Feminism Isn't Dead, It's Exhausted

Just days before the horrific Supreme Court decision that killed Roe v. Wade, a grievous act that rendered women and girls property of the state and subjected them to forced childbearing, a spate of opinion pieces appeared bemoaning the fact that feminism was all but gone in the face of massive backlash. Feminists I admire wrote disheartening columns that included expert opinion, research findings and personal analysis.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that “As the backlash gains steam, a lot of feminism feels enervated. There had been a desperate hope, among reproductive rights activists and Democratic strategists alike, that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to an explosive feminist mobilization, that people committed to women’s equality would take to the streets and recommit themselves to politics. But after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it’s far from clear whether a political groundswell will materialize.”

Susan Faludi’s New York Times piece argued that pop culture, celebrity, rampant consumerism along with fierce individualism has fueled not just a backlash but a subtle generational divide in which younger feminists can be said to fight against “practical impediments to equality,” while second wave feminists (like myself) were “old-fashioned shoe-leather organizers” who were “oblivious to race and class.” In making her argument against generational conflict she asks for “a reckoning with feminism” that “goes beyond generational indictments. It’s an admirable goal that has merit but her language seems to fuel the divide.”

What these two essays have in common is a focus on millennial feminism and their collective analysis should be taken seriously, But what troubles me is the notion that feminism, in all its variations and iterations, has spawned a powerful backlash and become divisive to the point of annihilation. As a second wave feminist I reject that idea having worked, marched, protested with and mentored millennial women. The feminism of my generation, flawed though it has been, is not dead; it is exhausted. In the words of the beloved civil rights leader Fanny Lou Hamer, we are simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Our fight has been long and arduous and unless you’ve been through it it’s impossible to grasp what it took to keep on keeping on, and how punishing it could be – which leads me to some thoughts on younger feminists.

First, with due respect to millennial women who never experienced a pregnancy scare in pre-Roe v. Wade times, times when women couldn’t get credit without a male guarantor, could be fired for being pregnant, couldn’t earn anything like what men doing the same work did, had no recourse to domestic violence, and more, there are lessons to be learned from those feminists – their mothers and grandmothers - who preceded and fought for them. Sadly, they are about to find out what it’s like and what it takes to begin again from the ground up. When they do find out their elders will be marching, protesting, voting, lobbying and more by their side. There will be no false dichotomy because we are all women who have been there or find ourselves there now. In that sense, context, as older feminists know, is everything; and “the personal [really] is political” because what happens to one of us can happen to all of us when male power presides over our lives.

In that context I urge young women to educate themselves fully about women’s history and courageous fights for equality, full personhood, social justice and human rights in this country. Our battles cross every sector of society and we have fought them well so that our daughters and granddaughters could lead better lives than many of my generation did.

As I tell my young friends, there is a qualitative difference between pussy hats and T-shirt slogans, and social media is not the same as showing up in big numbers, which takes organizing on a scale that can feel overwhelming. (Just ask Stacy Abrams.) Also, it’s deeply important to understand the politics of power, and the power of politics in order to think and act sufficiently strategically so that change becomes a new reality.

I’m not arguing against a new, different feminism; as the wise Greek philosopher Heraclitus knew, “The Only Constant in Life Is Change.” I’m making a case for a hybrid feminism that doesn’t fall prey to conflict among its constituents for lack of context, depth, and experience.

As for the disastrous decisions of a Supreme Court run amok, Rebecca Traister offered this call for hope: Noting that the situation is “wretched and plain” and will get worse,” she wrote in The Cut, “the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror, paralyzed by the bleakness of the view, is to figure out how to move forward anyway. … because while it is incumbent on us to digest the scope and breadth of the badness, it is equally our responsibility not to despair.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith agree. Writing in a New York Times op ed., they noted that this is a “dark moment” that “will require a long, hard fight.” As second wave feminists, they know what they’re talking about. “The two of us lived in an America without Roe v. Wade, and we are not going back. Not now. Not ever.” I’m with them.

The Death of Stare Decisis and the Demise of the 4th Amendment

I was out of the country in May when news of the SCOTUS leak in which Justice Samuel Alito’s policy statement went viral.  I hadn’t watched TV for a week and barely signed onto social media but when I did, I read astute and deeply troubling reactions to the document designed to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been considered established law for 50 years.

The document Justice Alito wrote was supported by four of his Court colleagues, revealing unsurprisingly that a majority of the Court concurred with ending women’s right to abortion. The timing of the leak was significant; it occurred when the Court was scheduled to rule on the constitutionality of a Mississippi abortion law which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

If the Court finds that the Mississippi law stands, it will have sanctioned ending Roe v. Wade, allowing states to make their own laws regarding abortion. Some states have already established Draconian laws that include charging women with murder if they miscarry or have an abortion. Some have ruled that physicians who perform abortions can be charged with a felony crime and some have set up vigilante laws that could affect anyone who helps a woman get an abortion.

Essentially the demise of the constitutional right to abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy will end women’s right to abortion in over half the states in this country. The implications are huge, not only for American women but for the future of the country, and they are abundantly clear.

Many analysts and pundits have written cogently and urgently about the legal, physical, economic and emotional consequences for women and others in this country, and for all of us with respect to our civil and human rights. As a women’s health educator and advocate I am all too familiar with those consequences. I have heard women’s testimonials, read their memoirs, listened to their stories.  I have helped them access abortion care and as a doula I have helped them give birth to much wanted babies.

After the Alito document was revealed (and during the last confirmation hearings) I thought about the great legal minds of the past who had served on the Supreme Court, Justices like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg among them. Now I mourn what has become of that institution, where several judges lied under oath to Congress regarding precedent, and where many are willing to ignore the Constitution’s 4th amendment right of Americans to be “secure in their persons” and to “not be violated or subjected to “unreasonable searches and seizures.”  

It pains and frightens me that faulty - some might say puerile logic - superficial, antiquated, cliched justifications, overt sexism, and religious ideology are blatantly on display. (It is worth noting that seven of the current justices are Catholic and no Protestants are on the bench).

Couple that with the less than stellar records and legal experience of several justices, the alleged sexual harassment conduct of two justices, the conflict of interest on the part of a justice whose wife actively supported the insurrection, along with the majority’s willing abrogation of civil and human rights and one can question where “liberty and justice for all” has gone.

How, I ask myself in these traumatic judgment days, has this largely trusted American institution so quickly deteriorated into depravity? How did its majority come to rely on bumper sticker taglines, social media tropes, and arguments so weak and sloppy that they wouldn’t pass muster in a law school? Where has compassionate consideration in difficult matters gone? Why have context, untoward consequences, and the reality of people’s lives disappeared?

The fact is the Supreme Court has become a political organization with its own dark agenda and its reputation will forever be tarnished, all because four men and one woman who should know better, appointed by a far right, self-serving autocrat, are now seated for life on the highest court in the land, along with several hundred inappropriate federal judges.

The price we’ll all pay for judicial travesties, individually and together, grows ever clearer and more threatening. If Roe v. Wade is overturned women’s lives will be destroyed. Precedent in other matters (gay and interracial marriage, LGBTG rights and more) will no longer be valid, and revision of laws that wreak havoc because of ignorance and a taste for punishment will return. 

It is no stretch to say that we will become an even more divided and dangerous nation, two-tiered and binary in ways that we can’t yet imagine. Violence is likely to flourish along with racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and increased marginalization. The elderly, young, disabled, and ill will suffer even more profoundly.  Murder charges, incarcerations and suicides will become commonplace. Poverty will prevail for those in the 99 percent, while corporations and billionaires flourish. Family structures will be deeply and sadly impacted. The earth will be at risk sooner than predicted. 

This is not solely about women’s rights, and it is not hyperbole. It’s a harbinger of what is to come because of laws we must live with, who makes and enforces those laws, who adjudicates disputes, what national priorities are established and by whom. It is about the future, which now is in the hands of the Supreme Court – a court plunged into decline that endangers us all. 

It’s a court that is beyond disappointing, a court with extraordinary power to shape our lives, and it grows ever more dangerous.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics and social issues. www.elayne-clift.com

Another Day, Another Newtown: The Obscenity of Gun Violence

When news of another school slaughter broke, this time again in Texas, the bile that rose in my throat was as bitter as the memory of Columbine, Newtown, Parkland – and the other grievous incidents of gun violence in schools – all 554 of them since Columbine, as NPR has reported.

From the Carolinas to California, 27 school shootings are among the 200 mass shootings this year alone in America, and it’s only May.   But this is not a time for numbers. It is a time for unprecedented action borne of rage about what is happening in our country. It is also time to answer burning questions: why is it happening, and what are we going to do about it? It is a time to shout our disgust and dismay, to demand gun legislation now, and to take action to end the slaughter of innocent children.

Here is what I believe must happen NOW. All living presidents (with the exception of Donald Trump) should stand together before Congress and declare that we are done with thoughts and prayers. We are done with the platitudes that surround grief and loss. We are done with inaction, and with turning the other way because political power is more important than loving our babies, especially among those who champion fetuses but ignore the needs of living children.

Go on strike because that is what it will take – teachers, clergy, workers, moms, women and men alike. Call for and participate in a national strike against violence and the insanity of mass murder. Bring down the economy as well as the evil that prevails on Capital Hill if that’s what it takes to stop the killing.

Call it what it is: a public health epidemic, not a gun violence or mental health issue.  We can and must learn the lessons of pioneering health communication campaigns, including, against all odds, the successful fight against the tobacco industry, which saved the lives of hundreds of thousands and demonstrated that people are capable of change.

