Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture

by Katha Pollitt

Overview

Subject to Debate, Katha Pollitt's column in The Nation, has offered readers clear-eyed yet provocative observations on women, politics, and culture for more than seven years. Bringing together eighty-eight of her most astute essays on hot-button topics like abortion, affirmative action, and school vouchers, this selection displays the full range of her indefatigable wit and brilliance. Her stirring new Introduction offers a seasoned critique of feminism at the millennium and is a clarion call for renewed activism against social injustice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679783435
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/06/2001
Series:	Modern Library Paperbacks Series
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Katha Pollitt writes the bimonthly column, "Subject to Debate" for The Nation. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting Foundations, a grant from the NEA, a National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism and a National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Clara Zetkin Avenue


Scurrying around Manhattan on a blustery morning a few weeks ago, I
happened to glance up while waiting for the light to change in front of the public library. Beneath the green and white sign reading Fifth Avenue was another, also green and white, and printed in exactly the same lettering:
Clara Zetkin Avenue. Gee, I thought for a split second, if Rudy Giuliani is naming a street for the grande dame of German socialism, he can't be as bad as I thought. But will New Yorkers really start telling taxi drivers to make a right on Zetkin? Then I saw the bent wires fastening the sign to the post, and realized what was going on: Some lefty prankster was reminding us that the next day, March 8, was International Women's Day.


Well, the great day came and went with barely a ripple of attention here in the United States-although I understand that, over at the United Nations,
Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali gave a speech about the need to do more for women, which in the case of the United Nations shouldn't be too difficult. Maybe the local indifference is why I find myself filled with gloomy thoughts about the worldwide situation of women. Here we are, at the end of the twentieth century, and not only have hundreds of millions of women around the globe yet to obtain even the barest minimum of human rights, but the notion that they are even entitled to such rights is bitterly contested.


Consider, for example, the horrors documented in the State Department's annual human rights report, which focused on women this year for the first time: genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East, bride burning in
India, sexual slavery in Thailand, forced abortion and sterilization in
China. Imagine the firestorm of international protest if any of these practices were imposed by men on men through racism or colonialism or
Communism! Well, you don't need to imagine: Just compare the decades of global outrage visited, justly, on South Africa's apartheid regime for denying political, civil and property rights to blacks, and the cultural-relativist defense advanced on behalf of Saudi Arabia and other ultra-Islamic regimes for their denial of same to women. Nobody's calling on American universities and city governments to disinvest in those economies. In Iraq and a number of other Middle Eastern countries that are not theocracies, a man can with impunity kill any female relative he feels is "dishonoring" him by unchaste behavior; in Pakistan, the jails are full of women and girls, some only nine years old, whose crime was to be the victims of rape. I suppose Benazir Bhutto will get around to them after she finishes persuading the world that her mother is trying to undermine her government because of a sexist wish to see a son, rather than a daughter,
in power.

Editorial Reviews

"There isn't a hotly debated sociopolitical issue that Pollitt hasn't taken on with conviction and blazing originality...She is an astonishingly gifted writer."

From the Publisher

The always provocative essayist for The Nation presents a collection of her biweekly columns dating from 1994 to fall 2000—including impeachment but before chads. Pollitt (Reasonable Creatures, 1994) is known as a feminist, a liberal, and a fighter for social justice—all causes from the same shopping cart, one might think. Not necessarily so, as the author points out in her introduction. Although the feminist movement has moved women along from their pre-Friedan roles as wives and mothers, Pollitt argues that the young women who have ended up in the workplace remain captives of body image and conflicting roles. Nevertheless, the women's movement lives, even in the"I'm not a feminist, but ... " culture; its great impact might be better understood if it were not separated (often for the convenience of the analysts) from other historical forces. A woman does not have as much choice as she thinks when social, race, and class disparities continue to exist."Gender equality requires general equality," says Pollitt. The essays that follow reinforce that theme, beginning with a gloomy assessment of the progress of women around the world, lightened by acid comments on Camille Paglia and Catherine MacKinnon. Swipes at New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (journalists are one of her favorite targets), plus loose defenses of Paula Jones, the movie Titanic, and President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky prepare readers for unexpected points of view. Mayor Guiliani takes some hits as both art critic (of the elephant dung Madonna) and demolition expert (of the city's welfare safety net), as does Judith Wallerstein for sloppy science in her recent analysis of the effects of divorce. ButPollittisnot just a quick wit with some easy targets. She researches and discerns the hypocrisies, the contradictions, the obfuscating—and the tragedies—on both sides of the political and cultural divides and notes them with clarity, logic, humor, and sensitivity. Biting, entertaining, erudite—destined to annoy, but also perhaps challenge, the politically correct on the right or the left.

Kirkus Reviews