CHAPTER 12
U.S. Women in a Global Age
1980–PRESENT
IN 1993, PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON NOMINATED corporate lawyer Zoe Baird to be the first woman attorney general of the United States. But Baird’s nomination foundered when it was discovered that she and her husband had employed an undocumented immigrant couple from Peru, Lillian and Victor Cordero, to serve as nanny and driver and that they had failed to pay Social Security taxes for the couple. After a media firestorm, Baird withdrew her name from consideration, and Janet Reno, a single woman with no children or household help, became America’s first woman attorney general instead.
The fate of Baird’s nomination suggests the dramatic change in women’s professional and political opportunities since the 1960s. That Baird, unlike male cabinet appointees, was grilled about her child care providers also reveals that a double standard exists about parental responsibility, despite women’s widespread entrance into the workplace. Finally, the fact that Baird paid Lillian Cordero $250 a week while her own household income was $600,000 a year indicates the wide disparity among working women’s experiences and highlights the centrality of immigrant women to the functioning of millions of prosperous American households.
1972
Phyllis Schlafly founds STOP-ERA
1973
U.S. Supreme Court issues decision in Roe v. Wade
1976
Jimmy Carter elected president
1978
Supreme Court rejects affirmative action in University of California Regents v. Bakke
1980
Ronald Reagan elected president
1981
Sandra Day O’Connor becomes first woman appointed to the Supreme Court
1982
ERA fails ratification process
1984
National Political Congress of Black Women created
1985
Emily’s List established
1988
AFSCME organizes clerical workers at Harvard University
1990
Justice for Janitors campaign
1990
Clery Act requires colleges to report incidences of sexual assault.
1990–1991
Fifteen U.S. military women die in Operation Desert Storm
1990s
Third-wave feminism flourishes
1991
Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings held
1991
Susan Faludi publishes Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women
1992
Bill Clinton elected president
1992
Record number of women elected to Congress
1993
Janet Reno becomes first woman attorney general
1993
Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes second woman Supreme Court justice
1995
United Nations International Women’s Conference held in Beijing
1996
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act passed
1997
Madeleine Albright becomes first woman secretary of state
1998
Clinton impeached by U.S. House of Representatives
2000
Highly contested presidential election resolved by Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush
2001
Terrorists destroy New York’s World Trade Center and attack Pentagon on September 11
2003
United States and allies invade Iraq
2004
Gay marriages begin in California and Massachusetts
2004
George W. Bush reelected president
2005
Condoleezza Rice becomes first African American woman secretary of state
2006
Immigration rights protest marches in cities throughout the United States
2006
Nancy Pelosi becomes first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives
2008
Barack Obama elected first African American president
2009
Sonia Sotomayor becomes first Hispanic and third woman Supreme Court justice
2011
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy repealed
2013
Defense of Marriage Act ruled unconstitutional in United States v. Windsor
2013
Black Lives Matter movement founded
2014
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Supreme Court ruling permitting private businesses whose owners had religious objections to withhold health insurance coverage for contraception and abortion
2015
Obergefell v. Hodges rules that no state can deny same-sex couples the right to marry
2016
Hillary Clinton loses presidential election to Donald Trump
2017
Nationwide anti-Trump women’s marches among the largest protest demonstrations ever held in the United States
FEMINISM AND THE NEW RIGHT
Some of the hostility Baird encountered stemmed from innuendos that she was too ambitious and had foisted her child care responsibilities onto hired help. The backlash against feminism was a major theme of the late twentieth century and contributed significantly to the strength of the conservative “New Right” in American politics. As of 1968, the obstacles faced by insurgent feminism stemmed mostly from traditional beliefs and long-established sexism. Within a decade, however, a much more determined and organized resistance began to surface, concentrated especially on stopping ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and reversing the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. The political gains of antifeminism were reinforced by a cultural and media backlash that questioned the desirability of feminist life choices. This antifeminism was part of a broader movement of religious and other conservatives against the social and cultural transformations fueled by the events of the 1960s and 1970s.
The STOP-ERA Campaign
Opposition to the ERA in the 1970s and early 1980s came primarily from the far right of the Republican Party. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, right-wing leaders had dedicated themselves to halting the spread of communism. Starting in the early 1970s, however, a self-proclaimed New Right (a kind of mirror image of the New Left of the 1960s) switched to domestic issues and contested the dramatic gains of the civil rights and feminist movements (and later the gay rights movement). The Republican Party, eager to break out of its image as the party of the rich, found this focus on social issues useful in attracting new adherents. The New Right was important to the election of Republican Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) and played a vital role in presidential politics through the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009).
Antifeminism was critical in the conservative offensive that marked American political life starting in the late twentieth century. The activist core of the antifeminist movement was primarily women. Mostly white, devoutly Christian, and married with children, they rose in defense of traditional gender roles and family values. Ironically, the antifeminist movement, like the feminist movement that it condemned, pushed concerns about women’s social role and status to the forefront of American politics. Indeed, the prominence of women in the conservative movement is one of the most striking measures of the changing place of women in American life in the late twentieth century.
Activist Phyllis Schlafly almost single-handedly put New Right antifeminism on the political map. One of the most important conservative leaders in U.S. history, she first made a name for herself when she wrote A Choice Not an Echo in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. Schlafly argued that elite Republicans, who controlled the party, had abandoned its principles of limited government and strong national defense. Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon B. Johnson in the election, but grassroots efforts on his behalf continued and were crucial to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Beginning in 1972, Schlafly used the ERA issue and a new antifeminist approach to help galvanize grassroots support for her conservative goals. She formed an organization, STOP (Stop Taking Our Privileges)-ERA, into which she recruited women who felt personally marginalized by feminist gains and were convinced that feminists threatened the moral and social order of the nation. They viewed the battle against the ERA as a fight against secular values that they felt were undermining the family.
A lawyer, an author, and the mother of six, Schlafly maintained a highly public career that contradicted her message that American society was best served and women were happiest when they remained full-time housewives and mothers (see Reading into the Past: “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?”). She claimed that ratification of the ERA would wreak social chaos by eroding fundamental gender distinctions. She insisted that instead of ending sex discrimination, the ERA would deprive women of crucial privileges such as the expectation of economic support from their husbands. Schlafly’s claims put the pro-ERA forces on the defensive. Ironically, many of her concerns, such as women being fully integrated into the armed services, came to pass despite the defeat of the ERA.
By lobbying forcefully in crucial state legislatures, STOP-ERA slowed the pace of ratification to a crawl. The National Organization for Women (NOW) vainly fought back by urging feminists to boycott states that refused to ratify the ERA. In 1982, the ERA went down in defeat, three states short of ratification, with both pro- and anti- forces exhausted but also battle strengthened (see Map 12.1). The contest contributed to a growing cultural divide in American politics between those with conservative social values, especially concerning women and the family, and those who emphasized individual choice, social diversity, and the importance of federal government protection against discrimination.
Map 12.1 The Battle over the ERA
The ERA quickly won support in 1972 and 1973 but then stalled. ERAmerica, a coalition of women’s groups formed in 1976, lobbied extensively, especially in North Carolina, Florida, and Illinois, but failed to sway the conservative legislatures in those states. After Indiana ratified it in 1977, the amendment still lacked three states’ votes toward the three-fourths majority required for a constitutional amendment. Subsequent efforts to revive the ERA were unsuccessful.
READING INTO THE PAST
PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY
What’s Wrong with “Equal Rights” for Women?
Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) began her conservative activism in the 1950s when she fervently embraced the anti-Communist campaign. In the 1970s, she took up the cause of antifeminism and founded the organization STOP-ERA. In this 1972 article published in her own newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, Schlafly details her objections to the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism.
In the last couple of years, a noisy movement has sprung up agitating for “women’s rights.” Suddenly, everywhere we are afflicted with aggressive females on television talk shows yapping about how mistreated American women are, suggesting that marriage has put us in some kind of “slavery,” that housework is menial and degrading, and — perish the thought — that women are discriminated against. New “women’s liberation” organizations are popping up, agitating and demonstrating, serving demands on public officials, getting wide press coverage always, and purporting to speak for some 100,000,000 American women.
It’s time to set the record straight. The claim that American women are downtrodden and unfairly treated is the fraud of the century. The truth is that American women never had it so good. Why should we lower ourselves to “equal rights” when we already have the status of special privilege?
The proposed Equal Rights Amendment states: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” So what’s wrong with that? Well, here are a few examples of what’s wrong with it.
This Amendment will absolutely and positively make women subject to the draft. Why any woman would support such a ridiculous and un-American proposal as this is beyond comprehension. Why any Congressman who had any regard for his wife, sister, or daughter would support such a proposition is just as hard to understand. Foxholes are bad enough for men, but they certainly are not the place for women — and we should reject any proposal which would put them there in the name of “equal rights.” . . .
Another bad effect of the Equal Rights Amendment is that it will abolish a woman’s right to child support and alimony, and substitute what the women’s libbers think is a more “equal” policy, that “such decisions should be within the discretion of the Court and should be made on the economic situation and need of the parties in the case.”
Under present American laws, the man is always required to support his wife and each child he caused to be brought into the world. Why should women abandon these good laws — by trading them for something so nebulous and uncertain as the “discretion of the Court”?
The law now requires a husband to support his wife as best as his financial situation permits, but a wife is not required to support her husband (unless he is about to become a public charge). A husband cannot demand that his wife go to work to help pay for family expenses. He has the duty of financial support under our laws and customs. Why should we abandon these mandatory wife-support and child-support laws so that a wife would have an “equal” obligation to take a job?
By law and custom in America, in case of divorce, the mother always is given custody of her children unless there is overwhelming evidence of mistreatment, neglect or bad character. This is our special privilege because of the high rank that is placed on motherhood in our society. Do women really want to give up this special privilege and lower themselves to “equal rights,” so that the mother gets one child and the father gets the other? I think not. . . .
Many women are under the mistaken impression that “women’s lib” means more job employment opportunities for women, equal pay for equal work, appointments of women to high positions, admitting more women to medical schools, and other desirable objectives which all women favor. We all support these purposes, as well as any necessary legislation which would bring them about.
But all this is only a sweet syrup which covers the deadly poison masquerading as “women’s lib.” The women’s libbers are radicals who are waging a total assault on the family, on marriage, and on children.
SOURCE: William H. Chafe et al., A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 211–13. Original source: The Phyllis Schlafly Report 5, no. 7 (February 1972).
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
What are Schlafly’s reasons for opposing the ERA?
How do Schlafly’s ideas reflect those of the emerging “New Right”?
The Abortion Wars
The campaign to undo Roe v. Wade has lasted longer and has been more contested than STOP-ERA. Although it has so far failed to recriminalize abortion completely, it has made the procedure much more difficult to obtain — in some cases completely impossible — in many U.S. states. The impact of the “abortion wars” on the larger political climate has been enormous. To those in the anti-abortion movement, the legalization of abortion represents the triumph of untrammelled individualism over women’s sacred social role of motherhood. They stake their ground on the rights of the fetus, framing the women who seek abortions either as murderously selfish or victimized by abortion advocates. Nonetheless, popular support for abortion has not appreciably waned over the last four decades.
