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Women’s Equality Day

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Twenty-five years ago, when I put together my holiday essays in a book called Economics Takes a Holiday, I sorted them by month.  I came to August and there was no holiday. Somehow, I had forgotten about the Celtic holiday of Lammas, August 1st, the celebration of first harvest.  But there was an even more important omission.  I failed to include Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th amendment, which can be celebrated on either the 19th (ratification by the 36th state) or August 26th, when it was officially added to the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal.  Man is a troublesome word in English. Sometimes it means a human being and other times it means a male human being. I took four years of Latin in high school.  Despite the patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, slave-owning culture of the Roman empire, Latin did distinguish between a homo as a human being and vir and mulier as, respectively, as a male human being and a female human being. Jefferson must have missed that lesson.

The Declaration of Independence assumed an even narrower view of man., It meant a white male property owner. It took a Civil war and four constitutional amendments and several Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act to broaden our definition of man.  T

As we celebrate the right to vote, women are once again fighting for women’s rights, the right of reproductive choice and control of our bodies, which we have enjoyed for fifty years.  I was married in 1962 in my native state of Connecticut where contraception was illegal.  That law that was not being enforced. Fortunately, condoms could be purchased for the prevention of socially transmitted diseases and birth control pills could be prescribed for menstrual irregularity, both of which were apparently epidemic in the state.  In 1965, SCOTUS handed down a ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut overturning the state’s contraception blue law on the grounds of a right to privacy inherent in the 14th amendment. That case set the stage for Roe v. Wade.. 

Only in recent years have we learned the extent to which assumed rights are fragile—voting rights, civil rights, privacy rights, safety rights. A major difference between the contraception ban in Connecticut before 1965 and the new abortion laws was enforcement. There was no enforcement in the earlier era, but now some states have established criminal penalties for doctors, clinics, and women for having abortions—even miscarriages that someone claims were actually abortions.

How did it finally happen after 72 years of agitation that women got the right to vote?  The movement was launched in 1948 at the Seneca Falls Women’s Convention with a Declaration of Women’s Rights. Soon that agenda had to take a back seat to the battle over slavery.  In 1868, after the War of the Rebellion, as it was sometimes known in the north,, the lesser-known 15th amendment was ratified. It prohibited the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Efforts by women to explicitly include gender were ignored.

Four other significant events took place in the intervening years that helped the suffrage cause. One was the settlement of the west, which was less conventional about women’s roles than the east. One by one, western states gave women voting rights.  Another was the 1913 constitutional amendment requiring direct election of senators by the people instead of appointed by state legislatures.  Western senators had to court the women’s vote, and increasingly, so did presidential candidates in states where women could vote.

The third event was the service rendered by women in so many ways for the war effort during the first world war.  They could fight, nurse, or do men’s jobs while the men were away, but they had no say in the government they were serving.   A fourth and final factor was the victory of the female-dominated temperance movement in enacting prohibition, passed in 2018. Many men and especially liquor interests saw a link between suffrage and prohibition, but when liquor became illegal even without women being able to vote, the opposition lost its steam. 

Back in the days before the 19th amendment, when my great-grandmother was marching for women’s suffrage, there was a split in the movement over strategy. Two splits, in fact.  One was whether to over focus on suffrage or push the ERA.  Realistically, the ERA would probably not have made it, but suffrage did.  Sometimes compromise is the best path.  But if the ERA had been enacted as a Constitutional amendment, then or later, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The other split was more tactical.  Get the right to vote state by state or focus on Congress and a Constitutional amendment? And the answer was yes.  It took both to get the 19th amendment through Congress and ratified by 36 of the 48 states. In August 1920, Tennessee put the amendment over the top by a single vote by a first term young representative responding to a request from his mother.

The majority of Americans value their civil liberties and those of their fellow citizens, not to mention immigrants and refugees.  For almost 50 years we have taken these rights for granted—freedom of religion, a right to privacy, the right to vote in free and fair elections, the right to engage in peaceful protest. The right to an equal and not separate public education. More recently, we have added the freedom to marry a person of the same gender or a different race. 

