..."empowering women ...[onto more]..noble goals."

Has a more existential function, or at least potential, in

bringing us better moderated governance, more comity?

Might it not be that a generally more distaff governance is a positive step to better socialization and understandings?

Chimpanzee ladies are renowned for plucking hard-fisted, throw-ready stones from the angry hands of their more violently conflicted...menfolk.

And I think the neuro-science answer is, increasingly..."Yes".

Asking. But maybe we should just look.

---Guy, here---

there are some actions that need to be taken in absolute terms. such as getting women involved (artificially, if that's what it takes) in governance and politics, no questions asked, especially in retrograde social systems. who knows, maybe there might be atleast a miniscule increase in representation of women's voices in a system that negates one half of itself. perhaps having those women in power might propel more men into education and gainful employment...it is a long-known fact in the third world where some of us come from, that women are the main drivers for the overall level of a family's educational advancement. so if women are advocated to be appointed to positions of power, that's not a bad thing, it might actually some much-needed role models for women in these societies, if nothing else.

"What's more, if part of a terrorist's rage stems from the spread of Western values -- like, you know, equality for women? -- then putting women in positions of power is probably not going to do much to calm him down."

Please check your sexism at the door, Ms. Price.

this is exactly the kind of threadjacking people indulge in all the time to deflect resources from the issue at hand.

your nitpicking is childish, so i will consider it an attempt at humor, however weak. so, seriously, what are *you* doing to alleviate sexism in the world...male to female and vice versa?

This galactically stupid idea of Baroness Uddin is receiving exactly the attention it deserves.

what are your ideas for

1. working to counter terrorism.

2. working to integrate women into political decision-making in societies where they are not an active part of the political and economical mainstream.

please try to give us some concrete steps here.

One spot where the Baroness's idea might actually help - women in positions of power and influence would be freer to talk to Muslim women living in traditional, sex-segregated communities. If the intention really is to address "hearth-and-home" issues within the Muslim immigrant population, this isn't a bad place to start.

And if it means using their own sexist ideas against them, so much the better.

Will all due respect to the idealistic baroness, how about if we stop inventing flimsy excuses to bomb their countries and steal their oil. (Even though I know we really, desperately need that oil because who wants to walk four blocks in the rain? Boo. F word. Hoo.)

I am all for gender equality, but it sounds supremely selfish to propose it as a means to our own ends instead of actually changing our own lives and thereby solving the utterly non-mysterious problem of why the world hates us.

desi_grrl, and I love your handle, what I do is:

live ethically,

try not to be sexist,

try to learn more about sexism and other forms of discrimination,

try to encourage those around me not to be sexist,

Point out latent sexism in people that think that due to the organ between their legs and the self-congratulations of everyone around them and the coffeehouses they hang out at, that they cannot be sexist themselves.

Salon's Broadsheet's authors like to find sexism every where BUT Broadsheet. I think that by being interested in Salon, I can help reduce sexism and help Salon by helping the girls of Broadsheet to find insight and enlightenment.

In this case while Price correctly points out that Uddin conflates helping feminism with increasing democracy and/or reducing terrorism, none of which necessarily go together, I think it's pertinent to point out that Price seems to feel that terrorism and radical ideologies are primarily the domain of men.

Seeing as how women are responsible for 30-40% of domestic violence, and how women leaders throughout the ages have been responsible for wars and other atrocities, and noting how many people do seem to feel that a matriarchy would in some indescribable manner be a more peaceful and better world, and how all of that is pure conjecture stemming from a childhood nursery rhyme (sugar and spice and everything nice), I think Price's pretense and pretension is worth deflating and valuable to deflate.

I think Ripley's take in Aliens is equally likely: a mother will take any violent action necessary to save her children, and women are just as responsible as men for the atrocities, terrorist actions, and war we see in the world.

http://www.iwf.org/issues/issues_detail.asp?ArticleID=586

How Do Women Rule?...Just Like Men

by Christine Stolba

12/1/2001

"New archeological evidence shows Boadicea, the warrior queen who led the Britons in revolt against the Romans, in a very different light: as a calculating, vengeful and brutal military leader, who methodically razed cities." -- The Observer, December 3, 2000

"Can we bring ourselves to recognize our common interest as women and wield power on the basis of it?" feminist and former Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich asks in her new book, Sex & Power. And how might women exercise power? Women, Estrich chirps, "talk less, and let others talk more; listen more, exercising influence and wielding power indirectly...the discussion is more open; and conflicting views are more often and more readily voiced."

