Jane Austen’s Lady Susan is a wrecking ball in petticoats. The main character of the new film Love and Friendship, drawn from Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan, is a widowed mother of a marriageable daughter. She is also widely known as “the most accomplished Coquette in England.” She has a married lover. She seduces wealthy young men who are courting eligible young women — including her own daughter. She tries to force her daughter into marriage with a young man who would take a blue ribbon in Monty Python’s “Upper Class Twit of the Year” competition. She lies. She runs out on her debts. She is thoroughly reprehensible. And she is enormous fun to watch.

The Austen industry has, of late, presented us with a soft-focus image of Austen and her works — concentrating on the romance, the handsome young heroes, and the charming heroines — and given us (often excellent) film adaptations that provide Pinterest with scores of drool-worthy interiors, covetable gowns, and inspiration for themed weddings. But Love and Friendship and Lady Susan are antidotes to that limiting vision of Jane Austen as “quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic,” as novelist Robert Rodi put it.

But I’m not interested in Lady Susan just because she’s one of the great antiheroines of English literature — up there with Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Trollope’s Lizzie Eustace. I’m not interested just because she highlights Austen’s often overlooked sharp intelligence and acerbic wit. I’m interested because I am persuaded that in her creation of Lady Susan, Austen was drawing heavily on the work of one of the great early classical liberal feminists — Mary Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792. Austen, it seems likely, composed Lady Susan around 1793 or 1794. Austen scholars agree that she must have read Wollstonecraft’s work. But reading A Vindication and Lady Susan together makes me think that Austen wasn’t just influenced by reading Wollstonecraft’s book; she seems to have used it as a template for the main character’s behavior. And that makes Lady Susan a lot more interesting.

Wollstonecraft argues that the women of her time — and Austen’s time — were “weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner, [who] undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society.”

Their corrupting influence, though, is not due to some sort of original sin handed down from Eve after the Garden of Eden. It is the result of the conscious and intentional educating of women out of natural virtue and into habituated weakness, dependence, and immorality.

She continues:

Women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence, that I do not mean to add a paradox when I assert, that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to play off those contemptible infantine airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire.

This is Lady Susan in a nutshell. Her tyrannical hold over her daughter’s future, her constant deceptions in matters large and small, and her pretended helplessness and innocence, which her male acquaintances interpret as charm — these are all hallmarks of her character.

Even more a propos is Wollstonecraft’s description of women who have been educated in this fashion and who are then left, as is Lady Susan, widowed and with a family to care for.

But supposing, no very improbable conjecture, that a being only taught to please must still find her happiness in pleasing; — what an example of folly, not to say vice, will she be to her innocent daughters! The mother will be lost in the coquette, and, instead of making friends of her daughters, view them with eyes askance, for they are rivals — rivals more cruel than any other, for they invite a comparison, and drive her from the throne of beauty, who has never thought of a seat on the bench of reason.

Wollstonecraft adds that it doesn’t take a literary genius to imagine the “domestic miseries and petty vices” occasioned by such a mother.

But in Austen’s imagining of Lady Susan, we have precisely that — a literary genius turning her considerable talents (though in early days) to delineating a portrait of a woman who has become precisely what she has been educated to be. In that way, Lady Susan becomes a powerful adjunct to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. A world without real education for women, a world without legal equality for women — this is a world that is rife with Lady Susans, grappling for power and money in the marriage market and in the gray market of sexual favors, because that is the only sphere open to women with ambition.

While Austen’s and Wollstonecraft’s works are more than capable of standing on their own, taken together they provide a persuasive argument — philosophical and artistic — for the importance of women’s liberty and for the crippling effects of denying that liberty.

https://archive.is/c0x4P

If you really love yourself, you’d keep a journal. Bold statement, I know, but I mean it.

The ultimate act of self-love is self-expression. It is confidently believing that your thoughts, both silly and serious, are worthy of note – no exceptions.

I assume I’m not alone in having spent a childhood and at least half an adolescence sporadically trying to keep a regular journal and failing at it consistently. Even as a little girl, when shame and inhibition should’ve been influencing exactly zero percent of my decisions, the act of keeping a diary filled with my daily thoughts and feelings felt frivolous and embarrassing and I never succeeded at writing more than one or two entries before I gave up.

I was perfectly fine dancing like a fool in the aisles at church or confidently yelling wrong answers out in class, but something about the act of journaling embarrassed me like nothing else could, which doesn’t make any sense, right?