When one Constitutional right is threatened by the courts, all rights are at risk.  As Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister during the Nazi era,  wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The 19th amendment in 1920 was the culmination of a 72-year battle. Tennessee, the 36th state to ratify, passed it into law by a single vote, giving the required ¾ majority on August `19th. The Secretary of State in Washington enrolled in the Constitution on August 26th, giving us not Women’s Equality Day but Women’s Equality Week.  A fitting length for such a long labor before it was birthed. Only one of the original suffrage leaders was still alive in 1920 but too ill to vote.  My great-grandmother Alice Stewart, who was born in the 6th year of that battle, marched in New York for the suffrage movement in 1913 and lived long enough to vote in 1920 and 1924. Given my birth family’s Republican leanings, I am guessing that she voted for Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

There are lessons in that struggle about compromising and holding firm, about strategy and tactics, and about the truth of Reinhold Niebuhr’s dictum that nothing worth accomplishing is ever accomplished in our lifetimes. Therefore, we are saved by hope. As we struggle to keep hope alive and make a difference in democracy, voting rights, and human rights, let us hold up and retell the stories of these past struggles to revive our commitment and determination.

Tariffs Again?

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Donald Trump is not the only president to wax ecstatic over tariffs.

Here is what Wikipedia had to say about the so-called Tariff of Abominations two centuries ago: ” The Tariff of 1828 was enacted on May 19, 1828, and aimed to protect Northern industries by imposing high duties on imported goods, with rates reaching as high as 50% on certain items. This tariff was designed to bolster American manufacturing by making foreign products more expensive, thereby encouraging consumers to buy domestically produced goods.”

 It was signed by soon-to-be departing President John Quincy Adams but enforced by Trump’s favorite president (other than himself) Andy Jackson.  When John C. Calhoun argued that the Port of Charleston didn’t have to enforce a tariff the state disagreed with (the Nullification doctrine of states’ rights), Jackson said he would send federal troops to enforce it.  He also refused to renew the charter of the nation’s central bank, the Second Bank of the United States, because the bank’s president had supported his opponent in the 1828 election. (Sound familiar?)  While there was some compromise on tariffs, the combination of the two led to a severe recession in the 1830s.

Fast forward to the 1920s.  The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was enacted in 1930 and signed by President Herbert Hoover, just six months after the stock market crash on Black Friday in October 1929.  To quote Wikipedia again, “Hoover signed the bill against the advice of many senior economists, yielding to pressure from his party and business leaders. Intended to bolster domestic employment and manufacturing, the tariffs instead deepened the Depression because the U.S.’s trading partners retaliated with tariffs of their own, leading to U.S. exports and global trade plummeting. “The combination of financial disaster and disruption of world trade repeated itself, plunging the nation into a severe depression.

Apparently, it takes a hundred years to repeat the same mistakes. Trump’s tariffs and quarrels with the banking system, both with the Fed chair and with trying to loosen the already loose bank regulations that led to the financial disaster of 2008, look all too familiar to anyone who has more than a nodding acquaintance with U.S. economic history.

As philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Efficiency: First Among Equals

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Brace yourself, dear readers.  My economist self wants you to hear my confession.

For many years I taught introductory economics, as well as more advanced classes. I taught the introductory classes because a colleague and I had a multi-edition principles text, and it was important to road test it regularly. In one of the earlier chapters it was customary to introduce the claim, which was in most mainstream textbooks, that economics was value-free. Economics was just a set of tools for making choices about how to use resources wisely that was useful for all of us as workers, owners, consumers and citizens. A few pages later, we introduced them to goals, which we insisted were not values.  Microeconomic goals (WHICH WERE ASSUREDLY NOT VALUES!! were efficiency, equity, and freedom. The next semester, students were introduced to the macroeconomic goals (WHICH WERE ASSUREDLY NOT VALUES!!) of full employment, price stability (as opposed to inflation) and economic growth.

Having defined the goals, it was easy to discover and implement decisions processes, anticipate the effects of changes in the marketplace or in government policy, and prepare our students for life in a capitalist society.

If economics were a religion (which it might be), my heretical self might be seeking penance for the sin of inflicting this mindset on innocent adolescents, but I was just expounding on doing what my colleagues and I routinely taught.  If I were to start over, I would hope that some of those students would question who set these goals.  At least for macroeconomics I had an answer. The Employment Act oi of 1946 created a Council of Economic Advisors to serve the president and guide him in pursuing these “self-evident” goals.  Actually, I feel less penitent about the macroeconomic goals, although the powers that be seem to worry more about price stability than full employment and never question the conflict between growth and sustainability. But it is the microeconomic goals that I feel called to challenge, and especially the presumed incompatibility of efficiency and equity.  (Freedom we will save for another day.).