To indicate the larger issues its leaders believed to be at stake, the anti-abortion movement renamed itself “pro-life” — prompting the pro-abortion-rights forces to christen themselves, in equally expansive language, “pro-choice.” Although many of the more visible leaders of right-to-life organizations are male, women constitute as much as three-quarters of the grassroots membership. In 1995, the movement secured a tremendous public relations victory when Norma McCorvey, the Roe of Roe v. Wade, renounced her support for abortion (see p. 650).
The anti-abortion movement got its start in 1971 when the Catholic Church sponsored the formation of the National Right to Life Committee. A sophisticated media campaign, including films of late-term fetuses in utero and photographs of tiny fetal hands, built popular support. Pro-abortion forces retaliated with the image of a wire coat hanger to symbolize deaths from illegal abortions, but many young women no longer understood the reference. Starting in the late 1970s, leadership of the anti-abortion movement shifted to fundamentalist Protestants and then relocated at the very center of the Republican Party.
Starting in the mid-1970s, anti-abortion protesters gathered outside the clinics that had sprung up since Roe v. Wade. They intended to dissuade women from having abortions and to intimidate physicians from providing them. Across the country, pro- and anti-abortion activists engaged in angry face-to-face encounters. Eventually, the heightened rhetoric of the anti-abortion forces, which characterized legalized abortion as a “holocaust” of unborn babies, spilled into physical violence, as clinics were bombed and abortion providers murdered. Between 1976 and 2015, there were 227 bombing and arson attacks on clinics, including eight murders of medical providers. Threats have accelerated in response to heinous false rumors based on a doctored video produced by anti-abortion advocates that abortion clinics were selling fetal body parts.
Anti-abortion activists have also exerted significant political muscle. They have successfully sponsored numerous state laws making abortions difficult or even impossible to obtain. These laws require underage girls to obtain parental permission for an abortion, deny public funds for abortion, and mandate waiting periods and elaborate counseling. Doctors who wish to perform abortions are required to have medical privileges at local hospitals, a privilege often denied them. Thirty-nine states have attempted to prohibit a late-term abortion procedure known as intact dilation and extraction (but called “partial-birth abortion” by opponents), intended to help pregnant women unable to terminate their pregnancies earlier. Since 2011, more state-level restrictions have been established than in the entire previous decade. As a result, in 2017, only 30 percent of women between the ages of 15–44 lived in states where abortion rights are supported. As a current abortion rights defender insists, “[A]lthough abortion has been legal for four decades, . . . for many women in America it might as well not be. It is inaccessible — too far away, too expensive to pay for out of pocket, and too encumbered by restrictions and regulations and humiliations.”1
The Abortion Controversy
Few issues in recent American political life have been more divisive than a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Rallies for and against abortion often provoke heated confrontations. Here demonstrators face off in Washington, D.C., in 2005.
Cases challenging these laws have made their way through the court system. In the 1989 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey cases, the Supreme Court stopped short of overturning Roe v. Wade but ruled that states could prohibit the use of public facilities and public funds for abortions (see pp. A-14 to A-15). In the 1992 Casey decision, the Court reaffirmed the regulation of abortion when the fetus is at the point of extrauterine “viability,” which it lowered to twenty-three weeks. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the Court, commented that the “respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child,” noting that “some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”2 Twenty-four-hour waiting periods to ensure “informed consent” and the requirement of parental consent for minor girls were also ruled constitutional. In 2016, in a surprise 5–3 decision, the Court (which was still short one justice) ruled that a Texas law requiring abortions to be performed in surgical facilities was unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the U.S. Supreme Court remains a shaky bastion of abortion rights.
Antifeminism Diffuses through the Culture
During this same time, popular culture also began to feature a more diffuse antifeminism. In her best-selling 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, Susan Faludi explored claims that circulated widely about the unhappiness and disappointment allegedly suffered by women who had chosen feminist lifestyles. One particularly inflammatory study reported in Newsweek magazine in 1986 stated that if a woman was over forty and single, her chances for marriage were less than her chances of being killed by a terrorist.3 Exaggerated statistics and news stories also appeared about the economic costs to women of the rising divorce rate and widespread psychological depression among unmarried career women. Not only were there no remaining tasks for feminism, according to the backlash mentality, but the movement’s achievements had cost women dearly.
Television was particularly striking for the very mixed messages it was giving to its female audience. Programs directed at an adult female demographic featured strong, independent, career women characters. The most watched show of the decade, Roseanne, featured one of the most unusual TV heroines ever — a working-class, overweight, often unpleasant wife and mother, who worked in a factory and as a waitress. Among its plots were the following: the grandmother of Roseanne having had two abortions; Roseanne’s sister being a single parent; Roseanne’s best friend being a lesbian, one of the first regular lesbian characters on TV. Meanwhile, programs directed at a younger female demographic featured ambitious female characters — Ally McBeal is often cited — who were nonetheless preoccupied with their weight, boyfriends, and clothes. Cultural critic Susan Douglas characterized this as a combination of notions of equality apparently accepted and “embedded” in the culture with a subtle and updated sexism “enlightened” by the recognition that overt inequality no longer plays well.4
FEMINISM AFTER THE SECOND WAVE
Public opinion and social pundits alike insisted that feminism was a thing of the past — its goals accomplished and its passion outdated. Nonetheless, feminist motivations, activism, awareness, and challenges were continuing to disperse throughout U.S. society and culture. In the response to the antifeminist “backlash,” feminism revived in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, in a movement known as third-wave feminism. Younger generations of women have found their way into a wide variety of movements, including attention to women’s concerns, female leadership, and broad social justice goals, such as antiviolence and ecofeminism movements.
Third-Wave Feminism
In addition to the feminist impact on these and other social justice movements, young women in the early 1990s returned to specifically feminist activism. They called themselves the “third wave,” a characterization that drew on the distinction between the first wave of women’s rights between 1848 and 1920 and the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, known as the second wave. Third wavers criticized their second-wave predecessors — not always accurately — for emphasizing women’s victimhood over their empowerment, for not speaking to the concerns of women of color, and for a general cultural conservatism when it came to sexuality, appearance, and entertainment.
Third-wave anthologies, most of them personal accounts that hark back in genre to the consciousness-raising essays of the 1970s, flourished. The Third Wave Foundation, founded in 1992, worked to identify and fund new-generation feminist organizations. This generation of young women also brought feminist agendas into popular culture, especially in the worlds of punk and hip-hop music. Unafraid to be outrageous, new feminist magazines like Bitch and Bust appeared, supplemented by inexpensively reproduced small-run magazines (“zines”) and Web pages self-published by young women and devoted to women’s issues.
Women Stand Up to Violence
Young women spearheaded a widespread movement against sexual assault on college and university campuses in 2013. (Estimates are that one in five undergraduates have been assaulted, usually by someone they know.) In 1990 Congress attempted to address this endemic problem by passing the Clery Act, named for a woman who had been raped and murdered in her dorm room. The law requires that institutions report statistics on campus sexual assaults to federal authorities, but it has proven inadequate. In 2013, several assault survivors from prestigious institutions like Amherst College, the University of North Carolina, and Occidental College went public with the stories of their institutions’ failure to address their cases adequately. Using social media, organizations such as Know Your IX and End Rape on Campus encouraged students to file complaints with the U.S. Department of Education and to put pressure on their institutions to improve their policies. Their efforts also influenced provisions in the 2013 reauthorized Violence Against Women Act that improved complaint procedures. The next year, President Barack Obama created a White House task force on college sexual assault.
Attention to domestic violence was part of second-wave feminism and continues to be an important issue for women activists pursuing social justice. Many of these address the problems faced by immigrant women. For example, Sakhi, an organization for New York South Asian women, founded in 1989, focuses on encouraging women to break the silence about domestic violence within their community. It describes its key aim as creating “a safe place with a full range of culturally-sensitive, language-specific information, support, services, and advocacy for South Asian women facing abuse in their lives.”5
Native American women have also organized against domestic violence in organizations such as the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Network and the South Dakota Coalition Ending Domestic and Sexual Violence. Estimates from 2008 are that 39 percent of Native women on reservations have been sexually assaulted, making them three times more likely to be victims than women of other races. Non-Indian men commit the vast majority of these assaults, reflecting in part the large percentage of Native women married to non-Native men. Native lobbying efforts led to provisions in the reauthorized Violence Against Women Act6 that brought assault against women by non-Native men on tribal lands under the jurisdiction of tribal authorities, which supporters hope will provide greater ability to prosecute more cases and stem the tide of violence.
Black women have been at the forefront of addressing another aspect of pervasive violence in American society. Three African American community organizers, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, created the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2013 as a response to the acquittal of Floridian George Zimmerman who killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin. A year later, when police in Ferguson, Missouri, killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, hundreds of members of BLM descended on the city for a nonviolent demonstration, and the movement grew dramatically. Brilliantly using social media, BLM generated hundreds of protests throughout the nation that persisted as more police-related deaths occurred. Most of those publicized were of young men, though the case of Sandra Bland who died in police custody in Texas in 2015, was a notable exception.
Yet BLM leaders, many of whom are LGBTQ, have insisted that the issues go beyond the deaths of black males. According to one scholar, the organization’s success is based on the feminist theory of “intersectionality” (see p. 642) that calls “for a united focus on issues of race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, disability, and state-sponsored violence. It argues that to prioritize one social issue over another issue will ultimately lead to failure in the global struggle for civil and human rights.”7 Another significant movement that embraced intersectionality emerged from the African American Policy Forum, which created #SayHerName, a social media-driven campaign to “help ensure that Black women’s stories are integrated into demands for justice, policy responses to police violence, and media representations of victims of police brutality.”8
#SayHerName
As protestors marched to draw attention to antiblack police violence in the second decade of the twenty-first century, activists called for recognizing that the movement should recognize that women, too, were routinely victims of violent tactics. Here at a 2014 New York demonstration against police violence, two women hold up a banner featuring black women with the message, “Say Their Names. Remember Their Faces.”
Ecofeminism
One of the first social justice concerns to be reinvigorated by feminism was the environmental movement. Ecofeminism emerged in the mid-1970s to contend that “the domination of women and the domination of nature are fundamentally connected.”9 In its earliest phases, ecofeminists emphasized women’s close relationship to nature’s rhythms, theoretically allying with “essentialist” feminists, who held that gender differences are inherent. Subsequently, ecofeminism has become increasingly activist. It has contributed significantly to the “green” movement. It has also shifted attention to the ways in which environmental degradation has a heavy impact on poor women of color and their communities. Native American women have spoken out forcefully and appeared in large numbers in the ongoing protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which would cut through Native American lands in the Dakotas. The demonstrations at Standing Rock Reservation began in April 2016 and attracted thousands of protesters, many of them from the Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas tribes. Native women have invoked traditional concerns of indigenous people, claiming that they aim “to peacefully and prayerfully defend our rights, and rise up as one to sustain Mother Earth and her inhabitants.” (See Reading into the Past: “The Meaning of the Standing Rock Protests.”)
Ecofeminist activism has also drawn attention to global inequalities in access to the world’s resources and capitalist shortsightedness in their use. Such approaches have proved attractive to women of the global South, for whom economic modernization policies have proved profoundly disempowering. Indian scientist Vandana Shiva has become an international biodiversity champion, insisting that the agency of women and their traditional agricultural practices are crucial to creating sustainable development policies. Kenyan activist and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai developed her environmentalism in response to the difficulty African women were experiencing in finding adequate fuel and safe drinking water.
