A world turned upside down

Clara Bingham's The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 just might be the most delicious achievement in oral history I've ever encountered. The author has assembled a huge, wide collection of voices from the period which catches viscerally the experience which is my lived-history alongside so many others. This is not just the political activists, though they are there. It is not just the white women; Black and other women of color also were about remaking their world and this author found them. The artists, the athletes, the educators -- all contributed to inventing a completely new culture, a zeitgeist that radically affirmed women in all our varieties. 

In the wake of this cultural breach, we still live and struggle against vicious enemies who would like to wipe out feminism's achievements -- yes, I'm talking about you Mr. Vance. 

From Bingham's introduction:

In 1963, a twenty-year-old American woman could not expect to run a marathon, or play varsity sports in college. She could only dream of becoming a doctor, scientist, news reporter, lawyer, labor leader, factory foreman, college professor, or elected official. She couldn't get a prescription for birth control, have a legal abortion, come out as a lesbian, or prosecute her rapist. She almost certainly knew nothing about clitoral orgasm or women's history. She could not get a credit card, let alone a mortgage, without the imprimatur of her husband or father. By 1973, the doors to these options and opportunities had cracked open, and a women turning twenty in 1973 faced a future of possibilities that no generation before had ever experienced.

...  This generation of women, as one feminist wrote, found "an opening in history." ... The women in this history [in The Movement] speak in their own words and tell their own stories.

Bingham has done a remarkably coherent job in twenty-one short chapters of organizing these testimonies into an understandable narrative of struggle and accomplishment. I read the book on audio and found this performance sensitively done and perfect for the subject matter. 

(If, like me, you actually know some of the women quoted, it can be a little jarring to hear the voices of actors instead of the women themselves, but go with the flow. On balance, it works.)

• • •

I think The Movement generation of feminists should be encouraged by the fire that still burns among many young women today even if their life experiences have been so very different. Jessica Grose writes a column for the New York Times that focuses on the travails of the 20-30 set; that focus in itself is a breach from the before-the-feminist-revolution times. Of the youngest women, she describes the gender gap in politics:

What’s changed is that young women have more of a voice. According to Deckman’s research, Gen Z women are more politically active than their male counterparts — a major historical shift, as men have heretofore been more politically active than women.

The reason that the gender gap in voting seems so pronounced is not because young men have become dramatically more conservative. It’s because of the political galvanization of the young women who came of age during the #MeToo movement, watching Donald Trump remain the leader of the Republican Party despite numerous credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, and witnessing the fall of Roe v. Wade.

“For Gen Z women, women’s equality has become a defining issue of what they care about and how they perceive politics,” Deckman, who is also the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. She quotes a female student from the University of Maryland who told her in a focus group that “Trump winning just kind of scared us all to our cores.” The woman added: “My rights are being threatened and just walking down the street I am being threatened, and I need to do something.”

Petula Dvorak is even more emphatic in the Washington Post. "The 2016 election crushed the girls. Now women, they’re revenge voting." [Gift article.]

Somehow, I don't think the effort among conservatives to sell young Christians on Queen Esther is likely to successfully compete. But they are sure trying.

What the neighbors are up to ...

Mexico's power class is not all men any longer.

Or so women aspiring to run for president hope.

The Los Angeles Times has shared a fascinating glimpse of two women from very different political parties with sharp differences who are trying to get into the ring to compete in the coming presidential election.

MEXICO CITY — The two presidential front-runners grew up exposed to sharply different visions of what a woman in Mexico could aspire to be.

In her impoverished home in the state of Hidalgo, Xóchitl Gálvez faced beatings from her alcoholic father, who once threatened to kill her mother. She’d hear the men in her family quip, “Women are only good for the petate (a bed) and the metate (a stone to grind grains).”

Claudia Sheinbaum grew up hearing her parents, both scientists and former student activists, talk politics in their home in the state of Mexico [City]. She saw firsthand what a woman could accomplish, spending a night at age 15 at a hunger strike with Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, the pioneering crusader for the disappeared whose work helped build Mexico’s human rights movement. ...

Contrary to what a casual US news consumer might expect, Gálvez, a sitting senator, seeks to lead the more rightward leaning party coalition, while Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor, comes out of the current president's left-populist party.

