Main Post 4/7

Carol Mendez – Acting on a Grander Scale

This article recounts one woman’s story as an immigrant to America and her struggle to find footing in this country. Eventually, she was able to achieve her success with great help from service minded people dedicated to equality and human compassion. She seems to believe very strongly in the powers of an education, activism, and communal organization. Her personal background and the strong example set by the people around her motivated Mendez to pursue various types of activism throughout her life. Her experiences translating in hospitals revealed to her some serious injustices in health care, as well as a considerable need for Hispanic doctors. All throughout her education and into her professional career, Mendez sought out new resources and new ways to better the community around her.

I read this article at a very appropriate time; just yesterday I got a job offer as a college campus organizer for a public interest lobby group. During my interview I heard countless stories from different people about the various projects they were working on. The enthusiasm was contagious and many of them were motivated by personal experience as Mendez was. I particularly enjoyed how Mendez sees activism as a means of learning. It affords one the opportunity to become involved with people you would not otherwise be in contact with. It allows you to learn about different cultures, different backgrounds, and different values that you may never have been exposed to. So, as you help others you help your own understanding of this world and of yourself.

Courtney Turner – Finding the Face in Public Health Policy

Similar to Mendez, Turner begins with her personal background. Again, her parents/guardians are a primary motivation for the activist spirit that she would cultivate as she got older. She cites her inherited competitive nature as an early manifestation of her drive to create highly resisted change. Specifically, the change she sought after was more considerate public health care, a system that did not marginalize and ignore intravenous drug users, prostitutes, and those affected by HIV and AIDS. Her means of getting involved with these issues was through interning, volunteering, and later researching in collaboration with needle exchange programs. These types of public services are often criticized for condoning illicit and irresponsible behavior. But Turner expresses her conviction that meeting with these people has shown her the truth; they deserve to be recognized instead of marginalized, and the health care system cannot ignore these people’s stories any longer. Like Mendez, Turner emphasizes the lessons she learned about leadership and collaboration through activism. She claims that her experiences outside of the classroom are the ones that contributed most to her education and expertise in public health.

Kaminsky – Choosing Nursing

Like the others, Kaminsky arrives at her knowledge of health care through a distinct career path. She was in the unique position of having an undergraduate degree in History and Women’s Studies, but decided to start a career as a nurse. This background gave her an analytic mindset as she began a career in such a traditionally female dominated occupation. In this article she chronicles how nursing became a popular female profession, how it has evolved, and where she hopes to see it go in the future. She gives a very interesting account of how nursing numbers were affected by feminism, which encouraged women to pursue careers unjustly dominated by men. Unfortunately, this had an adverse affect on how people viewed teachers and nurses because they seemed to be “settling” for traditionally female jobs. Kaminsky makes the very valid point that regardless of the history of gender relations attached to these positions, they are essential to a functioning society and should be respectable options for anyone. Beyond this, Kaminsky argues that because nursing is predominantly female, it is an arena that supports female unity and a fertile battleground for women to fight for better pay and better treatment in the workplace.

All three of these articles are good examples of what feminism and women’s studies encourage in people. I think that studying the movements of feminism and women’s rights forces you to be look at things differently, gain new perspective, and ultimately, it encourages you to become more positively active in your society. All three of these women took that mentality and sought positive change in ways that were not intrinsically related to feminism, but I think that the motives behind their actions and the determination that each of them show are skills that are sharpened by feminist study and involvement in the women’s movement.

Response to readings on feminism in the medical field

The overarching theme I’m seeing through the works of Mendez, Kaminsky, and Turner is a responsibility of feminism to not only address gender issues, but also to address the places in society that disadvantage a particular population. These three authors chose to focus on healthcare and who has access to healthcare. In these readings, we not only talk about the limited access of women into the medical field in a career sense, but also the limited access of racial minorities and the lower-class.

In response to this, these women decide to become soldiers in white coats that try to change this. Mendez views herself as an educator that enlightens disadvantaged and uneducated populations on ways to lead healthier lives and to protect their children from environmental health hazards. The privileged populations benefit from this information by reading newspapers, watching televisions, or from their educated and informed network of friends and families. The undocumented immigrants that Mendez encounters lack this source of information that could be the difference between life and death so she chose the medical field to fill that void.

