Return-Path: <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id f93JdD015507; Wed, 3 Oct 2001 15:39:13 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 15:39:13 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <14e.1f377e5.28ecc28e@aol.com> Errors-To: alcrsb@langate.gsu.edu Reply-To: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: AWilder106@aol.com To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-WOMENLIT:1639] Re: Silence X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Mac - Post-GM sub 146 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Status: O Content-Length: 2158 Lines: 43 Dear Ujwala, You, Daphne, Janet and Deborah have certainly perked up my afternoon. Do you know Martha Nussbaum's work? There is an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week. When she is criticized for supporting a western notion of...freedom, I guess you'd have to say, she talks about the time she spends in India each year working with poor women, mostly listening and learning, actually. "The biggest obstacle for a Western feminist philosopher in thinking about these lives may be the specific details and dynamics of their poverty more than their foreignness. Western feminist philosophy has not typically focused on getting loans, learning to read, and buying sewing machines." What she actually aims for is for the student to become a 'cosmopolitan,' "a citizen of the world, someone whose loyalty is not to a particular locality or cultural order but to humanity.....her cosmopolitan would ask, in a Socratic vein, what is a good society? Are there criteria for determining the most just way human beings might live?" This seems to me to be an excellent focus for adult literacy--the sewing machines, the loans, and how to create a just society. I didn't know about the growing movement of Hindu orthodoxy you mention. But the growth of the religious right in this country I see as the same kind of movement to be found these days in other fundamentalist religious movements and I wonder why no one has talked about the compare and contrast aspects of this religious growth. It is important to create or continue creating a middle class, people who have a stake in the future will want to protect it. A gulf between rich and poor undermines this. Thanks for your "ramble." There was something else I found in Karachi, maybe you will understand, maybe not, it was a warmth from women that I had not found in the United States. Maybe because I am talking about the upper class? A much greater comfort in being women, and I thought that Western feminism (by which I mean US) had a lot to learn from the subcontinent. Have you noticed this? If you have, how do you explain it? Andrea
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