, like 33 year old Wang. She says her husband became cold and emotionally detached, and, after finding a letter written to him by an ex-boyfriend, she confronted him and he admitted that he was gay.

Many women are uncomfortable and unable to seek divorce because of the pressure from their families to have children, and because they fear the reactions of those around them.

Read the full story in ipsnews 

Jane Goodall, primatologist, talks about 50 years working and living in Tanzania

The New Statesman has an interview with Jane Goodall, a primatologist (someone who studies monkeys and chimps), who has lived and worked in Tanzania for 50 years. 

In response to a comment from Alyssa McDonald (the interviewer) that going to Tanzania was a pretty unusual thing for a woman to do in 1960, Goodall replies that: "My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money, because Africa was the "dark continent" and because I was a girl". 

Her mother supported her dream so much that she even went with her to Africa for four months because the British authorities refused to allow Goodall to go to what was then Tanganyika on her own. 

Now that's what I call motherly love. 

Why women should try travelling alone

Writer and lone-traveller Sarina Singh reveals why travelling alone is so good for women in an inspiring article for Xinhua News. In her home nation of India, not many women travel alone and Sarina is often called upon for advice and tips by other women keen to get out and explore the world. Sometimes she is even asked to speak to the families of women who long to travel, but are prevented due to the concerns of their parents or extended families.

Sarina believes that travelling has a particular benefit for women - by raising their confidence, by being thrown upon their own resources and finding out who they really are.

"Travelling alone is an incredibly empowering, enriching and rewarding experience. It means you are the sole decision-maker, responsible for shaping the path you walk. This, in my opinion, not only teaches you to become street-smart and self-sufficient but it also encourages you to more actively engage with the world and, very importantly, learn to tune into the best friend you will ever have in life: your instinct," said Singh.

Having been travelling for the first time last year when I spent three months in South East Asia with two other women, I agree with Sarina on all the benefits. We met many, many women travelling alone, including several in their early twenties - all of them felt that there were many myths surrounding lone-travelling for women, especially perceptions of it being 'more dangerous' for women. They all said it was no more dangerous than their home towns! I found each of these women inspiring as the thought of travelling alone is compelling to me, but a little intimidating. Sarina's article reawakens my wanderlust, so WVON may one day have its own foreign affairs correspondent, watch this space....

Supporting the burqa ban is a feminist issue

Ahead of the French vote on the burqa ban this week, Salon features a fascinating interview with Mona Eltahawy, "an Egyptian-born journalist who calls herself 'a liberal, a Muslim and a feminist'". She argues that feminists should, by definition support the ban.

"I support banning the burqa because I believe it equates piety with the disappearance of women. The closer you are to God, the less I see of you -- and I find that idea extremely dangerous. It comes from an ideology that basically wants to hide women away," says Mona Eltahawy.

Eltahawy also contends that the right wing have hijacked the issue to scare people about the issue of immigration, an opinion with which I'm personally inclined to agree. But I was most interested in her reasons for stating that feminists should support the ban:

"I often tell (feminists) that what they're doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman's right to do anything. We're talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I'm really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women's right to do this, because it's basically the only kind of "right" that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing."

Thus far, I've been in the slightly awkward position of opposing the ban and opposing the right of Western, white, secular feminists (i.e. me) to tell any woman what is best for her (for the record, this opinion is mine and is not intended to represent the views of all of WVON's contributors). For me, the diversity of views within the feminist community on this one echo similar controversy over legalising prostitution and the rights of women to be prostitutes. Mona Eltahawy's comments have really given me pause for thought as a feminist. One thing I am sure of is that the feminist movement is ideally placed to capture a full range of views on this issue and I'd love to hear what our readers think about this one, so give the comments box a reason to exist if you've got an opinion.