Back to the Future, Part 4: If Only They Were Making America Great Again for Women . . .

Guys Just Wanna Have Fun--Regulating Women's Bodies

Thirteen years before he ran for president with a strong anti-abortion position, the God-Emperor for conservative Republicans, Ronald Reagan, approved an act liberalizing abortion law. On 15 June 1967, just six weeks into his term, Governor Reagan signed the Therapeutic Abortion Law. The optics were what you would expect for politics in 1967:

Reagan's Legislative Secretary is behind him;
on the far left is Republican assemblyman Craig Biddle,
looking over his shoulder is the Democratic Senator Anthony Bellenson

Yeah, it was four white guys happy to be in charge of what women could do with their bodies, but, hey!, it was FIFTY YEARS AGO! (And, afterwards, when he realized what he'd done, Reagan was really, really, really sorry about that bill . . . )

But, not to be outdone in the we're-the-boss-of-you department, here is George Bush signing the "partial birth" abortion ban in 2003:

There is a Democrat in this photo--or at least his head is there;
Senator Jim Oberstar was a pro-life Democrat

More smiling white guys! (And, yes, that's the paragon of virtue, Dennis Hastert, just to Bush's right--so nice to know he's thrilled with the prospect of regulating what women can do with their bodies and lives.) This picture was notorious for its masculine line-up FOURTEEN YEARS AGO!

But here we are, back to the future, in 2017, reinstating the so-called global gag order, from 1984 (yes, you read that correctly, Nineteen Eight-Four!): 

THE MORE THE MERRIER! From the left: Vice President Mike Pence,
White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus,
 National Trade Council adviser Peter Navarro,
 Senior Adviser Jared Kushner,
policy adviser Stephen Miller,
and chief strategist Steve Bannon--
nobody seems to  know who the guy between Miller and Bannon is . . . 
is it Don McGahn? (the forehead and hair look distinctive)

Do these guys never learn? Surely they could have rounded up a female body or two to stand in the frame? (By the way, the policy Trump was reinstating was originally put in place by Ronald Reagan in 1984--Clinton rescinded it in 1993, GW Bush reinstated it in 2001, Obama rescinded it in 2009. I'm tired.)

Anyway, I've been posting under the "Back to the Future" headline sarcastically--under the impression that Trump's desire to turn back the clock would be uniformly bad for women. But looking at this line-up, I'm  pretty sure we're way past sarcasm now . . . 

For previous "Back to the Future" posts: click for Part 1, for Part 2, for Part 3.

Back to the Future, Part 3: Women's Edition

The Women's March--Defending Roe v. Wade (22 January 1973)

Photo from Seattle's The Stranger,
announcing the Seattle Women's March,
21 January 2017

Today is the anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision--it took the Supreme Court to ensure that American women had some measure of control over their own bodies. But today women's reproductive freedom is under threat like never before in the more than forty years since 1973.

Yesterday, unprecedent numbers of feminists--women and men, who have always supported women's rights--marched in support of women's equality and rights. There were some 600 marches in cities and towns through the U. S., and over 40 in cities around the world. The largest event, drawing hundreds of thousands of women, was in Washington, D. C. (Evidently DJT's feelings are hurt that more people attended the march in D. C. than showed up at his inauguration. Sad.)

The more things change . . .

The first notable march on Washington undertaken by women--in support of suffrage--was in 1913, one day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson. 

And there was the Women's Strike for Equality on 26 August 1973--the biggest turnout may have been in New York, but over a thousand women marched in Washington D. C.. This nationwide strike was scheduled on the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Just four years later, on 26 August 1977, there was the Alice Paul Memorial March--Alice Paul had proposed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, and it still hadn't been passed. This march was in support of the amendment's passage. A year later, on 9 July 1978, some 100,000 women demonstrated in Washington D. C., again in support of the Equal Rights Amendment--it was "the largest march for women’s rights in the nation’s history."

Numerous marches to support women's equality have followed, beginning in 1986. 

But, of course, the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed, and here we are. It is now 2017, and women's rights are still not guaranteed under the constitution. And reproductive rights--including those guaranteed under Roe--are threatened.

Yesterday's Women's March was held on the day after the "presidential inauguration"--and it neatly coincides with the anniversary of the Roe. v. Wade decision (decided 22 January 1973).

It's going to be a tough time for women in this period of "making America great again." Don't forget. Don't give up. Stay strong. 

For Parts 1 and 2 of Back to the Future, click here and here.

As for me--did I march yesterday??? Well, ummmm, earlier this month, I was outside pruning my wisteria and I fell off a ladder. I am now confined to the house, hobbling around on crutches. But when I fell, I was wearing this shirt:

Mary Richardson, Suffragette, "Vandal," and Fascist

Mary Raleigh Richardson (died 7 November 1961)

I've posted many times here about women's long fight to gain the vote and about women who participated in that fight--some of them compelled to acts of violence. Mary Richardson is one of the most complex and complicated figures in the suffrage movement.

A surveillance photograph
of Mary Richardson,
taken in 1913 by Scotland Yard

Born in England in 1882, Richardson was raised in Ontario, Canada, by her Canadian mother and grandfather, returning to Britain when she was sixteen. Her life at the end of the nineteenth century seemed conventional enough--in 1898, for example, she was studying art, and then she traveled to Paris and to Italy. Once she completed her education, she moved to Bloomsbury and began a career as a journalist. 

