Category: Gender-Equality Issues

First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria

The Book of the Week is “First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria” by Eve Brown-Waite, published in 2009. This is the personal account of an adventurous idealist.

Although Brown’s late 1980’s Peace Corps experience in Ecuador prompted a painful realization about her interactions with a certain adult when she was an adolescent, there also occurred growth. Previously, she had fallen in love with her Peace Corps recruiter, who got a micro-financing job with the international aid organization, CARE. In August 1993, they ended up in Arua, Uganda.

They brought with them two pet cats, a cappuccino machine, a TV and a VCR.  They had to have shots or medication to protect against malaria, yellow fever, typhoid and cholera. Brown was afforded a mentor who taught her the culture of the locals. She was advised not to purchase the cows in the open-air market with no flies on them– those cows had been sprayed with insecticide. Poisonous grasshoppers made holes in the laundry on the clotheslines, but other ones were edible.

Brown and her husband lived richly compared to Ugandans. Instead of cooking over an open fire, they used a propane-powered stove and refrigerator. Her expatriate multi-family compound had electricity from 7-10 nightly– absent a war, political crisis, or thunderstorm. The expats drank gin and played badminton and tennis. Sometimes goats wandered onto the court.

“It was common for men to hold most of the positions of authority in rural Uganda, even thought it appeared the women did most of the work.” The women did the domestic chores and the childcare while the husbands were out of the country on business for long periods. Brown searched in vain for work in her field of AIDS-prevention education. Once, she happened upon an alternative-medical facility. The doctor there believed that AIDS could be contracted through sex, which was curable, or through voodoo hex, which was incurable.  Meanwhile, she did a lot of cooking and shopping. The expats enjoyed culinary diversity that included “…fish, chicken stews, curries, rice pilaf and fresh bread.” The area’s gardens yielded tomatoes, mangoes, potatoes, rice and okra.

Brown’s husband financially supported the kids in the community who begged most aggressively. There were food, clothing, medication and school fees to pay. On occasion, the couple took long road trips and were compelled to take kids to a family member, in the CARE Land Rover. The ultimate destination was an urban area with better medical care than Arua (which isn’t saying much). The roads were potholed, “…clogged with bicycles, pedestrians and dangerously overloaded commuter vans.”

The civil service appeared to consist of lazy bureaucrats. In the month of February, Brown needed to pick up packages at the post office. Those packages had been sent to her back in December. She was told to go to the customs house, reachable by a very short walk. The customs officer told her he needed to go to the post office with her. However, it was 4:42 and the post office closed at 5:00. Ugandan bureaucrats never walked anywhere, and the officer didn’t have access to a vehicle.

In 1996, the civil war in Uganda was serious cause for concern. Anti-government guerrillas were engaged in bombings, hijackings, and chopping off of facial features of villagers. Read the book to learn of whether Brown ever got her post-office packages, about her medical and family adventures, the terrorist incidents that occurred in Arua, and about other aspects of living in a rural village in Uganda in the mid 1990’s, as seen through American eyes.

My Beloved World – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the ebook “My Beloved World” by Sonia Sotomayor, published in 2013.  This is the autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor. Born in 1954, she grew up in a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx, in a close-knit family of Spanish-speaking origin.

Sotomayor’s mother’s philosophy was that whatever one is doing, one should do it well. Sotomayor internalized her advice. She became an overachiever in high school. As a Puerto Rican, she benefited from the growing popularity of “Affirmative Action” policies of the early 1970’s. She attended an Ivy League college. “The Daily Princetonian routinely published letters to the editor lamenting the presence on campus of ‘affirmative action students,’ each one of whom had presumably displaced a far more deserving affluent white male…”

In the United States, Affirmative Action, aka “diversity” is still a very controversial practice in education and employment in which the people in power, some say, out of “white liberal guilt,” are trying to salve their consciences for past discrimination of “minorities”– people who are not of white European origin. Ironically, this can result in reverse discrimination in specific sectors of society– favoring of non-white over white candidates. On the other hand, some ethnic groups comprising the minorities are statistically no longer in the minority of the entire population of candidates; they are now the majority.

Even so, people are becoming more tolerant of the growing popularity of multi-ethnic situations. Sotomayor remains very close with her younger brother, who married, had a daughter and adopted twins, “…Korean boys with Irish names, a Polish (adoptive) mother and a Puerto Rican (adoptive) father– the perfect American family.”

In college, Sotomayor had a lot of catching up to do, linguistically and culturally because she had grown up in a sheltered, limited environment. She writes, “I was enough of a realist not to fret about having missed summer camp, or travel abroad, or a casual familiarity with the language of wealth.” She had had trouble learning to write an essay because syntactically, her writing reflected her first language– Spanish, making for awkward phrasing in English. It was only as an undergraduate that she realized she needed to use the same thesis-oriented communication style she used on her high school debating team, but commit it to paper.

