Guest Post by Shtuey: Women’s rights: They’re not just for Women anymore

Posted: July 15, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , | 5 Comments

On March 25, 1911 a tragedy struck the city of New York that forever changed the Women’s Movement. Near closing time, from an unknown source, a fire ripped through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory killing 146 people.  Of those, 126 were women.  Though valiant efforts were made to save the Triangle workers, a locked exit and inadequate fire escapes doomed many of the immigrant men and women that worked there.  The grizzly scene of young girls holding hands with their coworkers, leaping to their deaths, rather than face the flames behind them, their burned and mangled bodies strewn upon the sidewalk, shocked the nation.

The women’s labor movement had been called to action two years earlier by Clara Lemlich, a 19 year old Ukranian Jewish immigrant who had been savagely beaten for her union involvement. Her modest but impassioned call for a vote for action began a shirtwaist makers’ strike that rocked New York City.  The movement found new force in the deaths of the young women in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, an event which also drove the final push in the fight to secure the right of franchise for women in America, as was seen at the 1912 New York City March for Suffrage.  Some 20,000 people marched.  A reported half million lined the streets.  But the coals that stoked the fires of these movements were not kindled on those ill fated floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan.  The match was struck upstate, with relative quiet, 63 years earlier in the town of Seneca Falls.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott found themselves in a situation oft repeated in the past 160 years.  Denied seats at the 1840 anti-slavery convention in London, due to their gender, Mott and Stanton agreed that a convention on women’s rights needed to be held.  Eight years later it came to pass, the result of Mott visiting family not far from Stanton’s home in Seneca Falls, New York.

The call was unassuming.  An unsigned notice was placed in the local paper advertising the convention.  Three hundred-forty women and forty men, most from within a five mile radius, attended the convention.

The task of constructing a declarative document fell upon Stanton.  Using the Declaration of Independence as her guide she constructed what she entitled the Declaration of Sentiments.  Within this document lay the undeniable and unshakable truth still contested by the ignorant today (some of whom can be seen blathering away on an almost daily basis on cable television news networks): “All men and all women are created equal.”

One hundred and forty-seven years later, then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, went to Beijing to address an international women’s conference themed, “Listen to the Women.”  In a singular act of bravery, and at great political and personal risk, Senator Clinton, standing on the shoulders of Stanton, Mott, Anthony, Lemlich, Roosevelt and others too many to name, changed the course of the conversation of women’s rights forever.  Echoing Stanton’s declaration she proclaimed to the world; “Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.”

In other words, women’s rights: they’re not just for women anymore.

It is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as being owned solely by women.  This is an issue of what it means to be human.  In 1995 Hillary Clinton made it plain that it is no longer acceptable for anyone, regardless of gender, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, age, nationality, or creed to be oppressed whether it be physically, emotionally, sexually, or economically, and that it is time for all of us to take responsibility for protecting and defending each other’s rights to live lives of freedom and equality.  Whether it is being paid equal wages for equal time, access to the same employment opportunities, or to share our lives with the partners of our choice, every American citizen should have equal protection under the Constitution of the United States, and every citizen of the world should be recognized as having equal protection of their inalienable human rights.  There is only one race; the human race.  When the rights of one human are violated, we are all violated.  When one of us has obstacles thrown up against them, is oppressed, insulted, attacked, or enslaved then we are obligated by our mutual humanity to stand up in their defense.  That is what Dr. King saw from the top of the mountain.

When Senator Clinton entered the 2008 Presidential Race she asked America to join her in a conversation, a conversation that began 160 years ago in Seneca Falls, New York.  Today we ask you to continue that conversation.  On Saturday July 19th, 2008 we ask you don your Hillary gear and gather together with your friends, your neighbors, your community, your country.  We ask you to look at yourselves, look at your nation, look at your world, and take up the path that Hillary laid before us in Beijing.  Convene in your homes, or in a public place.  Read the Declaration of Sentiments.  And read and sign a new declaration; a declaration that reaffirms the original Declaration of Sentiments, and issues a new call to embrace women’s rights as human rights; that demands that the rights of all people be protected and upheld.

You will find event details, and copies of both declarations at http://www.seneca160.us/

Join us in Seneca Falls.  Celebrate the anniversary of Seneca Falls.  Celebrate Hillary.  Come join the conversation.

Women under Carriages, under Street Cars, and under Buses

Posted: June 29, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 38 Comments

Abigail Adams “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Important anniversaries are on us. This quote by the second first lady of the United States, Abigail Adams,  is as fresh and pertinent as it was when  she penned this in a letter to her husband in 1776.

From the birth of this country down to present day, women are the forgotten citizens. When they assert their rights, some war, some other movement, a disease, some other man or even the rights of proto-humans are placed before them and many just fall in.  We take care of our gay brothers suffering from aids while the last few states fail to ratify the ERA.  We support the abolition movement to free and give rights to Black Americans and votes to black men while we’re considered property way into the 1970s and cannot achieve the vote until 1920.  We march.  We do all the behind the scene work and organizing.  Then, when we ask for the vote, for our place in governing, for our right to lead, we are told that would be expedient to larger movements.  This is true of black civil rights movements, labor movements, peace movements or antiwar movements, and the founding of our nation and so ad infinitum.

