Welcome to the Feministing Five for another week. This week, I put our five tough questions (OK, four tough questions and one fun one) to Cristina Page. Page, a seriously impressive woman, is the author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, and is moderator of the RH Reality Check series On Common Ground. She also writes the blog Birth Control Watch where she recently interviewed Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH) on his unique position as a pro-life and pro-contraception political leader.
Page is particularly interested in the population of which Ryan is the most prominent member: the overlap between the 51% of Americans who classify themselves as pro-life, and the 60% of Americans who don't want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. Page believes that those Americans, and their leaders, like Ryan, and the members of the diverse coalition she has assembled at On Common Ground, are our best hope for a chance at a real discussion about how to reduce the need for abortion, while simultaneously protecting women's rights and access to abortion and other vital reproductive services.
And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Cristina Page.
Chloe: What led you to your work in reproductive rights?
Cristina Page: It was an issue of Ms. Magazine that I stumbled across in college. It was a crime scene photo of a woman who was abandoned in a hotel, on the floor, naked, folded over on her knees, left by the person who she'd turned to to help her have an abortion, an illegal abortion at the time. And it failed, and this was the crime scene photo of what was left. She bled to death, and it turned out she was the mother of two children.
This is a conflict that uses a lot of graphic images, and our side doesn't really resort to that, and this was the sort of picture that no one ever sees now, but it was seared in my memory as a symbol of a place we should never go back to. And so I went to Ms. Magazine and started interning there - it was my first destination. That was my entry point.
CA: Who is your favourite fictional heroine? Who are your heroines in real life?
CP: My favorite fictional heroine is Liz Lemon, though the children's character Olivia comes in a very close second.
My heroine in real life is this ten-year-old girl, Nujood Ali, who recently fought to divorce a man who's three times her age, in Yemen. For me, she is the embodiment of the innate feminist in us all. She hasn't yet been corrupted: this is so clearly a wrong to her, this practice in her culture. And I think that that exists in every girl, in everybody, and I loved seeing the images of her being victorious in getting her divorce. And to me, she just seemed pure. A pure feminist, and I loved that.
And Tina Fey. She's a heroine to me because she doesn't have to wear feminism on her sleeve. Sometimes it becomes a uniform, but she just is: she's free and funny and smart and she's such a representative of our time. And I think the same is true of Michelle Obama. It seems like she's the first First Lady where we don't have an expectation that she's going to work for women. It just seems like, "Why should I do that? Shouldn't that be part of my husband's plan? Why do we need this pink ghetto, or auxiliary, that makes the First Lady the emissary for women? It's not a co-Presidency." I think that all the women who live and breathe feminism, who don't make it an awkward construct, so that it doesn't have to be a badge that they're wearing.
CA: What recent news article or story made you want to scream?
CP: Reverend Veazey at the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice wrote a piece that was slamming common ground as being anti-woman. And his argument - there was nothing there. It was a lot of scary words assembled together, but there was no actual policy in the speech - there was nothing there. And this idea that we would be compromising or that women's rights are at stake, well, possibly, but why are we throwing this away without even having a hand in shaping it. Why are we claiming it's evil when Melody Barnes, of all people, is leading it. I mean, you can't get a stronger pro-choice advocate. And this is a man who's widely respected, and anything he writes people take as true, so the fact that this was just a pile of scary words, and no substance, I thought was really unfortunate.
CA: In your opinion, what is the greatest challenge facing feminism today?
CP: Predictability. I think that so much of this is well-worn territory that it has to be presented in a way that the American public understands, and can hear, and wants to hear. And just because we're right doesn't mean people vote for us. If we've learned anything from the last eight years, it's that you don't have to be right to win.
So I think that we really do need a lot more public relations, and I think we need to sound a little bit more like what the American public wants to hear. Gloria Steinem once said that feminism is not a public relations campaign. And I don't disagree with much of what she's said, ever. But I do disagree with that.
I think that the public agrees with us, they understand it. But we too often play the stereotypical feminist, which was a media creation. It's kind of like the bra-burners. I remember talking to Robin Morgan when she was the editor of Ms., and she was there, she was one of the leaders of that protest of Miss American in Atlantic City, and there were no bras burned. That was a media creation. I don't even think they were wearing bras, they were so free of them at that point! And I see old interviews of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, and there's nothing shrill about these women. They were charming, they were funny, they were intellectually stimulating. But the second wave of feminism has been characterized as shrill, and part of it was a media creation.
