What's
Wrong With Cinderella?
By PEGGY
ORENSTEIN
The New York Times
12/26/2006
I finally came unhinged in the dentist's office one of
those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic
books, DVDs and arcade games where I'd taken my
3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I'd
held my tongue. I'd smiled politely every time the
supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with "Hi,
Princess"; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast
joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her
"princess meal"; made no comment when the lady at Longs
Drugs said, "I bet I know your favorite color" and
handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose
for herself. Maybe it was the dentist's Betty Boop
inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the
exam chair and said, "Would you like to sit in my
special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?" I
lost it.
"Oh, for God's sake," I snapped. "Do you have a princess
drill, too?"
She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.
"Come on!" I continued, my voice rising. "It's 2006, not
1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl
really have to be a princess?"
My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker,
looked back and forth between us. "Why are you so mad,
Mama?" she asked. "What's wrong with princesses?"
Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in
America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call
princesses a "trend" among girls is like calling Harry
Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which
started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its
female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up
to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in
2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess
items. "Princess," as some Disney execs call it, is not
only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever
created; they say it is on its way to becoming the
largest girls' franchise on the planet.
Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own "world of
girl" line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys,
clothing, home dιcor and myriad other products. At a
time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they
became instant best sellers. Shortly before that, Mary
Drolet, a Chicago-area mother and former Claire's and
Montgomery Ward executive, opened Club Libby Lu, now a
chain of mall stores based largely in the suburbs in
which girls ages 4 to 12 can shop for "Princess Phones"
covered in faux fur and attend "Princess-Makeover
Birthday Parties." Saks bought Club Libby Lu in 2003 for
$12 million and has since expanded it to 87 outlets; by
2005, with only scant local advertising, revenues
hovered around the $46 million mark, a 53 percent jump
from the previous year. Pink, it seems, is the new gold.
Even Dora the Explorer, the intrepid, dirty-kneed
adventurer, has ascended to the throne: in 2004, after a
two-part episode in which she turns into a "true
princess," the Nickelodeon and Viacom consumer-products
division released a satin-gowned "Magic Hair Fairytale
Dora," with hair that grows or shortens when her crown
is touched. Among other phrases the bilingual doll
utters: "Vαmonos! Let's go to fairy-tale land!" and
"Will you brush my hair?"
As a feminist mother not to mention a nostalgic
product of the Grranimals era I have been taken by
surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-girl
culture that has risen around it. What happened to
William wanting a doll and not dressing your cat in an
apron? Whither Marlo Thomas? I watch my fellow mothers,
women who once swore they'd never be dependent on a man,
smile indulgently at daughters who warble "So This Is
Love" or insist on being called Snow White. I wonder if
they'd concede so readily to sons who begged for combat
fatigues and mock AK-47s.
More to the point, when my own girl makes her daily
beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool
classroom something I'm convinced she does largely to
torture me I worry about what playing Little Mermaid
is teaching her. I've spent much of my career writing
about experiences that undermine girls' well-being,
warning parents that a preoccupation with body and
beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes,
toys) is perilous to their daughters' mental and
physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget
all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn't matter
at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?
On the other hand, maybe I'm still surfing a washed-out
second wave of feminism in a third-wave world. Maybe
princesses are in fact a sign of progress, an indication
that girls can embrace their predilection for pink
without compromising strength or ambition; that, at long
last, they can "have it all." Or maybe it is even less
complex than that: to mangle Freud, maybe a princess is
sometimes just a princess. And, as my daughter wants to
know, what's wrong with that?
The rise of the Disney princesses reads like a fairy
tale itself, with Andy Mooney, a former Nike executive,
playing the part of prince, riding into the company on a
metaphoric white horse in January 2000 to save a
consumer-products division whose sales were dropping by
as much as 30 percent a year. Both overstretched and
underfocused, the division had triggered price wars by
granting multiple licenses for core products (say,
Winnie-the-Pooh undies) while ignoring the potential of
new media. What's more, Disney films like "A Bug's Life"
in 1998 had yielded few merchandising opportunities
what child wants to snuggle up with an ant?