But after witnessing the violence of the Black Friday Protests of 18 November 1910, Richardson found her life transformed, and she joined the Women's Social and Political Union, the militant suffrage group founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and dedicated to "deeds not words."

In 1912, the WSPU began a campaign of arson, directed by Pankhurst's daughter Christabel--the group attempted to destroy homes of members of parliament, then escalated their campaign to include setting fire to railway stations and other public facilities, cutting telephone lines, and destroying the contents of mailboxes.

Mary Richardson was committed to this increasingly militant--and violent--campaign, which she regarded as "a holy crusade." As biographer Hilda Kean describes the physical sufferings borne by Richardson as a result of her participation in these acts of politically motivated violence:  

She was arrested nine times, serving several sentences in Holloway prison for assaulting the police, breaking windows, and arson. She was frequently attacked while campaigning for the suffrage cause: her shoulder blade was broken and her clothing torn to shreds when she presented a petition to George V in Bristol in 1913. She campaigned with the socialist Sylvia Pankhurst in east London and was arrested and then imprisoned with her after a rally in Bromley by Bow in July 1913. 

Mary Richardson was one of the first two women to be force fed, under the "Cat and Mouse Act" in 1913, having been arrested at the scene of an arson attack. She suffered extensive bruising and poor health as a result, writing about this experience as "torture." When released in 1914 after a long period of forcible feeding, she declared, "The worst fight on record since the movement began is now raging in Holloway."  

However, Mary Richardson's most infamous act of political protest was not on a private home or a public building but on a work of art: on 10 March 1914 she slashed a painting in the National Gallery, Diego Velázquez's nude portrait of Venus, Venus at her Toilet, now known as the Rokeby Venus (so-called because the painting was first brought to England and hung at Rokeby Park, Yorkshire, before being acquired by the National Gallery in 1906). 

The Rokeby Venus after
Richardson's attack,
photo published in The Times, 1914

Richardson was not the first suffragette to attack a work of art as an act of political protest. Five years earlier, in 1909, a suffrage poster demanding "Votes for Women" had been stuck onto a Royal Academy exhibit of a portrait of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Prime Minister (the portrait itself was behind glass, the poster stuck to the glass). 

In 1912, the Royal Academy had decided to close its annual winter exhibition early because of the WSPU campaign--the Academy noted that its decision was made in order to "safeguard the valuable pictures now on loan." The next year, in April of 1913, a group of women had broken the glass protecting a number of paintings at the Manchester Art Gallery, damaging more than a dozen works, including paintings by Edward Burne-Jones, Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 

Two months later, in June 1913, a group of suffragettes attempted to disrupt the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition by holding a meeting in one of the galleries, and the Academy took precautions by instituting security measures, locking cupboards, gates and doors. But they suffered during the next year's exhibition: on 4 May 1914, the suffragette "Mary Wood" (Mary Aldham) broke the glass protecting John Singer Sargent's  portrait of the author Henry James and slashed the painting three times with a meat cleaver while crying "Votes for women!" Further attacks followed: despite precautions, Gertrude Mary Ansell attacked the Royal Academy portrait of the duke of Wellington on 12 May, and Mary Spencer attacked George Clausen's Primavera on 26 May.  

But Mary Richardson's slashing of the nude Venus remains the most notorious of these acts of artistic vandalism. As Richardson described her act and its motivations to The Times,

I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy. ("Miss Richardson's Statement, The Times, 11 March 1914)

While Richardson's attack may be the most infamous, it was not the last act of vandalism against art undertaken by the suffragettes to gain attention to their cause. According to Rowena Clausen, some fourteen incidents were to follow, with suffragettes attacking works they found especially offensive: paintings of nude women and portraits of powerful men.

After this spate of violence against works of art, many museums closed their doors to unaccompanied women. (For Helena Bonett's "‘Deeds not words’: Suffragettes and the Summer Exhibition," posted at the Royal Academy's website, click here.)

The restored Rokeby Venus

Like many suffragettes, including the Pankhursts, Richardson suspended her political activities during the war and returned to writing, publishing a novel, Matilda and Marcus (1915), and two volumes of poetry, Symbol Songs (1916) and Wilderness Love Songs (1917). A third book of poetry, Cornish Headlands, was published after the end of the war, in 1920.

After some women women gained the right to vote in 1918 as a result of the Representation of the People Act,* and as a result of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which removed limits on jobs because of sex, Richardson stood for parliament, in 1922 as a candidate, for the Labour party,  in 1924 as an independent socialist, and in 1931, again as a Labour candidate. She was never elected.

In 1934 she joined the British Union of Fascists, becoming the "organizing secretary" for the "women's section." She spoke for the party and wrote for the press on its behalf. But by 1935 she left the party. She would later try to explain her attraction to the fascist party: "I was first attracted to the Blackshirts because I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service, and the ability to serve which I had known in the suffrage movement."

It was this, her year as a fascist supporter and party member--more than her participation in acts of violence and vandalism--that seems to have damaged Richardson's reputation and memory beyond repair. When she eventually published her autobiography, Laugh a Defiance, in 1953, she omitted any account of this part of her political career. 

In her entry on Richardson in the Dictionary of National Biography, Hilda Kean notes that Richardson not only gave numerous accounts and varying interpretations of her career throughout her life, but that she maintained "total silence on her fascist activities." (If you don't have access to the DNB, Kean provides a version of her biographical entry here.)

