Tag: feminism

Women’s Equality Day

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

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.

Mother’s Day: Choices for Women

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

 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.

What are your ‘isms?”

~ purplesage41 ~ 4 Comments

When I was in college, back in ancient times (the early 1960s), I was an economics major.  One of the most popular courses was called comparative economic systems—communism, socialism, capitalism. Despite the then-recent history of World War II, we did not discuss fascism, which is another form of economic governance, a governing structure based on an alliance of industry and authoritarian control.  Today capitalism seems to have triumphed, although triumph always reveals the greatest flaws of the victor. Socialism, communism, and fascism are thrown around indiscriminately in public dialogue as objects of scorn.

There are lot of other kinds of isms out there, some not as easily adopted or hurled as identifiers. Schools of art—-Cubism, impressionism, romanticism.  Prejudice also has isms—racism, sexism, ableism, and to borrow an “ism “from Spanish, machismo. But the ones that I am focused on here are those that reflect a positive world view, The way we  choose to experience, process, and participate in the world around us.  Those ”isms”  come from religion, philosophy, and personal experience.

Most but not all religions end in ism, from paganism to Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and animism.  (Look that one up if you need to.)  Exceptions are two of the world’s most popular religions, Islam and Christianity. Although some of their subsets are described is isms. (Sufism, Wahhabism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Methodism, etc.). This usage of “ism” is more what I have come to think of as a category, a set of shared beliefs or values as well as rituals, holidays, and practices. My own chosen faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism (at one time before merging, Unitarianism and Universalism) is grounded in shared values and rituals. I started down that path by embracing the heresy of Arianism, the early Christian doctrine denying the trinity.

After much soul searching, I have concluded that my values and my actions, my vocation and my worldview partake of three positive isms. (Meaning that they would always be used, at least by me, and an affirmation or compliment and never as an insult or criticism.)

The first one that entered my life, as It does for many of us, was mysticism—a sense of reverence, awe and wonder, of the presence of the holy in and around us. That experience can come through traditional religion, private spirituality, or the natural world. Of my three, this one is probably the most universal.

The second “ism” began to form in late adolescence as I rejected the standard options for careers for women–ideally, a homemaker and mother, but possibly a nurse, teacher, or secretary. My feminist self took shape and form as new options opened up with Sputnik, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. As I left my home town, intending never to return, I echoed the words of Miranda in The Tempest, “Oh, breve new world, that has such people in it!.” College was an invitation to rethink everything I believed, thought, or was taught.  I became a Democrat, an economist, and an academic. When my beloved husband (also a feminist) and I were blessed with three girls we had a good opportunity to pass on our feminist values, which they have lived with far more sense o discovery than I did. Also became deeply involved in the League of Women Voters, found feminist heroines to admire (including a great-grandmother who marched for women’s suffrage).  Over time, I built friendships and communities among women that have sustained me over my very long life as a feminist.  Feminism is not sexism, which would discriminate against men as a class. It is an affirmation of both quality and uniqueness, and a commitment to support future generations to preserve, protect and defend our equality and our specialness..

When I went off to college, having begun my long embrace of feminism, I intended to be an engineer.  There I discovered a third -ism, utilitarianism.  Utilitarianism is one several ethical schools in philosophy, one that is easily summed up as “the greatest good for the greatest number.” It is the foundation of economics as an academic and policy discipline, and it was there that I found my vocational home as a mystic feminist utilitarian. I caution that in my view and that of many of my fellow economists, utilitarianism is more suited to be a guide to how to govern a city, state country, or community than for individual and household/family behavior. In the family I tried to be a good Marxist– ’’from each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs.”

In my retirement years, I discovered that I had over the years adopted without realizing it a personal philosophy of stoicism, an ancient Greek philosophy that is often lightly summarized by the prayer associated with Alcoholics Anonymous—the courage to change the things you can change the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Stoicism requires daily practice and reflection on your interactions with others  It is well worth the effort.

