Sardonicky: The Other War Against Women

The war against women is nothing new, and it isn't limited to the GOP misogynists who don't want us to have access to birth control. The war against women is really an economic one, waged by the .01 percent against the rest of us. The real war is the class war being waged against the women, men and children of the 99%. The birth control battle, while odious, is just a part of the larger oppression of poor women, working women, and minority women. Wealthy white women get treated with dignity and respect, regardless of the medical circumstances. Paris Hilton will never be forced to undergo an ulstrasound if she doesn't want one. 

You don't get the big picture by reading or watching the mainstream media accounts. The debate that rages is whether it's false equivalence to compare Rush Limbough's vitriol with Bill Maher's potty mouth. Liberals are torn between championing the hate machine's right to free speech and calling for its silencing. Reactionary politicians are trying to out-do each other in creative medievalism, turning routine ob-gyn visits into torture. There is not a little pornography in the current political discourse. 

And meanwhile, American women are still only earning about 82 cents to the man's dollar -- an apparent increase from just a few years ago, when we got 75 cents to the dollar compared to men. However, that increase is mainly due to the fact that men lost more jobs during the meltdown; the hard truth is that everyone's wages have shrunk. Men's pay decreased by two percent, while women lost an average of .09 percent. Moreover, black women still earn only 70% of what white men get, and Latinas, just 60%. 

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, much vaunted by the Obama Administration as one of his signature legislative accomplishments, really has had nothing much to do with the very slight improvement in the pay scales of working women. 

 As a matter of fact, Lilly Ledbetter herself is having trouble making ends meet on her meager retirement benefits. In an interview with WNYC this week, she said her income has fallen by over 50% since her husband died in 2008. Despite her fame and her seat of honor at the State of the Union address, she is "just scraping by." You can listen to the interview here. Instead of contributing to politicians who are co-opting this brave woman for their own ends, you might want to purchase Mrs. Ledbetter's new book. It's called "Grace and Grit." As she says in the audio, income discrimination is not just a woman's problem -- it's a family problem. I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. It will open your eyes and make you mad as hell. You'll find out how she did all the work herself to get the law changed, and that she didn't earn a single extra penny as a result of her efforts. 

 Jenny Brown of Labor Notes writes that over her lifetime, the typical working woman loses $379,000 because of the continuing income gap. And as Lilly Ledbetter has experienced, this loss carries over into retirement. Social Security benefits are predicated on the amount of lifetime earnings. And then too, wage discrimination is usually built right into jobs that are traditionally held by women. 

 Hospitality and retail jobs are a big part in the "improving" employment statistics, because the increasing wealth of the one percent has given them scads more money to burn in hotels and restaurants and stores. So of course thousands more servants and lackeys are needed to meet the needs of the very rich. And service industries are dominated by low-paid female workers. The average wage for a restaurant server is only $2.13 an hour -- well below the legal minimum wage, but exempt from the law because tips theoretically compensate. Only they often don't, because employers don't make up the difference as they are required to do. Some bosses force the wait staff to pool their tips among the cleanup crews and even pocket their own cut. 

 Then there's the hotel business. The Hyatt Chain, owned by the wealthy Pritzker family, is notoriously anti-union and anti-woman. Management ordered heat lamps turned on striking workers outside the Chicago hotel during a heat wave last summer. At the Hyatt hotel in Santa Clara, California, bosses celebrated “housekeepers appreciation week” last September by grafting photographs of housekeepers’ faces onto bikini-clad bodies on surfboards. If Hyatt employees want health insurance, a $400 monthly premium is deducted from their checks. Yet Hyatt heiress, Forbes billionaire and Obama bundler Penny Pritzker has a seat of honor at the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. That should immediately suggest that this hilariously named in-house lobby of CEOs and a few token, co-opted big labor leaders has absolutely nothing to do with jobs. 

When you hear the word "job creator" in Washington, it refers to an oligarch who not only wants to keep more of his/her hoarded wealth, but wants to make sure what little the rest of us have left is taken away through "shared sacrifice." President Obama was happy to pose with Lilly Ledbetter at a few photo-ops, and never hesitates to use her name as a campaign talking point. But he also never dreamed of appointing her to his phony jobs council. She might have spoken too many inconvenient truths. She might have made Penny Pritzker uncomfortable. The war on women is bipartisan. The Republicans just have an uglier and more vocal way of expressing it. 

 

 

Occupying the Occupy Movement: Robin Morgan (Hurrah!)

Occupying the Occupy Movement

Robin Morgan   January 3, 2012   Women’s Media Center

An Occupy movement for 2012 could gain strength and staying-power with strategies suggested by an emerging feminist critique.