Here, for example, is Richardson's later rationale for her political act of artistic vandalism: 

Law and its application reflected public opinion. Values were stressed from a financial point of view and not the human. I felt I must make my protest from the financial point of view, therefore, as well as letting it be seen as a symbolic act. I had to draw the parallel between the public’s indifference to Mrs. Pankhurst’s slow destruction and the destruction of some financially valuable object. A painting came to mind. Yes, yes--the Venus Velasquez had painted, hanging in the National Gallery. It was highly prized for its worth in cash. If I could damage it, I reasoned, I could draw my parallel. The fact that I had disliked the painting would make it easier for me to do what was in my mind. 

Richardson's autobiography is long out of print. No used copies are available (at the time of writing) on Amazon, and the book is unavailable through Google Books, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. (See update, below). You can get a copy through Inter-Library Loan, however--here's a link to the book on WorldCat.

*The 1918 act eliminated almost all property requirements for men, allowing them to vote at age 21. The act did not eliminate all property requirements for women, nor did it grant them the right to vote until they reached the age of 30. This discrepancy was enacted deliberately to insure that women did not become the majority of the electorate--since so many men had died during the war, fears were that extending the suffrage to women on equal terms would place them in an "unfair" position. For equal enfranchisement, women had to wait another decade, until the passage of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act.

Update, February 2018: In honor of the centenary of some British women at last gaining the right to vote (the 1918 Representation of the People Act, 6 February 1918), the BBC's History Extra podcast has produced two excellent shows: "The Suffragettes" and "The Pankhursts." Enjoy!

Update, 15 January 2024: Laugh a Defiance is now available through the Internet Archive (click here).

More Really Great News on the Gender Pay Gap--This Time on a Global Scale

The World Economic Forum's 2016 Global Gender Gap Report

The World Economic Forum has just published its eleventh annual Global Gender Gap Report--this report has been published since 2006 and measures women's progress in 144 countries. *

Here's one way to make lemonade out of lemons . . . 

In its analysis, the index focuses on fourteen variables in four areas: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival; and political participation.

The differences between men and women are enormous. Over all, women are worse off than men by 31.7%. 

Here's the good news, according to the report. On average, "the 144 countries covered in the Report have closed 96% of the gap in health outcomes between women and men, unchanged since last year, and more than 95% of the gap in educational attainment, an improvement of almost one full percentage point since last year and the highest value ever measured by the Index" (7).

But here's the bad news: 

However, the gaps between women and men on economic participation and political empowerment remain wide: only 59% of the economic participation gap has been closed—a continued reversal on several years of progress and the lowest value measured by the Index since 2008—and about 23% of the political gap, continuing a trend of slow but steady improvement. Weighted by population, in 2016, the average progress on closing the global gender gap stands at a score of 0.683—meaning an average gap of 31.7% remains to be closed worldwide across the four Index dimensions in order to achieve universal gender parity. (7)

And here's the worse news (because I'm a glass-half-empty kind of person): "Out of the 142 countries covered by the Index both this year and last year, 68 countries have increased their overall gender gap score compared to last year, while 74 have seen it decrease. It therefore has been an ambiguous year for global gender parity, with uneven progress at best."

And now the worst news of all: at the rate things are going, it will take 83 years to close this gender gap. But that's for all four areas--the pay gap won't close for another 170 years! Or so . . . 

And don't assume that the U.S. scores high on this index--the U.S. saw a 17 point drop on last year’s score. And it places only 45th in the global table. 

And when it comes to those pesky kinds of unpaid labor--like household tasks and childcare, for example--women still do much more than men.

* This blog post used to contain links to all the relevant data in and quotations from the 2016 report, but as of January 2021, those links no longer worked ("Error establishing a database connection"). However you can still read and download the entire report at the World Economic Forum by clicking here.

Ida Craddock and Free Speech, Sex Education, and Women's Rights

Ida Craddock (1 August 1847-16 October 1902)

A dedicated advocate of sex education, Ida  Craddock is a fascinating figure, one who can be dismissed as something of a crackpot, as the title of one recent biography suggests: Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman. 

Ida Craddock

Yes, she can be labeled a "pseudo scholar." Yes, she claimed to be a priestess of the church of yoga. Yes, she claimed to be married to an angel named Soph. And yes, her mother tried to have her institutionalized.

But this "sexual outlaw," as another recent biographer has described her, is also a figure who demands our respect even more today, when so many twenty-first century crackpots and pseudo scholars are intent not only on controlling women's bodies but also on controlling our sexuality and returning to some imagined nineteenth-century "norm."

Ida Craddock might have been the first woman admitted to the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences--in October 1882 she had passed the university's entrance examinations and was recommended to the University for admission by the college's faculty, but the committee of trustees denied her admission and followed that denial up with "a resolution explicitly prohibiting the admission of women to the College."

Having denied Craddock admission, they decided to create a (separate but equal?) college for women, once they had raised enough funds. But, you guessed it: although the trustees "committed themselves to establishing a college for women at Penn," it took "more than fifty years . . . before the College for Women matriculated its first students."

Despite this disappointment, Craddock went on to publish a textbook on stenograpphy, her Primary Phonography, in 1882 (to see a copy, click here), and found a position teaching stenography at the Quaker Girard College. 

Craddock had been born and educated as a Quaker, but by 1887 she had become a Unitarian and was involved with the Theosophical Society, studying, translating, and unifying mystical literature. She moved to Chicago and immersed herself in sex education, offering marriage and sex counseling to men and women in a clinic she established on Dearborn Street. 

