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This is the speech given to the 2004 graduating women of Columbia
University. Barbara Ehrenreich is a well known social commentator, author
and journalist.

Barnard Commencement 2004
Speech by Barbara Ehrenreich

It is a total thrill to share this day with you today. I really
feel honored to participate.
How many of you are parents of graduates? What I'm really
curious about is how you managed to get here today, after paying all
that money for tuition - Greyhound bus? I put two kids thru Ivy
League myself, which meant I had to hitchhike to their commencement
ceremonies.

I had another speech prepared for today- all about the cost of
college and how the doors to higher education are closing to all
but the wealthy. It was a good speech -lots of laugh lines - but
2 weeks ago something came along that wiped the smile right off my
face. You know, you saw them too - the photographs of Americ
soldiers sadistically humiliating and abusing detainees in Iraq.

These photos turned my stomach - yours too, I'm sure. But they
did something else to me: they broke my heart. I had no illusions
about the United States mission in Iraq, but it turns out that I
did have some illusions about women.

There was the photo of Specialist Sabrina Harman smiling an
impish little smile and giving the thumbs sign from behind a pile of
naked Iraqi men - as if to say, "Hi mom, here I am in Abu
Ghraib!"

We've gone from the banality of evil... to the cuteness of evil.

There was the photo of Private First Class Lynndie England
dragging a naked Iraqi man on a leash. She's cute too, in those
cool cammy pants and high boots. He's grimacing in pain. If you
were doing PR for al Qaeda, you couldn't have staged a better
picture to galvanize misogynist Islamic fundamentalists around
the world.

And never underestimate the misogyny of the real enemy, which
was never the Iraqis; it was and should be the Al Qaeda-type
fundamentalist extremists: Two weeks ago in eastern Afghanistan,
suspected Taliban members (I thought we had defeated them, but
never mind) ... poisoned three little girls for the crime of
going to school. That seems to be the attitude in that camp: In the
case of women: better dead than well-read.
But here in these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have every Islamic
fundamentalist stereotype of   Western culture -- all nicely
arranged in one hideous image-- imperial arrogance, sexual
depravity ... and gender equality.

Now we don't know whether women were encouraged to partcipate.
All we know is they didn't say no. Of the 7 US soldiers now charged
with the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 3 are women : Harman,
England and Megan Ambuhl.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so shocked.

Certainly not about the existence of abuse. Reports of this and
similar abuse have been leaking out of Guantanamo and immigrant
detention centers in NYC for over a year We know, if we've been
paying attention, that similar kinds of abuse, including sexual
humiliation, are not unusal in our own vast US prison system.

We know too, that good people can do terrible things under the
right circumstances. This is what psychologist Stanley Milgram
found in his famous experiments in the 1960s. Sabrina and
Lynndie are not congenitally evil people. They are working class women
who wanted to go to college and knew the military as the quickest
way in that direction. Once they got in, they wanted to fit in.

And I shouldn't be surprised either because I never believed
that women are innately less aggressive than men. I have argued this
repeatedly - once with the famously macho anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon. When he kept insisting that women are just too nice and
incapable of combat, I answered him the best way I could: I
asked him if he wanted to step outside...

I have supported full opportunity for women within the military,
in part because -- with rising tuition-- it's one of the few
options around for low-income young people.

I opposed the first Gulf War in 1991, but at the same time I was
proud of our servicewomen and delighted that their presence
irked their Saudi hosts.

Secretly, I hoped that the presence of women would eventually
change the military, making it more respectful of other people
and their cultures, more capable of genuine peace keeping.

That's what I thought, but I don't think that any more.

A lot of things died with those photos.
The last moral justification for the war with Iraq died with
those photos. First the justification was the supposed weapons of mass
destruction. Then it was the supposed links between Saddam and
Osama bin Laden - those links were never found either. So the
final justification was that we had removed an evil dictator who
tortured his own people. As recently as April 30, George Bush
exulted that the torture chambers of Iraq were no longer
operating.

Well, it turns out they were just operating under different
management. We didn't displace Saddam Hussein; we replaced him.

And when you throw in the similar abuses in Afghanistan and
Guantanamo, in immigrant detention centers and US prisons, you
see that we have created a spreading regime of torture - an empire
of pain.

But there's another thing that died for me in the last couple of
weeks - a certain kind of feminism or, perhaps I should say, a
certain kind of feminist naiveté.

