The Other Day I Was Listing Off The Books On My Goodreads List Pertaining To Feminism At My Parents House

The other day I was listing off the books on my goodreads list pertaining to feminism at my parents house which went something like this:

Me: I've got Delusions of Gender: How our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference By Cordelia Fine, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know about Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights (By several authors and editors), I’m still waiting on Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism By Kathleen Stock, I really want to get to TRANS: When Ideology Meets Reality By Helen Joyce, and also All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister.

My Dad: Don't you ever just read a good fiction book?

Me: Yeah I have 24 new ones stacked up in the guest room. I've read 3 so far this year (2022), but I don't have a lot of time for leisurely academic reading while finishing up my MSN . I do read stories and opinions from other radical feminists on an esteemed website where I can contribute my own thoughts each morning though.

(He looked surprised. I didn't mention the website was tumblr....)

microdosing on having a degree by reading radblr like the morning paper

The eleventh commandment should be to fact check what you read, especially if it looks like clickbait or if it looks like something very one-sided or black and white. Nothing, nothing, no issue political or societal can claim to be one hundred percent right, or correct, or ethical according to only one source. Always fact check. Always look at both sides of things if the sources are available.

Yes, because the other guy tried to overturn our democracy. Get a fucking grip.

This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

ask historicity-was-already-taken a question

i love traditional clothing. doesn’t matter the culture. all traditional clothes look baller swag af etc

This is amazing. Something to celebrate, working against the culture of sharing nudes in high schools today. These kids are living in a world we couldn't even imagine. Among drugs, bullying, and peer pressure, there is one big problem the millenial generation never faced that twist the facets of these three common "high school" concepts into something new: smartphones.

Drugs: (I will come back to this post when I am not studying for my nursing boards to be taken in a week and add more info and sources) For now, take it from the girl who wrote an epidemiology paper on the vaping epidemic in America for a Masters course in community health last semester, that what is considered 'cool' is decided in entirely new formats now. For example, even if you had friends that smoked during high school (anytime before 2014ish) but lived in a smoke free home, it was likely an 'out of sight, out of mind' deal once you were away from the smoke. Not to mention, while I am well aware that people still smoke today, I do feel that the millenial generation was not nearly as grasped by the tobacco industry as earlier generations because of constant messages that cigarettes were harmful. The laws against ads on TV and in magazines, the increased taxes, the effects we saw in older adults with emphysema and COPD? All of that worked at least somewhat well in discouraging millenials to smoke. So that, for the most part was not a hard battle to fight. Now let's look at vaping. The messaage Gen Z recieves from their peers is that vaping is cool. And the difference between us and them is that they can't turn off the message that 'everyone is using ecigs'. It shows up on instagram, tik tok, snapchat, and this influence causes more teenagers to purchase the products, so that people actually encounter their friends now using vaping products. I have found e-cigarettes in my own 16 y/o sister's room. My best friend was 22 when her 15 year old sister begged her to buy her an e-cigarette in secret. Gen Z-ers pull out their phone at every opportunity and now, the tobacco companies have found a way in and it's working. (I will add sources and info about how how vaping is leading to regular cigarette use as well as talking about the drug use today next week when I am not an overwhelmed ball of stress).

Bullying: do you even need an essay on cyberbullying? Yes, some of us younger millenials (born in the early 90s) had texting, and yes cyberbullying was very real, but all you have to do is read the above posts to show how someone can be taken advantage of in whole new ways today. Did my phone have a camera when I was 15? Yeah, technically. A frontfacing one? I don’t remember but probably not. The photos were grainy and picture messaging cost extra. The mass spreading of a person's nude photo was not a possibility on the large and immediate scale it is today. We have to teach teens what they are putting on the line.

Be Careful What You Agree To - Ad campaign making teenagers aware of the dangers of sharing intimate photos.

Alright guys. lets get started