It is vital for Americans to vote, this year and in 2024, with all the energy a soul can muster.  Stand in line for days if that’s what it takes to be counted among the family of humankind, and the families who must now endure unimaginable and unending sadness.

Most importantly, Americans who want the massacres of innocents to stop must demand an end to the filibuster and lobby for killing the Second Amendment -- the only way to halt the madness we’ve grown used to. Forget appeasing the irresponsible, vicious right wing with calls for limited legislation; go for the one thing that can stop gun violence faster and more conclusively than anything else -- an end to an irrelevant and antiquated amendment written before bullets and rifles that tear bodies apart in seconds were invented.

I believe that what lies at the heart of the tragic problem that is ours alone among developed countries is this: We are a nation wedded to violence and we always have been.

From the time white men first set foot on American soil guns have been used in genocides to eliminate non-white Native American peoples. During slavery guns were a way (along with physical punishment) to ensure forced labor and to instill terror among human beings who were bought and sold. Throughout our entire history guns have been part of our increasingly lethal war arsenals and today the sale of weapons in the U.S. is higher than it has ever been, while the people least likely to be killed by a bullet are made exceedingly rich.

Killing, it appears, is in our DNA. Mass murder has come to define us, whether through war, incarceration, racist law enforcement, the consequences of ignoring poverty while clamoring for personal and financial power, and random gun violence. All of it results in deep-seated human pain in a nation that is “exceptional” in all the wrong ways. We must end our killing fields if we are ever to have pride in a country that asks us to pledge our allegiance.

We have become a country in which the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appears at NRA’s convention, held in Texas, three days after 19 children were brutally shot to death there, a country where a former president who tried to overthrow an election, and a Senator from Texas who thinks we need more guns, join the governor. It is a country that exposes the personification of evil and reminds us how often scum rises to the top.

So I say this to Governor Abbott: Have you, at long last, no decency? And to Ted Cruz I say: You are not sorry. You are guilty. You have colluded with mass murderers. May the words spoken to me by a 4-year old child ring in your adult ears for all eternity: “Sometimes sorry is not good enough.”  As for Donald Trump, there are no words.

To all the others akin to these monsters, I say only this: We condemn your evil. We will inscribe your names and your deeds and your selfishness in the world’s history books, and we will celebrate the end of your cruelty for all our days.

Pathologizing Grief: How Long Can You Be Sad?

Here we go again. The so-called experts in psychiatry charged with updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), the less than empirical “bible of psychiatry” that clinicians rely on for reimbursable diagnoses, have decided that six months, maybe a year if they’re generous, is sufficient time to recover from a life-shattering loss.

This pathologizing of “prolonged” grief is yet another example of the arbitrary labeling of human feelings that is present in every version of the DSM, and a reflection of the culture of pathology we have fallen prey to. Big Pharma couldn’t be more pleased as its chemists race to their labs in search of new psychotropic pills. I couldn’t be more concerned about the price women will pay.

Consider this comment by the psychiatrist who chaired the steering committee overseeing revisions to the DSM-5. While being interviewed for a story in the New York Times in  March he said, “They were the widows who wore black for the rest of their lives. They were the parents who never got over it, and that was how we talked about them. Colloquially, we would say they never got over the loss of that child.”

The absence of context in that statement is stunning.  The widows who wore black were likely not grieving forever; they were more likely observing a cultural norm. And can anyone who has not lost a child begin to understand the emotional agony of that experience? The insensitivity, judgmental language, assumptions, and lack of empathy and context among diagnosticians like that is nothing short of staggering. How can one practice psychiatry devoid of the emotional intelligence necessary to accompany someone on the long, sad journey of grief?

There are psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers who share this view. They are openly critical, arguing that pathologizing a fundamental aspect of the human experience is not only morally wrong, it’s dangerous, warning that being told you have a mental illness when you are emerging from a period of deep grief can add to despair and a debilitating sense of vulnerability.

The backlash against re-defining depression to include grief has been ongoing for at least a decade or more, along with longer term concerns about arbitrary labeling, lack of evidence-based diagnoses, overmedication of patients, and the lack of context in diagnosis, especially for women, who are all too often subjected to meaningless labels like “borderline personality disorder” and “premenstrual dysphoric disorder.”

Women are significantly more likely than men to be diagnosed with a range of psychiatric illnesses. They are also more likely than men to be prescribed psychotropic medication, given electroconvulsive therapy and hospitalized for psychiatric illness.

 One of the leading critics of the DSM was the late Dr. Paula Caplan, a pioneering feminist psychologist who resigned from the DSM-4 committee because she recognized that over-diagnosing and overmedication were occurring on the basis of unscientific labeling and diagnosing, especially for women. In a piece she wrote in 2012 in the Washington Post she said, “Since the1980s, I have heard from hundreds of people who have been arbitrarily slapped with a psychiatric label and are struggling because of it.”   She noted that “About half of all Americans get a psychiatric diagnosis in their lifetimes which can cost anyone their health insurance, job, custody of their children, or right to make their own medical and legal decisions.”

Others in relevant professions have similar, significant concerns about the DSM. Their concerns include oversimplification “of the vast continuum of human behavior,” misdiagnosis and over-diagnosis “simply because [the patient’s] behavior does not always not always line up with the current ideal,” labeling and stigmatization. The American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, and the society for Humanistic Psychology are among the professional organizations who have publicly shared their concerns about the DSM.

Psychiatric care and psychological counseling, of course, have their place in mental health. But practitioners, especially those charged with oversight of the troubling DSM, a reference book some professionals argue should be abandoned, as well as those who seek reimbursement for services, do clinical studies that require funding, and especially those who ignore context or lack sufficient empathy, must recognize their moral obligation to “do no harm.” That includes avoiding judgmental diagnoses, false assumptions, heavy reliance on medication, unhelpful labeling, and inherent sexism.

Paula Caplan had it right when she said “In our increasingly psychiatrized world, the first course is often to classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder, assume it is based on a broken brain or a chemical imbalance, and prescribe drugs or hospitalization…. These days you would think there is no such thing as normal.”

Perhaps the next DSM revision should include a new disorder: “Prolonged insensitivity to suffering.” It would be easily diagnosed by an absence of compassion and the overuse of meaningless labels upon meeting new people. Surely no one would argue with that.

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Elayne Clift is a health communications specialist and former Program Director for the National Women’s Health Network. She writes from Vermont. 

An Artist, A Mission and a Meaningful Moment

There are occasions in life that gift us serendipitously. Often they move us. Such was my experience when I met Russian born Alexey Neyman, an 83-year old Jewish artist whose work was sold at the Creative Connections Gallery in Ashburnham, Massachusetts recently in support of Ukraine.

 Neyman ‘s exhibition, “The Habitual Light of Memory,” was mounted to raise funds for Ukraine.  The works raised over $4,600 on the first day of the exhibit and the funds were immediately sent to the International Rescue Committee’s Ukrainian relief effort.

That’s because Neyman, who was born in Moscow and frequently visited Ukraine, lost his grandparents, one of whom was a rabbi, to Nazi cruelty in Ukraine during WWII. He still has family and friends in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Poland. He and his daughter, son, and Polish son-in-law are actively supporting refugees and will soon bring family to the U.S.

But there is more to the artist’s story which involves his philosophy of art. “In this time of crisis in Ukraine,” the gentle artist with twinkling eyes and a ready smile says. “Artists can contribute to the efforts of humanitarian aid, which is why we are donating proceeds from the art show to help Ukraine. It’s also why I went to protest the war in Times Square right after the war broke out.”

Formally trained as an architect, Neyman still designs Russian Orthodox churches and supervises their construction. He also studied the art of painting with Valdimir Weisberg, a renowned Russian painter and art theorist, for ten years. He is dedicated to “the philosophy of art,” which is contemplative and includes understanding how colors work in various mediums. He believes as well that “color has a life of its own,” as Weisberg and Cezanne did. The result is subtle, evocative, soft works that draw the viewer into paintings that are often inspired by people Neyman knows and places he has lived or visited. “I like to immerse the viewer in a visual experience they might not get elsewhere because the qualities and properties in works of art require an awareness of the color as an instrument.”

 One painting that conveys that idea is a portrait of the artist’s long-time partner who is from Ukraine. In her portrait she wears the colors of the Ukrainian flag. “My heart is with the people of Ukraine, and with the people of Russia who are protesting the war, Neyman says. “Everyone will pay a price that is too high. Being genuine and straightforward in my work is the one thing I can do in response to all war crimes.”

Listening to the quietly powerful words Neyman spoke, which closely align with his artistic sensibilities, moved me mightily.  They were the words not only of an artist, but of a humanist, an activist, and a man of deep character. They were also wise words spoken softly by someone who helped me believe that there was still hope for the world.

There is another reason I was moved to know Alexey Neyman.  I too am Jewish, and my grandparents and parents were born in Ukraine.  They fled the Russian pogroms of the early 20th century and in doing so, unlike some of the artist’s family, survived the atrocities.  Another connection we share is that we both engage with the world creatively, me as writer and Neyman as artist, both addressing human rights and social justice. That too was part of our serendipitous meeting.

Painting for nearly sixty years, Neyman’s work has been widely exhibited in the US, Russia, and Europe,  as well as in private and state art collections including the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. But perhaps his greatest gift to others is his gentle, human words: “Ukraine can’t be explained by human language. Art helps.”

Neyman’s art has indeed helped, not only esthetically but practically. His work of expression and remembrance continues. So, too, does our friendship.

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Elayne Clift writes about art, politics, women and social justice.

The Act of Resistance Through Art

Goya did it in 1814 with his powerful painting “Third of May” which depicted the horror of war in the face of a screaming soldier being shot to death. So did Picasso in his iconic 1937 painting “Guernica,” a stunning indictment against the suffering of innocent people during the Spanish Civil War. Diego Rivera did it in his famous 1920s mural renderings in Mexico that attacked the ruling class, the church and capitalism.