In addition to personal counseling, she offered a course by mail, the "Regeneration and Rejuvenation of Men and Women through the Right use of the Sexual Function." The course cost ten dollars, no small sum, but in return she provided reading material, a questionnaire, and two personal letters of advice and instruction, based on the questions provided by the "student."

She also drew attention by her public defense of Fahreda Mahzar, also known as "Little Egypt," a belly dancer who performed at the "A Street in Cairo" exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Conservative critics wanted to close down the popular performances--Craddock wrote in defense of the dance, describing it as a "religious memorial" that was about "purity and self-control." That description may not have persuaded authorities, but the exhibit stayed open. 

Craddock's follow-up defense of the performance, published in the medical journal Chicago Clinic, drew the attention of Anthony Comstock to Craddock and her work. Comstock was the U.S. Post Office's "special agent" whose job was to enforce federal obscenity statutes.* His pursuit of Craddock would be relentless.

The 1873 law prohibited "obscene, lewd, and lascivious materials" from being sent in the mail. Included under this law was "any article or thing intended for the prevention of conception or the procuring of abortion" and any advertisements for those "articles" or "things."

Although she defended what she called the danse du ventre, Craddock hardly advocated sexual "perversion." In fact, she agreed with many of Comstock's own views of sex and sexuality--she condemned prostitution, masturbation, and, perhaps surprisingly, oral sex, the use of contraceptives, and abortion.

But she differed from Comstock in her view that sex was normal and natural. She did not think sex should be limited to procreative acts, and she believed that women, as well as men, should participate actively in--and should enjoy--sex. 

To educate men and women about her views, she produced a number of privately printed educational tracts to be distributed to her clients, including "Letter to a Prospective Bride" (1897), "Advice to a Bridegroom" (1897), "Right Marital Living" (1899, published in and by the Chicago Clinic), "Spiritual Joys" (1900), describing the tantric sexual technique of "controlled orgasm and sustained thrill," and The Wedding Night (1902), a twenty-four page pamphlet addressed to both women and men, preparing them with frank anatomical descriptions, honest information about sexual positions and orgasm, and a stress on the importance of sexual pleasure.

It was the piece in the Chicago Clinic that spurred Comstock to action. On 27 October 1899, Cradock was indicted in federal court under Postal law 3893, commonly referred to as the Comstock Law. Clarence Darrow posted her bond, and Craddock herself pleaded not guilty to the charge of having published an "obscene, lewd, and lascivious" pamphlet, too obscene, lewd, and lascivious to be entered into the record. (reformer Alice B. Stockham would be charged in 1905 under the same law.)

But after her decision to fight, sensing the way the prosecution would go, Craddock  decided to plead guilty after all, and she received a suspended sentence. Believing that she was "divinely led," Craddock moved to New York--as she wrote, she was determined "to face this wicked and depraved man Comstock in open court and to strike the blow which shall start the overthrow of Comstockism." 

On 5 March 1902 she was again arrested, this time under New York law for having sent a copy of The Wedding Night in the mail. She was sentence to a three-month term served in the Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island) workhouse.

Craddock served her sentence, but as soon as she was released, she was arrested once more, this time under the federal Comstock law. While her defense was in preparation, she wrote to make public the conditions in the Blackwell's Island workhouse. She was found guilty.

Facing a five-year sentence, Ida Craddock committed suicide on 16 October 1902. In a letter to her mother, she wrote: "I maintain my right to die as I have lived, a free woman, not cowed into silence by any other human being." 

For an excellent introduction to Craddock, you may want to check out the website dedicated to her by clicking here. You will find some full texts of her work, as well as two letters she wrote about her decision to commit suicide, the letter to her mother and the "letter to the public," both composed on 16 October, the day of her death.

*For Grace Haley's informative piece on the Comstock Act and the way it is being deployed by forced-birth activists and politicians today, here is a link to the essay, published at Jessica Valenti's Abortion, Every Day.

Ah, Yes, the Woman Card!

Here Are Just a Few of the Many Unfair Advantages to Which You Are Entitled BECAUSE YOU HAVE YOUR WOMAN CARD!!!!

Since it looks like Donald Trump has now secured the Republican nomination for president, it's time to whip out those woman cards and see what benefits, advantages, privileges, and other goodies they guarantee you as a woman.*

It certainly looks as if those cards guarantee women the right to work their asses off to get an education. Today more than half of all college and university students in the United States are women, and women earn more than 57 percent of all bachelor degrees. Women now account for more than half of all students enrolled in M.A. and Ph.D. programs in the United States; in the academic year 2013-14, they earned 59 percent of the master’s degrees, and 52.2 percent of the doctorates. Women account for nearly half of all the students enrolled in medical and law schools in the United States, and their enrollment in business schools is increasing rapidly.

