How The Women's Movement Disappointed Me

 

(This article originally appeared in Women's e-News in April 2024, but was later removed, further making the point of this piece: even criticism of the women's movement is unacceptable.)

n 1977-79, a newcomer to the USA, I went through a horrific divorce. My then-husband’s assertion in the papers he filed with the court was that I had “joined the liberated women” and therefore was unsuitable to mother our two girls, the youngest of whom was a newborn. He, who traveled internationally two weeks a month—and was rarely home the rest of the time—sought full custody.

I found myself fighting in court the entire range of feminist ideas which I had expressed—and to which my-not-soon-enough-to-be ex brought in a string of witnesses to testify. It included my male therapist because the judge evoked without precedent the patient-therapist confidentiality, decreeing that “the mother’s mental state is in question.” None of the witnesses had found fault in either my mothering or mental stability, only testified that I had said that men had it better in this world; that women were no less smart and capable than men; that women should have equal rights to men under both the law and social norms.

That’s it. A mother who decried to friends and the marriage counselor that women were underappreciated in our society must be unstable. The judge ordered a temporary support of $25 a month at a time when even welfare would have given me $300 for the three of us. He also warned my lawyer that if I took a job, I would not be able to claim to be the main caretakers to these babies. Any mother’s work-for-pay would level the playing field against a mostly absent father.

The father of my babies now had an excellent incentive not to settle. He could never get a better deal in a divorce than paying only $25 a month while he was traipsing the world. He hired a live-in housekeeper, forced me out of the house by violence, and for almost two years rejected a court date for a divorce hearing which he had initiated.  

I did not yet have the lexicon of feminism, but I knew gross injustice and prejudice against me, formerly a career woman and now a full-time mother, studying for my Master’s degree at mostly night classes.

I called a local chapter of National Organization for Women (NOW), only to hear their phone recordings informing callers that they did not get involved in divorce cases. I showed up at anther chapter’s meeting, hoping to be directed to the right resources since divorce touched almost 50% of women—and my case must be of interest to feminists for its outcome would create a precedent in the State of New York. But NOW was engaged in the rights of gay women, a topic then-affecting 10% of women.

I was alone and at a loss where to find a feminist witness who would explain in court how normal were the sentiments I expressed. The influence of my worldview was not yet known since my daughters were still so young. That also meant that if I would give birth in the future to a third female baby, she should be taken away from me.  

It took a barracuda lawyer and some dishonest maneuvering—as well as all of my parents’ savings—to grant me the divorce. The judge, enamored with the new concept of  “joint custody,” imposed on me a partnership with a man who, failing to keep the court-ordered schedule of alternate days for the rest of my children’s growing years, terrified them when he showed up after an absence accompanied by a policeman.

 

Over the decades, as I matured to become an advocate for women’s issues and rights, my sensitivity to the plight of oppressed and disenfranchised women increased. Among the projects I tackled at the 1995 International Women’s Conference in Beijing was helping Egyptian women develop a campaign against the legalization of clitoridectomy. Egypt, the most advanced country in the eyes of other African nations, was setting the tone for the others. The then-Egyptian Minister of Health, a gynecologist, held that the clitoris was a cause of driving teenage girls crazy, especially if they wore synthetic panties. Better nip it before it caused problems for all society.

I sought the support of feminist leaders who peppered the landscape of the conference. None was willing to get involved in “a religious matter.”

That reluctance to speak up against the oppression of women in Muslim societies—and fight for the liberation of women from laws that allowed husbands to beat and kill them, that barred women from schooling and work-for-pay, that stoned disobedient wives without a trial, that prohibited a woman from stepping out of her house unless accompanied by someone with a penis (even if that penis belonged to an eight-year old), became more obvious as world events rolled in, emblazoned with a backward time-travel. The Western feminist movement’s respect of Islam even in its extreme forms has trumped the ways in which that culture was inherently very bad for women’s bodies, mental health, and life.

