Just two days after the women of Sirt’s month-long strike strike from sex with their husbands hit the international AP newswire, and attained global celebrity, the striking women declared victory [CNN] in their efforts to improve the village’s abysmal water system. As the strike pressed on, the men of the village finally frantically lobbied the government for help in fixing the system, and the Directorate of Rural Affairs has agreed to provide the men of Sirt with five miles of piping so that water can be brought directly to the village from a nearby source. The men of Sirt will work to lay the pipe themselves. Although some women have decided to end the boycott immediately with the announcement, others will continue to refuse sex until the pipe-building project is completed.

A little while ago I stumbled across a great page on the history of Women and the Labor Movement [TheHistoryNet], including the formative role that women played in labor radicalism (organized industrial work stoppages were going on in Lowell, Massachussetts as early as the 1820s) and the way that the mainstream, AFL-line labor movement conspired with the Progressive regulation movement to cut women out of the labor force in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries through protective labor restrictions which discriminated against women and by excluding women from the mainstream wing of the labor movement, which negotiated itself into a powerful alliance with the bosses and the government (this move, conveniently, induced greater labor shortages and drove up profits for their own all-male membership).

We think of unions as primarily male institutions these days, responding to the problems faced by men in industrial labor, but that neglects the fact that women have always been the first victims of industrialization (through textile mills and garment sweatshops, for example; this is still happening today in Mexico, Indonesia, immigrant communities in Los Angeles, etc.) and therefore had some of the first and strongest incentive to organize. The male-dominated condition of the labor movement and the industrial workforce today is precisely because of to the discriminatory laws that a powerful coalition of male mainstream union bosses, male corporate bosses, and male government officials managed to concoct during the labor struggles of the Gilded Age.

Of course, the ciritical role that women such as Sarah G. Bagley (a leading organizer in Lowell), Rose Schneiderman, Lucy Parsons, the female membership of the Knights of Labor, and innumerable others played in forming the labor movement, are often ignored in mainstream labor history. So are questions of women’s labor, the horrendous conditions imposed specifically on women under industrialization, and the struggles around the question of women’s labor and the anti-woman line that the mainstream male Left took in order to expand working men’s profits at the expense of working women’s (much like they used the racism and nativism of the post-Reconstruction era to exclude Blacks, Chinese-Americans, and poor immigrants from entering into unionized segments of the industrial workforce, thus protecting the profits of American-born white workers at the expense of all other workers). All of this isn’t too surprising, when we consider that the collective consciousness of the labor movement and labor history continues to be defined primarily by male organizers who aligned with the sexist AFL line and supported the discriminatory protective labor regulations that cut women out of the work force.

It’s also worth noting a couple of points about the relationship of all of this to feminism.

1. This unholy male supremacist alliance between mainstream male unions, male corporate bosses and Progressive regulation activists, emerged–like many other anti-woman alliances–during the post-Reconstruction period up to the 1920s, which happens to be more or less the same time as the peak of the struggle for women’s citizenship (with women’s suffrage finally being constitutionally protected in 1920). We may thus add it to the list of anti-woman institutions forming the backlash against First Wave feminism, including such illustrious company as Freudian psychoanalysis, the criminalization of abortion across the Western world, the flourishing of violent rape-based pornography in Victorian cities, and the AMA‘s efforts to seize control of women’s reproductive medicine away from midwives and other women into the hands of male surgeons.

2. The most effective forces in fighting the abuses inflicted on women laborers were organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization allying women of across social classes around the abuse specifically faced by women in the industrial workplace. The WTUL’s organizing efforts galvanized general strikes and other massive actions which eventually helped massively reform the horrendous sweatshop conditions faced by many garment workers (virtually all female) in New York. Not to be monomaniacal or anything, but once again organizing uniting all women on behalf of women (i.e., feminist organizing) was the most effective force in fighting patriarchal power.

She-Net has re-launched, with forums, a network of feminist websites, and feminist-oriented clothing, books, music, and movies [feminist media watch].

According to FindYourSpot, I should be living in Little Rock, Arkansas. I’m not entirely sure how it came up with that, but OK. Its following recommendations of Baltimore, Maryland and Sacramento, California were somewhat more explicable. However, no matter how many quizzes may tell me to, I will never ever ever live in New Orleans. Ever. I think it’s a serious methodological flaw of this quiz that it didn’t have a question to the effect of Do you have any objections to living in a festering, filthy cesspool of a city built on a swamp? Because this is an important factor in eliminating cities such as New Orleans and Houston from consideration.