READING INTO THE PAST
LADONNA BRAVE BULL ALLARD
The Meaning of the Standing Rock Protests
Allard, who was instrumental in creating the anti-DAPL protest, puts the recent controversy into the context of Native history by relating the story of the 1863 Invan Ska (Whitestone) Massacre, where over three hundred Sioux were killed by the U.S. Army.
As my great-great-grandmother Mary Big Moccasin told the story, the attack came the day after the big hunt, when spirits were high. The sun was setting and everyone was sharing an evening meal when Sully’s soldiers surrounded the camp on Whitestone Hill. In the chaos that ensued, people tied their children to their horses and dogs and fled. Mary was 9 years old. As she ran, she was shot in the hip and went down. She laid there until morning, when a soldier found her. As he loaded her into a wagon, she heard her relatives moaning and crying on the battlefield. She was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Crow Creek where she stayed until her release in 1870.
Where the Cannonball River joins the Missouri River, at the site of our camp today to stop the Dakota Access pipeline, there used to be a whirlpool that created large, spherical sandstone formations. The river’s true name is Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa, River that Makes the Sacred Stones, and we have named the site of our resistance on my family’s land the Sacred Stone Camp. The stones are not created anymore, ever since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged the mouth of the Cannonball River and flooded the area in the late 1950s as they finished the Oahe dam. They killed a portion of our sacred river.
I was a young girl when the floods came and desecrated our burial sites and Sundance grounds. Our people are in that water.
This river holds the story of my entire life.
I remember hauling our water from it in big milk jugs on our horses. I remember the excitement each time my uncle would wrap his body in cloth and climb the trees on the river’s banks to pull out a honeycomb for the family — our only source of sugar. Now the river water is no longer safe to drink. What kind of world do we live in?
Look north and east now, toward the construction sites where they plan to drill under the Missouri River any day now, and you can see the old Sundance grounds, burial grounds, and Arikara village sites that the pipeline would destroy. Below the cliffs you can see the remnants of the place that made our sacred stones.
Of the 380 archeological sites that face desecration along the entire pipeline route, from North Dakota to Illinois, 26 of them are right here at the confluence of these two rivers. It is a historic trading ground, a place held sacred not only by the Sioux Nations, but also the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Northern Cheyenne.
Again, it is the U.S. Army Corps that is allowing these sites to be destroyed.
The U.S. government is wiping out our most important cultural and spiritual areas. And as it erases our footprint from the world, it erases us as a people. These sites must be protected, or our world will end, it is that simple. Our young people have a right to know who they are. They have a right to language, to culture, to tradition. The way they learn these things is through connection to our lands and our history.
If we allow an oil company to dig through and destroy our histories, our ancestors, our hearts and souls as a people, is that not genocide? . . .
We are the river, and the river is us. We have no choice but to stand up.
Today, we honor all those who died or lost loved ones in the massacre on Whitestone Hill. Today, we honor all those who have survived centuries of struggle. Today, we stand together in prayer to demand a future for our people.
SOURCE: Yes! Magazine “Why the Founder of Standing Rock Sioux Camp Can’t Forget the Whitestone Massacre,” http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/why-the-founder-of-standing-rock-sioux-camp-cant-forget-the-whitestone-massacre-20160903 (accessed July 22, 2017).
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
What are the reasons Allard gives for protesting the pipeline?
Why does Allard view the building of the pipeline as “genocide”?
Peace Activism
Peace activism — and American women’s prominent role in it — has continued to grow alongside U.S. military interventions abroad. Despite the increasing integration of women into military service (see Primary Sources: “Gender and the Military,” pp. 725–33), women continue to play a major role in peace activism. Beginning in the 1990s, women in cities throughout the United States held vigils as part of an international movement called Women in Black, which grew out of protests against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Wearing the traditional color of mourning, Women in Black criticized militarism in its many forms from an explicitly feminist perspective, writing on their Web site: “We have a feminist understanding: that male violence against women in domestic life and in the community, in times of peace and in times of war, is interrelated. Violence is used as a means of controlling women.”10
Another antiwar group, Code Pink, started in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq invasion, uses the color pink as an ironic commentary on both the traditional “girlish” color and the Bush-era practice of coding terrorist threat levels as yellow, orange, or red. Code Pink’s demonstrations draw on the confrontational protest tradition of early twentieth-century suffrage militants (see p. 435).
WOMEN AND POLITICS
While the backlash against feminism has put the women’s movement on the defensive, feminist activism has kept women’s issues a vital part of national politics for more than forty years. Republicans and Democrats radically differed over, but were equally attentive to, issues of concern to women, from economic inequality to abortion rights to gender violence. Despite the expansion of the New Right’s conservative power, women’s political influence continued to grow, and the number of women in Congress, the presidential cabinet, and the Supreme Court grew. The dramatic impact of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent “war on terror” intensified political implications for women at home and abroad.
The 1980s: Carter and Reagan
Feminists were lukewarm to the 1977–1981 presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter. A social conservative and evangelical Christian, Carter was unsympathetic to the pro-choice movement and supported the law banning the use of federal funds for abortions. But Carter also appointed feminist Bella Abzug to head the planning commission for the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, and his wife, Rosalynn, was an active proponent of the ERA. His appointment of civil rights veteran Eleanor Holmes Norton (see p. 645) to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) rescued that agency from irrelevance and led to a significant increase in the federal government’s ability to challenge workplace discrimination by gender and race.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 raised greater obstacles to women’s concerns on the national stage. Reagan had campaigned with the promise “to get the government off our backs.” His administration trimmed federal agencies’ resources by 12 percent, dramatically shrinking federal programs that assisted poor women and children. The cuts also affected specifically feminist programs, for instance, the Women’s Education Action Project, which addressed gender discrimination in education. For the crucial position of head of the EEOC, President Reagan chose Clarence Thomas, an African American lawyer who believed that affirmative action programs eroded the self-confidence of their supposed beneficiaries.
Among Reagan’s many friendly gestures to the anti-abortion movement was the 1988 Emancipation Proclamation of Preborn Children, an executive order that deliberately played off of Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation by equating abortion with slavery. His administration cut public funding for abortions for poor women and blocked organizations that received federal funds for reproductive counseling if abortion was mentioned. Abortion opponents received public funds for their “pregnancy crisis clinics,” designed to convince women to forgo abortion in favor of carrying their pregnancies to term. Now that the ERA had failed, Reagan endorsed a pro-life amendment that would have made abortion unconstitutional.
Ironically, in 1981 President Reagan appointed the first woman justice — Sandra Day O’Connor — to the Supreme Court. Over her long tenure on the bench, O’Connor was regularly the swing vote in abortion cases, accepting the constitutionality of numerous restrictions on the practice while upholding Roe v. Wade itself.
Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas
In 1991, Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush, named Clarence Thomas to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the African American civil rights leader Thurgood Marshall. During the nomination process, Anita Hill — like Thomas, an African American lawyer — charged that Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the EEOC. Television audiences sat riveted while Hill testified before the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee about the intimate and embarrassing details of Thomas’s unwanted sexual advances. Thomas angrily denied the charges and claimed that he was being subjected to a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” The senators, unwilling to appreciate the gravity of Hill’s charges, narrowly approved the nomination. Thomas’s term on the Court has been marked by unwavering support for conservative decisions and a stubborn unwillingness, presumably born of the trauma of his nomination process, to join the other justices in openly addressing cases while the Court is in session.
Anita Hill Testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee
Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony against Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination set off a media firestorm. The Senate at that time had only two women members, and the Senate Judiciary Committee that heard Hill’s testimony was entirely male. While the committee did not give much weight to her account of the sexual harassment she endured, Hill’s story brought the issue to wide public notice, helping to transform workplace policies and procedures. It also stimulated women’s political engagement in electoral politics.
The Thomas-Hill incident catapulted the issue of sexual harassment into public consciousness. In the wake of the hearings, national polls found that four out of ten women said they had experienced sexual harassment on the job. The Thomas-Hill incident also contributed to the growing power and assertiveness of women in electoral politics. In the 1992 elections, the number of women elected to the U.S. Senate increased from three to seven. Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois state legislator, became the first African American woman elected to the Senate. As of 2017, women holding office in the U.S. Congress include twenty-one senators (21 percent) and eighty-four congressional representatives (19.3 percent). Three senators and thirty-four representatives are women of color. The state of California takes the lead in women in Congress, including, once again, both of its senators.
Behind the increasing numbers of women officeholders were women voters, many of them influenced by feminist perspectives. By the 1980s, more than sixty years after women won the right to vote, a female voting bloc had finally emerged. Women were more likely to vote Democratic than men. “The gravitation of men and women to different political camps appears to be the outstanding demographic development in American politics over the past twenty years,” claimed the Atlantic Monthly in 1996.11 Women of color are disproportionately responsible for American women’s Democratic Party leanings. Not only did men and women evidence basic differences over feminist issues such as reproductive choice and wage equity, but women were more favorably inclined to an enhanced role of government in extending social services.
The “woman’s bloc” was enabled by an increasingly sophisticated network of female fund-raising. The National Women’s Political Caucus, established in 1971, promoted women candidates regardless of party. In 1984, the National Political Congress of Black Women was founded to address political issues of specific concern to African Americans. In 1985, Ellen Malcolm founded Emily’s List to provide seed money for female, Democratic, pro-choice candidates. “Emily” is an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast.” It is now one of the most important political action committees in American politics.
The Clinton Years
In the 1992 election, women helped elect Democratic candidate Bill Clinton over Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush as president. During his first administration, Clinton’s strength among women voters grew. Among the women he appointed to prominent federal offices was Madeleine Albright, who as secretary of state became the highest-ranked female cabinet member ever. For the Supreme Court, Clinton chose women’s rights litigator Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In the 1996 presidential election, the female vote for a second Clinton administration was eleven points higher than the male vote.
Hillary Rodham Clinton was America’s first First Lady to have worked full-time for a living. Modeling herself after Eleanor Roosevelt (see pp. 498–508), she sought to use her position to enact political change. She was charged with primary oversight of her husband’s efforts to pass national health care legislation. When it failed, she was ridiculed and maligned for overstepping her role, in a right-wing attack that has continued to this day. In 1995, she played a major role at the United Nations International Women’s Conference, held in Beijing, China. Aligning herself with “world attention on issues that matter most in the lives of women and their families,” she gave voice to and became publicly associated with the global feminist slogan “women’s rights are human rights.”12
Then, in 1998, President Bill Clinton became embroiled in a scandal over a sexual affair with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. On the grounds that he had publicly lied about the relationship, he became the only president since Andrew Johnson in 1868 to be tried on articles of impeachment. Feminism played a complicated, even ironic, role in this episode. Although many previous presidents had been notorious adulterers, thirty years of feminism had called into question the long-standing assumption that men in power could engage in extramarital sex with impunity, and the proponents of impeachment made ample use of this new revulsion at the double standard. Nonetheless, many feminist groups stood by Clinton because of his defense of abortion rights and other feminist issues.
George W. Bush
Bill Clinton was followed into the presidency by George W. Bush, who shared the right wing’s commitment to narrowing abortion rights. However, the most dramatic historic events of his presidency were the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the military response he authorized.