Obviously, we don't have the same resources as the Christian Broadcasting Network, or whatever, but I do think that we do too little to address those mischaracterizations, and then they become fact.
And we give up to easily. Take Rock for Choice. Rock for Choice started with the bands like The Beastie Boys and Stone Temple Pilots and all these really great bands, and so the pro-lifers responded with Rock for Life. And Rock for Life still exists; it's got a pretty strong hold in the young generation of pro-life activists. I often see that our most successful campaigns are jettisoned by us and co-opted by the other side.
And the last thing is that the Christian right really invests in its activism and really invests in its grass roots, in a way that is unheard of on the left. They build buildings to house their interns so that kids who are coming in from other parts of the country can work in DC. We would never think of having a building that would be a place where the next generation of activists could be coming through. I think that examining those roots is important for progressives in general. We have a lot to learn from our opponents.
I don't want to sound critical of the movement. And obviously I wouldn't be working in the movement if it didn't mean challenging work and inspiring people. And I think we're doing great, for the most part. And I think we did an amazing job of exposing the Christian right and the Bush team over the past decade. I don't think they're going to get into office for, hopefully, decades, as a result. So that's the context I'm coming from. But I do think that we can tweak here and there and make the movement even better.
CA: You're going to a desert island and you get to take one food, one drink and one feminist. What do you take?
CP: Sushi, lemonade and Roseanne Barr.
Is there a feminist you'd like to see put in the Feministing Five hot seat? Leave their name in the comments section!
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: The Feministing Five: Cristina Page.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/15843
In getting the message of feminism across to more people and in pushing past the ways which it has been twisted by the Right into this archetype of the screeching female man-hater, I always go back to my Quaker faith.
Quakerly behavior teaches that we should respond to those who oppose us with love and with tact. Don't get me wrong. It's never easy. If someone is screaming epithets, smears, misinformation, or profanity at you, it is very easy to respond back in kind. Some might even say it's completely justified. But again, I recall the nonviolent practices advocated by Dr. King and his followers, who simply would not return the anger and violence they received at the hands of other people. It's not fair to have to put up with that degree of grief from anyone and at any time, but I find nothing de-escalates a situation more than staying calm when everyone else is losing his/her head.
The Right will always have an advantage over us, particularly the Religious Right, because they honestly believe that we live in a fallen world and that the End Times are neigh. If you take their version of Christianity literally, then you believe that anyone who opposes you is either Satan or some collective evil that is not to be compromised with ever. We try to be more inclusive and to at least give a fair listen to alternate points of view, but the Right doesn't see things that way. It's hard to wish to fix a world and live for our earthy existence when your opposition is concerned more for its place in Heaven and sees earthly matters as far less important.
It seems that Nujood Ali is still in a terrible spot (see http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/09/04/yemen.divorce.ime/).
Unsupported, treated like property. It's so sad.
How the Pro-Choice Movement is a GREAT book. I highly recommend it to pro-choice activists.
Exploring the concept of "common ground" and critiquing it in a few words without sounding like one can never see value in compromise or reconciliation is difficult.
The greatest value from "common ground" efforts has probably come from the local level where pro-choice and pro-life sides have agreed to dialogues in the wake of clinic violence, like in the late 90s in Boston after the clinic shootings by John Salvi. To agree on specific terms to limit confrontations through clinic protests (assuming some on the pro-life side are willing to compromise, like where the local Catholic church withdrew support to some extent on clinic protests) and public discourse (like antis using terms like "baby killer") can obviously be helpful and probably did help, in Boston, for example.
But expecting something like that to come about on the national level like is being done through the RH Reality Check blog is not as likely to have as much of an effect, and even if it did it wouldn't be as effective as there's not much that pro-life forces can in some stirring blog posts do to limit the provocative actions of more extreme groups.
Maybe the best example of a "common ground" that's been explored for decades now but little talked about these days occurs all the time at the local level in many communities between local women's clinics that provide contraceptive and/or abortion services and crisis pregnancy centers that (of course) do neither.
