To Save Women’s Rights and Lives
There’s an Urgent Need to Mobilize
A heightened outbreak of misogyny and a determined take-over of women’s health decisions are a call to battle.
Update: March, 11, 2018: We’re now in a desperate era when the most critical of women’s human rights and hard-won civil rights are under virulent attack.
As a journalist who chronicled the second-wave feminist movement, I have been deeply concerned about the vastly limited means women have to cope with the present dangers. I have found that the use of the term, the third-wave feminist movement, doesn’t begin to apply to current threats in all aspects of our lives. What we have is not a movement. It is a battle.
Even with the outrage and fervor of the millions-strong Women’s Marches there isn’t yet any all hands on deck way to counter-attack. To begin with, we are up against a flagrant, uninhibited display of out and out misogyny inflamed by the worst use of social media and led by our self-admitted sexual assaulter of women president.
Women are being attacked on all fronts. Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s anti-public schools pick for Education Secretary,decided to throw out Obama-era guidelines for college rape investigations. She thinks they favor women over their accusers. What’s needed, she says, is for the women to provide more of the “ burden of proof.”
Burden is the word for it. As women everywhere are aware, rape is among the most difficult crimes to prove. Only 10 percent of college rape survivors have the fortitude to come forward. Under the DeVos rulings even fewer are likely to go through the mortification.
Women’s health rights are now under unremitting attack. A nearly all-male, all- Republican government keeps writing “health care” laws that take aim at the very nature of women’s physiology. Being a woman automatically means facing men intent on taking over reproductive health safety, health needs, health care decisions, many a matter life and death.
Republican ‘health care bill” proposals persist in eliminating funds for pregnancy and maternity care, mammograms, contraceptives. Each edition aims to cut spending to Medicaid, Title X and to Planned Parenthood, a women’s health-care haven for more than a hundred years. The thankfully-defeated Graham-Cassidy bill advocated turning health care over to the states, insuring that those with Republican governors would further curtail abortion under any circumstance, even the possibility of death. That threat fades, just a little, with the bill, leaving the increasingly conservative-heavy Supreme Court to take the knife to Roe v. Wade.
On another front, “religious grounds” have been enough reason for employers to deny women free birth control insurance. The ObamaCare Mandate has been taking care of those women working for deniers. Until Trump and his gang opened the denial option to just about any company, business owner or insurance plan that wants to make life more difficult for women.
Hundreds of thousands of women employees will be out of luck when it comes to preventing unintended pregnancies. Laws for repealing and “replacing” the Affordable Care Act would also give insurance companies the ability to deny coverage of people with pre-existing conditions. Over all, the proposed damage to women’s health care would, in the words of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, make “being a woman a pre-existing condition.” In a venomous time for our country, women’s welfare and equality are among the lowest priorities.
That wasn’t always the case. During the l970s’ second-wave feminist movement, the precious few women in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, were the ones who proposed, sponsored and got passed many women’s rights bills. And at times during that decade there were as few as 11 women in Congress and no women Senators.
One of them was Rep. Martha Griffiths, a Democrat from Michigan (1955–1974), known as “the women’s heroine.” She’s the Congresswoman who got the Equal Rights Amendment out of committee, out of Congress and out on the road. In a display of bi-partisanship current then the House passed the amendment bill 352 to 15!
Griffiths also, as she liked to say, put sex into Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She saw to it that women’s civil rights were added to the list — “sex, race, color, national origin and religion.”
That was all before Republican majorities voted in rock-hard unity. But women in office today still have a chance to right some wrongs. It took a Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, to bring the Graham-Cassidy (alleged) health care bill down, preventing chaos. She is one of only five Republican women in the Senate today.
There are still only a precious few women in Congress today. Of the 535 members of Congress there are only 22 women senators. 16 of them Democrats. And out of 435 seats in the House, there are only 106 congresswomen, 26 of them Republicans.
Of the preponderance of Democratic over Republican women in Congress, a huge reason has been the formidable Emily’s List, available for pro-choice women Democrats. There is nothing comparable for Republican women.
Since 1985, Emily’s List been recruiting and fundraising to help elect women candidates. And since Donald Trump was elected and the threats against women’s very lives have mounted, more than 20,000 women have contacted Emily’s List as potential political candidates. Last year, that number was under a thousand.
There are other groups with rising interest, like the Patsy Mink Center for Business and Leadership in Hawaii, active in promoting women. Mink was a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii (1965 -1977). Title IX is now known as the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, in honor of her role as its co-author and sponsor.
And there’s a terrific new project at the National Women’s Law Center, the Washington, D.C. women’s rights advocacy group. Its president, Fatima Goss Graves, recently announced the formation of the Legal Network for Gender Equity. Thirty attorneys from 15 states are now on board to help victims of gender discimination get legal representation. The goal is to have attorneys in 50 states.
Said the head of the American Civil Liberty Union’s Women’s Rights Project, Lenora Lapidus, cheering them on, “We come in like a tide that can push change more rapidly.”
It is also heartening that the organizers of the Jan. 21, 2017 Women’s March, which brought out millions of women followed through. This year, women marched by the millions over a two-day weekend. During a Women’s Convention last fall activists and movement leaders held workshops, strategy sessions, forums and “intersectional movement building” toward a “collective liberation of women.” If they can succeed in building a national network of activated women’s groups to harness the power surging through the millions of Women’s Marchers, we may yet see a movement to take over our lives again.
[This article is #81 in a collection of more than 100 newspaper articles by Judy Flander from the second wave of the Women’s Movement reflecting the fervor and ingenuity of the women who rode the wave.]