Both speak loudly about the role of gender in the election:

“Mexico is no longer written with the M of machismo ... but M of mother, M of mujer” or woman, Sheinbaum declared to thousands of supporters just before leaving her post as mayor to enter the presidential race.

Gálvez has called Mexico’s president a “machista” and told reporters, “You need many ovaries like the ones I have to confront such a powerful man.” 

Though the two major parties may put forward women candidates, Mexican political scientists caution this election will likely turn on voters' evaluation of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). 

“People vote for women without a problem. What matters is the political party, and you have to understand that Mexico is not a feminist country,” said Karolina Gilas, a political scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM. “Mexican society continues to be very conservative.”

While the presidential hopefuls can’t ignore feminist issues in a country where an average of 10 women a day were slain last year, the movement doesn’t have the weight to tip a national election either, Gilas said.

The election will be held June 2, 2024.

• • •

Two comments from me: 

1) Around the world, women seem able to make more incursions into the highest elective offices than we see here in the USofA. Latin America has elected women leaders in Argentina, Chile, even Nicaragua and Honduras. Way back in the mid-1960s, I remember marveling that Mrs. Bandaranaike could become the first premier of post-colonial Sri Lanka. A wise professor who had lived in the country explained to me when a government/system of government was in the process of finding it's feet, there might be more room for women. 

Perhaps if we get through the current trauma with US democracy intact, we'll be in a season in this country when unprecedented space opens ... we'll see.

2) Thanks to the Los Angeles Times for the best mainstream coverage of Mexico available to me. We are not alone on this continent and the neighbors matter.

Angry young women

Daniel Cox is a data scientist who runs the Survey Center on American Life. He observes that some young liberal American women display measurable evidence of mental distress and even despair. He opines:

One recent event was especially significant for young liberal women: #MeToo. Even as public interest in the #MeToo movement recedes, its influence remains considerable. In recent interviews with young women, we found that the #MeToo movement was incredibly salient—for many, it was a transformative experience that informed their views on relationships, sexism, and gender equality.  

... As the #MeToo movement gained traction, many women began to reevaluate their understandings of the way American society treats them. Gallup polls reveal plummeting levels of satisfaction with the treatment of women in the last few years. In 2016, 61 percent of women said they were satisfied with the way women were treated in the US. The next time Gallup asked this question, in 2018, feelings of satisfaction had fallen dramatically. Today, only 44 percent of women report being very or somewhat satisfied with the treatment of women in American society.

Sounds plausible to me. Women are having a moment of being more appropriately aware that our aspirations are impeded by the sexist and misogynist elements in our society -- like, say, Republican judges and Donald Trump. And, too often, though by no means always, men in women's peer groups can be oblivious and unsupportive.

 

Cox goes on to report mournfully that 4 in 10 among current young liberal women are open to adopting a bisexual or lesbian sexual orientation. He thinks that indicates depression. I think it merely makes sense given what young women are experiencing ...

There's a universal antidote to depression that arises from seeing the world as it is. That's to struggle to make things better, in this case, a revived 21st century feminism. Will current distress generate a new feminist wave? It might. It seems as if every few years we experience a new such eruption -- and will continue to do so as long as women realize we won't have the equality we expect and deserve without demanding it,.

• • •

I was going to give Mr. Cox's distressed musings a pass, until I ran across this: The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies. Wow! The conflict between the sexes could be so much worse.

On the days she’s feeling most generous toward men—say, when she sees a handsome man on the street—Helena Lee can sometimes put her distaste aside and appreciate them as “eye candy.” That’s as far as she goes: “I do not want to know what is inside of his brain.” Most of the time, she wants nothing at all to do with men.

“I try to have faith in guys and not to be like, ‘Kill all men,’” she says. “But I’m sorry, I am a little bit on that side—that is, on the extreme side.”

The ghost of Valerie Solanas lives in South Korea?

[Helena] Lee is part of a boycott movement in South Korea—women who are actively choosing single life. Their movement—possibly tens of thousands strong, though it’s impossible to say for sure—is called “4B,” or “The 4 No’s.” Adherents say no to dating, no to sex with men, no to marriage, and no to childbirth. (“B” refers to the Korean prefix bi-, which means “no”.)