Not all goals are created equal.  Efficiency is the primary goal, equity gets a greeting card on some holidays, and freedom is loosely defined and somewhat hard to pin down.  Efficiency is defined in economics in either of two ways getting the most (most WHAT?) out of our available resources or satisfying our wants/needs/desires at the lowest possible expenditure of time and effort. Want to insult an economist? Just tell him (more hims than hers) that his proposal or idea pr practice is INEFFFICNENT.  You will not get nearly the same reaction if you claim it is inequitable.  In fact, Economist Arthur Oken argued that these two goals are constantly in conflict. Equity means a leveling of incomes and assets, but it threatens efficiency because it reduces work incentives.  Some of those who pay more taxes to provide benefits and those who receive more government benefits will just drop out of the labor force. A  nation of idlers! Parasites on those who continue to work and pay taxes! Reducing work incentives Is clearly inefficient.

Efficiency versus equity is another false binary.  We need both.  As a result of this false idolatry of efficiency we have an income distribution that is more like that of a third world oligarchy than a prosperous democracy.  The very rich can use their wealth to redirect government policies to their benefit rather than the needs and desires of the confused and misled majority.  We have outrageously expensive health care costs and a severe shortage of affordable housing, a minimum wage that has not been increased since the Clinton administration, falling life expectancy and a growing environmental crisis.  Other nations that choose to strike a healthy balance between these two goals are more prosperous and more democratic.

When we name these “goals” as the values that they are, values that are the driving forces in our political economy, the choices are much clearer.  The values of efficiency and equality that both support a healthy economy and a democratic polity are not enemies, but partners.

Read my 2023 book, Passionately Moderate: Civic Virtues and Democracy, available from amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.

Head or Heart Again

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Before the election in 2025, I wrote a political post about head and heart and the role each played in our choice at the ballot box.If you speak Myers-Briggs, you might call it Left Brain/Right Brain, T or F for short. No,. that’s not true/false, it’s another dichotomy, thinking/feeling. Or sometimes reason and emotion. We could take on all of he four Myers-Briggs binaries–introvert/extrovert, Intuition/Sensing, and Judging/perceiving, and judging/perceiving, but let’s save those for another day..

We use both halves of our brains, sometimes one more than the other, although we tend to have a preferred first response. A classic example is being at the scene of the accident. The T, left-brained person sees it as a problem to be solved. Everybody out of the car? Police? Do we need a medic? Meanwhile, the right-brained F is feeling empathy and compassion and trying to offer comfort..At our best, we humans try to cover both bases. But if not, we can pair up, the left-‘brained person (more likely a man but not necessarily) can problem solve while the right-brained persons offers consolation and hope.Ultimately, everyone at the scene will engage both halves of the brain.

Challenging the assumed superiority of thinking or reasoning or logic over empathy or affection or compassion led to some useful answers to bothersome questions in multiple fields of thought. I am mainly aware of the the effect of this challenge to my own academic discipline, economics, but I am sure it has influenced other and ethics.( Or as one of my economist friends said, shouldn’t that be economics or ethics?)

The standard textbook in economics introduced the young scholar to homo economicus (economic man), the basis of a simplistic model of how we make economic decisions about money, spending, working, marrying, having children, investing, retiring. and so forth. Homo economicus has two sterling qualities. He is a fully informed master calculator who can do cost/benefit analysis in his head, or occasionally on a spreadsheet. And his sole goal is to maximize his personal self-interest, to get as much out of life as he can with the least expenditure of effort or money.or both. I personally find this person to be rather obnoxious, but I have encountered people who do seem to conform to that model much of the time….

There has always been an undercurrent in economics suggesting that the average actual human does not exactly conform to that model. That undercurrent can be traced from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (a precursor to his Wealth of Nations) through Keynes’ animal spirits to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman’s work earned him the only Nobel prize in economics awarded to a psychologist. Back in the 19th century, Charleston Dickens satirized economic man in his novel Hard Times, in which a paterfamilias subjected his family to cost-benefit analysis of every decision and couldn’t understand why his wife gave up and his children left home at the earliest opportunity.

