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Apr. 1st, 2004 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxThere's an editorial posted on the main page of Bitch Magazine's website today that raises some interesting points about the way the word "choice" has changed our approach to women's rights.
She sites Rickie Solinger's book about abortion and adoption (which I read about half of before getting tired of what I perceived as whinyness about birth mothers' rights - not that they don't deserve them, just that she championed them in an irritating emotional way), which essentially argues that choice language is bad, because we don't really have free choice. Alternately, I guess we should use "rights", but that would limit what feminism was about, in my book. Rights implies having the legal right to do something. So? There are a lot of factors that would limit a person's real ability to exercise a right. I like choice.
But what I really wanted to point out from the article was a point I've made here before - namely, that not every choice you make (i.e. as a consumer) is inviolable and unquestionable just because you're a woman and a feminist.
She sites Rickie Solinger's book about abortion and adoption (which I read about half of before getting tired of what I perceived as whinyness about birth mothers' rights - not that they don't deserve them, just that she championed them in an irritating emotional way), which essentially argues that choice language is bad, because we don't really have free choice. Alternately, I guess we should use "rights", but that would limit what feminism was about, in my book. Rights implies having the legal right to do something. So? There are a lot of factors that would limit a person's real ability to exercise a right. I like choice.
But what I really wanted to point out from the article was a point I've made here before - namely, that not every choice you make (i.e. as a consumer) is inviolable and unquestionable just because you're a woman and a feminist.