We are not only approaching our annual celebration of Independence Day.  We have come upon the 160th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention.  The women who met during that July suggested this addition to the Declaration of Independence and penned their own tome the Declaration of Sentiments.

It was signed by a number of women leaders  including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. The first women’s rights conference in the United States Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York on July 19 and 20, 1848.  Few will be celebrating this historic gathering  or probably even know of it.   One hundred and sixty years after the convention, the equality that Elizabeth Cady Stanton demands still eludes us.Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“The eloquent Frederick Douglass, a former slave and now editor of the Rochester North Star, however, swayed the gathering into agreeing to the resolution. At the closing session, Lucretia Mott won approval of a final resolve “for the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce.”

Source:  http://www.npg.si.edu/col/seneca/senfalls1.htm

This is the same Frederick Douglass who later threw women under the carriage for Black male suffrage.  In 1869, an amendment was proposed to Congress that guarantees “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Douglass told women to wait since it was easier to get the proposed amendment through congress if it guaranteed black males the right to vote, but not women.  This is exactly what happened.  Women had to wait.

For over two centuries, American women had few civil or political rights. Wives had to do what they were told by their husband. Until 1884, a wife was officially listed as one of her husband’s possessions. Women stayed slaves for years after the emancipation proclamation was signed.

When I was at university, I noticed this strange pattern.  Every time women say it is our turn to be recognized for all this work and we  deserve equal pay, equal rights, and equal respect,  men change the subject and put some other movement in between us.  If you look through history,  many women’s rights movements have been cast aside for peace movements or labor movements and later for civil rights movements that basically favored the rights of gay men or black men.

When asked what the role of women was in the Black Panther Movement, the answer was:  “The only role for women in this movement is horizontal.”  This continual divide and conquer strategy has left us waiting at bus stops for buses that we are later thrown under.  Much of the impetus of the women’s movement in the 70s was distilled to civil rights for gays after Stonewall and the Aids crisis.  Gay bashing and Aids struck gay men hard but much of the work and nursing was done by lesbians who abandoned the fight for the ERA and protection of the sanctity of women’s individuality as the religious right’s attempts to water down Roe v. Wade increased the humanity of proto-human life while decreasing that of breathing, living women.

The odd thing is that none of these movements are bad causes.  The development of a democratic nation, peace, abolition, Aids research, or suffrage for black men all have merit.  The fact that these are ALL good causes is not what bothers me.  The larger point to me is that these movements sprung up during active women’s rights movements and suddenly took precedence.

Senator Shirley Chisholm has always been one of my personal heroines and clearly recognized that women’s rights were not a priority for this nation.  She was always quick to note that she had experienced more sexism in her life than racism.   Please read what this great champion of women’s rights said as she fought for passage of the ERA.

“Mr. Speaker, House Joint Resolution 264, before us today, which provides for equality under the law for both men and women, represents one of the most clear-cut opportunities we are likely to have to declare our faith in the principles that shaped our Constitution. It provides a legal basis for attack on the most subtle, most pervasive, and most institutionalized form of prejudice that exists. Discrimination against women, solely on the basis of their sex, is so widespread that is seems to many persons normal, natural and right.

Legal expression of prejudice on the grounds of religious or political belief has become a minor problem in our society. Prejudice on the basis of race is, at least, under systematic attack. There is reason for optimism that it will start to die with the present, older generation. It is time we act to assure full equality of opportunity to those citizens who, although in a majority, suffer the restrictions that are commonly imposed on minorities, to women.

Source: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/shirleychisholmequalrights.htm

Whenever women make progress, men step in with some other distraction and create disunity.  I see this same pattern today in the Democratic Party ONE HUNDRED and SIXTY years after the Seneca Falls Convention and well over TWO HUNDRED years after Abigail Adams.

Women, please stop and think about this before you donate your time to peace movements, misc. civil rights movements, ANY kind of movement.  We are the work horses of all of these movements, yet how many of these movements turn around and provide us ANYTHING  but lip service?  Think of the DNC, what have they done recently to stop the hemorrhage of reproductive rights?  support equal pay laws?  stop SEXIST attacks on women candidates?  Which women in this system (yes, YOU Nancy Pelosi, yes, You Candy Crowely, yes, you Cindy Sheehan, yes, you Donna Brazille, yes YOU, Governor Sibilius, yes YOU Senator Mary Landrieu, yes you Secretary of State Rice,yes, YOU Gloria Borger, …) will willingly sell out their own sex to be acceptable to the boys and get recognition in a movement or a profession not of our own design whose rules are set up so that we ultimately fail.

Just THINK ABOUT IT when you celebrate this Fourth of July.   Look at your daughters, your mothers, your grandmothers, your granddaughters, and the women around you and THINK about it.  What movement did I join that stopped me from asking for basic human and democratic rights for women?  Think about what happened to Hillary Clinton this primary season and ASK yourselves will you compromise YET again?

How much is that compromise worth to you?