I am ready to order my customized T-shirt, regretfully leaving off my beloved utilitarianism as a public and not a private ism. Here is what it says:

I believe in

Mysticism

Feminism

Stoicism

How about you?

Discovering My Inner Celt

~ purplesage41 ~ 3 Comments

I grew up being told that I was a Yankee, which in Connecticut meant a New Englander of English descent.   Most of my ancestors were in New England a century or more before the American Revolution.  But it turns out that they were not all English. I did know there was some Scottish in there, but wasn’t sure how much.  My mother, after all, was a Stewart. As ancestry.com continued to refine my ethnic heritage, I turned out to be 50% English (my father’s side), 40% a mix of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh, and the rest Norwegian—those Vikings visiting the British Isles and leaving their DNA behind.

Along with a mostly Welsh friend and a mostly Irish friend, I had watched the Great Courses series The Celtic World as we celebrated our shred ancestry. But my proudest moments of being 40 percent Celtic came with two unrelated discoveries, the Irish monk and heretic Pelagius and the delightful historical mystery series by Peter Tremayne, set in seventh century Ireland with Sister Fidelma as the heroine.

Pelagius was a fourth century monk who differed significantly from the emerging Augustinian orthodoxy of original sin and predestination. Arguing that we were created in the image of God, Pelagius believed in free will and the opportunity for all to be saved.  That might sound obvious to modern ears, but it was heresy in his day. When my Monday night discussion group discovered Pelagius, we agreed that those of us who had been to seminary who had heard of him at all had been told he was a heretic. He was, indeed, a Christian Universalist like the second century theologian Origen, affirming a heresy that has been embraced by most of contemporary mainstream Christianity

More important than the theology to me was the culture embodied by Sister Fidelma.  Fidelma was the sister of the king of Muman (later Munster, one of five Irish kingdoms under the High King).  She was a well-educated person and a dalaigh—an officer of the court, a lawyer with investigatory powers under Brehon law. She was not alone. Other women held positions of authority in law, religion, and governance.  Although she left the convent and renounced her vows to pursue a more worldly career in collaboration with her brother, she was still known as Sister Fidelma.  She married an Angle, Brother Eadulf, and bore a child.

Kings in 7th century Ireland were selected by a quasi- democratic process.  When a king (or queen) died, there would be a designated heir  already in place.  A conclave of at least three generations of the ruling family would crown the designated heir and select from within the family a new designated heir based on the fitness of that person to rule. It could be a woman.  

Through Sister Fidelma’s adventures, we discover a great deal that was different about Celtic religion and culture, especially the role of women and an egalitarian view of the world. Nuns and monks lived in co-houses under the joint rule of an abbot and an abbess, in which monks and nuns could marry and raise their children in the faith.  There was no attempt to wipe out the old religion; many of its beliefs and practices were retained and integrated into their Christian faith. It was a faith deeply grounded in the earth, a practice that some segments of modern Christianity have somewhat belatedly embraced. 

Women in that culture could choose to marry or not, divorce, and own  property. They could enter a trial marriage for a year, as Sister Fidelma did, after which they made it permanent or parted ways without penalty, free to remarry or remain single . While misogyny flourished in areas of Western Europe under Roman rule and /or influence, Ireland was never part of the Holy Roman Empire, too far away to be subjected to patriarchy until much later.  

I have always celebrated my Scotch-Irish great grandmother Alice Munger Stewart, who marched for women’s suffrage  in the early 20th century  It is heartening to learn from Peter Tremayne and Sister Fidelma how deep in my DNA runs the belief that women are fully human, competent, and equal, and deserve to be treated accordingly. I defied my mother’s expectation that I could become a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary, and became an academic economist instead.

I was fortunate to come of age in the time of the women’s movement in this country, led by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and countless others. I was blessed with a feminist husband who told me early in our marriage that he did not want a wife who lived vicariously through him.  I assured him that such an arrangement was fine with me.  We raised three feminist daughters who in turn raised our four granddaughters to be all that they can be. 

I wish the same for women everywhere striving to reassert their full humanity and their right to be treated as equals.