And, wow, does all that education (guaranteed to them by their woman's card) pay off: If you're lucky enough to be carrying that woman card, here's what you can look forward to:

• Women occupy 19.4 percent of the 535 seats in the U.S. Congress--there are 20 women in the Senate and 84 in the House of Representatives. In state legislatures, women hold 24.5 percent of the seats--1,812 of 7,383 members of state legislatures.
• Six of fifty state governors are women. In the 1,391 U.S. cities with populations of over 30,000, women are mayors in 262--18.8 percent.
• There have been no female presidents of the United States in the 240 years since the country declared its independence in 1776.
• Of the 112 justices who have served on the U.S. Supreme Court, four have been women.
• Women hold  4 percent of the CEO position in Fortune 500 companies.
• According to the most recent U.S. Census, about one-third of U.S. physicians are women, 31.5 percent of lawyers are women, 17.5 percent of clergy are women, and 9.7 percent of civil engineers are women (United States Census Bureau, “Labor Force, Employment, and Earnings,” Table 616, “Employed Civilians by Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin,” Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012]).
• In the increasingly important world of technology and social media, here are some numbers: At Apple, women make up 18 percent of the company’s management, and while Amazon’s website proclaims its commitment to diversity, only 18 of its 120 "most senior managers" are women, a mere 15 percent. Meanwhile, Microsoft reports that only 26.8 percent of its total workforce is female and that women represent only 17.3 percent of its leadership. At Google, women account for 22 percent of the leadership, at Facebook, 20 percent, and at Twitter, 28 percent.
• And the wage gap persists; although the Equal Pay Act was passed fifty years ago, in 1963, today women in the U.S. still earn 78.6¢ for every dollar earned by men.
• Hamilton may be breaking records for Tony nominations, but the picture isn't so rosy for women. In commenting on the opportunities for women writers in theatrical productions, playwright Marsha Norman recently noted, "Women have lived half of the experience of the world, but only 20 percent of it is recorded in our theatres." In other words, "if life worked like the theatre, four out of five things you had ever heard would have been said by men." Onstage and back stage, there is also a colossal gender gap: significantly fewer roles for female actors than male, and noticeably fewer female directors, set designers, lighting designers, sound designers, and choreographers, among other crucial roles.
• At the same time, on screens both large and small, women face similar inequities. Recent studies of the top 100 films released in 2015 reveal women accounted for only 11 percent of the writers, 7 percent of the directors, 22 percent of the producers, 20 percent of the editors, and 3 percent of the cinematographers. On screen, women played leading roles in only 21 percent of the top 100 films of 2014—but not a single woman over the age of forty-five "performed a lead or co lead role." And none of these numbers address issues of pay equity.
• While women are more fully represented on television screens than they are in film—in the 2014-15 prime-time season, 40 percent of the “major characters” on broadcast, cable, and Netflix programs were female—they still comprised only 25 percent of the writers, 12 percent of the directors, 38 percent of the producers, 20 percent of editors, and 1 percent of directors of photography, among other roles.
• Meanwhile, women and girls constitute the majority of the 54.3 million Americans who live in poverty.
• Two-thirds of the low-wage workers in the U.S. (earning $10.50 per hour or less) are women. Four out of five of these women have at least a high-school diploma--33 percent have some college, 10 percent a B.A.
• More than twice as many women over the age of 65 (over 3 million) as men (over 1.5 million) lived in poverty in 2014; the poverty rate for women 65 and older was 12.1 percent, 4.7 percentage points higher than the poverty rate for men 65 and older (7.4 percent).
• On a really cheery note, 94 percent of women who are murdered are killed by men they know.
• And while exact numbers are impossible to know, the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that there are about 293,066 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year. While this represents a significant (49%) decrease in recent years, it still means that a sexual assault occurs every 107 seconds. While men and boys are also the victims of rape and sexual assault, 9 of 10 victims are female. But note: as the CDC recently reported, the numbers of rape victims are significantly under-reported--as many as 88 percent may not be counted in national rape statistics.
• And if all this isn't enough, you can be sure your woman card will earn you criticism for your ambition, your weight, your hair, your complexion, your smile, your breasts--well, okay, basically your entire body--your clothing, your voice, your laugh, your tone, your emotions, your driving . . . Well, you get the picture.

That woman card sure gets you the deals, huh?

*Update, 6 January 2022: The links in this post remain live (as of today), but please note that many of them now send you to sites with current data rather than to the figures, charts, and/or graphs that were available when this essay was posted in 2016.

Update, 6 January 2023: Another check shows that the links in this post remain live, though there are many changes to what they link to now. And as far as social media: Facebook has become Meta, but information about women in leadership has been obscured--it is not readily available, and you have to be persistent, but if you're willing to dig, at least some details can be gleaned. As for Twitter, under the "leadership" of Elon Musk, the link now leads to an empty page . . . 

Update, 8 January 2024: Another check on the links. Again, they all work, but some data has been updated from the info I posted in 2016, and still more, particularly for tech and social media companies, has been obscured—I’ve left these last links as is so you can see the sorry state of affairs. When it comes to Twitter, now “X,” all I can say is WTF. I love that the link that used to take you to data about gender in management now takes you to a page that says “Nothing to see here.” Fitting. 

Once More on Pay Equity

Equal Pay Day (12 April 2016)

This is now the tenth year that the National Committee on Pay Equity has designated an "Equal Pay Day"--the day that vividly illustrates the gender  pay gap.

Put simply: the current pay gap is 21%--that is, women earn, on average, 79 cents for every $1.00 earned by men. Thus Equal Pay Day. The day "symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year." The National Committee on Pay Equity chooses a Tuesday because is is yet another way "to represent how far into the work week women must work to earn what men earned the previous week."

Today, more than fifty years after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy on 10 June 1963, the wage gap persists. 

I've written about pay equity issues several times since starting this blog, most recently in February, when the AAUW updated its analysis, The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap--the study looks at the pay gap not only by sex but by race, geographical locale, and level of education. For my 20 February post, click here. 