What was the feminist movement engaged in during those passing decades? In 1982 we lost the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, never to be ratified nationwide since. Strides were made in removing open workplace discrimination, and shrinking the gap—not eliminating—the women’s work pay when compared with men’s. The portrayal of women in the media has improved greatly, albeit the objectification of their bodies in underground pornography exploded. Interestingly, the formerly reviled semi-clad models of the pinup calendars now took front news as female celebrities strut in insubstantial attires and make their public almost-nudity Politically Correct. Feminists claim that women could wear whatever they wish, even as it entices tweens to emulate provocative getups and moves. The onus is on men to not get sexually aroused.

One issue that I supported wholeheartedly was the freedom of reproductive rights. After the spectacular achievement of Roe vs. Wade, a couple of generations of women enjoyed the freedom to decide if, when, and how often their bodies reproduced. Sadly, attrition in the battle to reverse this right has shut down women’s health clinics by the dozens, until the movement lost the war. Licking its wounds, it may manage to regroup and strategize a comeback. In the meantime, I ache for my granddaughters’ generation.

The awakening of “MeToo” was the slow yawn of an hibernating bear. At Redbook magazine, where I worked in the early 1980s, we did a survey about sexual harassment in partnership with Harvard Business Review and published those findings. The issue went nowhere for a very long while.

Until it did.

Violence against women in all its forms is not OK, our feminist leaders have agreed. They have championed legislation against unwanted touching, verbal comments, locker-room atmosphere—and of course rape, also defined as exertion of perceived hierarchal power, even if no physical force is applied. Prominent men were finally dethroned from their lofty spots in media and corporations. Decades-old sexual exploitations complaints were won both in public opinion and in courtrooms.

The UN, a puppet organization that, on a rotating basis, has given the helms of guarding the rights and safety of women worldwide to countries such as Iran and Somalia, had long declared various “days” in support of women: International Women’s Day (March 8); World Population Day (July 11);  International Equal Pay Day (September 18); International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (November 25).

 

Then October 7 happened.

Hundreds of Israeli women were not “merely” gang-raped, but tortured by sex-crazed Hamas terrorists who broke their limbs, chopped their breasts, and shot nails into their vaginas. Women who survived and were dragged to Gaza, have been imprisoned now for five months, gang-raped and beaten daily, repeatedly, by porno-demented sadists.

The silence of the feminist movement—or whatever can be defined as such in the absence of outstanding focal leaders— about this extreme sexual violence has been deafening. In fact, many female activists have joined the ranks of pro-Hamas demonstrators, of useful idiots calling to “free Palestine” (which means in that vernacular the elimination of Israel and the genocide of its people), of anti-Semitic calls for “a ceasefire”—as if it wasn’t Hamas that had broken every ceasefire, including the one on October 6. As if Hamas couldn’t stop the war on October 8 or any time thereafter by releasing the hostages and surrendering. As if in this war between Israel, a sovereign state, and Hamas, a terrorist group, Israeli women’s tortures and rapes were an acceptable collateral damage.

Or as if it hasn’t even happened. 

UN Women, in the meantime, was silent, as unresponsive as the strewn burned victims of the Hamas massacre to the prodding of Israeli women’s organizations, Jewish organizations, and people of conscience that demanded it to declare its disgust and to condemn both the massacre and the lingering inhuman treatment of Israeli hostages. NOW finally issued a neutral statement against using rape as a tool of war, without condemning—or even specifically mentioning—the brutality of Hamas against Israeli women.

On my radar screen, only one Second-Wave feminists, Phyllis Chesler, Jewish and in her 80s, has been excoriating the remaining feminists of her generation for their failure to condemn the atrocity visited upon Israeli women. Where are the younger feminists?

Last month, on February 12, I lit a yellow candle for the release of the young women hostages. I allowed myself the stabling pain of uttering their names—Agam, Eden, Doron, Shiri, Noa, Karina, Arbel, Liri, Amit, Carmel, Daniella, Naama, Romi—and imagining them being tortured and raped at that very same moment. I was certain that they were unaware that this date was the UN’s International Day for the Prevention of Violent Extremism as and when Conducive to Terrorism.

