Tag Archives: women

Women, Angry Over Food Prices, Act Up

21 Apr 2022 By in Protest and Protestors Tags: , , , , , ,


Food prices in the United States shot up in 1917 as a consequence of World War I, then engulfing Europe.  Agriculture had come to a halt in the theater of war, so the US had stepped up its production and export of food in response.  Our nation was shipping vast quantities of food overseas (wheat especially), both in support of the Allied war effort and to relieve famished civilian populations.  Besides leading to a collossal loss of life, the all-consuming war had disrupted everyday life in many countries, reducing many people to homelessness, hunger, and worse.

Back in the States, the price of food was skyrocketing.  Food was scarce, and ordinary wage-earners couldn’t afford enough food to feed their families.  Frustrated women, many of them immigrants, began protesting in places like Newark and New York City.   The crowd of women above “charged” New York city hall in the winter of 1917 to plead for bread.

Similarly, women in Newark slogged en masse through the snow and slush to present their mayor with a petition for food relief.  Many of the women brought their children to the demonstration.  The spectacle of the protestors, appearing in numbers with their hungry children, made the urgency of their hunger tough to ignore.  Only people with a just case would stand so patiently in bad weather, the snow falling on their umbrellas, hoping for compassion and mercy to come down, too.

Image: from this source, and this.

 

Will #MeToo Be The Senate’s Waterloo?

26 Sep 2018 By in The Trump Years Tags: , , , , , , ,

Something decisive will occur in the Senate this week.  Not just a nomination hearing, but a political drama crystallizing in the minds of Americans the nature of a political party, and an institution.

In a hearing set for Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is a person of respectable character.  They will hear from a California psychology professor, Christine Blasey-Ford, who has come out of nowhere with a believable claim that in 1982 Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when she was 15.  Kavanaugh denies it.  Despite the perturbation the allegations are causing, Senate Republicans are intent on shielding the nominee.  Determined to treat whatever is disclosed in tomorrow’s hearing as irrelevant to his confirmation, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell anticipates that, after hearing from the two parties in a non-judicial setting, the committee will vote on the confirmation the very next day.

On the way to that vote, America will see how its leaders behave.  How do senators treat a woman whose personal story threatens the plans of President Trump and the Republican Party?  How considerate are they in sorting out this very unsavory #MeToo story, which the recent openness of women in discussing sexual assault is empowering?  To what extent have senators reckoned with the implications of sexual equality, or how badly are they out of step with the times?

President Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress have dug in their heels, exploiting their every institutional advantage in an effort to mute a damning social narrative and push Kavanaugh through.  Trump’s White House has become Kavanaugh’s sanctuary.  He has been holed up there like a wanted man, arming himself with the latest in dis-ingenuity.  Kavanaugh’s proxies have spread out on the news circuit, broadcasting doe-eyed astonishment that anyone could fail to see Judge Kavanaugh as squeaky-clean.  Meanwhile, Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the judiciary committee, has announced that an outside interlocutor, Rachel Mitchell, a sex-crimes prosecutor from Arizona, will spare Republicans members the embarrassment of figuring out how to talk with Dr. Ford.  A brilliant fix for a hearing where the goal is to avoid hearing anything she says.

Ultimately—and this is what the president and Senate don’t seem to get—, Dr. Ford’s challenge to Kavanaugh’s confirmation isn’t about legalities.  It’s about whether Kavanaugh is acceptable to society.   It’s about whether Brett Kavanaugh, who is rumored to have put his hand over a girl’s mouth while attempting to overpower her, is a socially respectable being.  Is he a gentleman?  Today, American society is ostracizing harassers of women because their behavior is anathema to equality.  The buzz surrounding Kavanaugh is alarmingly loud.

Over the centuries, the Senate has often exemplified dignity.  It has upheld courtesy as an ideal, as a source of inner order, as the secret of its prestige.  Tomorrow, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will be called on to receive “an inconvenient rememberer” courteously.  Yet, as #MeToo comes knocking, a blinkered and insensitive Senate cowers.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Caitlin Flanagan, “I Believe Her,” The Atlantic.
Caitlin Flanagan, “The Abandoned World of 1982,” The Altantic.

Power Lines: Hillary’s Nomination

10 Jun 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky wedding, NYC
Interesting to find this picture circulating on Twitter soon after Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination.  Of the millions of extant photographs of Hillary—whether taken from throughout her public career or in the company of her husband former president Bill Clinton—, the choice of this particular image to punctuate news of her unprecedented political achievement was almost shocking.

It pictures Hillary with her late mother Dorothy and daughter Chelsea, taken on the day Chelsea married.  Standing to one side of her aged mother, Hillary is the embodiment of conventional femininity and maternal pride.  She is simply a mother and a daughter, occupying a place in the generations celebrating a classic rite of passage.  Sartorially, the lady politician famous for her pantsuits has disappeared: if anything, her fancy dress wears her.