It was about a month after Mooney's arrival that the
magic struck. That's when he flew to Phoenix to check
out his first "Disney on Ice" show. "Standing in line in
the arena, I was surrounded by little girls dressed head
to toe as princesses," he told me last summer in his
palatial office, then located in Burbank, and speaking
in a rolling Scottish burr. "They weren't even Disney
products. They were generic princess products they'd
appended to a Halloween costume. And the light bulb went
off. Clearly there was latent demand here. So the next
morning I said to my team, 'O.K., let's establish
standards and a color palette and talk to licensees and
get as much product out there as we possibly can that
allows these girls to do what they're doing anyway:
projecting themselves into the characters from the
classic movies.' "
Mooney picked a mix of old and new heroines to wear the
Pantone pink No. 241 corona: Cinderella, Sleeping
Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and
Pocahontas. It was the first time Disney marketed
characters separately from a film's release, let alone
lumped together those from different stories. To ensure
the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual
"mythologies," the princesses never make eye contact
when they're grouped: each stares off in a slightly
different direction as if unaware of the others'
presence.
It is also worth noting that not all of the ladies are
of royal extraction. Part of the genius of "Princess" is
that its meaning is so broadly constructed that it
actually has no meaning. Even Tinker Bell was originally
a Princess, though her reign didn't last. "We'd always
debate over whether she was really a part of the
Princess mythology," Mooney recalled. "She really
wasn't." Likewise, Mulan and Pocahontas, arguably the
most resourceful of the bunch, are rarely depicted on
Princess merchandise, though for a different reason.
Their rustic garb has less bling potential than that of
old-school heroines like Sleeping Beauty. (When Mulan
does appear, she is typically in the kimonolike hanfu,
which makes her miserable in the movie, rather than her
liberated warrior's gear.)
The first Princess items, released with no marketing
plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if
blessed by a fairy godmother. To this day, Disney
conducts little market research on the Princess line,
relying instead on the power of its legacy among mothers
as well as the instant-read sales barometer of the theme
parks and Disney Stores. "We simply gave girls what they
wanted," Mooney said of the line's success, "although I
don't think any of us grasped how much they wanted this.
I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some
grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was
envision a little girl's room and think about how she
could live out the princess fantasy. The counsel we gave
to licensees was: What type of bedding would a princess
want to sleep in? What kind of alarm clock would a
princess want to wake up to? What type of television
would a princess like to see? It's a rare case where you
find a girl who has every aspect of her room bedecked in
Princess, but if she ends up with three or four of these
items, well, then you have a very healthy business."
Every reporter Mooney talks to asks some version of my
next question: Aren't the Princesses, who are interested
only in clothes, jewelry and cadging the handsome
prince, somewhat retrograde role models?
"Look," he said, "I have friends whose son went through
the Power Rangers phase who castigated themselves over
what they must've done wrong. Then they talked to other
parents whose kids had gone through it. The boy passes
through. The girl passes through. I see girls expanding
their imagination through visualizing themselves as
princesses, and then they pass through that phase and
end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers or princesses,
whatever the case may be."
Mooney has a point: There are no studies proving that
playing princess directly damages girls' self-esteem or
dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is
evidence that young women who hold the most
conventionally feminine beliefs who avoid conflict and
think they should be perpetually nice and pretty are
more likely to be depressed than others and less likely
to use contraception. What's more, the 23 percent
decline in girls' participation in sports and other
vigorous activity between middle and high school has
been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine.
And in a survey released last October by Girls Inc.,
school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing
pressure to be "perfect": not only to get straight A's
and be the student-body president, editor of the
newspaper and captain of the swim team but also to be
"kind and caring," "please everyone, be very thin and
dress right." Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass
slipper and they'd be in business.
At the grocery store one day, my daughter noticed a
little girl sporting a Cinderella backpack. "There's
that princess you don't like, Mama!" she shouted.
"Um, yeah," I said, trying not to meet the other
mother's hostile gaze.
"Don't you like her blue dress, Mama?"
I had to admit, I did.
She thought about this. "Then don't you like her face?"
"Her face is all right," I said, noncommittally, though
I'm not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in
thrall to those Aryan features. (And what the heck are
those blue things covering her ears?) "It's just, honey,
Cinderella doesn't really do anything."
Over the next 45 minutes, we ran through that
conversation, verbatim, approximately 37 million times,
as my daughter pointed out Disney Princess Band-Aids,
Disney Princess paper cups, Disney Princess lip balm,
Disney Princess pens, Disney Princess crayons and Disney
Princess notebooks all cleverly displayed at the eye
level of a 3-year-old trapped in a shopping cart as
well as a bouquet of Disney Princess balloons bobbing
over the checkout line. The repetition was excessive,
even for a preschooler. What was it about my answers
that confounded her? What if, instead of realizing: Aha!
Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of
all women, another example of corporate mind control and
power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy
doesn't want me to be a girl?