What were those challenges to homo economics? First of all, most of us can only acquire a limited amount of information about all the details of all t he choices we have to make every day. There goes the assumption that our hero is fully informed. In fact, we make better choices when we employ what is called bounded rationality, limiting our options to a small number.. Second, we often lack the complex calculation skills to determine which choice would most meet our needs an desires. Finally, many of us feel that there is more to life than narrow self interest. There is family. There is culture. there is community. There is play. There is being in nature. Some of the best things in life really are free! We care with and for others and they do the same. It’s called altruism, and it messes up those tidy one-person decision models concerned only the decider’s self-interest..

There are lessons in this rethinking of our model of human choice that impact public policy choices as well as our personal choices.If we rep;lace Homo economics with homo not so sapiens, we find that we may need to revise the way we present choices to citizens and taxpayers. The first Medicare drug coverage programs offered way more choices than sick people and their caregivers could adequately evaluate. People often need a default that can make a decision for them if they forget or can’t decide. Usually the default is the one that works best for the average person. Making wise choices is itself a demand on our scarce resources of time and attention that might be better–or more joyfully!–employed elsewhere

A 20th century British philosopher, Mary Midgeley, applied the same challenge to to the practices in many fields ofdeveloping “universal”;explanations, including philosophy, history, biology and ethics–even physics in its evolution from Newton to Einstein! These theoretical models must be qualified by the diversity of context and circumstance, diversity and complexity, that challenge overly simple explanations to life’s complex questions.

Lie my blog? You may like my book. Passionately Moderate: Civic Virtues and Democracy. Available from amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.

First Harvest, Celtic Style

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Got some Irish, Scottish, Welsh in your ancestry? Or maybe some of the original Brits (Celtic) in your English ancestry, or Gallic that came to he islands with the Norman conquest? Celttc culture once covered a huge part of the European continent only to be run off to Britain those annoying Romans. Some of these holidays were baptized and melded into Christianity, especially . Easter with Ostara (the spring equinox, with bonfires at dawn), as well as Sammain/Hallowe’en (All Saints’ Day), Yul and Christmas(and midnight mass).. Others live on in other customs, like Groundhog Day (Imbolc) and the fertility festival of Beltain (May Day, the maypole as a mating ritual).. Lithia, the summer solstice was celebrated with midday bonfires, a midsummer holiday that is most closely kin to July 4th in this country.

But one lonesome little Celtic holiday seems to have disappeared from memory. This sweet little holiday on the first day of August is Lammas or Lughnasad, the celebration of first Harvest. I sit at the table with my friends eating fresh corn and tomatoes from the farmers’ market just two days before the holiday. As the Druids disappeared and the Celts turned to Christianity, Lammas was celebrated by bringing the first fruits of the harvest to church for a blessing, a custom carried on in this country into colonial times. I myself have led a blessing of the vegetables service, which is must less disaster-prone than a blessing of the animals and also provided fresh vegetables to our local food bank.

So add an upbeat holiday to your calendar the first of August and celebrate the abundance of harvest and the rich taste of fresh fruits and vegetables!

Speak Up, My Silent Generation!

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Sandwiched between the Greatest Generation (born 1902-1927) that saw us through the Depression and World War II and the Baby Boomers/Me Generation (born 1946-1964) is my generation, (1928-1045)  known as the Silent Generation.  Silent, perhaps, because there were fewer of us and we lived in fairly pleasant times. Life was pretty good for most of us. 

We weren’t entirely silent.  We cheered the election of John Kennedy and supported Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to civil rights and the war on poverty while opposing Vietnam. In college and after, I remember protesting everything from letting women wear Bermuda shorts on campus and making them observe curfew in dorms to Vietnam We had lots of babies (I contributed three) and women explored new careers after ignoring their mothers’ recommendation of teacher, nurse, secretary. We had TV and Rock/n’ Roll, the pill and polio vaccine.  It was an era of, as they say in  New Orleans, to “laissez les bons temps router.”  (Let the good times roll.) It was the best of times, just as the millennials —our grandchildren–are coming of age in the worst of times.

