Tag: feminism

An Open Letter To Congress On Family Planning And Healthcare

March 14, 2017 / Katie L. Carroll

Dear Congress (and those of you reading my blog),

I have grave concerns about the message you are sending to women about our ability to control our reproductive futures and our capacity for family planning. Each woman has her own reproductive journey, many with far more obstacles than I have had, but I think it’s important for all of us to share what we face when trying to make reproductive choices for ourselves and our families.

My family planning has been very successful to date. When I first started birth control, I went to Planned Parenthood for my ob-gyn services. They provide affordable, convenient healthcare for women, and it was a good option for me. In addition to birth control and preventative care (like yearly pap smears), they provide life-saving services. I had an abnormal pap-smear and had to have a cervical biopsy done (which turns out is way more common than I realized). Luckily, I was given a clean bill of health after the biopsy and only had to follow up with more frequent pap-smears for a few years.

Oral contraceptives worked for me for many years. I had to be on a more expensive, low-hormone version because the higher-hormone ones caused me to pass out. This was before birth control was covered under the ACA. So even though I had decent insurance through my employer, I was paying around $600 out of pocket for birth control each year. Again, I was lucky because I was able to afford that for the 10 or so years I was on it.

Then when I decided to start trying to have children, I went off the pill and used condoms for several months in order to give my system time to regulate itself. After that I got pregnant with my first child pretty quickly. I nursed my oldest child for 20 months, so I opted not to have any hormone-related birth control and relied on condoms. When it was time to try for child number two, once again, I got pregnant pretty much immediately after not using any form of birth control. Similar circumstances of nursing, condoms, and conception occurred for baby number three, who is due to arrive this summer.

That is a very brief account of 15+ years of active family planning. I could tell you about the time I was on vacation and forgot condoms, and the only ones I could find to purchase were less-than-ideal. Or about the first pregnancy test I took when the line was so faint, I wasn’t sure if it was positive or not and ended rereading the instructions and searching the Internet in order to determine that it was, in fact, a positive result. Or about how my first child was born 17 days early during a hurricane and how my second was born within a few hours of my water breaking and I barely made it to the hospital in time.

I also haven’t mentioned my marital status thus far. I don’t believe it’s Congress’s business what my marital status is. I will tell you that my partner has been an active part of our family planning and has supported my decisions, and that has been very important to me. Nor have I mentioned my education, which should also be irrelevant when talking about adequate healthcare.

While the actual reproduction part of having or not having children has been relatively easy, the childcare part is where things got a little trickier. I worked full-time for a year after my first child was born. I was lucky (again, notice how much I’m using that word) to have a flexible schedule where I could work from home several days a week and I had family to help out with childcare. Then there came a time when that arrangement was not working anymore. The responsibilities of working full-time, doing freelance work, and caring for my child became too hard.

When I looked into daycare, it would have taken somewhere in the range of 70-90% of my income to pay for it, depending on where and how often I sent my child. Though I had never anticipated leaving my full-time job to be full-time caregiver, that was the best option for my family.Living solely on my partner’s income has proven to be challenging both financially (though we’re certainly not destitute) and emotionally. I do not like having to depend on someone else for financial stability, and that feeling has nothing to do with my trust or confidence in my partner. It has to do with being a grown women and not being financially independent. I’ve had a job since I was 9 years old (my first job was delivering newspapers), and while I still do freelance work and write, the tiny amount of money I take in is almost negligible.

Back before the 2016 election (when we decided to try for baby number three), I was hopeful for better and more affordable healthcare coverage for me and my family. I was hopeful for a chance–or at least a discussion–at universal preschool. I was hopeful about sending my children to college in the future with none of us having to go into huge amounts of debt. I was hopeful for the country.

Throughout my working life, the cost of healthcare–first under my own policy when I worked full-time and now under my partner’s–has continued to rise. The ACA has certainly not been a perfect solution, but we were at least guaranteed no out-of-pocket costs for preventative care (and there are a lot of well-visits the first few years of a child’s life), maternity coverage, birth control (it sure would have saved me a lot of money had this been the case when I was on birth control), and coverage for pre-existing conditions (as pregnancy is considered a pre-existing condition). And there was the hope that the country would continue to move in a direction of more affordable healthcare for all.

Now there’s a new Republican healthcare bill on the table, one that doesn’t guarantee all of what I mentioned above. It’s a step in the opposite direction. It cuts services and raises premiums for those who are the most needy (of which I am not). Some Republicans have made it clear, they don’t think men should have to contribute to prenatal care. Some also think that maternity coverage should not be a given under healthcare. What happens to the women and their unborn children who will no longer be able to afford proper prenatal and delivery services? What about babies that end up in neonatal care? How are families going to pay for that?

