Women Academics From The United States

"Women's History is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women."

"Women have been kept from contributing to History-making, that is, the ordering and interpretation of the past of humankind. Since this process of meaning-giving is essential to the creation and perpetuation of civilization, we can see at once that women's marginality in this endeavor places us in a unique and segregate posi­tion. Women are the majority, yet we are structured into social in­stitutions as though we were a minority."

"In order to survive in this interconnected global village we must learn and learn very quickly to respect others who are different from us and, ultimately, to grant to others the autonomy we demand for ourselves. In short, celebrate difference and banish hatred."

"What women must do, what feminists are now doing is to point to that stage, its sets, its props, its director, and its scriptwriter, as did the child in the fairy tale who discovered that the emperor was naked, and say, the basic inequality between us lies within this framework. And then they must tear it down."

"There was a considerable time lag between the subordination of women in pa­triarchal society and the declassing of the goddesses. As we trace below changes in the position of male and female god figures in the pantheon of the gods in a period of over a thousand years, we should keep in mind that the power of the goddesses and their priestesses in daily life and in popular religion continued in force, even as the supreme goddesses were dethroned. It is remarkable that in societies which had subordinated women economically, educationally, and le­gally, the spiritual and metaphysical power of goddesses remained active and strong."

"Radical feminism combines the ideology of classical feminism with the class-oppression concept of Marxism, the rhetoric and tactics of the Black Power movement, and the organizational structure of the radical student movement. (1970 article)"

"The way the system of competing outgroups works, there is an incentive for members of one minority group to display their assimilation, their Americanism as it were, by participating in institutionalized racism. Thus some European Jewish immigrants, who in all their lives had never seen a person of color, learned racism in short order once they assimilated to American society. I wanted to be an American but I did not want to assimilate to the evil of racism, here any more than there. It was logical for me as a scholar to focus on the issue of race in American history and because of my interest in women, on the history of black women."

"What I learned from that comfortable, sheltered life I led in a country in which Catholicism was the state religion and antisemitism was an honored political tradition, was that being Jewish set one apart. Jews were not "normal," we were not right, we were different. And that difference had something to do with our inescapable, compelling history."

"Assimilated Jews did not wish to dwell on the actuality of European Jewish history. There were biblical times and there was the present. What was forgotten and silenced out of existence was the long, bitter, repetitive history of persecution. There was no good news in it. As a child I once heard a story of how in the Middle Ages the Jews of certain German cities had been forced onto leaky boats to float down the Rhine river and drown to the last man, woman and child. Such stories made me feel the shame of belonging to a group so thoroughly victimized. Victims internalize the guilt for their victimization; they become contemptible for being available to victimization. Did they never fight back? Did they go like sheep? Today, I know innumerable instances of Jewish heroism, resistance, fighting back in the series of medieval antisemitic disasters which led to the 15th-century holocaust which destroyed two-thirds of the Jewish communities of western Europe and ended with the expulsion of all Jews from Portugal and Spain. I never heard of this history, not at school, not at home, not in the synagogue, any more than I heard of the existence of a women's history."

"I have sometimes been asked, "How has your being Jewish influenced your work in Women's History?" The simplest way I can answer this question is, I am a historian because of my Jewish experience."

"What is left to a Jew who refuses the religious community? Antisemitism and history. In short order I experienced plenty of both."

"I believe myself that appointing women with their history is the single most important thing we can do to raise feminist consciousness. And feminist consciousness means for women to understand that they have a grievance in this world. That the grievance is not individual, that to change their grievance, they need to ally with other women. They need to define for themselves what their goals are. They need then, to form alliances with men and women to attain their goals, and that when their goal is attained, we will have a better society for all of us. Men and women."

"In the final analysis, after a lifetime spent as a writer and as a historian, I must take a stand in my own right. History matters to me, for the many and complex reasons that are documented in this volume, and I feel the need to find a proper form for expressing why it does."

"After the Holocaust, history for me was no longer something outside myself, which I needed to comprehend and use to illuminate my own life and times. Those of us who survived carried a charge to keep memory alive in order to resist the total destruction of our people. History had become an obligation."

