Sorry, Dave but I take Sister Mukhopadhyay's side in this debate. We've begun an inexorable slide into the world of A Handmaid's Tale, spearheaded by America's fundamentalist equivalents of the Taliban but the reports today of a Congressional rebellion for fair treatment and early diagnosis for women's health may represent a much needed backlash against that trend.

Meanwhile, this piece seemed a foreshadowing of Fahrenheit 451!

Sorry, Dave but I take Sister Mukhopadhyay's side in this debate. We've begun an inexorable slide into the world of A Handmaid's Tale, spearheaded by America's fundamentalist equivalents of the Taliban but the reports today of a Congressional rebellion for fair treatment and early diagnosis for women's health may represent a much needed backlash against that trend.

Meanwhile, this piece seemed a foreshadowing of Fahrenheit 451!

Oh, brother!

An otherwise wonderful program on books this afternoon [Sunday, Nov. 30, 2:30 pm KQED radio] was ruined by the use of the gender-biased terms "man", "mankind", "men" etc. Studies long ago established that using these terms both reflects and reinforces males as "normal" and "central" and women as marginal. Virtually all academic institutions and journals, especially in the social sciences and humanities, use gender-neutral language. I have no problem doing that in my own teaching and writing. Why is public radio still back in the 1960s...or is this the backlash to feminism that has occurred on so many other fronts.