A Woman’s World

Troubling news events come bull-dozing at us with the frequency of the explosive forest fires in California, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona; with the floods and tornadoes in the South; with the daily destruction of Ukraine and evidence of Western appeasement despite our efforts to help; with yet another Covid variant causing illness and one million Americans dead; with the curse of rising inflation; with unstoppable crime everywhere, every day in big cities and small and with daily evidence of the social media-fed division among Americans.

And just to rub it ever deeper, now comes the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade…a leaked working document detailing in 68 pages how the majority of the Court will undoubtedly vote in June or July.

The only genuine news here is the unprecedented release of the document to the media. The majority of the Court is clearly willing not to just change 50 years of precedent but to overturn it — they were appointed for that purpose. There is conjecture that Chief Justice Roberts will try to convince Justice Kavanaugh to vote for the Mississippi case which limits abortion to 15 weeks but to go no further and not support language overturning Roe…but conjecture is another word for guessing.

There is an investigation of the leak and perhaps one or another of a Justice’s law clerks will be caught sacrificing a career believing this news now will make a difference in the ultimate outcome.

No matter. Roe v. Wade was a landmark case and the decision to end the legality of abortion will also be a landmark case – but perhaps for different reasons.

Just this fact for the record: The Liberal Party of New York was the only political party in America to file a formal brief in support of the Roe v. Wade decision. The Liberal Party – its leadership and membership – believed then and now – in a woman’s right to choose.

PROGRESS

While a legal decision to permit abortion in America had little to do with it, these past fifty years have revealed a stunning growth of women’s power and standing in this country.

The elevation of women in every aspect of American life has not come with a single act to forever shatter a glass ceiling that limited the involvement and power of women and has existed for much of America’s 300 year history.

When it comes to matters of social justice and change, there can be noise and harshness but ceilings don’t shatter easily. They instead crack little by little over time until they just seem to disappear quietly into the nightfall of history.

Consider the quarter of a century effort and ultimate victory by women alone when after two hundred years of America’s life, they won the right to vote. That right to vote alone shattered nothing…but it provided the means, the weapon, to begin taking whacks at the ceiling. In time, that effort caused cracks so that generations of women could see the light waiting for them if they did what women do so well…persevere, stubbornly, patiently persevere…some quietly, some loudly…but with a strength of purpose that can never be denied.

And so we follow the beams of light….

Until the Second World War, women were expected to be at home.

There were women who had entered the work force…slowly finding their way as administrative help into the industrialization and growth of American business. Or, as communities grew, women entered the world of small retail businesses.

And when the men who moved slowly across the country from East to West to build a national education system, opened and staffed one room schoolhouses needed help, they found women who stepped into those schools to become teachers…women who had enough education themselves to properly do the job. Over time and until today, women became America’s teachers.

And as the 19th Century became the 20th Century, it was women who joined an increasingly educated medical and healthcare system to join male physicians as the nurses they needed to provide the care they proposed.

But it was during the Second World War that women’s work resembled men’s as never before. The war effort in Europe and Asia demanded a commitment of the nation as never before in history including our own Civil War.

Rosy the Riveter became the face of women who joined assembly lines side by side with men, building the American war machine… as major industries moved from commercial production to armaments, warships, fighter planes and bombers.

Beams of light: As ‘American boys’ went off to fight, America’s colleges found places for young women…even the Ivy League schools who were then men’s schools only.

While many returned to those standards after the war, some did not and while it took time, most converted as well accepting those young women who could qualify academically.

Glass ceilings do not crack unless they are in rooms. Once the doors to those schoolrooms opened, those ceilings were under siege.

Postwar America had produced a Middle Class. Now workers, made more powerful by unions, worked with management to produce salaries that let them buy a home in our growing suburbs, have children they could send to college and enjoy an annual vacation.

As America prospered in this clearly social capitalism and people were able to “want and get more” for themselves and their families, women stepped quietly into the workforce while continuing their roles as Mom, teacher’s necessary helper and manager of family life…multiple roles few men would even think of attempting.

Whatever the other results of this unprecedented status in America, one thing became clear: women wanted more in their lives and proved capable of getting it.

And then in the 1960’s came the miracle of self-administered chemical birth control and women were free to strive in any direction their need and talent could take them.

The vote. The War. Advanced education. Birth control.

Do you hear the ceilings crack? See the beams of light they let in?

Again the fight for social change can be loud, sometimes vicious and self-defeating…but it all takes time.

Once Ruth Bader Ginsberg was the only “girl” in her Harvard Law School class. Not anymore.

WOMEN IN POWER

It’s only fair to suggest that for all intents and purposes it has been a man’s world. After all we do call it his-story. If you require further explanation you don’t want to read any further.

We suggest here that for all the reasons above, women have been able to succeed in whatever direction they desire. Yes, there is competition and yes, old attitudes die hard especially when they are under attack.

But today as fewer men even go to college much less graduate from college, women are in all those seats.

In graduate schools women outnumber men by considerable margins in law school, medical school, dental school and even in some business schools.

While women in politics have been very visible, women running important if not the most visible corporations, are there in charge.

The fact that women have run for President and that America has a female Vice President seems to be less impactful because politics is neither professional nor corporate.

But this is important. Women vote far more often than men. It was a woman’s vote for Biden that made him President. And it was women in key States voting for him rather than again for Donald Trump that made the Biden victory possible.

In 1973 the Supreme Court helped women not only fortify their productive rights gained by oral contraceptives, but their reproductive rights in the case known as Roe v. Wade.

Since then and fortified by the archconservative Religious Right, the fight against abortion has remained as constant and current as no other single issue ever has including race.

Suddenly women are faced with an attempt to push back their personal gains in a very personal issue. The fact is that 80% of all abortions take place among black, brown and poor women. Given the racial discrimination found in our healthcare system one would imagine no one would care.

But this is about power. And about societal progress.

What can women do to protect the gains they have won?

They can vote.

Yes, they can march and appear on cable news day after day but what will count are the votes against politicians nationally and on a State by State basis who will support an end to their control over their lives.

That first beam of light still matters: women can vote. It didn’t shatter a ceiling but it gave them the ultimate weapon in the endless fight for social justice.

No Supreme Court vote can overwhelm that weapon.