Who’s she kidding? History abounds with sagas of powerful women who did not let others talk more, weren’t good listeners, and didn’t particularly relish the open exchange of conflicting views -- who were, in short, as manly, if not more so, than men.

Want to raze a village? Boadicea, England’s warrior queen, was just the gal to get the job done. A revered figure and a sentimental favorite of Victorian painters, Boadicea is commemorated by a statue that stands on Westminster Bridge, near the Houses of Parliament. She is remembered for her bravery in leading a revolt against her country’s occupiers, the Romans, in 60 A.D. Alas, recent discoveries at an archeological dig near Colchester -- a town seized and destroyed by Boadicea -- led dig director Philip Crummy to compare Boadicea’s program and tactics to "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans.

Boadicea’s brutality was noteworthy, even by the standards of her era. A dismayed Crummy marveled to the Observer: "These were not flammable buildings. But they were leveled. It was a murderous, determined, intensive, and deliberate attack." Historians estimate that 70,000 Romans and their "collaborators" perished before the Roman general Paulinus’ legions caught up with Boadicea’s rebel force. Rallying her soldiers from her chariot, Boadicea fought on against the superior Roman army. Once surrounded, she drank poison rather than surrender.

Nor did Boadicea’s distaff descendants shy away from violent displays of power. Mary Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII, didn’t earn the sobriquet "Bloody Mary" by listening to conflicting views. Perhaps no female figure has better understood power and how to keep it than Mary Tudor’s sister, Queen Elizabeth I. During her reign (1558-1603), England became a great power with a prosperous economy and the beginnings of a colonial empire. Elizabeth, who was known to relish a good bear-baiting, evinced a genius for diplomacy, often using the lure of marriage to reel in foreign allies. Elizabeth was not, however, particularly gifted at recognizing her common interest with other women: In 1587 she ordered the beheading of the charming and clever Mary Queen of Scots. (Apparently Mary also lacked the ability to recognize a common interest with other women -- she had been involved in a plot to murder Elizabeth and seize the English throne.)

Women across the Channel were equally tough. Catherine de’ Medici, the queen consort of Henry II of France, helped plan, and convinced a reluctant Charles IX to carry out the bloody Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of France’s Protestants in 1572, an event that triggered a resumption of the Wars of Religion.

A modern leader both Boadicea and Elizabeth likely would have admired was Margaret Thatcher. During her tenure as the longest-serving British prime minister of the twentieth century, Thatcher launched the Falklands War. She maintained a steely posture during the waning days of the Cold War and pursued an unwavering path of free market expansion...Throughout history women have also not been above deploying a finely calibrated combination of feminine wiles and old-fashioned politicking to exercise power behind the scenes. One exemplar was the eleventh century’s Lady Godiva, the wife of Leofric, earl of Mercia. When Leofric refused to heed her entreaties to lower the region’s heavy tax burden, Godiva rode naked through the town of Coventry in protest.

Despite the lessons of history, flaky models of cooperative power-sharing (not to mention the introduction of ugly neologisms such as "womanpower," which has found its way into the American Heritage Dictionary) remain popular with feminists. Feminist theorist Kathleen Jones, for example, proposes in her book Compassionate Authority that women should use power to create more cooperative and compassionate models of governing. Rather than pursuing power to dominate, she says, women should be trying to construct a "woman-friendly" concept of authority...One wonders where that altruistic urge was when Boadicea was slaughtering Romans....In contemporary Bangladesh, for example, Sheik Hasina, the daughter of the country’s first president, and Khaleda Zia, widow of another former president are locked in a bitter power struggle. Their arch-rivalry is the cause of national paralysis; the legislature remains deadlocked while their feud rages on. In Sri Lanka, where Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the first woman prime minister in 1960, the political matriarchy now run by Bandaranaike’s daughter (president Chandrika Kumaratunga) is plagued by allegations of corruption.

Like Thatcher, Indira Gandhi was a leader who understood power -- and so ruled like a man. She favored an authoritarian over a cooperative ruling style after becoming prime minister in 1966. Though she was called the "Mother of India," Gandhi did not hesitate to pursue rather unmotherly activities such as intervening in Pakistan’s civil war and bringing India into the nuclear age by acquiring atomic weapons. When opposition to her government increased in 1975, she responded by suspending civil liberties and jailing her opponents....

This is not the kind of power that contemporary feminists admire. Feminists such as Susan Estrich believe that women share a common set of interests that can and should be transformed into united political action to achieve power. Why, she says, do we "act singly, when our greatest power would come from collective action?".......