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 j2IHphC22160; Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:51:43 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:51:43 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <s23ace3a.061@mailsrv21.gsu.edu> Errors-To: listowner@nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "Daphne Greenberg" <ALCDGG@langate.gsu.edu> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-WOMENLIT:3198] message from Andrea X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise Internet Agent 6.5.2 Status: O Content-Length: 3018 Lines: 92 Andrea asked me to post this for her: Colleagues: I can't figure out whether or not Laurie's original post made it to the list serv, but here is my reply. My concerns are real concerns, I don't want to spade over the same tired ground. Everything has to do with how women perceive their place in the world, and particularly their relationship to men. Why is this important? It is important because we teach who we think we are. 1) The Larry Summer's (Harvard Pres) imbroglio. I first read the report of what he said while sitting at the kitchen table, and it was a shock. Unedited, the article suggested to me that Summers perceived himself to be in the middle of a group of men while women existed at the fringes, edges, of his mental universe. In the foothills of his moutain, as it were. I imagined myself as one of Larry's secretaries, looking at him as he came through the office door, knowing that he mentally relegated me to less than fully human (male) status--an inferior being. You can believe I read every report about Summers following this, I was so upset and angry. Then, by golly, I read a letter posted (with link) on the Harvard School of Public Health home page. Among other things it said that women make up at that school 31% of faculty members. These are scientists from all over the world, who have worked all over the world, whose work is top notch. 2) I also read an issue of Time magazine (March 7) which raised my spirits still more--"' If you have a man and a woman looking at the same landscape, they see totally different things....women can see colors and textures men cannot see. They hear things men cannot hear, and they smell things men cannot smell.'" 3) From another article--women can be much more reactive to an angry male raised voice than men, has to do with their hearing and link ups with the amygdala. (Reference deleted from short term memory.) 4) Also, from Parallel Lives (Phyllis Rose) toward the end--a metaphor of playing a tennis game: while for men the wind is at their back, for women the wind is in their face (social privilege). 5) A book by Griffin (Howard?) published maybe in the fifties ? sixties? tells of his transformation into a black man, and his realizaton of how black men were treated, in the south particularly, as I recall. 6) Then from an actor--Hoffman? Tootsie? describing how it felt to take on a woman's persona, a shock. to him. 7) Finally, the only causal link in adult literacy is that between a mother and her children--with mother's literacy child health improves and she has fewer children. (Reduction in fertility is the way this is phrased.) From an article on Richard Cash, MD, MPH: "'There has never been effective population control through excessive deaths,'" Cash says. "'A clear drop in the infant death rate reliably and very quickly brings down the birth rate.'" All for this morning. Andrea
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