They are the extreme edge of a broader trend away from marriage. By one estimate, more than a third of Korean men and a quarter of Korean women who are now in their mid-to-late 30s will never marry. ...

... “I think the most fundamental issue at hand is that a lot of girls realize that they don’t really have to do this anymore,” Lee told me. “They can just opt out.”

That's some angry women. 

According to this account, young Korean women find dating unsatisfactory and sometimes physically dangerous. Demographers are projecting that the Korean population is shrinking because many young women simply are not choosing to couple and have children -- and don't like the available male partners.

In the U.S., the similar trend is partially mitigated by widespread acceptance of female single parenthood, though that's a hard road for the mother. And new immigrants generally have been more likely to want and bear large families. If it weren't for immigration, we'd be on a demographic trajectory more like Korea's.

Shards from the embattled republic

Things to think about ...

• Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur started 2023 off right. Congress has not covered itself with glory since but ...

As we approach the new year with hope and optimism in our hearts, let’s heed the timeless words of Daniel Webster etched in the U.S. House of Representatives: “Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests and see whether we also in our day and generation may not perform something to be remembered."

• GOPer dysfunction as evidenced by the Speaker election has many pundits trying to figure out what's wrong with rightwing politicians. Here's David Lauter in the LA Times:

What the voters on the right and their representatives have demanded is a return to the 1950s, if not earlier — an era when government was smaller, the social safety net weaker and traditional gender and racial hierarchies far more solid. That’s not achievable by democratic means: A large majority of the country rejects that agenda. So they’ve turned to anti-democratic tactics to try to push toward their goal. McCarthy and other Republican figures — one can’t truly call them leaders — have tried to indulge that faction to maintain their hold on power.

But their flirtation with anti-democratic practices has clearly hurt the GOP, especially with the swing voters who decide close elections.

That has brought the GOP to its current dead end: Without the far right, they would forfeit their current majority. With it, they may lose their legitimacy with a generation of voters.

• Meanwhile GOPers continue to try to completely ban abortion despite a strong national majority that supports comprehensive reproductive health care. NPR created an useful quiz which you can use to test your own basic understanding of abortion; many of us haven't had to know all about it for many years. Now we do.

• We're finding there's a lot of history, and a lot of heroes, whose work we need to retrieve.

• Jill Filipovic asks: "What's the matter with (rightwing) Men?"

In the US, men commit roughly 90% of homicides, 85% of non-parental murders of children under five, 99% of rapes, 88% of robberies, 85% of burglaries, and 78% of aggravated assaults. Most men who are murdered are killed by other men; most women who are murdered are killed by men, too. ...

The men who enact mass violence do have particular afflictions that separate them out from the Republican voter who may also be xenophobic and misogynist, most notably their misfit-ness — their isolation. But of course many women and girls are misfits, too, and they are far less likely than men to hurt others because of it.

It’s the entitlement, the hewing to narrow gender roles, the sense that one isn’t being allowed to be a true man (and that’s someone else’s fault), and the desire to make other people listen and pay attention and bow down — that’s what seems to drive so much violence from this particular demographic.

And it’s those same dangerous sensibilities that the Republican Party is stoking.

• Jamelle Bouie reflects on what makes bad cops.

With great power should come greater responsibility and accountability. The more authority you hold in your hands, the tighter the restraints should be on your wrists. 

To give power and authority without responsibility or accountability — to give an institution and its agents the right and the ability to do violence without restraint or consequence — is to cultivate the worst qualities imaginable, among them arrogance, sadism and contempt for the lives of others. It is, in short, to cultivate the attitudes and beliefs and habits of mind that lead too many American police officers to beat and choke and shock and shoot at a moment’s notice, with no regard for either the citizens or the communities we’re told they’re here to serve and protect.

• A former Sheriff of King County, Seattle WA, Sue Rahr, describes what often motivates officers:

Though the vest, the gun, the training, and the equipment all lessen the physical danger of the job, nothing assuages the fear of rejection from one’s group.