Mexico city collective, from Occuprint.org

As women of the Arab Spring are rediscovering, being participants, even leaders, of the uprisings hasn’t led to women’s equality—a depressingly familiar scenario, notoriously reminiscent of the 1960s aftermath of the Algerian revolution. In fact, the phenomenon is historically omnipresent (including the American revolution).

Here in the Global North, for example, women were active early in the Occupy movement. Yet that movement has presented an optic of being  predominantly male (and in the United States, white and young)—as well as indifferent to the fact that capitalism simply cannot be transformed without confronting its foundation: patriarchy, itself reliant on controlling and exploiting women. And women, by the way, comprise 51 percent of the 99 percent (and virtually zero of the 1 percent).

Who then is the real constituency in need of economic justice?

The United Nations acknowledges that the world’s poor are 70 percent female. Women’s unpaid labor is worth $11 trillion globally, accounting for 41 percent of the GDP in, for instance, North America. It could well be argued that, given women’s massive amount of unpaid labor—and since women are the means of reproduction who produce the labor force itself—most women exist more under feudalism than under capitalism.

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Equal pay, reproductive rights, maternity leave, childcare—all are economic as well as human-rights issues. So are sweatshop labor/maquilliadores, sex trafficking/slavery/tourism, and war’s impact on women, who with their children comprise some 80 percent of refugees and displaced peoples. Women are the primary caregivers for the ill, the young, the aged, and the dying—so health costs are “women’s issues.”

The pornography and prostitution industries each run into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually; China spends $27 billion just on Internet pornography. We only have statistics for a few “developed” countries on the staggering cost of domestic violence. We do know that domestic violence costs $5.8 billion a year in the United States alone.

One would think that such “women’s issues” would make unarguable the centrality to economics of female human beings. Wrong. Too often, the Occupy movement has betrayed its own vision by revealing itself as a sexist microcosm of the society it opposes. Harassment and assaults required women to define safe sleeping areas—immediate necessities yet questionable strategically, since these can become “ghettos,” while the problem, a  male sense of entitlement, goes unchallenged.

Nor does this happen only in the United States, although North American sites got more press attention. Incidents of sexual assault and rape have been reported not only in New York, Cleveland, Dallas, and Baltimore, but in Glasgow, Montreal, London, and more. In some locations, male site monitors were reluctant to call police for fear that negative attention would be deleterious to the Occupy “message.”

Brooklyn, Occupy Imnop, from Occuprint.org

Now, however, women are protesting that kind of protest. In Bristol, England, feminists called for “Carrying Our Safe Space With Us,” aiming to empower women to speak at Occupy general assemblies. On November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Feminists Occupy London took to the streets denouncing rape; that same day, Italian women marched in Rome, defining economic austerity measures as a form of violence against women, and citing policies that in effect force women to work multiple jobs, paid and unpaid. In Manila, Occupy was taken over by women, becoming Occupy RH (reproductive health), Filipina-led. Women in Slovenia, New Zealand, and Australia publicly decried the lack of safety for women at Occupy sites.

Such international groups as Code Pink, WomenOccupy, RadFem, the Filipina network Af3IRM/GabNet, and others raised women’s profile, thus challenging men’s hegemony. The Feminist Peace Network established the Occupy Patriarchy website, to  provide a supportive, global space for  feminist analysis, response, organizing, and networking within the global Occupy movement.

Having caught the world’s imagination with an admirable energy, seemingly spontaneous and seemingly grassroots,  the Occupy movement is now poised at a crossroads. It has enormous potential—but lasting change will require consciousness that doesn’t ignore the majority of  humanity. It needs to break free of being “a guy thing” or risk drowning in its own rhetorical generalities.

It’s not as if certain models aren’t there. The women of England’s Greenham Common “occupied” turf decades before OWS—they endured, and won. Irish women barred doors to keep men from storming out of Northern Ireland peace talks. Women in Liberia sat singing for months in a soccer field to birth a revolution. Market women in Ghana brought down a government. Gandhi acknowledged copying the concept of  Satyagraha— nonviolent resistance—from India’s 19th century women’s suffrage movement.

These are  different—and long-lasting—techniques of protest, by which at first it seemed the Occupy movement was influenced. (At the risk of offending anarchists, I’ll paraphrase two of the Women’s Media Center slogans: “You have to name it to change it,” and “You have to see it to be it.” As a woman who once agreed “Level everything, then we’ll talk politics,” I recommend examples and clearly articulated demands as pretty good stuff.)

Christy C Road, Brooklyn, from Occuprint.org

It’s not too late. As the Occupy movement in many areas moves away from the tactic of claiming physical space, a change of protest style is in order: more hit-and-run, engage-disengage, morning-long, afternoon-long, or day-long (not open-ended) demonstrations—plus focused, doable demands.

