American women need to be recognized as full citizens. Yes, women in this country. It's me again, sitting in my office, by myself, saying that "equal enough" is NOT. But, I am not alone.
Tomorrow, Saturday, April 28th, thousands of women and men will participate in 53 marches and rallies for women's rights in 45 states and the District of Columbia. These events are part of UNITEWOMEN.ORG movement against the War on Women. In truth, I don't care what the sustained legislative assault on women's rights by the Republican party is called. Nor do I care, actually, for the Unitewomen moniker, because although I am happy for anything that offsets a cultural preference to portray women as enemies, I believe that men and women who understand the importance and benefits of equality must work together. However, I agree wholeheartedly with UNITEWOMEN.ORG's goals and intent. If you are not joining them, you should ask yourself why and consider doing it.
Why should you march?
Because women's and girls' fundamental rights, to privacy, to life, to bodily integrity, to chose when to plan their reproduction are being violated.
Because women can't afford to nor should be forced to live their lives according to rules that assume they are dependent on men.
Because women and girls should not be punished, denigrated and publicly humiliated for speaking civilly and intelligently in their own interest or making their own choices.
Because boys and girls should be taught what equality, not entitlement, means.
Without fail, when I talk to people about gender inequality in the United States, someone inevitably says some variation of this: "Compared to other women, women here are equal enough." First of all, women are not in competition with other women for safety from violence and freedom. Second, this type of comparison, with its echo of threat, is an unacceptable and irrelevant framework for considering citizenship and protection under the law. Women are citizens and should have the full rights and privileges of citizens.
We should. But we don't.
If you are uncertain about what I am saying and think I am exaggerating the harm, consider the effect of one distillation of events: the degree to which the conservative "political" agenda requires that all women, regardless of color, faith, economic status or sexual preference, seek men's review and approval before acting. (Those factors, race, economic status, sexual preference magnify the effect.) "Informed consent, " "permission slips," wage policies determined because "money may be more important to men," "man-up finances," women's health care being determined by all-male religious leaders and congressional panels, refusal to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act because of homophobia (and racism). On and on and one: every time the baseline requirement for women to exercise their rights and live freely is the intervention and approval of men. This is not just unfair to girls and women, but imposes unreasonable responsibilities and pressures on boys and men.
Even the phrasing of hot button issues -- "Mommy Wars" and "Slutgate" -- are coded conversations that define women, their health, their choices and their incomes primarily in terms of their relationships to men. Those frameworks are unacceptable. These attempts to legislate the subordination of women are not just distasteful and embarrassing but designed ultimately to humiliate women and keep them in their place.
TO BE CLEAR: This is not a man-bashing exercise. I do not hate men. I hate inequality and oppression. This is about men and women being mutually central as humans and, together, fighting systematized biases against girls' and women's full engagement with the world.
All over the world women seek equality. Men and women, who understand this, fight against everything from subtle, cultural sexism to extreme and violent gendered oppression. Here, in the US, many people really do think women are "equal enough." I am told we should "consider ourselves lucky." I am not going to compare oppressions. Nor am I in any way dismissing the dehumanizing and life-crushing hatred that women face in too many places on the planet. But, because others are violently deprived of rights and life does not mean that we should be content with circumscribed rights and lives. Women should not have to be thankful for hard-won rights, be penalized for seeking to live better lives or have to settle for "enough" when it comes to equality. In theory, we are citizens with full rights.
Republicans would have you believe that the word "war" is not a valid way to describe the assault on women's rights represented by the hundreds of bills (916 since January 2012 alone) and laws they've pursued or enacted during the past two years. This attitude is unsurprising. What is surprising to me however, is the degree to which these assaults reveal the Republican abandonment, when it comes to women, of three core beliefs of their own party, namely:
• Our country was founded on the fundamental principle that individuals have rights and freedoms
• Government intervention into the lives of private citizens should be limited
• Traditional values and freedoms of the American Republic should be reaffirmed
Either they are betraying their belief in, for example, individual rights and limited government or they are demonstrating that they don't believe women are genuinely included in the definition of individual citizens with full rights and privileges. Time and again, women and their rights are made marginal and secondary to almost everything else and debated away as a matter of expedience.
You should march because this is unacceptable.
It is evident that conservatives do not believe women can be trusted to think for themselves and make their own decisions... about when to become parents, money, faith.. nothing. Instead, in almost every sphere of life, their agenda is designed to keep women dependent on the good graces of men and competing for the resources that men have traditionally provided and keep them vulnerable in the process. That belief seems largely derived from Complementarianism, a worldview of gender roles as different but complementary, in which there are requirements made of men (as heads of households and public life) and restrictions placed on women, who are essentially limited to childrearing. It is one thing for people to chose this model privately, but it should not be enshrined in law, imposed on everyone and enforced judicially and legislatively to undermine equality and freedom. Yet, like a slow moving train wreck, that's what is happening.
As I said, it isn't about individual men and their relative goodness. It's about systematized bias, gender hierarchies and how power, responsibilities and rights are distributed. And, also for the record, before anti-feminist trolls come out of the commenting woodwork, I believe women should fight in combat in military wars. And, yes, I know, these systems are supported by both men and women. That's how Complementarianism works. It's a primary vector for ambivalent and paternalistic sexism's cultural sanction and enforcement by women.
Writer Erin Solaro put it this way in a commentary on women and war and freedom:
"At the core of citizenship is the idea that the citizen's body is hers and hers alone, regardless of sexual history, marital status or childbearing... The full citizenship of women is not just about the right to hold credit cards, buy real estate in our own names, have access to abortion and birth control and lead openly lesbian lives in which marriages and adoptions are legally recognized. These things are important in themselves -- terribly so, to the point of sometimes being matters of life and death -- but what they represent is vastly more important. They are part of a woman's citizenship and freedom, the right of a woman to fully inhabit her own life and participate fully in the life of the polity (in this case the American Republic) as a public and private equal."