Resistance art is a longstanding tradition that has grown larger over time as a form of political protest grounded in the mobilization and activism of people who wish to resist nonviolently. It has come to represent popular power and strength by offering activists something to rally behind, as art historian and critic Ruth Millington has pointed out. “Protest artwork can question, disturb, and even change the status quo,” she says, citing AIDS awareness campaigns in the 1980s and the more recent Guerilla Girls, a group of anonymous feminist advocates who got their start pushing for gallery representation of female artists. Now they protest, speak and perform, their identities concealed since they are working artists. Their humorous in-your-face posters, flyers, billboards and books are widely recognized and revered.

For all of history brave and creative people have fought oppression, injustice and inequality through various forms of art. They have stood for and led those who are without voice, marginalized because of their class, gender, age, disability, race, or social status. They have been the embodiment of the slogan “Power to the People” as they lead the way in acts of defiance that inspire connection and conviction.

Today protest art is even more important and possible thanks to the prolific possibilities of social media. It also takes numerous forms beyond paintings and poetry. But all of it, whether literature, drama, dance, puppetry, posters, or strobe lights on public buildings, it speaks volumes, encouraging public gatherings and passive resistance.

Music can also move people to action. Think Arlo Guthrie, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan.  Or YoYo Ma playing the Ukrainian national anthem on his cello in front of the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. Or just think of the beauty of the little girl with the golden voice who sang from a bunker in Ukraine and went viral.  Watch the Ukrainians singing their national anthem in front of Russian tanks.

Photography can also be social reform art.  The work of 1960s photographer Diane Arbus revealed the pain of poverty and otherness, while the work of Margaret Lange, whose “Migrant Mother” moved millions during the Depression and Dust Bowl days.  Social reformers like Jacob Riis used their social reform photography to bring evidence of their claims of injustice to viewers, conveying potent messages that engaged others. They communicate ideas that resonate across time, place, and context.

Such ideas are shared in the simple act of witnessing. Who would not be moved by the overwhelming crowds of protesters all over the world moving silently along the boulevards of their cities, placards in hand, as Ukrainians suffer? Who could not be mesmerized by the courageous woman fleeting across a live Russian state TV program with a placard that said simply, “Stop the War!” Who is not motivated to act in whatever why they can when we witness bombed babies and birthing mothers on Facebook and Twitter?

Whether it’s a universal image of a closed fist on a poster, a bit of graffiti on a building or bridge, an outrageous visual by the Guerilla Girls, or a simple rendition of the Ukrainian flag, powerful images like those of Iranian artist Shirin Neeshat, who advocates for women in Iran, call us to action because, as she says, “Art is our weapon.”

It is also a common thread among those of us who wish to be counted in the struggle against cruelty, injustice, and violence, and to those of us who want to bring about positive societal change. In light of all that this fragile world is confronting in these times, I am grateful for all forms of art that humanize and galvanize us, as they move us to resist when resistance is needed.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

Women Who Change the World: La Pasionaria Past and Present

Throughout history women have left their mark on the world in numerous, and often unknown, unrecognized, or forgotten ways. What better time to honor some of them than Women’s History Month, especially the “pasionarias.”

La Pasionaria, a term that has come to encompass powerful, activist women whether by word or deed, derives from a Communist leader in the Spanish Civil War, named Dolores Ibarruru. According to the Encyclopedia  Britannica, she became known as La Pasionaria - “The Passionflower” in Spanish – because of her brilliant oratory and her war cry, “No pasaran!” (They shall not pass!) Her oratory led to her imprisonment several times, but she never stopped talking on street corners and other venues. When Franco became Spain’s dictator, she fled to the Soviet Union where she represented her party at Kremlin congresses until 1960, returning to Spain in 1977, where she served in the Spanish parliament until her death in 1989.

  Not all pasionarias are as forceful in their rhetoric as Ibarruru, but she is matched by one of my favorites -- Sojourner Truth, who knocked the socks off the white men who heard her fiery speech, “Ain’t I A Woman?” at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Ohio  “…..That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere,” the petite, illiterate truthteller before them said. “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? ….Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? … From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him…” From her slave roots to the White House at the invitation of Abraham Lincoln, the itinerant preacher never stopped advocating for abolition, civil and women’s rights.

Some women exercise their power by speaking publicly, but others use words in other irreversible ways. One of them was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the pioneering work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. In her groundbreaking treatise she argued for women’s right to education, surpassing other pleas on the same topic by calling for national education systems. While her ideas languished in her own time, by the middle of the 19th century her impact was being felt by women’s rights leaders, including Emmaline Pankhurst in England and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues in America, who included numerous rights for women in their demands.

Women who entered the realm of politics were often pasionarias. One of them was Jeannette Rankin, the first woman member of the U.S. Congress, a Republican representing Montana from 1917 to 1919, and again from 1941 to 1943, thus serving during both WWI and WWII. A social worker by training, she campaigned for women’s suffrage for years before gaining the right for women to vote in Montana. An outspoken pacifist, she voted against war with Germany in 1917 and again in 1941, ending her political career, but she continued advocating for social reform and peace. “If I had my life to live over again,” she once said, “I’d do it all again, but this time I would be nastier.”

Many lesser-known women have had major political, literary, and rhetorical impact. I was privileged to know some of them when I worked in Washington, DC on behalf of women. There was Mildred Marcy, who wrote the sentence that became known as the Percy Amendment, so that women became equal beneficiaries in U.S. foreign assistance programs.  Virginia Allen saw to it that every state had a Commission for Women. Others quietly effected change behind the scenes.

Among that generation of outstanding women who helped create a constituency for the life-changing women’s movement was Esther Peterson with whom I had a special friendship. She worked on behalf of women from the days of FDR to the Carter and Clinton administrations. The first woman lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, she was assigned to lobby a young legislator named John F. Kennedy, Jr. They became fast friends. When JFK became president, he asked Esther what she would like to do in government, That’s how she became head of the Women’s Bureau at the Labor Department where she was recognized for her quiet, highly effective leadership.

Many women throughout history from all countries, cultures, and walks of life have been, and are, worthy of being called pasionarias. From the Roman Hortensia who was renowned as a skilled orator, and Aspasia of Greece, who held influential salons attended by Socrates, to today’s Emma Gonzales, whose oratory after the Parkland school shootings stunned a nation, to Greta Thunberg, who as a teenager shocked United Nations representatives with her condemnation of climate change cliches, and Malala Yousafzai, who, like Mary Wollstonecraft, became an influential leader advocating for girls’ education, the tradition of women’s wise and powerful words, whether written or spoken, goes on.

As Dolores Ibarruru and all the others who have gone before us might have said, “Brava, Pasionarias, Gracias, and Abrazos! We commend you, and we are ever grateful.”

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Vermont. www.elayne-clift.com

The Mysterious Draw of Crime Drama During the Winter of Our Discontent

Winter 2022. Another season of isolation. Trips cancelled. Theater, museums, movies, restaurants now no-go zones. Closeted clothes. Manicures and make-up a thing of the past. Exercise more resolution than reality. Occasional beans on toast for supper. Panic attacks when a book stash is low. FaceTime with friends. House arrest that feels like life in solitary. (How do people survive that?)

On dark days I think of Hildegard von Bingen, who became a German Benedictine abbess, composer, philosopher, medical writer, and healer during the Middle Ages - once she overcame her years of solitude as an anchorite, one of many young girls sealed in secluded brick chambers in remote abbeys with only a straw bed, a bible, and if they were lucky, a tiny garden. Hildegard grew medicinal herbs in hers as she watched her chamber mate slowly go mad.  Occasionally she joined other veiled young women to sing to priests from behind a latticed wall, and somehow kept her wits about her. Having proved her intelligence and genius for healing, the abbot finally released to start her own convent where nuns were free to move about, read, write, study, garden, and engage in intellectual and social discourse.

Sometimes I think about all the women in the world whose entire universe consists of a lonely hut where daily life revolves around a husband, children, backbreaking chores, and subsistence gardening. I even recall poor Rapunzel alone in her castle. That’s when I thank God for good books, streaming platforms, and FaceTime friends.

Now that my husband and I have become Netflix junkies we try to vary our choices, but invariably when we can’t find a good movie, we resort to watching BBC mysteries and other fictional stories that revolve around crime. Apparently so do a good many other people.  

My research about why some people get hooked on true crime, or well-scripted fictional mysteries, wasn’t particularly enlightening, but one article in the New York Times tried to explain the phenomenon.  Writing in October, Stephen Graham Jones posited that “Horror can offer comfort, can offer solace. Not because it’s an accurate representation or dramatization of our turmoil…but because horror comes packaged…in stories that end. … For all of us who sense no end to our own daily horror stories, that’s what’s so “important.”

A Google search was totally useless because no matter what search terms I offered it revealed list upon list of why people watch copious true crime stories. But I never watch true crime because it’s so depressing. However, well-crafted, complex mystery stories like the ones Agatha Christie wrote and Hercule Poirot solved are worthy of attention even if they are a bit outdated.

Psychologists were the least helpful as I tried to answer the question of why so many of us are drawn to mystery dramas, but a few did offer some insight. Most of them agreed that we like stories that offer a battle between good and evil. We also, they say, like things to be resolved almost as much as we want to escape from the crises in our own lives. We seek respite from our anxieties, and in these days from our isolation, and we enjoy helping clever detectives solve fictional crime.