How far we have come, the picture telegraphs, particularly in light of Mrs Rodham’s story.  She managed to surmount a hard loveless childhood to raise and inspire a daughter who has bent tradition to become the symbol of something new in American history.  Mrs Clinton’s own ambitions, coupled with those of her husband, long ago catapulted them to the heights of political celebrity, a journey synonymous with radical social mobility.  The Clintons have grown dramatically more wealthy.  And who knows what the future holds for Chelsea?

Though a quintessential American success story, the Clintons are no longer representative of most Americans.  In that regard, Chelsea’s fancy wedding in Duchess County, New York, encapsulates everything that a segment of the American public dislikes about the Clintons.  The private and public lines of Hillary’s destiny are awkwardly entwined, as controversies over her email server make clear.

If this were a photograph of Kennedy men, taken back on the day of Jack’s wedding, say, how different our reactions would likely be.  Ah, yes, we would say: here is Jack getting married, perpetuating the Kennedy dynasty.  We might not pause to criticize the expense of his suit or the nature of his political ambitions.

Bill’s absence from the picture: yes, he may be absent.  Should Hillary become president, increasingly she will be writing her own story, and, as this photograph’s appearance on the internet suggests, the visual culture of the presidency, and women’s sense of their place in the nation, will also change.  The story line is being written even now, of the power lines that have gotten American women to where they are.

Image:
Photograph by Barbara Kinney

Related
Judith Shulevitz, How to Fix Feminism (NYT)

Columbia Has Her Eye On You

27 Feb 2016 By in History Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

A modern Columbia reminds American women to vote

A very modern-looking Columbia, dressed in a becoming flapper style, adorns the cover of Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on October 2, 1920.  Her message?  “Don’t Forget!  Columbia has her eye on You and expects You to vote for the Good of the Nation”  (Columbia being the traditional female personification of the United States).

Her message had special meaning, given that women had gained the right to vote just months earlier, when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified on August 26.  Women were about to cast ballots in a presidential election for the very first time, the fruit of an epic political struggle that American women began way back in 1848.

Over the decades, myriad arguments had been advanced both for and against women’s suffrage.  Some opponents to suffrage argued that political participation would degrade the female sex; others worried it would quickly lead to a government by females.  And of course it was argued that woman suffrage was contrary to the vision of the Founders, as laid out in the Constitution.  Americans of the Progressive era understood that the female vote would inevitably alter the dynamics of American politics–they just didn’t know how.

Suffragists responded partly by arguing that women would have a civilizing effect on political life, an attitude that Leslie’s get-out-the-vote appeal was eager to prove.  As it turned out, newly enfranchised women voted in far smaller numbers than did men.  Not until 1980 would the size of the female vote exceed that of males.  Even today, it’s unclear how the female vote as such will influence the outcome of the current campaign.

Don’t forget!
  Cast your vote for the good of the nation this Super Tuesday.

Image: Drawing by [William] Haskell Coffin
from this source.

The Feminist Gap

11 Feb 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

There was something poignant (and grotesque) about the ‘scolding’ that Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem gave younger American women this week.  The subject was Hillary and the support that female voters—as women—supposedly owe her.  The tone was dire yet dismissive.  Madeleine Albright, revered for her achievements as a diplomat, essentially threatened wayward women with punishment, warning that if they didn’t ‘help’ Hillary they would go to hell.  Gloria Steinem, now a shocking 81, relied on sexual stereotyping to explain why some young women have chosen to vote for Bernie.  These women, she claimed, care only about ‘where the boys are’—lemming-like, they have gravitated to Sanders because ‘the boys are with Bernie.’  In other words, young women in Sanders’ camp suffer from an out-of-control sex drive!  Both Albright and Steinem asserted in different ways that young women had forgotten their rightful duty, which, in the eyes of older feminists, is to practice sex solidarity.  This tenet, so central to first-generation feminism, is outmoded and deeply unpalatable.

The desperate awkwardness of these protests points up a problem that Hillary is having.  How does her sex, how does the women’s movement, figure in her campaign?  Hillary never was much of a bra-burner; she never wasted much time railing against society’s constraints or male tyranny.  Instead, she crossed over early, believing that doors were open and assuming that full equality and freedom were hers.  She carved out a remarkable path, relying more on her own grit and talents than on the dictates of feminist ideology.

In some profound sense, Hillary is not free to tell her story, which is that of a woman who has been more in the public eye for more of her life than any other woman in American history.  Contrary to Steinem’s assumption about the fate of women, Hillary has not ‘lost power’ as she’s aged.  Instead, Clinton is one of the most well-known and powerful women on the face of the globe.

As Clinton has grown more unusual, more distinguished, and more famous, her capacity to pass as a representative woman has inevitably waned.  The fact is one to reckon with in the remaining campaign.