I am a UK based reader so this may be a naive point to make but it seems to me the US has to be made to engage with parental paid leave if we are to address feminist concerns in the US. On your broader question of feminist priorities I think we need to look at religious fundamentalisms of whatever faith and impact for women, LGBT, young people and secular members within religious communities, recession and gender, climate change/resource wars and gender. I am extremely conscious that in all areas women’s rights are not mainstreamed and will not be addressed indeed will be traded off even though women will be disproportionately impacted by them.
Posted by: heather harvey
I appreciated Rhonda Copeland’s article on DV as torture however I felt the tone of it was wrong. It read as though this was an argument yet to be made, whereas it is a well accepted doctrine already – the problem as with so many women’s rights issues is how to implement it,make it stick and have it widely accepted and understood and enforced. State responsibiity for non state actor abuse relying on the due diligence doctrine has been used by womens’ rights activists to demonstrate state responsibiity for DV etc since the early 90’s. It was a huge achievement to make and have accepted that argument at that time. Indeed it was only after women’s rights activists made this case successfully that Amnesty International, which targets state abuse, eventually started to include women’s rights abuses including violence in the family and community in its reports and launched a stop violence against women campaign. Women’s human rights victories are few and far between and easily retrenched upon. We do not need to present this as an argument to make, thereby allowing people to argue the principle back again from first base, rather we need to present it as an argument already made but requiring implementation otherwise we take ourselves back 20 years. Those in opposition to us will fight hard enough anyway without us giving them a space to re argue old battles we have already won.
Posted by: heather harvey
