Does this group have a host?

[iverglas]

36. perhaps you would be wise to abstain

given that you seem not to agree with the SoP, at least as you say you understand it.

There's nothing in that statement that says that the issues mentioned should not be discussed here as they relate to women's issues -- see, for example, the thread on what people consider to be the most important issues today.

The reference to "women's rights and issues as they affect women from a woman's perspective and experience" indicates how the discussion is to be framed; it does not define "women's issues".

I'm a socialist feminist. In the thread I mentioned, I referred to the chicken-egg nature of the question: can women be safe w/o economic security, can women have economic security w/o being safe? e.g. That chicken-eggness is of course inherent in women's issues as it is in the issues of any other disadvantaged group.

A discussion of whether it is reasonable to expect to achieve safety for women without reforming the economic system would not be problematic, to my mind, since if focuses on the concerns and interests of women. If it broadened to include assertions that feminists should work to reform the economic system in the interests of other groups rather than working to further women's safety interests, or to focus instead on, say, the safety interests of blue-collar men that feminists should work to further because of their common safety interests, disregarding women's economic interests, that would cross the line, to my mind.

I would see no problem in discussion of how various groups' concerns and interests intersect with women's, and how that might affect feminists' analysis and actions.

It is the setting up of the concerns of another group as overriding the concerns of women qua women that I think is the problem. The consensus in this group in the past has been that there has been and is quite enough of that elsewhere. The consensus has been, and the original reason for the group was, that feminists here don't want to be told that women should sit in the back of the bus, or be thrown under that bus, in the Feminists group.

I do think members of other groups might understand that.

I know that the poverty analysis is important to you. It is to me as well; over the years of my law practice, for example, I did considerable work with low-income women / women in social housing / foreign domestic workers and the like. I'm a member of a social democratic political party. I have been talking about income inequality (in the general sense) at DU for years , since long, long before it became the idea du jour in the US. For example, in a "poverty analysis" of crime rates in 2003:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=1900&mesg_id=1930

What I generally argue in such situations is that, e.g., one does not say "crime cannot be addressed unless and until we narrow the income gap". Crime can be addressed by various other measures while awaiting economic utopia.

Ditto for women's concerns and measures to advance women's interests. It is not illegitimate to talk about such concerns from the perspective of women and not the perspective of any other group one might mention, and to take such measures without revolutionizing the entire social and economic system. It is not illegitimate to talk about how present circumstances harm women without talking about how they also harm other groups. It is instructive to examine the intersections, but it is not legitimate to dismiss the concerns of women as women, and the discourse of feminists as feminists, because they do not coincide with the concerns or analysis of some members of another social or economic or other group.

I don't claim to speak for anyone else in this, but I think, personally, that the hosts of the group should be on board with that fundamental vision of the group.