Even more than Republican predecessors George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush allied himself with the religious right and the “pro-family” lobby. He wore away at abortion rights, withdrawing $34 million in congressionally authorized funds from United Nations family planning programs on the grounds that the money would facilitate the availability of abortions worldwide. He also opposed research involving stem cells derived from fetal tissue. (In contrast to this, it should be noted that his administration provided unprecedented levels of funding to tackle AIDS in Africa.) His appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito greatly increased the conservative and pro-life strength on the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet at the same time, he named numerous women to high positions, most notably Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, the highest national political position ever held by an African American woman.
A new epoch in American history began on September 11, 2001, when extremists from the al-Qaeda terrorist group hijacked four commercial airliners. Two of the planes destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York City, another seriously damaged the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Among the more than three thousand people who died were of course many women. Flight attendants CeeCee Lyles and Debbie Welsh helped bring down the fourth plane before it could be flown into the White House or the Capitol. The United States went to war against Afghanistan in October 2001 because the ruling group, the Taliban, had harbored al-Qaeda leaders. This became the longest-running war in American history.
Two years later, President George W. Bush announced a preemptive strike on Iraq, claiming, falsely as it turned out, that the nation had “weapons of mass destruction” and intimate links to al-Qaeda. Within a few months, Bush proclaimed an end to major combat operations there, but actual victory remained elusive. The Iraq War continued, becoming a bloody battle between U.S. forces and insurgents, and helped fuel a continuing civil war among Iraqis.
Bush’s enhanced status as a leader in the war against terror helped him win a second term in 2004. Within two years, however, discontent over the war in Iraq and the federal government’s incompetence in the face of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led to midterm election victories for Democratic candidates. In 2007, Californian Nancy Pelosi became the first woman majority leader and Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in the line of presidential succession.
The Election of 2008: A Historic Presidential Choice
Despite the significant successes of women in politics, the presidency and vice presidency remained elusive. In 1972 Shirley Chisholm had been the first African American and the first woman to make a meaningful bid for her party’s presidential nomination, and in 1984 Geraldine Ferraro had run for vice president, but until 2008 neither party had seriously considered nominating a woman for president. Hillary Clinton changed this. Breaking out of the limitations of the First Lady role, she was elected senator from New York in 2000. By 2007, she had become the presumed front-runner for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Then Hillary Clinton’s chances at the nomination were challenged by Barack Obama, a charismatic first-term African American senator from Illinois. Clinton and Obama fought a contentious battle through a long and suspenseful primary season. Although Clinton began the campaign with little emphasis on her gender, she was the object of sexist attacks from commentators who concentrated on her clothing and criticized her emotional responses, charging her with lack of emotion in some cases and too many tears in others. These attacks precipitated a revived feminist awareness among younger women who thought that such explicit misogyny was a thing of the past. When Obama finally secured a majority of delegates, Clinton endorsed Obama and belatedly acknowledged the historic significance of her candidacy. Referring to the number of popular votes cast on her behalf, she movingly told her supporters, “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.”13
The 2008 campaign then took a surprise turn when Republican nominee John McCain selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, hoping that she might attract women voters disappointed by Clinton’s exit from the race. Photogenic and charismatic, Palin characterized herself as an ordinary “hockey mom.” She did not attract the majority of women voters, but she did prove enormously successful with the right-wing conservative base. She was resolutely anti-abortion, played to traditional “family values,” and staunchly advocated Republicans’ anti-government, anti-tax concerns. She played a major role in catalyzing a grassroots insurgency that called itself the Tea Party and considered the party’s establishment insufficiently conservative. It would go on to play a major role in subsequent elections.
The Obama Years
The 2008 election was a clear victory for Barack Obama. His success stemmed from his exceptionally well-organized grassroots campaign and his appeal to young and nonwhite voters. He also pledged to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He brought enough Democrats into office with him to secure impressive albeit temporary majorities in both houses of Congress. Entering office amid the dire political fallout of an economic recession that had begun in December 2007, he was able to reverse the alarming banking and mortgage crisis, a steep decline in the stock market and housing values, and a sharp spike in unemployment.
Michelle Obama, a high-powered professional woman with a strong personality, might have been expected to follow in Hillary Clinton’s footsteps as First Lady, but as an African American woman, she faced different challenges. Invoking long-standing negative stereotypes, critics characterized her as “an angry black woman.” In response, she worked to soften her public persona, successfully balancing activism and traditionalism. She was outspoken and passionate about her projects — military families and childhood obesity — which stayed within a relatively conventional female sphere of interest. She became enormously popular for her elegance, forthright advocacy of her husband’s priorities, and the admirable family of two daughters she raised in the White House spotlight.
President Obama appointed a significant number of women to high-level positions, fourteen to cabinet-level posts alone. He also named Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. The third woman to hold that office, she served successfully for the entirety of his first administration and, in contrast to her subsequent career, became one of the most admired women in American public life. Privileged with two opportunities for Supreme Court appointments, the president named women to both: Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice, and Elena Kagan. The court now had an unprecedented four women.
In President Obama’s first few days in office, he reversed the ban on funding for international family planning programs imposed by his predecessor. He also signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which repealed restrictions on filing an equal pay lawsuit. But Obama’s greatest domestic achievement, the reform of the national health care system, had the most profound implications for women and their families. Ever since Harry Truman, American presidents had sought to reform national health care. Obama succeeded, though not without many compromises. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), which the Right nicknamed “Obamacare,” left the employer-based private insurance system intact while phasing in a network of state “health exchanges” and federal supplemental funds to assist those who could not otherwise afford health care and insurance. As a disproportionate percentage of the uninsured poor, women — and their children — would have far more reliable access to health care. In addition, the law required insurance plans to provide specific preventive treatments, such as mammograms, for women.
The public’s response to the ACA was contradictory. Many elements were popular, for example, regulations requiring the maintenance of insurance coverage for those with “previously existing conditions.” And in states that cooperated with the federal law, the number of people with health coverage increased dramatically. But conservatives made political capital of the law by decrying it as a government intrusion into private life, and they used this issue to help make a clean sweep in Congress in the midterm elections of 2010. They successfully eliminated the law’s coverage of abortions and challenged the requirement that as part of a basic standard of health, women must receive access to birth control. In 2014, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court agreed that private businesses whose owners had religious objections were not required to provide contraception coverage to their employees. Nonetheless, two years later, thanks in part to intense divisions among Republicans, President Obama secured reelection. The controversy surrounding the ACA would go on to make it one of the most politically significant pieces of legislation in many years and promised to play a major role in post-Obama politics.
The Long War on Terror
Obama’s pledge to end the Afghan and Iraq wars contributed to his successful run for president. Over the course of his presidency, U.S. forces in Afghanistan were steadily drawn down from 180,000 to less than 10,000 at the end of 2014, but military departure from Iraq proved more difficult. In August 2010, President Obama announced that the United States was ending its official combat mission there, but subsequent developments made the drawdown impossible to complete.
Beyond the staggering financial price tag of these two wars, the human costs have been enormous. By 2016, almost 6,000 Americans troops had been killed in the two wars, approximately 160 of them women. Compared to the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War, the death numbers are relatively low in part because care of those wounded on the battlefield has been intense and aggressive. However, the high number of survivors has meant that tens of thousands of severely wounded and traumatized veterans have returned to the United States, only to find the U.S. Veterans Administration unprepared and unable to provide them with adequate and timely care. Current estimates of civilian deaths among Afghans number 31,000. Figures for Iraq are harder to determine, but one reliable source puts the number of civilians close to 200,000.14
Iraqi and Afghan women have been deeply affected by these wars. Part of the rationale for going to war in Afghanistan was the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of Afghan women, to which women’s groups in the United States had been trying to draw attention for decades. Some gains for Afghan women emerged during the U.S. war in Afghanistan as education levels improved and political representation expanded though only in urban areas; isolated rural areas continue to be hostile environments for women. In contrast, the situation for women in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been nowhere near as dire before the war and was made worse as a result of the conflict. The post-Hussein regime was heavily influenced by Muslim fundamentalists, who increased pressure on women to leave their jobs and education for subordinate positions in the home. The new constitution in Iraq permitted local religious sects to oversee family courts, which alarmed many women’s rights advocates. The war created instability and danger in Iraq, particularly for women fearing rape, kidnapping, and even murder at the hands of religious extremists.
Far from countering terrorists, U.S. action in Iraq seems to have destabilized the region and created a power vacuum that allowed even more extreme terrorists to flourish. In the summer of 2014, a startling new threat to peace in the region emerged. A radical Islamic terrorist group, more sophisticated and brutal than al-Qaeda, made significant inroads into controlling parts of Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, uses social media to recruit new fighters and produces videos with high production values that feature horrific beheadings. ISIS announced that its policy toward women considered infidel or disloyal would include rape, enslavement, and forced marriage.
ISIS has gone on to declare itself a virtual Islamic Empire, a “Caliphate.” Although it has suffered increasing losses of territory on the ground, ISIS has stepped up its dramatic international terrorist attacks, especially in Europe. Numbers of women have joined its ranks to become suicide bombers, ISIS’s primary weapon of terror. Fear of this escalating international war of terrorism played a significant role in the election of 2016.
The Election of 2016
The election of 2016 will surely be one of the most disturbing and consequential in modern American history. When the campaign began, a full two years before the November 2016 election, Hillary Clinton seemed a sure bet for the Democratic nomination. She sought to address growing income inequality by increasing corporate taxes and also campaigned against unregulated private funds pouring into American politics. Protecting and extending women’s rights and working toward equal pay for equal work were important parts of her platform. She promised to build on and protect the gains of the Obama administration, most notably the Affordable Care Act.
Hillary Clinton and the 2016 Campaign
Observers have noted that although Hillary Clinton did well among women voters as a whole in the 2016 election, Donald Trump had greater success with white women without college degrees. Clinton performed well among women of color. Her most impressive showing was among young women. She carried 63 percent of those between 18 and 29 years old. This photograph at a Nevada rally features Clinton with actress Eva Longoria, Chelsea Clinton, and actress America Ferrera.
The Republican field began with sixteen candidates, but gradually real estate mogul and reality television star Donald Trump knocked off all the others. Trump ran an antiglobalization and extremely nationalistic campaign. He promised to withdraw the United States from global free trade agreements and to dramatically limit immigration from Mexico, which he claimed was responsible for American workers’ economic problems, and to target Muslim immigration for national security reasons. In particular, he promised to halt the immigration of Muslims completely and to build a wall across the southern border of the United States to halt what he claimed was massive illegal immigration from Mexico.
