dgross@polyslo.calpoly.EDU (Dave Gross) (06/13/91)
According to jym@mica.berkeley.edu (Jym Dyer): > I suspect I'm better read on feminism than Hillel Gazit, and I >can honestly report that I've not seen one feminist document that >supports a male-only draft. Well, I don't know if these qualify as documents, but here are some quotes I have from people I believe to be feminists, about men and women in combat and/or the draft: Angela Davis (at a news conference for a couple of women who refused to serve in the military during the Persian Gulf war): "I applaud their courageous stand. In the women's movement, we are fighting for equality for women but that does not mean we seek equality in the right to kill other people." Stephanie Salter (feminist columnest for the S.F. Examiner): "[O]ver the millennia women's tendencies have not inspired them to become sanctioned killers. This has been a good thing for the world; it is a more moral, God-like stance. But now [January 20, 1991], in the understandable but gravely mistaken notion that the right to be a sanctioned killer is nothing more than the right to better pay, improved status, and career advancement, women are in danger of sacrificing one of their most precious traits -- their nonviolence." On the other hand, NOW came out in favor of an equal combat role for women in the Persian Gulf war, while at the same time opposing that war. A very principled distinction, methinks. "There is an assumption that because men are the ones who are supposed to put their lives on the line to defend this country, they have a right to set policy," said Patricia Ireland, NOW's national vice president. Then there was Mary Kenny of the London Daily Telegraph, who I include here because what she said was amusing. I can't say for sure whether or not Kenny thinks of herself as a feminist: "Indeed, it seems to me that by sending women into the Gulf conflict as soldiers in the first place, we have betrayed one of the most elemental and civilizing ideas of Western, and Christian, culture -- the chivalric ideal that women and children should be protected by the more brutish male, that women should be respected as higher human beings, morally, than the common run of men." And it's just as bad in the other paragraphs, when she talks about how kids need their mothers more than they need their fathers, and that in fact women are needed more by the next generation in toto. The only reason I suspect that she may think of herself as a feminist is because she uses some feminist language at places in the essay -- talking about "the basic male chauvinist thinking" or about "Western feminism [which] challenged the fundamental male chauvinism that is part of the natural order" or about "a carefully controlled male system" -- phrases that an antifeminist might avoid. Then there's Linda Chavez, who also wrote a piece about how women should not have to be in combat. She ran for Congress, I believe, as a Republican, so she's no traditional woman, but I can't vouch for her feminist beliefs either. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "[E]very paranoid style has its dreams of lost wholeness, whether it be in the Aryan past, Christendom, or the plantation way of life. For radical feminism is is prehistoric matriarchy..." -- Dan Dervin