According to theories of gender constancy, until they're
about 6 or 7, children don't realize that the sex they
were born with is immutable. They believe that they have
a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a
daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets
in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture
presents, whether it's piling on the most spangles or
attacking one another with light sabers. What better way
to assure that they'll always remain themselves? If
that's the case, score one for Mooney. By not buying the
Princess Pull-Ups, I may be inadvertently communicating
that being female (to the extent that my daughter is
able to understand it) is a bad thing.
Anyway, you have to give girls some credit. It's true
that, according to Mattel, one of the most popular games
young girls play is "bride," but Disney found that a
groom or prince is incidental to that fantasy, a
regrettable necessity at best. Although they keep him
around for the climactic kiss, he is otherwise relegated
to the bottom of the toy box, which is why you don't see
him prominently displayed in stores.
What's more, just because they wear the tulle doesn't
mean they've drunk the Kool-Aid. Plenty of girls stray
from the script, say, by playing basketball in their
finery, or casting themselves as the powerful evil
stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella. I
recall a headline-grabbing 2005 British study that
revealed that girls enjoy torturing, decapitating and
microwaving their Barbies nearly as much as they like to
dress them up for dates. There is spice along with that
sugar after all, though why this was news is beyond me:
anyone who ever played with the doll knows there's
nothing more satisfying than hacking off all her hair
and holding her underwater in the bathtub. Princesses
can even be a boon to exasperated parents: in our house,
for instance, royalty never whines and uses the potty
every single time.
"Playing princess is not the issue," argues Lyn Mikel
Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of "Packaging
Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers'
Schemes." "The issue is 25,000 Princess products," says
Brown, a professor of education and human development at
Colby College. "When one thing is so dominant, then it's
no longer a choice: it's a mandate, cannibalizing all
other forms of play. There's the illusion of more
choices out there for girls, but if you look around,
you'll see their choices are steadily narrowing."
It's hard to imagine that girls' options could truly be
shrinking when they dominate the honor roll and
outnumber boys in college. Then again, have you taken a
stroll through a children's store lately? A year ago,
when we shopped for "big girl" bedding at Pottery Barn
Kids, we found the "girls" side awash in flowers, hearts
and hula dancers; not a soccer player or sailboat in
sight. Across the no-fly zone, the "boys" territory was
all about sports, trains, planes and automobiles.
Meanwhile, Baby GAP's boys' onesies were emblazoned with
"Big Man on Campus" and the girls' with "Social
Butterfly"; guess whose matching shoes were decorated on
the soles with hearts and whose sported a "No. 1" logo?
And at Toys "R" Us, aisles of pink baby dolls, kitchens,
shopping carts and princesses unfurl a safe distance
from the "Star Wars" figures, GeoTrax and tool chests.
The relentless resegregation of childhood appears to
have sneaked up without any further discussion about sex
roles, about what it now means to be a boy or to be a
girl. Or maybe it has happened in lieu of such
discussion because it's easier this way.
Easier, that is, unless you want to buy your daughter
something that isn't pink. Girls' obsession with that
color may seem like something they're born with, like
the ability to breathe or talk on the phone for hours on
end. But according to Jo Paoletti, an associate
professor of American studies at the University of
Maryland, it ain't so. When colors were first introduced
to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century,
pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel
version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin
Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be
dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as
late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in
one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that's
why so many early Disney heroines Cinderella, Sleeping
Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland are swathed in
varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be
the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings
and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder
girl's version of pink.)
It wasn't until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and
sex differences became a key strategy of children's
marketing (recall the emergence of " 'tween"), that pink
became seemingly innate to girls, part of what defined
them as female, at least for the first few years. That
was also the time that the first of the generation
raised during the unisex phase of feminism ah, hither
Marlo! became parents. "The kids who grew up in the
1970s wanted sharp definitions for their own kids,"
Paoletti told me. "I can understand that, because the
unisex thing denied everything you couldn't be this,
you couldn't be that, you had to be a neutral nothing."
The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at
least in part, be a reaction against the so-called
second wave of the women's movement of the 1960s and
'70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which
fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and
legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have
resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of
feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional
femininity conferred on women despite its costs doors
magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo
Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks
of our sex until we're sure of what we'll get in
exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe
it's deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed
came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves
flowing through "Ally McBeal," "Bridget Jones's
Diary," "Sex and the City" of losing male love, of
never marrying, of not having children, of being
deprived of something that felt essentially and
exclusively female.
I mulled that over while flipping through "The Paper Bag
Princess," a 1980 picture book hailed as an antidote to
Disney. The heroine outwits a dragon who has kidnapped
her prince, but not before the beast's fiery breath
frizzles her hair and destroys her dress, forcing her to
don a paper bag. The ungrateful prince rejects her,
telling her to come back when she is "dressed like a
real princess." She dumps him and skips off into the
sunset, happily ever after, alone.