When I first read about these women becoming nurses, I immediately thought of the argument Kaminsky brings up; the nursing field is historically a women’s occupation. I was concerned that these women were really just feeding back into the oppressive system. I wanted to see a desire to challenge traditionally male occupations and this talk or perpetuating the female population of nurses concerned me. Although I still don’t necessarily agree, I began to understand Kaminsky’s point more as I read. Kaminsky brings up how the nursing field is tied to the evolution of the feminist movement (167). Gender neutral scrubs eliminated and female nurses no longer had to salute or give way to make doctors. Furthermore, Kaminsky pressed that ultimately the difference is that women could choose the nursing field or choose another field. Kaminsky just happened to choose the nursing field and this doesn’t make her less of a feminist.

Given this, I still disagree because I think Kaminsky’s points support nursing as a “women’s field,” especially when she says that ”women are in powerful, decision-making positions in all areas of nursing, and we should see this as empowering,” (170). She says this after she has given the statistic that the nursing field is only 6% male so that makes me wonder what these “powerful decision-making” actually looks like if it’s not over the “powerful decision-making” of men. The way I see it, all women are also in powerful decision-making positions in all areas of housework as well. What I want to see is integration of the field and not in the way Kaminsky suggests. Kaminsky is saying how the imbalance would compel men to join the field, but I actually think quite the opposite. If the stereotype of nursing being a women’s job is not challenged and actively discussed and dispelled, then I do not see men joining the field just in the fact that the field is imbalanced itself. In fact, I see men being more intimidated. Just watch the episode of Friends where Chandler makes fun of a male nurse that Monica decides to date by saying, "So, uhh, Dan. Nurse not a doctor, huh? Kind of girly, huh?" He finds the occupation emasculating.

Integration of the field should be a more active process and should be a goal because if wages are a source of inequality, then integrating the field with men would boost the pay up, like Kaminsky also speaks briefly about. Then, not only women are seen as constantly “complaining” about money.

However, I am not trying to denigrate the field of nursing because I agree wholeheartedly with Kaminsky that it is a field that is absolutely crucial to society and this is why this topic is so tricky. Women do have the potential to utilize their positions to promote good like Turner’s needle campaign. She envisioned a world where access to healthcare wasn’t contingent upon wealth or privilege, but had everything to do with it being a human right and created a program that was active in playing out this vision.

Another similarity between these three women is how they all were raised disadvantaged and with family histories of oppression. It is very interesting and inspiring to read about women who rose above their oppression and consequently devote their lives to helping others rise from the oppression.

Response Post April 5

Judith Arcana’s approach to the abortion debate is a completely new point of view to me. Due to the environment in which I was raised (catholic school in a notoriously conservative state), abortion was only ever brought up as a moral question of life and death; it was never approached as a women’s issue, the focus was always on the well-being of the unborn rather than the mother. Only when I came to Colgate did I become familiar with the logic behind a pro-choice mindset. Very superficially, I had always summarized the debate this way: on one side there were people who saw an unborn baby and thought abortion was a moral question of life and death, on the other side there were people who saw an embryo and were fighting for the right to choose. Arcana’s argument throws my rudimentary understanding out the window. She makes the compelling pro-choice argument that women are aware of the life and death situation of an abortion decision. She says women do not need to hide behind rhetoric that makes light of the decision. Instead, she thinks that it is better for them to openly accept the true weight of the choice; it will allow them to make an informed decision and accept responsibility. Arcana claims that maternity begins with conception, which is an argument I would have never associated with a pro-choice stand point. But by making this claim for the purpose of supporting a mother’s right to choose what is best for her child, I think Arcana strengthens the pro-choice case.

Response Post 4.4

Judith Arcana’s article is incredibly powerful and emotional. After reading it, I was left with a mixture of feelings about abortion. I have always considered myself pro-choice, but some things about this article made me question my stance. However, other points of Arcana’s reinforced my decision to be pro-choice.