As we did in the 1960s of fond memory, it is time for our small but powerful generation to stand up and speak out.  Now in our 70s to 90s, many of us are financially secure and not vulnerable to threats from the emerging police state. I recently listened to a retired general on TV who would like to continue working part time as a consultant but can’t be hired because he spoke out against the Trump administration and lost his security clearance. But he has another kind of security, financial security, and as a retired military person a strong sense of patriotic duty, he is using his time to fight Trump instead.

We have resources that can be put to work to retrieve our democracy.  We have money. We have time. We have experience and skills.  We can shelter immigrants, boycott businesses (Washington Post, CBS, Fox News)) that kowtow to Trump. WE can volunteer for community groups to provide mutual support while also engaging those who live in the other world of Trump and Fox News. We can vocalize our opinions, contribute to ACLU  and PBS and private foreign aid, attend protests, annoy our representatives in state legislatures and Congress, support candidates or run for office, and file lawsuits (I am a party to one against our Trump-like City Council). What we cannot do is sit at home and say “Woe is me” Withdrawal is not an option, it is amoral obligation for those of us for whom the danger is smallest.

Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister in Nazi Germany, left us these immortal words: \

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

When your great0grandchildren want to know what you did in the face of this challenge to our democracy, what will you tell them?

Spiritual or Religious?

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Binary #5

This strange description of one’s relation to whatever considers to the sacred has become the most popular response to a question about one’s faith understanding. SBNR (spiritual but not religious) is one focused expression of the extreme individualism that has always been a hallmark of American culture. It means that this thing, this religion, this spirituality stuffs just between me and whatever I call or don’t call God, and I don’t need any help, any companions on the journey, any guidance or answers to my questions that I can’t find on my own.

The opposite of SBNR, which few people will openly admit to, is religious but not spiritual. 
Religious because I belong to a church or because I like the companionship of lik-eminded people or because I like ritual or because it seems important to belong to some kind of community and Kiwanis or Rotary just doesn’t quite do it.

This particularly binary reminds me of an old Latin joke.  A popular motto in Roman times was mens sana in corpore sano—meaning, a healthy mind in a healthy body.  But a more contemporary formulation is mens sana auf (or) corpore sano—take your pick.

I consider my relationship to the sacred as requiring both a private spirituality and an affirming, embracing, challenging community of people who are my chosen companions on my journey of faith. Not that I would necessarily have chosen all the ones in my present religious community. But even the people I find to be difficult do what a good religious community should do.  They affirm, they challenge, and/or they inspire. Some do just one, others all three.

I know that if you ask people what they think is the purpose of a religious community, you will get many different answers.  My answer came to me in response to a question from a  friend who wanted to know what I thought was the purpose of a sermon. I considered a few minutes and finally said, “to affirm, to challenge, and to inspire.” That’s also the purpose of a church, or mosque, or temple. Such communities have rituals that retell and reinterpret their shared stories as well as the stories that people bring to the gathering to share, to be affirmed, cared for—and challenged and inspired.

Of all the binaries I have considered, and there are many more to explore, this is the one that I think works best as a both/and rather than an either/or. Without affirmation, we shrink. Without challenge, we cease to grow. Without inspiration, we drift. For a meaningful, purposeful, satisfying life, I need my congregation. And my congregation needs me. If there is a congregation in your life—the one that you attend or the one that you abandoned—but it doesn’t provide you with companions on the journey and affirmation, challenge, and inspiration, then perhaps you are in the wrong place, or perhaps you aren’t engaging this community with an open and well nurtured spirit.

True or false? Potholes on the Road to Truth

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Blog #4 in my non-binary series.

As one moves along the continuum from physics to biology to economics to sociology to history, the challenge of separating truth from falsehood or truth from error becomes greater. Truth is not sitting there like an apple waiting to be plucked, but deeply embedded in a web of people, places, customs, circumstances, and other dimensions. Truth must be coaxed, enticed, dragged kicking and screaming from its source.  It is a task which has become far more challenging in the era of social media and artificial intelligence, which makes every event or choice somewhat unique.

One of our currently popular true/false economic statements comes from President Donald Trump, who insists that the foreign producer will always absorb the tariff so that American consumers will not see any rise in prices.  Most of my fellow economists (and I) insist that this belief is wrong. Wrong not in the sense of either or, right or wrong, but rather wrong more often than right. Yes, there can be instances where world markets are very competitive and some part of the tariff will be absorbed by the foreign seller, but in most cases, the tariff is passed on to the buyer.

