Friday, April 13, 2007

Great gawking on Bennetts' recent talk

There's a savvy read of Leslie Bennett's NYPL LIVE event this week on Gawker, by the way, for those who missed it. (Thanks to Rachel Kramer Bussell for hipping me to it.)
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Alison Piepmeier said...

Okay, I'm catching up on a week's worth of your blog this morning, and I wanted to weigh in. I haven't read Leslie Bennett's book, so I'm only responding to your responses here. I wanted to say that I appreciate your questioning of the personal/political emphasis in Bennett's book, which I also see in Linda Hirshman's work. I have profoundly mixed feelings. I absolutely agree that our focus should be on the structures--the institutions--that promote and perpetuate certain "choices" rather than on individual women who make those choices. And yet, I certainly know that in my own life, I scrutinize almost every choice I make for its political valences and significance.

I taught Hirshman in an upper-level Women's and Gender Studies class this week, and my students were pretty upset by what she said. Part of their frustration was that they didn't want to hear that the world they'll be graduating into isn't as gender equitable as they want it to be. And part of their frustration is that they don't want to have to scrutinize their personal choices and consider the larger political consequences of who they partner with, and how many children they have.

April 14, 2007 at 9:51 AM

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