Don’t we usually think of embarrassment as an emotion we only feel in a crowd, an emotion that comes as a direct product of being judged? Why then did the thought of keeping a journal, that was only ever meant for me, embarrass me to the point of giving up for most of my life? Why does the same thought still keep many adults from journaling to this day?

I think it’s because we judge ourselves more harshly than anyone else ever could. In our (at least ideally) merit-based society, we’re taught that the good ideas are worth sharing and the bad ones are worth keeping to ourselves, that the good songs should get on the album and the bad songs should get left on the cutting room floor. Now I’m not arguing that the bad songs should make it onto the album, I’m just saying that you’re never going to write a good song until you write a couple of bad ones. In your journal. Without being embarrassed about it.

We all deserve a place where we can be free to create without fear of judgment from anyone, including ourselves.

A journal is a place to keep all your bad songs, all your embarrassingly terrible love poems and all the mundane details of your day. It’s a place where you show yourself compassion by not holding yourself to a single standard other than production, a place where you make and document and keep and ramble – each word you write, a self-affirmation of your own right to be heard. Your journal can be notebook or a blog or a sketchbook or a bunch of voice memos on your phone – it doesn’t matter.

But whatever form it takes, journaling is a way to get to know the truest, most vulnerable iteration of yourself. It’s scary and intimate and weird but it’s all worth it. So much can be learned by taking the amorphous mush of thoughts and ideas and feelings and memories in your mind and materializing them in any way you can. And so much can be gained. Don’t believe me? Try it. I dare you.

I dare you to keep a journal that you write in every day. I dare you to love yourself one sentence at a time. I dare you to show yourself that your voice is worthy of being heard, even if the only person hearing it is you. I dare you to sit alone in a crowd and applaud for every one of your own bad songs, blissfully indifferent to their destiny to be left on the cutting room floor.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ladieslounge/comments/5eybgv/if_you_really_love_yourself_youd_keep_a_journal/

Cologne plans helicopters & mounted police to prevent mass sex assaults on NYE – report

29 Nov, 2016

Cologne authorities may deploy helicopters, better CCTV cameras and mounted police during the upcoming New Year celebrations in order to prevent a repeat of the mass sexual assaults that rocked the city on New Year's Eve last year.

The report is the end result of Project Silvester (the German name for New Year's Eve celebrations), where a group of experts and federal police, under control of Federal Criminal Police Office, analyzed what happened in Cologne during last year's festivities.

The document will be discussed at a conference of interior ministries on Tuesday. A copy of the 60-page document was obtained by Cologne’s Express newspaper.

The report proposes the deployment of helicopters and mounted police “for regular assessment of the situation” during celebrations. Limiting the number of visitors in certain areas during New Year events can also help prevent crimes, it adds.

“Due to the high number of visitors, possible [criminal] activities could not be detected and stopped in time. In addition, there was no way for the victims to escape the situation,” it says about the events of last year.

Better video surveillance and better light sources should also be a must, according to the paper.

“Many camera images from and around Cologne Central Train Station had poor quality to identify perpetrators.”

The report proposes the detention of “intoxicated or aggressive groups of persons” and the introduction of more effective registration of migrants. To improve data sharing with other countries, the paper recommends deploying Europol 'Mobile Offices', which could be directly connected to police deployment areas.

Authorities should also deploy officers specially trained to handle sexual assault victims, in particular women, “in order to carry out qualified questioning and secure objective evidence,” the report states.

The document also calls upon the city authorities to arrange for better integration of migrants into the social fabric of Germany.

Cologne needs to “improve the basic conditions which result in social-structure disadvantages and frustrations as a result of lack of personal exchange, financial participation, recognition and barriers to getting to know women,” it adds.

Since January 2016, the issue of asylum seekers reportedly sexually harassing local women has been gathering momentum. Many of the victims, apart from being sexually harassed, said they had been robbed.

The report revealed the recent figures on the crimes committed on New Year’s Eve in Germany: there were cases of 881 sexual offences involving over 1,231 women. Apart from Cologne, similar incidents took place in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. The victims were almost all young women between 18 and 24 years.

According to the document, almost all the suspects involved in the Cologne New Year attacks came from Algeria, Morocco and Iraq.

In June, two men were found guilty of sexual assault last New Year’s Eve in Cologne and were given probationary sentences. The court said it was evident that one man, named as Hussein A., kissed a young woman against her will. The other man, an Algerian national, was part of a group that sexually harassed women. German media reported that two more men were found guilty of sexual assault charges in Düsseldorf and Nürtingen.

https://www.rt.com/news/368531-cologne-helicopters-cctv-sex-assaults/

Since 1975, the Nordic country has blazed the trail in gender equality and now, from infancy to maternity, women and girls enjoy a progressive lifestyle. But how did they achieve it? ..............

