4 - The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, February 15, 2006 OPINION c e Ib rgt Bi fgu ilg DoNN M. FRESARD Editor in Chief EMILY BEAM CHRISTOPHER ZBROZEK Editorial Page Editors ASHLEY DINGES Managing Editor EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com NOTABLE QUOTABLE 44'Take that hammer and knock it on your own head." - Saddam Hussein, in response to an attempt by the chief judge in his trial to restore order in the courtroom, as reported yesterday by CNN.com. is I -#!? Li 4 F F i yk lt' , {: M N.\ JEFF CRAVENS TiifE C.RAV:. 01 Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their author. Betty Friedan's dead but feminism isn't EMILY BEAM Ltx oCKIN FI AMERICA ometimes I sus- pect I was born a few decades too late. My initial reaction to Betty Friedan's death two weeks ago was just further evidence. Despite being two generations removed, reading her obituary left struck me with nostalgia for an era that I completely missed. It's not the 1950s glo- rification of the middle-class suburban housewife that prompted Friedan's "The Feminine Mys- tique" that I'm longing for - I'm grateful to pass on that one. Rather, I would have liked to be around for the years that followed its publication, when women across the country came out to fight for gender equality instead of trying to convince themselves that everything is just fine. It seems I'm too late. Prominent feminists are fading away, and images of angry, sign-waving feminists from the 1970s have been relegated to textbooks. The struggle may have more or less stopped, and "feminist" has been reduced to a derogatory name for women suspected of not knowing their new, improved place in the world - but things are not equal. Two generations later, much of what outraged Friedan has improved. Unlike in the 1950s, women face little expectation that we enter college in pur- suit only of an MRS degree, more concerned with completing our four years with an engagement ring on one hand than a degree in the other. But for all these years of struggle, women never really got much further than gaining the right to wear pants in fancy restaurants and more choices for middle-class women in the job market. With the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment still a fresh memory, the movement was qui- etly declared done, and those who persisted were labeled radical or man-hating. Of course, there were those who were radi- cal and hated men. Valarie Solanas's "SCUM Manifesto" (that's the Society for Cutting Up Men) is a perfect example. She wrote: "There remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill- seeking females only to overthrow the govern- ment, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex" Even if Solanas hadn't gone from being a mili- tant feminist to a homicidal nutcase - she shot Andy Warhol the same year her book was pub- lished - her beliefs wouldn't have done much to help the women's rights movement. If calling oneself a feminist means identifying with Solanas, no wonder the word has become so unpopular. A CBS News poll last year found that just 24 percent of women considered themselves feminists. Once the pollster defined a feminist as "someone who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes," that number rose to 65 percent. Does that mean that a third of women don't support social, political or economic equality? Or does it suggest that the negative connotation of feminism has overwhelmed any further discus- sion? Either way, it's not a good sign. Even more disturbing is the notion that it may take a good deal of convincing to win over these women who aren't so sure about feminism's worth. The same poll found more than a quarter of women said the movement made their lives worse. It would seem that striving for gender equality would be a positive thing. Indeed, feminism's gains - not just of the 1960s and '70s, but through- out the past century - gave women all sorts of choices previously denied them. These crazy, radi- cal changes let young women define themselves in new ways, not just as future mothers or wives. Women could have their own interests, occupa- tions and identities. They gained more choices over what to wear, where to work and when to have children. Not all choice is easy choice, and perhaps here is where some women become disillusioned. The genders are certainly more equal than a few decades ago, but it is still women, not men, who overwhelmingly must juggle home time and work time. A U.S. Department of Labor report revealed women spend an average of one more hour a day on housework than men. Not too surprisingly, another 2003 study from the University of Mary- land found men average almost a half-hour per night more free time than women. Even if there's some inner peace to be had from scrubbing toilets and making dinner every night, this difference suggests that equality is still a goal (I hope), not a reality. What started out as Friedan's cry to free women from vacuum cleaners did make a lot of gains, but fizzled out prematurely. Too many problems - violence against women, wage gaps, sexism and homophobia - exist to pretend an unfinished movement was good enough. When the lasting image of feminism is make- up-less women throwing out their razors (the horror!), and the whole idea is unfairly lumped together with everything from hating God to mur- dering men, you've got a movement that can't even unite people under the idea of equality. To carry out the work that started decades before Friedan and others, we need an inclusive movement that spans generations and fights for the equality that is relevant to both men and women. And yes, we might still call it "feminism." 