Most women have far too many other responsibilities—including children—to spend months in tents playing drums, even if the tents were safe spaces. The Occupy movement needs women—the numbers, the economic analysis, the different strategic approach—to survive, let alone succeed. Yet women’s engagement with it might well require turning up in numbers massive enough to effect a de facto transformation of leadership and focus;:occupying Occupy in a “women’s style” could make all the difference.

At the minimum, it should be possible to demand that men become the change they claim they want to see.  (I mean,really, guys.) If Occupy men can dare be unafraid of that different kind of leadership—can even seek it out and welcome it—everyone wins and the paradigm is transformed.

If not, they will at least have radicalized a whole new generation of feminists.

The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone and do not represent WMC.  WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not endorse candidates.

Getting More Women to Run for Office

—By Kevin Drum

| Thu Sep. 15, 2011 7:54 AM PDT

A new paper uses a clever design to figure out if women are more willing to compete in teams than as individuals. The answer, in a laboratory test setting, is a resounding yes:

• Even though men and women performed equally well on the task, 81% of men chose to compete as individuals compared with 28% of women.
• When participants competed in teams, the gender competition gap shrank by 31 percentage points to 22%, with 67% of men choosing to enter the competition compared with 45% of women.

One of the clever parts of the study design was a series of different competitions that tried to untease the cause of different gender preferences. The result, say the authors, is that it really is a true difference in competitive preference, not just an artifact of risk aversion, feedback aversion, or confidence. Does this make a difference in the real world? Sure it does:

Countries that have party-list proportional representation, in which voters select a slate of candidates put forth by a party, generally have more than twice the female representation rate in their legislatures than countries that have single-member districts. Two countries that elect some members under each system, Germany and New Zealand, illustrate the differences most clearly. In the 1994 German election, 13% of the representatives elected from single-member districts were women, while 39% of the representatives elected from party-list districts were women. In New Zealand in 1996, the corresponding numbers were 15% and 45% for the single-member and party-list districts, respectively. These differences occur primarily because women are more likely to be candidates under proportional representation.

As I recall, we have much the same phenomenon in the United States. Once they decide to run, women generally do as well as men in political campaigns. The problem is that not very many are willing to run.

Our political system isn't likely to change to improve this situation, but this research does suggest there might be slate-oriented ways to get more women to run. Here's an example from my neck of the woods. In my hometown of Irvine, for historical reasons, there are basically two slates of candidates that run as a group for city council every couple of years. (I think of them as gangs, but I guess "slate" is a better word.) This system, accidental though it is, seems to attract a fair number of female candidates. People actually vote for councilmembers individually, and usually we end up with some winners from one slate and some from another. Nonetheless, merely running as part of a team seems to encourage more female participation.

That's just my impression, of course, and it might be wrong. But it might be worth another study to see if slate-like behavior, whether formal or informal, increases the number of women who run for political office in the United States.

Via Tyler Cowen.

Seattle Women in Black will be handing this passage out to passers by

Seattle Women in Black will be handing this passage out to passers by tomorrow...

by Julianne Jaz on Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:47am

A MATRIOT’S PLEA

  

There's not much that's important at my age

except making the world a better place.

What would I do?

I say we damn well better

get out on the streets again.

Everyone has to put their hand to the wheel

and get out and get off their butt

like in the sixties. We had compassion then,

and we've lost it. It breaks my heart.

I've lived through two depressions,

two of them. Everyone at that time

was just sick about the way things were,

just like now, only it's worse now.

I see everything falling apart --

People, starving on the streets.

Children, beaten in their homes.

Sick people without health care.

Imagine this, in a country

that spends so much on the war machine.

I'd spend the money on health instead.

I'd see that children are born healthy

and make sure they stayed that way.

All children no matter what age.

I'd clean the air, the water. I'd take away

all that polluting shit they put on vegetables.

I'd promote the use of sun, sea, and wind

for natural energy. I'd save the forests,

especially the redwoods. I'd ban firearms.

I'd take away every nuclear device man to man.

No more wars, ever. Now we're talking health.

How are we going to pay for all this?

No one ever says we don't have enough

money to go to war. No one ever says

we don't have money for national defense.

This is national defense

  

Frances Payne Adler 1992

****

Nearly 20 years and it's just as true today as it was then... 

