实践主题

Do some research on globalization and give your comments with proper evidence and reasons.

实践目标

1) To get further and updated information on the topic we discussed in this unit

2) To be able to sustain a long speech on a topic

实践任务

（1）Discuss your views with your friends or classmates.

（2）Use proper words and expressions to show your attitude.

实践要求

Write down what has come to your mind during your thinking and discussion, and organize them into a neat essay.

Sample

Many books, songs, and movies have talked about feminism.There are also many great feminists who promote the liberation of women and improve their equality and rights in daily life.There are also different types and varieties of feminism.

Can you give some examples about such kind of information？

教师解析

The Variety of Feminism and their Contribution to Gender Equality

Gender Reform Feminisms

The feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s were the beginning of the second wave of feminism. They are liberal feminism, marxist and socialist feminism, and development feminism. Their roots were, respectively, 18th and 19th century liberal political philosophy that developed the idea of individual rights, Marx's 19th century critique of capitalism and his concept of class consciousness, and 20th century anti-colonial politics and ideas of national development. Gender reform feminism put women into these perspectives.

Liberal Feminism

Theoretically, liberal feminism claims that gender differences are not based in biology, and therefore that women and men are not all that different -- their common humanity supersedes their procreative differentiation. If women and men are not different,then they should not be treated differently under the law. Women should have the same rights as men and the same educational and work opportunities. The goal of liberal feminism in the United States was embodies in the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S.Constitution, which was never ratified. (It said, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.") Politically, liberal feminists formed somewhat bureaucratic organizations, which invited men members. Their activist focus has been concerned with visible sources of gender discrimination, such as gendered job markets and inequitable wage scales, and with getting women into positions of authority in the professions, government, and cultural institutions. Liberal feminist politics took important weapons of the civil rights movement -- antidiscrimination legislation and affirmative action -- and used them to fight gender inequality, especially in the job market. Affirmative action calls for aggressively seeking out qualified people to redress the gender and ethnic imbalance in work-places. That means encouraging men to train for such jobs as nursing, teaching, and secretary, and women for fields like engineering, construction, and police work. With a diverse pool of qualified applicants, employers can be legally mandated to hire enough different workers to achieve a reasonable balance in their workforce, and to pay them the same and also give an equal chance to advance in their careers. The main contribution of liberal feminism is showing how much modern society discriminates against women. In the United States, it was successful in breaking down many barriers to women's entry into formerly male-dominated jobs and professions, helped to equalize wage scales, and got abortion and other reproductive rights legalized. But liberal feminism could not overcome the prevailing belief that women and men are intrinsically different. It was somewhat more successful in proving that even if women are different from men, they are not inferior.

Marxist and Socialist Feminisms

Marx's analysis of the social structure of capitalism was supposed to apply to people of any social characteristics. If you owned the means of production, you were a member of the capitalist class; if you sold your labor for a wage, you were a member of the proletariat. That would be true of women as well, except that until the end of the 19th century, married women in capitalist countries were not allowed to own property in their own name; their profits from any businesses they ran and their wages belonged to their husband. Although Marx recognized that workers and capitalists had wives who worked in the home and took care of the children, he had no place for housewives in his analysis of capitalism.It was marxist feminism that put housewives into the structure of capitalism. Housewives are vital to capitalism, indeed to any industrial economy, because their unpaid work in the home maintains bosses and workers and reproduces the next generation of bosses and workers (and their future wives). Furthermore, if a bourgeois husband falls on hard times, his wife can do genteel work in the home, such as dressmaking, to earn extra money, or take a temporary or part-time job, usually white collar. And when a worker's wages fall below the level needed to feed his family, as it often does, his wife can go out to work for wages in factories or shops or other people's homes, or turn the home into a small factory and put everyone, sometimes including the children, to work. The housewife's labor, paid and unpaid, is for her family. Marxist and socialist feminisms severely criticize the family as a source of women's oppression and exploitation. If a woman works for her family in the home, she has to be supported, and so she is economically dependent on the "man of the house," like her children. If she works outside the home, she is still expected to fulfill her domestic duties, and so she ends up working twice as hard as a man, and usually for a lot less pay.

