I hope you're all ready for your yummy estrogen-filled post featuring women bloggers from the left side of the political spectrum. (Since I do know of more liberal female bloggers than Ilyka, I added a few.)

Organizing Principles from The Sideshow

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And that, my friends, is the organizing principle of liberalism. The "general Welfare" and "the Blessings of Liberty" are meant to be the goal of the United States of America - it says so in the very first sentence of the Constitution. It is the obligation of the government to "secure" these things for us.

Breaking Free From the Power Suit from Feministing.

While I'm still wrestling with Givhan's critique, I'm struck by the fashion conundrum that powerful women are left to wrestle with. By breaking with her usual uniform -- "a bland suit with a loose-fitting skirt and short boxy jacket with a pair of sensible pumps" -- Rice got cast a dominatrix. While I personally think that the "power-suit" is an extremely unflattering look, why does breaking free of a two-piece suit imply sexual deviance? It seems that even in wardrobe choices, critics are eager to impose the virgin/whore dichotomy on women.

The American Dream from One Good Thing.

I've written about my grandfather before, but it seems timely to bring up again his unusual views on the raising of girls. He just flatly refused to do it. He refused to raise a daughter and refused raising granddaughters three more times. Girls, he said, were boring. They were dumb. All they ever wanted to do was sit around and play with dolls and wear white gloves and dresses and fix each others hair and he wasn't going to tolerate that sort of crap in his house. Only boys for him, yes sir. My mother, and after her all her daughters, learned to respond to some variation of "Boy!" when he called after us. Now that we were acknowledged boys, it was all right to teach us to fish, to build soap box cars, to teach us football and baseball, to hunt after alligators. (Sometimes, late at night, when no one was watching, my mother, as a child, was permitted to sit on his back while he stretched out on the floor with the newspaper turned to the box scores and allowed to roll his hair up in curlers, but nobody needs to know about that.)

And it starts again from Pinko Feminist Hellcat.

It seems perfectly okay for men to call us manhaters, dykes, frigid, witch-hunters, repressive, "victims", and censors for having the gall to question the value of rape porn (you don't even have to advocate censorship, just criticize it), ask why it is that women's bodies are used as ornamentation for magazines as diverse as Vogue and Maxim, point out that the wage gap does exist, and say that being promiscuous doesn't mean one deserves to be raped.

Call them on this, and suddenly it's Pinochet's Chile. I mean come on, enough already.

Well, I Can't Read A Map... from Plum Crazy

but I’m not sure this study really explains why. My main issue with the study is that it focused on adults and, discovering differences in how adults process data, attributed the cause to genetics. The problem is, by the time you’re adults, any effects of socialization would be in full swing, so how could you reasonably be sure that the differences were not socialized as opposed to genetic? Are we so damn sure that we don’t unconsciously teach boys and girls different methods of problem-solving?

A Blogosphere Prediction from Rox Populi (I couldn't not link a post that refers to Matt Yglesias as the Danny Bonaduce of the blogosphere).

Set your watches. Sometime in the next 72 hours, Danny Bonaduce of the blogosphere Blogaduce will comment on the "women and blogging" issue.

Wade Horn To Drum Up Grants For Abstinence-Only Education from Trish Wilson.

Horn is better known for promoting marriage and "responsible" fatherhood. He is one of the founders of The National Fatherhood Initiative, which has printed out "Father Facts." Those "facts" were lists of flimsy statistics that blamed "fatherlessness" (code for single and divorced mother homes) for a host of social problems such as juvenile delinquency, low S. A. T. scores, drug and alcohol addiction, and teen pregnancy. These statistics malign single and divorced mother homes. They also oversimplify and misrepresent problems exacerbated by poverty and lack of adequate support systems by insinuating that these families can rise out of poverty if the father is present in the home. Preferably, that father should marry the mother. Hence, the arrival of marriage initiatives promoted by Gallagher and McManus, funded by DHHS

Warning: Cell phones contain Pavlov's Bells! from Watermelon Punch.

Why on earth do people respond to their phones ringing like Pavlov's Dogs?

The State of the Black Union: Jesse Lee Patterson from blackfeminism.org.

What I hear from black leaders is that we need to be pro-active in demanding better. Not one person on this morning’s panel — a panel about what black folks can do to better Black America — said “The white man done did me wrong.”

The Real Crisis from Random Thoughts on Politics.

In an ideological fervor, Bush and his acolytes have been fanning the flames trying to convince the American public that there's a social security crisis. With claims of future bankruptcy and the implication that without significant reform today's young people are tomorrow's destitute elderly, the Bush team is waging a full-bore campaign to eliminate them most successful social program we have and to replace it with a high-debt, high-risk alternative straight out of the GOP handbook.

Where are the African Women bloggers? from Black Looks.

Now all this talk of women bloggers, minority bloggers, bloggers of colour etc is great stuff BUT no one is talking about AFRICAN women bloggers, especially those blogging from Africa rather than the diaspora. If anyone's voice is lost it is that of African women. When it comes to the mainstream media and even the" alternative" so called "progressive" media and that includes the Blogger world, technologically we don't exist - but actually we do. A few weeks ago I reported on the African IT initiative

Hell and high water from Body and Soul.

With the near certainty of Ibrahim Jafari becoming prime minister, it's impossible to conceive of women's rights being equal to what they were in pre-war Iraq. Jafari was behind a move last year to make sharia the legal basis for family law. An "ayatollah in a suit." As Juan Cole recently discussed, the American press tends to portray him as a "secularist," but that's like calling George Bush a democrat. He makes a few noises in the direction of the ideal, but actions speak louder.

Casing Casey from Suburban Guerilla.

Bob Casey's a lot like his old man, the deceased former Governor. In Casey Sr.'s inaugural speech, he told his supporters if they voted for him because he was against abortion, they needed to understand they'd also voted for all the social programs and supports necessary to stop abortion - including the taxes necessary to fund them.

Cross-posted at Plum Crazy.

Posted by plumcrazy at February 27, 2005 02:53 AM in estrogen week