As was, so it seemed, the rest of the world.

 

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Talia Carner is a novelist whose heart-wrenching suspense and historical fiction expose society’s ills speak for those without voice. www.TaliaCarner.com

 

The Globe’s Women’s Problem

 

By Talia Carner

 (This article was published in Digital Journal in November 2011)

            On November 25, the U.N. again commemorated International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon again urged nations “to help end this pandemic of violence… [in order to] have a more just, peaceful and equitable world.”
            What has changed since 1993 when the U.N. General Assembly adopted resolution 48/104? In 2011, across the globe, women are not only subject to violence, but are still positioned as far inferior to men in every public sphere—political, religious, legal and economic.
            No country is free of “a woman’s problem,” be it full legal rights, maternity care, religious representation, political leadership, education opportunities, or pay equality.
            In South America, under military regimes, poverty is feminized with the highest rate of teenage mothers. In some African nations, maternity death reaches 2,000:1 maternity death in Europe. In the U.S., mothers are disenfranchised and discredited in our courts.
            And what happens in third-world nations stuck in the seventeenth century?
            In the film, The Stoning of Soraya, a man in contemporary Iran wishing to divorce his wife concocts an allegation of infidelity. Using false witnesses in a trial that Soraya is prohibited from attending, she is sentenced to death. As her lower body is buried in the sand, her male relatives and neighbors are her delighted executioners—starting with her own father. The viciousness in which her adolescent son is the first to throw a stone that hits her forehead reflects the misogyny indoctrinated into boys’ minds. It is also linked to global terrorism: Bloodthirsty societies such as Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi-Arabia that are obsessed with women’s bodies’ “purity” are also the countries that produced most terrorists and terrorist acts of the 20th and 21st centuries.
            A child-bride forced into sexual slavery in the Middle East, Asia or South America may dream about fleeing the marriage into which she was sold. But the world outside is more cruel toward an illiterate women. Courageous girls who flee the rice fields of Vietnam or the steppes of Siberia for the promise of jobs abroad, are likely to fall into sex trafficking rings. Every year, one- to two-million girls and women are ensnared into brothels from Berlin to Calcutta.
            The atrocities visited upon women are highlighted in mass rape used as a tool of war. From East Timor to Sierra Leone, wars between nations are won by breaking women, shattering nuclear families, tearing apart villages and wrecking a nation’s spirit. But when people crawl out of the ashes, mores are shattered. In African nations, men expect sex simply by overpowering a female, making gender violence common even in schools.
            Then there is the burning of brides in India, the mass gendercide of girls in China, and clitoridectomy of two million girls a year in Africa and Muslim nations.
            What is the answer for this bleak state of global gender discrimination that results in female misery and death?

            Education.
            When women are educated, they delay marriage age, have fewer children, seek to educate them, present role models for their daughters and a fresh view of women for their sons.
            When women are educated, their earning capacity increases, they are more likely to start their own business ventures, and have a better chance to pull out of poverty.           
            When women are educated, they help better other women’s and children’s lives, seek leadership roles and run for political offices. They use the Internet to reach beyond their narrow world and begin to resist extreme forms of religious fundamentalism.
            Women are not the problem, but rather than solution. Had society heeded the 1993’s resolutions of eliminating violence against women, women, one-half the world’s population would have helped society double its forward move toward development and prosperity.

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            Author Talia Carner’s most recent award-winning novels often deal with social issues and the plights of women and children. Please check www.TaliaCarner.com .

"Unorthodox," a memoir by Deborah Feldman

An examination of an insular world is best described by an insider--especially one who's never felt she belonged in this world, yet was pinned to its dogmas and unbending religious fanaticism.