Not being satisfied with expert opinion I began to ponder a few other questions. For example, who dreams up such complex plots surrounded by numerous subplots? What makes these mysteries so compelling? Why do we care so much about the outcome? 

Being a writer helped me answer my own questions. I know that good drama must be grounded in strong plot lines, clever dialogue, brilliant acting, and credible, likeable characters. It helps if at least one character is attractive, even sexy.  Take the vicar in PBS’s” Grantchester.” Not only was he better at solving crimes than his best friend, Gordy, the detective; the actor James Norton was incredibly loveable as a sleuth, a guy conflicted about God, and a priest leading his flock.

Then there was “Astrid,” the Danish autistic savant who bested the pathologist in every episode by paying much deeper attention to corpses than the forensic guy did. Brilliantly acted by a young actress who captured Astrid’s autistic compulsions along with her astounding qualities emanating from her love of solving puzzles, the friendship she formed with the female detective who understood her was a heartwarming aspect of the weekly stories.

And how could I not recommend “Unforgotten,” a series about long unsolved crimes in which the British actress Nicola Walker portrays a compassionate detective so committed to solving challenging 20-year-old crimes that it gets her in trouble.  Like Astrid and her detective, Walker has great chemistry with her male deputy in a relationship of understanding and trust vs. sexual attraction.

All of this is the stuff of good drama and compelling mystery that, for whatever reason, serves up distraction, makes us feel we are in good company, and leads us to believe that trouble ends, and all will be well. That’s enough to make any dark night feel less threatening or lonely. After all, Hildegard went on to do great things, and Rapunzel was rescued from her castled solitude, proving that hope works in mysterious ways, even in Covid times.

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Elayne Clift is a writer. She has never written a mystery and seldom reads them but she watches lots of TV. 

What the Supreme Court Has Done to Women

“My friend and I drew up to a drab brown brick building.  An older man, shrunken and slouched, opened the door furtively. We climbed a flight of stairs in a putrid green escape well and emerged into a hallway, then entered a dark apartment.  I imagined fleeing down the stairs but then considered the consequences.

“’Wait here,’ the man commanded.  After a few minutes he reemerged from another room and asked me some questions. I tried to stay calm.  I felt as if I were sinking into a huge hole from which I might never emerge. ‘Come with me,’ he said, leading me into what must have been a kitchen.  It had a table in the center of the room, at the foot of which, between stirrups, was a lamp on a stand, and a stool. The table was covered with a sheet of white paper with a thin pillow on it.  Next to it was a tray bearing silver instruments and a large jar. The man told me to take off everything from the waist down. There was no privacy screen. I asked him for something to cover myself. ‘You won’t need that,’ he said.  ‘Just get on the table.’

“He put my feet into the cold stirrups. I’d never been exposed like that. I felt dirty, naked into my soul. I shivered uncontrollably. He handed me a towel, but no blanket.  I wondered if he would wash his hands or put on gloves.  I stared at the ceiling, tears dripping from my eyes.  Why wasn’t there a nurse, I wondered?  He came toward me with a wad of gauze in his hand. ’Breathe,’ he said, forcing the gauze down on my mouth. I thought I would suffocate. 

“Then I woke up still on the table, legs straight, a sheet over me. Pain burned between my legs. I felt as if my stomach had been pulled out of me.  The man fiddled with instruments.  I heard a whimper and realized it came from me.  I passed out. When I woke the man said, ‘You need to get up and leave. Get dressed.’ He handed me a sanitary pad.  I rose slowly waiting for the dizziness to stop. The pad I had shoved between my legs felt saturated already. I hoped I wouldn’t die.”

That did not, in fact, happen to me. I imagined it for a novel I was writing.  My character was one of the lucky ones who did not die from a back-alley abortion, and I was lucky too because despite a few scares I never needed an abortion. But I knew lots of women who did. I covered for a friend who had to flee the U.S. to get one, and because I worked in women’s health I knew where to refer my friends, single and married, for safe abortions.

Now here we are again, having just passed the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which gave women agency over their bodies and their lives. It is inconceivable for those of us who remember life before legal abortion and who fought hard for reproductive control to find ourselves back in the trenches fighting for the sovereignty of self as the Supreme Court drags us backwards, starting with the Court’s support of Draconian laws launched in Texas, soon to be followed by as many as two dozen other states, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The Court’s shocking position and lack of knowledge about, or regard for, women’s lives and the role that reproductive autonomy plays in those lives is staggering. It is a Court that views abortion as easy birth control instead of a deeply difficult choice, and adoption as an good way out of parental responsibility. It’s a court that has no concept of pregnancy confirmation, fetal viability or the lifelong trauma of rape and incest.

Neither does the Court have a clue or a care that without safe abortion there will still be unsafe abortion resulting in death, irreparable psychological harm, and possible suicides among women of childbearing age. Many other women will be deprived of economic security, quality of life aspirations, or the fulfillment of life goals.

“The erosion of reproductive rights is a result of raw, bare-knuckled politics, of a minority exercising their power over a majority,” Cecile Richards, past president of Planned Parenthood, wrote in a New York Times essay after the Court’s latest decision regarding SB8, the Texas law that limits abortion. “The millions of Americans who are watching, horrified, as the Supreme Court prepares to roll back a right they have had for nearly half a century need to be just as dogged and determined. But it’s going to take unprecedented levels of political activism to fight back.”

Perhaps it is Justice Sonia Sotomayor whose words ring out. "This case is a disaster for the rule of law," Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.  " It allows the State yet again to extend the deprivation of the federal constitutional rights of its citizens through procedural manipulation. The Court may look the other way,  but I cannot.”

Nor can women who will pay the price of a cruel procedural manipulation.

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Fanning the Flames of Poverty

A child plays with a lighter in a three-story apartment building in Philadelphia resulting in a fire that kills twelve people, mostly children. A malfunctioning hallway door in a Bronx high-rise apartment building leads to the death of seventeen people, including eight children – all within one week. Both tragedies housed low-income people. Both speak to the need for compliance with coded housing safety measures.

In the case of the Bronx high-rise building a self-closing door malfunctioned, filling a staircase with rapidly spreading suffocating smoke. The building had no fire escapes and residents reported that the building had door problems for years. They also reported persistent heat and fire safety issues, including fire alarms that no one actually paid attention to because “they rang at all hours of the day.”

In 2018 a fire in a residential building in the Bronx killed another dozen people. At the time, Rep. Richie Torres (D-NY) was a Bronx City Council member. He co-sponsored a bill that mandated all residential buildings in the Bronx have self-closing doors by the middle of last year. Now he has announced a federal, state, and local task force to examine residential building fire safety hazards. “We have to ensure that the housing stock is brought to the 21st century when it comes to fire safety, and the Bronx is no stranger to deadly fire,” he told the local press.

According to the press report, the Bronx building, built in 1972 under New York’s affordable housing program, only had sprinklers in the basement because, as a spokesperson for the owners of the building said, “its ceilings and floors are poured concrete and its fire doors are sufficient to make the building qualify as “non-combustible.” It’s worth noting that the current building owners include the son of a for-profit affordable housing developer.

Safe, affordable housing is a critical issue that gets little attention until there is a tragedy. Profit over people is usually the name of the game among developers and building owners, and politicians often look the other way or just don’t find time to address the urgent problems inherent in housing for low-income residents. Those problems often create health as well as safety issues, yet they remain ignored or skirted around because they are part of a complex, failing infrastructure too long denied, not only because of the expense of ensuring safety, but because building tenants at risk are not a high priority group for many building owners or politicians.

Sometimes it’s a matter of benign neglect on the part of landlords, but more often than not in large cities like New York, corruption fuels code breaking. And no landlords are more corrupt than so-called “slum landlords” whose neglect is criminal.

Take, for example, Jared Kushner, whose abuse of tenants was documented in a film by Alex Gibney called “Dirty Money,” in which one person interviewed called Kushner a “tier one predator.” According to the documentary, Kushner’s properties “have received hundreds of health code violations, including the presence of lead paint, lung carcinogens, and fire safety hazards.” In many documented cases, “the New York City Housing authority had issued violations but never followed up on collecting fine payments” nor had they checked to see if Kushner’s company actually fixed any dangerous living conditions.

Not all landlords rise to the level of Kushner’s abuse, but there are enough bad players that one guy’s mission in life is to keep landlords out of trouble. He calls himself “the real estate solutions guy” on his website which warns building owners about twelve common code enforcement violations. They include missing or inoperable smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, plumbing, heating, and electrical deficiencies, insufficient ventilation and rodents and infestations. Some cities, he adds, separate priority and non-priority violations. On his list of non-priorities? Missing or non-functioning smoke detectors.

Jessie Singer, in her forthcoming book There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise in Injury and Disaster – Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, points out that “the term ‘accident’ itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators,” her publisher, Simon and Schuster, says, adding “As the rate of [all] accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the ‘accident’ to avoid consequences for their actions.”

That insight gets to the heart of the matter when it comes not only to building codes and fire safety but to the fundamental human right to safe, adequate shelter, as expressed in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25, which begins with these words: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing …”

As Jessie Singer said on an Instagram post following the Bronx tragedy, “Seventeen people in the Bronx died in a fire for the same reason that many Americans die in a house fire in 2022, because the only housing accessible to them is housing that is unsafe.”

In 2022, that is not only a human tragedy. It is a national disgrace.

A View of the World Through a Gendered Lens

As a feminist writer I often refer to “the lens of gender,” a term that refers to looking at the world through metaphorical spectacles that allow one to view people and events via a special filter. That filter exposes women’s experiences, needs, and perceptions while revealing the realities, needs and perceptions of men in new ways too.  Our vision becomes refined, more acute, and more humane when we don these spectacles, allowing us to see things more clearly and compassionately. By becoming aware of context, we find new meaning in our own and others’ experiences. 