Rebekka is so tiny that, even on her tiptoes, arms aloft, she cannot reach. So her teacher lifts her up to the unvarnished wooden monkey bar. “One, two, three,” her classmates count. She hangs on, determinedly. When she reaches 10, she jumps to the ground. “I am strong,” she shouts proudly.

It’s an ordinary morning for this single-sex class of three-year-olds at Laufásborg nursery school in Reykjavik. No dolls or cup-cake decorating on the lesson plan here. Instead, as Margrét Pála Ólafsdóttir, the school’s founder, tells me: “We are training [our girls] to use their voice. We are training them in physical strength. We are training them in courage.”

It’s a fascinating approach to education. And a popular one. In a country of only 330,000 people, there are 19 such primary and nursery schools, empowering girls from an early age.

For the past six years, Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index and looks likely to do so again this week. The Economist recently named Iceland the world’s best place for working women – in comparison, the UK came in at No. 24. Ólafsdóttir’s philosophy seems to sit well with the nation’s progressive accomplishments, but her network of schools has been going for less than 20 years. So, if preschoolers trained in feminism aren’t the reason for this gender success story, what is?

History may provide us with clues. For centuries, this seafaring nation’s women stayed at home as their husbands traversed the oceans. Without men at home, women played the roles of farmer, hunter, architect, builder. They managed household finances and were crucial to the country’s ability to prosper.

By 1975, Icelandic women were fed up. It wasn’t just that they weren’t being properly paid for their labour, they also were sick of their lack of political representation: only nine women had ever won seats in parliament. So, against the backdrop of the global feminist movement, Iceland’s women decided to take things into their own hands.

An outpouring of women on to the streets was, by then, a well-trodden form of activism. In 1970, tens of thousands of women had protested on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. In the UK, that same year, 20,000 women marched in Leeds against discriminatory wages. But what made Iceland’s day of protest on 24 October 1975 so effective was the number of women who participated. It was not just the impact of 25,000 women – which, at the time, was a fifth of the female population – that gathered on the streets of Reykjavik, but the 90% of Iceland’s female population who went on all-out professional and domestic strike. Teachers, nurses, office workers, housewives put down tools and didn’t go to work, provide childcare or even cook in their kitchens. All to prove how indispensable they were.

Thordis Loa Thorhallsdottir, CEO of a tourism company, was on the streets that day: “I was 10 at the time, and I remember it very clearly, standing there with my mother, fighting. I can still feel the crowd and the power that was there. The big message was that if women don’t work, the whole community is paralysed – the whole society.”

Grassroots activism at such a scale unsurprisingly had a significant material impact. Within five years, the country had the world’s first democratically elected female president – Vigdis Finnbogadottir. Now in her 80s, this steely-eyed powerhouse tells me of the impact that day of protest had on her own career trajectory.

“I would never have been elected in 1980 if it hadn’t been for the women’s day of action … because when my predecessor announced that he was not going to stand again, the voices were immediately heard: now we have to have a woman among the candidates.”

Other landmarks soon followed. An all-female political party – the Women’s Alliance – was established. More women were elected to parliament; by 1999, more than a third of MPs were women.

And then, in 2000, parental leave legislation came into effect: whichevery person I spoke to highlighted this moment as key to Iceland’s march to the top of the gender-equality table. Today, every parent receives three months’ paid leave that is non-transferable. Parents then have an additional three months to share as they like.

Because the pay is significant – 80% of salary up to a ceiling of £2,300 a month – and because it’s on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, 90% of Icelandic fathers take up their paternal leave. This piece of social engineering has had a profound impact on men as well as women. Not only do women return to work after giving birth faster than before, they return to their pre-childbirth working hours faster, too. Research shows that, after taking the three months’ leave, fathers continue to be significantly more involved in childcare and do more housework. Sharing the parental responsibilities and chores from the beginning, it seems, makes a difference.

“It’s a good place to be a woman,” says Thorhallsdottir. And it is. Almost 80% of Icelandic women work. Thanks to mandatory quotas, almost half of board members of listed companies are now women, while 65% of Iceland’s university students and 41% of MPs are female.

Yet, women I met on my journey were also clear that the country has a long way to go. They still have less economic power than men – only 22% of managers are women; only 30% of experts on TV are women; and women still earn around 14% less than men. Iceland’s record on all of these fronts is better than most countries; in the UK, women’s hourly pay is 18% less than men.