When she was planning her wedding, Sotomayor became a bargain-hunter, but “The prices horrified me, each piece of the fairy tale seeming a bigger rip-off than the last.” She attended Yale Law School and became an Assistant District Attorney to get litigation experience. Her dream was to become a judge. Even at Yale, there had been no program that equipped students with the specific skills and experience for becoming a judge.

When she told her mother about her appointment to her first judgeship, she had to explain that various aspects of the job would be less than exciting. There was no world travel involved. She would get to meet “interesting people,” just not the kinds she would be able to make friends with, as she had in her previous position. On top of that, she would be earning very little money, compared to what she could earn at a big-name law firm.

Read the book to learn the details of Sotomayor’s life triumphs and tragedies, and her opinions on various issues.

Moving Beyond Words – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the ebook “Moving Beyond Words” by Gloria Steinem, published in 2012. It is a collection of articles about Phyllis Freud (a fictional character created to explore how things would be if Sigmund Freud was a female), Steinem’s experiences working at Ms. Magazine in the early 1970’s and other topics.

At Ms. Magazine, Steinem writes that it was like pulling teeth to try to convince Philip Morris to advertise its Virginia Slims cigarettes without the slogan “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby” in the magazine. “No amount of saying that we, like men, are a segmented market, that we don’t all think alike, does any good.” Through the years, Ms. lost a vast quantity of ad dollars for sticking to its guns, not only at the hands of Philip Morris. “…But no matter how desirable the Ms. readership, our lack of editorial recipes and traditional homemaking articles proves lethal.” This, despite the fact that the Ms. ad sales reps did their homework in providing ample evidence of women’s lifestyle changes, to potential advertisers. Four years of research went into showing that “…women make their own travel choices and business trips” to try to persuade airlines to advertise in Ms. The airlines made various unrelated excuses for advertising elsewhere. The late 1980’s saw the financial troubles of the magazine continue to worsen– not caused by poor subscriber demand, but caused by misguided advertising departments run by men.

In her 1990’s article on economics, Steinem opines that her checkbook was a reflection of her values– what her spending consisted of, and in what amounts. This blogger thinks that the modern-day equivalent of that is physical keys and online passwords. The author also discusses unequal pay for men and women: “Because I was helping to establish speaking fees for other feminists and was giving away some of what I earned, I had become part of the problem.” Recently, this blogger has observed women doing themselves a similar disservice–perpetuating the degrading of all women with their behavior– but might not realize it: Many women post profile-photos on job websites, in which they are nearly topless. This blogger guesses that they think looking sexy will advance their careers. Wearing a strappy or sleeveless top in a professional photo is inappropriate. It’s as unprofessional as wearing flip-flops in a white-collar office. Wearing a top with short sleeves at minimum, would be appropriate. It appears that they want to be treated like sex objects rather than as professional workers who want to be taken seriously.

Read the book to learn of Steinem’s views on and/or experiences with Freud, the strongest woman in the world, working for a women’s magazine, Victoria Woodhull, economics and aging.

The Good Girls Revolt

The Book of the Week is “The Good Girls Revolt” by Lynn Povich, published in 2012. This short ebook discusses what happened when a group of female employees sued Newsweek magazine’s parent company in March 1970, for gender discrimination.

Shortly thereafter, similar litigation followed at other publications– at Time, Inc., Reader’s Digest and various newspapers across the United States. The author briefly describes the historical backdrop before, during and after. One of many cultural phenomena she relates is that the year 1973(!) saw the elimination of classified ads divided into “Help Wanted– Female” and “Help Wanted– Male,” the former of which were mostly for menial and/or low-paying jobs. “Saying you worked at Newsweek was glamorous compared to most jobs available to college-educated women.”

The author says that from the early 1920’s up until the aforementioned lawsuits, periodicals publishers relegated women to dead-end positions. At Newsweek, the vast majority of female employees held the title “researcher”– a fact-checker, who could never become a reporter or editor like, or get paid as much as, the male employees. Besides, many of the men were hired “…as reporters and writers with no prior professional journalistic experience” and most of the female researchers had the same qualifications as they did.

One reason many women did not protest or were not even consciously angry about their situation, is that they were conditioned by the workplace and society in general to comply with gender stereotypes. Four decades ago, women were limited in their opportunities and criticized if they chose a male-dominated career field. They were given to believe they should not aim too high, but stay where they were, because otherwise, they would encounter difficulty.  It became a self-fulfilling prophecy for most of them. Even many women’s colleges at that time had the goal of providing an education with the assumption that a graduate might get a job, but she would quit the workforce when she had children.