I liked how she mentioned that every woman she encountered took her decision to abort very seriously. The author tells everyone that the women did not take the decision lightly or make the decision quickly…even the women who were far too young to be pregnant. I think that there a stereotype exists about women who get abortions. Often times these women are thought of as careless, lazy, promiscuous, etc. I think that Arcana does a good job of destroying this stereotype, and shows the readers that the people she has worked with in abortion clinics are really torn apart by their decision.

I did not react well to parts of Arcana’s article. Maybe this is wrong of me, but I felt truly disgusted when Arcana discussed how she (in the span of five years) learned how to perform abortions, got pregnant, gave birth, had a miscarriage, had an abortion, and then had surgery to become sterilized. I really disliked how she listed these things like they are everyday occurrences, because these are all big life events! The way she listed them made me think that Arcana is careless about the way she treated her body at one point in her life.

The other point that I took issue with was when Arcana mentioned that every woman she encountered at the abortion center had a justified reason for getting an abortion. I know that I said Arcana debunks the stereotypes about women who get abortions, I have a hard time beleiving that every single woman has a justified reason for needing an abortion. For example, if a woman simply doesn’t want to use protection with her partner (but has the resources to purchase condoms), is that abortion justified? I suppose Arcana has a point that women who abort pregnancies all feel that they could not properly raise a child at that point in their lives, but I still question her idea that all abortions are justified.

Leading Post: Anon & Arcan

Anonymous – “How it all Began: I Have Had an Abortion”

This short piece focuses on the movement to decriminalize abortions in Europe. Women were restricted and so were physicians who felt restricted by the law to perform such operation. Furthermore, there were many women that died because of illegal abortions. These women hoped that decriminalizing abortions would not only decrease the number of mortalities related to unprofessional abortions as well as pave a path towards liberation for women.

These women were correct; as soon as the restriction on abortion was lifted, there was an immediate decline in abortion-related death. The organization of women who protested anti-abortion laws confessed publicly to having abortions before and are speaking for the right of every other women to choose to have one as well. This public campaign and confession attempts to take a taboo topic and deconstruct it to make society face it. By confessing in public, they’re upsweeping the topic of abortion from underneath the rug and forcing society to consider the rationality behind decriminalizing abortions.

What I found to be interest in the beginning was how the upper-class German women, through the manipulation of magazines and other media outlets, was trying to give the impression that German women are better than the Americans, the British, the French. They didn’t want liberation and there was “no anger” as a German woman put it (356). This I find to be absurd and also shows how feminists break off into class and often get caught fighting each other instead of the oppressing systems.

Lastly, this text pushes the fact that the fight for abortion is much less about abortion than it is about seeking self-determination for all women.

Arcana – Abortion is a Motherhood Issue

What I found to be immediately eye-catching about Arcana’s piece was how she singled out the biological construct of a woman and emphasized the sexual reproductive system. By doing this, I think she highlights the toll of childbirth on a woman’s body that many tend to overlook. She only gave birth to one child and she can feel and imagine the toll it had on her once “youthful cervix” (225).

We can understand why she started off with this as well because it relates to her background. She performs abortions and she is speaking about abortion in this article to argue that the topic should be not separated from other discussions involving motherhood. It is very much related and for the sake of convenience, we tend to separate discussions of abortion from discussions of contraception, sterilization, and the mothering process. Arcana insist that we lose value to the conversation when we separate it out. Opponents of abortion utilize this “scatteredness” and isolates one thing to attack advocates of abortion, usually singling out the fetus/baby and forgetting about the mother who has the responsibility to raise this child for the rest of her life. A choice that should belong solely to the mother is instead made open for public discussion and indoctrination of ideas. Our society does not accept that “every women who choose to abort a pregnancy is justified in her decision,” (226).

Arcana touches on something separate from the political argument as well. In the recalling of civilizations in the past and in different parts of the world, she brings up that these societies have respected “that matters of life and death belonged in the hands of the mothers,” (226). A woman should not be shamed and ridden by regret and guilt because a society decides this punishment. It’s not fair and Arcana insist that we need a society that is open to recognizing our “joys and sadnesses, our regrets or reliefs,” (227). After all, no one should ever tell us how we should feel.