Last year I used my blog to speak a lot about the problems within our maternity care system, and spoke a small amount about issues affecting women in other aspects of our society. As I get completely engrossed in talking about maternity care, and women’s health, I can sometimes forget that maternity care is really only a microcosm of what we have to deal with in many aspects of our lives.
The maternity care system that we have today was established by the good ol’ boys and continues to be run by the good ol’ boys. It is set up to keep women literally and figuratively on their backs, immobile, submissive, and weak. The good ol’ boys fear the power of labor and so they set out a century ago to set up a system to keep it at bay.
Here’s the rub, this is not just happening in maternity care. It’s happening in cardiac care, cancer care, obesity treatment and psychiatric medicine. It’s happening in the media, in the movies, in the music and on T.V. It’s happening on Wall Street, on Main Street, on your street and on Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s happening in churches, in schools, and in the military. It’s happening in every facet of American society.
SEXISM… it permeates our society at every level from childbirth and beyond. If you have any doubts about the strength of sexism today, all you have to do is crack the spine of a phenomenal book… Sexism in America: Alive, well and Ruining our Future by author and historian Barbara J. Berg, Ph. D.
I received information about an event with Dr. Berg taking place in New York on January 19. I am unable to attend the event but was delighted to be able to get a copy of the book to read. I opened the book to the Introduction and from the first paragraph I knew I was in for a great read:
“Alive and well?” my dentist asks. “After Hillary almost got the Democratic nomination, and Sarah Palin had the number-two spot on the Republican ticket, how can you say sexism is alive and well?” I wonder if he’d say Barack Obama’s presidency has obliterated racial discrimination in America, but before I can ask he says, “Besides, with so much wrong in this country, why are you worrying about women?”
Further into the introduction she speaks about what she “discovered” as she completed and evaluated the extensive research she used to write the book.
“I discovered renewed sexism in our national policies and our jobs; on college campuses, the Internet, and major television shows; and in our most intimate relations—an unequivocal resurgence of sexism in the country so potent, so complexly and broadly expressed, so much a product of the twenty-first century, it should be called nothing less than the sexism of mass destruction. Yet astonishingly, the nation is in a collective state of denial over this deepening misogyny and these growing gender inequities. It’s as if we’d rather believe that the emperor really has new clothes that confront the naked truth”
WOW!!! I was hooked. And the book from beginning to end did not disappoint! The book is both a historical account as well as a current events document as it takes you from the women’s suffrage movement straight into the Obama administration. It is a work of advocacy and a rallying cry that will awaken a part of your woman soul that you didn’t even know was asleep. It gives you information to share, facts to ponder, questions to ask, and she gives us a call to action.
“Everyone who believes in gender equality—women and girls, men and boys, whether they call themselves feminists or shun the label—must join together… “
She calls on us to be “gender conscious” and in this twenty-first century wave of the women’s movement, she encourages us to use our twenty-first century tools: our computers, facebook, emails, blogs, and twitter to share information and to wake each other up. With this book, Sexism in America, Dr. Berg provides us with a valuable resource that can be the magnifying glass we need as we take another look at the way the good ol’ boys are still hard at play. To use a measurement and term that are a solid part of my professional vernacular, this book definitely gets an exam of 10 centimeters from me 
Blessings,
Nicole