It's well known in many communities that the leaders of both pro-choice clinics and CPCs communicate at least at times related to legislation that would affect their funding or funding of services that would be of interest to both "sides" equally like WIC or other welfare programs aimed at poor mothers. CPCs and local women’s clinics are often in touch as well around times of especially confrontational clinic protests. If asked, the leaders and staff of CPCs often criticize clinic protestors, especially the ones with the most disgusting signs or the most confrontational rhetoric and actions. That's not to say that CPCs have much of a moderating effect in reducing clinic protest or protest violence, but they often have taken pains to distinguish themselves from clinic protestors, saying that they're not about that but rather providing a service to women.
Well, that's true only if you believe that CPCs provide a legitimate service to women, and for the most part we don't believe they do. Only for a woman who walks through the door of a CPC knowing that if pregnant she (1) absolutely will not have an abortion and (2) needs names and numbers of local welfare agencies will a CPC likely be of much help. They’re not going to find unbiased options counseling regarding an unintended pregnancy, and worst-case even if the woman decides to carry her pregnancy to term she may not get much help either in being supported in applying for benefits (or arguing in court if need be she deserves support from the father), women who have gone to CPCs have in some cases been manipulated or subtly coerced into placing their child, once born, up for adoption.
It's nearly impossible (certainly not without an enormous sense of shame and public humiliation attached to it) for a woman who has surrendered custody to sue an adoption agency or CPC for something like malpractice or coercive adoption tactics, but comparatively easy for someone alleging medical malpractice or violation of complex, confusing anti-choice legislation on the part of a comprehensive women's clinic -- but "common ground" advocates talk little (and never seem to find agreement) on removing restrictions already in place on abortion providers.
There’s other examples of topics that “common ground” efforts don’t touch on, like the taboos that existed a century ago about discourse of topics in “mixed company” like “religion, politics, and sex”, but that’s the nicest example we can think of at the moment.
The nicest by far.
What seems to make "common ground" advocates most happy, besides wishing the extremists on the anti-choice side to somehow go away, is for more money to be spent on programs they'll advocate, programs one shouldn't need to continually fight for -- like AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children -- like a food stamp program).
But let common ground efforts like that succeed – as they did to some extent in the mid-90s in moderating the more extreme cuts in welfare programs considered by right-wing pressure on the Clinton administration – or let time pass from the immediate aftermath of a tragedy like the shootings in Boston a decade ago by John Salvi or the murder of Dr. Tiller in Wichita earlier this year -- and "common ground" efforts historically have ceased, like they likely will this time, save for some cross-posted blog entries on websites like "common ground" at RH Reality Check.
Do we support AFDC and WIC? Of course. We also support finding a cure for breast cancer, and think more money should go to kids with muscular dystrophy. But how much time and money should pro-choice activists, activist leaders, and pro-choice coalitions in particular – because that’s one thing that “common ground” purports to be, a coalition of leaders and groups who are somehow at once pro-choice and pro-life – how much should our coalition efforts be directed to that, realizing that as we do so we take away resources from making comprehensive reproductive health care services, including the most appropriate abortion services and contraceptive methods, accessible to women regardless of income, education, or age?
And that's just what's happened around common ground efforts at the national level in the past -- tolerating if only by silence the passage of parental notification and consent legislation, not to mention the many different kinds of restrictions on abortion access, all of which mostly affect poorer or less educated women, and barely keeping up with inflation in funding family planning services like Title X.
If Reverend Veazey didn't elaborate on concrete policy reasons how "common ground" may lead to "appeasement", maybe it's because the Reverend didn't want to seem like the stereotype that ministers have of being wordy. We'd be glad to take some of the heat for doing so. We could even be funny in doing so, like by giving an famous example of "appeasement", like Neville Chamberlain's speech with the immortal phrase "peace for our time". Well, Monty Python's Flying Circus thought it was funny -- but they can joke that way, they're British and took proportionally a lot more flak in WWII because of it.
We're sure more money could be raised (and less hot air expelled) for Jerry's Kids with muscular dystrophy than to prevent women dying like that woman who Christina Page saw in that Ms. Magazine article, but what does that have to do with determining where our priorities should be?