Several new reports on pay equity have also recently appeared, including one by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, profesors at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Many critics dismiss the pay gap by citing a variety of issues--educational levels, for instance, or job experience--to explain the wage discrepancy between men and women. But Blau and Kahn report a persistent "gender wage gap that cannot be accounted for, even after controlling for observable variables that influence workers’ pay." To read about their work, The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations, click here.

What I find even more disturbing is the pay gap as it manifests itself in jobs traditionally filled by women, so-called "caring work": childcare, eldercare, elementary-school teaching, and nursing to name the obvious. As the unpleasant economic and professional realities are phrased in one recent study, "Occupations with a greater share of females pay less than those with a lower share, controlling for education and skill." Women are paid less because the work they do is "devalued": in other words, "the proportion of females in an occupation affects pay, owing to devaluation of work done by women." To access the abstract of this this longitudinal study, Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950–2000 U.S. Census Data, with links to all its sources, click here.

And then there is Paula England and Nancy Folbre's "The Cost of Caring," published in the March issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. From the abstract: 

Caring work involves providing a face-to-face service to recipients in jobs such as child care, teaching, therapy, and nursing. Such jobs offer low pay relative to their requirements for education and skill. What explains the penalty for doing caring work? Because caring labor is associated with women, cultural sexism militates against recognizing the value of the work.

So it's not just the gender pay gap, though that is bad enough. It is also the devaluation of the "caring work" that women do.

We live in a particular political moment when many individuals, cities, and states want to grant full personhood to a human fertilized egg. When many insist that women must give birth, regardless of whether their pregnancy threatens their life or their livelihood, whether they are pregnant by choice or by force. When politicians proclaim their allegiance to life and to the family above all. 

But the reality is different than the rhetoric. What is the value of all that "caring work" for children and families that women do? 

When I was still teaching, I used to ask my students what it said about a country's values when those who take care of our children, who educate our children, and who take care of our elderly are compensated so poorly? 

Aside from being the majority of those who perform childcare, elementary education, and eldercare, women are the majority of those who care for the sick and provide therapy and counseling: 91 percent of nurses are women,  and 82% of social workers are women, among other "caring" professions. A "lack of prestige" is a large factor in most analyses of why so few men choose nursing, while Jack Fischl, writing for MIC suggests the "famously low pay in social work could explain" why so few men enter the field.

So I return to my question--what does it say about a country that pays men (and men only, not women in "professional" sports) tens of millions of dollars to throw, kick, or hit balls (in other words, it pays grown men unconscionable sums of money to play children's games), but pays grown women just a minimum wage--not even a living wage--to care for children and to care for our infirm and elderly? 

So pay equity day! It's important!

Politicians, business leaders, religious leaders, and all those who mouth platitudes about "life," motherhood, and "family values": put your damn money where your mouth is!!! 

One More Time on the Gender Pay Gap

Pay Equity--AGAIN!!!

I've posted on pay equity before: here, for example, and, more extensively, here. But this week the AAUW published its most recent analysis: The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap.

While noting that the gender pay gap has narrowed over the last fifty-three years (John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963), most of this change is "due largely to women's progress in education and workforce participation and to men's wages rising at a slower rate."

The gap is still sizeable--21%. In other words, "women working full time in the United States typically were paid just 79 percent of what men were paid."

Many critics have tried to dismiss the pay gap by saying that the disparity exists "just" because women make different "personal choices." Women just "choose" lower-paying jobs and professions, and they just "choose" to work part-time and to take time out of the workforce.

It is true that jobs typically filled by women are lower paying. Whether they are childcare workers or office workers, elementary school teachers or social workers and nurses, women find that the jobs where they predominate--no matter how valuable to society--are lower-paying than equivalently skilled men's work.

But even this kind of "life choice"--"choosing" lower-paying jobs--doesn't fully explain the wage differences between men and women. The AAUW finds that "just one year after college graduation, women were paid 82 percent of what their similarly educated and experienced male counterparts were paid." And 10 years after graduation, "the pay gap widened, and women were paid only 69 percent of what men were paid." From the age of 35 through retirement age, "women are typically paid 76 to 81 percent of what men are paid depending on age."

Another reason frequently given for the wage gap is women's "choice" to have children. But while becoming a parent is a "life choice" of both men and women, it's women who still pay the price. The "motherhood penalty" not only reduces women's wages, it affects their professional opportunities. Employers "are less likely to hire mothers compared with childless women, and when employers do make an offer to a mother, they offer her a lower salary than they do other women." 

And there is no "fatherhood penalty"--fathers "do not suffer a penalty compared with other men"  when they become a parent. In point of fact, "[m]any fathers receive a wage premium after having a child."

The gender pay gap cannot be explained away by such "life choices." For those with a college degree:

After accounting for college major, occupation, economic sector, hours worked, months unemployed since graduation, GPA, type of undergraduate institution, institution selectivity, age, geographical region, and marital status, . . . a 7 percent difference in the earnings of male and female college graduates one year after graduation was still unexplained. 

Similarly, [there is] a 12 percent unexplained difference in earnings among full-time workers 10 years after college graduation.

Here's one more thing you may not have considered. A recent study found that five years after they graduated from college, "women working full time had paid off 33 percent of their student loan debt on average, while men working full time had paid off 44 percent of their debt."

All this is just looking at the averages for all women. It should not be surprising that the news is even worse for women of color. 

For the full report, click here.

In other news this week . . . 