• Esau McCaulley on Black history in this disunited country:

What makes America a wonder is that this is the land upon which my ancestors, despite the odds, fought for and often made a life for themselves. We are great because this land housed the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Maya Angelou, the advocacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, the urgency of Nina Simone’s music, and the faith-inspired demand for change in Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons. This way of telling the story allows us to speak of American ideals even if the norm is failure rather than accomplishment. It allows our history to chronicle progress without diminishing the suffering necessary to bring it about.

• Ezra Klein waxes philosophical, even if many of us can't afford to: 

... many in politics have abandoned any real vision of the long future. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our politics mainly to give voice to our fears or urgency to our agendas. We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible. The remarkable burst of prosperity and possibility that has defined the past few hundred years has been a story of energy. ...

Meanwhile, innovators and entrepreneurs work toward a more climate friendly future.

• Chris Choo is a planning manager for Marin County, California. She tries to look ahead:

“People still tend to think of these things [wildfire and flood] as isolated terrible things, rather than as part of a collective shift … in what the future might hold,” she said. “We live in nature and too often think of ourselves as separate from it … but nature is still very much in charge.”

• The 2024 presidential election comes closer. And feels familiar. Josh Marshall notes:

If the GOP were ready to move on from Trump they would be having a campaign that wasn’t entirely about him. But that is just what they’re doing.

• Sarah Longwell conducts focus groups: 

While many Republican voters may be moving off Trump the man, the forces that he unleashed within the party—economic populism, isolationist foreign policy, election denialism, and above all, an unapologetic and vulgar focus on fighting culture war issues—remain incredibly popular with GOP voters.

• Katherine Stewart studies Christian nationalism:

The lessons to be drawn from the rise of DeSantis in the wake of his reelection in Florida are stark. The descent of the Republican Party into a uniquely American form of authoritarianism has not stopped. The second coming of the “anointed one” will not be any better for America than a return of the first. We may be spared Melania and Roger Stone, but we won’t be spared the politics of division, demonization, and domination. DeSantis is simply promising to do demagoguery better. No wonder Trump has started calling him names.

• Former Federal prosecutor Joyce Vance isn't giving up.

I hear a lot of people who say, often apologetically, that they just can’t take it anymore. That they have to unplug from the news for the sake of their sanity. I understand that. Truly, I do. But bad things happen when good people look away. We are still in too fragile of a position to be able to afford that luxury. It is often said that every generation has to secure democracy for itself. Our fight is not over yet.

Kick ass, ladies!

How could I not thrill to Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger? I've been an angry woman for decades. This doesn't show much in my daily interactions: I like my anger better when efficacious rather than expressive. But it's there -- and I know I'm not alone. So Rebecca Traister's catalogue and exposé of our contemporary fury is satisfying.

It's also smart, professional, and deeply researched. She's delved into the history, both of women who embodied their rage as feminist theorists in the 1960s and 70s, and of political insurgents subjected to patriarchal disdain like Susan B. Anthony, Shirley Chisholm, and Barbara Lee. She's attempted the work that any white woman must to describe the complications lived by women of color struggling amidst both male entitlement and white supremacy as well as US late-capitalism and a host of other isms. In her coverage of our reaction to the 2016 election of a classic male pig and the subsequent #MeToo explosion, she offers journalism that should serve as "a rough first draft of history" -- if that history is not buried as so much of women's experience has been.

And her particular observations are acute, if not necessarily original. She digs into the media's enthusiasm for reporting conflicts within and about the Women's March over political direction and legitimacy, pointing out that it is the nature to social movements to dispute their differences and learn from the process. But when it comes to women, there's always more:

The highlighting of dissent over accomplishment is a way to undermine a movement, and it has everything to do with the structural reality of gender inequality. The women's movement is a movement not of an oppressed minority, but of a subjugated majority. Majorities, by the very nature of their scale, are bound to include groups with varying -- and warring -- priorities and goals. ... The cheapest way to weaken and undermine a mass movement is to use its differences to divide it, and thus maintain power over it.

(That's also worth remembering next time you see the media proclaiming "Democrats in Disarray." Democrats/liberals/even the resigned-but-cautiously-hopeful also are a majority of everybody; we just don't know how to turn our majority into power. Yet.)

