And the other surprise is that in some parts of the world, or by some people, it is celebrated in a similar way as Vallentyne’s day. I know international women’s day more like Jane Fleming and Katherine – demo’s, debates, oped pieces for the newspapers, debate on the radio. It’s actually the first time I hear about celebrating women’s day with chocolates and flowers are new to me.

We’ll be looking forward to it! Feminist-identified mothers, that is. And we won’t scold you if those posts are slow in coming – enjoy your little one and get the rest you need!

The priority in the US I believe is to end discrimination and sex segregation in the labor market for WORKING CLASS WOMEN—the two-thirds+ that don’t have college degrees. See to it that working class women have a realistic chance of getting traditionally male jobs in unskilled/semi-skilled manual labor and skilled trades. Sex segregation in these occupations has hardly decreased. Women are doing fine in management and the professions but fewer than 1% of auto mechanics are women. I have yet to see a woman mechanic—or house painter, plumber, appliance repair person, exterminator, electrician, or mobile carpet cleaner.

We’ve established a 3 gender system: men, women, and us—the unisex elite. The activists and writers on feminist issues are members of the unisex us. Most of us can’t imagine wanting to be mechanics, house painters, plumbers, etc. and can’t imagine our daughters stuck in pink-collar occupations because blue-collar jobs are de facto closed to women. So the issues that get us interested are the ones that affect, or could affect, us and people we know: glass ceilings in management and the professions, abortion, parental leave and child care, etc. But we’re a minority, not all women (or men) can get MBAs, law degrees or PhDs, and women who don’t/can’t get BAs are still largely confined to a relatively narrow range of overcrowded, underpaid, dead-end, deadly boring pink-collar jobs.

It’s worked out for me: I did lousy in high school but am at the top of the scale for aptitude and and interest in “mechanical activities.” If it weren’t for Sex Discrimination I would have been shunted off on some “vocational” track and never gotten to college. And much as I like monkeying with machinery and pride myself on my abilities as an automotive diagnostician, being a tenured professor is 37 billion times better than being a mechanic.

But honest to God this is important! There’s a class action sex discrimination suit agaist Walmart that potentially involves 2 million women. In the past there were sex discrimination suits against Sears, Home Depot and the Lucky supermarket chain. These get relatively little attention compared to issues that affect elite women—glass ceilings in management, women’s difficulties in getting onto the partnership track in law firms, stopping the tenure clock, etc. Working class women are turned off from feminism because it hasn’t done a very good job of addressing the issues that affect their lives. And they are the majority.

(Speaking of which, when do we get a 6 Nations update from Chris in which we point and laugh hysterically at everyone’s pre-tournament predictions?)

I still have memories of what must have been a major debate in the 80’s, when pressure was being put on the police to take domestic violence seriously and to stop downplaying “domestics”. That is really so recently it’s shocking.

If you wonder who on earth I am, I was once an SSRC Funded Researcher at Brunel with Professor Silverstone