women's work
sastyk | March 8, 2011Today is the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day, founded to celebrate the achievements of women. Founded in Europe to advocate for greater participation of women in the public sphere, International Women's Day focuses heavily on those public sphere accomplishments of women - as political leaders, in education, in activism. Those are important and powerful things, the more important because most of us still have visceral memory of women's past. Consider this Guardian interview with women talking about what has changed in their lifetimes.
At the same time that we speak about the…
sastyk | January 5, 2011In my recent essay "300 Years of Fossil Fuels and Not One Bad Gal" I wrote:
...a narrative in which women's entry in the workforce is responsible for our dramatic rise in fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions can look superficially like a tool for those who would prefer that women go back home and come out of the workforce, and would like to blame feminists and feminism for our present ecological disaster. Indeed, if no one has come up with this ideological claim yet, I'm sure it is only a matter of time before someone explains earnestly to me how wimmen's rights are destroying the…
sastyk | December 17, 2010If you haven't seen this video by Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute, you should. In a lot of ways it is an excellent summary of the history of fossil fuels, entertainingly and creatively done. In some ways, it is extremely valuable as a basic educational piece.
I'm very impressed with the clarity of this video, but it does have an odd gap in it - all of the human history of 300 years of fossil fuels doesn't have a single female person in it - not one. Women are addressed by implication when population is mentioned - but all the little hand-drawn people are men. There is a…
sastyk | March 14, 2010First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on... any writer worth her salt could do better than that.
Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.
Hayes pointed out that the original "…
sastyk | January 31, 2010In 2005, my first widely republished article was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and detailed the ways that material realities for women were likely to change in an energy depleted world. I got more than a 100 emails after I wrote that piece, mostly falling into two camps - either "Wow, I never thought of that, but of course it is" and "Oh, I've been worrying about these issues for a long time and no one ever writes about them." I was not the first significant woman writer in the peak oil movement, nor was I even the first to ever write about these issues, but somehow this article…
sastyk | January 4, 2010I've always meant to write a post with this title, but somehow never got around to it. Then I saw The-always-amazing-Zuska's latest about the way that Erma Bombeck's name is being used to derogate people as being unserious and tied somehow to domestic life. Somehow I hadn't realized that "Bombeck" was an insult - although it shouldn't have surprised me, given our deep social contempt for women and women's traditional work (the subject of most of Erma Bombeck's humor.) Not that I needed another reason to be bored and annoyed by the eternally over-rated Steve Pinker, but here's one.
This…
sastyk | December 8, 2009I was about to post the Chocolate-Banana Bread Pudding recipe that I left out of my food waste post, when I found myself worrying a little bit about whether posting recipes is appropriate for my new forum. You see, I tend to think of Scienceblogs with the first syllable pronounced just like Thomas Dolby in "She Blinded Me With Science" yelling "SCIENCE!" (which I have included a link to for no apparent reason, simply because it pleases me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V83JR2IoI8k.) Is this warm, fuzzy, chocolatey goodness appropriate to a hard-edged SCIENCEblog? Does PZ Myers post…