[LMB] [SPAM?] Re: Pat's questions for the females on the list OT:

[Paula Lieberman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "PAT MATHEWS" <mathews55 at msn.com>


> Hi, Meg. I guess I was assuming that what you're talking about has 
> vanished
> in the face of a world where women fight in Iraq, arrest crooks, etc.

Ha, ha, ha, ha.  There are LOTS of reports of harrassment of women from male 
service people even today.  It's gotten worse actually I think--back when I 
was in there was a higher proportion of people from outside the reactional 
misogynistic redneck rightwing Belt in the USA in the military and at the 
top of the military than there are today.  Mr Boykin, may his retirement pay 
be busted down to private first call, would NEVER had been kept IN the 
military, much less PROMOTED, after his religious bigotry towards 
non-Christians --note that the Nexus appears to be a place where there is a 
lot of religious tolerance of anyone who's gone off of their own corner of 
their own world.

Ethan stayed devoted to hisplanet's God the Father religion, Miles kept the 
practices he'd been brought up with (Bothari's graveside)... Prince Serg and 
Ges Vorrutyer were -monsters- and etqual opportunity ones--they committed 
atrocites on women, but they also tortured men....  Eventually Ezar purged 
the Barrayaran military of its extremistic elements, by sticking them all on 
that ship together and arranged for it to be blown out of existence, 
including ridding the Nexus of his insane offspring....

> I imagine we're headed backward to a mild period of greater social 
> division

What do you mean, "headed," and what do you mean, "mild"?  Susan Faludi 
documented the turn rightwing intolerant-ward years ago.   I could go into a 
lot more detail that what happened with the US military academies concerning 
BOTH harassment of female cadets AND proselytizing of particularly 
evangelical Christianity violating the US Constitution at at least both the 
Air Force Academy and the US Naval Academy, but I rather thing that that 
gets into the area of Off Limits Discussion.  Suffice it to say that the two 
tend to go together, promotion of intolerant religious branches and 
suppression of women--note that the Society of Friends (Quakers) does NOT 
discriminate against women and does not specify e.g. "The wife is submissive 
to her husband who is the master of the family" and does not go around 
aggressively proselytizing in the US military and punishing those not of 
their faith by disrespecting religious traditions and deliberately 
scheduling cadet exercises to give cadets Sundays to be days of rest and 
forcing non-Christian cadets to do exercises on the non-Christian cadets' 
religious days of rest that Christian cadets escaped almost entirely.

> between the sexes. Such things as girls being steered into feminine
> professions such as medicine and the law, for instance.

"It takes  woman, all powdered and pink
"To joyously clean out the drain in the sink,
...
"That frail young maiden, who's constantly there
"For washing and blueing and shoeing the mare
"She's a joy and pleasure, for practic'ly speaking
"To whom can you turn when the plumbing is leaking?///"

"It Takes a Woman" from _Hello, Dolly!"

Lot of careers that turned into "pink ghettoes" didn't start out that 
way--the terk "clerk" used in e.g. clerk-secretary, came from "cleric" and 
particularly -male- priests... it was only when literacy became a lot more 
common and somewhere the job of clerk and secretarial work became seen as 
scut lowpaid low prestige labor, that it became a pink ghetto.   Note that 
the salaries for OB/GYNS -dropped- as the number of women increased in that 
field of medicine, and that a lot of other fields the salaries dropped as 
the number of women increased.  And particularly there were corporations 
which made it a point to employ women on the lower paid piece work stuff in 
factories because they felt they could get away with paying women less than 
men... originally Lowell, Massachusetts, focussed on hiring young women from 
farms to be factory workers, because they were looking for paying work to 
earn money to save up so they'd have money going into a marriage (as oppose 
to being unpaid labor back home on the farm...) and because the perception 
was that the males needed to have -livelihoods- to pay for a family and 
wouldn't accept low pay rate factory newbie jobs.... the mills recruited the 
highest skilled workers from Great Britain, rather than spend the money to 
train people over over, and the ones recruited from overseas, were male...