You should march because women have yet to be recognized as full citizens, with agency in both the private and public spheres.
Follow Soraya Chemaly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/schemaly
Margie Omero: A Different Kind of Mommy War
Barbara Hannah Grufferman: Mad Women: How the Flames of Revolution Are Ignited
Karen Teegarden: The War on Women: Why We're Fighting
Barbara Hannah Grufferman: From Apathy to Action: Are Women Mad Enough to Get the Job Done?
How much awareness and activism is focused on these pressing men's issues? Not much and not . Women can pursue their gender issues but we should recognize they are not the disadvantaged group they once were and the issues facing men are far more pressing.
So, after years of attempting to prevent females from obtaining any significant level of education, after years of attempting to prevent females from participating in higher education at all, after all of the below "justifications" to prevent females from obtaining educations:
* Women's brains are too small;
* Females are not biologically suited to the stresses and strains of examinations and the competitive spirit;
* If women's blood were diverted from their reproductive organs to their brains their reproductive organs would atrophy and they would be unable to bear children;
* Woman do not have an independent existence; their lives are relative to men;
* Educated women rarely make good wives and mothers;
...after ALL of this discrimination against females in educational opportunity because they supposedly just couldn't compete with males -
somehow, all these mentally and intellectually superior men, who were SO much smarter and SO much more capable than females that the women did not even deserve an opportunity for education - NOW can't cut it in the classroom? I thought they were SO far superior to females!
What's the matter, guys? Surely, we are so inferior that you should be able to show us up with one hand tied behind your backs!
Spoken like a modern sexist feminists who still thinks she is speaking to men from the 1960's. The "you guy's" you speak of are old or dead and changed their minds on the matter long ago. Equality is the mainstream, you are speaking for a radical fringe that pretends it's not.
Get over this specific argument. It's a dead one.
Now, if you want to get angry about wage inequality feel free because that's still alive and well (even though that is also going away with the current generation if you look at wages in major cities for young men and women).
For the younger generation of women (20-25) the feminist movement has been mostly a success. Sorry the benefits haven't been able to trickle up to older women quite as well but I don't know how to do anything about that.
Now we just need to make sure that it doesn't slide backwards.
You can't use broad averages to assume discrimination in groups with substantially different average behavior. Women earn 50% more degrees than males overall and I don't count that as doing a little better.
Studies have shown that some of that is explained by factors like job experience, etc.
But not all.
""I'm not opposed to birth control, but am opposed to women using abortion as birth control. I don't believe a majority of Americans are opposed to birth control. Most of this proposed legislation will not pass." "
I am a man, and really have no say in this discussion. Are you male or female? Your posting name is very interesting, though. Are you wiser? I am old enough to remember when girls and women (scared out of their minds) went to unlicensed women conducting abortions on a kitchen table, and the absolute nightmare this caused.
I loved women. I am married to a "women", and have two daughters. In no way do I want the likes of John Boehner and his co-horts deciding what care my family should have. That should be up to a Physician and the girls. Period.
(BTW, I have never seen a man at Planned Parenthood. (Have any of you? )
As always, this is up to the women. Women should decide.)
When men get 14% of child custody, that's equal enough, right?
When men make up 100 workplace deaths to every 1 woman, that's equal enough, right?
When women can adopt a man's child without his knowledge or consent, that's equal enough, right?
When women can end the life of a man's child over his objections, that's equal enough, right?
When the recent update to the VAWA includes everyone BUT heterosexual men...even though men are abused in every state in this nation every single day by women...that's equal enough, right?
Such bias all around.
Everything's about you, I know.
Did any of the thing I wrote above sound like privilege to you?
Did they?
They are not. They are inequalities.
And if modern feminists called about equality instead of female privilege, they would be as outraged by that list of inequalities as they are by Soraya's.
Instead...
"Men, their rights, and nothing more.
Women, their rights, and nothing less."
It is like we are determined to bring the pick pocket to justice while we let the serial killer go free....
When the ERA did not pass, nothing further was done.
Since then, women have been fine with voting for Reagan, Bush, Bush, and, soon, more misogynistic then them all, Romney.
Women vote for Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, Rubio, etc. While they vote down help for rape victims and cut cancer care for women.
Clearly, unequal rights for women is acceptable to women. Particularly in Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Kansas, Indiana, Virginia, Mississippi, etc.
We live in a progressive state, but some states have already made regressive laws that invade women's privacy, keep them from seeking redress for infractions against them (or even major crimes, ) restrict and limit their choices re: their bodies, and roll back equal pay for equal work laws, among other disgsuting regressive policies. As a result, friends and family are marching today, and it is only the beginning.
Those who are against this march are - IMO - against women, and wish to see women as second class citizens. I believe women and girls matter, and have worked to ensure that my daughters would have better opportunities and rights than I had during the 50s, 60s, 70s and even the 80s. The progress we have made is being systematically attacked by those claiming to be conservative. We must stand strong against these regressives, some of whom seem to despise women, and others who wish to have control over us.
The march is about turning back the legal & constitutional clock on women, not men. Not everything is about men. Imagine!
I am all for equal pay so that will get my support. I am against a across the board child system because it is extortion to have to pay to see my own child.
How old are you? 16?
I don't see the problem - but then, I'm a man!
Things like comprehensive healthcare are not rights under the law. If you want new laws then get enough support to pass them which means convincing the other half of women.
Yup, you're a guy. Disgusted here.