The Supreme Court made three anti-woman decisions in the last few days. “What?” you say, “There was Hobby Lobby and there was Buffer Zone, but what was the third one?”
The third one was the anti-union decision against the Illinois home care workers. By choosing to disallow certain sorts of unions to collect agency fees, they will make these unions less effective in advocating for their members. And what do these particular types of unions—home health care and home child care—have in common? The majority of people in them are women – very low paid women.
So in three back-to-back decisions, the Supreme Court’s sexist Neanderthals took away a chunk of women’s right to be protected from harassment and harm while pursuing health interests, took away their right to having certain health procedures covered because of the will and whim of individual employers, and took away many women’s right to have effective workplace advocacy.
As a woman who came to feminism in the 70’s, this punch, punch, punch from the nation’s highest legal body shows that no freedoms are every fully won and that the forces that do not want equal rights never sleep. At the same time that we are seeing amazing breakthroughs in the courts on marriage equality, we see major setbacks on women’s right. Combine this with the attacks on teachers unions, another female dominated profession, and we see a fairly united front on the conservative corporatist agenda.
Other forces are at work, of course. Anti-unionism is not gender-oriented in general. The attack on public education is also a gigantic privatization scheme. Still, underneath it all is a barely disguised hatred of and disgust for women and all things female.
Is it time to reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment with a serious push? I do understand that there is little chance of passing it, but the debate that would ensue would help even more women understand how deeply the attitudes that oppose their equality are embedded into our political and social system. Young women are coming to understand this, but the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment can make it clearer than ever. Those of us who came to age – or at least to political age – during that era (1972-82) can attest that participating in that fight was life-changing.
Our national women’s organizations seem to me to need a new focus. They fight a rear-guard action on abortion but have lost more battles than they have won in the last two decades. We’ve made miniscule progress on equal pay, the glass ceiling and so much more. It is not that progress has not been made, because it has. But progress has not been won.
Let’s ask our female representatives and senators to reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment and pressure our women’s right organizations to make it the centerpiece of their agendas. Every politician will have to go on record across this country and we will know again, even more clearly, who is with us and who is against us.
The anti-woman quotes that will be engendered will fill a book.