Scientific truth is a result of observation and statistical evidence that the medicine works, or the ball drops toward the earth, or anything else that combines credible evidence, repeated observation, and hopefully an explanatory theory.  But the scientific method sets the standard of truth very high.  A statistically significant number of observations must fall very close to the mean in order to be reasonably certain that the hypothesis is true.  The higher the standard (or the smaller the acceptable margin of error), the more likely it is that the hypothesis is true.  That high standard means that some true hypotheses will be rejected.  In lay terms, to keep any falsehood out, one must require a very strict criterion for what is let inside the gates. And that means  shutting out a lot of potentially very good and very useful ideas, possibilities or choices

Truth and falsehood are not strictly binary, especially as we move away from scientific methods toward the choices, analyses and decisions that guide our daily lives. Bob is an honest and dependable person–true or false?  Well, most of the time, but sometimes when he has had too much to drink, or is caught in an embarrassing situation, maybe not then.  Bob is mostly true.   Like the tariff, which is mostly passed on to the consumer, but there are exceptions. This medicine works in 95 percent of cases, but you may be in the other five percent, where it may fail to help or even cause harmful side effects.    This health insurance policy will cover all your health needs unless the company can find a good reason to deny your claim.  This house and yard are in excellent condition if you don’t visit it after heavy rain.

Perhaps the question of “What is the truth?” is most dramatic and challenging in a court of law. If you ever wonder why court cases are so complicated and use such arcane language, it’s because both sides are claiming to possess the truth.  A good legal system will recognize that there are few open and shut cases, so they rely on “preponderance of the evidence” in order to make a decision.. Along with physical evidence they must rely on the accounts of witnesses, which involve a mix of unvarnished truth, stretched truth, specious claims and downright lies. Placing the burden of proof on the prosecution and steep penalties for perjury are intended to increase the likelihood that the judge and jury will discern the most likely truth of the matter.

The next time you watch someone put a hand on a bible and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, take it with a grain of salt.  Especially the part about the whole truth, or the possibility that the witness has a faulty or incomplete recollection.  The mind is not a totally reliable instrument. Like science, law sets a high standard for conviction, because it is more just to let ten guilty parties go free than to punish one innocent person.

Mother’s Day: Choices for Women

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 I grew up in New England, in a state where birth control was illegal and the pill had not yet been invented.  My mother, my grandmothers, and my great grandmothers all accepted marriage and motherhood as their destiny. Not like many of our Catholic neighbors, though, they somehow managed to produce smaller families of two, three, or four. Birth control seemed to be highly correlated in my family with the departure of one spouse. My paternal grandparents divorced after four children, my maternal grandfather was killed in a motorcycle accident at age 36, leaving three children. My parents separated when their youngest child (me) was only three, and there was no child support.

My paternal grandfather got the children, promptly farming all four out, two to his mother, one to another family, one to an orphanage.  But my mother and maternal grandmother were on their own to provide for the children. Working outside the home became a resented necessity rather than a career, a vocation, a source of meaning and a chance to express their non-domestic gifts. From this distant perspective I understood my mother suggesting that I could be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary until I got married. Post-Sputnik, I said, “I think I’ll be an engineer.”  My generation had choices. The pill, which came on the market in 1960. When I married in 1962, the main point of premarital counseling from my minister was that I should get on the pill.  It was an important part of ensuring those choices as we were able to exert some control over our fertility. 

There were also more role models and mentors.  I had one beloved childless aunt who introduced me to theater, music, and gardening, along with bemoaning her inability to produce children of her own. There were Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan and Bette Middler and Gloria Steinem and Valentina Tereshkova. There were teachers and professors who encouraged me, and a woman I never met who left her estate to my family congregation to provide scholarships, which paid my way through college.

 Our three carefully planned daughters took for granted that they were expected to go to college and would have options about work, career, marriage, children, choices that I and many of my generation had to fight for. All three have professional careers, and two of them have children. Their expectations were reinforced by a feminist Dad who supported their choices as he had supported mine.

And now the fifth generation is at that point, all in their twenties. Two are in relationships and contemplating marriage but not children.  One is married, teaching school, and hoping to become a mother. The youngest is still in college, plans to go to graduate school, would consider marriage but is not interested in having children.  