The literary feud provoked by the opening salvo of B.R. Myers’ Atlantic Monthly philippic "about the GODAWFULNESS of today’s ‘Great Writing’" rages on, as both Laura Miller in Salon and Meghan O’Rourke in Slate weigh in (and, dear God, a Salon article actually linked to a Slate article? Has the Internet culture feud reached a detente?).

The Atlantic Monthly article is, sadly, not online (sad because, whatever its intellectual merits or demerits, Myer’s sniping is hilarious in the grand old tradition of Mark Twain’s broadsides against James Fenimore Cooper). But, to give a synopsis, Myers spends a long, growling, not entirely well-organized essay attacking (i) the marginalization of plot by "literary" writers and reviewers in favor of obsessive concerns with ostentatious style, and (ii) the style itself being opaque and near incomprehensible. Along with lots of "hoo-rahs" from critics and readers, there have been plenty more who step up to the plate to grandiloquently defend the Great Writing of the critical darlings Myers’ slams, provoking exactly the kind of notoreity and feud that I’m sure Myers had hoped his literary molotov cocktail would provoke.

One of the main complaints against Myers seems to be that his stance of populism against the critics boils down to a patronizing defense of unchallenging writing. Miller and O’Rourke try to straddle the divide with a bit of ironic detachment; sure, there’s a lot to complain about in these targets, but older classics often had very sloppy writing; there’s room for stylism and works whose pleasures are primarily linguistic rather than narrative; and besides which, the targets he hand-picks are a bit dated anyway. All well and good. On the other hand, I think people have short-shrifted Myers a bit on a few different points.

For one, he doesn’t have anything against stylistic writing; rather, he complains about writers who "exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry’s rigorous standards of precision and polish." The problem is not that writers aim at the suggestive and the mysterious rather than the lucid, but that they try to do this while ignoring the economy and focus that makes good, truly "evocative" or "suggestive" writing laser-accurate rather than diffuse nonsense of the sort seen in bad Ken Wilbur books about The Universe or black-clad adolescent angst-a-thons.

A perfect example of this problem is Barbara Kingsolver (who, Miller pointedly notes, Myers never mentions), who apparently took a very powerful and, yes, evocative series of vignettes about a doctor’s descent into dementia, then decided to stitch them together into a novel (Animal Dreams). She needed some bridge pieces to show the objective, outside world as a contrast to Doc Homer’s growing disconnection from reality. Her exercise could have worked out well in one of two ways: she could have abandoned the stitching project, and kept disjointed vignettes (in the style of, say, The Wasteland), while including the occasional return to reality as a paragraph or so fragmentary insert. Or she could have put together a strong, prose novel with a compelling plot and characters, with the vignettes appearing from the backdrop as brief descents into the inarticulable. But, defiantly eschewing both poetic mystery and prosaic sensibility, proudly knocking down both economy and clarity and dancing a jig on their backs, Kingsolver decided to concoct a sloppy, plodding bundle of banalities and clichés, peppered with meandering digressions, capped with a trite and pointless resolution. This is intersected every so often with evocative vignettes which, ultimately, fail to evoke much of anything unless they are analytically detached from the melodrama they are supposed to illuminate. Considered as a package the novel takes you nowhere, shows you nothing, and even where it was failing to take you is a boring, stupid place. This kind of a sloppy prose bellyflop, which flails about everywhere hoping to hit something praiseworthy somewhere through the law of averages, is a large part of what Myers is rightly criticising.

The other critique I find to be somewhat unfair is the complaint that Myers is being patronizing and suggesting that the "common folk" can’t take difficult or challenging prose, so good writers ought to aim at workmanlike, but non-heroic, lucid work. But this isn’t fair at all. Myers has no complaint about taking work to struggle through a book about something important. The problem with the self-styled literary prose of today is more that it, with trendy postmodern credentials, takes "challenge" as an end in itself, rather than the means to an end of realizing a genuinely complex and challenging truth. A book like Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which one of the definitive paragraphs consists of "Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?" presents an excruciating thicket of wordplay, ironic detachment, and non sequiturs which, when hacked through, only gets us to more nonsense. Rising to the challenge of a work is one thing; wasting time and effort on a work in which there is nothing to rise to and in which the "challenge" consists entirely of continuing the torturous challenge rather than using the book as a postmodern drink coaster is quite another.

All this fulminating to one side, no matter how much may be right or wrong with Myers, or his critics, I love this feud and I hope to be entertained by it for some time to come. I love seeing a critical battle, with every last drop of wit, bombast, and indignation deployed; there are few geekier pleasures in life.