"Among equals there is no category of "Otherness." The act of categorizing another implies oppression."

"Men have been writing the history of the world from their point of view, and according to their sets of values, for over 2000 years. In fact, 4000 years, if you want to be strict about it. Because when writing was invented, it was 4000 years ago and ever since then we have history.” I say, “Well, women have begun to reclaim their history about 150 years ago, and the modern women’s history movement is about 35 years old.” I say, “You give us 4000 years, and we’ll mainstream. I think we need to get a perspective that is larger than our time, larger than our memory, larger than our lifetime."

"Patriarchy has not only invented itself and usurped a central place, but it has usurped intellectually, a kind of legitimacy, that described anything that is not like it, as deviant. And men and women have gone into that for 4000 years. Not all women. There were always some women who resisted. And our great tragedy is, that because we were deprived of a history of women, generation after generation of women who wanted to resist patriarchy, had to do it on their own."

"In U.S. historiography, as in American popular culture, historians have tended to over-emphasize the role of the individual in history. Great men are identified as founders and leaders; they become the virtual representatives of the movement: William Lloyd Garrison for abolition, Eugene Debs for the socialist movement, Martin Luther King Jr. for the civil rights movement. In fact, no mass movement of any significance is carried forward by and dependent upon one leader, or one symbol. There are always leaders of subgroups, of local and regional organizations, competing leaders representing differing viewpoints, and, of course, the ground troops of anonymous activists. And, as can be shown in each of the above cases, emphasis on the "great man" omits women, minorities, many of the actual agents of social change. In so doing it gives a partial, an erroneous picture of how social change was actually achieved in the past and thereby fosters apathy and confusion about how social change can be made in the present. As was to be expected, the same distorted historiography would be applied to the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement. By elevating Stanton and Anthony to the great and unique leaders of the movement; by omitting Lucy Stone and most of the New England activists; by down-playing the role of radicals like Frances Wright, Ernestine Rose, and labor movement activists; and by disregarding the parallel struggles of African American women for suffrage and equal rights the movement's breadth and depth were lost and the complexities of its tactics were obscured."

"I have documented 700 years of feminist bible criticism prior to 1870, and every woman who engaged in that feminist bible criticism thought she was the first woman ever to do this. And when Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1893, published the Woman’s Bible, she put in the forward, “No woman before me has ever done this.” This is tragic, because it symbolizes the true position that women held in the world, which was to think, each woman thought, and each man taught each woman to think, and each mother taught their sons and daughters to think, that women have not contributed significantly to the creation of thought, to the creation of culture, and to the creation of civilization. This is a lie, all right?"

"We are living at a very wonderful moment. A moment that I believe is more important than a renaissance, a moment that is more important than the reformation. It is the moment when half of the human race is reclaiming its ID as full human beings. We have regained our history. And by regaining our history and by transmitting it to the next generation, we will create a basis where women will no longer have to reinvent the wheel. We will be able to stand on the shoulders of the women before us, and I think this is a very wonderful and exciting endeavor."

"To be a Jew means to live in history. The history of the Jews is a history of one holocaust after another with short intervals of peaceful assimilation or acculturation. Most of us never study this long and bitter history and yet we live with it and it shapes our lives. We live from pogrom to pogrom, one of my friends recently said. What it means to be a Jew-having to look over your shoulder and have your bags packed."

"Why did I spend years helping to develop the then nonexistent field of Black Women's History and never, until recently, study the history of Jewish women? As one who chose to be an American, I had to accept the problematic in my newly adopted home together with the good. Race was the crucial issue in America. The relative freedom of the American Jewish community compared with Jews in other countries, and its long existence under conditions of tolerance and open access to the resources of the society, is no doubt due to the existence of the American Constitution and its protections, but it is also due to the existence of racially defined minorities which are the primary target for discrimination, hatred and scapegoating."