I tell this story because it is an amazing transformation in the 114 years between the birth of my grandmothers in 1890 and the birth of my youngest grandchild in 2004, a common story (with maybe fewer single parents!).  Mothers’ Day was created in 1908 when they were both young women in their childbearing years. Traditionally, it is celebrated with gifts and flowers and praise for the wonderful mother that one was, even if one wasn’t.

In our later years the care of aging parents becomes a responsibility for all, but mostly daughters. My sister looked after our beloved aunt and I took care of my mother even as she had taken care of her mother as a young adult.  My generation fo working women is somewhat more self-sufficient, both financially and otherwise, but we do turn to our daughters (and sometimes sons) to help us through the end times. That is something to celebrate on Mothers’ Day!

I am glad I was able to choose to do it all.  Every Mothers’ Day, if I remember, I send a thank you note to my daughters for teaching me how to be a mother. That holiday is now important to the mothers of my grandchildren, since the responsibilities of parenthood weigh lightly on me now.  They are happy that at age 83 I still live by myself (a widow of ten years) and manage my own affairs, rarely asking anything more than taking care of my cat when I am out of town.

I know that some of my generational cohort feel deprived of a right to grandchildren or even great-grandchildren. I am grateful for those beloved four young women growing into adulthood, but  lay no expectation on them to satisfy any desire I might have for continuing the line.  These are their lives, and challenging times and an uncertain future.  Perhaps it should be a holiday to celebrate all women, mothers and not mothers, mentors, role models, cheerleaders. workers. Community builders. And to celebrate their right to choose, and work as hard as we can to keep those choices open tor them.

Woman Without a Party

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One of the big binary polarities in the United States is the two-party system. You might think it was in the Constitution, but it isn’t. The political system evolved early into the Federalist (strong central government) and the Democrat-Republican (small and decentralized government) parties. Others have arisen, but unlike most other democracies, we seldom see any sign of an effective third party. Their official names are Republican and Democratic, but their identity labels are conservative and liberal. I freely acknowledge that I vote Democratic most of the time, but it is far from fully reflecting my values and priorities.
I am a civil libertarian, wanting to protect the rights we have under the Constitution, like free speech and due process and the right to bear muskets. And especially the right of women to control their own bodies. Neither embryos nor corporations embody the defining characteristic of a human being, which comes from being born of a woman. I do send money to the ACLU, but it isn’t a political party.
I am a fiscal conservative. I believe that we should decide what we want the government to provide and raise enough revenue (on average, allowing for recessions and expansions) to pay for it. Neither of the two major parties qualifies as a hospitable environment for a fiscal conservative. Democrats create too many entitlements with built in growth when they are in charge, and Republicans never met a tax they couldn’t cut, especially if it falls more on the wealthy.
I am a social progressive, believing in diversity and inclusion and respect, which come from my faith tradition but are essential ways to live together in peace in a nation of immigrants. Democrats do get some points there. Protecting voting rights and money in politics are two of my big issues as a social progressive. I may not vote the same way you do but I will go to the wall to protect your rights.
I am an economic populist, believing in strong unions as a counterweight to corporations, a more equitable distribution of income and wealth, and adequate basic public services like health care, education and transportation to give more people access and opportunity. Both parties claim to be “for the working people,” but when the chips are down, they depend on big corporate donors to finance their campaigns. I also believe in protective regulation to save us from the destructive behavior of large corporations who subscribe the belief that, as Vince Lombardi might say, “Profits are is not just the best thing. They are the only thing.”
Finally, I am an environmentalist. This is the only earth we have, and we have trashed it long enough. Let’s show Mother Earth some respect I love the Green Party but their platform is very focused.
If I can’t find between these two parties one that honors all those dimensions of my politics, what would be the next best thing? The two-party system is not embedded in law or constitution. Third parties could capture enough votes to be represented in the electoral college. The obstacle is the custom (nowhere embedded in law) that the winner of the plurality (not majority) of votes in a state gets all that state’s electoral votes. (It was Thomas Jefferson’s idea because he wanted all the votes from Virginia to become our Third President. Shame on you, Tom.) The chance to have some electoral votes to bargain within the Electoral College and create a coalition government would certainly make organizing a third party an attractive option.
I need more than two choices. I’m tired of voting for the lesser of two evils. Can we “debinarize” our democracy and become a little more normal like other democrztic countries?