Student researchers from Cal Poly (San Luis Obispo) and North Carolina State University reported on their their findings about women coders. Their research revealed that the contributions of female coders to projects were more readily accepted those of their male counterparts--until their sex was revealed. Once they are identified as women, their acceptance rates drop, and their work is more often rejected. For a report by The Washington Post with links to the study, click here. 

And if all this isn't depressing enough, Science magazine reports that women even get screwed when it comes to selling on eBay: "A study of more than 1 million auctions on the online commerce site eBay finds that women receive consistently less money than men for selling the very same products." Here's the link.

Update, 2 January 2021: To keep the links working on the blog, I try to update them. So the link for the The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap still takes you to the 2016 report. If you would prefer an updated report--from 2018, with additions from 2021, click here! (Update, 4 January 2023: You can now access the 2022 report at the same link.) 

Margaret Sanger and "What Every Girl Should Know"

Margaret Sanger (first part of "What Every Girl Should Know: Sexual Impulse" published 22 December 1912)

The American birth-control activist and educator Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) published a twelve-part series entitled "What Every Girl Should Know" in the New York Call between 17 November 1912 and 2 March 1913. 

Margaret Sanger, 1922

In her excellent New York Times article on Sanger, "Margaret Sanger's Obscenity," Gloria Feldt indicates something of the genesis of Sanger's educational column. In response to shocking mortality rates among infants and small children, and women's complete "lack of information about birth control," Sanger, then working as a nurse in New York's Lower East Side, began her sex-education column.

In 1914, she was arrested for violating the 1873 Comstock Act, which criminalized the "publication, distribution, and possession of information about or devices or medications for 'unlawful' abortion or contraception." 

Sanger was indicted, published her attack on the Comstock Act in a new magazine called The Woman Rebel, and fled to Europe. She returned to the United States in 1916 after charges against her were dropped and opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States. (The clinic was closed ten days after its opening, she was arrested for maintaining a "public nuisance," and she spent thirty days in jail.)

For the first part of Sanger's column on "Sexual Impulse," published on 22 December 1912 in the New York Call, click here.* This publication is made available by New York University's The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, whose homepage can be accessed here.**

You can read a 1920 pamphlet, published by Sanger, containing all twelve parts in the series, by clicking here.***

From Sanger's "What Every Girl Should Know": "In conclusion I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine. Too long have they allowed themselves to become this, bowing to the yoke of motherhood from puberty to the grave."

The New York Call produced this
response to the U.S. postal authorities'
suppression of "What Every Girl Should Know"

Update, 17 April 2021: For an excellent op-ed on Margaret's Sanger's racist views (and thus her complicated legacy), Alexis McGill Johnson's New York Times editorial, "I'm the Head of Planned Parenthood. We're Done Making Excuses for Our Founder," is available here.

Update, 10 December 2022: For more, you may be interested in an episode of the BBC podcast, The Forum, focusing on Margaret Sanger: "Margaret Sanger: The Mother of Birth Control." The one-hour discussion includes a discussion of Sanger's accomplishments as well as the controversy surrounding her involvement in eugenics. (To listen, click here. As always, the host Bridget Kendall is amazing!)

Update, 30 July 2023: For Grace Haley's informative piece on the Comstock Act and the way it is being deployed by forced-birth activists and politicians today, here is a link to the essay, published at Jessica Valenti's Abortion, Every Day.

*As of December 2021, Sanger's 1912 "Sexual Impulse" is no longer available at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project website. To access an earlier version of the site, preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, clock here.

**As of December 2023, the Margaret Sanger Papers Project continues to exist but the website seems to no longer function—the site describes the archive, but documents and resources are no longer made available online.

***Although I can no longer find the 1912 original online, a later version of "Sexual Impulse," in a later is in What Every Girl Should Know--for the 1920 pamphlet, click here. Chapter IV is "Sexual Impulse."

The First National Women's Rights Convention

The National Women's Rights Convention (23 and 24 October 1850)

Earlier this year, we looked at the two-day convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. (If you missed those posts, click here and here.) Less well known is the first National Women's Rights Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850.

Harriot Kezia Hunt
addressed the National
Women's Rights Convention
on the medical education
of women

About 300 people had attended the Seneca Falls Convention, which famously approved the Declaration of Sentiments. Two years later, there were 1,000 attendees for the first of what would eventually be twelve national conferences. (The tenth took place in 1860--the conventions were suspended during the years of the Civil War, the eleventh held in 1866. A gathering in Washington, D.C. was called the "twelfth National Convention" was held in January 1869.)

Many of the prominent organizers and speakers at the first convention--including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott--were still active in the 1869 gathering. Over nearly two decades, the issues remained the same: equal wages, access to education, access to work and careers, property rights, marriage rights, and, always, voting rights. Susan B. Anthony would later say that it was reading the text of the speech given by Lucy Stone that drew her to the suffrage movement.

Speakers included the abolitionist and suffragist William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. (You can see the entire program and read the speeches by clicking here.) Interestingly, however, while one of the major themes of this first convention was opening the medical profession to women, physician Elizabeth Blackwell, who, she says, has "read through all the proceedings carefully," had deep reservations--"I feel a little perplexed by the main object of the Convention--Woman's Rights."