Republicans concentrated a barrage of attacks on Clinton, focusing on her years as secretary of state. As Trump rose to the top of the field, he alleged that, by using a nonsecure email server, Secretary Clinton had put national security at risk. Claiming that her behavior rose to the level of criminality, he regularly incited his audiences to chant “Lock Her Up!” Meanwhile, Clinton faced an equally unlikely primary challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, self-described socialist, who pressed for much more aggressive income equalization measures. The expectation was that Clinton would ride the support of women to the nomination and then the presidency, but both Trump and Sanders attracted sectors of the female electorate (young women in Sanders’s case and noncollege educated white married women in Trump’s). Strong evidence of Trump’s long-term sexual harassment of women, which was expected to undercut white women’s support for him, seemed to make little difference. Clinton’s strength among women voters remained strongest among women of color. Despite Sanders’s strong showing, Clinton captured the Democratic Party’s nomination. In the election, Trump won the Electoral College, aided by narrow victories in a half dozen crucial states although Clinton won the popular vote by over three million votes. Riding on Trump’s coattails, Republicans retained narrow control of the Senate and significantly increased their control of the House. The horrified reaction of millions of women to the election led to demonstrations the day after Trump’s inauguration all over the country and on all seven continents. By many counts, the January 21, 2017, women’s marches were the largest protest demonstrations ever held in American history.
Trump’s egregious sexual predation contributed to the emergence, nine months into his presidency, of the willingness of more and more sexual assault victims, beginning in Hollywood but spreading much more widely, to go public and name the powerful men who were their assailants. In an exceptionally activist expression of the capacity of social media, accusations began to accumulate under the Twitter sign #MeToo, and the public began to take greater notice than ever before of the sexual violence faced by women.
Women’s March, Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017
The shock of Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat by Donald Trump, a well-documented sexual harasser, generated a spontaneous, widespread call for women to gather together and protest. Gathering steam on social media, protest leaders quickly determined to be genuinely intersectional, so that all races, ethnicities, and sexualities would be equally represented and visible. The marches, spreading to most major American cities and beyond, were marked by clever, daring signs and slogans; and by ubiquitous, pink “pussy hats,” hand-knitted by participants to satirize the president-elect’s proud boast that he could grab women by “the pussy” with impunity.
Even before Election Day, evidence was beginning to accumulate of intrusion into the voting process by computer hackers almost certainly with the knowledge and support of Russian president Vladimir Putin. In the months just after the election, congressional committees and an officially charged special federal prosecutor began investigating these charges although President Donald Trump refused to give them credence.
Trump has approached the presidency with an unprecedented disdain for the traditional protocol of the office — refusing to release his tax returns, questioning the integrity of the media, and denigrating his predecessor President Obama. His casual misogyny was much on display during the campaign, and for the most part, women play a small role in his administration. There are two exceptions. His daughter Ivanka Trump, who sometimes acts as counsel to her father, often supplants his much less visible third wife, Melania, in the public eye. And in July 2017, Sarah Huckabee Sanders became White House press secretary. An aspect of the Trump presidency that is still unfolding concerns investigations into whether the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign and whether Trump obstructed justice when he fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating the possibility of Russian intervention in the election.
Beyond “Russiagate,” the first year of the new administration was marked by four key developments. When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in the last months of the Obama administration, Republicans in the Senate refused to allow the sitting president to fill the seat. Soon after Trump took office, he nominated and the Republican Congress ratified Neil Gorsuch, who was expected to strengthen the right wing of the Court, including on abortion cases. In addition to its ability to shape the Supreme Court, with control of all three branches of government, the Republican Congress seemed to be perfectly situated to fulfill Trump’s and the party’s campaign promises to undo the Affordable Care Act, which would have devastating consequences for poor women and children. This promise, however, has proved difficult to fulfill. Acting solely through executive action, the president has sought to fulfill a second campaign pledge, to draw a virtual halt to Muslim immigration, which he has said threatens the nation with terrorism. Massive popular demonstrations and quick court actions stayed the president’s anti-immigration orders, until, in July 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that parts of the order could remain in force. Undocumented families, discussed below, also became targets of anti-immigration policy. Again, vulnerable families are the most deeply affected by this radical shift in national policy. In December 2017, Trump achieved arguably his only legislative success when Congress passed on overhaul of the federal tax system, one that primarily benefited wealthy Americans. Other dramatic changes in American politics and standing in the world no doubt are to come. (For a view of American politics from the perspective of its first Somali America woman elected to public office, see Reading into the Past: “First Muslim Somali American Lawmaker.”)
READING INTO THE PAST
ILHAN OMAR
First Muslim Somali American Lawmaker
Although the big political news in 2016 was the election of Donald Trump, who ran a campaign hostile to immigrants, Muslims, women’s reproductive freedom, and LGBT rights, there were also progressive victories. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee, worked as a Minneapolis city council policy analyst before running for election to Minnesota’s state legislature in 2016. Building on a coalition of students, immigrants, and progressives, she unseated a forty-four-year incumbent and became the first Somali American lawmaker in the nation. In January 2017, she graced the cover of Time magazine as one of the “women who are changing the world.” The passages below are from her Web site.
Meet Ilhan
Ilhan Omar is an experienced Twin Cities policy analyst, organizer, public speaker, and advocate. She was recently elected as the Minnesota House Representative for District 60B, making her the highest-elected Somali American public official in the United States. Ilhan is the Assistant Minority Leader, with assignments to three house committees: Civic Law and Data Practices Policy, Higher Education and Career Readiness Policy and Finance, and State Government Finance. In addition to serving in the legislature, Ilhan is a mother of three and the Director of Policy Initiatives at Women Organizing Women, where she empowers East African women to take civic leadership roles in their community. Born in Somalia, Ilhan and her family fled the country’s civil war when she was eight. The family spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the United States in the 1990s.
Fighting for Equity and Justice
Rep. Ilhan Omar is the first Somali American Muslim legislator elected to a state legislature in the United States. She proudly represents district MN-60B, including University of Minnesota, Augsburg, Prospect Park, Seward, Como, Cedar Riverside neighborhoods.
Our campaign’s vision is rooted in co-governance, equity, and justice and we are committed to training the next generation of organizers to create grassroots, progressive change throughout our district and state from the ground up.
Advancing Equity for All
As a woman, immigrant, and person of color, I am an intersectional progressive who works to build power within our community. In order to do so, I am dedicated to advancing an agenda focused on economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.
When elected, I will be both the first Muslim woman and Somali American woman to hold office in the United States. However, women leaders and leaders of color have been drawn to our campaign not because we have sought them out as a politically expedient, but because the campaign represents the changes in our community and district that are bringing underrepresented people into the political process. I am proud of the leadership roles women and people of color play in my campaign — leading our finance team, communications, field outreach, organizing conventions, and crafting policy in favor of social justice. My work in the community and my campaign demonstrates that we as Minnesotans do better when we all do better.
I am the only candidate endorsed by OutFront Minnesota Action and Stonewall DFL. I was humbled and honored to be part of our state’s historic victories for marriage equality in 2012 and 2013. However, there is still a great deal of work to do in the struggle for LGBT inclusion. Many LGBT community members have endured bullying, homelessness, lack of opportunity, and discrimination. I realize that these struggles are the same struggles many new immigrants face. I understand civil rights issues are human rights issues. Discrimination is harmful no matter who you are; all people deserve respect and equity under the law. I will be a steadfast advocate for all underrepresented communities at the Capitol. It is not our job to judge one another, but to welcome and serve everyone.
I want to help build a world where chances of birth don’t define people’s lives. I want my daughters to be judged not by their gender or skin color, but by their contributions to our community.
I unequivocally support women’s reproductive rights and I am the current Vice President of the DFL Feminist Caucus. I have fought my entire life for human rights and as your representative, I will continue that fight.
SOURCE: https://www.ilhanomar.com
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
How do Omar’s experiences compare to those of earlier immigrant women?
What does her election suggest about the changing role of women of color in American politics?
WOMEN’S LIVES IN MODERN AMERICA AND THE WORLD
While feminism and the conservative backlash against it provide an essential framework for understanding the recent history of American women, there have been other engines of change in women’s lives, especially the maturation of the female labor force and corresponding shifts in American marriage patterns in family life and sexual choices, as well as changing immigration patterns.
Inequalities — Old and New — in the Labor Force
Consistent with long-running developments, women currently constitute nearly half of paid labor, and working mothers are now the norm (see the Appendix, Table 2, p. A-19). This development has occurred in the context of a dramatic increase in national wealth inequality, making the United States the most economically stratified industrial nation in the world. Women at the turn of the twenty-first century could be found on both extremes of the labor force.
From one perspective, many women workers are moving in the direction of greater opportunity, better wages, and increasing equality with men. The median wage for full-time women workers increased from 59 percent of men’s average earnings in 1970 to approximately 80 percent in 2015. White and Asian women are earning 75 percent and 85 percent, respectively, of the average white male wage, while black and Hispanic women earn much less, 63 percent and 54 percent, respectively.15
In the professions, the infusion of women has been especially stunning. The percentage of medical degrees awarded to women jumped from 7 percent in 1966 to 46 percent in 2016, and the percentage of law degrees increased from 4 percent to 47 percent in that same period. By the turn of the twenty-first century, women were the majority of graduates in veterinary medicine and pharmacy programs. Even in the corporate world, female executives quintupled from 5 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 2014. Still, at the highest professional and corporate levels women remained underrepresented.
Positive Images for Female Achievement
In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, published Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Her fundamental message was that ambition in women was denigrated as unfeminine and that women colluded with this by holding themselves back instead of marshaling their talents to advance into top leadership positions. Some feminists criticized Sandberg for focusing on individual corporate success rather than on the social conditions of most working women. Others appreciated her recognition that the larger culture made it difficult for women to see themselves as accomplished leaders. This photograph of a young girl deeply engaged in the male-dominated world of technology was part of a Lean In project to provide more accurate and attractive representations of working women to mainstream advertisers, magazines, and newspapers.
These achievements contrast sharply with the experience of working women at the low end of the labor market. The majority of women continue to work in female-dominated jobs that paid a fifth to a third less than those in male-dominated sectors. In 2010, 75 percent of clerical and administrative support jobs, 91 percent of private household labor, and almost 90 percent of institutional health care service work continued to be performed by women. These underpaid sectors of the labor force provide for much of the continuing disparity between men’s and women’s earnings. For the experience of the majority of working women to improve, this continuing sexual division of labor must change.
Combating Discrimination
The traditional tool of workers, union membership, has declined sharply in this era. At the same time, women’s representation in organized labor has risen dramatically from 19 percent in 1962 to 46 percent in 2014. As one scholar has noted, “Labor feminists increased their numbers and leadership in a class movement that was rapidly declining in power and prestige.”16
Labor unions have served as a resource for women, especially in female-dominated industries such as the clerical and service sectors. Groups of female workers who had never been previously considered candidates for unionization surprised male labor leaders by forming militant unions. The Association of Flight Attendants, formed in 1973, successfully fought demeaning age and weight requirements and the title of “airline hostess” (see Figure 11.1, p. 661). In the 1980s and 1990s, service sector and public employee unions benefited from women members and a new generation of women leaders. In 1988, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers won a seventeen-year battle against Harvard University.
Today, the most vital area of labor organization is among immigrant workers, many of whom are women in the low-wage sectors of food preparation, cleaning-service work, and in-home health care. In 1985, the Service Employees International Union created the Justice for Janitors campaign to organize the cleaning personnel who work in office buildings and hotels in major cities. Unions have been active in living wage campaigns, which also address the concerns of immigrant workers. These programs bring together low-wage workers with community, religious, women’s, and labor organizations to campaign for increases in municipal minimum wage rates.