It was a kind of feminism that saw men as the perpetual
perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and male sexual
violence against women as the root of all injustice. Maybe this
sort of feminism made more sense in the 1970s. Certainly it
seemed to make sense when we learned about the rape camps in Bosnia in
the early 90s. There was a lot of talk about women then - I
remember because I was in the discussions - about rape as an
instrument of war and even war as an extension of rape.

I didn't agree, but I didn't disagree very loudly either. There
seemed to be at least some   reason to believe that male sexual
sadism may somehow be deeply connected to our species' tragic
propensity for violence.

That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.
But it's not just the theory of this naïve feminism that was
wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy
and vision for change rested on the assumption, implicit or
stated outright, that women are morally superior to men. We had a lot
of debates over whether it was biology or conditioning   that made
women superior- or maybe the experience of being a woman in a
sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority was beyond
debate. After all, women do most of the caring work in our
culture, and in polls are consistently less inclined toward war
than men.

Now I'm not the only one wrestling with that assumption today.
Here's Mary Jo Melone, a columnist in the St. Petersburg Times,
writing on May 7:
 .
"I can't get this picture of [Pfc. Lynndie] England out of
my head because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism
taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal
from men, but that we were morally superior to them."

Now the implication of this assumption was that all we had to do
to make the world a better place - kinder, less violent, more
just - was to assimilate into what had been, for so many
centuries, the world of men. We would fight so that women could
become the CEOs, the senators, the generals, the judges and
opinion-makers - becasue that was really the only fight we had
to undertake. Because once they gained power and authority, once
they had achieved a critical mass within the institutions of society,
women would naturally work for change.

That's what we thought, even if we thought it unconsciously. And
the most profound thing I have to say to you today, as a group
of brilliant young women poised to enter the world   - is that it's
just not true.
You can't even argue, in the case of Abu Ghraib, that the
problem was that there just weren't ENOUGH women in the military
hierarchy to stop the abuses.

The prison was directed by   a woman, General Janis Karpinski.

The top US intelligence official in Iraq, who was also
responsible for reviewing the status of detainees prior to their release,
was a woman, Major Gen. Barbara Fast.

And the US official ultimately responsible for the managing the
occupation of Iraq since last October was Condoleezza Rice.

What we have learned, once and for all, is that a uterus is not
a substitute for a conscience; menstrual periods are not the
foundation of morality.

This does not mean gender equality isn't worth fighting for for
its own sake. It is. And I will keep fighting for it as long as
I live. Gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and
peaceful world.

What I have finally come to understand, sadly and irreversibly,
is that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of moral
superiority on the part of women is a lazy and self-indulgent
form of feminism.

Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman -
whether a diploma, a promotion, a right to serve alongside men
in the military - is ipso facto - by its very nature -- a victory
for humanity.

And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle - the
struggle for gender equality - when in fact we have many more.
The struggles for peace, for social justice and against imperialist
and racist arrogance ... cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be
folded into the struggle for gender equality.

Women do not change institutions simply just by assimilating
into them. But - and this is the "but" on which all my
hopes hinge - a CERTAIN KIND of woman can still do that-- and this is where you come in.

We need a kind of woman who can say NO, not just to the date
rapist or overly persistent boyfriend, but to the military or
corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.

We need a kind of woman who doesn't want to be one of the boys
when the boys are acting like sadists or fools.

And we need a kind of woman who isn't trying to assimilate, but
to infiltrate - and subvert the institutions she goes into.
YOU can be those women. And as the brightest and best educated
women of your generation, you better be.

First, because our nation is in such terrible trouble - hated
worldwide, and not just by the fundamentalist fanatics. My
version of patriotism is simple: When the powerful no longer act
responsibly, then it is our responsibility to take the power
away from them.

You have to become tough-minded activists for change because the
entire feminist project is also in terrible trouble worldwide.
That project, which is minimally about the achievement of
equality with men, is threatened by fundamentalisms of all kinds -
Christian as well as Islamic.

But we cannot successfully confront that threat without a moral
vision that goes beyond gender equality. To cite an old - and
far from naïve -- feminist saying: "If you think equality is
the goal, your standards are too low."

It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting
like beasts.

It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth
assimilating into.

I'm counting on you. I want YOU to be the face of American women
that the world sees -- not those of Sabrina or Megan or
Lynndie or Condoleezza.

Don't let me down. Take your hard-won diplomas, your knowledge
and your talents and go out there and RAISE HELL!










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