Deborah Feldman's difficult upbringing was clouded and severely compromised by the absence of her parents: Her borderline mentally disabled father had been matched to marry an impoverished yet intelligent teenager from a distant community, who took off shortly after Deborah was born to fend for herself and to get education and a life. As a result, the young Deborah was abandoned into the care of her grandparents, loving but bound to austerity both by religious norms and personal histories as Holocaust survivors.

What should have amazed me (but didn't) when reading Deborah Feldman's "Unorthodox," was how little had changed in that world set in Brooklyn, NY, from 100 years ago in a similar ultra-Orthodox society in Jerusalem, yet how much had.... In my research into the lives of women in Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman Empire rule of the Holy Land, I found women living in a highly restrictive Jewish religious society marked on the outside by its adherence to exaggerately modest clothing (and head-shaving for married women,) and subject to decrees, rules, male-dominant religious hierarchy and strict social expectations that forced the public into every private domain. Then and now, every transgression was watched closely by others, and manifestations of individuality cut at the bud. The difference was that in Jerusalem of the time, women suffered the lack of personal freedoms underpinned by shortages, plagues and pestilence with more stoic acceptance--even spiritual exuberance--because they had a mission: suffering and "building a home" in the holy city helped hasten the messiah's arrival and thus bring salvation to world Jewry. Not so in Feldman's milieu in the Satmar community in Brooklyn, just within sight of the Manhattan skyline. There was no apparent spiritual foundation to justify the imposition of extreme strict norms of conduct and of education that was no more than indoctrination to further stave off outside influences. At least it was not apparent to Feldman, nor instilled in girls and women relegated to the back of the synagogue and (then and now) excluded from active participation in religious services.

A free spirit, open-minded, intelligent Deborah suffered both from low social standing as a result of her dubious parentage and from emotional detachment that often accompanies parentless children. In the close-knit society of a few city blocks, she forever felt as an outcast. Her grandparents fed her well and clothed her in hand-me downs from her cousins, and loved her in their own distracted ways. And unlike the ceaseless labor often imposed on girls in large Satmar families, the grandparents made little physical demands of Deborah: her help in her grandmother's housecleaning and long days in the kitchen seemed more voluntary rather than forced. Society's total control came into young Deborah's life in the form of an aunt who made all important life decisions for her, control that baffled the young Deborah, yet was understandable in the absence of parents, the aunt's qualifications as the principal of the local girls' school, and the need to help the grandparents handle the unexpected gift of raising a grandchild long after their own children had left home. The glaring problem in this aunt-niece relationship was the fact that the aunt never became a parent figure, and the short time little Deborah had lived in her home among her cousins was a miserable experience for the girl. While the aunt didn't seem resentful of the added responsibility, the young Deborah hated the woman's ever-present authority that made no allowance for the girl's wants and individuality.

I had learned in my research that in old Jerusalem, where there was no running water, sanitation or electricity, girls were kept illiterate, which further isolated the already insular Jewish females so they could be married off soon after puberty. In the Satmar community one-hundred years later, though, all girls were educated--albeit in truncated programs that shunned English and offered a stilted religious world view via distorted facts (e.g., the Satmar believe that Jews should not create their own state until the messiah's arrival, and therefore object to Israel's existence.) Luckily for Deborah, there were public libraries available, and when she dared explore the world beyond her street, it was only a few subway stops from Manhattan.

Those freedoms took enormous courage, yet were available within a stone-throw away. If we stop to consider hundreds of million of women living today in Muslim societies that oppress and subjugate them in the name of religion, the hopelessness of their situations is evident as schools, accessible public libraries, piped music at discount clothing stores, subways where women need not be chaperoned by men, and colleges that offer scholarships are simply not available.