"When she was asked about a newspaper ad she signed criticizing Roe v Wade, first reported by the Guardian, Barrett said she had “no recollection” of it and stressed she had nothing to hide... Most of the Democrats’ questioning centered on the ACA (Affordable Care Act), and how a ruling by the high court overturning the law would take healthcare away from millions of Americans... Barrett said she was not hostile to the ACA, abortion or gay rights, another area worrying progressives as the court seems set to tilt to a 6-3 conservative majority. She repeatedly denied any indication that her political views would color her rulings on the high court. (Kamala) Harris at one point asked Barrett if she had heard Trump’s vows to seat a supreme court justice who would overturn Roe v Wade and the ACA. Harris also pointed out that Trump nominated Barrett to serve as an appellate judge seven months after Barrett penned an article criticizing Justice John Roberts’ ruling upholding the ACA. Harris argued that showed Trump had been elevating Barrett to overturn the healthcare law."

"Barrett, in addition to serving as an appellate judge, is also a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Almost 100 of Barrett’s colleagues in a letter urged her to hold off on the confirmation process until after the presidential election in November.... “You are not, of course, responsible for the anti-democratic machinations driving your nomination,” the letter added."

"It allows (indeed it requires) the recusal of judges whose convictions keep them from doing their job. This is a good solution."

"I am not here on a mission to destroy the (Affordable Care Act). I’m just here to apply the law and adhere to the rule of law... No hints, no previews, no forecasts (quoting Ruth Bader Ginsburg)... I apply the law, I follow the law. You make the policy... I would not discriminate on the basis of sexual preference."

"Both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting, and insofar as you and many of your amici focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder womens access to the workplaceand to equal opportunities, it's also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why don't the safe haven laws take care of that problem?"

"Dogma and law are two different things, and I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern."

"Eighty-eight faculty members at the University of Notre Dame have penned an open letter to colleague and Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, asking her to halt the confirmation process until after the presidential election. The group — which does not include any instructors at Notre Dame Law School, where Barrett, 48, teaches — called on her to “take this unprecedented step” in light of three considerations... Your nomination comes at a treacherous moment in the United States. Our politics are consumed by polarization, mistrust, and fevered conspiracy theories... You have the opportunity to offer an alternative to all that by demanding that your nomination be suspended until after the election.... We’re asking a lot, we know. Should Vice-President Biden be elected, your seat on the court will almost certainly be lost. That would be painful, surely. Yet there is much to be gained in risking your seat. You would earn the respect of fair-minded people everywhere. You would provide a model of civic selflessness. And you might well inspire Americans of different beliefs toward a renewed commitment to the common good."

"A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman. But the search to find that voice can be remarkably difficult"

"Some of these big firms often believe in the white guy in a hoodie disrupting a whole industry. So we’re going to disrupt it by making sure we’re indexing for women and minorities because they’ve got great ideas."

"The guts of honey bee workers contain a distinctive community of bacterial species. They are microaerophilic or anaerobic, and were not clearly deliniated by earlier studies relying on laboratory culture of isolates under atmospheric oxygen levels. Recently, a more complete picture of the potential metabolism and functions of these bacteria have been possible, using genomic approaches based on metagenomic samples, as well as cultured isolates. Of these, most are host-restricted and are generally absent outside adult guts."

"Without need any longer of religious backing, capitalism may now have the power to shape people in its own image. Its conduct-forming spirit may be its own production. ... Capitalism brings along with it, as part of its normal functioning, cultural forms affecting how subjects relate to themselves and to others. Capitalism has cultural concomitants—beliefs, values and norms—that help direct conduct—that get people to do willingly what capitalism requires of them—by encouraging them to see what they are doing and what they must do to get ahead as meaningful, valuable, or simply inevitable."

"Among the many early revelations from molecular phylogenetic studies of bacteria (Woese, 1987) was the recognition that the mycoplasmas represented an evolutionarily derived condition rather than a primitive one, as once believed. Now that phylogenetic relationships and genome sizes are determined for a broader array of organisms, it is clear that the mycoplasmas are just one example of genome shrinkage that has occurred in a variety of obligately host-associated bacteria. Other prominent examples are Rickettsia and related pathogens within the α-proteobacteria; insect symbionts within the γ-proteobacteria, as exemplified by Buchnera aphidicola in aphids; the chlamydiae; and the parasitic spirochetes, such as Borrelia burgdorferi (the agent of Lyme disease)."

