Mary Harrington's 'Feminism Against Progress' book is out.

[ArabellaScott]

Looking forward to this one. I know she gets mixed responses; I find her work really interesting.

swiftpress.com/book/feminism-against-progress/

I’ve read some of those too- can be quite harrowing.

What’s also illuminating are reading publications written by women’s organisations that were against women getting the vote, or against women practicing medicine or law. You see lots of “biology” arguments and implications that “those women” fighting for these rights are “unnatural and possibly suffer from a diseased mind” in those too.

It's claims like that which I find questionable , she states it as a fact with zero evidence to back it up

And I disagree with this too. You could say that a painkiller is transhumanist too given that it bypasses a human experience which is the feeling of pain - I find this silly. Any drug/medicine/herb etc which helps us alter feelings /sensations or bodily functions could be said to be "trans human" Acc to MH's analysis

@Onnabugeisha, you said this: "I probably get overly defensive and curt when discussing this issue because I was made to feel like a terrible and unnatural mother for not even wanting to be home with them as babies"

and also this:

"the poster that said I was “throwing away” my baby by going back to work when they were only a few months old."

I don't really want to derail the thread into an argument with you over maternal needs & interests versus infant needs & interests. I've explained that you misunderstood my meaning.

To be fair there may be evidence of this in her book!

Echoes of the false dichotomy between 'natural' and 'manmade', perhaps.

Not to get too philosophical about it, but that's definitely debatable!

Yes a few elite privileged and lucky women, the 1% had some agency due to indulgent male relatives. But let’s not try and pretend this was the common lived experience of women from 1500-1700.

Precisely. The existence of Mary Ellen Pleasant Madam CJ Walker as extreme outliers does not say anything about the agency of other black women in late C19 and early C20.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Pleasant

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam_C._J._Walker

I don't distinguish that sort of writing or talk from the vaginal mesh scandal where the male gynaes and obstetricians were sniggering about advising women who found vaginal penetration painful to have anal sex instead.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4824880/Doctors-told-pelvic-mesh-patients-anal-sex.html

@ArabellaScott there may be, but I did listen to that entire interview on Triggernometry and found myself being really frustrated by KK and FF becasue at no stage did they teally question or challenge any of her statements, they seemed to be slightly cowed by her.

I was not persuaded by her arguments, and I really try to keep an open mind on this topic but I felt her point that the contraceptive pill was somehow the start of a transhumanising of medicine to be faulty because since the dawn of time humans have used whatever substances they could get from nature or in latter times pharmaceuticals in order to bypass or overcome human pain, suffering disease and consciousness .

Oh and one other thought and then I really need to get back to work regarding the pill, again while the pill certainly was revolutionary at the time, women have always tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to prevent pregnancy in many ways using condoms, withdrawal method etc of course these methods had high failure rates but point being that the pill only facilitated something that women were already doing or trying to do.

I watched the whole thing too. Her point about the Pill was precisely that it was the first mainstream pharmaceutical product that did NOT 'bypass or overcome human pain, suffering disease and consciousness." It wasn't treating or healing any medical (or even psychological) problem. It was designed to interfere with normal female menstrual cycles.

(For those doubting some of her claims, I'd also say that a Youtube interview is not the right medium to drill down into academic accuracy/footnotes/source material etc. That will be in the book. If it isn't, fair enough that's a problem.)

That will be in the book. If it isn't, fair enough that's a problem.

That was my reaction to the interview, "I'd need to see the book." The corollary to that is I'd need to borrow it from the library or wait for it to be on special offer.

MH and Stephen Fry are mistaken for intellectuals by a lot of people, including the 2 interviewers. A confident speaking manner and a good memory can get you a very long way. (As can years of not being talked over and the repeated experience of being listened to. I've witnessed a lot of very fine women lose their fluency in sustained discussion over time because they so rarely get to speak in an uninterrupted way.)

@RethinkingLife it's 20% off on Amazon currently (£13.61), or £9.99 on Kindle. Otherwise maybe you could request that your library purchases it..? My sister says she does this with all the books she wants to read!