Once married at seventeen, Ms. Feldman learned to drive, owned a car, and in time, was able to enroll in college. As horrifically we view the notion of being married off as a teenager to a man she had met only once pre-engagement, and stepping into a marriage that turned out to be doomed by incompatibility, at the beginning the new bride embraced it all. She loved her new status, the adulation she was receiving during the engagement period, and the shower of new clothes, household gifts and furniture when her parsimonious grandfather's purse suddenly opened. Most importantly, marriage offered Deborah the chance to move away with her husband to a suburb where other young Orthodox families breathed a more relaxed atmosphere and Deborah enjoyed the loosening of the community's tight hold on her soul. When she decided to enroll in college, the question of child care of her baby never seems to come up as a problem.

At the end, it seemed that Deborah was never truly religious. She never fully bought into the doctrine and practices embraced by many other Satmars. Eventually, she found her comfort zone in secular Jewish living. This is not a fact her former community seems willing to accept as glimpsed by the vicious attacks on her. It is sad--and expected--that the one who self-expelled from the bonds of fanaticism would be considered a traitor by those who had shown her little compassion when she was living in their midst. There is never room for individual wants or personal freedoms within a fundamentalist religious society that reveres itself exactly for being what it is.

Author Talia Carner's latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, is set in the ultra-Orthodox community of Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman Empire rule of the Holy Land. www.TaliaCarner.com

No "Spring" for Saudi Women

In the midst of the Arab awakening, women fighting oppression—in Saudi or any other Muslim nation—is doomed to fade away into a dark night.

Earlier this year, the world watched with bated breath as Egyptian women took to the streets alongside men to protest Mubarak’s rule and demand democracy. Cynically, men encouraged women’s participation—only to betray them once Mubarak was removed. Merely a few months later, Egypt—formerly the more modern among Muslim nations—has regressed into gender apartheid the like of which the country has not been seen in decades, and “modesty squads” roam neighborhoods in search of errant women whose appearance or behavior defy the Extreme Islam’s dictates.

Does anyone believe that Saudi women will fare better in their quest for the right to drive? In 2010, the Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 129th out of 134 countries for gender parity (down from spot #114 in 2006.) Islamic patriarchal system has kept Saudi women not just from driving, but from traveling, working and even signing medical forms without the permission of a male guardian—any male relative, even their own minor child.

Gender apartheid is the basis for the entire Muslim social structure. The Arabic word “fitna” means both civil disorder and beautiful woman. In his 2004 article, “Female Desire and Islamic Trauma,” Islam scholar Daniel Pipes explains:

“The entire Muslim social structure… goes to great lengths to separate the sexes and reduce contact between them. This explains such customs as the covering of women's faces and the separation of women's residential quarters, or the harem. Many other institutions serve to reduce female power over men, such as her need for a male's permission to travel, work, marry, or divorce. Revealingly, a traditional Muslim wedding took place between two men – the groom and the bride's guardian.” The reason, Dr. Pipes explains, is rooted by the view that a woman’s sexual desire is so great, that believers are obsessed with the dangers posed by her presence. “So strong are her [sexual] needs …she represents the forces of unreason and disorder. …She must be contained, for her unbridled sexuality poses a direct danger to the social order.”

For that reason, in 2002, in Saudi Arabia, religious policemen prevented fourteen-year-old schoolgirls from leaving a burning school building because they were not wearing their headscarves and abayahs. Fifteen girls died.

The Quran was written long before automobiles were invented. Therefore, it did not specifically prohibit women from driving. It did not even forbid women from riding horses or camels. And in a society obsessed with the modesty of women’s dress, cars actually hide women better than any other methods of transportation. Saudi Arabia’s leaders’ explanation that women driving is unsafe and leads to sexual impropriety is entirely false, as women are routinely pinched and groped through the chadors when walking in the streets, and are often sexually harassed by taxi drivers—or even raped by their own chauffeurs.

On the other hand, driving women around has created a source of income for many Saudi men: there are hundreds of thousands of chauffeurs in Saudi Arabia. Removing the religious fatwa against women driving would deeply affect an entire profession.