Los Angeles Latinas Strike for Justice
Organized in 1985, the Justice for Janitors movement has drawn attention to the issues of low wages, poor benefits, and difficult working conditions among service workers in cities all over the country. The campaign has had notable successes in Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and Cincinnati. This image is from an October 2005 rally protesting California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s anti-union initiatives. The majority of the protesters were Latino, and the rally included large numbers of women. Many of the speakers, including veteran farm labor activist Dolores Huerta, spoke in Spanish. The women chanting in the foreground are Janitors for Justice members Martina de Maroana (right) and Ana Castro (left). What do their expressions and body language suggest about how they view their labor activism?
In addition to turning to unions, women seeking to break through labor market segmentation have made use of two important legal tools. In class action suits, based on the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s (see pp. 582 and 588), instead of one person’s seeking to prove individual discrimination, a group of people (the “class”) establishes a pattern of job segregation and underpayment. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, at least five hundred of these actions were settled in favor of the women litigants. The other tool is the voluntary affirmative action program, by which employers undertake plans to qualify more women and minorities for employment in areas in which they are underrepresented. Affirmative action campaigns have opened up not only professional work, such as university employment, but also jobs in steel factories, construction trades, and police and fire departments.
A measure of the impact of these programs has been the political and legal reaction against them. Characterizing affirmative action programs as “reverse discrimination,” Republican candidates vowed to dismantle them. The Supreme Court’s 1978 ruling in University of California Regents v. Bakke was a major blow to affirmative action (see the Appendix, p. A-14). In 2011, the Supreme Court also dealt a major blow to class action antidiscrimination suits. In Walmart v. Dukes, a group of women suing the largest retail employer of women in the country was found to be too varied and diverse to be able to stand as a “class” and thus to sue. The decision will have far-reaching consequences for antidiscrimination suits that come from groups of people rather than individuals.
CHANGES IN FAMILY AND SEXUALITY
Much like the bifurcation of the female labor experience into high-end achievement and low-end economic decline, the changes in family life are very much affected by class and income differences. The increased presence, new demands, and political gains of gay, lesbian, and transgender people constitute another historic development in family and personal life. Similarly, attention to sexual assaults on America’s college campuses, like similar developments in the military (see Primary Sources: “Gender and the Military,” pp. 725–33), opens up a new front in American women’s struggles for sexual dignity and freedom.
Changing Marriage Patterns
By the late twentieth century, lifelong marriage had become far less common as an experience for women than ever before. With women’s increasing capacity for self-support and the widespread acceptability of cohabitation among unmarried couples, the marriage rate has declined. In 2016, only one out of five households in the United States included a married couple with children. Women married at later ages — an average of twenty-seven in 2016. Currently, perhaps as many as half of all first marriages end in divorce. One historian refers to this development as the “disestablishment” of the institution of marriage in favor of the “pluralization” of sexual and familial arrangements.17
In one area, marriage seems to be thriving in the twenty-first century. By the mid-1990s, religious leaders were sanctifying gay unions, and corporate practices and state law were beginning to grant marriage-like recognition to “domestic unions.” Seeking to halt this development, congressional conservatives passed and President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal recognition of gay marriages and prohibited married gay couples from having the benefits attached to marriage, such as tax and Social Security benefits.
Marriage regulation, however, has always been a matter of state law, which in many states was becoming more liberal. Ground zero for the battle over gay marriage became California. Antigay marriage forces were able to pass a state constitutional amendment stating that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Two gay couples took the California amendment to the Supreme Court, joining a case from New York. In 2013, the Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional (see the Appendix, pp. A-15 to A-16). Dramatically, in June 2015, in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled that no state can deny same-sex couples the right to marry.
Edith Windsor, Plaintiff in United States v. Windsor
New Yorkers Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer had been together for thirty years when, in 2007, they traveled to Canada, where gay marriage was legal, to have their union made official. Two years later, Thea died and left Edith a large inheritance. However, because of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government refused to recognize their marriage and denied Edith a spousal inheritance tax exemption. She brought her case to the court system, and lower courts found the relevant section of DOMA unconstitutional. In this 2013 photograph, Windsor (center) and her lawyer celebrate on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, which had just reaffirmed the lower courts’ findings, a decision that marked a turning point in the legalization of gay marriage throughout the United States.
Parenting
Childbearing and childrearing have also undergone significant change. American women have fewer children, have them later, have more of them outside of marriage, and are more likely never to have them at all. Single motherhood is one of the most dramatic statistical changes in women’s lives over the last half century, rising from 5 percent of births in 1960 to 40 percent in 2014. Racial differences are equally dramatic, with 70 percent of African American mothers single, compared with 66 percent of Native Americans, 53 percent of Hispanics, and 29 percent of whites. Although much attention has been paid to pregnancies among unmarried teens, their numbers have been declining while the numbers of adult single mothers have been rising.
The experience of single mothers differs significantly by class. At the upper-income levels, single women have been able to support themselves, become homeowners, and have children. For most single mothers, however, this has not been the case. In 2015, 36 percent of all homes headed by working single mothers fell below the poverty line. For women at the lower end of the income scale, cuts in social services have made single motherhood even more difficult. Aid for Families with Dependent Children, known colloquially as “welfare,” had been under attack since the Reagan years. Finally, in 1996, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act, claiming to “end welfare as we know it.” The law limited to five years the time that poor women and children could receive federal welfare assistance. By 2000, the welfare rolls had been cut in half. The impact of this step was blunted until the economy collapsed a decade later. Poor single mothers were now required to take any job available to them, no matter how low the pay; most of these jobs lacked any health benefits to replace the federal programs from which these families had been removed.
For all working women, mothering is challenging. The problem of balancing home and work life is now arguably the most persistent and difficult personal dilemma for American women. In contrast to the mothers of the 1950s, who were discontent because they spent too much time at home raising children, twenty-first-century mothers worry about their divided lives, about not having enough time with their children, and about falling behind in the workplace. The United States is the only major industrial country in which new mothers do not have rights to paid leave.
Because early feminist calls for publicly funded child care went unheeded, well-paid women turned to low-wage women to care for their children, clean their homes, and tend to their aging parents. At the lower end of the labor force, the children of working mothers were cared for by family members or in informal and too often unlicensed family day care facilities. A 2007 survey found most commercial child care to be of fair or poor quality.18 Although feminist groups continue to call for publicly supported child care, noting, for instance, that the armed forces provide this benefit, there is no significant political support for extending it to society at large. By comparison, publicly supported child care, staffed by licensed educators, is available in all the European Union countries. No demand of second-wave feminism has fallen off the political radar more steeply than the call for child care support to working mothers.
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights
The early twenty-first century saw two very important gains in gay rights: the normalization of gays in the military and the growing legalization of gay marriage. Nonetheless, the movement for an expansion of civil rights has been limited by the significant backlash against gays and continuing violence, especially against gay and lesbian youth.
The increasing visibility and demands of transgender people have added a major new element to the battle for recognition and rights of gay and lesbian people and the radically shifting territory of American sexuality. Throughout American history, there have been women living as men who have fought in wars, done men’s work, or married women (to a lesser extent, men have also lived as women). In the 1950s, physicians became involved, and highly publicized examples of people who surgically changed their bodies brought new recognition to people seeking to be transgender. Transgender people were always part of the gay and lesbian movement, but in the 1990s they became more prominent.
Transgender issues simultaneously pose a challenge to feminism and extend its basic premises. If one of the goals of feminism is to increase the range and variety of ways to be a woman (and a man), some feminists have argued that physically changing sex reinscribes rigid gender distinctions. Proponents of a growing transgender movement have argued differently — that the feminist principle that gender roles are a matter of social construction and individual choice should be extended to one’s fundamental designation as male or female. Moreover, they ask, in a society that accepts bodily modifications such as tattoos and breast modification and the use of hormones for contraceptive purposes, why are these practices suspect for the purposes of transitioning between male and female?
The twenty-first century has seen many transgender firsts in politics, entertainment, and academia. Many government bodies now allow transgender individuals to change their official sexual designation on birth certificates, on passports, and in Social Security records, and some government and business antidiscrimination practices have been extended to transgender persons. In contrast to these gains, violence against vulnerable transgender people, such as teens, prisoners, and sex workers, is a serious problem. Some states have also begun efforts to limit transgender rights. Although it later repealed the bill after extensive public protest and boycotts, North Carolina in 2016 enacted legislation that prohibited transgender individuals from using public bathrooms for the sex they identified with and in addition placed limits on the state’s antidiscrimination laws.
Women and the New Immigration
Changes in both women’s work and family lives highlight the large, significant presence of immigrants (see the Appendix, Table 5, p. A-21). The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened up gates of immigration that had been closed since 1924; it also shifted from quotas based on countries of origin to categories based on occupational skills, family ties, and political refugee status. Many in the flood of new immigrants lacked formal immigration papers, either because they overstayed temporary visas or because they crossed into the country without papers in the first place. Instead of coming from eastern and southern Europe as in the early twentieth century, half of the new immigrants came from Latin America and a quarter from Asia. From a gendered perspective, late twentieth-century immigration also differed dramatically because women were now in the majority. They immigrate to the United States as part of an international labor market of low-waged women.
The boom in immigration has been accompanied by considerable anti-immigrant sentiment, much of it focused on immigrants’ reliance on publicly funded social services. Women and children are the special targets of these attacks because they made much greater use of educational, health, and welfare services than men did. Laws in southwestern border states have attempted to ban immigrants from public services but have generally failed in the courts, giving way instead to congressional legislation on this fundamentally federal issue. In 1996, the federal Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act barred immigrants, even those with legal status, from federal welfare programs for five years after their arrival. The law also mandated the addition of new federal officers to patrol the borders.
While the economic downturn in the United States and the moderate improvement in conditions south of the border have reduced the number of illegal immigrants, those who still try to cross the border do so at greater risk. The Obama administration drastically increased deportation, in 2013 estimated at four hundred thousand cases per year. Despite increasing public activism on the part of the growing Latino population, national politics has refused to ease the path to citizenship for the estimated 10 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, an increasing number of them parents of U.S.-born, hence citizen, children. Observers expect the situation will become more problematic because of the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. In his campaign he promised not only to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, but also to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. It is too early in his presidency, however, to evaluate the long-term impact of his policies, but their immediate effect has been to spread fear and mobilize action among undocumented children and their parents.
Immigrant women constitute approximately 17 percent of the female labor force. It may be surprising to realize that one-third of immigrant women hold professional or managerial jobs, such as the many Filipina and Korean nurses. Undoubtedly, immigrant women flow into the lowest rungs of the female labor force ladder, making services and manufactured goods affordable for middle-class Americans. In the garment industry, the majority of workers are Latina and Asian women. Low pay, long hours, and dangerous working conditions recall the immigrant sweatshops of a century ago. Immigrant women also pour into the booming service sector. Cooking and cleaning in hospitals and hotels, they usually do the dirtiest work and have the least desirable working shifts. Immigrant women also constitute the overwhelming number of private domestic workers. The low cost of immigrant women’s labor has made it easier for middle-class women to hire other women to work in their homes while they take demanding outside jobs. We began this chapter with the story of Zoe Baird, one such woman.
