Having worked at The Nation for a while, a while ago, it was not always as unusual as it is now for me to agree with something that appears there. But now it is unusual enough for me to make a point of agreeing with something that Bruce Shapiro just wrote there:
If the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education can be said to have opened the epic of the modern civil rights era, it is now also possible to mark that era’s final, exhausted page: January 31, 2006.
It was not just the confirmation that day of Samuel Alito, whose constricted notion of law is likely to turn the Supreme Court definitively against Brown’s expansive promise and the other liberation movements it inspired, or the death of Coretta Scott King, so soon after the passing of Rosa Parks. Rather, the rise of Alito and the death of Coretta King illuminate the abandonment by both political parties of the civil rights legacy….
Well, I agree with the central point, anyway, “the abandonment by both political parties of the civil rights legacy,” although I don’t think any light was thrown on that abandonment by the nomination of Justice Alito or the death of Mrs. King. The Democrats abandoned “Brown’s expansive promise” the moment they abandoned their longstanding commitment to the “without regard” principle of neutral, colorblind equality and embraced racial preferences, and the Republicans abandoned it by acting like wimps in accomodating themselves to those same preferences, and on occasion — as by their support of “minority majority” voting districts — actually embraced them.
I agree. It is an interesting point that the promise of the original civil rights movement has been so thoroughly politicized by both parties. Sad mainly for those growing up with the rhetoric but not the power of movement.
“… whose constricted notion of law is likely to turn the Supreme Court definitively against Brown’s expansive promise and the other liberation movements it inspired…”
Brown should not have been an “expansive promise,” nor should “other liberation movements” have been inspired by it.
That was the mistake. Only one problem needed to be solved… granting basic civil and voting rights to blacks. Tacking on women’s and gay’s issues was a travesty.
The death of Betty Friedan provides a good starting point for contemplating this error. Friedan was a complete liar. She lied that she was a housewife, when in fact she was a communist labor organizer supported by a rich husband. She lied when she claimed that housewives suffered the same fate as concentration camp victims. Just about everything you can think of in relationship to Friedan was a lie. The equation of women’s standing to that of blacks in the Jim Crow South was the biggest lie of all.
And, God, are we paying for that lie. Once you start lying, it’s awfully hard to stop.
Stephen,
While women had a higher status than black people under Jim Crow, they certainly were not treated equally by the law. Married women could not own property in their own name, for instance, until 1967 in my home state of Texas. Women were classified with “imbeciles and children.” Women could not sue in court for their own torts; their husbands or fathers had to sue for them because it was considered to be damage to the man’s property. And there were other practices that were normal for the time but we would now consider demeaning and degrading. While it was certainly was not a “concentration camp,” I doubt many women would want to be treated that way now.
Sharon, you point is well taken.
However, the political tactics used by feminists to achieve what were, in fact, minor reforms, has poisoned the well… both legally and in terms of the relationships of men and women.
And, as events have proven, all women had to do is ask. I’m old enough to know. The basic reforms you’ve suggested were first proposed seriously in about 1969, and by 1973 were law.
Trouble is, feminists didn’t want to stop there. They wanted to re-engineer the family and society.
It’s disengenuous to call such changes in property rights, employment rights, education, and the ability to have and get credit “minor reforms.” It’s not a minor thing when one is involved in a traffic accident but can’t sue the guy who hits you because you are considered a single entity with your husband.
True, there were lots of unforseen consequences of the women’s rights movement, including a much lower marriage rate, later age at time of first marriage, and a decrease in the number of children per family. There’s also the instability of the family, caused in part by a loosening of divorce laws which was supposed ot “empower” women, or the fact that women are now entitled to be overworked in exactly the same fashion as men. You will get no argument from me there.
But to trivialize the legal gains women made in the decades following the civil rights movement is simply wrong. And it wasn’t that women had to “ask” (which is demeaning in itself). Women had to stand up and argue for the rights men enjoyed.
Sharon, you are quite simply wrong.
Women didn’t have to fight. The vicious extremism of the feminist movement developed because there was absolutely no opposition from men.
At every point, men just said: “OK, honey, if you really feel like it would make you feel better, you can have it.”
The sole opposition to the feminist onslaught was Phyllis Schafly’s movement to defeat the ERA, and it took a woman to do that.
Feminism deliberately reached out to provoke men’s chivalrous feelings for the ladies. The result was a disaster.