Looking at the world through the lens of gender allowed Jean Kilbourne, for example, to shine light on the world of advertising in a way that no one had done before her. She demonstrated through her writing and classic video series that women were being objectified and sexualized by advertising that seemed clever, until the gender lens revealed advertising’s alarming or violent subtext.

Another kind of gender lens was more literal as photographers Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus and others revealed. Lange and Bourke-White were social realists whose visionary work revealed what Henry James referred to in literature as an “air of reality.”  Like James their work valued accurate representations of the psychological and material realities of life.

Lange achieved this reality by capturing historically important events, including the Dust Bowl and Depression-era days.  Committed to revealing the hardships visited upon poor migrants, she afforded her subjects dignity and respect, and by offering a literal gender lens, she also revealed what it looked like to be frightened, unbearably fatigued and marginalized.  Lange's images, like the iconic “Migrant Mother,” were often confrontational calls to conscience exposing the need to defend against a lack of interest or skepticism, especially among policymakers.

Margaret Bourke-White offered something new with her imagery of industrial America, 1930s Russia, and the horrors of World War II as no one else had. She also proved adept at capturing human moments in the lives of both the powerful and the poor in a body of work that ranged from the uncompromising to the personal. Women were often among the people she photographed to tie picture essays to real lives and individual experiences in a human way.

Diane Arbus once noted, “There are things nobody would see if [we] didn’t photograph them.”  Thankfully, she and other women photographers did view their work through a gender lens, for without that lens we would never have known so much of the world or the historical events that challenged everyone, including women and children. 

Martha Gellhorn was an intrepid journalist who covered several wars through a literary lens of gender. Leaving the news of bombs, battleships and martyred soldiers to the male press corps, she used her reporting to show the world what civilian women and children were suffering in war torn places By telling their stories she put a human face on the dreadful effects of conflict.

These innovative photographers and reporters, along with others, paved the way for women writers and photojournalists who were compelled to address social justice issues. Marion Palfi, for example, combined her art form with social research which resulted in her iconic images, including the 1940s photo “Wife of a Lynch Victim.” Social documentarian Mary Ellen Mark’s work explored homelessness, addiction, mental illness and teenage pregnancy, as seen from the inside.  (In 1976 she spent 36 days in the women’s maximum- security section of an Oregon mental institution.)

I can’t help thinking now about women like these as we contemplate the suffering occurring in the world in our own time. What might we learn in larger social justice terms if unflinching photographs of the vacant stares and skeletal bones of children starving in Yemen, Afghanistan and parts of Africa were in our minds, or we heard the stories of grieving mothers, themselves hungry and frail? Would we see the face of famine differently?

Would we more fully empathize with the pain of incarceration, wrongful or otherwise, or the unending grief of parents who bury their children because of gun violence? Would we view addiction or mental illness differently? Would we be less judgmental about those who live in family structures unlike our own? Would we understand more deeply what it is like to lose everything in a natural disaster, or to grow old alone?

If we saw the faces of hopelessness, terror, marginalization, solitude, and profound sadness might we be inspired to show up at the polls to vote for change, to advocate vociferously, to press for more humane legislation?

As feminists know, context is everything. When the world is viewed through the lens of gender, social change becomes a political imperative. Stories of real people who live punishing lives for various reasons become compelling through a visual medium that offers powerful testimony to the reality of lives lived outside our own spheres. 

In short, seeing is knowing. And knowing, we can no longer look away.

The Normalization of Fascism

When my siblings and I were growing up and we did something untoward that got us into trouble my mother would say, “Let that be a lesson to you!” I’ve remembered that line whenever someone thinks I’m over-reacting when I say the Trump administration has opened the way to a functioning autocracy rapidly morphing into full-blown fascism.

I think about the truism that “history is prologue.  We should be taking that truth more seriously.

A chilling December article in The Guardian by Jason Stanley revealed why. “America is now in fascism’s legal phase,” Stanley posits.

His article begins with a 1995 quote by the late Toni Morrison. “Let us be reminded,” the writer said, “that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

Morrison recognized the connection between racism, anti-Semitism and fascist movements propagated by and aligned with oligarchs, as Stanley does. His compelling article lays out the various ways in which Donald Trump led us to the tipping point “where rhetoric becomes policy.”

Among the issues Stanley discusses are the takeover of our courts by Trump appointees, right wing attempts at voter suppression, increasing corporate influence, the crackdown on reproductive rights and enforced gender roles, Jim Crow laws and controlled school curricula, increased political and police violence, mass incarceration particularly among blacks, threatening vigilante groups, and punitive actions towards journalists and non-loyalists. It’s a gobsmacking portrait of where we are now as a country on the brink.

This isn’t the first time America has had to confront insurrection and political violence, but it is a time to consider history, and to remember that this isn’t America’s first fascist threat.

The lessons of history include a close look at all dictatorships. In this moment, it is urgent that we consider Hitler’s rise to power. As Stanley and others make clear, Hitler and his minions were adept at using propaganda and lies to create a narrative that led to his election, and his subsequent hideous policies. Citing “the big lie” that the last election was stolen, Stanley notes that “we have begun to restructure institutions, notable electoral infrastructure and law” and that “the media’s normalization of these processes encourages silence at all costs.’

German fascism didn’t arise overnight. Germany’s National Socialist Party began small, but extremely right wing and anti-democratic, according to historians. Masked in nationalist rhetoric, its agenda resonated with people who felt worried and humiliated. They welcomed scapegoats. Stanley put it this way: “The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews.” Nazi leaders “recognized that the language of family, faith, morality, and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things.”

Sound familiar? We’ve already heard talk of book burning, spying on each other, and Jews altering their behavior as precautionary measures. We’ve witnessed racist violence, attacks on peaceful protesters, and acts of white supremacy grounded in the claim that we are a Christian nation. Congress has its share of pro-autocracy politicians, and our local and state governments have all been infiltrated. Vigilante groups prowl the streets, guns and hate placards waving.

What more do we need to wake up?

This is not the first fascist threat to American democracy but the pro-Nazi movement of the 1930s and early 1940s was the most frightening to date. Characterized by a 1939 event at Madison Square Garden, a rally of 22,000 members of the German party known as the Bund, saluted large banners in Nazi fashion. The banners showed George Washington surrounded by swastikas.  

The movement included summer camps for children, billed as family friendly venues, where Nazi indoctrination took place.  At one of them in New York state an annual German Day festival attracted 40,000 people. Germany’s brown-shirted camp kids later became SS thugs. 

The American Nazi movement, with which Charles Lindbergh sympathized, came to an end only after the 1939 invasion of Poland by Hitler, followed by the Bund being outlawed in 1941. All of this is captured in Philip Roth’s semi-autobiographical novel The Plot Against America.

Nevertheless, America has continued to witness Nazi inspired acts. In 1978 a rally in Skokie, Illinois repeated the language of the Third Reich. Donald Trump coopted a German slogan in “America First” as support for anti-immigration sentiments. And now white supremacist rhetoric is being spewed as it was in Charlottesville in 2017. A year ago, a massive crowd of insurrectionists stormed the Capital wearing T-shirts embossed “Camp Auschwitz.”  

In her speech at Howard University, Toni Morrison asserted that fascism relies upon media to convey an illusion of power to its followers.  Now, finally, the media is listening to booming alarm bells and the military is preparing for an all-out coup which could happen in 2024 if not before.

It’s time now to ask for whom the alarm bells toll. As Ernest Hemingway knew, it tolls for all of us.

The Supreme Court Takes Aim at Women

 In her memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence Rebecca Solnit writes, “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways.” Nothing proves her point more powerfully than the debacle of the Supreme Court as it debated the likely demise of legal abortion in this country.

With stunning ignorance of and disregard for women’s lives, five men and one woman in black robes pontificated and danced around the real issue before them -- women’s bodily integrity, agency, and personhood.  Instead, they reprised the overwhelming oppression of females that has existed for millennia in fear of women’s autonomy, thereby joining the generations of (mostly) men who view women as nothing more than state-owned semen vessels.

The argument before the Court aimed at gutting 50 years of precedent in the matter of abortion reminded many women of the medieval practice of disappearing women into convents and monasteries and later into asylums where they were diminished, demoralized, and drugged into passivity.  

Imagine this: You are a woman with three children living in poverty when you have a contraceptive failure and are forced to carry the pregnancy to term.  You are a woman 19 weeks pregnant with a much-wanted child when you learn that anomalies render the fetus unviable and continuing the pregnancy could endanger your own life, but you are denied an abortion. You are a college student who has been awarded a scholarship for advanced study when you realize you are pregnant.  Denied a safe abortion, you schedule a clandestine, illegal one. You are a 13-year-old child who has been raped by her stepfather and is now told she must bear her rapist’s child.

Try to imagine living with the crippling fear these scenarios engender.

And yet the Supreme Court is trying mightily to hold women hostage because macho-male powerbrokers are so threatened by the idea of female agency that they must control women at all costs and condemn them for believing they are entitled to fully lived lives grounded in equality and human rights.

There is, of course, one woman among the six justices chomping at the bit to effect the demise of legally sanctioned abortion. She should have been able to relate to issues relevant to pregnancy, for she too has borne children, felt them wiggle in her belly, done the hard labor of delivering them into the world and loving them when they arrived. Yet she argued that women don’t need abortions because they can easily dump their newborn babies into adoption or foster care like so much detritus, while her male colleagues grappled with numbers, the vagaries of viability, and the rights of fetuses over living women.

The reckless and dangerous disregard for women’s lives and lived reality during the justices’ discourse was nothing short of staggering as it showcased America’s Taliban.