Phyllis Chesler has written extensively that subjugating women is behind the brutal misogynistic Islamic practices such as female genital mutilation, stoning and immolation of women, beatings, forced marriages, child marriages and polygamy. Now that Muslim feminists are taking to the streets in protest for the right to drive, they are beaten by mobs, yet have no legal protection even in cases of barbaric assault or rape. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, commented at FoxNews.com "… [Saudi] women's rights activists have very little [legal] protection for their physical well-being …This is the problem in a corrupt society…. Republics of fear oppress and repress their citizens by allowing criminals to do the dirty work of the government. It allows the government to keep [its] hands free."

Saudi Arabia is the only country that prohibits women from driving. But viewing the protesting women in context of the men’s dread of female power to cause civil disorder, it is clear that breaking any taboo carries the unthinkable threat of women seeking rights for representation in government, in marriage and divorce, or in property ownership.

In the midst of the Arab awakening, women fighting oppression—in Saudi or any other Muslim nation—is doomed to fade away into a dark night, because the power to relinquish control lies in the hands of their oppressors: men, government, and Islamic religious leadership.

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Author Talia Carner’s novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, June 2011) is the story of a woman’s struggle for individuality and freedom within the confines of her society’s strict religious dictates. http://www.taliacarner.com/

My personal feminism--and JERUSALEM MAIDEN

I was recently asked about the roots of my feminism--and my newly released novel's relevance to today's women. Here are my responses:

1) Over the span of your professional life, you have held several influential positions related to women's issues, rights and activism. At what point in your career did you begin to formulate thoughts that would be later used to craft the story of JERUSALEM MAIDEN?


While stories find me in “Eureka!” moments, their seeds have often been planted in me long before, creating the fertile soil for the blooming of a novel. This is certainly the case with JERUSALEM MAIDEN. I come from a family with a strong maternal line of talented, capable, ground-breaking females. I heard stories about my great-great-grandmother who traveled from Jerusalem to Russia at age fourteen to get Halitza (a form of Jewish release from marriage), and about my great-grandmother who was so intelligent that her father, a rabbi, allowed her to sit outside the door to his yeshiva (Jewish religious school) and listen. As an adolescent, I already had a sense that my grandmother Esther was a superb artist who did not belong in her world and who was bitter about being kneaded into a mold that she hated. Her oldest daughter actually ran away from home in the early 1940s to study law in Beirut (under the British Mandate). My grandmother’s youngest daughter manipulated her way to New York where she eventually became the first woman stock broker at Dean Witter Reynolds, then third largest US brokerage firms. My own mother, now a successful Israeli artist who’s sold literally thousands of paintings in her career only began painting at age forty. In my nascent feminism of the early 70s which I developed independently from the lexicon and ideas that had already entered US culture, I ached for the tremendous waste I sensed in the previous generations. It took the penning of three novels and the premature death of a talented cousin with whom I had discussed our grandmother many times for me to finally begin to tackle this big subject that was both personal and global.

2) In JERUSALEM MAIDEN you introduce readers to a young woman in early 20th-century Jerusalem who struggles with her traditional faith as her personal desires pull her away from home. Is there a message for today's women in Esther's journey? What about women in non-Western style societies?

Esther's story is still universal. Having lived and traveled abroad, and having worked with women in Third-World nations, I learned to appreciate our freedoms and opportunities. Yet, even in the 21st century, all too many women in Western societies are bound by self-imposed social, religious or psychological constraints lodged in their heads, constraints that hold them back no less than did Esther’s God—or the rabbis’ interpretations of His will.

This is not the case with women living in non-Western societies. Whether in China or Congo, Argentina or Saudi Arabia, women do not have the access to education, health care, economic resources, birth control, political power or civil liberties that would make it possible for them to even envision—let alone accomplish—independence and personal fulfillment. Also, not mutually exclusive is the fact that around the globe poverty is feminized, which immensely affects priorities. The key to change, of course, is education—of women, but also of men and governments, for development can be accelerated when women share the resources, gain confidence, and contribute to the betterment of society.