Women’s voices, women’s choices

After being demoted and forced to retire, mRNA researcher wins Nobel by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

The finding kicked off the field of mRNA therapeutics and spurred the formation of both Moderna and BioNTech, the two companies that would go on to develop lifesaving mRNA vaccines against COVID-19…

However, the finding received little fanfare among much of the scientific community at the time, and Karikó’s research and contribution continued to go largely unappreciated before the pandemic. In 2013, Karikó said she was forced to leave UPenn.

As Dan Killam writes, “We should wonder what excellent, transformative ideas are being back burnered because they’re too hard to get funded, hired or tenured with.”

(ETA: more details about Karikó’s career and the poor treatment she faced.)

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The Right to Listen by Astra Taylor

When I began filming “What Is Democracy?,” I cringed at my own voice, which sounds nothing like the voices of the men who generally occupy positions of cinematic authority. For better and worse, my documentary sensibility has been shaped by male directors, such as Errol Morris, Adam Curtis, and Werner Herzog, whom viewers can often hear offscreen, asking probing questions or providing erudite commentary. I had fully absorbed the sound of the male auteur and sage.

Meanwhile, Isaacson, chronicler of (mostly male) ‘geniuses,’ reveals himself as either unreliable narrator or poor fact-checker at best with his Musk biography. He wanted to listen only to Musk, and in doing so ignored the quieter voices pointing out the harm in Musk’s approach.

Over the centuries, we’ve been taught to believe that deep voices are deep. Margaret Thatcher, famously, took lessons with a speech coach at the National Theatre to learn how to lower her pitch; Theresa May has admitted to modulating her delivery in the House of Commons, lest she sound a “shrill note.”

The very pitch of our voices becomes an excuse to dismiss us. The emotion our voices carry becomes an indication we are merely hysterical, thus unreasoning. This makes writing an even more valuable outlet for women, where our words might receive more consideration (though perhaps not).

To defend our right to listen to one another, we must sometimes strain to hear voices that the powerful would drown out.

Emphasis mine.

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The Shared Anti-Trans and Anti-Abortion Playbook by Irin Carmon

Although the issues aren’t identical, both involve who gets to make decisions over one’s own body and life’s course. For years, some anti-abortion activists have tried to argue that they are the true feminists, protecting women’s true maternal nature even when the arrangement has to be forced upon them. A similar co-opting of feminism is at work with anti-trans forces.

Emphasis mine.

A smothering of other women’s voices: we know better than them what they want. It dismisses the femininity of women who do want bodily autonomy, polices womanhood.

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The Return of the Marriage Plot by Rebecca Traister (The Cut)

It’s not just the think-tank-economist-columnist class prescribing the marriage cure. It’s also hard-right commentators and politicians pushing policies aimed to re-center (hetero) marriage as the organizing- principle of American family life by reversing the progress — from legal abortion to affirmative action to no-fault divorce — that has enabled women to have economic and social stability independent of marriage. This desire was voiced most evocatively last year by conservative radio host Steven Crowder, who bemoaned the fact that his ex-wife had “decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore, and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.”

Respecting someone’s right to a voice aligns with believing they’re allowed to make their own choices.

See also: White men have controlled women’s reproductive rights throughout American history – the post-Dobbs era is no different by Rodney Coates (The Conversation)

It’s clear that at least some of what is motivating conservatives is the threat of women in positions of power. When Roe was overturned, Ohio’s J. D. Vance, then running for the Senate, tweeted that “if your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.” The sentiments, like Brooks’s plea to Times readers to focus more on weddings than careers, give away part of the game: the fantasy that a return to a traditional family structure would take high-achieving women out of the job market.

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My So-Called #TradWife Life by Anne Helen Petersen (ELLE)

Because here’s the truth: Tradwife behaviors aren’t something you can try out like a new morning routine. They seem to require a wholesale ideological conviction that a woman’s primary role is to be the helpmate of her spouse. They demand a subsumption of personal will, an unquestioning eagerness to bend to a man’s desires—and a belief that those who don’t are sinning against God.

Emphasis mine.

That also doesn’t mean feminism has failed us. It means that legislatures largely controlled and influenced by men—many of whom believe in some version of biblical womanhood—have worked really hard to make a life of submission this attractive, and a life of agency this hard.