It was also shocking to hear Scott Stewart, lawyer for the state of Mississippi which seeks to limit abortion to 15 weeks as a gateway to overturing of Roe v. Wade. His responses to questions from the justices were befuddled, obfuscating, superficial, and just plain ridiculous. This is the man Donald Trump put in charge of immigrant detention centers without any qualifications for the job.  Still, he was kept busy keeping monthly updated logs of females’ menstrual cycles during their incarceration to prevent legal abortions from happening.

How draconian can you get?

The foundation of entrenched, continuing misogyny women face yet again is what women like Emmeline Pankhurst and Alice Paul fought for when they risked their lives for women’s’ suffrage, what Margaret Sanger sacrificed in her fight for contraception and sex education, what Second Wave feminists fought for when they marched in every country in the world before, during and after the UN Decade for Women.  It is what women like Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olson, Betty Friedan, Carol Gilligan, Carolyn Heilbrunn, Audrey Lorde, and the multitudes who preceded or followed them wrote about: The trivialization, objectification, marginalization and silencing of over half the population in this country and elsewhere.

None of us who have been in the trenches for years fighting for equality, autonomy, economic justice, reproductive health care (which includes abortion), privacy, choices, and other basic human rights – all of which are at risk with this Supreme Court -- thought we’d find ourselves back to Square One in this moment, living in fear, facing limited opportunities and the denial of our chosen paths. Never did we imagine that in the 21st century we would again live with the oppression of patriarchal power, such that sexism, racism, and violence prevail.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked this question during the SCOTUS debate, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” she was asking a question so vital that it could have an impact on the outcome of the case being considered.

That question also invoked the patriarchy and misogyny that once again prevails as a dominating force in women’s lives. Sadly, especially for our daughters and granddaughters, the stench of annihilation is likely to be with us far into the future.

The Arming of America

The verdict is in. The vigilantes are celebrating. Kyle Rittenhouse is free.  The postmortem predictions of what it will mean for us as a society begin, as does the fear for our future as we face a freefall into more violence while our country descends into the depths of depravity acted out on the streets.

It is now possible to kill someone in the name of self-defense and literally get away with murder. It’s a field day for open carry laws that make going to a public event or riding the subway or simply walking down the wrong street at the wrong time a determining factor in whether you live or die. It is a dark day in America.

Gun violence was bad enough before Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people and walked away a free man. But as a recent New York Times piece about the proliferation of “ghost guns” – untraceable guns that can be assembled from online purchases of components – has made clear, America’s gun problem has reached epidemic proportions. These lethal weapons are within easy reach of people legally barred from buying or owning guns which, as the Times article revealed, “helps explain why since 2016 about  25,000 privately made firearms have been confiscated by local federal law enforcement agencies nationwide.”

Earlier this year the Children’s Defense Fund issued a report about the epidemic of gun violence affecting children. It revealed, among other statistics, that gun violence has killed more than 200,000 children and teens since the 1960s. “That’s more than the number of soldiers killed in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq combined,” with black children suffering the highest gun death rates. In 2019, according to the report, they accounted for 43 percent of child and teen deaths even though they constituted just 14 percent of all children and teens that year.

Women are also among those most vulnerable to gun violence. According to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, “nearly 92 percent of all women killed by guns in high-income countries were American women, [who are] 21 times more likely to be shot and killed than women in other high-income countries.”  https://efsgv.org/ Further, “around one in four women in the United States have been threatened with a gun and nearly 1 million women have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner. Over half of all intimate partner homicides are committed with guns and a woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun.”

According to www.everytownresearch.org, every month an average of 57 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner. Black, American Indian, and Hispanic women are disproportionately affected by gun violence, along with members of the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities. That’s why Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Ca.) has introduced a number of relevant bills including H.R. 1441, the No Guns for Abusers Act, designed to help states enforce existing laws against people who try to purchase firearms without the legal right to do so.

The epidemic gun violence affecting women and children are part of the entire fabric of gun violence in this country, a phenomenon that other “developed” countries simply cannot fathom. They, ghost guns, and now the exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse are connected like the parts of a quilt, similar to those that have woven into them pieces of history.

One of the pieces of our history is the outdated Second Amendment, meant to arm militias in the 18th century. It’s an amendment no longer relevant, and a shield behind which gun enthusiasts hide. It’s an amendment that fuels the likes of open carry advocates, eager vigilantes, and people comfortable with and prone to violence all too eager to claim self-defense, often a defense rooted in racism. It’s an amendment that allowed Kyle Rittenhouse to be exonerated.

So far, according to a September CNN report, “2021 is likely to be the worst year for gun violence in decades.” What’s more, in October The New York Times revealed that a significant number of travelers have been stopped at U.S. airports trying to board planes with loaded guns.  Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers report stopping nearly 5,000 passengers from carrying firearms onto flights by October this year.https://www.tsa.gov/

Now comes the conservative Supreme Court which recently heard a gun rights case in which the majority could make it easier for people to carry firearms in public. According to Time Magazine, “justices could loosen or strike down a century-old provision in New York that requires people to prove they have a special need for self-protection if they want to carry a concealed handgun outside of their home. The challengers in the suit—backed by the NRA-affiliated New York State Rifle & Pistol Association—argue that the restriction violates the Second Amendment.”

As we await the SCOTUS decision, the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict has already added immeasurably to America’s growing gun violence epidemic. It has effectively declared open season on the gunning down of America. It fuels an unchecked impetus toward violence and vigilantes and increased an escape valve when gun violence occurs.

God help us all. 

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The Democratic Party Progresses Despite Postmortem Reviews

It took mere minutes for rumors of the Democratic Party’s demise to hit the airwaves, social media, and conservative print media following the predictable election – by just two points – of Glenn Youngkin as Virginia’s new governor.

Pundits delighted in spewing premature obituaries and declaring the Party out of touch with American voters and values as they called for their own visions of centrist right governance that is stubbornly backward-looking in the face of changing demographics, and a fragile future.

There were many factors at play in the recent elections, from blatant propaganda and lies to insufficient legal action against insurrectionists and corrupt politicians, to historical trends in voting patterns. There were some really bad candidate options as well. Democrats were also up against two legislators in their own camp who seem to delight in obstructionism.

Even The New York Times spewed spurious views of the “political nightmare” that had occurred, calling for a “badly needed” conversation among Democratic leadership that return the party to “moderate policies and values” and issues like the economy (which appears to be doing quite well), inflation, and “restoring normalcy in schools.”

Congressional Democrats, the Times declared, “need to stop their left-center squabbling,” a stunning trivialization of a cogent progressive agenda that listens to what the majority of Americans want and understand – precisely because, as The New York Times got right, this is a moment in history that cannot be ignored because so much is at stake.

The fact is that centrists on both sides fail to recognize the two big elephants in the room or can’t risk acknowledging them lest they lose their power and privilege. Those two elephants are white supremacy, and the encroaching autocracy that is rapidly eroding the American experiment.

Left of center politicians – the dreaded “progressives” – understand the impact those two fundamental issues have on policy and on people’s lives.  They know, and some have suffered, the reality of legislation that is written by and fully supported by wealthy, white, primarily male powerbrokers in this country, the 1% who are terrified of women and people of color taking their rightful place in politics, the marketplace, America’s board rooms and decision-making bodies. 

Left leaning leaders understand that in the richest country in the world when there are working people paying taxes who can’t afford decent housing, nutritious food, basic healthcare, or childcare on a minimum wage, and who live in fear of guns and police brutality and so much more, our economic and social systems are broken. They also recognize that broken systems leave a nation especially vulnerable to dictatorial control.

To be clear, Democrats in leadership deserve and will need to quickly address the accusations being hurled at them, especially the chronic and mystifying lack of messaging talent.  Most people don’t know what the Biden Administration has achieved in the first year nor do they know what is in the two signature bills that seemed endlessly stalled in Congress, or how they will be paid for. That’s a terrible failure given that over 70 percent of voters want what’s in those bills, including paid parental leave, childcare, Medicare coverage for dental, hearing and eye care, and educational debt relief

But “building back better” also means turning a new page on Democratic policies and players. It’s time for old, white, centrist guys to stop being recycled as both party heads and advisors. Led by younger, more dynamic, and more visionary party leaders, the progressive agenda is overdue, urgent, and viable. Significant down ballot wins are another sure sign of what our political future looks like. Ideas wedded to fossil fuels, hugely pro-big business agendas, and tax breaks for billionaires, along with voter suppression and denying women agency over their lives, are old school and worn thin. Such skewered priorities ignore the elephants in the room, leaving proponents to rely on self- deception to protect their own profits and privileges.

Now is the time to listen to those in Democratic leadership who engage with and foster future leaders, who truly hear, respect, and understand their constituencies, and who mentor from the ground up. Howard Dean understood this when he was running for president, and so do many of the best talking heads and political analysts now. They understand that “centrist” calls for incremental change are hollow. Just ask women and people of color how that has worked for them.

In these threatening times when white supremacy and autocracy loom large, unredacted American history, CRT to critics, cannot be denied, ignored or buried.  If being progressive means being “woke” and being woke means being keenly aware of the incipient racism this country has always endured while understanding the threat of fascism through the lessons of history then we should all strive to wake up. The populist voice is important, intelligent, and informed and it is sounding an alarm: Our country is facing not only an imminent climate crisis, but an urgent political one.

We have precious little time left to correct course in either case.

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The Nightmare of Rationed Healthcare

A mother watches her seven-year-old child die in excruciating pain from a ruptured appendix in their car waiting for access to the emergency room.  A family member sees their 44-year-old relative succumb to a heart attack waiting for a bed in the Cardiac Care Unit. A woman suffering from high blood pressure during pregnancy awaits admission while in premature labor.