It is the gender pay gap that puzzles me the most. How can it be that it is still so significant given the huge efforts the state has put into mitigating the “mummy penalty”? Not only when it comes to parental leave, but with heavily subsidised nursery schools and after-school care?

Explanations vary: from women going into less well-paid professions, to the penalty paid for working part-time that we’ve found in the UK as well, to the time it takes for employers’ implicit gender biases to shift.

Steiney Skuladottir, one of Reykjavíkurdætur (or the Daughters of Reykjavik) – a feminist rap collective who rap about gender issues – puts the blame in part on women’s reluctance to ask for sufficient pay compensation. Fellow rapper Bloer Johanusdottir concurs. “It’s like we can’t be cocky. We are supposed to be modest.”

Back at the school, Ólafsdóttir has this to say: “If you are learning from a young age that you are not getting your rightful share, if you are taught and trained in waiting, what do you expect?”

The Icelandic government has pledged to close the gender pay gap by 2022. And the women of the country continue to be highly organised and socially aware; an astonishing one- third of Iceland’s women are members of a Facebook group – ironically named Beauty Tips – in which they actively discuss gender issues.

History teaches us that progress doesn’t come about in a vacuum and that grassroots pressure plus investment in politics is a very powerful catalyst for change. In Iceland, it seems that they have both. In spades.

https://archive.is/6QFIc

https://archive.is/E8NOU

Workers Vanguard No. 982 10 June 2011

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

By Simone Hayes

(Young Spartacus pages)

When I first came around the Spartacist League, I was shocked when members declared that they were definitively not feminists. I was a feminist and everyone I knew was a feminist. I subscribed to the pick-your-own version of feminism. Whatever you wanted feminism to mean, that was fine with me.

I recall being asked a very simple question by a Spartacist League member. She asked me where women’s oppression came from and I responded, matter of factly, that “patriarchy” oppressed women. I believed the divisions in society were based on gender, as all feminists do. In other words, women were oppressed because for centuries people believed them to be inferior and society and its laws merely reflected that belief.

When I was a sophomore in college, I became a feminist. A lot of the activities I participated in as a feminist centered on campus agitation. I joined a group in community college called the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, which was basically a campus section of the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF). The FMF was a nonprofit organization that had split with the National Organization for Women in the 1980s. Its main objective was to “raise consciousness” among students about women’s rights, within the framework of capitalism. We had petition drives, panel discussions and demonstrations on issues surrounding reproductive rights and issues affecting women internationally.

When I transferred to UCLA my junior year, antiwar “social justice” organizations, i.e., class-collaborationist coalition groups, abounded and I threw myself into this cozy little “family of the left” with great enthusiasm. It did not bother me that we emphasized (maybe 15 to 20 times a day) during the 2006 midterm elections that women desperately needed Democrats in office to get rid of harmful legislation. Or that I had to write press releases for the FMF calling on the U.S. and UN to intervene in Afghanistan and Iran to “protect” Middle Eastern women.

My basic outlook as a feminist was that most worldly ills could be solved if everyone just realized that women were equal to men. Feminists have a fundamental misunderstanding of the breakdown of society and its antagonisms as they believe the fundamental division in the world is between women and men. Feminist theorists have cooked up all sorts of theories on how to rectify and overcome these divisions. The principle most commonly promulgated by feminists is the need for women’s representation among the bourgeoisie and in bourgeois politics. I myself believed that if women were represented in government and Fortune 500 companies in a more egalitarian manner, this would plant the seed of women’s equality and the world would gradually become a more equal place. These were thoroughly idealist views that were eventually stamped out after I studied a historical analysis of women’s oppression.

“Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict” came with my first subscription to Workers Vanguard and was the first Spartacist article I believe I ever read. This article made clear the origins of feminism from “utopian egalitarianism” in the early 19th century and its eventual degeneration into the liberal individualist milieu.

As I was studying Marxism, I read a lot of articles on the deficiency of feminism, on its very bourgeois roots and its very flawed program for women’s emancipation. But what truly broke me from a feminist, and therefore, idealist viewpoint, was studying historical materialism and looking at the world from a class perspective. With this perspective, the roots of women’s oppression became clear. One particular work that was essential to my understanding of women’s oppression was Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/) Engels presents and explains the core institution of women’s oppression, the monogamous family unit, and how this institution arose with the inception of private property.

The institution of the family under capitalism is essential to the maintenance of capitalism and it is also the main source of women’s oppression. Women bear the burden of raising the next generation of laborers, instilling bourgeois morality and obedience and caring for the people capitalism will not care for: the young, the sick and the old. Black women workers are triply oppressed, as they are not only wage slaves but are also subject to sexual and racial oppression.