There you have it, "Thelma and Louise" all over again.
Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing
crazily over a cliff to your doom. Alternatives like
those might send you skittering right back to the
castle. And I get that: the fact is, though I want my
daughter to do and be whatever she wants as an adult, I
still hope she'll find her Prince Charming and have
babies, just as I have. I don't want her to be a fish
without a bicycle; I want her to be a fish with another
fish. Preferably, one who loves and respects her and
also does the dishes and half the child care.
There had to be a middle ground between compliant and
defiant, between petticoats and paper bags. I remembered
a video on YouTube, an ad for a Nintendo game called
Super Princess Peach. It showed a pack of girls in
tiaras, gowns and elbow-length white gloves sliding down
a zip line on parasols, navigating an obstacle course of
tires in their stilettos, slithering on their bellies
under barbed wire, then using their telekinetic powers
to make a climbing wall burst into flames. "If you can
stand up to really mean people," an announcer intoned,
"maybe you have what it takes to be a princess."
Now here were some girls who had grit as well as grace.
I loved Princess Peach even as I recognized that there
was no way she could run in those heels, that her
peachiness did nothing to upset the apple cart of
expectation: she may have been athletic, smart and
strong, but she was also adorable. Maybe she's what
those once-unisex, postfeminist parents are shooting
for: the melding of old and new standards. And perhaps
that's a good thing, the ideal solution. But what to
make, then, of the young women in the Girls Inc. survey?
It doesn't seem to be "having it all" that's getting to
them; it's the pressure to be it all. In telling our
girls they can be anything, we have inadvertently
demanded that they be everything. To everyone. All the
time. No wonder the report was titled "The Supergirl
Dilemma."
The princess as superhero is not irrelevant. Some
scholars I spoke with say that given its post-9/11
timing, princess mania is a response to a newly
dangerous world. "Historically, princess worship has
emerged during periods of uncertainty and profound
social change," observes Miriam Forman-Brunell, a
historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Francis Hodgson Burnett's original"Little Princess" was
published at a time of rapid urbanization, immigration
and poverty; Shirley Temple's film version was a hit
during the Great Depression. "The original folk tales
themselves," Forman-Brunell says, "spring from medieval
and early modern European culture that faced all kinds
of economic and demographic and social upheaval
famine, war, disease, terror of wolves. Girls play
savior during times of economic crisis and instability."
That's a heavy burden for little shoulders. Perhaps
that's why the magic wand has become an essential part
of the princess get-up. In the original stories even
the Disney versions of them it's not the girl herself
who's magic; it's the fairy godmother. Now if Forman-Brunell
is right, we adults have become the cursed creatures
whom girls have the thaumaturgic power to transform.
In the 1990s, third-wave feminists rebelled against
their dour big sisters, "reclaiming" sexual
objectification as a woman's right provided, of
course, that it was on her own terms, that she was the
one choosing to strip or wear a shirt that said "Porn
Star" or make out with her best friend at a frat-house
bash. They embraced words like "bitch" and "slut" as
terms of affection and empowerment. That is, when used
by the right people, with the right dash of playful
irony. But how can you assure that? As Madonna gave way
to Britney, whatever self-determination that message
contained was watered down and commodified until all
that was left was a gaggle of 6-year-old girls in
belly-baring T-shirts (which I'm guessing they don't
wear as cultural critique). It is no wonder that
parents, faced with thongs for 8-year-olds and Bratz
dolls' "passion for fashion," fill their daughters'
closets with pink sateen; the innocence of Princess
feels like a reprieve.
"But what does that mean?" asks Sharon Lamb, a
psychology professor at Saint Michael's College. "There
are other ways to express 'innocence' girls could play
ladybug or caterpillar. What you're really talking about
is sexual purity. And there's a trap at the end of that
rainbow, because the natural progression from pale,
innocent pink is not to other colors. It's to hot, sexy
pink exactly the kind of sexualization parents are
trying to avoid."
Lamb suggested that to see for myself how "Someday My
Prince Will Come" morphs into "Oops! I Did It Again," I
visit Club Libby Lu, the mall shop dedicated to the
"Very Important Princess."