And, yes, those were only minor reforms. And those reforms were already happending, pre Betty Friedan.
In other words, Sharon, feminist history is almost entirely a self-serving lie created by ideologues.
“Women didn’t have to fight.”
Really? So women always had the same rights men did? I thought it wasn’t until the 1960s that most of the laws I talked about were passed. The Pay Equity Act did not pass until 1963 and even through the 1970s it was still common in some jobs for women to be paid less than men. It wasn’t until 1967 that married women had the SAME RIGHTS as men to buy and sell property. Even into the 1980s, married women typically could not get credit in their name without their husbands cosigning on the loans (even if they made considerably more than the husbands).
There’s no question that much of the feminist agenda, including comparable worth, are complete hogwash. But the idea that men were just happy to give women what they wanted (again, more patronizing descriptions by you), is absolute bunk.
It would be interesting to know how old you are, Sharon.
You are probably too young to know that this reality of my family was true for the vast majority of families.
No man in my family enjoyed the right to vote, or owned property, until the 1890s. My great-grandparents sailed to the U.S. on what were called “coffin ships” to flee the Irish potatoe famine. So, women in my family obtained the right to vote 30 years after the men. They obtained basic property rights, as you’ve noted, not so many years later.
Women and men in my family have always worked. Prior to the 1970s almost every woman and man in my family worked at a labor job at low pay. This was the common lot of almost all American families. The women and men in my family shared in their poverty.
No, there was no fight except in the mind of hysterics, mostly Marxists who deliberately wanted to incite hysteria in order to create the destruction of family you’ve noted. Destruction of family has been a principle tactic of Marxists since the Bolsheviks.
The feminists of the 60s made it all up, Sharon. They lied, bluntly and fiercely. The domestic violence and rape hysterias were fabrications.
The vast majority of Americans are descendants of impoverished, unfranchised immigrants. Most men had none of the rights or property you assumed they had. You’ve been fed a steady diet of lies throughout your life by feminists propagandists.
Oh, Lord.
Personally, I can’t forgive Friedan the “comfortable concentration camp” line, which wasn’t merely bullsh*t, but extremely offensive bullsh*t. And Stephen is right that every feminist advance has been more or less at the courtesy of men, starting of course with the suffrage.
But sharon is right that many of the legal changes that came about in the 60s and 70s are real, nontrivial improvements. I’m not particularly keen on Roe, to put it mildly, but equality in such things as obtaining credit and being able to sue in one’s own name were real gains and important ones. And, Stephen, if we “only had to ask,” why were the discriminatory laws there in the first place? Someone didn’t do sufficient sweet-talkin’ before the vote, or what?
Michelle, you should read what I wrote again.
Ownership of property and access to credit are very recent inventions for almost everybody… men and women. The financial wherewithal to hire a lawyer and sue… the vast majority (99?) of men did not have this until very recently.
Rack your brains over this. The U.S. emerged from the Great Depression as a result of the Second World War.
I’ll repeat. Think about this before you reply. 30 to 50 years is a speck of time in history, barely a generation or two.
The vast majority of men in the U.S. had only recently acquired the effective means to prosecute the rights you’ve enumerated in the 1960s. What in the hell does it mean to have property rights, credit rights, etc., if you are dirt poor?
You and Sharon are just wrong. There was no heroic battle. I’ll repeat… the feminist movement went so wacky precisely because men want to please women and hate to oppose them. Feminists went nuts because there was no opposition to their platform.
And, if you’ll notice, as we enter a period when the atrocious damage of feminism needs to be repaired, who’s leading the charge? Only women can do this, and it is women who are doing something about it.
Men hate to openly criticize and fight women. Marxist feminists deliberately took advantage of this to create a phony history of the past.
In my family, until very recently, no woman wanted to assert individual property rights. Every woman in my family was married for 50 or 60 years, with no intention of divorcing or separating, and wanted the man to head the household.
Shouting Thomas,
Michelle, you should read what I wrote again.
Well, if you had troubled to look at the time-stamps on your comment and mine, you might possibly have noticed that they were two minutes apart. That and the fact that I didn’t mention your name ought to have clued you in that I wasn’t actually replying to you. As a matter of fact, the first time I saw your post was after I’d published my own.
I said nothing at all about a “heroic battle.” What I said was that advances in women’s property rights, credit rights, &c. are real advances.