The importance of immigration in the United States is part of “globalization,” the process by which massive international businesses have grown in size and power, exacerbating inequalities both within and between nations. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 left international capitalism an unchallenged system, thus accelerating globalization. Manufacturing jobs have been exported abroad, particularly in the wake of free trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1994 by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. In foreign factories run by or subcontracted to companies with familiar brand names like Nike and Gap, garments are produced at a fraction of the wages paid to American workers and then shipped to the United States for sale. The workers are preponderantly female, many of them mothers whose earnings are crucial to their families’ well-being. In this way, women who work for American corporations abroad — across the Mexican border making clothing, in China making children’s toys, and in Vietnam making athletic shoes — need to be considered part of the history of the United States through women’s eyes
CONCLUSION: Women in the Twenty-First Century
Just as the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s profoundly influenced women’s lives and gave rise to second-wave feminism, broad historical developments over the last forty years have had an enormous impact on women’s experiences. In part fueled by a backlash against feminism, conservatism has eroded some of the advances forged by the women’s movement, especially in the realm of reproductive freedom. Yet despite the culture wars and political conflicts that have so divided the nation, the conventional patterns by which women were subordinated in the family have continued to change. Women have also continued to make concrete gains in their quest for political and economic equality.
Growth in the labor force, accelerating inequality, and transformation in family and sexual experience — some of these changes long-standing and others new and unexpected — have made women’s lives in the twenty-first century very different from their lives fifty years ago. Patterns of globalization have significantly shaped American women’s economic opportunities and will continue to do so in the future. Women are crucial to the expansive immigration that has been one of the defining demographic developments of these years.
We cannot predict the extent to which the twenty-first century will be an era of “progress” for women or what that progress might specifically entail. Yet, as noted in this book’s introduction, Mary Ritter Beard, whose book inspired ours, insisted in 1933 upon the need to understand women’s role in “the development of American society — their activity, their thought about their labor, and their thought about the history they have helped to make or have observed in the making.” Through Women’s Eyes has extended Beard’s charge, to look not only at the profound changes in women’s lives but also at the way in which historians recognize the centrality of women’s experiences for understanding the nation’s past, up to and through the twenty-first century.
CHAPTER 12 REVIEW
KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE
Terms
STOP-ERA
third-wave feminism
Clery Act
Violence Against Women Act (2013)
Black Lives Matter
#SayHerName
ecofeminism
Emily’s List
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby
Justice for Janitors campaign
Defense of Marriage Act
Obergefell v. Hodges
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act
United States v. Windsor
People
Phyllis Schlafly
Anita Hill
Condoleezza Rice
Hillary Clinton
Michelle Obama
REVIEW QUESTIONS
What was the “New Right,” and how did it seek to counter feminism?
What were the most significant developments among feminists and social justice activists after the second wave?
Describe the advances made by women in politics since the Thomas-Hill hearings in 1991. What limitations still exist? How do you account for them?
What role do immigrant women play in today’s economy? What challenges do they face?
Describe the most important changes to family life in the last thirty years. How do you account for them?
Making Connections In what ways have the experiences of American women’s lives been affected by patterns of globalization i
PRIMARY SOURCES
Gender and the Military
IN THE DECADES AFTER THE VIETNAM WAR, feminists became interested in the American military in two very different ways. On the one hand, the doors to service, training, and military benefits were opened wider to women, and many took advantage of the rich array of educational and job opportunities, as well as the adventure, mobility, and patriotic expression the military offered. On the other hand, the long and deep history of military masculinism and misogyny remained a powerful force, and the growing number of women in the ranks faced serious gender discrimination, rampant sexual harassment and abuse, and sex-based limits on the combat capacities in which they could serve. We trace the history of these opposing forces in this essay, through military recruitment devices, firsthand experiences of servicewomen, and direct evidence of gender discrimination and sexual abuse.
In 1973, the draft was effectively ended. (Though men continue to register for service, this is a formality and they have never been called up on this basis.) The widespread conscription of the U.S. male population had arguably been a major incitement for the anti–Vietnam War movement. Replacing a “citizen’s army” with an “all volunteer” force would, it was hoped, keep future wars from affecting the entire population and limit the impact to those who, for whatever reason, chose to serve. The other consideration in setting aside the draft was the emergence of the women’s liberation movement. As American society became increasingly aware of the breadth and consequences of gender discrimination, an all-male draft no longer seemed politically feasible. Yet drafting women was opposed by both family traditionalists and pacifist feminists and would never have been acceptable in the United States.
Small and brief U.S. military actions took place in the 1970s and 1980s in Panama and the small Caribbean nation of Grenada. Then, in 1991, in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush took the United States into a six-month war, ultimately involving over seven hundred thousand U.S. troops. Military recruitment for the new “all volunteer” army was directed at those for whom service, even with the risks that war incurred, might constitute an attractive opportunity: the unemployed and underemployed, African Americans and Latinos, and women. Over the six months of the war, forty thousand women served, constituting 11 percent of U.S. troops. Fifteen women died in combat, approximately 10 percent of official combat deaths.
This brief and seemingly successful war, followed by what looked like a stable U.S.-dominated world peace, brought a great deal of attention to American military women. Women, no longer limited to nursing and support functions, served in many of the same positions as men and were exposed to the same dangerous conditions as men. Admitted into the college-based Reserve Officer Training Corps in the early 1970s and the military academies in 1980, women were being trained for leadership positions as well as being relied upon as rank-and-file forces. For women in the military, the emphasis was no longer on how to reconcile their femininity with military participation (and then demobilize back into civilian life), as it had been in the first and second world wars, but on how to use military service as an expression of and route to gender equality (see pp. 508–11).
Jennifer Bailey, portrayed in Figure 12.1, joined the marines in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. She decided to take advantage of new opportunities and train to be a marine drill sergeant, a notoriously harsh and aggressive job. This picture of her was initially featured in a 1999 Marine Corps recruiting publication. Several years later, a fellow drill sergeant used the same image of her to create his own unofficial version of a female-specific recruiting poster, shown in Figure 12.1. He modified the slogan that the marines used, “We never promised you a rose garden,” to highlight women’s role. Do you think that this fake poster was meant to celebrate or ridicule women in the armed forces? How does the slogan, normally used on posters of tough male marines, change meaning when linked to a servicewoman? And finally, given that the volunteer army and the women in it were disproportionately drawn from people of color, how do you interpret the racial dynamic that this image represents?
Figure 12.1 “We don’t promise you a rose garden either.” (1999)
After the apparently successful use of female troops in the first Gulf War, the long-standing prohibition against women in direct combat roles came in for criticism. The increasing technological sophistication of American military performance, the enormous role that various sorts of technological and support staff played in connection with ground forces, and the growing reliance on war from the air rather than on the ground made distinctions between combat and noncombat positions difficult, even arbitrary. In the early 1990s, feminists, politicians, and military leaders began to reconsider the prohibitions limiting women’s combat service. For the most part, military figures, recognizing the deployment advantages of having more women in the military and more flexibility in assigning them, supported these changes. Politicians were divided, with conservatives opposing any changes, and congresswomen, their numbers beginning to increase, supporting them.
In the wake of the 1991–1992 war, President George H. W. Bush established an official commission to recommend new policies on women in combat. Torn between liberals and conservatives, it narrowly voted to decrease rather than increase women’s access to combat roles. In response, Shirley Sagawa and Nancy Duff Campbell of the National Women’s Law Center issued the following report, outlining the flaws and myths in arguments for combat restrictions. The feminist movement, which had first appeared in conjunction with the anti–Vietnam War effort, was changing gears.
Which of the objections to women in wider combat roles do you believe are justified, and which do you believe are not? How successful was the Women’s Law Center in refuting the policy? Why do you think that integrating women fully into combat has been such a long, slow process? How does the way in which the military recruited women in the 1990s compare to the way in which the several military services recruited women during World War II?
SHIRLEY SAGAWA AND NANCY DUFF CAMPBELL
Women in Combat (1992)
Serious attention has focused on women’s roles in the military since the end of the [first] Persian Gulf War. As a result of women’s performance in Desert Storm, Congress repealed the law barring women from combat aircraft assignments and established a Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces to study whether additional positions should be opened to women. This paper outlines the law as it currently pertains to women’s assignability, provides arguments against and in favor of opening combat positions to qualified women, [and] discusses the work of the Presidential Commission. . . .
Although no law bars women from engaging in combat, women are excluded from half of all military positions. . . . No statute prevents women from serving in ground combat units. Army and Marine Corps policy, however, excludes women from assignments to units that are likely to become engaged in direct combat. In addition, a “risk rule” . . . provides that “risks of exposure to direct combat, hostile fire, or capture are proper criteria for closing noncombat positions or units to women. . . .”
Because assignment of women is limited by military policy, the military uses a quota system that limits the number of women who may enlist or be admitted to ROTC or the service academies. As a result less qualified men are taken over more qualified women. Currently, about 11 percent of military personnel are women. Despite their small numbers, military women now serve with distinction in every service. . . . Among the women who served in Operation Desert Storm were women who flew planes into enemy territory, fired weapons, commanded combat support units, ferried troops in to the combat zone and carried them fuel and supplies. . . .
[A]rguments raised by opponents of opening positions to women in Congressional debate and before the Presidential Commission include:
Women are physically weaker than men and therefore standards would have to be lowered and unit effectiveness jeopardized;
The presence of women in units leads to fraternization, sexual harassment, and sexual assault;
Women lose a disproportionate share of time due to pregnancy, which would undermine unit readiness;
Combat would take women away from their families, which would have harmful psychological effects on the children;
If combat units are open to women, women would have to be drafted; and
The presence of women in combat units would adversely affect unit cohesion and undermine the morale of men who do not want to work with women. . . .
In the Persian Gulf War, 13 women were killed, two were taken prisoner of war, and many more were injured. But when women who serve in the Gulf come up for promotions, they may be passed over because current policies deny women the experience that provides a route to higher-level jobs. . . .
Studies show that sexual harassment is most common in nontraditional jobs with low numbers of women. In the military, barriers to assignability have led to a quota system limiting the number of women at all levels including senior positions. They also have created a climate in which it is acceptable to treat women as inferior. . . . Making assignments based on ability rather than gender would go a long way toward ending second-class status and abuse of women in the military.
The incorrect perception that military women lose a disproportionate share of work time, primarily due to pregnancy, has also been used to justify unequal treatment. . . . Men are more likely to lose time due to discipline problems — drug or alcohol use, fighting, etc. As for concerns about parenting responsibilities, the great majority of single parents in the military are fathers, and more male personnel than women have children at home. . . .
The presence of women in a unit does not undermine cohesion. Experience and research has demonstrated that cohesion is found in mixed-gender units as well as male-only units in the military. With good leadership, a group of dissimilar individuals can bond based on their commonality of experience, regardless of the gender make-up of the group. In fact, evidence suggests that mixed-gender units may actually communicate and work better than single gender units performing similar tasks.
SOURCE: Shirley Sagawa and Nancy Duff Campbell, “Women in Combat,” National Women’s Law Center, 1992, www.nwlc.org/sites/default/.../Combat.pdf.
GENDER RESTRICTIONS CONTINUE TO EXIST in the military, especially in high-profile, high-skilled divisions such as the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers. In G.I. Jane, a 1997 movie riding the wave of women’s greater military participation, Demi Moore played a woman determined to become a Navy Seal. However, despite many people’s expectations, the ban was not terminated, and such service by women is still not fully authorized. Nonetheless, although women are not yet allowed to become Navy Seals, Navy Seals can apparently become women. This was the lesson of the highly publicized case of Chris Beck, a decorated veteran. This former Navy Seal announced in 2013 that she was transgender and had transitioned to become Kristin, a woman (Figure 12.2). What do you think the relationship was between Beck’s experiences with the hypermasculine Navy Seals and as a transgender person?