The material conditions necessary to liberate women became clear. It was imperative to overthrow capitalism and therefore private property and establish a socialized planned economy. With a planned economy everything that is materially necessary to truly emancipate women would be provided, such as socialized kitchens, laundries, day care, not to mention free health care and free abortion on demand. Studying the Russian Revolution made this clear to me. The Bolsheviks fought, as soon as the Soviet government was formed, to replace the family with the socialization of household labor. Communal dining halls, laundries and childcare facilities were established and laws giving women the right to vote and to abortions were passed. When I first studied the Russian Revolution, I continually, and perhaps skeptically, questioned why the emancipation of women was an essential task of the Bolsheviks after the revolution. I say skeptically, because as a feminist, I thought that women played more of a background role in the revolution and the question of their liberation was never a crucial one. Reading letters from Lenin and other Bolsheviks at this time (from The Emancipation of Women) quashed my skepticism. Because to the Bolsheviks, women’s emancipation was integral to the emancipation of labor itself, not subordinate to it.

Many feminists who have studied the Russian Revolution claim that the Bolsheviks subordinated the question of women’s emancipation to the question of proletarian liberation and the struggle for power. This shows a clear misunderstanding of what is necessary for women to be liberated. In other situations where the question of women’s emancipation was essential, feminists have been on the wrong side. Example: Afghanistan 1979. When the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan in 1979, most feminists took the side of the woman-hating CIA-backed mujahedin against the Soviet Union, while the mujahedin threw acid in the faces of women who were attempting to educate themselves.

After a lot of reading (and many arguments) I came to the realization that feminism can take you to some pretty nasty places politically. From many feminists’ hysterical call, like Take Back the Night, for more cops on college campuses, thereby targeting minority youth, to feminists cozying up to the religious right in anti-sex witchhunts against pornography. Internationally, feminist ideology hurts women by continuously calling for U.S. imperialism and the UN to “intervene” in places like Afghanistan and Iran. Here in the U.S, it is no secret that feminists make it their duty to get Democrats elected. If you go to the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Feminists for Obama Web site, you will see in big bold letters, “We won! We won!” and below it, a huge picture of Obama with the caption: “This is what a feminist looks like.” This clearly demonstrates the political bankruptcy of feminism. Feminists claim that “we have won.” Who is this “we”? It is certainly not the workers, black people or the oppressed of this country. And it’s not just Obama they champion; feminists ask women workers to solidarize with Hillary Clinton, Deputy Top Cop of U.S. imperialism, rather than the man next to them on the factory line! Feminists do not want to get rid of the capitalist state; in fact, they seek to work inside it. Therefore, they have no genuine perspective toward women’s emancipation.

As a Marxist, I now champion the fight for all the workers and oppressed in the world to throw off the yoke of this racist capitalist system. As a Spartacus Youth Club member, I join the fight to win students over to the understanding that the workers must take power in their own name and dismantle this racist capitalist system. As I studied the SL’s history and the history of working-class struggle, I came to the understanding that one cannot fight just for the liberation of women. One must take up the fight for the liberation of all workers and oppressed. How is this possible? By building a Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in the struggle to smash capitalism through world socialist revolution!

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/982/ysp-simone_feminism.html

I'd like to add to the wiki. What would you like to see in the wiki?

For those that use Snoonet, I use Snoonet IRC and I created #feminist Feel free to stop by. If you have IRC, the network to connect to is: irc.snoonet.org port: 6667 or 6697 channel: #feminist

I'm looking for 3 moderators to help me mod this sub. The only requirements are:

• you must be a feminist, feminist supporter, or pro-feminist
• posting to the sub, replying to posts, and promoting the sub

If you would like to apply for a moderator position, please PM /u/grrrlriot with the subject "SecondWaveFeminism Mod Application" and please specify the sub in the subject because I am looking for mods for a few other subs as well. In the message you should include:

• your account age
• mod experience if any
• time zone
• why you would like to be a mod
• if you know CSS or automoderator
• what you would like your duties to be as mod of this sub (examples: CSS, get rid of spam, add to/create the wiki)

Other subs that I mod that are currently looking for mods: (Yes, you can apply for as many subs that you want or just one. Up to you.)

• /r/IdeasForTheMods
• /r/LiberalFeminism
• /r/punksubculture
• /r/redditoholics
• /r/SecondWaveFeminism (this sub)

Feel free to share your suggestions and ideas for this sub.