All this from a political party that stands on a pro-life platform. A party that has continued to chip away at funding for Planned Parenthood, even though it’s well-established that ZERO federal funding goes toward abortions. And what happens when access to women’s healthcare services provided by places like Planned Parenthood is eliminated? Women die. In Texas, where resources for women’s healthcare have been under attack for years, the maternal death rate has skyrocketed.

The message I am getting from the Republican Congress is that they are pro-birth, but they are against giving women options for family planning and they are leaving families out to dry when it comes to actually having to raise those children. Some of them probably even use religion to justify the belief that it’s not a woman’s right to abstain from having sex with her husband, yet they have no desire to offer birth control options or even care for a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Pro-life is a misnomer.

My partner’s insurance is up for renewal in June, a month before our third child is due to be born. What happens to us if our new insurance doesn’t cover maternity care? Delivering a baby in a hospital is expensive without health insurance (and sometimes not so cheap depending on what kind of insurance you have), expensive enough to put this middle-class family in debt if we have to pay out-of-pocket for it all. I’ve never felt so anxious about the expense of birthing a child, and I didn’t expect this when we planned for this baby.

The message I’m getting from the Republican Congress is that they don’t care about my ability to family plan or to raise my family. They want to make the insurance companies more profitable. They want to control what I do with my body under their terms, but they don’t want to give me the tools to do that in a healthy, affordable way. They want to provide tax assistance for the wealthy to get healthcare, but they don’t care if poor people can afford to be healthy. (And I’m not even getting into other anti-family policies here, like barring same-sex couples from adopting.)

Is that the message they want to send? If it’s not, I hope they get their act together and start sending a better one with their words, actions, and proposed laws. If it is the message they want to send, then I hope we all (women and men both) vote them out of office in the next elections. Because I believe in a country where the health and well-being of women and children are some of the most important values we can support. I think our lawmakers should believe that and make laws accordingly.

#InkRipples Feminism Wrap-Up, Round Up Style

March 28, 2016 / Katie L. Carroll

For my final #InkRipples post for March, here’s a hodgepodge of different, interesting things I’ve come across that can fall under the topic of feminism.

My entire #FemalesInYA series: https://katielcarroll.com/tag/females-in-ya-2/.

UN Women’s #HeForShe campaign: http://www.heforshe.org/en.

Taylor Swift’s Grammy speech:

A little piece of local (for me) history: “The Smith Sisters and Their Cows Strike a Blow for Equal Rights”.

Two links for book lists: “The Best Feminist Books for Younger Readers” and “The Best Feminist Picture Books”.

A fun video the boys and I like to watch:

Shutting down sexism in GIFs: “22 Times Tina Fey And Amy Poehler Shut Down Sexism In The Best Damn Way”.

Quotes from a Supreme Court Justice: “All rise! 9 amazingly feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes in honor of her new book”.

A serious look at the way women are objectified in ads:

And finally a link to a wrap-up article in this wrap-up post: “35 Inspiring Feminist Moments From 2015“.

#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (next month we’re talking poetry), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. Be sure to check out Kai’s and Mary’s posts this month. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.

Feminism in YA Fantasy: A Study of ELIXIR BOUND #InkRipples #FemalesInYA

March 21, 2016 / Katie L. Carroll

When I started writing ELIXIR BOUND many, many moons ago, I never intended to write a novel with feminist themes. I set out to write a fantasy adventure about two sisters with a structure modeled on the there-and-back-again journey of THE HOBBIT (a very non-feminist book!). Being the third of five children and a woman, it was important to me that the guardianship of the Elixir wasn’t passed down to the firstborn or a son, but I didn’t necessarily think about it in terms of feminism as I wrote the book.

It was only after I finished the first draft that I realized that I had created feminist characters, a feminist mythology, and a general feminist worldview.

At one point in an early draft, I had an older, male character–Hirsten’s father–in a brief scene question the decision to let Katora, a young woman, lead the quest to find the secret healing Elixir. He wasn’t questioning her abilities as leader, but the fact that Katora’s father was comfortable letting her venture into the dangerous Faway Forest. It stemmed from the fact that he only had male children and young women seemed a bit of a mystery to him.

I remember that as I wrote that scene, something about it wasn’t sitting well with me. I couldn’t pinpoint what the problem was until I had a whole draft, and then I quickly realized it didn’t fit in with the worldview I had created in pretty much every other aspect of the story. The world of ELIXIR BOUND wasn’t a place where the gender of a person was a reason to question whether or not they should do something. And it was only then that I was able to consciously recognize the type of world I had created.