But -- you guessed that "but" was coming, didn't you? -- Traister's Mad also disappointed me. The deep, awful insight which insurgent women cannot escape is that we live with, and often desire to be intimate with, and even to love, men whose social condition is to have power over us. To be a woman is to experience from infancy the imperative to constrain our own development so as to protect male entitlement. We've recently seen on national TV what it looks like when a man fears he might be blocked from what he knows are his just desserts by a woman calling him out. Brett Kavanaugh is no aberration; he's just an entitled upper-class white guy. (The Blassey Ford/Kavanaugh hearing came after the book's publication. Traister certainly nailed that episode.)

Yet there are quite a few contemporary U.S. women who have managed to organize lives far less dependent on men than hardly any women who came before. There were the middle class women of the author's mother's generation who left empty marriages from the 1970s onward because they found they could, even if just barely, support themselves and children. We are a different sort of society for this leap into the unknown. There are the emerging "Single Ladies" whose hopes and discontents Traister has chronicled.

But (I have to ask because this is my kind) where in all this history of rage are the lesbians? Are we not also women?

Not in Mad. We don't appear anywhere, though I know that some of her interviewees identify as lesbians. What's with that omission?

I suspect this is because of an inconvenient truth this author chose not to wrangle with as it might detract from her truths. Her newly rediscovered mentor Andrea Dworkin bluntly stated the dilemma in Right-wing Women:

Lesbianism is a transgression of rules, an affront; but its prohibition is not a basic constituent part of sex oppression and its expression does not substantively breach or transform sex oppression.

I think that's a truth, though partial. We lesbians throw off male expectations, but unless we actively identify with and participate in the struggle of all women for self-definition -- for liberation for all -- our mere existence doesn't intrinsically contribute much.

Now in truth, if you look around at much of the leadership of resistance to patriarchy (and white supremacy, and economic exploitation, and our cruel authoritarian POTUS), we lesbians are indeed everywhere. But there is nothing automatic about that. My instinct is that most women-loving women won't settle solely a chance to have legal marriage and some recognition that we can be parents -- but that's not a certainty. And I can see why Traister might not want to blunder about in that complex discussion.

Quibbles aside, this is an important book. It came out before the 2018 midterms in which women, "newly engaged suburban activists," helped turn rage into a Blue Wave. Can we stay mad watching the GOP threaten our bodily autonomy and everyone's lives? I promise to try.

Feminism in a Clinton White House

Continuing with my resolve to pay attention to what a Hillary Clinton presidency might/will be like, here's some fascinating banter from two New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Susan Dominus. Kantor wrote what I considered a genuinely revealing book about the Obama White House. She's thought hard about this sort of thing.

[Jodi Kantor]: ... This could be messy. Defining the Feminist Thing to Do in a woman’s White House is likely to be a running riddle, because which is the project: role reversal or wiping away outdated roles altogether?. Perhaps the first husband should smash the outdated conventions of the presidential-spouse role, do away with the floral-botanical complex for good? Publicly discuss Syria policy and environmental protection, because who made the rule that smart presidential spouses don’t discuss that stuff, anyway? But the risk of undercutting or overshadowing Hillary Clinton is great, as we saw in the 2008 race.

Cosmically, it seems as if figuring this all out could be part of Bill Clinton’s penance for the damage he did years ago. He is unlikely to talk about it. First spouses have little incentive for public introspection — name the last deep interview Michelle Obama did — but his actions will speak volumes. ...

[Susan Dominus]: Of course, we do have a precedent for a first spouse who advised the president on foreign policy, and pretty much everything else, and that was Hillary Clinton. Many of her supporters at the time called that feminism; but as you suggest, if Bill were to play as much of a role in her presidency as she did in his (especially in his first term), it would look anything but feminist, to the public.

... I know I’m getting ahead of myself here, but it is comforting to realize that Hillary Clinton is probably not singular, that there will be other women running for president as serious candidates going forward. And possibly those elections will be far less fraught than this one. ...The recording has amplified, for many women, their sense of the urgency of this election. It’s not just that they can’t bear Trump, or that they love Hillary; it’s that the election is about something bigger now than just the office of the presidency. The recording put many women directly in touch with their outrage about the outdated, the exclusionary, the sexist, the predatory, the power-and-otherwise grabby. ...

The sexist environment created by electing the first woman U.S. president isn't going to go away just because HRC vanquishes Mr. GOP Id.