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archived: 26 Dec 2004 - 1 Jan, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: December 27, 2004 Separate and Unequal – Women’s rights under fire in America Today, the rights of American women are dangling by a slender thread, because they are swinging ever more precariously under a new and insidious threat. Sadly, this latest threat to the rights of women comes not from the radical religious right that seized control of the Republican Party in the closing decades of the twentieth century, but from a growing movement that is designed to transform the only major political party in America which has historically supported civil rights, voting rights and equal rights for women – the Democratic Party. At this very moment, several high-ranking and powerful leaders of the Democratic Party are launching their attack on American women by advocating fundamental alterations to women’s rights to make choices about the course of their personal lives. While we shall detail some of the names and characters involved in this brazen assault on women, let us first recall the great campaign waged by American women for their rights to the vote, to equality and to determine the course of their own destinies sans the direct intervention of the state into their minds, their bodies and their family lives. Let us begin at the beginning, the birth of our nation. In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, imploring him to remember the “ladies” in his work at the Continental Congress where he was helping to draft the Declaration of Independence. Adams reported for duty at the State House in Philadelphia where he worked with Jefferson, Madison and others, but he promptly forgot Abigail’s advice when he and the others wrote the telling phrase, “all men are created equal,” into the cornerstone of American culture. Until the nineteenth century, men tightly grasped and jealously guarded the reins of political power. For millennia, men unashamedly paternalized women. They argued that women were merely the chattel of men, and this inferior position ranked them below the lowest rung of power and effectively isolated them from their rights as humans, imprisoning them in their status as lower and subservient beings to their supreme masculine lords and masters. Women were deemed to be humans, but they were detached from equality with men, for they were defined as devoid of volition, control and ultimately marooned from any temporal power to govern their own destinies. Men insolently informed women that they were locked into this endless and inescapable cycle of domesticity by their nature, biology and their fundamentalist readings of the laws of God as revealed in the Bible. In the rational minds of the men in control of civilization, women did not have the intellectual capacity required to discern the finer points involved in political decision-making, thus they did not deserve the right to vote. While this audaciously sexist mentality worked itself out in myriads of ways over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on our planet, women began their brilliant campaign to unlock themselves from the prisons constructed by the men who disempowered them. While this is an extremely inspiring and compelling story, in this short column, we shall focus primarily on the struggle for women’s rights in America. In the first half of the nineteenth century, women began to fight back against their masculine overlords in America, and they fought back by deploying a brilliant new strategy. In 1821, Emma Hart Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary in New York, the first endowed school for young women in America. In 1833, Oberlin College in Ohio became the first co-educational institution in America, but it was through the work of formidable Mary Lyon, who established the first four year college for women in 1837 at Mount Holyoke that the myth of women’s intellectual inferiority really crumbled. At Mount Holyoke, women were encouraged to study not only the liberal arts but also the sciences and to take up leadership positions in society. Mary Lyon’s strengthening women’s strategy for independence made a quantum leap at Mount Holyoke, and American women have never looked back since. Following Mary Lyon’s bold lead, other women’s colleges were eventually organized at Vassar (1861), Smith (1875), Wellesley (1875), Bryn Mawr (1885), Barnard (1889) and Radcliffe (1894). While the famous Seven Sisters were leading the national movement for women’s intellectual rights, there were very significant parallel developments taking place in North Carolina. In 1857, the Charlotte Female Institute was founded with a campus located at College and Ninth Streets. Eventually, this nascent institution for the education of young women moved to Myers Park where it was renamed, Queens College, and eventually, Queens University. In 1892, North Carolina’s first state-supported school for the higher education of women, The State Normal and Industrial School, was founded in Greensboro. After becoming Women’s College, it is now known as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In Raleigh, Peace College was founded in 1857 to educate young women, while Meredith accepted its first women students in 1899. Shaw University became co-educational in 1873 when it erected Estey Hall, the oldest dormitory for the higher education of Afro-American women in the nation. Through Mary Lyon’s strategy of demonstrating, cultivating and enriching the intellectual capacity of women, American women launched their march to equality. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the National Women’s Suffrage Association in 1869. This led to an explosive chain of events that resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting American women their right to vote in 1920. It is worth noting that American women were not the first to be granted suffrage. New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Germany, Canada, England, Sweden, Russia and the Netherlands had granted women the right to vote long before America. In 1920, America joined together with Albania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to grant women the right to vote. In 1923, The National Women’s Party proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) designed to delete all gender-based discrimination in America. As readers of this column know, the ERA has never been ratified. The radical religious right was not sleeping during the struggle for women’s rights. They fought it every foot of the way. Beating their breasts and thumping their Bibles, men and a few of their most malleable, suggestible and subservient women thundered against the rising tide of women’s rights. The radical right organized women’s groups to oppose the suffragettes and later to oppose equal rights for women. By the late 1950s, the radical religious right began to focus on the power of women