1000 Women Leaders say "We've had enough!" (PA)

http://keystoneprogress.blogspot.com/2011/08/1000-women-leaders-say-weve-had-enough.html

TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2011

1000 Women Leaders say "We've had enough!"

We need your help. The Pennsylvania legislature is on the verge of passing new abortion regulations that are so burdensome that many safe, compassionate and pro-women providers are expected to close.  Another bill that would prevent women from using their health insurance to cover abortion care is one step away from final passage.  Another bill to force doctors to ask women to look at their ultrasound image and listen to a fetal heartbeat before abortion is waiting in the wings. In the meantime, women are suffering from a failing economy and a sluggish recovery that has not produced jobs for women; from widespread wage discrimination; from harassment, violence, and abuse; from hunger and poverty; from lack of health care; from a lack of affordable housing and transportation; and from inadequate support for their family responsibilities. Our state government’s answer to these real problems is, Let’s pass another abortion restriction!In fact, in the first six months of this year, the Pennsylvania legislature acted on anti-abortion legislation on fully one-third of its voting session days. Had enough? As a leader in your community, we are asking you to join the 1000 Women Leaders campaign to send a message to the Pennsylvania legislature that we’ve had enough. 1000 Women Leaders is a shared initiative of the Women’s Law Project and Pennsylvanians for Choice, a statewide coalition of reproductive health advocates and providers. Our goal is to shift the focus of our state government away from restricting abortion and toward solving the problems of real women in communities across the Commonwealth. How to participate:  All we ask is that you add your name to the rapidly growing list of women leaders (see below)who think the Pennsylvania legislature should stop passing new abortion restrictions and start solving women’s real problems. We will share the list with these leaders at a rally at the state capitol scheduled for Tuesday, September 27th. We hope you’ll be there. Yes, please add my name to the 1000 Women Leaders List! If, in addition to lending the force of your name, you are also in a position to make a contribution, we will put all funds raised from the 1000 Women Leaders initiative into a paid media campaign to publicize our message. Contributions are tax-deductable.  And if you’d like to spread the word to another woman whose name is missing from the 1000 Women Leaders list, please pass this message along through your networks. Also, if you would like to participate in our social media campaign and learn more about the rally on September 27th, visit www.wevehadenoughpa.org. The We’ve Had Enough campaign is also a project of Pennsylvanians for Choice and is committed to planning the September rally and educating Pennsylvanians about this dangerous legislation. 1000 Women Leaders (affiliations are listed for identification purposes only)

Amanda S. Aronoff, Executive Director WOMEN'S WAY Suzanne Sheehan Becker Jessica Beckett-McWalter, Esq. Kathy Black, President Philadelphia Coalition of Labor Union women Jen Boulanger Allentown Women's Center Jeanne K.C. Clark, Chair Shadyside Dems, Democratic Committee Seventh Ward, City of Pittsburgh Jennifer R. Clarke, Executive Director Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia Melissa M. Craig Gerianne Tringali DiPiano, President & CEO FemmePharma Global Healthcare, Inc. Barbara Burgos DiTullio WomenVote PA Anna Doering AD Consulting Julie Drendall JoAnne A. Epps Nancy O'Mara Ezold, Esq. Sara K. Faisetty Allentown Women's Center Kristyn Felman, MPH, LSW Cynthia Figueroa Alma Speed Fox Susan Frietsche, Esq., Senior Staff Attorney Women's Law Project Terry Gillen Carol Goertzel, President & CEO Pathways PA Nancy Bregstein Gordon Brenda Green CHOICE PA Wendy Grube, Ph.D., CRNP Barbara Hafer Hafer and Associates, LLC Honorable Babette Josephs Pennsylvania House of Representatives Carol Ann Kell Eve Biskind Klothen Vicki W. Kramer V. Kramer & Associates Judith N. Lasker, Ph.D. Dept. Sociology & Anthropology, Lehigh University Roberta D. Liebenberg, Esq. Gail Lopez-Henriques, Esq. Carol A. Mager, Esq. Dorothy Mann Lynn A. Marks Tara Marks La'Tasha D. Mayes New Voices Pennsylvania: Women of Color for Reproductive Justice Kate Michelman, Former President NARAL Pro-Choice America Leslie Anne Miller, Esq., LLC Diane Mohney, Recording Secretary Philadelphia Coalition of Labor Union Women Dr. Lynne Ann Molter, Professor & Chair Dept. of Engineering, Swarthmore College Kimberly C. Oxholm Nancy Reese, Chief Creative Officer Akoya Sarah Ricks, Board of Trustees Women's Law Project Mary Catherine Roper, Staff Attorney American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania Judith A. Ruszkowski Margaret Sadler Susan Schewel, Executive Director Women's Medical Fund Carolyn Scott Dayle Steinberg, President & CEO Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania Sylvia Stengle Martha Swartz, Esq. Stella M. Tsai, Esq. Carol E. Tracy, Esq., Executive Director Women's Law Project Deborah A. Williq, Esq. Kathleen J. Wilson, Vice President Pennsylvania NOW