Figure 12.2 Kristin Beck (2013)
Women in this new era of American military life encountered obstacles other than discrimination in service and advancement. Gradually it became apparent that sexual assault of military women by the men with whom they were serving was a major problem. Initially unrecognized and even deliberately hidden, the issue first surfaced in 1991 in the notorious Tailhook scandal.
Tailhook, a voluntary association of naval and marine aviators, holds an annual professional and social meeting, where in 1991 dozens of women and a handful of men were sexually assaulted in a drunken hazing ritual. The account below is the official Department of Defense report, issued in May 1992, nine months after the incident. Despite the copious detail in the report, the result was that only two lower-ranking officers were disciplined. Objections, including those from Assistant Secretary of the Navy Barbara Pope, ultimately led to the resignation of the secretary of the navy. However, since Tailhook ’91, sexual assault in the military has become, if anything, an ever more serious problem. By some accounts, as many as one-third of women serving have either experienced or been threatened by unwanted sexual encounters. The Veterans Administration now officially considers rape a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder.19
As you read the following report, consider the distinction, accepted as such by the investigators and made by male observers, between women who willingly entered the hallway where the attacks took place, known as “the gauntlet,” and those who were assaulted. On what basis was this distinction made, and is it a valid distinction? According to the report, what distinguishes an assault from a woman’s willing participation? Of the female witnesses, only one, Paula Coughlin, is named and quoted directly. Why do you think this was the case? As the report suggests, her persistence finally brought the sexual assaults of Tailhook ’91 to light.
INSPECTOR GENERAL, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Tailhook ’91 (1992)
According to most descriptions, Tailhook conventions in earlier years were largely “stag” affairs. . . . The nature of the gauntlet activities apparently changed some time in the mid to late 1980’s when the gauntlet started to involve males touching women who walked through the hallway. . . . Our investigation disclosed that gauntlet-related indecent assaults dated back to at least Tailhook ’88. Ten women reported to us that they were assaulted when they attended Tailhook conventions between 1988 and 1990. The women reported they had been grabbed on the breasts, buttocks and/or crotch area. None of the women are known to have reported their assaults to authorities until after Tailhook ’91. . . . A significant number of witnesses reported that women went through the gauntlet and seemed to enjoy the attention and interaction with the aviators. Those witnesses, . . . both men and women, generally stated they could tell the women were enjoying themselves because, despite being grabbed and pushed along through the crowd, they were smiling and giggling. . . .
Our investigation also revealed a much more sinister aspect to the gauntlet at Tailhook ’91 which involved assaults on unsuspecting women. . . . [As a] couple who appeared to be in their mid to late 60’s . . . walked through the gauntlet, a passageway opened up to let the couple through. . . . He recalled that one woman started down the gauntlet and became irate when she was apparently pinched. He said she turned around and threw a beer at a man standing 3 to 4 feet away, hitting him in the face and head with the beer. The man retaliated by throwing his beer on the woman. The woman hit the man on his jaw and the man then struck the side of the woman’s head with a closed hand and the witness thought the woman might have fallen to her knees. . . . He noted that in previous years he also took part in the gauntlet. . . . He opined that the gauntlet is more of a melee than an organized event. . . .
The officer’s spouse provided a somewhat different perspective of the same incidents. . . . She said it appeared that some signal had been given that the “gauntlet” was about to start, and all the men in the hallway began lining the halls rather than milling about, as though suddenly organized. . . . Regarding the incident described by her husband in which a man and a woman struck each other in the gauntlet, she said that she was personally shocked by the force of the blow the man used. It appeared to her that the man put his full strength behind the blow. Unlike her husband, she did not see any women lining up to get pinched or patted, but rather it seemed to her that they were simply trying to get through the hallway. . . .
The gauntlet was also vividly described to us by several victims. One female civilian victim . . . told us that, as she walked up the hallway, at least seven men suddenly attacked her. They pulled down her “tube top” and grabbed at her exposed breasts while she attempted to cover herself with her arms. She fell to the ground and the assault continued. She bit several of her attackers in an attempt to stop their assault. After a few moments, they stopped their attack and she was allowed to get up from the floor. She turned and looked back down the hallway and observed another woman screaming and fighting her way down the hallway as she too was attacked. . . . The victim later told her boyfriend, a Navy officer, about the attack but he advised her not to tell anyone about it because they would think she was a “slut. . . .”
One victim, a 32-year old female, reported that she attended Tailhook ’91 with her spouse, a Navy officer, her mother, and two of her mother’s female friends. As the group walked through the hallway the victim, who was wearing a formal cocktail dress, was suddenly grabbed around the waist and lifted above the crowd by two men. The men lifted the skirt of her dress above her waist and pushed their hands between her legs in an attempt to get their fingers inside her panties. Our investigation revealed that the victim’s mother as well as one of her mother’s friends were also indecently assaulted as they walked through the hallway.
LT Paula Coughlin, the Navy officer who first publicly revealed allegations of impropriety at Tailhook ’91, told us that she entered the third floor hallway at the Hilton Hotel and, as she walked up the hallway and into a crowd of men, someone began to yell “Admiral’s Aide!” She was grabbed on the buttocks from behind with such force that she was lifted up off the ground. As she turned to confront the man, another man behind her grabbed her buttocks and she was pushed from behind into a crowd of men who collectively began pinching her body and pulling at her clothing. One man put both his hands down the front of her tank top, inside her brassiere and grabbed her breasts. LT Coughlin told us that she crouched down and bit the man on his forearm and on his right hand. As the man released his grip on her breasts, another man reached up under her skirt and grabbed her panties. She then kicked at her attackers. She stated, “I felt as though the group was trying to rape me.” LT Coughlin told us that she saw one of the men in the group turn to walk away so she “reached out and tapped him on the hip, pleading with the man just let me get in front of him.” The man turned around to face her, raised both his hands, and placed them on her breasts.
SOURCE: Inspector General, Department of Defense, Tailhook ’91 (May 1992).
ANOTHER ISSUE AFFECTING SERVICEWOMEN is that of military parenthood. Aggressive recruitment of young enlistees was insufficient to meet the demands of the armed forces, especially once the United States officially went to war in Iraq in 2003. Military reservists made up the difference. These were usually older adults, both women and men, many of them with children and spouses. As terms of service were extended, the pressure on military families intensified, undermining the military’s efforts to isolate the majority of the public from people whose lives were affected by serving in the armed forces. Those whose spouses were serving found themselves raising their children and managing their households alone for extended periods of time. With large numbers of servicemen returning home with post-traumatic stress disorder, domestic abuse also became a problem.
As for women service members, a significant number of mothers of young children entered the ranks. An estimated one hundred thousand mothers, 50 percent of all active women in the military, were serving in 2009. Single mothers are not allowed to enlist, but those who are reservists can be called up and face especially intense challenges.20 Military mothers are a specific subset of working mothers. The military has been no more successful than other employers in balancing antidiscrimination policies with support policies for working mothers.
Motherhood has long infused people’s understandings of women’s relationship to war. This has been the case whether mothers objected to sacrificing their boy children or whether they supported their soldier sons out of patriotic pride. Americans’ increasing awareness that many mothers, most of them with young children, are themselves serving in the theaters of war brings mothers’ dilemmas right into the heart of warfare.
Below is a review, written for young readers, of Hero Mom, a 2013 picture book for young children of military mothers, written by Melinda Hardin and illustrated by Bryan Langdo. The cover of the book (which you can find online) features a drawing of a black woman in desert fatigues about to board a helicopter, reaching out to her young son, who reaches back to her; both smile. As you consider this book and the review, ask yourself: What approach does the author take to the problem of military mothers? What other issues are not discussed? What policies might the military have undertaken to deal with the issues faced by military mothers and fathers and their children? Do you think that mothers of young children should be allowed to serve or should be prohibited from serving? Why?
TRACY MOORE
Review of Hero Mom (2013)
In Hero Mom, a diverse range of children discuss how proud they are of their military moms and the ways in which the women resemble heroes or superheroes for their courage and skill during deployment.
Hero Mom takes a difficult subject — family separation during deployment — and presents it as a point of pride for children, who can explain to others that their mothers are gone but are doing something extremely important, whether they’re transporting cargo, repairing aircraft, or leading a battalion. The book makes a point of showing the way moms who are deployed show love for their children with letters or by email or video chat. And the soft watercolor illustrations give the book an expressive, sentimental feel.
For kids missing their moms overseas, Hero Mom can help instill a sense of pride in their moms’ line of work. For parents, this can be a way to broach a tender subject and open up a dialogue about managing the separation.
Families can talk about separation. Have you been separated from your mom or dad for a period of time due to their work, travel, or deployment? How did it make you feel?
How do you stay in touch when your mom or dad has to leave for a period of time?
SOURCE: Tracy Moore, review of Hero Mom, by Melinda Hardin, Common Sense Media, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/book-reviews/hero-mom (accessed March 23, 2015).
FINALLY, THE ISSUE OF GAYS IN THE ARMED FORCES has affected women service members. In 1993, President Bill Clinton instituted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Gay and lesbian servicepeople were counseled to remain discreet and private about their sexual orientation, which, if discovered, still subjected them to involuntary discharge. In practice, the policy actually increased the pressure on them because of the threat of exposure and dismissal, and rather than diffusing the issue, intensified it.
According to a careful study, from the late 1990s on, women and men of color became increasingly likely to be investigated and discharged with violating the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.21 The disproportionate impact on lesbians is especially interesting because it flies in the face of straight men’s fear of being exposed to male homosexuality, which has played such a major role in public anxiety over gay people’s serving. Criticism of the policy grew among politicians, including President Obama, and military leaders, including former secretary of state General Colin Powell. Finally, in 2010, Congress repealed the policy. Gay men and women are now welcomed into military service without any restrictions.
While debate over the policy was still going on, gay servicepeople who had been victims of “don’t ask, don’t tell” challenged their dishonorable discharges in court. One of these was Margaret Witt, an air force major and nurse, who was discharged in 2007. Her crime was that she was discovered to be living in a long-term lesbian relationship. She had been extremely cautious but was turned in to her superiors by the ex-husband of a woman she had dated. Witt claimed that her Fourteenth Amendment rights to due legal process had been violated. After a lower court decided against her, an appeals court agreed with her, ruling that the air force could not simply assume that her actions interfered with “unit cohesion and morale,” but had to prove this, which it did not do. After the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was repealed, Witt was allowed to retire with full benefits.
Why do you think lesbians suffered disproportionately under “don’t ask, don’t tell”? Figure 12.3 is a photograph of Witt marrying her partner, a civilian, the year after the air force reversed its action against her. Why do you think the issue of military service has had such a ripple effect on other rights of gays and lesbians?
Figure 12.3 Major Margaret Witt Gets Married (2012)
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
With the ban against women’s serving in the military ending, what are the new obstacles that military service poses to women?
How do you think the increase in the number of women in military service will affect society’s attitude to gender difference and equality?
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