Reading these chapters, concerning events that took place during my early lifetime, I’m struck by how much I unconsciously conflated the vast improvements in “women’s lot” with the natural opportunities of a wider community that came as I moved from elementary school to high school school and away from my working-class urban community to a midwestern land-grant college. Sure, I was a proud “women’s libber” (helping with childcare services for the Womyn’s Music Festival, getting kicked out of a Marxist lesbian separatist working group for insufficient seriousness), but in hindsight I can understand that I had no idea how much of my exhilarating new freedom came through the hard work of women just 10 or 20 or 50 years older than I was, women who’d spent their lives doggedly unpicking locked doors so I could slam through them wearing my Ladies Home Journal “A Woman’s Place Is EVERYWHERE” t-shirt. And I’m sure I’m not the only under-60 woman (person) who’s made the same assumptions about how “easy” it was to break down those barriers…
Republican women tended to favor the Equal Rights Amendment, but it raised hackles among many Democrats because it would eliminate the protective laws they had struggled to pass during the last generation. Esther Peterson had spent much of her life working with desperate women who were crippled by the physical demands of their jobs, sexually harrassed by their supervisors, and deprived of enough time to be proper mothers to their undernourished children. She resented the “elite, privileged old ladies” who cared about only their own emancipation. “Are women better off being singled out for protection, or are they better served by erasing all legal distinctions between men & women? As the lettuce pickers & cafeteria workers know, it depends on your status,” she said.
Ah, social/class shaming. Guilt — the first, best, most-often-used weapon against women. How can we privileged American women complain about being kept out of the White House, when women are still undergoing genital mutilation and being sold into childhood prostitution elsewhere? (I thought one of the most brilliant ‘needful words’ in Laadan was doroledim…)
It was a very old & very painful debate. The fight for women’s rights and the struggle for racial justice had almost always been linked in America. Abolition of slavery had been the first political issue that brought large numbers of women into the public world, and many of them pointed out the similarities they saw in the treatment of women & African-Americans. Black leaders were grateful for the support but tended to feel that however bad & repressive Victorian marriages were, they were not quite as grim as slavery & lynching. From the beginning, each cause was keenly aware that when they presented a joint front, critical support tended to dwindle away…
And the wealthy white men who control most political power have learned very, very well how to play the “there’s only enough room to slot in ONE minority” game. Works just great — for them — and us “minorities” are still falling for it!
Of all the forces of progress Smith wanted to stop, civil rights was at the top of the list. “Congressman Smith would joyfully disembowel the civil rights bill if he could. Lacking the votes to do so, he will obstruct it as long as the situation allows,” said a writer in the New York Times Magazine…
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“An NAACP for Women”
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Howard Smith’s decision to play games with the Civil Rights Act was an extraordinary example of unintended consquences. At the time he introduced his amendment, the idea of ending job discrimination against was on almost no one’s radar… But of course, once the CRA was amended, expectations rose. And when it became clear that the EEOC had no intention of protecting women workers as the law required, it created instant militancy…
If I had known, when I was 15 or 16, just how tenous a structure NOW was — a handful of women, widely dispersed, with few resources and even less support — could I have been as recklessly brave with my feminist credentials?
Or might it have made me act more usefully, if I wasn’t so sure that richer, more educated, more politically powerful “someones” would have my back?
Book Chat: When Everything Changed (Week 2)Post + Comments (28)