"Symbioses are central in the evolution of complexity; have evolved many times and are critical to the lifestyles of many animals and plants and also to whole ecosystems, in which symbiotic organisms are key players. The primary reason that symbiosis research is suddenly active, after decades at the margins of mainstream biology, is that DNA technology and genomics give us enormous new ability to discover symbiont diversity, and more significantly, to reveal how microbial metabolic capabilities contribute to the functioning of hosts and biological communities."

"Life cycles that incorporate discrete, morphologically distnct phases predominate among animals."

"Buchnera only have 600 genes, compared to about 4,000 or 5,000 for E. coli ... This is a recurring pattern in the genomes of both bacterial symbionts and pathogens, but why do they get so small? ... while part of the reduction is due to adaptation, a lot of it just reflects genetic drift ... It's just a consequence of long-term evolution in a restricted environment with small population sizes."

"The genomes of long-term obligate symbionts often undergo irreversible gene loss and deterioration even as hosts evolve dependence on them. In some cases, animal genomes may have acquired genes from symbionts, mirroring the gene uptake from mitochondrial and plastid genomes. Multiple symbionts often coexist in the same host, resulting in coadaptation among several phylogenetically distant genomes."

"Heteroecy appears to be a consequence of the seasonal polymorphism of aphids, which causes some morphs (the fundatrices) to be more evolutionarily constrained than others (the summer females) in their abilities to acquire hosts. Some aphid lineages have escaped this constraint by replacing the ancestral fundatrix morph and remaining all year on former secondary hosts, thus becoming secondarily autoecious. Most of the large and species-rich groups of Aphidinae on herbaceous angiosperms probably are derived from ancestors showing such life-cycle reduction."

"Biogeographical and paleobotanical evidence suggests that the aphid subtribe Melaphidina has been associated with its sumac host plant since the early Eocene when these plants were continuously distributed across the Bering land bridge. Transfer experiments indicate that the American species, Melaphis rhois, shows an unusual complex life cycle, similar to that known in Chinese melaphidines, with some generations feeding on mosses as alternate host plants. As with the association with sumac, this complex life cycle may have been established in the melaphidine lineage before the southward retreat of sumac from Alaska 48 million years ago. This example suggests that the interactions and life histories shown by modern populations may be determined, in large part, by evolutionary commitments made in the distant past."

"The aphid Pemphigus betae typically shows a complex life cycle, with annual alternation between cottonwood trees, where it forms leaf galls, and herbaceous plants, where it lives on roots. Distinct phenotypes are associated with each phase. In a population in Utah, aphid clones vary in their tendencies to undergo the cottonwood phase of the life cycle, with certain clones rarely producing the winged migrants that initiate the cottonwood phase."

"Anxiety was a philosophical concept before it taken up by psychology and psychiatry. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855) argued that anxiety is part of human nature. Anxiety arises where possibility and actuality come into contact and the present touches the future. Anxiety is a product of having the freedom to make choices and act, and by doing so make a commitment to one’s identity, ways of being in the world, and standing in relation to other people. For Kierkegaard, anxiety can be an avenue to stand in relation to God. This is why he wrote, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” One can bracket out the God dimensions and still learn something valuable from Kierkegaard, namely that anxiety can cause inaction, which is, in its most basic sense, a loss of freedom. What is possible may never actualize and one may lose the present by tending to an imagined future. One becomes immobilized and unable to meet needs and realize goals and aspirations."

"Plainly, the most powerful exception to the notion of a voluntary exchange in a market economy is the labor market. The existence of a market for labor is one of the distinguishing features of a market economy: workers compete to sell their labor at the most favorable price—meaning, in practice, the highest possible wage. At the same time, however, it is clear that the market for labor is qualitatively different from the market for goods, because workers need to sell their labor to survive."

"Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history... Martha Nussbaum, who argues that India’s internal clash today is between the good guys, who are Westernized liberal Indians, versus the bad guys, who are branded as militant ‘Hindu thugs’.... But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. ... She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing’, which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment’. After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere, especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, has made it easier for them to use this ploy’. .. She accuses the Indian government of using al-Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy....Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.... In this manner, she has been effective in shifting attention away from anti-India terrorism....Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics."