The Greater Peninsula is ruled by Mother Nature, an unseen goddess character, whom Katora often refers to in dialogue as the “Great Mother” in way that in our world would probably be considered blasphemy (though it’s okay in her world). A young women leads the quest to find the secret ingredient for the Elixir, and the other women on the quest, though different, are certainly as worthy as any of the male characters, and believe themselves to be so. And so do the male characters…all of them (once I got rid of that rogue scene with Hirsten’s father). The external antagonist is called a witch, but she is really a minor goddess and has three male characters as her henchmen. No shortage of feminism there.

I suppose my own feminist ideas bled into the world I was creating all of their own accord. Once I was able to take a step back from the work and look at what I had done, it clicked that this was the way it was supposed to be. It’s my world, right, so why shouldn’t it have a more idealized version of women’s rights? I’m not saying it’s a perfect world or that I represent feminism in a perfect way, but it sure filled a need in me to create a world that didn’t paint someone like me in an inferior way.

I’ve read a lot of fantasy, and a whole lot of YA fantasy. Adult fantasies and their portrayal of women has generally been a disappointment; I know there are exceptions to this, but as a whole the genre is seriously lacking. There are many amazing female characters in YA fantasy, too many to list here (but for a sampling, Katsa from GRACELING, any of Tamora Pierce’s female characters, Alina from the The Grisha series, and Elisa from the Fire and Thorns series). The thing about a lot of these awesome female characters is that they often are the outliers: women doing things that men usually do or bucking against a world with inherent sexism. (Again, I recognize I’m generalizing here and that there are exceptions to this, but I’m talking about the greater picture I’ve observed in fantasy.)

So it came as a surprise to me that my world might be considered unique. I didn’t really think of it as such (I mean, everything has been done before, so I never consider anything I do as even remotely close to unique), but after thinking about it and noticing the trends in what I’ve read, I was like, “Huh. Maybe I’ve got something slightly out of the norm here.”

Then I thought, “Well, isn’t that kind of sad.” Even in our imaginary worlds, we can’t seem to break out of the sexist mold that we are pegged into in our real world. Even when we have dynamic, interesting female characters that pass the Bechdel Test, we too often put them in a patriarchal world, or worse a sexist one, or worst one that normalizes violence against women. (Seriously, just Google “sexism and fantasy” for a whole slew of articles about the topic.)

I’d love to read more fantasy books with a feminist outlook and not just the so-called “strong” female characters. So please throw some recommendations out there, and we can work on bringing more attention to fantasy books with feminist worlds.

#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (there’s still time to add to the March topic of feminism), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. Be sure to check out Kai’s and Mary’s posts this month. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.

March #InkRipples: Feminism, Title IX, and Aging

March 7, 2016 / Katie L. Carroll

I guess I was born a feminist. When I say “feminist,” I mean someone who believes women should have equal rights to men (for further discussion on this, see my post “Females in YA: Part 9 Feminism”). What girl isn’t born a feminist? And for that matter, what boy isn’t? I have a hard time believing a boy could be born and suddenly think, “I am a far superior being than any girl and deserve to be treated as such.”

But then we (both girls and boys) are exposed to our parents’ ideas, beliefs, and prejudices; and then our peers’ ideas, beliefs, and prejudices (and by extension their parents’ I/B/P); and societies’ I/B/P. So somewhere along the way, many of us become non-feminists. Or maybe we stop thinking that feminism is still important or relevant.

I think this was me in middle and high school: though I never stopped believing women deserve equal rights to men, I just didn’t see the need for feminism anymore. Admittedly I fell into the trap of thinking being a feminist meant I had to be a radicalized bra-burning, man-hating woman. And I also believed I was being treated equal to my male peers.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older: It was an earlier push for equal rights that granted me the ability to be apathetic about it. I grew up playing sports in a post Roe v. Wade world and post Title IX era, which states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

That created an environment where my fellow female athletes and I were often celebrated along with our male counterparts because we were just as successful, or even more successful. We were treated with respect and won awards and accolades. We wore our own letter jackets, not our boyfriends’. Not to say we never heard the comments about “playing like a girl” or where our “place” in the world was, but I always felt those comments were from people of an older generation who had no clue. They were antiquated ideas, outdated. Or so I believed at the time.

As I’ve gotten older and my horizons have expanded beyond my (maybe progressive) hometown, I’ve seen a bigger picture of how women are being treated in the U.S. and the world. It’s not a pretty picture. I’ve also been educating myself about the gender pay gap (see “There’s A Gender Pay Gap At Every Age, And It Only Gets Worse As Workers Get Older” by Shane Ferro), sexism in the tech industry and Hollywood (see “Why are women leaving the tech industry in droves” by Tracey Lien and “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out” by Maureen Dowd), and the cost of staying home to raise children (see “When Being A Stay-At-Home Mom Isn’t a Choice” by Jillian Berman).