0 Beam can be reached at ebeam@umich.edu. VIEWPOINT Health as a human right By LUKE POLCYN, EUNICE YU, AND ERIC BARSTAD There is a human right to health. In a world where 11 million children die each year before the age of five, there has to be. We can no longer afford to conceive of health merely as a market- able commodity. But the concept of treating health and economic disparities as a human rights issue far predates the outrage wielded these days by sun- glassed spokespeople. Its origin stems from some of the founding documents of the World Health Organization and the United Nations. In particular, Article 25 of the United Nations's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his fam- ily, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." The right to health doesn't necessarily mean a right to universal health care. Instead, it empha- sizes standards of quality and equal access with regard to the fundamental determinants of health such as safe water and food, basic treatments, essential medicines and adequate housing. The criterion for success becomes the health of patients rather than the profitability of services. Health as a human right means returning to the underlying purpose of a health-care system, which is to ensure everyone a basic level of well-being. It treats pub- lic participation in health-related decision making at the community, national and international level as the genuine expression of demand. Granted, economic laws have given Americans the high- est quality of treatment in the world, but they also guarantee that such treatment isn't accessible to all Americans. Above all, the right to health means understanding the status quo both at home and abroad in the terms of social breakdown in addi- tion to market reality. It asks us to assume respon- sibility for inequality of access. Despite widespread consensus on the right to health in international human rights norms, the American dialogue hasn't yet afforded it the same kind of primacy seen by civil and politi- cal human rights. This is within our power to change. As students, we can work to utilize the resources and social capital of our universities to respect and cultivate the observation of all human rights, including the right to health. We can call upon public universities to serve more robustly as public institutions. We can urge the University to serve as a positive nonstate actor in the very international system it seeks to engage, and we can insist it do so while speaking the language of human rights. Some of us have been doing so, with admit- tedly mixed results. But the primary and most serious responsibil- ity of the University is to educate, and programs for human rights education are well underway. The International Perspectives on Human Rights initiative has coordinated and sponsored courses for the last two years. The recently approved inter- national studies minor allows students to choose human rights as one of its thematic emphases. It's OK to want more. Limiting dialogue on human rights to extracurricular groups at this University has forged an essentially isolated political subculture that is powerless to bring human rights fully into the social and political mainstream. All the while, the kind of social progress that advocates truly crave can only be reached through consensus, and so we must also crave classrooms with diversity of opinion, facili- tated by faculty in pursuit of productive and solu- tion-oriented debate that can give students the tools and knowledge they need for the future. An academic approach to human rights is the first and most crucial step in enabling the Uni- versity to participate in the international system on behalf of the dispossessed. The potential of our University to promote a complete definition of human rights cannot be underestimated. Our research meaningfully influences the national and international academic and political dia- logue. In particular, scholarly discourse on health as a human right can facilitate a new understand- ing of health in America, both in terms of its own health care system and the way it engages a world of extreme poverty and pandemics. To ensure the success of this project, we students have to start approaching human rights as what we are: students. Only then can we be the partner the University needs to guide our education. Polcyn, Yu and Barstad are LSA juniors and members of Human Rights Through Education, a student group that is hosting a free and open conference Feb. 17-18 at the Michigan League on the human right to health. For more information about "The Right to Health: Prospects and Approaches" and HR TE, visit www.umich.edu/-hrte or e- mail hrtecore@umich.edu. 0 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Campus ROTC war games simple-minded TO THE DAILY: This is in response to the Daily's moment of participation and observation in the recent war games at the University by the Reserve Officer Training Corps (War Games, 02/10/2006) in which soldiers-in-training simulate experiences of discerning ostensibly good "Arabs" from bad ones in simulated Iraqi village settings. the general uproar it would raise. My hope is that the Daily would take the time to provide some kind of critical commentary or context. But it shouldn't take imagining a simulation in reverse to show how the Daily's coverage of the war games itself promotes the fatal stereotype between good and bad Arab that Bush and com- pany push. Or is it the case, perhaps, that the Daily does accept that view of the world, and finds no issue with either its implications or the Daily's uncritical pitching of them? I suppose, if this were indeed the case, then it Society does not fully accept interracial relationships To THE DAILY: Regarding David Betts's column, The dia- logue of dating (02/14/2006), a dialogue over the issue of interracial dating is an extreme- ly worthy one, particularly because of the issues the author raises regarding its recep- tion. As the daughter of a white woman and a black man, I have seen first-hand that to .. ,. .. .. q . J ,., I