This source of gender inequality has been somewhat redressed in countries that give all mothers paid leave before and after the birth of a child and that provide affordable child care. But that solution puts the burden of children totally on the mother, and encourages men to opt out of family responsibilities altogether. To counteract that trend, feminists in the government of Norway allocated a certain portion of paid child care leave to fathers specifically.

Women in the former communist countries had what liberal feminism in capitalist economies always wanted for women --full-time jobs with state-supported maternity leave and childcare services. But marxist and socialist feminists claim that the welfare state can be paternalistic, substituting public patriarchy for private patriarchy. They argue that male-dominated government policies put the state's interests before those of

women: When the economy needs workers, the state pays for child-care leave; with a down-turn in the economy, the state reduces the benefits. Similarly, when the state needs women to have more children, it cuts back on abortions and contraceptive services. Women's status as a reserve army of labor and as a child producer is thus no different under socialism than under capitalism.

The solution of women's economic dependence on men thus cannot simply be waged work, especially if jobs continue to be gender-segregated and women's work is paid less than men's.Socialist feminism had a different solution to the gendered workforce than liberal feminism's program of affirmative action.It was comparable worth.In examining the reasons why women and men workers' salaries are so discrepant, proponents of comparable worth found that wage scales are not set by the market for labor, by what a worker is worth to an employer, or by the worker's education or other credentials. Salaries are set by conventional "worth," which is rooted in gender and ethnic and other forms of discrimination.

Comparable worth programs compare jobs in traditional women's occupations, such as secretary, with traditional men's jobs, such as automobile mechanic. They give a point values for qualifications needed, skills used, extent of responsibility and authority over other workers, and dangerousness. Salaries are then equalized for jobs with a similar number of points (which represent the "worth" of the job). Although comparable worth programs do not do away with gendered job segregation, feminist proponents argue that raising the salaries of women doing traditional women's jobs could give the majority of women economic resources that would make them less dependent on marriage or state benefits as a means of survival.

Development Feminism

Addressing the economic exploitation of women in post-colonial countries on the way to industrialization, development feminism has done extensive gender analyses of the global economy. Women workers in developing countries in Central and Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa are paid less than men workers, whether they work in factories or do piece work at home. To survive in rural communities, women grow food,keep house, and earn money any way they can to supplement what their migrating husbands send them.The gendered division of labor in developing countries is the outcome of a long history of colonialism. Under colonialism, women's traditional contributions to food production were undermined in favor of exportable crops, such as coffee, and the extraction of raw materials, such as minerals. Men workers were favored in this work, but they were paid barely enough for their own subsistence. Women family members had to provide food for themselves and their children, but with good land confiscated for plantations, they also lived at a bare survival level.

Development feminism made an important theoretical contribution in equating women's status with control of economic resources. In some societies, women control significant economic resources and so have a high status. In contrast, in societies with patriarchal family structures where anything women produce, including children, belongs to the husband, women and girls have a low value. Development feminism's theory is that in any society, if the food women produce is the main way the group is fed, and women also control the distribution of any surplus they produce, women have power and prestige.

In addition to gendered economic analyses, development feminism addresses the political issue of women's rights versus national and cultural traditions. At the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Forum held in Beijing in 1995, the popular slogan was "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights." The Platform for Action document that came out of the UN Conference condemned particular cultural practices that are oppressive to women - infanticide,dowry, child marriage, female genital mutilation. The 187 governments that signed onto the Platform agreed to abolish these practices. However, since they are integral parts of cultural and tribal traditions, to give them up could be seen as kowtowing to Western ideas. The development feminist perspective, so critical of colonialism and yet so supportive of women's rights, has found this issue difficult to resolve.

Indigenous women's own solution to this dilemma is community organizing around their productive and reproductive roles as mothers -- so that what benefits them economically and physically is in the service of their families, not themselves alone. However, this same community organizing and family service can support the continuance of cultural practices like female genital mutilation, which Western development feminists want to see eradicated. The decision to not interfere with traditional cultural practices that are physically harmful to girls and at the same time work for their education and better health care is a particularly problematic dilemma for development feminism.