This is an interesting perspective.

I often look at these alpha female types in high level industry positions and I'm a little sceptical about their claims of being ardent feminists as many seem to play into patriarchal structures.

When Marissa Mayer talks about working 130 hours a week, doing at least one all nighter a week, working from her hospital bed after giving birth to twins, and claims that being there on the weekend 'is a huge indicator of success'....is this really the direction we want to go in? Is this really good for most women?

I find myself wondering if many women like her have ulterior motives like described above and are just manipulating the many women below them.

Concerningly, many women look up to these women as aspirational and swallow all the the rhetoric about empowerment. I think we need to be careful what we wish for.

I would say that for many women the bond and the yearning to be with the baby comes first and leads to the desire to take time out. It doesn't arise as a result of taking time out.

KPSS, Maya Forstater and I am Sarah have my spare money at the moment. (I'd think a number of us are in this position.)

Good call on requesting that my library buys it, the more requests the more copies they might put on their purchase order?

I was listening to Woman's Hour last week and there was a discussion about tearing during labour and childbirth - featuring a dutch midwife, who is, aparently, the first midwife to actually design something 'gynae' for over a hundred years. The last invention was the speculum.

Anyway her invention is a sort of wish-bone shaped gadget which can be inserted into the vagina, and fit snugly around the perineum to enable the stitching of tears to be done far more easily and efficiently.

JFC

That's also arguable. An unwanted pregnancy is going to cause suffering, that's why we use contraception. To avoid the problem of unwanted pregnancy.

Unwanted pregnancy is not an illness which requires medicine. Menstruation is also not a illness which requires medicine. Both are normal physiological functions.

MH is pointing towards a different kind of use of pharmaceuticals, which don't heal the abnormal/aberrant, but rather alter what is normal. The correlation with trans-treatments is clear.

I agree. Back to back pregnancies was why women used to die younger than men - we didn’t always have longer life spans (except for decades with wars).

Even setting aside all the deaths due to botched abortions, forced pregnancy caused untold suffering and drastic impacts to their physical health from losing all your teeth to premature osteoporosis. Even being pregnant lowers your immune system so you are more likely to die of infectious diseases which were rampant and the #1 cause of death in the pre-antibiotics and public sanitation eras. E. coli from chamber pots. Cholera from contaminated drinking water. Typhus from clothes/bed lice. Dysentery from unwashed vegetables.

Then there was the high risk of dying in childbirth or the week following from childbed fever (sepsis).

The pill absolutely was to avert suffering…to say it didn’t is yet more romanticising.

"Why do you believe this special mother-baby bond requires so much more sacrifice than the special father-baby bond? And to be fair, I agree that a parent-child bond is a special and unique kind of love, but I don’t agree that women need to sacrifice so much more than men to achieve it because of biology."

@Onnabugeisha I haven't actually used the word 'sacrifice' at all. You've used it twice in one short paragraph.

Do you think that we can/should outlaw the concept of 'mothers' and 'fathers' in favour of gender-neutral 'parents'?

Well if you are arguing that all pharmaceuticals prior to the pill were to treat illness as medicines then that makes MH even more wrong. You could in the 19th century buy cocaine an OTC pharmaceutical product as a pick me up…didn’t treat any illness. It wasn’t medicine. It averted normal fatigue…

Theres a whole list of pharmaceuticals that were sold legally long before the pill that were purely recreational- so the pill wasn’t the first pharmaceutical used to alter what is normal and not treat any illness by a long shot.

And that’s ignoring the entire age defying & beauty pharmaceuticals industry…which has a long history too.

Not sure what word other than sacrifice encapsulates your explanation of consciously choosing to lose something good in pursuit of avoiding something else bad.

No, legislation doesn’t change culture…so the idea of outlawing mother/father is ludicrous.

"The words “mother” and “father” will be removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with gender neutral terminology, the State Department says.
“The words in the old form were ‘mother’ and ‘father,’” said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. "They are now ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two.’" "

From an article dated Dec 2015. Sweden was also considering it (I don't know what they decided). It's really not much of a leap in the current climate.