These actual examples underscore the reality of people unable to access crucial healthcare because of a crisis that has been exacerbated by people who refuse to be vaccinated. Not only are extremely ill patients dying in parking lots. Hospitals are also suffering shortages of beds, staff, and equipment, especially in ICUs, and flying patients out of state for care, while leaving others in need of urgent care literally out in the cold.

It’s an unimaginable, horrific scene to contemplate.

 A friend of the man waiting for cardiac care put it this way. “Car accidents happen. Heart attacks happen. Trauma happens and there may not be care for you in the hospital if we can’t do something to get this under control.” The fact is, it’s been getting harder to control.

It is not just a terrifying experience for people waiting for care. It’s also difficult to imagine what it must be like for exhausted doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals. What must it be like as a nurse holding the hand of a young patient who might be succumbing to Covid or setting up a Zoom call so someone on a ventilator can wheeze out a farewell to loved ones? Consider the emotional toll it takes being on a team that must declare one patient worthy of trying to save and another not quite so worthy. It’s a deeply depressing situation to ask anyone to endure.

The burnout rate among health workers since the Covid pandemic skyrocketed initially, and again with the Delta variant, has resulted in a significant number of nurses leaving or considering leaving the field.  A report issued by The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation in June “found that 26% of health care workers in hospitals are angry and 29% have considered leaving the medical field. These are the warning signs of a smoldering epidemic of burnout among front-line medical professionals.”

In the midst of the current crisis, the idea of rationing healthcare, which several hospitals have been forced to do or to contemplate by triaging who will live and who will die, begs for attention. Rationing care, often applied during wartime, should not mean that people of any age living with a pandemic must have their lives cut short because others refuse to comply with lifesaving mandates or masking requirements and end up occupying all available beds.

We may never know exactly how many people in this country died from Covid-19 but many compounding variables must be considered, from lack of health insurance to increased vulnerability to poverty. It’s likely that deaths from rationed care will likely not be among them.  

In 2010, an Institute of Medicine committee defined the term “crisis standards of care,” calling it “a substantial change in usual healthcare operations and the level of care it is possible to deliver which is made necessary by a pervasive (e.g., pandemic) or catastrophic (e.g., earthquake) disaster. This change in the level of care delivered is justified by specific circumstances and is formally declared by a state government, in recognition that crisis operations will be in in effect for a sustained period. The formal declaration that crisis standards of care are in operation enables specific legal/regulatory powers and protections for healthcare providers in the necessary tasks of allocating and using scarce medical resources and implementing alternative care facility operations.”

I wonder if the crafters of that statement were thinking about rationed care during a pandemic resulting in numerous tragic deaths because some people behaved irresponsibly when they wrote that definition, given that they emphasized that “in order to ensure that patients receive the best possible care in a catastrophic event, the nation needs a robust system to guide the public, healthcare professionals and institutions, and governmental entities at all levels.”

To achieve that objective, the committee cited the important of “Fairness – standards that are …recognized as fair by all those affected by them…”, and “Equitable processes – processes and procedures for ensuring the decisions and implementation of standards are made equitability…”

The Hippocratic Oath, the basis for medical ethics, no longer required of graduating medical students by many medical schools, does not actually contain the phrase “First, do no harm.” Nevertheless, medical students, some of whom write their own Oaths, as well as doctors and other healthcare providers, are deeply dedicated to their commitment to providing compassionate care and healing practices for all those in need.

That’s why I believe 20 percent of hospital beds, ICU or otherwise, should be allocated to unvaccinated patients suffering from Covid, while 80 percent of all beds and resources be available to anyone requiring care at any level in order that their lives or health not be held hostage to those who have made choices that are not only deeply selfish but dramatically dangerous.

That seems more “fair and equitable” to me than people having to die in hospital parking lots. It also might just be the way to “get this under control.”

Whatever Happened to Pay Equity?

Poor Lilly Ledbetter must be tearing her hair out.  She is the woman, you may recall, who “sought justice because equal pay for equal work is an American value” some years ago when she learned that she was earning significantly less money than men doing the same managerial work in the Alabama tire plant where she worked for nearly 20 years.

Her legal fight ultimately led her to the Supreme Court in 2007, where in a 5-4 decision, the Court “stood on the side of those who shortchanged my pay, my overtime and my retirement just because I [was] a woman,” she lamented, after the Court ruled that she didn’t report the inequity within the required six months, even though she didn’t discover the discrepancy for nearly two decades. “In the end,” she said, “I didn’t get a dime of the money I was shortchanged.”

What she did get, ultimately, was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, signed into law by President Barack Obama. The law allowed individuals who faced pay discrimination to seek rectification under federal anti-discrimination laws. It also clarified that wage discrimination based on age, religion, national origin, race, sex, and disability would “accrue” every time an employee received a paycheck deemed to be discriminatory. It was the first bill President Obama signed and it became one of several federal laws designed to protect worker's rights.

Prior to that, in 1963, the Equal Paycheck Act, signed by President John F. Kennedy, made it illegal for employers to pay women less for performing the same jobs as their male counterparts. However, it had several loopholes that needed to be addressed. Then Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex.

The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 added to those prior acts by reversing the Supreme Court decision that upheld the short statute of limitations for wage discrimination claims that had killed Lilly Ledbetter’s case.

In 2014 the Paycheck Fairness Act was first introduced in the Senate by former Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), essentially as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, but it failed to be adopted.

In January this year Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2021. It passed in the House in April. This bill addresses wage discrimination on the basis of sex, which includes pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics

.

A requirement of the Paycheck Fairness Act is that employers must provide detailed information to the federal government that ensures the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Labor have the necessary tools to enforce laws against pay discrimination, including employment-related data from employers analyzed by race, gender, and employees’ national origins.

The Paycheck Fairness Act also prevents retaliation for discussing salary with colleagues and prohibits employers from asking about a person’s salary history. In addition, it allows workers to participate in class action lawsuits that challenge systemic pay discrimination.

That’s all well and good, but why are women still earning 82 cents on the dollar (if they’re white) compared to men and what are the ramifications?

The first thing to understand is that the gender pay gap exists in every occupational category even when accounting for educational levels, skills, and worker’s choices. Assumptions like the ones men and managers often make are a big part of the problem.

For example, one assumption is that women choose lower level or lower paying work because they are mothers who bear the brunt of responsibility in meeting children’s needs. But as the Covid crisis revealed, the lack of childcare in this country leaves women little choice.

Such assumptions ignore the underlying causes of workplace discrimination and often lead to women being pushed out of their chosen career fields. Some of those underlying causes, in addition to not having affordable childcare, are the lack of adequate parental leave policies, flexible working conditions, paid family and medical leave, which most industrialized nations offer.

Importantly, advocates for equal pay underscore the fact that pay discrimination occurs in almost every field of work. Women, who are over-represented in the lowest paid industries, take the hardest hit. Collectively, women lose hundreds of thousands of dollars annually because of the pay gap driven by gender and race.

That loss has real-time, long-term consequences. Underpaid workers, primarily women, suffer lowered social security benefits, retirement pensions, and personal savings, which is why so many female elders find it difficult to survive with dignity in their later years.

The Biden administration understands this dilemma and has a committed focus on pay equity, a particular interest of Vice President Kamala Harris. Major corporations will soon be dealing with multi-million-dollar settlements in class action equal pay claims, and employers are likely to face big changes and a lot of scrutiny with regard to pay equity, not just around gender, but also around race. In addition to federal efforts, states are beginning to step up their equal pay laws too.

All that bodes well, but as we know, things move at a snail’s pace when it comes to enacting and enforcing legislation. Until there is true equality in wages and salaries, women are among many people who continue to wait for fairness in the workplace. For them, 82 cents on the dollar remains inadequate, and clearly insulting.

The Hands That Rock the Cradle Need Help

After MSNBC anchor Katy Tur gave birth to her first child in 2019 she devoted her come back show to the need for a Family Leave policy that matches that of other developed countries. Her plea was personal.  She had undergone an unplanned C-section to deliver her son and had struggled with breastfeeding her small baby who needed to nurse frequently. She also got a post-op infection which slowed down her surgical recovery. All of this made her feel exhausted to the point of hallucinations, and she feared being home alone with her newborn after her supportive husband returned to work. It’s not an atypical story, especially for first-time parents.

“Mothers and fathers need time with their babies and they need support,” she said then. “Lawmakers talk about family leave but nothing gets done. It’s shameful.” She might have made the exact same plea after the birth of her daughter earlier this year.

Tur was one of the lucky ones. Her employer had an excellent, supportive family leave policy. Most women – and men – are not so fortunate. Many women must return to work within a couple of weeks of giving birth because they can’t afford unpaid leave. Seventy percent of men must return to work within ten days or less after becoming a father.

An estimated 80 percent of U.S. employers do not have paid parental leave or have miserably inadequate plans, often following the federal government which gives most federal workers just twelve weeks of paid parental leave. That’s a pittance compared to other countries.

A 2019 study of 41 countries conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed the dismal U.S. situation. Countries like Estonia, which topped the list at 86 weeks of paid leave, Japan, Norway, Luxembourg, Malta, Korea and others had impressive leave policies. The U.S. ranked last.

Clearly, another Labor Day, a day on which we honor the country’s workers, has come and gone and still we fail to support women’s ongoing labor - in the workplace, at home, and essentially after childbirth.