"Nussbaum, if she were truly a well-wisher of India, would educate herself about Indian philosophy, religion and culture and read reports about Indian events by other than her Marxist/Socialist friends and colleagues. She should, as a rhetorician, be especially interested in the fourth-century logician Vatsyayana’s identification of the vices and virtues of speech. The vices originating from speech, according to him are mithya (falsehood), parusha (caustic talk), soochana (calumny) and asambaddha (absurd talk). The virtues of speech are satya (veracity), hitavaachana (talking with good intention), priyavaachana (gentle talk) and svaadhyaaya (recitation of scriptures). Prof. Nussbaum may want to appear on the “right side of history” but that should not be at the expense of truth."

"What makes her stylistic choices here so disappointing is not just that they are beneath commonly held standards of professional scholarship, but that they fall short of the standards of conduct that Nussbaum herself (via Gandhi) sets for India and America. In its own way, is not her treatment of these all-too-human subjects a kind of “violence,” a seeking to put them in their place? ...Nussbaum either cannot or does not wish to take seriously the question of Muslim extremism within India, or a broader regional backdrop to sectarian tension and violence..."

"I said that Nussbaum has only one card to play in this position, but then again, in Nussbaum’s deck of cards, reason always trumps, and all those holdouts who don’t like the rule of reason must ultimately be persuaded to reason differently — that is, similarly to us reasonable folk. Personally, I find this eminently reasonable. But I’m less sanguine about what reason can and can’t do when it’s confronted with political and religious opposition to gay and lesbian studies; fundamentalist Muslim clerics, evangelical Christian preachers, and even popes have so far seemed unmoved by Nussbaumian appeals to our common humanity and our shared capacity for reason. It seems prudent, then, at the very least, to entertain reasonable doubts about the reach of reason."

"Divorced from Alan Nussbaum in 1987, Nussbaum embarked on a romantic liaison with Amartya Sen, the Indian-born Harvard scholar who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics and later moved to Cambridge University in England. Working with United Nations development initiatives in impoverished areas of the globe, she and Sen came up with what they called the "capabilities approach," a way of measuring a nation's achievements apart from its economic output. Their idea was to look at factors such as ownership of property, access to health care and political systems, and sovereignty over one's body in matters such as reproductive rights. Nussbaum's romance with Sen was the second of three major relationships that demonstrate how tightly woven are her personal and professional worlds. Nussbaum's current partner, author and U. of C. law professor Cass Sunstein, to whom she recently became engaged, is, like Alan Nussbaum and Sen, an internationally known scholar. Nussbaum, it could be argued, rarely dates below the genius level."

"What began to bother me about Nussbaum's trajectory is that she is really not interested in the general issue of "religious violence" and the manner in which religious violence links up with religious sensibilities of one kind or another, whether perpetrated by the left or the right in India. What she is really interested in is mounting a political assault on what she identifies as the “Hindu Right,” and in this regard Nussbaum takes no prisoners... Alas, I fear, Martha Nussbaum has yet to resolve that “clash within” her own intellectual orientation."

"When I arrived at Harvard in 1969, my fellow first-year graduate students and I were taken up to the roof of the Widener Library by a well-known professor of classics. He told us how many Episcopal churches could be seen from that vantage point. As a Jew (in fact a convert from Episcopalian Christianity), I knew that my husband and I would have been forbidden to marry in Harvard's church, which had just refused to accept a Jewish wedding. As a woman I could not eat in the main dining room of the faculty club, even as a member's guest. Only a few years before, a woman would not have been able to use the undergraduate library. In 1972 I became the first female to hold the Junior Fellowship that relieved certain graduate students from teaching so that they could get on with their research. At that time I received a letter of congratulation from a prestigious classicist saying that it would be difficult to know what to call a female fellow, since "fellowess" was an awkward term. Perhaps the Greek language could solve the problem: since the masculine for "fellow" in Greek was hetairos, I could be called a hetaira. Hetaira, however, as I knew, is the ancient Greek word not for "fellowess" but for "courtesan.""