While Blackwell does express "respect and sympathy" and says she is prepared to do what she can, she also is clear that her "energy" is reserved for other causes. There were certainly deeper criticism and outright mocking from members of the press and the public. I thought I'd include here a section from the New York Herald's convention coverage, the paper's summary of "the actual designs of that piebald assemblage called the Women's Rights Convention":

1. abolish the Bible;

2. abolish the constitution and the laws of the land;

3. reorganize society upon a social platform of perfect equality in all things, of sexes and colors;

4. establish the most free and miscellaneous amalgamation of sexes and colors;

5. elect Abby Kelley Foster President of the United States and Lucretia Mott Commander-in chief of the Army;

6. To cut throats ad libitum [at their pleasure];

7. To abolish the gallows.

What struck me about this list, so fearful of women's "designs," is how closely it resembles Pat Robertson's view of feminism, from a 1992 fundraising letter (he was running for President). The "feminist agenda," he claimed, was not about equal rights: "it is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Those women! Always wanting stuff, like equal rights. 

Lucy Stone, with a quotation from the
speech she made at the 1850 convention

Lydia Maria Child, Social Reformer and Political Activist

Lydia Maria Francis Child (died 20 October 1880)

Born on 11 February 1802, Lydia Francis should be remembered today for much more than her "Over the River and Through the Woods" Thanksgiving poem.*

Lydia Maria Child, 1870

The daughter of David Convers Francis and Susannah Rand, Lydia Francis was educated at home in Medford, Massachusetts, then at a local "dame school"--a private school where girls received a primary-level education and "necessary" female skills like sewing and embroidery--and, then, at a women's seminary. (By contrast, her brother got a Harvard education.)

After her mother's death, Lydia was sent to live with a sister and trained to be a teacher. The years she spent with her sister in Maine also introduced her to an impoverished community of Abenaki and Penobscot Indians, awakening in her an awareness of the dire situation faced by Native American peoples. 

After a brief stint at teaching, she moved back to Massachusetts. At age nineteen, she renamed herself "Maria" (she didn't like the name Lydia) and began her real education with her brother, who introduced her to Homer and Milton and challenged her to write.

Her first novel, Hobomak: A Tale of Early Times, was completed in six weeks and published in 1824--set in Salem, it told the story of a young Puritan woman who scandalized her family and community by marrying an Indian, with whom she had a child. (Double scandal--the novel's heroine later married a second time, an Episcopalian!) The novel's themes, which challenged racial and religious views, ensured its success and Francis's celebrity. Lydia Maria Francis was just twenty-two.

In 1824 Maria Francis also opened a school and, two years later, began publication of a bi-monthly magazine for children, Juvenile Miscellany, the first periodical for children in the United States. She would continue to write and publish--novels, biographies, poetry, guides to housekeeping and child-rearing, and histories--throughout her lifetime. 

In 1828 she married David Lee Child, a man whose political and social activism corresponded with and extended her own. By 1831 she was involved with the abolition movement. Perhaps her most significant work was published in 1833, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, a history of slavery in the United States.

She joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, working alongside Lucretia Mott, and in 1840 became the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. In her anti-slavery fiction, like the novel The Quadroons, published in 1842, ten years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, she exposed the realities of slavery to those who did not read anti-slavery pamphlets or anti-slavery periodicals. Child also edited Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first published in 1861.

Nor did she forget her interest in the plight of the American Indians. She detailed white atrocities against native populations in The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets: As Related by a Mother to Her Children, and Designed for the Instruction of Youth (1829) and, still working on the issue forty years later, An Appeal for the Indians (1868).

Her work in the abolition movement also involved her in the struggle for women's rights. Although she published a number of books for women that focused on domesticity (she published The Frugal Housewife the year after she married), she also wrote to support women's equality. 

In addition to publishing a series of biographies of notable women, her two-volume The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations was published in 1835, then revised and republished ten years later as Brief History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. Her Letters from New York, also filling two volumes, included editorials on the topic of women's rights. As she argued, 

That the present position of women in society is the result of physical force is obvious enough; whosoever doubts it, let her reflect why she is afraid to go out in the evening without the protection of a man. What constitutes the danger of aggression? Superior physical strength, uncontrolled by the moral sentiments. If physical strength were in complete subjection to moral influence, there would be no need of outward protection. That animal instinct and brute force now govern the world, is painfully apparent in the condition of women everywhere. . . . 

This sort of politeness to women is what men call gallantry--an odious word to every sensible woman because she sees that it is merely the flimsy veil which foppery throws over sensuality to conceal its grossness. So far is it from indicating sincere esteem and affection for women, that the profligacy of a nation may, in general, be fairly measured by its gallantry. This taking away rights and condescending to grant privileges is an old trick of the physical force principle, and with the immense majority, who only look on the surface of things, this mask effectually disguises an ugliness which would otherwise be abhorred. The most inveterate slaveholders are probably those who take most pride in dressing their household servants handsomely and who would be most ashamed to have the name of being unnecessarily cruel. And profligates, who form the lowest and most sensual estimate of women, are the very ones to treat them with an excess of outward deference. . . .

Along with Lucretia Mott, she knew and worked with women we have met before, including Angelina Grimké and Margaret Fuller. 

Many of Child's works are available online through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. There is a detailed biographical essay posted at The Poetry Foundation website--Deborah Clifford's biography is followed by an extended bibliography of primary sources and a great list of material for further reading, including biographies of Lydia Maria Child.

*Written for Thanksgiving and published in her 1844 collection of children's verse, Flowers for Children, the poem was set to music by an unknown composer and is now commonly regarded as a Christmas song.