I see the assault on a woman’s right to make choices about her own body and the rampant and disgusting sexism in this year’s presidential election, and the importance of feminism is more obvious to me than ever before. I have a desire to be more outspoken in my mindset of being a feminist. I sometimes feel alone in this because sexism isn’t rampant in my everyday life and in the live’s of many of the people I know, and there isn’t necessarily an immediate need for us to rise up and demand equal rights. I’m lucky to live in a place where my rights as a woman are protected…for now.

It’s that “for now” that gives me pause and drives me to a greater call. I want the next generation of women to feel secure in their rights and that they are considered equal to men. I want them to feel this way their whole lives, not have a sense that their worth erodes as they get older, which is something I have begun to feel and I’m only in my mid-thirties.

Feminism is a topic I have many, many thoughts on, far too many for one blog post. I know, too, that it’s a divisive topic. I’ll be revisiting it throughout the month here on the blog. Coming up soon, look for a post about how my first novel ELIXIR BOUND ended up having many feminist viewpoints in it, initially without a lot of intention on my part.

#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (March is all about feminism), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. Be sure to check out Kai’s and Mary’s posts this month. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.

Females in YA: Part 9 Feminism

February 3, 2015 / Katie L. Carroll

Somewhere along the line the word “feminist” got a bad rap, so much so that people seem to be confused about what it really means to be a feminist. Feminism is simply “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men”. So if you think women should have equal rights as men, then you’re a feminist. No man-hating or bra burning required!

When the heck did feminism become a bad thing anyway? Turns out a simple Internet search turns up plenty of discussion on that topic already. See “When Did Feminism Become a Bad Thing?” by Daisy Lindlar; “Why men have a problem with the word ‘feminism'” by Martin Daubney; and “Feminism: Has it Become a Dirty Word?” by Barbara & Shannon Kelley…just to name a few.

The idea of feminism has been so construed to some kind of men vs. women mantra that even these 10 really famous women celebrities (including Madonna and Susan Sarandon) have come out and said point-blank that they are not feminists. Many of whom go out of their way to say they are “humanist” (whatever the hell that means…can anyone who isn’t a sociopath not be a humanist?), but I suspect that they are actually feminists and are simply under the delusion that feminism is a bad thing. There’s even a hashtag on Twitter #womenagainstfeminism. Really?

C’mon, ladies, let’s get our shite together and take back the word. (Initially I wrote “our word” but changed it because men can be and should be feminists, too.) Still not convinced you’re a feminist? Check out the article “Not Sure What Feminism Is? Allow These Famous Authors To Explain” by Maddie Crum. Even as I write this rally cry, it seems someone may have beaten me to the punch.

In September 2014, UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson made a speech about gender equality (i.e. feminism) and launched the HeForShe campaign. Among the things she said about was this:

I decided I was a feminist and this seemed uncomplicated to me. But my recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word.

Apparently I am among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-men and, unattractive.

Why is the word such an uncomfortable one?”

After this speech, Watson faced both praise and criticism (see the article “Emma Watson’s UN speech: what our reaction says about feminism” by Michelle Smith), and also threats to release nude photos–which didn’t actually exist–of Watson (see “The Emma Watson Threats Were A Hoax, But Women Face Similar Intimidation Online Every Day” by Emma Gray). In my mind, it was yet one more thing to confirm that we do need feminism and that we need to show what being a feminist really is.

So by now you’re probably asking, “Ummmm, Katie, when are we going to get to the part about YA?” Patience, dearies, and you shall be rewarded! Before we get to the YA part, let me point you to one more article, “Teen spirit: young feminist heroes” by Kira Cochrane, showcasing real, non-celebrity young people and their insights on feminism.

Okay, so now we’ve finally reached the YA part of all this. Writers of YA have a huge impact on the lives of teenagers. We can take our own messages of feminism and weave them into our narratives (in a non-didactic way of course). And I, for one, think we not only can, but we should. Let’s not pretend that gender inequality hasn’t infiltrated not only the fictional world of YA but also the real world in which women and men writers are treated differently (see “A Censored History of Ladies in YA Fiction” by Kelly Jensen).

Will feminism be a central issue in every piece we write? Certainly not. But even when we write about something else, like first love or a daring adventure, I think it’s important to understand what messages, even indirectly, we are sending to our readers. Is every character we are going to write be a feminist? Again, of course not. But it’s important to examine our work and wonder if in it we are buying into and maybe even feeding into gender inequality. Let’s not pigeonhole our characters, thereby not pigeonholing our teen readers.

And just in case I haven’t given you enough reading to do already with all those links, here are a few more that make me hopeful for the idea of feminism in YA: “13 Contemporary Novels All Feminists Should Read” by Emma Cueto, “13 Female Young Adult Fiction Authors That Owned 2014” by Caitlin White, and “2015 Is the Year of the Feminist YA Novel” by Kelly Jensen.

Finally, let me state for the record that I, Katie Carroll, YA author, am a feminist.