to obtain abortions. The radical religionists opposed the work of the American Law Institute (ALI), which proposed a revolution in the legal status of abortion. ALI put forward a plan to base prosecutions for abortion on a trimester model predicated on the health of the mother. North Carolina and California were the first states to pass legislation based on the ALI model. This is evidence that North Carolina became one of the most progressive states in America during the Sanford Era, a lofty status that has since disintegrated through the onslaughts of the radical religious right championed by North Carolinians from Billy Graham and Jim Martin of Mecklenburg to Jesse Helms as well as the more subtle fifth column action of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the New Democrats which have produced a cautiously conservative Democratic Party in North Carolina and the entire South. In 1973, the United States Supreme Court delivered its historic Roe versus Wade decision which decimated the ability of the states to govern women’s rights to obtain abortions. The radical religious Republican right swiftly went into feverish action. In the same year, the National Right to Life Committee (NRL) was incorporated, and the next year, Jesse Helms of North Carolina introduced the Human Life Amendment, which – like much of his ill-conceived proposals - has never been passed. In 1981, Jesse Helms put forward another bill to challenge Roe versus Wade, and it was referred to a subcommittee that approved it for debate, but it was blocked in the Senate by a filibuster staged by advocates of women’s rights. Over the last decade the battle over the rights of women to control their own lives without the intervention of the state has been raging out of control. The battle intensified greatly after Ronald Reagan left the White House. The Bush (41) administration was much more adamant in its opposition to women’s rights as the radical religious right gained increasingly more traction inside the Republican Party. To his immense credit, President Bill Clinton reversed the tide of radical religious Republicanism on the very first day of his presidency by issuing five executive orders reversing Title 10 regulations that restricted funding across a broad spectrum of women’s rights. Sensing that they were facing an implacable foe, the radical religious right has fought back tooth and nail since Clinton’s first day in office. In 1995, they introduced the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. To the shame of the Democratic Party some of its most conservative New Democrat and DLC members supported this anti-women’s rights legislation, but President Clinton promptly vetoed the bill when it arrived on his desk in 1996. The next year, another version of the bill was passed by a wider margin involving the collaboration of larger numbers of New Democrats operating under the influence of the ultra-conservative DLC. The battle over women’s rights to determine whether or not individual women have the power to decide when they give birth has been raging with intensifying ferocity ever since. Unfortunately, three leading members of the DLC have been collaborating with the radical religious Republican right wing by helping to precipitate an erosion of the rights of American women. Senator Joseph Lieberman and Senator Harry Reid are two of the most prominent Democrats involved in this incursion into our party of radical and repressive ideology. Now, in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, Lieberman and Reid are backing a conservative candidate to chair the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Timothy Roemer, of Indiana. Roemer, Reid and Lieberman are implacable foes of women’s rights to determine whether or not they have abortions. While they put forward macabre arguments about the techniques of abortion, the truth is that they are eager to establish the principle that the state has the power to invade the bodies of American women against their will. This policy position is a shamelessly Orwellian form of theocracy. The rationale for the ban on what is termed partial birth abortions is that life has begun and the foetus is viable. However, as Dr. Steven Jonas has pointed out in his writings, the determination of the beginning of life is a purely religious belief, and it is not based in any degree whatsoever on the findings of science. The beginning of life is, therefore, purely an article of faith, and it should have no role in the laws of any democracy. Any deviation from this principle is a totalitarian reflex, and, in this case, it is a shameful reversion to masculine superiority, the most egregious form of sexism. Looking into the personalities of the three Democrats who are attempting to reshape the rights of American women, we find some striking similarities. Senator Lieberman is known as an ultra-conservative member of the orthodox school of the Jewish faith. Timothy Roemer is a conservative member of the Roman Catholic Church, but whether he is a member or merely a sympathizer with the ultra-conservative organization, Opus Dei, remains obscure. Senator Harry Reid is a high-ranking member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, i.e. the Mormon Church. It is perfectly apparent that the Democratic Party has been infiltrated by conservative religious ideologies that are engaged in advancing a radical agenda. How can a nation predicated on the separation of church and state operate with two major political parties that are both under the influence of the church? The founding fathers, including John Adams, would argue that the rights of women that have been incorporated into the constitutional culture of America are not the only core values on the firing line in Bush’s America. Our entire culture of constitutional democracy faces increasing dangers due to the collaboration of Democrats with radical religious Republicans and their ultimate agenda of theocracy. American women should be vigilant in defence of their rights, for there are now thieves proliferating throughout the palace of democracy. Michael Carmichael Post Script – Mr. Timothy Roemer served as a Representative of the people of Indiana in the Congress until 2003. His bid to be re-elected to Congress as a New Democrat subservient to the DLC failed to win him the support of the majority of the people of his district in Indiana, yet he is now proposing himself as the best candidate to head the Democratic Party in its campaign to regain Congressional seats lost to radical Republicans. That Roemer’s candidacy has the support of Senator Harry Reid and Senator Joseph Lieberman clearly indicates that their agenda is the total re-shaping of the Democratic Party rather than any desire to win elections in the future. __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global political action organization based in the United Kingdom.
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