Even today, in the American workplace, there is an environment in which women are jockeying for position and power. According to the book, they are less well-liked, the higher up the corporate ladder they climb. The opposite goes for men. In certain aspects of their lives, such as weight-loss groups and fitness, women band together and cheer each other on. But not usually in the workplace.

Read the book to learn about the consequences of the initial legal action, and whether Newsweek’s workplace policies changed when, in 2006(!), three female employees recognized the recurrence of gender discrimination.

Sum It Up

The Book of the Week is “Sum It Up” by Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, published in 2012. This ebook is the autobiography of a long-time coach of the women’s basketball team at the University of Tennessee; Olympian, Olympic coach, daughter, wife, mother, etc., etc.

Summitt’s childhood consisted of doing hard labor on her family’s Tennessee farm, drag racing and playing aggressive basketball with her three older brothers. Her father was a gruff, hard worker who refrained completely from showing affection toward his family. Nevertheless, he had a passion for basketball. Therefore, in the mid 1960’s, he had the family move to a fixer-upper residence so that his daughter could play high school basketball on a very good team.

Unfortunately, the team was part of a pathetic interscholastic program that existed for girls at the time. There were many inequalities between male and female sports programs in Summitt’s generation. For one, she had to pay full college tuition, because “…athletic scholarships for women simply didn’t exist in 1970.”

At 22 years old in 1974, even when she was named head coach of the women’s basketball team at her alma mater, she was given a budget that was a fraction of the men’s team’s budget. Also, unlike a male coach, she had to play many roles in addition to coaching, such as serving as driver, laundress, ankle-taper, gym-floor cleaner, and bench assembler. Her office was at the top of five flights of stairs in a hot attic with no elevator and no air conditioning. At the same time, she was taking four master’s degree classes and was required to teach undergraduate classes.

Finally, in 1975, Title IX– which was supposed to “even the playing field” for male and female athletes– was signed into law by President Gerald Ford (according to the book). Summitt started to benefit from progress, but even in the late 1970’s, the men’s sports teams still had bigger marketing budgets and staffs than the women’s teams; plus the men traveled by airplane while the women had to drive hours and hours.

Summitt also discusses basketball as a metaphor for other aspects of life. She writes, “The point guard position in basketball is one of the great tutorials on leadership… they only follow you if they find you consistently credible… If there is a single ingredient in leadership, it’s emotional maturity.”

Read the book to learn about the coaching-career teams, victories, setbacks, comebacks and defeats; and family, health and retirement issues in the life of this overachiever.

Confessions of A Prairie Bitch

The Book of the Week is “Confessions of A Prairie Bitch” by Alison Arngrim, published in 2010.  This is the autobiography of the actress who played Nellie Oleson on the hit American TV show, “Little House on the Prairie” which aired from 1974 to 1983.

On the show which was set in a small town in the late 1800’s, Arngrim played the role of the spoiled, rich teenage daughter of the owners of a general store. She frequently got into fights with a goody-goody girl from another family in the neighborhood. Arngrim was twelve years old when she started the show.  Prior to that, her show-business parents had afforded her the chance to play some small parts in TV commercials and movies. Starting when she was six, she was subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of her much older brother.

Read the book to learn how Arngrim was able to deal with the trauma from her early childhood in positive ways later in life through her acting career and social and political activism.

Wendy and the Lost Boys

The Book of the Week is “Wendy and the Lost Boys” by Julie Salamon, published in 2011. This is a biography of Wendy Wasserstein, award-winning playwright.

Wasserstein grew up in a wealthy Jewish family with a mythmaking, high-pressure mother. Born in 1950, Wasserstein had four older siblings. As an adult, she followed in her mother’s footsteps, carefully orchestrating public relations for herself. For much of her life, she denied the existence of an older brother who was mentally challenged and sent away to a home.

A large number of women of Wasserstein’s generation were fighting for gender equality. She realized that she was attending the wrong college when her classmates at Mount Holyoke knitted sweaters in class and obsessed over getting engaged instead of planning their careers.

Wasserstein became famous through making connections with powerful people she might not have met had she not been born to an upper-class family.  Nevertheless, it took her several years to find herself; all the while her mother was needling her about her super-successful older siblings.

At one point, Wasserstein befriended New York Times theater critic Frank Rich. He found himself in a conflict whereby as Wasserstein’s friend, he was inclined to write a favorable review of her plays. A New York Times theater review makes or breaks a new production because it is the bible of theatergoers.  One review can hold overwhelming power and influence over the success of playwrights like Wasserstein.

Another factor in Wasserstein’s popularity was getting the right directors for her different works. The wrong director can spell doom for a show while a different one with a certain vision can make it shine.

Read the book to learn about Wasserstein’s relationships, eventual fulfillment of her dreams and her and her family’s sad fate.