Walking into one of the newest links in the store's
chain, in Natick, Mass., last summer, I had to tip my
tiara to the founder, Mary Drolet: Libby Lu's design was
flawless. Unlike Disney, Drolet depended on focus groups
to choose the logo (a crown-topped heart) and the colors
(pink, pink, purple and more pink). The displays were
scaled to the size of a 10-year-old, though most of the
shoppers I saw were several years younger than that. The
decals on the walls and dressing rooms "I Love Your
Hair," "Hip Chick," "Spoiled" were written in
"girlfriend language." The young sales clerks at this
"special secret club for superfabulous girls" are called
"club counselors" and come off like your coolest baby
sitter, the one who used to let you brush her hair. The
malls themselves are chosen based on a company formula
called the G.P.I., or "Girl Power Index," which predicts
potential sales revenues. Talk about newspeak: "Girl
Power" has gone from a riot grrrrl anthem to "I Am
Woman, Watch Me Shop."
Inside, the store was divided into several glittery
"shopping zones" called "experiences": Libby's
Laboratory, now called Sparkle Spa, where girls concoct
their own cosmetics and bath products; Libby's Room; Ear
Piercing; Pooch Parlor (where divas in training can
pamper stuffed poodles, pugs and Chihuahuas); and the
Style Studio, offering "Libby Du" makeover choices,
including 'Tween Idol, Rock Star, Pop Star and, of
course, Priceless Princess. Each look includes
hairstyle, makeup, nail polish and sparkly tattoos.
As I browsed, I noticed a mother standing in the center
of the store holding a price list for makeover birthday
parties $22.50 to $35 per child. Her name was Anne
McAuliffe; her daughters Stephanie, 4, and 7-year-old
twins Rory and Sarah were dashing giddily up and down
the aisles.
"They've been begging to come to this store for three
weeks," McAuliffe said. "I'd never heard of it. So I
said they could, but they'd have to spend their own
money if they bought anything." She looked around. "Some
of this stuff is innocuous," she observed, then leaned
toward me, eyes wide and stage-whispered: "But ... a lot
of it is horrible. It makes them look like little
prostitutes. It's crazy. They're babies!"
As we debated the line between frivolous fun and
JonBenιt, McAuliffe's daughter Rory came dashing up,
pigtails haphazard, glasses askew. "They have the best
pocketbooks here," she said breathlessly, brandishing a
clutch with the words "Girlie Girl" stamped on it.
"Please, can I have one? It has sequins!"
"You see that?" McAuliffe asked, gesturing at the bag.
"What am I supposed to say?"
On my way out of the mall, I popped into the " 'tween"
mecca Hot Topic, where a display of Tinker Bell items
caught my eye. Tinker Bell, whose image racks up an
annual $400 million in retail sales with no particular
effort on Disney's part, is poised to wreak vengeance on
the Princess line that once expelled her. Last winter,
the first chapter book designed to introduce girls to
Tink and her Pixie Hollow pals spent 18 weeks on The New
York Times children's best-seller list. In a
direct-to-DVD now under production, she will speak for
the first time, voiced by the actress Brittany Murphy.
Next year, Disney Fairies will be rolled out in earnest.
Aimed at 6- to 9-year-old girls, the line will catch
them just as they outgrow Princess. Their colors will be
lavender, green, turquoise anything but the Princess's
soon-to-be-babyish pink.
To appeal to that older child, Disney executives said,
the Fairies will have more "attitude" and "sass" than
the Princesses. What, I wondered, did that entail? I'd
seen some of the Tinker Bell merchandise that Disney
sells at its theme parks: T-shirts reading, "Spoiled to
Perfection," "Mood Subject to Change Without Notice" and
"Tinker Bell: Prettier Than a Princess." At Hot Topic,
that edge was even sharper: magnets, clocks,
light-switch plates and panties featured "Dark Tink,"
described as "the bad girl side of Miss Bell that Walt
never saw."
Girl power, indeed.
A few days later, I picked my daughter up from
preschool. She came tearing over in a full-skirted frock
with a gold bodice, a beaded crown perched sideways on
her head. "Look, Mommy, I'm Ariel!" she crowed.
referring to Disney's Little Mermaid. Then she stopped
and furrowed her brow. "Mommy, do you like Ariel?"
I considered her for a moment. Maybe Princess is the
first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over
her body image, a Hundred Years' War of dieting,
plucking, painting and perpetual dissatisfaction with
the results. Or maybe it isn't. I'll never really know.
In the end, it's not the Princesses that really bother
me anyway. They're just a trigger for the bigger
question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter
with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a
girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to
growing up female. Maybe the best I can hope for is that
her generation will get a little further with the
solutions than we did.
For now, I kneeled down on the floor and gave my
daughter a hug.
She smiled happily. "But, Mommy?" she added. "When I
grow up, I'm still going to be a fireman."
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