Here. Think about this before you reply. Even “rack your brains” if that pleases you. Do you think there’s any difference between a right that you can’t exercise because you can’t pay for it, and a right you can’t exercise because you’re legally excluded from it? Is there no difference between a lack of Black-owned newspapers because there aren’t any Blacks wealthy enough to run a newspaper, and a lack of Black-owned newspapers because it’s illegal for a Black to run a newspaper? It seems a thundering lot of difference to me. And that’s exactly the situation women were in wrt property, torts, credit, &c.
Don’t tell me that men didn’t have property rights a century ago. Of course they did. They had much less actual property, but they could own stuff. I’m less sure of credit, but recall that you could buy a Model T on installments, so formal credit arrangements aren’t exactly new. As for torts, I wonder how you would feel if you were grievously wronged and couldn’t file a suit unless you could find a suitable female relative to file it for you.
In my family, until very recently, no woman wanted to assert individual property rights. Every woman in my family was married for 50 or 60 years, with no intention of divorcing or separating, and wanted the man to head the household.
I know there are women who feel this way, and I’ve no problem with it. My trouble is that whenever I hear that this is what women really want, it always turns out to be a man speaking. I should like to hear from some of your female relatives. The non-feminist-corrupted ones, of course.
Sharon & Michelle,
I agree with BOTH of you on this thread. The struggle for equality transcends gender as you well know. I commend you.
Racism, Sexism and Classism are the three vicious heads of Cerberus that have historically blocked the gates of liberty for MANY Americans. We have a common goal–to keep that hound of hell at bay, and fulfill the Pledge of Allegience–One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for All.
–Cobra
“It would be interesting to know how old you are, Sharon.”
First of all, I’m old enough to remember being told I couldn’t participate in certain activities in school that boys could participate in because I was a girl. I’m old enough to have watched my college-educated mother have to get my dad (who never graduated from high school) to cosign on a loan for her car. The loan was supposed to be a way for her to establish credit in her own name, yet when the payment book came, it was in my father’s name. This was 1983.
Let me give YOU a little background. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. My mother was British. My father a G.I. My parents were married 38 years before my mother died, and they raised 3 kids on my dad’s $8-an-hr job. 2 of their kids graduated from college (the first to do so) and one of them graduated from law school. My mother got a G.E.D., then went to college at 40. In short, my dad started as a coal miner (yes, I’m a coal miner’s daughter!) and wound up being quite successful because he lives in the freest country on earth.
In spite of the fantasy you want to believe in about feminism (and I am not a big fan of modern feminism), it is simply a lie to say that there was no struggle for women’s rights or that, somehow, women always had the same rights as men. Most of the progress I pointed to came, not by asking sweetly, “Honey, please,” but by suing institutions in court and demanding equality. Men did not willingly open up seats of power such as the exclusive clubs they do business in, the professions in which they make their careers, the schools from which they got their educations. These were hard fought battles for equality so that women young enough to never have been told they couldn’t do something because they were a girl could go to med school or law school.
Women now make up more than 50% of the medical school graduates and nearly half of the law school graduates. Both of the female Supreme Court justices could tell you their stories about the exclusive boys’ club that prevented or discouraged women from certain jobs within the last 50 years. If you really want to talk about 50 years not being a long time, try thinking about the fact that it’s been less than 50 years since women were treated as full citizens in this country.
I’m glad your women are so civilized they stay married 50 or 60 years. Marriage is a wonderful, commendable institution. But having rights as an individual really doesn’t have anything to do with being married, except that less than 40 years ago, according to the law married women were mere extensions of their husbands.
as a black woman i have to disagree with the statement that the position of women vis a vis men is equivalent to that blacks vis a vis whites, or jews vis a vis christians (in the past) or any such comparison. the worst thing that happened to black people is that because of feminism black women never go to be the housewives. black men never got to say no wife of mine is going to work. as a black woman i can’t put down the traditional role of being a housewife and taking care of my own husband and kids. i have to experience it before i can decide it is oppressive. (actually i experienced it and i LOVED it, far more fulfilling than work and i feel sorry for my husband that he had no such choice, but that’s not the point) millions of black women should have had the experience. then we could have decided if we just had to work to fulfill ourselves. the demise of the traditional family and the sexual revolution were the bad side of the sixties that were very harmful to black people