While we have yet to enact a national mandate for paid family leave, some states do have paid leave policies in place. They report a measurable reduction in the number of women leaving their jobs in the first year after giving birth and up to a 50 percent reduction after five years, according to a 2019 study conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Paid leave is gaining more traction as an issue in need of legislation. In addition to an increasing number of national models that shame our own, more U.S. women are in the workforce and more families have two working parents. And paid leave isn’t needed just for new moms and dads. It may be necessary to recover from an illness or to care for a sick or disabled family member or elderly relative.

That’s why The Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMILY) Act was introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D – CT) yet again in 2019.  The Act, modeled after successful state programs, uses a social insurance system to provide workers with comprehensive paid family and medical leave. Comparable models have been passed in four states and the District of Columbia.

This year the two legislators have tried again to get Congress to pass a permanent paid leave policy nationally, arguing in language that male and conservative legislators like; The FAMILY Act, they said, would spur economic recovery and growth.

The Act would ensure that every worker, no matter the size of their employer, self-employed status, or part-time work would have access to twelve weeks of paid leave equal to up to 66 percent of wage replacement for every serious medical event every time it’s needed.

In defending the Act, Sen. Gillibrand noted that the Covid pandemic seriously impacted women in the workforce and hit middle class families hard. “Women have been forced to make the impossible decision between caring for their families or earning a paycheck.”

Rep. DeLauro added, “Long before this crisis there has been a desperate need for paid family and medical leave. This problem must be addressed in a permanent way.”

“It’s a national disgrace that our federal government doesn’t guarantee paid family and medical leave for the American people,” activist Melanie Campbell, CEO of The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, says.

Activists like her and others aren’t mincing words. “They know what it means to go back to work three weeks after giving birth. They know the extraordinary cost of having to start from scratch because of lost income while caring for a loved one with a disability,” Sade Moonsammy of Family Values @ Work said in support of the FAMILY Act, which has been endorsed by more than 85 national organizations.

It’s an Act that is long overdue, as Katy Tur and other new moms and dads know. It’s time to join the list of countries that get it, and care enough to do something meaningful in support of American workers and their families. The hand that rocks the cradle has long needed a hug and a little help. Surely that’s not asking too much.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.

Staring at America's Dystopian Future

In 1940, Alice Duer Miller wrote a beautiful epic poem called “The White Cliffs.” An American who had married a British man just prior to World War I, she soon lost her husband serving a country that wasn’t hers. As she penned the poem, she faced the possibility of losing her son to World War II, again for a country not her own.  Yet, her last poetic lines are these: “I am American bred. I have seen much to hate here – much to forgive. But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.”

Imagine loving a country that is not your own so much.  Then consider not loving your own country anymore because it has dragged you into a very dark place, a place of fear and disillusion, a place growing more dystopian by the day.

In the space of just a few days, we have watched a Congressperson promise to shut down media organizations if they complied with legal subpoenas, we saw a state pass draconian laws that inhibit voting rights in dramatic, disturbing and undemocratic ways, and then we watched as that same state ignored the constitutional right to abortion granted to women in 1973. On top of that, the state, Texas, granted vigilante rights with financial incentives to any citizen who didn’t want to grant women that right.   

Just let the idea of private bounty hunters sink in. They might be husbands or boyfriends, angry neighbors, relatives, friends, pastors, people who think pregnancy by rape or incest is not so bad, folks who hate the idea of abortion but especially like the thought of a $10,000 reward. Some may be devout, but they are all devious and despicable. Over what ideologies might other states consider employing them?

Then came the most stunning blow of all in the form of the unbelievable and terrifying silence of an overwhelmingly conservative and politicized Supreme Court in the face of Texas’s deeply dangerous, and replicable law; a law so hideously and overtly fascist, a law wreaking with the stench of secret police in autocracies and dictatorships like those of Italy’s Mussolini, Romania’s Ceausescu, and today’s Vickor Orban in Hungary. How can any American not be sickened by that level of betrayal?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of four dissenting justices, unleashed her fury and spoke for many of us in her minority opinion: “The court’s order is stunning,” she wrote. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. The court has rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation. The court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule  of law.”

How, one must ask, does the court overrule fifty years of precedent – a value deeply held by conservatives - in its race to allow the invasion of women’s lives, a question former Representative Claire McCaskill asked in rage when commenting on MSNBC. How quickly will states rush to replicate this precedent?

In a statement that could have been more strongly supportive of women’s right to privacy and agency, President Biden warned that the nearly complete ban on abortion in Texas will cause “unconstitutional chaos.” It also begs the question, how will the Supreme Court rule on other cases that seek to curb abortion rights nationally?

While civil rights advocates sound alarm bells about worrisome implications for future laws, social justice and human rights opinion leaders like Michael Moore and others suggest the situation has reached crisis proportions such that terms like “conservative” and “evangelical” in reference to right wing radicals are no longer appropriate because they normalize groups that have essentially become America’s Taliban.

That term may be offensive to some, but in the face of an ever-growing political climate of oppression, exclusion and violence, and a Congress or Supreme Court that increasingly embraces ideas antithetical to democracy and proceeds to exercise the power to curb it, surely the time has come to recognize the imminent and very real threat before us.  That threat is nothing short of an undemocratic and dystopian future in which we join in the despair of so many others around the globe.

It’s a world in which we may still have a choice: To deny what is happening with frightening speed, or to ignore what is bearing down upon us, only to find ourselves back in Plato’s allegorical cave, in which we all sit staring at a blank wall, our backs to the light, believing that is simply the way we must live.

As Alice Duer Miller might have said, in such a world, where freedom and hope are finished and dead, I do not wish to live.

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Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt. 

Women Athletes Are Making Their Mark in Ways That Matter

I grew up never thinking about, observing, or participating in sports. I hated gym class, couldn’t play tennis, never imagined skiing, and didn’t learn to swim until I was an adult. Such activities were never fostered in my immigrant Jewish culture. Academics were the only thing that required excellence.

Consequently, I’ve never paid much attention to athletes or the Olympics. But this year, along came Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, Suni Lee, Yusra Mardini, and the women who traded in their required G-strings for shorts or long leotards. That caught my feminist attention.

This year’s female athletes join tennis firsts Serena Williams and Billie Jean King, track and field Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and the great Babe Didrikson-Zaharias who excelled in golf, basketball, baseball, track and field, winning a gold in the 1932 Olympics. These women didn’t just demonstrate what women athletes could achieve. Each in their own way stood up to pressure, sexism, and misogyny just as today’s stellar female athletes are doing.

Naomi Osaka, who dropped out of the French Open tennis tournament earlier this year, explained why, in a recent TIME Magazine article. Anxious about press events she said, “It’s okay to not be okay, and it’s okay to talk about it. I wanted to skip press conferences to exercise self-care and preservation of my mental health. I stand by that. Athletes are human.”

For that decision, she was fined $15,000 for not doing media events, affecting the profit margins of companies that supported her.

Simone Biles, four-time gold medalist in the 2016 Olympics, caused a lot of sponsors and fans to become hysterical and verbally abusive over her decision to withdraw from several events this year. With 19 gold medals to her credit, the expectations had become unbearable for the 24-year old athlete, who along with other Olympic gymnasts, was sexually assaulted by Larry Nassar, the doctor for the American gymnastic team now serving a life sentence for sexual abuse.

As tensions mounted, Biles dramatically difficult routine became dangerous, so she decided to withdraw. She was then accused of being weak, unable to take the pressure, and more by would-be jocks who likely found it difficult to bend over to tie their shoes. Biles also ended her sponsorship with Nike this year to go with a smaller, less demanding and more supportive brand. “It wasn’t about my achievements, it’s what I stood for and how they would help me use my voice for females and kids,” she said.

Biles’s withdrawal opened the way for 18-year old Suni Lee, the first Hmong-American Olympian to win the gold and two other medals this year, a feat she accomplished after being out of action for two months last year due to injuries, the death of two relatives from Covid, and the accident that paralyzed her father in an accident. Stunned by her magnificent win, she said proudly, “I'm super proud of myself for sticking with it and believing in myself.”

Yusra Mardini is not as well known as Biles or Lee, but her story is equally compelling. She fled the Syrian war as a teenager, swam for three hours in the sea while steering her sinking boat to safety, and saved every passenger onboard. Then she walked from Greece to Germany. This year, she competed in the 100-meter Butterfly swim at the Olympics, revealing that even without winning a medal, women like these athletes are strong, self-respecting, and determined.

They were joined by Olympic women who refused to accept the sexualization in gymnastics by rejecting bikini cut underwear that likely induced the world’s worst wedgie with the required “close fit and cut on an upward angle toward the top of the leg.” Punishment time again: Team Germany earned their $1500 Euro fine from the International Handball Association for wearing shorts, which men’s teams wear.

The blogosphere went viral as women protested that kind of misogynistic nonsense. As one of them posted, “Biles set aside her dreams in order to do the right thing for her teammates and her country. I see a lot of dudes who look like they’d break a sweat opening a bag of Doritos mocking Biles for being ‘weak’. She could crack their spines with her calves and do a full floor routine afterwards [but] she’s too good a person to challenge them to a fight.”

Another said, “It’s hard to not feel feminist. It’s hard not to be angry and disgusted. Society refuses to acknowledge a woman’s worth. The system continues to fail women, even ones as outstanding as these. It’s time to get mad.”

Even if the women in this year’s Olympics never compete or win another medal again, they will remain gold star champions to every woman who has ever cleared her own hurdles and landed on her feet, hands in the air, the smile of achievement on her face. No longer will competent, strong women give their bodies to male titillation and sexual fantasy, or to corporations who view them as simply commodities, or to imposed pregnancies. Along with women who have aspired us anew, sisters in sport, we are reclaiming our power and our legitimacy in every arena. 

That makes every one of these astounding athletes, and all women, winners.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt.