Month: July 2023

It is easy to lose track of the ultimate goal of women’s liberation – the end to sex-based oppression of half the human race born female – by focusing exclusively on our defensive battles. There are many such battles taxing our spirits. In the wake of our loss of abortion rights last year, we have seen the passage of one horrific state law after another placing women’s liberty, health, and very lives at risk.

And of course, there is the defensive fight against a pernicious worldwide ideology that denies the existence of sex, allowing males into women’s spaces and programs, and depriving us of privacy, safety, and opportunity and even the language needed to talk about ourselves and assert our rights. We are also seeing the tragedy of a whole generation of girls (future feminists, future lesbians) desperately attempting to escape their womanhood by doing great harm to their female bodies through submitting to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and lopping off healthy body parts.

Despite these challenges, we must maintain our broader vision. We women have still not achieved equality in the workplace, under law or in the rest of society, and winning our current defensive battles will not by themselves get us there.

We are coming upon the 100^th centennial of the Equal Rights Amendment, written by suffragist Alice Paul in 1923, that would finally guarantee equality based on sex in the U.S. Constitution. The ERA does not solve all problems but is a vital tool to move us forward once again.

Feminist lawyer Wendy Murphy recently spoke at Seneca Falls in celebration of this centennial in the presence of the great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Coline Jenkins:

“For the entirety of women’s 247 years in this country – a country that dares to declare itself the greatest democracy on earth – women have been denied basic legal equality of rights and no laws must be enforced equally when applied to women because without the ERA women are not constitutionally entitled to equal treatment under the law.”

“Neither party truly supports the ERA,” Wendy added. She also extolled the independence of Ms. Paul from both parties. something she claims we need now more than ever, as we have a Democratic President that refuses to instruct the archivist to publish the ERA.

So, no matter how hard things get, sisters, let’s keep our eyes on the prize.

This opinion piece is from an individual FIST member and does not necessarily represent the views of the organization as a whole.  However, FIST is on record in support of affirmative action.

The Supreme Court decision this past June in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard,  finding race based affirmative action in college admissions an unconstitutional violation of equal protection https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf, not only struck a blow to Black people trying to break free from centuries of oppression and racist policies. It is also an impediment to women’s advancement as a sex in our own struggle against male supremacy.

Race blindness, like sex blindness, is an exceedingly bad idea when discrimination and/ or the institutionalized remnants of past discrimination still exist.  Discriminatory intent is hard to prove but if all the staff at the local car repair shop is all white and male, chances are that sexism and racism played a determinate role. And race or sex conscious remedies are necessary.

Like in the case of abortion rights, affirmative action wasn’t gotten rid of all at once but was slowly eroded by the courts until the recent death blow was struck.  The Bakke decision in 1978 marked the beginnings of this downward spiral.  https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/regents_of_the_university_of_california_v_bakke_(1978)

Though most women now work in the paid labor market and women have broken into certain professions, like law and medicine, previously mostly barred to them, the workforce remains highly sex segregated.  There are still “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs” even if advertisements that spelled this out have been banned for decades under civil rights laws.  Women, though highly educated, are still relegated to lower paid, lower status positions, including even within the same field or profession.  Women lawyers, for example, are concentrated in the non-profit world or work for the government (with the few men there disproportionately found in top management) and are rarely owners or partners of successful private law firms.  Moreover, fields where most women work are underpaid and undervalued, despite the level of skill and education required or the importance of the work to society.  Nursing and teaching come to mind.

Women of all colors benefited from affirmative action especially when it was more robust in the early years, i.e., at a time when it included quotas and/or goals and timetables.   For example, women broke into the trades in the 1970’s, the first time since the government implemented its own affirmative action program bringing women into the war industry during World War II.   For a fascinating documentary of this period, I recommend “the Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081053/

So, in the 1970’s and into the 1980’s women worked as car mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, plumbers, electricians, engineers, and construction workers. However, by the 1980’s, women were forced out of the trades, not because they weren’t interested in the work or too weak or lacking in the skills needed to do the job well, but due to the hostility of male co-workers and managers who engaged in severe sexual harassment and violence against the female newcomers. See https://socialchangenyu.com/review/toward-gender-equality-affirmative-action-comparable-worth-and-the-womens-movement/

Affirmative action’s impact on women’s status in the workplace was limited because it wasn’t strong enough.  The number of women brought into male fields was small and the women were left isolated and far more vulnerable to harassment.  If women had been recruited in large numbers or ideas such as all-women teams implemented, women would likely have stayed.

Affirmative action is a vital measure for achieving equality for both people of color and women of all colors.  We need to create a movement strong enough to bring it back.